CONTRIBUTORS TO THE FUND ii
SABINE HILLS vii
EDITORS' PREFACE ix
INTRODUCTION: THE DYNAMISM OF THE FEW xiii
I. HORACE INTERPRETED
The Appeal of Horace 3
1. Horace the Person 6
2. Horace the Poet 9
3. Horace the Interpreter of His Times
Horace the Duality 23
i. The Interpreter of Italian Landscape 25
ii. The Interpreter of Italian Living 28
iii. The Interpreter of Roman Religion 31
iv. The Interpreter of the Popular Wisdom 35
Horace and Hellenism 38
4. Horace the Philosopher of Life
Horace the Spectator and Essayist 39
i. The Vanity of Human Wishes 44
ii. The Pleasures of this World 49
iii. Life and Morality 54
iv. Life and Purpose 59
v. The Sources of Happiness 62
II. HORACE THROUGH THE AGES
Introductory 69
1. Horace the Prophet 70
2. Horace and Ancient Rome 75
3. Horace and the Middle Age 87
4. Horace and Modern Times
The Rebirth of Horace 104
i. In Italy 106
ii. In France 114
iii. In Germany 115
iv. In Spain 118
v. In England 121
vi. In the Schools 126
III. HORACE THE DYNAMIC
The Cultivated Few 127
1. Horace and the Literary Ideal 131
2. Horace and Literary Creation
i. The Translator's Ideal 136
ii. Creation 143
3. Horace in the Living of Men 152
IV. CONCLUSION 168
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 171
INTRODUCTION: THE DYNAMISM
OF THE FEW
To those who stand in the midst of times and attempt to grasp their
meaning, civilization often seems hopelessly complicated. The myriad and
mysterious interthreading of motive and action, of cause and effect,
presents to the near vision no semblance of a pattern, and the whole web
is so confused and meaningless that the mind grows to doubt the presence
of design, and becomes skeptical of the necessity, or even the
importance, of any single strand.
Yet civilization is on the whole a simple and easily understood
phenomenon. This is true most apparently of that part of the human
family of which Europe and the Americas form the principal portion, and
whose influences have made themselves felt also in remote continents. If
to us it is less apparently true of the world outside our western
civilization, the reason lies in the fact that we are not in possession
of equal facilities for the exercise of judgment.
We are all members one of another, and the body which we form is a
consistent and more or less unchanging whole. There are certain
elemental facts which underlie human society wherever it has advanced to
a stage deserving the name of civilization. There is the intellectual
impulse, with the restraining influence of reason upon the relations of
men. There is the active desire to be in right relation with the
unknown, which we call religion. There is the attempt at the
beautification of life, which we call art. There is the institution of
property. There is the institution of marriage. There is the demand for
the purity of woman. There is the insistence upon certain decencies and
certain conformities which constitute what is known as morality. There
is the exchange of material conveniences called commerce, with its
necessary adjunct, the sanctity of obligation. In a word, there are the
universal and eternal verities.
Farther, if what we may call the constitution of civilization is thus
definite, its physical limits are even more clearly defined.
Civilization is a matter of centers. The world is not large, and its
government rests upon the shoulders of the few. The metropolis is the
index of capacity for good and ill in a national civilization. Its
culture is representative of the common life of town and country.
It follows that the history of civilization is a history of the famous
gathering-places of men. The story of human progress in the West is the
story of Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Cnossus, Athens, Alexandria,
Rome, and of medieval, Renaissance, and modern capitals. History is a
stream, in the remoter antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia confined
within narrow and comparatively definite banks, gathering in volume and
swiftness as it flows through Hellenic lands, and at last expanding into
the broad and deep basin of Rome, whence its current, dividing, leads
away in various channels to other ample basins, perhaps in the course of
time to reunite at some great meeting of waters in the New World. To one
afloat in the swirl of contradictory eddies, it may be difficult to
judge of the whence and whither of the troubled current, but the ascent
of the stream and the exploration of the sources of literature and the
arts, of morals, politics, and religion, of commerce and mechanics, is
on the whole no difficult adventure.
Finally, civilization is not only a matter of local habitation, but a
matter of individual men. The great city is both determined by, and
determines, its environment; the great man is the product, and in turn
the producer, of the culture of his nation. The human race is gregarious
and sequacious, rather than individual and adventurous. Progress depends
upon the initiative of spirited and gifted men, rather than upon the
tardy movement of the mass, upon idea rather than force, upon spirit
rather than matter.
I preface my essay with these reflections because there may be readers
at first thought skeptical of even modest statements regarding Horace as
a force in the history of our culture and a contributor to our life
today. It is only when the continuity of history and the essential
simplicity and constancy of civilization are understood that the direct
and vital connection between past and present is seen, and the mind is
no longer startled and incredulous when the historian records that the
Acropolis has had more to do with the career of architecture than any
other group of buildings in the world, or that the most potent influence
in the history of prose is the Latin of Cicero, or that poetic
expression is more choice and many men appreciably saner and happier
because of a Roman poet dead now one thousand nine hundred and thirty
years.
HORACE AND HIS
INFLUENCE