In what manner of Paradise are we to conceive that you, Horace, are
dwelling, or what region of immortality can give you such pleasures as
this life afforded? The country and the town, nature and men, who knew
them so well as you, or who ever so wisely made the best of those two
worlds? Truly here you had good things, nor do you ever, in all your
poems, look for more delight in the life beyond; you never expect
consolation for present sorrow, and when you once have shaken hands with
a friend the parting seems to you eternal.
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis?
So you sing, for the dear head you mourn has sunk for ever beneath the
wave. Virgil might wander forth bearing the golden branch 'the Sibyl
doth to singing men allow,' and might visit, as one not wholly without
hope, the dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn. To him was it
permitted to see and sing 'mothers and men, and the bodies outworn
of mighty heroes, boys and unwedded maids, and young men borne to the
funeral fire before their parents' eyes.' The endless caravan swept past
him--'many as fluttering leaves that drop and fall in autumn woods when
the first frost begins; many as birds that flock landward from the great
sea when now the chill year drives them o'er the deep and leads them to
sunnier lands.' Such things was it given to the sacred poet to behold,
and the happy seats and sweet pleasances of fortunate souls, where the
larger light clothes all the plains and dips them in a rosier gleam,
plains with their own new sun and stars before unknown. Ah, not _frustra
pius_ was Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melancholy song. In him,
we fancy, there was a happier mood than your melancholy patience. 'Not,
though thou wert sweeter of song than Thracian Orpheus, with that lyre
whose lay led the dancing trees, not so would the blood return to the
empty shade of him whom once with dread wand the inexorable god hath
folded with his shadowy flocks; but patience lighteneth what heaven
forbids us to undo.'
_Durum, sed levius fit patientia_?
It was all your philosophy in that last sad resort to which we are
pushed so often--
'With close-lipped Patience for our only friend,
Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair.'
The Epicurean is at one with the Stoic at last, and Horace with Marcus
Aurelius. 'To go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing
to be afraid of; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no
concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe
devoid of gods or devoid of providence?'
An excellent philosophy, but easier to those for whom no Hope had dawn
or seemed to set. Yet it is harder than common, Horace, for us to think
of you, still glad somewhere, among rivers like Liris and plains and
vine-clad hills, that
Solemque suum, sua sidera borunt.
It is hard, for you looked for no such thing.
_Omnes una manet nox
Et calcanda semel via leti_.
You could not tell Maecenas that you would meet him again; you could
only promise to tread the dark path with him.
_Ibimus, ibimus,
Utcunque praecedes, supremum
Carpere iter comites parati_.
Enough, Horace, of these mortuary musings. You loved the lesson of the
roses, and now and again would speak somewhat like a death's head over
thy temperate cups of Sabine _ordinaire_. Your melancholy moral was
but meant to heighten the joy of thy pleasant life, when wearied Italy,
after all her wars and civic bloodshed, had won a peaceful haven. The
harbour might be treacherous; the prince might turn to the tyrant; far
away on the wide Roman marches might be heard, as it were, the endless,
ceaseless monotone of beating horses' hoofs and marching feet of men.
They were coming, they were nearing, like footsteps heard on wool; there
was a sound of multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North,
_officina gentium_, mustering and marshalling her peoples. But their
coming was not to be to-day, nor to-morrow; nor to-day was the budding
princely sway to blossom into the blood-red flower of Nero. In the hall
between the two tempests of Republic and Empire your odes sound 'like
linnets in the pauses of the wind.'
What joy there is in these songs! what delight of life, what an
exquisite Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure, what
tenderness and constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that is fair
in the glittering stream, the music of the waterfall, the hum of bees,
the silvery grey of the olive woods on the hillside! How human are all
your verses, Horace! what a pleasure is yours in the straining poplars,
swaying in the wind! what gladness you gain from the white crest of
Soracte, beheld through the fluttering snowflakes while the logs are
being piled higher on the hearth. You sing of women and wine--not all
whole-hearted in your praise of them, perhaps, for passion frightens
you, and 't is pleasure more than love that you commend to the young.
Lydia and Glycera, and the others, are but passing guests of a heart at
ease in itself, and happy enough when their facile reign is ended. You
seem to me like a man who welcomes middle age, and is more glad than
Sophocles was to 'flee from these hard masters' the passions. In the
'fallow leisure of life' you glance round contented, and find all very
good save the need to leave all behind. Even that you take with an
Italian good-humour, as the folk of your sunny country bear poverty and
hunger.
_Durum, sed levius fit patientia_!
To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to
live for. None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem
to me to have known so well as you, Horace, how happy and fortunate a
thing it was to be born in Italy. You do not say so, like your Virgil,
in one splendid passage, numbering the glories of the land as a lover
might count the perfections of his mistress. But the sentiment is ever
in your heart and often on your lips.
Me nec tam patiens Lacedaemon,
Nec tam Larissae percussit campus opimae,
Quam domus Albuneae resonantis
Et praeceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda
Mobilibus pomaria rivis. (1)
(1) 'Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissaean
plain so enraptures as the fane of echoing Albunea, the
headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, the orchards watered by
the wandering rills.
So a poet should speak, and to every singer his own land should be
dearest. Beautiful is Italy with the grave and delicate outlines of her
sacred hills, her dark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on
the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient walls; beautiful is Italy,
her seas, and her suns: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites
the rock below the minster in the north; dearer is the barren moor and
black peat-water swirling in tanny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle
and the bloom of heather, and, watching over the lochs, the green
round-shouldered hills.
In affection for your native land, Horace, certainly the pride in great
Romans dead and gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a lover
of your country, your country's heroes, your country's gods. None but a
patriot could have sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as our own hero
died, on an evil day for the honour of Rome, as Gordon for the honour of
England.
Fertur pudicae conjujis osculum,
Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor,
Ab se removisse, et virilem
Torvus humi pusuisse voltum:
Donec labantes consilio patres
Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato,
Interque maerentes amicos
Egregius properaret exul.
Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus
Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen
Dimovit obstantes propinquos,
Et populum reditus morantem,
Quam si clientum longa negotia
Dijudicata lite relinqueret,
Tendens Venafranos in agros
Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. (1)
(1) 'They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife and
his little children, like a man unfree, and with his brave face bowed
earthward sternly he waited till with such counsel as never mortal gave
he might strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, and through his mourning
friends go forth, a hero, into exile. Yet well he knew what things were
being prepared for him at the hands of the tormenters, who, none the
less, put aside the kinsmen that barred his path and the people that
would fain have held him back, passing through their midst as he
might have done, if, his retainers' weary business ended and the suits
adjudged, he were faring to his Venafran lands or to Dorian Tarentum.'
We talk of the Greeks as your teachers. Your teachers they were, but
that poem could only have been written by a Roman! The strength, the
tenderness, the noble and monumental resolution and resignation--these
are the gift of the lords of human things, the masters of the world.
Your country's heroes are dear to you, Horace, but you did not sing them
better than your country's Gods, the pious protecting spirits of the
hearth, the farm, the field, kindly ghosts, it may be, of Latin fathers
dead or Gods framed in the image of these. What you actually believed
we know not, _you_ knew not. Who knows what he believes? _Parcus Deorum
cultor_ you bowed not often, it may be, in the temples of the state
religion and before the statues of the great Olympians; but the pure and
pious worship of rustic tradition, the faith handed down by the homely
elders, with that you never broke. Clean hands and a pure heart, these,
with a sacred cake and shining grains of salt, you could offer to the
Lares. It was a benignant religion, uniting old times and new, men
living and men long dead and gone, in a kind of service and sacrifice
solemn yet familiar.
Te nihil attinet
Tentare multa caede bidentium
Parvos coronantem marino
Rore deos fragilique myrto.
Immunis aram si tetigit manus,
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
Mollivit aversos Penates
Farre pio et salienta mica. (1)
(1) Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the gods with
slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest thy tiny
deities with myrtle rare and rosemary. If but the hand be
clean that touches the altar, then richest sacrifice will
not more appease the angered Penates than the duteous cake
and salt that crackles in the blaze.'
Farewell, dear Horace; farewell, thou wise and kindly heathen; of
mortals the most human, the friend of my friends and of so many
generations of men.