We have followed in such manner and at such length as is possible for
our purpose the fortunes of Horace through the ages from his death and
the death of the Empire in whose service his pen was employed to our own
times. We have seen that he never was really forgotten, and that there
never was a time of long duration when he ceased to be of real
importance to some portion of mankind.
The recital of historical fact is at best a narration of circumstance to
which there clings little of the warmth of life. An historical event
itself is but the cumulated and often frigid result of intimate original
forces that may have meant long travail of body and soul before the act
of realization became possible. The record of the event in chronicle or
its commemoration in monument is only the sign that at some time there
occurred a significant moment rendered inevitable by previous stirrings
of life whose intensity, if not whose very identity, are forgotten or no
longer realized.
Thus the enumeration of manuscript revisions, translations, imitations,
and scholastic editions of Horace may also seem at first sight the
narrative of cold detail. There may be readers who, remembering the
scant stream of the cultivated few who tided the poet through the
centuries of darkness, and the comparative rareness of cultivated men at
all times, will be slow to be convinced of any real impress of Horace
upon the life of men. They especially who reflect that during all the
long sweep of time the majority of those who have known him, and even of
those who have been stirred to enthusiasm by him, have known him through
the compulsion of the school, and who reflect farther on the
artificialities, the insincerities, the pettinesses, the abuses, and the
hatreds of the class-room, the joy with which at the end the text-book
is dropped or bidden an even more violent farewell, and the apparently
total oblivion that follows, will be inclined to view as exaggeration
the most moderate estimate of our debt to him.
Yet skepticism would be without warrant. The presence of any subject in
an educational scheme represents the sincere, and often the fervent,
conviction that it is worthy of the place. In the case of literary
subjects, the nearer the approach to pure letters, the less demonstrable
the connection between instruction and the winning of livelihood, the
more intense the conviction. The immortality of literature and the arts,
which surely has been demonstrated by time, the respect in which they
are held by a world so intent on mere living that of its own motion it
would never heed, is the work of the passionate few whose enthusiasms
and protestations never allow the common crowd completely to forget, and
keep forever alive in it the uneasy sense of imperfection. That Horace
was preserved for hundreds of years by monastery and school, that the
fact of acquaintance with him is due to his place in modern systems of
education, are not mere statements empty of life. They represent the
noble enthusiasms of enlightened men. The history of human progress has
been the history of enthusiasms. Without enthusiasms, the fabric of
civilization would collapse in a day into the chaos of barbarism.
To give greater completeness and reality to our account of Horace's
place among men, ancient and modern, we must in some way add to the
narrative of formal fact the demonstration of his influence in actual
operation. In the case of periods obscure and remote, this is hardly
possible. In the case of modern times it is not so difficult. For the
recent centuries, as proof of the peculiar power of Horace, we have the
abundant testimony of literature and biography.
Let us call this influence the Dynamic Power of Horace. Dynamic power is
the power that explodes men, so to speak, into physical or spiritual
action, that operates by inspiration, expansion, fertilization,
vitalization, and results in the living of a fuller life. If we can be
shown concrete instances of Horace enriching the lives of men by
increasing their love and mastery of art or multiplying their means of
happiness, we shall not only appreciate better the poet's meaning for
the present day, but be better able to imagine his effect upon men in
the remoter ages whose life is less open to scrutiny.
Our purpose will best be accomplished by demonstrating the very specific
and pronounced effect of Horace, first, upon the formation of the
literary ideal; second, upon the actual creation of literature; and,
third, upon living itself.