What fastidious choosing! What fragile-pointed penciling! Sharp
indeed, fine leaved, were the bristling thickets which hid the God,
Sylvanus. Here is delicately modeled detail of French line engravers,
such as Edelinck. Nowhere else is there such inspiring swinging up
and slow, pensive drooping of moons, with such calm vistas. Moons
are red gold. The sky is lapis, a Byzantine enamel. The delight when
they swing to sight! Nowhere do they rise more majestically than with
Latin poets. I like, too, his swift painting of forests, fields,
_herds and the black hills of Acadia_, lofty Tusculum where wealthy
Romans had country houses, and he went to banquet with his friends,
or cool Lucanian pastures overlooking the Tuscan Sea; the ocean
flowing among the shining Cyclades. His pictures are sure of line
as an etching by Braquemond. They give some the same pleasure. They
are crisp. They are oftenest of the outdoor world. Artists of all
time have been indebted to this plastic picturing. When he describes
wine foaming around white feet of laughing girls, we see a group by
Donatello. When he paints Autumn crowned with vine-leaves, lifting
his head above level plains, we see the richly colored, fluent art of
Boucher. Might not the _oxen with weary necks dragging the inverted
plowshare_ be from brush of Breton or L’Hermitte? Latin blood is
there!
In Horace there is appreciation of rustic life which French art
realized. The order of descriptions is beautiful. One moment does not
rush upon another. This is a Latin quality; nothing superimposed;
nothing hurried. The influence of Horace, his spirit, is in art of
France, Spain, Italy; but not in Holland or the north. There it met
a counter current, which swept it back. In the north _the spirit_
triumphed.
It is sanity of Latin races that periodically reclaims art from the
crowded vagueness of the north, then shows it the way back to life,
which is nature.
Landscape painters of France, Italy, and Spain are spiritual
descendants of Roman word-painters. Like them they have united love
for the thing they saw with sufficient mental detachment to insure
truth. The spirit of Horace is in landscapes of Rousseau, Harpignies,
Daubigny, Corot. The same nature looks from the canvasses; the same
truth. Love of thing they painted, singleness of purpose, with no
momentary side-glancing, stamped success. Love, sincerity, were
there, coupled with fidelity that outweighed price. Over these
landscapes with their artistic well-being, rests sure tradition of
Roman ancestry.
In Horace, in Quintillian, we see beginning that perspicuity, sense
of distinctions, that made Latin races—France in particular, supreme
in criticism. There is in Horace a likeness to the French mind that
blossomed in 1830.
Who can help loving this antique world Horace shows, which keeps so
much that is fine? We love it too because it had no shadows. It was
content. We love its persistent search for joy, its disdain of the
unworthy. We love conviction that life is supreme. Puritanism, a
narrow morality, have driven it away. They have given nothing worth
while in return. The reformer has driven out the uninsistent Greek.
The worshippers of the spirit have done violence to worshippers of
the flesh. Beauty is one of the few values. We should be grateful
for any reality. Perfection of line is not bad morality. It is at
least substitute for folly. In most modern art except that which
France created, there is something crude, unseizable. Some wild
homesickness! At heart, republican France has always been pagan,
aristocratic. It has led nations in the arts.
One reason the human race is no more beautiful is because men have
ceased to desire it. It is becoming a negligible quality. Beauty was
commoner in pagan days because men loved it.
Who would not prefer the swiftly sketched picture of a vanished
city made by such happy observers as Horace, Seneca, Catullus, to
travelers’ descriptions! The best picture of Rome of Augustus is in
his verse. It would be interesting to know what material world the
reader pictures from the verses. No two see alike. One sees, as Heine
remarked, with bitter glance of an Archenholz, one with inspired eyes
of a Corinne, rarely one with clear Greek eyes of a Goethe.
Who can not picture the circus, shows, baths, the ex-slave Menas
made knight, dragging a robe three ells long? Syrian flute-players,
and cameo-faced Roman women hastening stealthily to the temple of
forbidden, alluring Egyptian gods! He gives good reproduction of
the age. He saw its pomp. He enjoyed frivolities. He measured the
fleeting shadows of change that were sweeping over it, without caring
what the end might be. He lived and loved and he did not regret.
I have caught vivid, delightful glimpses of Augustan Rome. I am
grateful for the clear, unprejudiced eyes which preserved it. He
had no bias of mind to make things other than they are. For him, in
joy, there were no regrets. These unemotional poems are the one door
that lets us into the Imperial City, that Augustus and Virgil, and
Faustine of the unforgettable face and cruel heart, and dissolute
Verus, knew.
At other times reading Horace is like holding marble miniatures. No
matter how subjectively he may write of his occupations, description
makes him a plastic artist. Some of the poems are little cameo chains
strung upon a ribbon. Such for instance as the faun who chases
fleeing nymphs. (Carmen xviii, Book III.), Cytherean Venus dancing by
moonlight, surrounded by Graces. (Ode IV.)
“Pallas fitting her helmet, shield, and her fury.”
“The Corybantes, redoubling strokes upon the cymbals.”
“Chloris, shining with fair shoulders in the midnight sea.”
“Bacchus dictating strains among the rocks, while the nymphs, the
goat-footed satyrs, listen.”
“The Thracian Priestess upon the mountain, her knotted hair bound
with vipers.”
The carver of gems could find inspiration as frequently as poets. To
prove he did, we have only to look into cabinets of collectors. The
poets who copied him have been many. There were Ronsard, the Pleiad,
in old French days. Tennyson, Ernest Dowson, in our own day, and in
English, to mention few.
He left indelible trace upon poets of Italy. They found a model
ready made in a tongue their own. There are lines of d’Annunzio
that suggest Horace because they keep interest in natural things;
fresh, loving vision. However, it is not Latin poets who influenced
d’Annunzio, but Greek. He drank from the fountain from which Horace
drank when he boasted he was first to attune Greek meters to the
Latin lyre. D’Annunzio likes better the Greeks of a later day,
in Alexandria, who were softer muscled, more luxurious, although
his tragedies show the _fate_—_motif_ of a sterner, _artistically
speaking_, purer age. Carducci dreamed architecturally of the Rome of
Horace and Augustus. He has built pictures in the _Odi Barbare_ that
are memorable, splendid.
As society poet Horace set a model which has been imitated but never
equaled. He brought to it polished, perfect expression, and the
_savoir faire_ of a courtier. The most perfect society verse in the
world is the _Ode to Pyrrha_ (Ode V), because of equilibrium between
matter and form, grace of poise, bantering lightness. In such verse
no one has said more endearing things, more gracefully insincere.
We may presume his social gift was considerable. In the portraits
we find a touch at times, that is almost Japanesque; the habit of
fixing fleeting, inconsequential thoughts without logical beginning.
They are airy fancies that strike the mind obliquely in rapid flight.
Centuries ago he sounded, tentatively, the shrill clarions of today.
Two of Horace’s admirable qualities were capability for friendship
and just estimate of self. A gentle unenvious kindness radiates
toward his friends. There was no condescension, superiority, no
literary posing. _Friends!_ How old-fashioned the word! Are they
something that vanished with the manhood of Rome? Who loves his
friends! Many memories of pleasant days with them his verse recalls!
We judge of their importance by the fact he deemed them worth his
art. Today friendship plays slight part in life. There are spaces of
the self where there is not any judgment of wrong, of right, where
there remains only the observing mind. We have grown narrow, selfish,
enlarged of ego. We can love only those united by ties of blood.
Is there less heart? Is that a reason there are few poets? Great,
ennobling pitifulness which could shelter the world and his neighbor
is not of today. We imitate. We do not create. At the test there is
sound of something broken. Poetry is language of the emotions. When
they are enfeebled they cannot speak. Where is the poet who pays
tribute to a brother, a friend? Who is capable of feeling that sways
the heart! We are tin toys. Love is of the heart. Without it the
intellect can not create. Love was mainspring of those fluent opening
lines of Horace, love that vibrated richly in his heart, then attuned
it to sympathetic singing.
We have become drier, less inclined to giving. We are old with the
world. We have less to give! At least writers can no longer picture
life fatly. We have lost sight of so many things. The tide of time
has swept us upon a barren shore where nothing is important save gold.
The philosophic poise of Horace was universal love, perhaps, too
great to be given to an individual. It touched all evenly, like
light. We have missed the sunny, friendly way. We must go back. We
must find it if we can, before it is too late.
They who have been great, have been so by loving something better
than self. The heart has share in fame. Love is productive of
creative qualities such as vigor, joy. Vigor, joy, beat behind the
lines of Horace.
No other writer has taken his measure so justly. Common sense was
basis of his genius. With pride he insists it is his province to sing
lightly. He was greater for the justice of his mind than for his
poetry. Many have written poetry as good, but where is the person who
has seen with vision nothing could dim! He understood he was neither
an imaginative nor dramatic poet when he writes: _I am only a little
bee gathering thyme by the dewy shores of Tiber_. This is memorable
for unenvious grace. Nor did he permit himself to philosophize long
enough to forget it is a poet’s province to amuse. There have been
few of such balance. And he had been child of fortune, too. He had
become friend of Ruler of the World. There was only one world, then,
and its center was Rome. Yet upon his face we feel sure there was
none of that pallor which Juvenal declares is engendered by wretched
friendship with the great.
He resisted the invitation of Augustus to live at court. He knew
simple life was better. He realized that to create, it would be well
to live humbly, dream richly.
After he became star of the court of Augustus, he did not grow
scornful nor inclined to underrate the homely middle-class. He was
gracious. There is no better preacher than Horace against money-mad
modernness, its absence of leisure, false standards. He is teacher
of the simple life. As he grew older he preached it. He proclaimed
it boldly to decadent Rome. To be sure, as Juvenal scornfully says:
_Well plied with food and wine was Horace when he shouts his evoe_!
Evidently meaning to insinuate that well he might be happy, whom
the tragedy of life could not touch. Yet it was a small income,
the Sabine farm, gift of Maecenas. But he had become rich in the
developed resources of mind. He knew wealth is not without, but
within. He valued taste above gold. So plain, so persistent was his
consciousness of this, that wealth beyond satisfaction of daily
needs was folly, useless wasting of life to acquire. It was base
prostitution of energy. The life bounded by horizon of the dollar can
see no vast horizon. The poet’s gift was superior to what gold gives.
One of his illuminating sayings is: _One may be poor amid great
wealth_.
At the same time he had no high ideals; no passionate convictions.
He was not interested enough in anything to struggle because he felt
struggle useless. As satirist he is inferior to Juvenal and Persius.
As philosopher, as artist, he is greater. But as a satirist he lacked
conviction. He lacked decision. The satires of Horace have neither
the eloquence, fire, nor the stern scorn of Juvenal. Bitterness was
not in his heart. They are better art but less powerful humanly.
Juvenal reaches heights that equal Tyrtæus. Juvenal and Persius
wished to make the world better. Horace did not care. He was artist,
social exquisite; not moralist, nor reformer. He cared about men’s
taste, their appreciation of beauty, the things that make for refined
living. He cared nothing about morals if manners were good. He looked
at everything with laughing, indifferent disdain. He believed nothing
mattered since the end is alike for all. Therefore be kind to your
neighbor. Be happy if you can. He was critic of art, not morals.
Even to the dissipations of that luxurious age he gave himself with
good humored disdain. He lent himself to dissipation with a tolerant
smile, without caring one way or the other.
Horace lacked the commanding power of greatness, its one sidedness.
He never compels us. He wins by grace, good temper. He is a
charming companion for the rich. I can fancy him an admirable
_causeur_, perhaps an ideal talker, whose conversation was greater,
imaginatively, more fancifully attractive, than the written word. His
temperament needed stimulus of admiration, applause, _the moment_.
He needed candles and love and pretty women and music and wine. He
could have said of himself with the oriental lyrist: _None know thee,
Hafiz, save when candles shine!_
Horace insists on nothing. He has no interest in teaching. He tells
us, to be sure, that gold is a false standard, that there are better
things. Life and manners were simpler, in an early age, as Dante told
his Florentines. But he does not care whether we believe it or not.
Life was more beautiful when less complicated; money multiplies bad
taste, is the extent of his interest. He did not get far from beauty
as standard.
His philosophizing is that of a graceful dilettante. But in knowing,
in understanding this, he preserved his Epicurean existence, freedom
from work. Perhaps there was another Horace whom his writing _dared
not_ show. Perhaps this serene, laughing existence was the price
paid for ease. Horace’s age, we must remember, was one when men were
busy forgetting the bloody wars of Augustus; they were bowing to a
tyrannical demi-god.
Early a note of weariness creeps into his verses, a regretful,
late-autumn splendor. It is like light upon rich fields of grain that
have been reaped. His life was loveless, given over to men. This was
not unusual in his age. Was it this that made his nature cold, and
nothing worth while? Love was possible in pagan days and wrought
havoc. Catullus knew how to love. So did Propertius, Tibullus. It
was not wholly the age. We get impression that he feels old and is
weary, even of pleasure, song, when we know he must have been under
fifty. Was it because his body was delicate, frail, as we find hint
now and then, or were his senses superfine, easily sated? Or had the
excessive dissipation of the age made him old before his time?
When he says, somewhere in last of the Epistles, that the only way
to be happy is to admire nothing, we know what years have done.
Cultivation had enervated him. It had weakened zest for life, or he
echoed the age that was growing weary with too much living. That
is why Christianity overpowered the pagan world. It was worn out
with joy. It had lived too much. It was ready for penitence. It was
weakened with luxurious learning.
There is more love, more understanding of home, in Propertius,
Tibullus, than in Horace. Each had had his dream. If Horace had,
his words give no hint. He hides from us. Persius says of him: _Sly
Horace does not give us his heart to sift_. It may have been his
dream was too tenderly cherished to unveil for a greedy world. His
emotions, his longings are as carefully concealed as the veiled face
of Isis.
It is not often we find a poet without enthusiasms. Horace had none.
He is the only poet of the world without an ideal. He believed,
in his indifferent way, with Goethe, that life is more important
than art. He could have said with Wilde: “To my life I have given
my genius, to my writing, my talent.” He saw it clearly. He judged
sanely. It is true, perhaps, that he had toward it, as was his habit,
an air of _de haut en bas_.
His Satires tell his real life. They, strangely enough, are poetry
of fact, something which (the poetry of fact) has not been invented
again until our day, and Verhaeren. Horace set about making life a
work of art in the same calm way Goethe did. With both, the thing to
be lived was superior to the thing created.
He is never confidential. With him, the world is present. He wears
a charming manner of indifference. He was too worldly to show his
heart. The _human interest_ element is lacking. He would scorn the
heart-throbs upon which inquisitive modernity insists.
There is a sensuous spirituality in poets of the Augustan Age, in
scorn of gold, in clear understanding it can not buy the best,
because genuine things belong to all. With them spirituality was
striving for the best of earth. There is its sadness, in lack of
conception of anything beyond.
But how grateful, how appreciative were they for pleasant things!
Having no heaven they had kindlier nearness to earth. They were
brothers to the trees, streams. Among them Catullus and Propertius
are most modern. In their technique, their emotional view point,
there is something that startles. Their heart cry, their rebellion
against time and its ravages, shiver with new iridescence, the pagan
calm. It plays over their poems like rainbow-shimmer across Murano
glass, in contrast to the calm of chiseled marble. Some fretful,
wandering wind of modernity touched them, then made them tremble with
prophetic wisdom in the comfort of their gay, Greek garden.
Most sonnet writers in America, except George Sterling, overweight
the sonnet line, just as in my opinion Brangwyn, delightful
draftsman, when he leaves paint brush and colors, overweights the
etched line. This crowding of the small, clean room of the sonnet,
is the chief fault of that accomplished sonneteer, Mahlon Leonard
Fisher. The sonnet line should be noble, clean, and of gracious
curve. It should be pure, unvexed, like skies of great etchers,
Rembrandt for example.
The American sonnet writer, again excepting Sterling, who to my mind
has written the best sonnets in our country, (see his _Sequence to
Oblivion_), is like a pretty debutante, a very pretty debutante, who,
in addition to being pretty, insists upon being brilliant, insists
upon using a mouth so lovely that is evidently what God made it for,
to say clever things. This is worse than mixing metaphors. It is like
insisting upon putting furniture that belongs by right to a large
house into one small room, one very small room, _the sonnet-room_.
The world is mad about information, about knowing everything there
is to know, and it insists upon displaying it. No one has courage to
admit ignorance. Everyone pretends wisdom that surpasses Solomon. One
should learn to wear learning lightly, as a jester his bells. And for
the same good reason, to mark the ways of joy.
Modern sonnet writing is becoming an exhibition of acrobatics, of how
to put the greatest possible number of objects dangling, pirouetting,
balancing, upon one little line until its loveliness, its clean,
clear profile is obscured. Art is not made to astonish. It is not an
acrobat who performs feats upon lines either long or short. It is
made to charm, to ennoble, bring refreshment to the spirit. It is
divine play. It is cream-skimming joy. It is plucking the invisible
flower of the heart, for a moment’s showing. Assuredly an unvexed
thing, from which imperfections have been taken!
England did not do any too well by the sonnet in the early days when
she took it from Italy. She roughened it. She coarsened it. She made
it a trifle pot-bellied. She taught it to drink ale, instead of wine.
She took the classic, Latin profile and gave it two round eyes and a
turn-up nose.
And yet I know English sonnets that are lovely. Milton wrote one.
Keats wrote one. Mrs. Browning wrote more than one. George Pellew
wrote three, three great ones, on Greek subjects, I seem to remember.
To do it he made himself, in spirit, un-English. He slipped upon
his shoulder the graceful garment of another race and turned back,
for rare creative moments, toward the red, wine-making south. Mrs.
Browning did something similar, although she only went as far as
Italy. She was prodigiously instructed, however, in both Greek and
Latin.
The calm spaces between words in Italian sonnet writers is vastly
more difficult of realizing than people think. It is harder to sit
perfectly still than to stand upon your head at stated intervals,
wearing bells and motley. You can not catch Art, (with either a large
or a small letter) by running after her and sprinkling salt upon her
tail. Genuine Success is something besides a large noise and a yellow
electric light.
The calm gliding into the first line of an accomplished sonnet writer
of old Italy, gives me the same sensation as, after noise, discomfort
of a storm, the calm gliding into a harbor, blue, safe, sheltered,
smiling, serene. I have felt this strongly in opening lines of
Dante’s _Vita Nuova_. They recur to me again and again.
_Ballata i voi che tu ritrovi Amore_
Consider the jeweled setting of vowels, their wise interlining, the
grace, consider, the beginning, that does not disturb the poise of
silence, nor invade harshly its suave secrecy.
Or
_Tutti li miei penser parlare d’Amore_
_Donne ch’avete intellette d’Amore,
i vo’con voi de la mia donna dire._
Italy is almost as rich in dignified, nobly chiseled sonnets as
in chiseled marbles. Today we are trying to belittle the sonnet.
Frequently we make it tawdry. The sonnet is akin to the eye
which is one of the windows of the soul. It is not an up-heaped
bargain-counter, for a noisy bargain sale.
Heredia, despite his varied story-telling in sonnet form, did not
overcrowd the line. He was too reliable an artist. He knew what a
frame is silence. Nor did d’Annunzio! Both were too sensitive for
this indelicate wrong.
Very likely the chief difficulty lies in the fact that the sonnet
does not suit the life of the present. New art-form must be invented
for our restless, changing existence. The old bottles are not strong
enough for the heavy, strange effervescences, from grapes, of this
crowded, disconcerting, wild Garden of Time.
Goethe expatriated the soul of him astonishingly in that war-vexed
Germany that knew the wild ways of Napoleon, when he wrote _The
Roman Elegies_. (_Die Römische Elegien._) They are calm. They are
chiseled like marbles of Attica. They are sincere, noble, firm,
truly visioned; the kind of art we shall not see soon again. They
have given me unvarying pleasure throughout the years because of the
perfection they keep. Their wholeness is source of strength. I read
them over and over.
And yet it is the same as reading Tibullus, Propertius, or the
_Amores_. It is the same art, happening merely to be written in a
northern tongue.
Goethe was a unique, powerful figure in history of letters for one
whose manhood saw the French Revolution. One of the strangest things
in literature is that it did not move him. When it was sweeping
grandly on, for freeing man from trammels of the past, Goethe wrote a
scholarly friend in Paris about the good news. The friend supposed of
course he meant the Revolution. Goethe, however, had no such thought.
He was merely referring to praise the French Academy had given his
scientific discoveries.
I have read Brandes’ book about Goethe, and with interest, because
practically every idea projected was given long ago by the late
Professor Calvin Thomas, who very likely is the most trustworthy
authority on the _Man of Weimar_. A comparison of the two books about
the German writer is interesting. There has seldom been, perhaps,
so much rehashing of projected thought of the past as now, so many
evidences that limitation has come, and that reconstructed mental
clothes are considered good enough.
The etched line of Whistler, especially in the first Italian series,
is peculiarly like the sentence-line of Loti in his earlier books
on the East. There is the same rare distinguished attack, of which
not two in a generation are capable. The same wistful, intensified,
highly personal beauty, flashed upon the dazzled senses by a moment
of tremendous seeing. The same tremulous sensitiveness, that only
the exquisitely dowered possess. Mingled with all, _witchcraft_, the
vanishing essential of art, which none may seize easily with words.
I can recall passages in etchings of those dim, night-palaces of
Venice, up which the sad-lighted sea sends faint, equivocating
shivers, that give me the exact sensation of lines of Loti. They rise
to mind from depths of consciousness. And without volition. Now that
Loti is traveling and writing of what he sees no more, and Whistler’s
etching needle is stilled, there are two joys fewer in the world for
me.