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Title: Horace and His Influence
Author: Showerman, Grant
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Horace and His Influence" ***
HORACE AND HIS INFLUENCE
by
GRANT SHOWERMAN
* * * * * *
Our Debt to Greece and Rome
Editors
George Depue Hadzsits, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania
David Moore Robinson, Ph.D., Ll.D.
The Johns Hopkins University
[Illustration]
Contributors to the "Our Debt to
Greece and Rome Fund," Whose
Generosity Has Made Possible
the Library
Our Debt to Greece and Rome
Philadelphia
DR. ASTLEY P.C. ASHHURST
WILLIAM L. AUSTIN
JOHN C. BELL
HENRY H. BONNELL
JASPER YEATES BRINTON
GEORGE BURNHAM, JR.
JOHN CADWALADER
MISS CLARA COMEGYS
MISS MARY E. CONVERSE
ARTHUR G. DICKSON
WILLIAM M. ELKINS
H.H. FURNESS, JR.
WILLIAM P. GEST
JOHN GRIBBEL
SAMUEL F. HOUSTON
CHARLES EDWARD INGERSOLL
JOHN STORY JENKS
ALBA B. JOHNSON
MISS NINA LEA
HORATIO G. LLOYD
GEORGE MCFADDEN
MRS. JOHN MARKOE
JULES E. MASTBAUM
J. VAUGHAN MERRICK
EFFINGHAM B. MORRIS
WILLIAM R. MURPHY
JOHN S. NEWBOLD
S. DAVIS PAGE (memorial)
OWEN J. ROBERTS
JOSEPH G. ROSENGARTEN
WILLIAM C. SPROUL
JOHN B. STETSON, JR.
DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE (memorial)
GEORGE D. WIDENER
MRS. JAMES D. WINSOR
OWEN WISTER
The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Liberal Studies.
Boston
ORIC BATES (memorial)
FREDERICK P. FISH
WILLIAM AMORY GARDNER
JOSEPH CLARK HOPPIN
Chicago
HERBERT W. WOLFF
Cincinnati
CHARLES PHELPS TAFT
Cleveland
SAMUEL MATHER
Detroit
JOHN W. ANDERSON
DEXTER M. FERRY, JR.
Doylestown, Pennsylvania
"A LOVER OF GREECE AND ROME"
New York
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
WILLARD V. KING
THOMAS W. LAMONT
DWIGHT W. MORROW
MRS. D.W. MORROW
_Senatori Societatis Philosophiae_, [Greek: PhBK], _gratias maximas
agimus_
ELIHU ROOT
MORTIMER L. SCHIFF
WILLIAM SLOANE
GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM
And one contributor, who has asked to have his name withheld:
_Maecenas atavis edite regibus,_
_O et praesidium et dulce decus meum._
Washington
The Greek Embassy at Washington, for the Greek Government.
* * * * * *
HORACE AND HIS INFLUENCE
by
GRANT SHOWERMAN
Professor of Classics
The University of Wisconsin
George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd.
London Calcutta Sydney
The Plimpton Press Norwood Massachusetts
1922
To
HOWARD LESLIE SMITH
LOVER OF LETTERS
SABINE HILLS
O_n Sabine hills when melt the snows_,
S_till level-full His river flows_;
E_ach April now His valley fills_
W_ith cyclamen and daffodils_;
A_nd summers wither with the rose_.
S_wift-waning moons the cycle close_:
B_irth,--toil,--mirth,--death; life onward goes_
T_hrough harvest heat or winter chills_
O_n Sabine hills_.
Y_et One breaks not His long repose_,
N_or hither comes when Zephyr blows_;
I_n vain the spring's first swallow trills_;
N_ever again that Presence thrills_;
O_ne charm no circling season knows_
O_n Sabine hills_.
GEORGE MEASON WHICHER
EDITORS' PREFACE
The volume on Horace and His Influence by Doctor Showerman is the second
to appear in the Series, known as "Our Debt to Greece and Rome."
Doctor Showerman has told the story of this influence in what seems to
us the most effective manner possible, by revealing the spiritual
qualities of Horace and the reasons for their appeal to many generations
of men. These were the crown of the personality and work of the ancient
poet, and admiration of them has through successive ages always been a
token of aspiration and of a striving for better things.
The purpose of the volumes in this Series will be to show the influence
of virtually all of the great forces of the Greek and Roman
civilizations upon subsequent life and thought and the extent to which
these are interwoven into the fabric of our own life of to-day. Thereby
we shall all know more clearly the nature of our inheritance from the
past and shall comprehend more steadily the currents of our own life,
their direction and their value. This is, we take it, of considerable
importance for life as a whole, whether for correct thinking or for true
idealism.
The supremacy of Horace within the limits that he set for himself is no
fortuity, and the miracle of his achievement will always remain an
inspiration for some. But it is not as a distant ideal for a few, but as
a living and vital force for all, that we should approach him; and to
assist in this is the aim of our little volume.
The significance of Horace to the twentieth century will gain in clarity
from an understanding of his meaning to other days. We shall discover
that the eternal verity of his message, whether in ethics or in art,
comes to _us_ with a very particular challenge, warning and cry.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
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
I. HORACE INTERPRETED
THE APPEAL OF HORACE
In estimating the effect of Horace upon his own and later times, we must
take into account two aspects of his work. These are, the forms in which
he expressed himself, and the substance of which they are the garment.
We shall find him distinguished in both; but in the substance of his
message we shall find him distinguished by a quality which sets him
apart from other poets ancient and modern.
This distinctive quality lies neither in the originality nor in the
novelty of the Horatian message, which, as a matter of fact, is
surprisingly familiar, and perhaps even commonplace. It lies rather in
the appealing manner and mood of its communication. It is a message
living and vibrant.
The reason for this is that in Horace we have, above all, a person. No
poet speaks from the page with greater directness, no poet establishes
so easily and so completely the personal relation with the reader, no
poet is remembered so much as if he were a friend in the flesh. In this
respect, Horace among poets is a parallel to Thackeray in the field of
the novel. What the letters of Cicero are to the intrigue and turmoil of
politics, war, and the minor joys and sorrows of private and social life
in the last days of the Republic, the lyrics and "Conversations" of
Horace are to the mood of the philosophic mind of the early Empire. Both
are lights which afford us a clear view of interiors otherwise but
faintly illuminated. They are priceless interpreters of their times. In
modern times, we make environment interpret the poet. We understand a
Tennyson, a Milton, or even a Shakespeare, from our knowledge of the
world in which he lived. In the case of antiquity, the process is
reversed. We reconstruct the times of Caesar and Augustus from fortunate
acquaintance with two of the most representative men who ever possessed
the gift of literary genius.
It is because Horace's appeal depends so largely upon his qualities as a
person that our interpretation of him must center about his personal
traits. We shall re-present to the imagination his personal appearance.
We shall account for the personal qualities which contributed to the
poetic gift that set him apart as the interpreter of the age to his own
and succeeding generations. We shall observe the natural sympathy with
men and things by reason of which he reflects with peculiar faithfulness
the life of city and country. We shall become acquainted with the
thoughts and the moods of a mind and heart that were nicely sensitive to
sight and sound and personal contact. We shall hear what the poet has to
say of himself not only as a member of the human family, but as the user
of the pen.
This interpretation of Horace as person and poet will be best attempted
from his own work, and best expressed in his own phrase. The pages which
follow are a manner of Horatian mosaic. They contain little not said or
suggested by the poet himself.
1. HORACE THE PERSON
Horace was of slight stature among even a slight-statured race. At the
period when we like him best, when he was growing mellower and better
with advancing years, his black hair was more than evenly mingled with
grey. The naturally dark and probably not too finely-textured skin of
face and expansive forehead was deepened by the friendly breezes of both
city and country to the vigorous golden brown of the Italian. Feature
and eye held the mirror up to a spirit quick to anger but plenteous in
good-nature. Altogether, Horace was a short, rotund man, smiling but
serious, of nothing very remarkable either in appearance or in manner,
and with a look of the plain citizen. Of all the ancients who have left
no material likeness, he is the least difficult to know in person.
We see him in a carriage or at the shows with Maecenas, the Emperor's
fastidious counsellor. We have charming glimpses of him enjoying in
company the hospitable shade of huge pine and white poplar on the grassy
terrace of some rose-perfumed Italian garden with noisy fountain and
hurrying stream. He loiters, with eyes bent on the pavement, along the
winding Sacred Way that leads to the Forum, or on his way home struggles
against the crowd as it pushes its way down town amid the dust and din
of the busy city. He shrugs his shoulders in good-humored despair as the
sirocco brings lassitude and irritation from beyond the Mediterranean,
or he sits huddled up in some village by the sea, shivering with the
winds from the Alps, reading, and waiting for the first swallow to
herald the spring.
We see him at a mild game of tennis in the broad grounds of the Campus
Martius. We see him of an evening vagabonding among the nameless common
folk of Rome, engaging in small talk with dealers in small merchandise.
He may look in upon a party of carousing friends, with banter that is
not without reproof. We find him lionized in the homes of the first men
of the city in peace and war, where he mystifies the not too
intellectual fair guests with graceful and provokingly passionless
gallantry. He sits at ease with greater enjoyment under the opaque vine
and trellis of his own garden. He appears in the midst of his household
as it bustles with preparation for the birthday feast of a friend, or he
welcomes at a less formal board and with more unrestrained joy the
beloved comrade-in-arms of Philippi, prolonging the genial intercourse
"T_ill Phoebus the red East unbars_
A_nd puts to rout the trembling stars_."
Or we see him bestride an indifferent nag, cantering down the Appian
Way, with its border of tombs, toward the towering dark-green summits of
the Alban Mount, twenty miles away, or climbing the winding white road
to Tivoli where it reclines on the nearest slope of the Sabines, and
pursuing the way beyond it along the banks of headlong Anio where it
rushes from the mountains to join the Tiber. We see him finally arrived
at his Sabine farm, the gift of Maecenas, standing in tunic-sleeves at
his doorway in the morning sun, and contemplating with thankful heart
valley and hill-side opposite, and the cold stream of Digentia in the
valley-bottom below. We see him rambling about the wooded uplands of his
little estate, and resting in the shade of a decaying rustic temple to
indite a letter to the friend whose not being present is all that keeps
him from perfect happiness. He participates with the near-by villagers
in the joys of the rural holiday. He mingles homely philosophy and
fiction with country neighbors before his own hearth in the big
living-room of the farm-house.
Horace's place is not among the dim and uncertain figures of a hoary
antiquity. Only give him modern shoes, an Italian cloak, and a
walking-stick, instead of sandals and toga, and he may be seen on the
streets of Rome today. Nor is he less modern in character and bearing
than in appearance. We discern in his composition the same strange and
seemingly contradictory blend of the grave and gay, the lively and
severe, the constant and the mercurial, the austere and the trivial, the
dignified and the careless, that is so baffling to the observer of
Italian character and conduct today.
2. HORACE THE POET
To understand how Horace came to be a great poet as well as an engaging
person, it is necessary to look beneath this somewhat commonplace
exterior, and to discern the spiritual man.
The foundations of literature are laid in life. For the production of
great poetry two conditions are necessary. There must be, first, an age
pregnant with the celestial fires of deep emotion. Second, there must be
in its midst one of the rare men whom we call inspired. He must be of
such sensitive spiritual fiber as to vibrate to every breeze of the
national passion, of such spiritual capacity as to assimilate the common
thoughts and moods of the time, of such fine perception and of such
sureness of command over word, phrase, and rhythm, as to give crowning
expression to what his soul has made its own.
For abundance of stirring and fertilizing experience, history presents
few equals of the times when Horace lived. His lifetime fell in an age
which was in continual travail with great and uncertain movement. Never
has Fortune taken greater delight in her bitter and insolent game, never
displayed a greater pertinacity in the derision of men. In the period
from Horace's birth at Venusia in southeastern Italy, on December 8,
B.C. 65, to November 27, B.C. 8, when
"M_ourned of men and Muses nine_,
T_hey laid him on the Esquiline_,"
there occurred the series of great events, to men in their midst
incomprehensible, bewildering, and disheartening, which after times
could readily interpret as the inevitable change from the ancient and
decaying Republic to the better knit if less free life of the Empire.
We are at an immense distance, and the differences have long since been
composed. The menacing murmur of trumpets is no longer audible, and the
seas are no longer red with blood. The picture is old, and faded, and
darkened, and leaves us cold, until we illuminate it with the light of
imagination. Then first we see, or rather feel, the magnitude of the
time: its hatreds and its selfishness; its differences of opinion,
sometimes honest and sometimes disingenuous, but always maintained with
the heat of passion; its divisions of friends and families; its
lawlessness and violence; its terrifying uncertainties and adventurous
plunges; its tragedies of confiscation, murder, fire, proscription,
feud, insurrection, riot, war; the dramatic exits of the leading actors
in the great play,--of Catiline at Pistoria, of Crassus in the eastern
deserts, of Clodius at Bovillae within sight of the gates of Rome, of
Pompey in Egypt, of Cato in Africa, of Caesar, Servius Sulpicius,
Marcellus, Trebonius and Dolabella, Hirtius and Pansa, Decimus Brutus,
the Ciceros, Marcus Brutus and Cassius, Sextus the son of Pompey, Antony
and Cleopatra,--as one after another
"S_trutted and fretted his hour upon the stage_,
A_nd then was heard no more_."
It is in relief against a background such as this that Horace's works
should be read,--the _Satires_, published in 35 and 30, which the poet
himself calls _Sermones_, "Conversations," "Talks," or _Causeries_; the
collection of lyrics called _Epodes_, in 29; three books of _Odes_ in
23; a book of _Epistles_, or further _Causeries_, in 20; the _Secular
Hymn_ in 17; a second book of _Epistles_ in 14; a fourth book of _Odes_
in 13; and a final _Epistle_, _On the Art of Poetry_, at a later and
uncertain date.
It is above all against such a background that Horace's invocation to
Fortune should be read:
G_oddess, at lovely Antium is thy shrine_:
R_eady art thou to raise with grace divine_
O_ur mortal frame from lowliest dust of earth_,
O_r turn triumph to funeral for thy mirth_;
or that other expression of the inscrutable uncertainty of the human
lot:
F_ortune, whose joy is e'er our woe and shame_,
W_ith hard persistence plays her mocking game_;
B_estowing favors all inconstantly_,
K_indly to others now, and now to me_.
W_ith me, I praise her; if her wings she lift_
T_o leave me, I resign her every gift_,
A_nd, cloaked about in my own virtue's pride_,
W_ed honest poverty, the dowerless bride_.
Horace is not here the idle singer of an empty day. His utterance may be
a universal, but in the light of history it is no commonplace. It is the
eloquent record of the life of Rome in an age which for intensity is
unparalleled in the annals of the ancient world.
And yet men may live a longer span of years than fell to the lot of
Horace, and in times no less pregnant with event, and still fail to come
into really close contact with life. Horace's experience was
comprehensive, and touched the life of his generation at many points. He
was born in a little country town in a province distant from the
capital. His father, at one time a slave, and always of humble calling,
was a man of independent spirit, robust sense, and excellent character,
whose constant and intimate companionship left everlasting gratitude in
the heart of the son. He provided for the little Horace's education at
first among the sons of the "great" centurions who constituted the
society of the garrison-town of Venusia, afterwards ambitiously took him
to Rome to acquire even the accomplishments usual among the sons of
senators, and finally sent him to Athens, garner of wisdom of the ages,
where the learning of the past was constantly made to live again by
masters with the quick Athenian spirit of telling or hearing new things.
The intellectual experience of Horace's younger days was thus of the
broadest character. Into it there entered and were blended the shrewd
practical understanding of the Italian provincial; the ornamental
accomplishments of the upper classes; the inspiration of Rome's history,
with the long line of heroic figures that appear in the twelfth _Ode_ of
the first book like a gallery of magnificent portraits; first-hand
knowledge of prominent men of action and letters; unceasing discussion
of questions of the day which could be avoided by none; and, finally,
humanizing contact on their own soil with Greek philosophy and poetry,
Greek monuments and history, and teachers of racial as well as
intellectual descent from the greatest people of the past.
But Horace's experience assumed still greater proportions. He passed
from the university of Athens to the larger university of life. The news
of Caesar's death at the hands of the "Liberators," which reached him as
a student there at the age of twenty-one, and the arrival of Brutus some
months after, stirred his young blood. As an officer in the army of
Brutus, he underwent the hardships of the long campaign, enriching life
with new friendships formed in circumstances that have always tightened
the friendly bond. He saw the disastrous day of Philippi, narrowly
escaped death by shipwreck, and on his return to Italy and Rome found
himself without father or fortune.
Nor was the return to Rome the end of his education. In the interval
which followed, Horace's mind, always of philosophic bent, was no doubt
busy with reflection upon the disparity between the ideals of the
liberators and the practical results of their actions, upon the
difference between the disorganized, anarchical Rome of the civil war
and the gradually knitting Rome of Augustus, and upon the futility of
presuming to judge the righteousness either of motives or means in a
world where men, to say nothing of understanding each other, could not
understand themselves. In the end, he accepted what was not to be
avoided. He went farther than acquiescence. The growing conviction among
thoughtful men that Augustus was the hope of Rome found lodgment also in
his mind. He gravitated from negative to positive. His value as an
educated man was recognized, and he found himself at twenty-four in
possession of the always coveted boon of the young Italian, a place in
the government employ. A clerkship in the treasury gave him salary,
safety, respectability, a considerable dignity, and a degree of leisure.
Of the leisure he made wise use. Still in the afterglow of his Athenian
experience, he began to write. He attracted the attention of a limited
circle of associates. The personal qualities which made him a favorite
with the leaders of the Republican army again served him well. He won
the recognition and the favor of men who had the ear of the ruling few.
In about 33, when he was thirty-two years old, Maecenas, the
appreciative counsellor, prompted by Augustus, the politic ruler, who
recognized the value of talent in every field for his plans of
reconstruction, made him independent of money-getting, and gave him
currency among the foremost literary men of the city. He triumphed over
the social prejudice against the son of a freedman, disarmed the
jealousy of literary rivals, and was assured of fame as well as favor.
Nor was even this the end of Horace's experience with the world of
action. It may be that his actual participation in affairs did cease
with Maecenas's gift of the Sabine farm, and it is true that he never
pretended to live on their own ground the life of the high-born and
rich, but he nevertheless associated on sympathetic terms with men
through whom he felt all the activities and ideals of the class most
representative of the national life, and past experiences and natural
adaptability enabled him to assimilate their thoughts and emotions.
Thanks to the glowing personal nature of Horace's works, we know who
many of these friends and patrons were who so enlarged his vision and
deepened his inspiration. Almost without exception his poems are
addressed or dedicated to men with whom he was on terms of more than
ordinary friendship. They were rare men,--fit audience, though few; men
of experience in affairs at home and in the field, men of natural taste
and real cultivation, of broad and sane outlook, of warm heart and deep
sympathies. There was Virgil, whom he calls the half of his own being.
There was Plotius, and there was Varius, bird of Maeonian song, whom he
ranks with the singer of the _Aeneid_ himself as the most luminously
pure of souls on earth. There was Quintilius, whose death was bewailed
by many good men;--when would incorruptible Faith and Truth find his
equal? There was Maecenas, well-bred and worldly-wise, the pillar and
ornament of his fortunes. There was Septimius, the hoped-for companion
of his mellow old age in the little corner of earth that smiled on him
beyond all others. There was Iccius, procurator of Agrippa's estates in
Sicily, sharing Horace's delight in philosophy. There was Agrippa
himself, son-in-law of Augustus, grave hero of battles and diplomacy.
There was elderly Trebatius, sometime friend of Cicero and Caesar, with
dry legal humor early seasoned in the wilds of Gaul. There were Pompeius
and Corvinus, old-soldier friends with whom he exchanged reminiscences
of the hard campaign. There was Messalla, a fellow-student at Athens,
and Pollio, soldier, orator, and poet. There were Julius Florus and
other members of the ambitious literary cohort in the train of Tiberius.
There was Aristius Fuscus, the watch of whose wit was ever wound and
ready to strike. There was Augustus himself, busy administrator of a
world, who still found time for letters.
It is through the medium of personalities like these that Horace's
message was delivered to the world of his time and to later generations.
How far the finished elegance of his expression is due to their
discriminating taste, and how much of the breadth and sanity of his
content is due to their vigor of character and cosmopolitan culture, we
may only conjecture. Literature is not the product of a single
individual. The responsive and stimulating audience is hardly less
needful than the poet's inspiration.
Such were the variety and abundance of Horace's experience. It was large
and human. He had touched life high and low, bond and free, public and
private, military and civil, provincial and urban, Hellenic, Asiatic,
and Italian, urban and rustic, ideal and practical, at the cultured
court and among the ignorant, but not always unwise, common people.
And yet, numbers of men possessed of experience as abundant have died
without being poets, or even wise men. Their experience was held in
solution, so to speak, and failed to precipitate. Horace's experience
did precipitate. Nature gave him the warm and responsive soul by reason
of which he became a part of all he met. Unlike most of his associates
among the upper classes to which he rose, his sympathies could include
the freedman, the peasant, and the common soldier. Unlike most of the
multitude from which he sprang, he could extend his sympathies to the
careworn rich and the troubled statesman. He had learned from his own
lot and from observation that no life was wholly happy, that the cares
of the so-called fortunate were only different from, not less real than,
those of the ordinary man, that every human heart had its chamber
furnished for the entertainment of Black Care, and that the chamber was
never without its guest.
But not even the precipitate of experience called wisdom will alone make
the poet. Horace was again endowed by nature with another and rarer and
equally necessary gift,--the sense of artistic expression. It would be
waste of time to debate how much he owed to native genius, how much to
his own laborious patience, and how much to the good fortune of generous
human contact. He is surely to be classed among examples of what for
want of a better term we call inspiration. The poet _is_ born. We may
account for the inspiration of Horace by supposing him of Greek descent
(as if Italy had never begotten poets of her own), but the mystery
remains. In the case of any poet, after everything has been said of the
usual influences, there is always something left to be accounted for
only on the ground of genius. It was the possession of this that set
Horace apart from other men of similar experience.
The poet, however, is not the mere accident of birth. Horace is aware of
a power not himself that makes for poetic righteousness, and realizes
the mystery of inspiration. The Muse cast upon him at birth her placid
glance. He expects glory neither on the field nor in the course, but
looks to song for his triumphs. To Apollo,
"L_ord of the enchanting shell_,
P_arent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs_,"
who can give power of song even unto the mute, he owes all his power and
all his fame. It is the gift of Heaven that he is pointed out by the
finger of the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, that he
breathes the divine fire and pleases men. But he is as perfectly
appreciative of the fact that poets are born and also made, and condemns
the folly of depending upon inspiration unsupported by effort. He calls
himself the bee of Matinum, industriously flitting with honeyed thigh
about the banks of humid Tibur. What nature begins, cultivation must
develop. Neither training without the rich vein of native endowment, nor
natural talent without cultivation, will suffice; both must be friendly
conspirators in the process of forming the poet. Wisdom is the beginning
and source of writing well. He who would run with success the race that
is set before him must endure from boyhood the hardships of heat and
cold, and abstain from women and wine. The gift of God must be made
perfect by the use of the file, by long waiting, and by conscious
intellectual discipline.
3. HORACE THE INTERPRETER
OF HIS TIMES
HORACE THE DUALITY
Varied as were Horace's experiences, they were mainly of two kinds, and
there are two Horaces who reflect them. There is a more natural Horace,
simple and direct, of ordinary Italian manners and ideals, and a less
natural Horace, finished in the culture of Greece and the
artificialities of life in the capital. They might be called the
unconventional and the conventional Horace.
This duality is only the reflection of the two-fold experience of Horace
as the provincial village boy and as the successful literary man of the
city. The impressions received from Venusia and its simple population of
hard-working, plain-speaking folk, from the roaring Aufidus and the
landscape of Apulia, from the freedman father's common-sense instruction
as he walked about in affectionate companionship with his son, never
faded from Horace's mind. The ways of the city were superimposed upon
the ways of the country, but never displaced nor even covered them. They
were a garment put on and off, sometimes partly hiding, but never for
long, the original cloak of simplicity. It is not necessary to think its
wearer insincere when, constrained by social circumstance, he put it on.
As in most dualities not consciously assumed, both Horaces were genuine.
When Davus the slave reproaches his master for longing, while at Rome,
to be back in the country, and for praising the attractions of the city,
while in the country, it is not mere discontent or inconsistency in
Horace which he is attacking. Horace loved both city and country.
And yet, whatever the appeal of the city and its artificialities,
Horace's real nature called for the country and its simple ways. It is
the Horace of Venusia and the Sabines who is the more genuine of the
two. The more formal poems addressed to Augustus and his house-hold
sometimes sound the note of affectation, but the most exacting critic
will hesitate to bring a like charge against the odes which celebrate
the fields and hamlets of Italy and the prowess of her citizen-soldiers
of time gone by, or against the mellow epistles and lyrics in which the
poet philosophizes upon the spectacle of human life.
_i_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN
LANDSCAPE
The real Horace is to be found first of all as the interpreter of the
beauty and fruitfulness of Italy. It is no land of mere literary
imagination which he makes us see with such clear-cut distinctness. It
is not an Italy in Theocritean colors, like the Italy of Virgil's
_Bucolics_, but the Italy of Horace's own time, the Italy of his own
birth and experience, and the Italy of today. Horace is not a
descriptive poet. The reader will look in vain for nature-poems in the
modern sense. With a word or a phrase only, he flashes upon our vision
the beautiful, the significant, the permanent in the scenery of Italy.
The features which he loved best, or which for other reasons caught his
eye, are those that we still see. There are the oak and the opaque ilex,
the pine and the poplar, the dark, funereal cypress, the bright flower
of the too-short-lived rose, and the sweet-scented bed of violets. There
are the olive groves of Venafrum. Most lovely of sights and most
beautiful of figures, there is the purple-clustered vine of vari-colored
autumn wedded to the elm. There is the bachelor plane-tree. There are
the long-horned, grey-flanked, dark-muzzled, liquid-eyed cattle, grazing
under the peaceful skies of the Campagna or enjoying in the meadow their
holiday freedom from the plow; the same cattle that Carducci sings--
"I_n the grave sweetness of whose tranquil eyes_
O_f emerald, broad and still reflected, dwells_
A_ll the divine green silence of the plain_."
We are made to see the sterile rust on the corn, and to feel the blazing
heat of dog-days, when not a breath stirs as the languid shepherd leads
his flock to the banks of the stream. The sunny pastures of Calabria lie
spread before us, we see the yellow Tiber at flood, the rushing Anio,
the deep eddyings of Liris' taciturn stream, the secluded valleys of the
Apennines, the leaves flying before the wind at the coming of winter,
the snow-covered uplands of the Alban hills, the mead sparkling with
hoar-frost at the approach of spring, autumn rearing from the fields her
head decorous with mellow fruits, and golden abundance pouring forth
from a full horn her treasures upon the land. It is real Italy which
Horace cuts on his cameos,--real landscape, real flowers and fruits,
real men.
"What joy there is in these songs!"
writes Andrew Lang, in _Letters to Dead Authors_, "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 water-fall, the hum of
bees, the silvery gray 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!... None of the Latin poets
your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have known as 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 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."
_ii_. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN LIVING
Again, in its visualization of the life of Italy, Horace's art is no
less clear than in the presentation of her scenery. Where else may be
seen so many vivid incidental pictures of men at their daily occupations
of work or play? In _Satire_ and _Epistle_ this is to be expected,
though there are satirists and writers of letters who never transfer the
colors of life to their canvas; but the lyrics, too, are kaleidoscopic
with scenes from the daily round of human life. We are given fleeting
but vivid glimpses into the career of merchant and sailor. We see the
sportsman in chase of the boar, the rustic setting snares for the greedy
thrush, the serenader under the casement, the plowman at his ingleside,
the anxious mother at the window on the cliff, never taking her eyes
from the curved shore, the husbandman passing industrious days on his
own hillside, tilling his own acres with his own oxen, and training the
vine to the unwedded tree, the young men of the hill-towns carrying
bundles of fagots along rocky slopes, the rural holiday and its
festivities, the sun-browned wife making ready the evening meal against
the coming of the tired peasant. We are shown all the quaint and quiet
life of the countryside.
The page is often golden with homely precept or tale of the sort which
for all time has been natural to farmer folk. There is the story of the
country mouse and the town mouse, the fox and the greedy weasel that ate
until he could not pass through the crack by which he came, the rustic
who sat and waited for the river to get by, the horse that called man to
aid him against the stag, and received the bit forever. The most formal
and dignified of the _Odes_ are not without the mellow charm of Italian
landscape and the genial warmth of Italian life. Even in the first six
_Odes_ of the third book, often called the _Inaugural Odes_, we get such
glimpses as the vineyard and the hailstorm, the Campus Martius on
election day, the soldier knowing no fear, cheerful amid hardships under
the open sky, the restless Adriatic, the Bantine headlands and the
low-lying Forentum of the poet's infancy, the babe in the wood of
Voltur, the Latin hill-towns, the craven soldier of Crassus, and the
stern patriotism of Regulus. Without these the _Inaugurals_ would be but
barren and cold, to say nothing of the splendid outburst against the
domestic degradation of the time, so full of color and heat and
picturesqueness:
'T_was not the sons of parents such as these_
T_hat tinged with Punic blood the rolling seas_,
L_aid low the cruel Hannibal, and brought_
G_reat Pyrrhus and Antiochus to naught_;
B_ut the manly brood of rustic soldier folk_,
T_aught, when the mother or the father spoke_
T_he word austere, obediently to wield_
T_he heavy mattock in the Sabine field_,
O_r cut and bear home fagots from the height_,
A_s mountain shadows deepened into night_,
A_nd the sun's car, departing down the west_,
B_rought to the wearied steer the friendly rest_.
_iii_. THE INTERPRETER OF ROMAN RELIGION
Still farther, Horace is an eloquent interpreter of the religion of the
countryside. He knows, of course, the gods of Greece and the
East,--Venus of Cythera and Paphos, of Eryx and Cnidus, Mercury, deity
of gain and benefactor of men, Diana, Lady of the mountain and the
glade, Delian Apollo, who bathes his unbound locks in the pure waters of
Castalia, and Juno, sister and consort of fulminating Jove. He is
impressed by the glittering pomp of religious processions winding their
way to the summit of the Capitol. In all this, and even in the
emperor-worship, now in its first stages at Rome and more political than
religious, he acquiesces, though he may himself be a sparing frequenter
of the abodes of worship. For him, as for Cicero, religion is one of the
social and civic proprieties, a necessary part of the national
mechanism.
But the great Olympic deities do not really stir Horace's enthusiasm, or
even evoke his warm sympathy. The only _Ode_ in which he prays to one of
them with really fervent heart stands alone among all the odes to the
national gods. He petitions the great deity of healing and poetry for
what we know is most precious to him:
"W_hen, kneeling at Apollo's shrine_,
T_he bard from silver goblet pours_
L_ibations due of votive wine_,
W_hat seeks he, what implores_?
"N_ot harvests from Sardinia's shore_;
N_ot grateful herds that crop the lea_
I_n hot Calabria; not a store_
O_f gold, and ivory_;
"N_ot those fair lands where slow and deep_
T_hro' meadows rich and pastures gay_
T_hy silent waters, Liris, creep_,
E_ating the marge away_.
"L_et him to whom the gods award_
C_alenian vineyards prune the vine_;
T_he merchant sell his balms and nard_,
A_nd drain the precious wine_
"F_rom cups of gold--to Fortune dear_
B_ecause his laden argosy_
C_rosses, unshattered, thrice a year_
T_he storm-vexed Midland sea_.
"R_ipe berries from the olive bough_,
M_allows and endives, be my fare_.
S_on of Latona, hear my vow!_
A_pollo, grant my prayer!_
"H_ealth to enjoy the blessings sent_
F_rom heaven; a mind unclouded, strong_;
A_ cheerful heart; a wise content_;
A_n honored age; and song_."
This is not the prayer of the city-bred formalist. It reflects the heart
of humble breeding and sympathies. For the faith which really sets the
poet aglow we must go into the fields and hamlets of Italy, among the
householders who were the descendants of the long line of Italian
forefathers that had worshiped from time immemorial the same gods at the
same altars in the same way. They were not the gods of yesterday,
imported from Greece and Egypt, and splendid with display, but the
simple gods of farm and fold native to the soil of Italy. Whatever his
conception of the logic of it all, Horace felt a powerful appeal as he
contemplated the picturesqueness of the worship and the simplicity of
the worshiper, and reflected upon its genuineness and purity as
contrasted with what his worldly wisdom told him of the heart of the
urban worshiper.
Horace may entertain a well-bred skepticism of Jupiter's thunderbolt,
and he may pass the jest on the indifference of the Epicurean gods to
the affairs of men. When he does so, it is with the gods of mythology
and literature he is dealing, not with really religious gods. For the
old-fashioned faith of the country he entertains only the kindliest
regard. The images that rise in his mind at the mention of religion pure
and undefiled are not the gaudy spectacles to be seen in the marbled
streets of the capital. They are images of incense rising in autumn from
the ancient altar on the home-stead, of the feast of the Terminalia with
its slain lamb, of libations of ruddy wine and offerings of bright
flowers on the clear waters of some ancestral spring, of the simple
hearth of the farmhouse, of the family table resplendent with the silver
_salinum_, heirloom of generations, from which the grave paterfamilias
makes the pious offering of crackling salt and meal to little gods
crowned with rosemary and myrtle, of the altar beneath the pine to the
Virgin goddess, of Faunus the shepherd-god, in the humor of wooing,
roaming the sunny farmfields in quest of retreating wood-nymphs, of
Priapus the garden-god, and Silvanus, guardian of boundaries, and, most
of all, and typifying all, of the faith of rustic Phidyle, with clean
hands and a pure heart raising palms to heaven at the new of the moon,
and praying for the full-hanging vine, thrifty fields of corn, and
unblemished lambs. Of the religious life represented by these, Horace is
no more tempted to make light than he is tempted to delineate the
Italian rustic as De Maupassant does the French,--as an amusing animal,
with just enough of the human in his composition to make him ludicrous.
_iv_. THE INTERPRETER OF THE POPULAR
WISDOM
Finally, in the homely, unconventional wisdom which fills _Satire_ and
_Epistle_ and sparkles from the _Odes_, Horace is again the national
interpreter. The masses of Rome or Italy had little consciously to do
with either Stoicism or Epicureanism. Their philosophy was vigorous
common sense, and was learned from living, not from conning books.
Horace, too, for all his having been a student of formal philosophy in
Athens, for all his professed faith in philosophy as a boon for rich and
poor and old and young, and for all his inclination to yield to the
natural human impulse toward system and adopt the philosophy of one of
the Schools, is a consistent follower of neither Stoic nor Epicurean.
Both systems attracted him by their virtues, and both repelled him
because of their weaknesses. His half-humorous confession of wavering
allegiance is only a reflection of the shiftings of a mind open to the
appeal of both:
And, lest you inquire under what guide or to what hearth I look for
safety, I will tell you that I am sworn to obedience in no master's
formula, but am a guest in whatever haven the tempest sweeps me to. Now
I am full of action and deep in the waves of civic life, an unswerving
follower and guardian of the true virtue, now I secretly backslide to
the precepts of Aristippus, and try to bend circumstance to myself, not
myself to circumstance.
Horace is either Stoic or Epicurean, or neither, or both. The character
of philosophy depends upon definition of terms, and Epicureanism with
Horace's definitions of pleasure and duty differed little in practical
working from Stoicism. In profession, he was more of the Epicurean; in
practice, more of the Stoic. His philosophy occupies ground between
both, or, rather, ground common to both. It admits of no name. It is not
a system. It owes its resemblances to either of the Schools more to his
own nature than to his familiarity with them, great as that was.
The foundations of Horace's philosophy were laid before he ever heard of
the Schools. Its basis was a habit of mind acquired by association with
his father and the people of Venusia, and with the ordinary people of
Rome. Under the influence of reading, study, and social converse at
Athens, under the stress of experience in the field, and from long
contemplation of life in the large in the capital of an empire, it
crystallized into a philosophy of life. The term "philosophy" is
misleading in Horace's case. It suggests books and formulae and
externals. What Horace read in books did not all remain for him the dead
philosophy of ink and paper; what was in tune with his nature he
assimilated, to become philosophy in action, philosophy which really was
the guide of life. His faith in it is unfeigned:
Thus does the time move slowly and ungraciously which hinders me from
the active realization of what, neglected, is a harm to young and old
alike.... The envious man, the ill-tempered, the indolent, the
wine-bibber, the too free lover,--no mortal, in short, is so crude that
his nature cannot be made more gentle if only he will lend a willing ear
to cultivation.
The occasional phraseology of the Schools which Horace employs should
not mislead. It is for the most part the convenient dress for truth
discovered for himself through experience; or it may be literary
ornament. The humorous and not unsatiric lines to his poet-friend Albius
Tibullus,--"when you want a good laugh, come and see me; you will find
me fat and sleek and my skin well cared for, a pig from the sty of
Epicurus,"--are as easily the jest of a Stoic as the confession of an
Epicurean. Horace's philosophy is individual and natural, and
representative of Roman common sense rather than any School.
HORACE AND HELLENISM
A word should be said here regarding the frequent use of the word
"Hellenic" in connection with Horace's genius. Among the results of his
higher education, it is natural that none should be more prominent to
the eye than the influence of Greek letters upon his work; but to call
Horace Greek is to be blinded to the essential by the presence in his
poems of Greek form and Greek allusion. It would be as little reasonable
to call a Roman triumphal arch Greek because it displays column,
architrave, or a facing of marble from Greece. What makes Roman
architecture stand is not ornament, but Roman concrete and the Roman
vault. Horace is Greek as Milton is Hebraic or Roman, or as Shakespeare
is Italian.
4. HORACE THE PHILOSOPHER OF LIFE
HORACE THE SPECTATOR AND ESSAYIST
A great source of the richness of personality which constitutes Horace's
principal charm is to be found in his contemplative disposition. His
attitude toward the universal drama is that of the onlooker. As we shall
see, he is not without keen interest in the piece, but his prevailing
mood is that of mild amusement. In time past, he has himself assumed
more than one of the rôles, and has known personally many of the actors.
He knows perfectly well that there is a great deal of the mask and
buskin on the stage of life, and that each man in his time plays many
parts. Experience has begotten reflection, and reflection has
contributed in turn to experience, until contemplation has passed from
diversion to habit.
Horace is another Spectator, except that his "meddling with any
practical part in life" has not been so slight:
Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind than as one of
the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman,
soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical
part in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband, or a
father, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, and
diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them: as
standers-by discover blots which are apt to escape those who are in the
game.
He looks down from his post upon the life of men with as clear vision as
Lucretius, whom he admires:
Nothing is sweeter than to dwell in the lofty citadels secure in the
wisdom of the sages, thence to look down upon the rest of mankind
blindly wandering in mistaken paths in the search for the way of life,
striving one with another in the contest of wits, emulous in distinction
of birth, night and day straining with supreme effort at length to
arrive at the heights of power and become lords of the world.
Farther, Horace is not merely the stander-by contemplating the game in
which objective mankind is engaged. He is also a spectator of himself.
Horace the poet-philosopher contemplates Horace the man with the same
quiet amusement with which he surveys the human family of which he is an
inseparable yet detachable part. It is the universal aspect of Horace
which is the object of his contemplation,--Horace playing a part
together with the rest of mankind in the infinitely diverting _comédie
humaine_. He uses himself, so to speak, for illustrative purposes,--to
point the moral of the genuine; to demonstrate the indispensability of
hard work as well as genius; to afford concrete proof of the possibility
of happiness without wealth. He is almost as objective to himself as the
landscape of the Sabine farm. Horace the spectator sees Horace the man
against the background of human life just as he sees snow-mantled
Soracte, or the cold Digentia, or the restless Adriatic, or leafy
Tarentum, or snowy Algidus, or green Venafrum. The clear-cut elegance of
his miniatures of Italian scenery is not due to their individual
interest, but to their connection with the universal life of man.
Description for its own sake is hardly to be found in Horace. In the
same way, the vivid glimpses he affords of his own life, person, and
character almost never prompt the thought of egotism. The most personal
of poets, his expression of self nowhere becomes selfish expression.
But there are spectators who are mere spectators. Horace is more; he is
a critic and an interpreter. He looks forth upon life with a keen vision
for comparative values, and gives sane and distinct expression to what
he sees.
Horace must not be thought of, however, as a censorious or carping
critic. His attitude is judicial, and the verdict is seldom other than
lenient and kindly. He is not a wasp of Twickenham, not a Juvenal
furiously laying about him with a heavy lash, not a Lucilius with the
axes of Scipionic patrons to grind, having at the leaders of the people
and the people themselves. He is in as little degree an Ennius,
composing merely to gratify the taste for entertainment. There are some,
as a matter of fact, to whom in satire he seems to go beyond the limit
of good-nature. At vice in pronounced form, at all forms of unmanliness,
he does indeed strike out, like Lucilius the knight of Campania, his
predecessor and pattern, gracious only to virtue and to the friends of
virtue; but those whose hands are clean and whose hearts are pure need
fear nothing. Even those who are guilty of the ordinary frailties of
human kind need fear nothing worse than being good-humoredly laughed at.
The objects of Horace's smiling condemnation are not the trifling faults
of the individual or the class, but the universal grosser stupidities
which poison the sources of life.
The Horace of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ is better called an essayist.
That he is a satirist at all is less by virtue of intention than because
of the mere fact that he is a spectator. To look upon life with the eye
of understanding is to see men the prey to passions and delusions,--the
very comment on which can be nothing else than satire.
And now, what is it that Horace sees as he sits in philosophic
detachment on the serene heights of contemplation; and what are his
reflections?
The great factor in the character of Horace is his philosophy of life.
To define it is to give the meaning of the word Horatian as far as
content is concerned, and to trace the thread which more than any other
makes his works a unity.
_i_. THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES
Horace looks forth upon a world of discontented and restless humanity.
The soldier, the lawyer, the farmer, the trader, swept over the earth in
the passion for gain, like dust in the whirlwind,--all are dissatisfied.
Choose anyone you will from the midst of the throng; either with greed
for money or with miserable ambition for power, his soul is in travail.
Some are dazzled by fine silver, some lose their senses over bronze.
Some are ever straining after the prizes of public life. There are many
who love not wisely, but too well. Most are engaged in a mad race for
money, whether to assure themselves of retirement and ease in old age,
or out of the sportsman's desire to outstrip their rivals in the course.
As many as are mortal men, so many are the objects of their pursuit.
And, over and about all men, by reason of their bondage to avarice,
ambition, appetite, and passion, hovers Black Care. It flits above their
sleepless eyes in the panelled ceiling of the darkened palace, it sits
behind them on the courser as they rush into battle, it dogs them as
they are at the pleasures of the bronze-trimmed yacht. It pursues them
everywhere, swifter than the deer, swifter than the wind that drives
before it the storm-cloud. Not even those who are most happy are
entirely so. No lot is wholly blest. Perfect happiness is unattainable.
Tithonus, with the gift of ever-lasting life, wasted away in undying old
age. Achilles, with every charm of youthful strength and gallantry, was
doomed to early death. Not even the richest are content. Something is
always lacking in the midst of abundance, and desire more than keeps
pace with satisfaction.
Nor are the multitude less enslaved to their desires than the few. Glory
drags bound to her glittering chariot-wheels the nameless as well as the
nobly-born. The poor are as inconstant as the rich. What of the man who
is not rich? You may well smile. He changes from garret to garret, from
bed to bed, from bath to bath and barber to barber, and is just as
seasick in a hired boat as the wealthy man on board his private yacht.
And not only are all men the victims of insatiable desire, but all are
alike subject to the uncertainties of fate. Insolent Fortune without
notice flutters her swift wings and leaves them. Friends prove
faithless, once the cask is drained to the lees. Death, unforeseen and
unexpected, lurks in ambush for them in a thousand places. Some are
swallowed up by the greedy sea. Some the Furies give to destruction in
the grim spectacle of war. Without respect of age or person, the ways of
death are thronged with young and old. Cruel Proserpina passes no man
by.
Even they who for the time escape the object of their dread must at last
face the inevitable. Invoked or not invoked, Death comes to release the
lowly from toil, and to strip the proud of power. The same night awaits
all; everyone must tread once for all the path of death. The summons is
delivered impartially at the hovels of the poor and the turreted palaces
of the rich. The dark stream must be crossed by prince and peasant
alike. Eternal exile is the lot of all, whether nameless and poor, or
sprung of the line of Inachus:
A_las! my Postumus, alas! how speed_
T_he passing years: nor can devotion's deed_
S_tay wrinkled age one moment on its way_,
N_or stay one moment death's appointed day_;
N_ot though with thrice a hundred oxen slain_
E_ach day thou prayest Pluto to refrain_,
T_he unmoved by tears, who threefold Geryon drave_,
A_nd Tityus, beneath the darkening wave_.
T_he wave we all must one day surely sail_
W_ho live and breathe within this mortal vale_,
W_hether our lot with princely rich to fare_,
W_hether the peasant's lowly life to share_.
I_n vain for us from murderous Mars to flee_,
I_n vain to shun the storms of Hadria's sea_,
I_n vain to fear the poison-laden breath_
O_f Autumn's sultry south-wind, fraught with death_;
A_down the wandering stream we all must go_,
A_down Cocytus' waters, black and slow_;
T_he ill-famed race of Danaus all must see_,
A_nd Sisyphus, from labors never free_.
A_ll must be left,--lands, home, beloved wife_,--
A_ll left behind when we have done with life_;
O_ne tree alone, of all thou holdest dear_,
S_hall follow thee,--the cypress, o'er thy bier!_
T_hy wiser heir will soon drain to their lees_
T_he casks now kept beneath a hundred keys_;
T_he proud old Caecuban will stain the floor_,
M_ore fit at pontiffs' solemn feasts to pour_.
Nor is there a beyond filled with brightness for the victim of fate to
look to. Orcus is unpitying. Mercury's flock of souls is of sable hue,
and Proserpina's realm is the hue of the dusk. Black Care clings to poor
souls even beyond the grave. Dull and persistent, it is the only
substantial feature of the insubstantial world of shades. Sappho still
sighs there for love of her maiden companions, the plectrum of Alcaeus
sounds its chords only to songs of earthly hardships by land and sea,
Prometheus and Tantalus find no surcease from the pangs of torture,
Sisyphus ever rolls the returning stone, and the Danaids fill the
ever-emptying jars.
_ii_. THE PLEASURES OF THIS WORLD
The picture is dark with shadow, and must be relieved with light and
color. The hasty conclusion should not be drawn that this is the
philosophy of gloom. The tone of Horace is neither that of the cheerless
skeptic nor that of the despairing pessimist. He does not rise from his
contemplation with the words or the feeling of Lucretius:
O miserable minds of men, O blind hearts! In what obscurity and in what
dangers is passed this uncertain little existence of yours!
He would have agreed with the philosophy of pessimism that life contains
striving and pain, but he would not have shared in the gloom of a
Schopenhauer, who in all will sees action, in all action want, in all
want pain, who looks upon pain as the essential condition of will, and
sees no end of suffering except in the surrender of the will to live.
The vanity of human wishes is no secret to Horace, but life is not to
him "a soap-bubble which we blow out as long and as large as possible,
though each of us knows perfectly well it must sooner or later burst."
No, life may have its inevitable pains and its inevitable end, but it is
far more substantial in composition than a bubble. For those who possess
the secret of detecting and enjoying them, it contains solid goods in
abundance.
What is the secret?
The first step toward enjoyment of the human lot is acquiescence. Of
course existence has its evils and bitter end, but these are minimized
for the man who frankly faces them, and recognizes the futility of
struggling against the fact. How much better to endure whatever our lot
shall impose. Quintilius is dead: it is hard; but patience makes lighter
the ill that fate will not suffer us to correct.
And then, when we have once yielded, and have ceased to look upon
perfect happiness as a possibility, or upon any measure of happiness as
a right to be demanded, we are in position to take the second step;
namely, to make wise use of life's advantages:
M_id all thy hopes and all thy cares, mid all thy wraths and fears_,
T_hink every shining day that dawns the period to thy years_.
T_he hour that comes unlooked for is the hour that doubly cheers_.
Because there are many things to make life a pleasure. There is the
solace of literature; Black Care is lessened by song. There are the
riches of philosophy, there is the diversion of moving among men. There
are the delights of the country and the town. Above all, there are
friends with whom to share the joy of mere living in Italy. For what
purpose, if not to enjoy, are the rose, the pine, and the poplar, the
gushing fountain, the generous wine of Formian hill and Massic slope,
the villa by the Tiber, the peaceful and healthful seclusion of the
Sabines, the pleasing change from the sharp winter to the soft zephyrs
of spring, the apple-bearing autumn,--"season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness"? What need to be unhappy in the midst of such a world?
And the man who is wise will not only recognize the abounding
possibilities about him, but will seize upon them before they vanish.
Who knows whether the gods above will add a tomorrow to the to-day? Be
glad, and lay hand upon the gifts of the passing hour! Take advantage of
the day, and have no silly faith in the morrow. It is as if Omar were
translating Horace:
"W_aste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit_
0_f This and That endeavor and dispute;_
B_etter be jocund with the fruitful Grape_
T_han sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit._
"A_h! fill the Cup: what boots it to repeat_
H_ow Time is slipping underneath our Feet:_
U_nborn tomorrow, and dead yesterday,_
W_hy fret about them if today be sweet!"_
The goods of existence must be enjoyed here and now, or never, for all
must be left behind. What once is enjoyed is forever our very own. Happy
is the man who can say, at each day's close, "I have lived!" The day is
his, and cannot be recalled. Let Jove overcast with black cloud the
heavens of to-morrow, or let him make it bright with clear sunshine,--as
he pleases; what the flying hour of to-day has already given us he never
can revoke. Life is a stream, now gliding peacefully onward in
mid-channel to the Tuscan sea, now tumbling upon its swirling bosom the
wreckage of flood and storm. The pitiful human being on its banks, ever
looking with greedy expectation up the stream, or with vain regret at
what is past, is left at last with nothing at all. The part of wisdom
and of happiness is to keep eyes on that part of the stream directly
before us, the only part which is ever really seen.
Y_ou see how, deep with gleaming snow,_
S_oracte stands, and, bending low,_
Y_on branches droop beneath their burden,_
A_nd streams o'erfrozen have ceased their flow._
A_way with cold! the hearth pile high_
W_ith blazing logs; the goblet ply_
W_ith cheering Sabine, Thaliarchus;_
D_raw from the cask of long years gone by._
A_ll else the gods entrust to keep,_
W_hose nod can lull the winds to sleep,_
V_exing the ash and cypress agèd,_
O_r battling over the boiling deep._
S_eek not to pierce the morrow's haze,_
B_ut for the moment render praise;_
N_or spurn the dance, nor love's sweet passion,_
E_re age draws on with its joyless days._
N_ow should the campus be your joy,_
A_nd whispered loves your lips employ,_
W_hat time the twilight shadows gather,_
A_nd tryst you keep with the maiden coy._
F_rom near-by nook her laugh makes plain_
W_here she had meant to hide, in vain!_
H_ow arch her struggles o'er the token_
F_rom yielding which she can scarce refrain!_
_iii_. LIFE AND MORALITY
But Horace's Epicureanism never goes to the length of Omar's. He would
have shrunk from the Persian as extreme:
"YESTERDAY _This Day's Madness did prepare_,
TOMORROW'S _Silence, Triumph, or Despair_,
_Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why_:
D_rink! for you know not why you go, nor where_."
The Epicureanism of Horace is more nearly that of Epicurus himself, the
saintly recluse who taught that "to whom little is not enough, nothing
is enough," and who regarded plain living as at the same time a duty and
a happiness. The lives of too liberal disciples have been a slander on
the name of Epicurus. Horace is not among them. With degenerate
Epicureans, whose philosophy permitted them "To roll with pleasure in a
sensual sty," he had little in common. The extraction from life of the
honey of enjoyment was indeed the highest purpose, but the purpose could
never be realized without the exercise of discrimination, moderation,
and a measure of spiritual culture. Life was an art, symmetrical,
unified, reposeful,--like the poem of perfect art, or the statue, or
the temple. In actual conduct, the hedonist of the better type differed
little from the Stoic himself.
The gracious touch and quiet humor with which Horace treats even the
most serious themes are often misleading. This effect is the more
possible by reason of the presence among his works of passages, not many
and for the most part youthful, in which he is guilty of too great
freedom.
Horace is really a serious person. He is even something of a preacher, a
praiser of the time when he was a boy, a censor and corrector of his
youngers. So far as popular definitions of Stoic and Epicurean are
concerned, he is much more the former than the latter.
For Horace's counsel is always for moderation, and sometimes for
austerity. He is not a wine-bibber, and he is not a total abstainer. To
be the latter on principle would never have occurred to him. The vine
was the gift of God. Prefer nothing to it for planting in the mellow
soil of Tibur, Varus; it is one of the compensations of life:
"I_ts magic power of wit can spread_
T_he halo round a dullard's head_,
C_an make the sage forget his care_,
H_is bosom's inmost thoughts unbare_,
A_nd drown his solemn-faced pretense_
B_eneath its blithesome influence_.
B_right hope it brings and vigor back_
T_o minds outworn upon the rack_,
A_nd puts such courage in the brain_
A_s makes the poor be men again_,
W_hom neither tyrants' wrath affrights_,
N_or all their bristling satellites_."
When wine is a curse, it is not so because of itself, but because of
excess in its use. The cup was made for purposes of pleasure, but to
quarrel over it,--leave that to barbarians! Take warning by the
Thracians, and the Centaurs and Lapiths, never to overstep the bounds of
moderation. Pleasure with after-taste of bitterness is not real
pleasure. Pleasure purchased with pain is an evil.
Upon women he looks with the same philosophic calm as upon wine. Love,
too, was to be regarded as one of the contributions to life's pleasure.
To dally with golden-haired Pyrrha, with Lyce, or with Glycera, the
beauty more brilliant than Parian marble, was not in his eyes to be
blamed in itself. What he felt no hesitation in committing to his poems
for friends and the Emperor to read, they on their part felt as little
hesitation in confessing to him. The fault of love lay not in itself,
but in abuse. This is not said of adultery, which was always an offense
because it disturbed the institution of marriage and rotted the
foundation of society.
There is thus no inconsistency in the Horace of the love poems and the
Horace of the _Secular Hymn_ who petitions Our Lady Juno to prosper the
decrees of the Senate encouraging the marriage relation and the rearing
of families. Of the illicit love that looked to Roman women in the home,
he emphatically declares his innocence, and against it directs the last
and most powerful of the six _Inaugural Odes_; for this touched the
family, and, through the family, the State. This, with neglect of
religion, he classes together as the two great causes of national decay.
Horace is not an Ovid, with no sense of the limits of either indulgence
or expression. He is not a Catullus, tormented by the furies of youthful
passion. The flame never really burned him. We search his pages in vain
for evidence of sincere and absorbing passion, whether of the flesh or
of the spirit. He was guilty of no breach of the morals of his time, and
it is likely also, in spite of Suetonius, that he was guilty of no
excess. He was a supporter in good faith of the Emperor in his attempts
at the moral improvement of the State. If Virgil in the writing of the
_Georgics_ or the _Aeneid_ was conscious of a purpose to second the
project of Augustus, it is just as likely that his intimate friend
Horace also wrote with conscious moral intent. Nothing is more in
keeping with his conception of the end and effect of literature:
It shapes the tender and hesitating speech of the child; it straight
removes his ear from shameless communication; presently with friendly
precepts it moulds his inner self; it is a corrector of harshness and
envy and anger; it sets forth the righteous deed; it instructs the
rising generations with the familiar example; it is a solace to the
helpless and the sick at heart.
_iv_. LIFE AND PURPOSE
Horace's philosophy of life is thus based upon something deeper than the
principle of seizing upon pleasure. His definition of pleasure is not
without austerity; he preaches the positive virtues of performance as
well as the negative virtue of moderation. He could be an unswerving
follower and guardian of true virtue, and could bend self to
circumstance.
He stands for domestic purity, and for patriotic devotion. _Dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori_,--to die for country is a privilege and a
glory. His hero is Regulus, returning steadfastly through the ranks of
protesting friends to keep faith with the pitiless executioners of
Carthage. Regulus, and the Scauri, and Paulus, who poured out his great
spirit on the disastrous field of Cannae, and Fabricius, of simple heart
and absolute integrity, he holds up as examples to his generation. In
praise of the sturdy Roman qualities of courage and steadfastness he
writes his most inspired lines:
The righteous man of unswerving purpose is shaken in his solid will
neither by the unworthy demands of inflamed citizens, nor by the
frowning face of the threatening tyrant, nor by the East-wind, turbid
ruler of the restless Adriatic, nor by the great hand of fulminating
Jove himself. If the heavens should fall asunder, the crashing fragments
would descend upon him unterrified.
He preaches the gospel of faithfulness not only to family, country, and
purpose, but to religion. He will shun the man who violates the secrets
of the mysteries. The curse of the gods is upon all such, and pursues
them to the day of doom.
Faithfulness to friendship stands out with no less distinctness. While
Horace is in his right mind, he will value nothing so highly as a
delightful friend. He is ready, whenever fate calls, to enter with
Maecenas even upon the last journey. Among the blest is he who is
unafraid to die for dear friends or native land.
Honor, too,--the fine spirit of old Roman times, that refused bribes,
that would not take advantage of an enemy's weakness, that asked no
questions save the question of what was right, that never turned its
back upon duty, that swore to its own hurt and changed not; the same
lofty spirit the recording of whose manifestations never fails to bring
the glow to Livy's cheek and the gleam to his eye,--honor is also first
and foremost in Horace's esteem. Regulus, the self-sacrificing; Curius,
despising the Samnite gold; Camillus, yielding private grievance to come
to his country's aid; Cato, dying for his convictions after Thapsus, are
his inspirations. The hero of his ideal fears disgrace worse than death.
The diadem and the laurel are for him only who can pass on without the
backward glance upon stores of treasure.
Finally, not least among the qualities which enter into the ideal of
Horace is the simplicity of the olden time, when the armies of Rome were
made up of citizen-soldiers, and the eye of every Roman was single to
the glory of the State, and the selfishness of luxury was yet unknown.
S_cant were their private means, the public, great_;
'T_was still a commonwealth, that State_;
N_o portico, surveyed with private rule_,
A_ssured one man the shady cool_.
T_he laws approved the house of humble sods_;
'T_was only to the homes of gods_,
T_he structures reared with earnings of the nation_,
T_hey gave rich marble decoration_.
The healthful repose of heart which comes from unity of purpose and
simple devotion to plain duty, he sees existing still, even in his own
less strenuous age, in the remote and peaceful countryside. Blessed is
the man far from the busy life of affairs, like the primeval race of
mortals, who tills with his own oxen the acres of his fathers! Horace
covets the gift earnestly for himself, because his calm vision assures
him that it, of all the virtues, lies next to happy living.
_v_. THE SOURCES OF HAPPINESS
Here we have arrived at the kernel of Horace's philosophy, the key which
unlocks the casket containing his message to all men of every
generation. In actual life, at least, mankind storms the citadel of
happiness, as if it were something material and external, to be taken by
violent hands. Horace locates the citadels of happiness in his own
breast. It is the heart which is the source of all joy and all sorrow,
of all wealth and all poverty. Happiness is to be sought, not outside,
but within. Man does not create his world; he _is_ his world.
Men are madly chasing after peace of heart in a thousand wrong ways, all
the while over-looking the right way, which is nearest at hand. To
observe their feverish eagerness, the spectator might be led to think
happiness identical with possession. And yet wealth and happiness are
neither the same nor equivalent. They may have nothing to do one with
the other. Money, indeed, is not an evil in itself, but it is not
essential except so far as it is a mere means of life. Poor men may be
happy, and the wealthy may be poor in the midst of their riches. A man's
wealth consisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesseth. More
justly does he lay claim to the name of rich man who knows how to use
the blessings of the gods wisely, who is bred to endurance of hard want,
and who fears the disgraceful action worse than he fears death.
Real happiness consists in peace of mind and heart. Everyone desires it,
and everyone prays for it,--the sailor caught in the storms of the
Aegean, the mad Thracian, the Mede with quiver at his back. But peace is
not to be purchased. Neither gems nor purple nor gold will buy it, nor
favor. Not all the externals in the world can help the man who depends
upon them alone.
N_ot treasure trove nor consul's stately train_
D_rives wretched tumult from the troubled brain_;
S_warming with cares that draw unceasing sighs_,
T_he fretted ceiling hangs o'er sleepless eyes_.
Nor is peace to be pursued and laid hold of, or discovered in some other
clime. Of what avail to fly to lands warmed by other suns? What exile
ever escaped himself? It is the soul that is at fault, that never can be
freed from its own bonds. The sky is all he changes:
T_he heavens, not themselves, they change_
W_ho haste to cross the seas_.
The happiness men seek for is in themselves, to be found at little
Ulubrae in the Latin marshes as easily as in great cities, if only they
have the proper attitude of mind and heart.
But how insure this peace of mind?
At the very beginning, and through to the end, the searcher after
happiness must recognize that unhappiness is the result of slavery of
some sort, and that slavery in turn is begotten of desire. The man who
is overfond of anything will be unwilling to let go his hold upon it.
Desire will curb his freedom. The only safety lies in refusing the rein
to passion of any kind. "To gaze upon nothing to lust after it,
Numicius, is the simple way of winning and of keeping happiness." He who
lives in either desire or fear can never enjoy his possessions. He who
desires will also fear; and he who fears can never be a free man. The
wise man will not allow his desires to become tyrants over him. Money
will be his servant, not his master. He will attain to wealth by curbing
his wants. You will be monarch over broader realms by dominating your
spirit than by adding Libya to far-off Gades.
The poor man, in spite of poverty, may enjoy life more than the rich. It
is possible under a humble roof to excel in happiness kings and the
friends of kings. Wealth depends upon what men want, not upon what men
have. The more a man denies himself, the greater are the gifts of the
gods to him. One may hold riches in contempt, and thus be a more
splendid lord of wealth than the great landowner of Apulia. By
contracting his desires he may extend his revenues until they are more
than those of the gorgeous East. Many wants attend those who have many
ambitions. Happy is the man to whom God has given barely enough. Let him
to whom fate, fortune, or his own effort has given this enough, desire
no more. If the liquid stream of Fortune should gild him, it would make
his happiness nothing greater, because money cannot change his nature.
To the man who has good digestion and good lungs and is free from gout,
the riches of a king could add nothing. What difference does it make to
him who lives within the limits of nature whether he plow a hundred
acres or a thousand?
As with the passion of greed, so with anger, love, ambition for power,
and all the other forms of desire which lodge in the human heart. Make
them your slaves, or they will make you theirs. Like wrath, they are all
forms of madness. The man who becomes avaricious has thrown away the
armor of life, has abandoned the post of virtue. Once let a man submit
to desire of an unworthy kind, and he will find himself in the case of
the horse that called a rider to help him drive the stag from their
common feeding-ground, and received the bit and rein forever.
So Horace will enter into no entangling alliances with ambition for
power, wealth, or position, or with the more personal passions. By some
of them he has not been altogether untouched, and he has not regret; but
to continue, at forty-five, would not do. He will be content with just
his home in the Sabine hills. This is what he always prayed for, a patch
of ground, not so very large, with a spring of ever-flowing water, a
garden, and a little timberland. He asks for nothing more, except that a
kindly fate will make these beloved possessions forever his own. He will
go to the ant, for she is an example, and consider her ways and be wise,
and be content with what he has as soon as it is enough. He will not
enter the field of public life, because it would mean the sacrifice of
peace. He would have to keep open house, submit to the attentions of a
body-guard of servants, keep horses and carriage and a coachman, and be
the target for shafts of envy and malice; in a word, lose his freedom
and become the slave of wretched and burdensome ambition.
The price is too great, the privilege not to his liking. Horace's prayer
is rather to be freed from the cares of empty ambition, from the fear of
death and the passion of anger, to laugh at superstition, to enjoy the
happy return of his birthday, to be forgiving of his friends, to grow
more gentle and better as old age draws on, to recognize the proper
limit in all things:
"H_ealth to enjoy the blessings sent_
F_rom heaven; a mind unclouded, strong_;
A_ cheerful heart; a wise content_;
A_n honored age; and song_."
II. HORACE THROUGH THE AGES
INTRODUCTORY
Thus much we have had to say in the interpretation of Horace. Our
interpretation has centered about his qualities as a person: his broad
experience, his sensitiveness, his responsiveness, his powers of
assimilation, his gift of expression, his concreteness as a
representative of the world of culture, as a son of Italy, as a citizen
of eternal Rome, as a member of the universal human family.
Let us now tell the story of Horace in the life of after times. It will
include an account of the esteem in which he was held while still in the
flesh; of the fame he enjoyed and the influence he exercised until Rome
as a great empire was no more and the Roman tongue and Roman spirit
alike were decayed; of the way in which his works were preserved intact
through obscure centuries of ignorance and turmoil; and of their second
birth when men began to delight once more in the luxuries of the mind.
This will prepare the way for a final chapter, on the peculiar quality
and manner of the Horatian influence.
1. HORACE THE PROPHET
Horace is aware of his qualities as a poet. In an interesting blend, of
which the first and larger part is detached and judicial estimation of
his work, a second part literary convention, and the third and least a
smiling and inoffensive self-assertion, he prophesies his own
immortality.
From infancy he has been set apart as the child of the Muses. At birth
Melpomene marked him for her own. The doves of ancient story covered him
over with the green leaves of the Apulian wood as, lost and overcome by
weariness, he lay in peaceful slumber, and kept him safe from creeping
and four-footed things, a babe secure in the favor of heaven. The sacred
charm that rests upon him preserved him in the rout at Philippi, rescued
him from the Sabine wolf, saved him from death by the falling tree and
the waters of shipwreck. He will abide under its shadow wherever he may
go,--to his favorite haunts in Latium, to the far north where fierce
Britons offer up the stranger to their gods, to the far east and the
blazing sands of the Syrian desert, to rude Spain and the streams of
Scythia, to the treeless, naked fields of the frozen pole, to homeless
lands under the fiery car of the too-near sun. He will rise superior to
the envy of men. The pinions that bear him aloft through the clear ether
will be of no usual or flagging sort. For him there shall be no death,
no Stygian wave across which none returns:
F_orego the dirge; let no one raise the cry_,
O_r make unseemly show of grief and gloom_,
N_or think o'er me, who shall not really die_,
T_o rear the empty honor of the tomb_.
His real self will remain among men, ever springing afresh in their
words of praise:
N_ot lasting bronze nor pyramid upreared_
B_y princes shall outlive my powerful rhyme_.
T_he monument I build, to men endeared_,
N_ot biting rain, nor raging wind, nor time_,
E_ndlessly flowing through the countless years_,
S_hall e'er destroy. I shall not wholly die_;
T_he grave shall have of me but what appears_;
F_or me fresh praise shall ever multiply_.
A_s long as priest and silent Vestal wind_
T_he Capitolian steep, tongues shall tell o'er_
H_ow humble Horace rose above his kind_
W_here Aufidus's rushing waters roar_
I_n the parched land where rustic Daunus reigned_,
A_nd first taught Grecian numbers how to run_
I_n Latin measure. Muse! the honor gained_
I_s thine, for I am thine till time is done_.
G_racious Melpomene, O hear me now_,
A_nd with the Delphic bay gird round my brow_.
Yet Horace does not always refer to his poetry in this serious vein; if
indeed we are to call serious a manner of literary prophecy which has
always been more or less conventional. His frequent disclaimers of the
higher inspiration are well known. The Muse forbids him to attempt the
epic strain or the praise of Augustus and Agrippa. In the face of grand
themes like these, his genius is slight. He will not essay even the
strain of Simonides in the lament for an Empire stained by land and sea
with the blood of fratricidal war. His themes shall be rather the feast
and the mimic battles of revelling youths and maidens, the making of
love in the grots of Venus. His lyre shall be jocose, his plectrum of
the lighter sort.
He not only half-humorously disclaims the capacity for lofty themes,
but, especially as he grows older and more philosophic, and perhaps less
lyric, half-seriously attributes whatever he does to persevering effort.
He has
"N_or the pride nor ample pinion_
T_hat the Theban eagle bear_,
S_ailing with supreme dominion_
T_hrough the azure deep of air_;"
he is the bee, with infinite industry flitting from flower to flower,
the unpretending maker of verse, fashioning his songs with only toil and
patience. He believes in the file, in long delay before giving forth to
the world the poem that henceforth can never be recalled. The only
inspiration he claims for _Satire_ and _Epistle_, which, he says,
approximate the style of spoken discourse, lies in the aptness and
patience with which he fashions his verses from language in ordinary
use, giving to words new dignity by means of skillful combination. Let
anyone who wishes to be convinced undertake to do the same; he will find
himself perspiring in a vain attempt.
And if Horace did not always conceive of his inspiration as purely
ethereal, neither did he always dream of the path to immortality as
leading through the spacious reaches of the upper air. At forty-four, he
is already aware of a more pedestrian path. He has observed the ways of
the public with literature, as any writer must observe them still, and
knows also of a certain use to which his poems are being put. Perhaps
with some secret pride, but surely with a philosophic resignation that
is like good-humored despair, he sees that the path is pedagogical. In
reproachful tones, he addresses the book of _Epistles_ that is so eager
to try its fortune in the big world: But if the prophet is not blinded
by disgust at your foolishness, you will be prized at Rome until the
charm of youth has left you. Then, soiled and worn by much handling of
the common crowd, you will either silently give food to vandal worms, or
seek exile in Utica, or be tied up and sent to Ilerda. The monitor you
did not heed will laugh, like the man who sent his balky ass headlong
over the cliff; for who would trouble to save anyone against his will?
This lot, too, you may expect: for a stammering old age to come upon you
teaching children to read in the out-of-the-way parts of town.
2. HORACE AND ANCIENT ROME
That Horace refers to being pointed out by the passer-by as the minstrel
of the Roman lyre, or, in other words, as the laureate, that his satire
provokes sufficient criticism to draw from him a defense and a
justification of himself against the charge of cynicism, and that he
finally records a greater freedom from the tooth of envy, are all
indications of the prominence to which he rose. That Virgil and Varius,
poets of recognized worth, and their friend Plotius Tucca, third of the
whitest souls of earth, introduced him to the attention of Maecenas, and
that the discriminating lover of excellence became his patron and made
him known to Augustus, are evidences of the appeal of which he was
capable both as poet and man. In the many names of worthy and
distinguished men of letters and affairs to whom he addresses the
individual poems, and with whom he must therefore have been on terms of
mutual respect, is seen a further proof. Even Virgil contains passages
disclosing a more than ordinary familiarity with Horace's work, and men
like Ovid and Propertius, of whose personal relations with Horace
nothing is known, not only knew but absorbed his poems.
If still further evidence of Horace's worth is required, it may be seen
in his being invited to commemorate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius,
the royal stepsons, against the hordes of the North, and the greatness
of Augustus himself, ever-present help of Italy, and imperial Rome; and
in the Emperor's expression of disappointment, sometime before the
second book of _Epistles_ was published, that he had been mentioned in
none of the "Talks." And, finally, if there remained in the minds of his
generation any shadow of doubt as to the esteem in which he was held by
the foremost men in the State, who were in most cases men of letters as
well as patrons of letters, it was dispelled when, in the year 17,
Horace was chosen to write the _Secular Hymn_, for use in the greatest
religious and patriotic festival of the times.
These facts receive greater significance from an appreciation of the
poet's sincerity and independence. He will restore to Maecenas his
gifts, if their possession is to mean a curb upon the freedom of living
his nature calls for. He declines a secretaryship to the Emperor
himself, and without offense to his imperial friend, who bids him be
free of his house as if it were his own.
But Horace must submit also to the more impartial judgment of time. Of
the two innovations which gave him relief against the general
background, one was the amplification of the crude but vigorous satire
of Lucilius into a more perfect literary character, and the other was
the persuasion of the Greek lyric forms into Roman service. Both
examples had their important effects within the hundred years that
followed on Horace's death.
The satire and epistle, which Horace hardly distinguished, giving to
both the name of _Sermo_, or "Talk," was the easier to imitate. Persius,
dying in the year 62, at the age of twenty-eight, was steeped in Horace,
but lacked the gentle spirit, the genial humor, and the suavity of
expression that make Horatian satire a delight. In Juvenal, writing
under Trajan and Hadrian, the tendency of satire toward consistent
aggressiveness which is present in Horace and further advanced in
Persius, has reached its goal. With Juvenal, satire is a matter of the
lash, of vicious cut and thrust. Juvenal may tell the truth, but the
smiling face of Horatian satire has disappeared. With him the line of
Roman satire is extinct, but the nature of satire for all time to come
is fixed. Juvenal, employing the form of Horace and substituting for his
content of mellow contentment and good humor the bitterness of an
outraged moral sense, is the last Roman and the first modern satirist.
The _Odes_ found more to imitate them, but none to rival. The most
pronounced example of their influence is found in the choruses of the
tragic poet Seneca, where form and substance alike are constantly
reminiscent of Horace. Two comments on the _Odes_ from the second half
of the first century are of even greater eloquence than Seneca's example
as testimonials to the impression made by the Horatian lyric. Petronius,
of Nero's time, speaks of the poet's _curiosa felicitas_, meaning the
gift of arriving, by long and careful search, at the inevitable word or
phrase. Quintilian, writing his treatise on Instruction, sums him up
thus: "Of our lyric poets, Horace is about the only one worth reading;
for he sometimes reaches real heights, and he is at the same time full
of delightfulness and grace, and both in variety of imagery and in words
is most happily daring." To these broad strokes the modern critic has
added little except by way of elaboration.
The _Life of Horace_, written by Suetonius, the secretary of Hadrian,
contains evidence of another, and perhaps a stronger, character
regarding the poet's power. We see that doubtful imitations are
beginning to circulate. "I possess," says the imperial secretary, "some
elegies attributed to his pen, and a letter in prose, supposed to be a
recommendation of himself to Maecenas, but I think that both are
spurious; for the elegies are commonplace, and the letter is, besides,
obscure, which was by no means one of his faults."
The history of Roman literature from the end of the first century after
Christ is the story of the decline of inspiration, the decline of taste,
the decline of language, the decline of intellectual interest. Beneath
it all and through it all there is spreading, gradually and silently,
the insidious decay that will surely crumble the constitution of the
ancient world. Pagan letters are uncreative, and, with few exceptions,
without imagination and dull. The literature of the new religion,
beginning to push green shoots from the ruins of the times, is a
mingling of old and new substance under forms that are always old.
In the main, neither Christian nor pagan will be attracted by Horace.
The Christian will see in his gracious resignation only the philosophy
of despair, and in his light humors only careless indulgence in the
vanities of this world and blindness to the eternal concerns of life.
The pagan will not appreciate the delicacy of his art, and will find the
abundance of his literary, mythological, historical, and geographical
allusion, the compactness of his expression, and the maturity and depth
of his intellect, a barrier calling for too much effort. Both will
prefer Virgil--Virgil of "arms and the man," the story-teller, Virgil
the lover of Italy, Virgil the glorifier of Roman deeds and destiny,
Virgil the readily understood, Virgil who has already drawn aside, at
least partly, the veil that hangs before the mystic other-world, Virgil
the almost Christian prophet, with the almost Biblical language, Virgil
the spiritual, Virgil the comforter.
Horace will not be popular. He will remain the poet of the few who enjoy
the process of thinking and recognize the charm of skillful expression.
Tacitus and Juvenal esteem him, the Emperor Alexander Severus reads him
in leisure hours, the long list of mediocrities representing the course
of literary history demonstrate by their content that the education of
men of letters in general includes a knowledge of him. The greatest of
the late pagans,--Ausonius and Claudian at the end of the fourth
century; Boëthius, philosopher-victim of Theodoric in the early sixth;
Cassiodorus, the chronicler, imperial functionary in the same
century,--disclose a familiarity whose foundations are to be looked for
in love and enthusiasm rather than in mere cultivation. It may be safely
assumed that, in general, appreciation of Horace was proportionate to
greatness of soul and real love of literature.
The same assumption may be made in the realm of Christian literature.
Minucius Felix, calmly and logically arguing the case of Christianity
against paganism, Tertullian the fiery preacher, Cyprian the enthusiast
and martyr, Arnobius the rhetorical, contain no indications of
familiarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that they
did not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero,
Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, the intense, the irascible,
Prudentius, the most original and the most vigorous of the Christian
poets, and even Venantius Fortunatus, bishop and traveler in the late
sixth century, and last of the Christian poets while Latin was still a
native tongue, display a knowledge of Horace which argues also a love
for him.
The name of Venantius Fortunatus brings us to the very brink of the
centuries called the Middle Age. If there are those who object to the
name of Dark Age as doing injustice to the life of the times, they must
at any rate agree that for Horace it was really dark. That his light was
not totally lost in the shadows which enveloped the art of letters was
due to one aspect of his immortality which we must notice before leaving
the era of ancient Rome.
Thus far, in accounting for Horace's continued fame, we have considered
only his appeal to the individual intellect and taste, the admiration
which represented an interest spontaneous and sincere. There was another
phase of his fame which expressed an interest less inspired, though its
first cause was none the less in the enthusiasm of the elect. It was the
phase foreseen by Horace himself, and its first manifestations had
probably appeared in his own life-time. It was the immortality of the
text-book and the commentary.
Quintilian's estimate of Horace in the _Institutes_ is an indication
that the poet was already a subject of school instruction in the latter
half of the first century. Juvenal, in the first quarter of the next,
gives us a chiaroscuro glimpse into a Roman school-interior where little
boys are sitting at their desks in early morning, each with odorous lamp
shining upon school editions of Horace and Virgil smudged and discolored
by soot from the wicks,
_totidem olfecisse lucernas_,
Q_uot stabant pueri, cum totus decolor esset_
F_laccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni_.
(VII. 225 ff.)
The use of the poet in the schools meant that lovers of learning as well
as lovers of literary art were occupying themselves with Horace. The
first critical edition of his works, by Marcus Valerius Probus, appeared
as early as the time of Nero. A native of Berytus, the modern Beirut,
disappointed in the military career, he turned to the collection, study,
and critical editing of Latin authors, among whom, besides Horace, were
Virgil, Lucretius, Persius, and Terence. His method, comprising careful
comparison of manuscripts, emendations, and punctuation, with
annotations explanatory and aesthetic, all prefaced by the author's
biography, won him the reputation of the most erudite of Roman men of
letters. It is in no small measure due to him that the tradition of
Horace's text is so comparatively good.
There were many other critics and interpreters of Horace. Of many of
them, the names as well as the works have been lost. Modestus and
Claranus, perhaps not long after Probus, are two names that survive.
Suetonius, as we have seen, wrote the poet's _Life_, though it contains
almost nothing not found in the works of Horace themselves. In the time
of Hadrian appeared also the edition of Quintus Terentius Scaurus, in
ten books, of which the _Odes_ and _Epodes_ made five, and the _Satires_
and _Epistles_ five, the _Ars Poetica_ being set apart as a book in
itself. At the end of the second or the beginning of the third century,
Helenius Acro wrote commentaries on certain plays of Terence and on
Horace, giving special attention to the persons appearing in the poet's
pages, a favorite subject on which a considerable body of writing sprang
up. Not long afterward appeared the commentary of Pomponius Porphyrio,
originally published with the text of Horace, but later separately. In
spite of modifications wrought in the course of time, only Porphyrio's,
of all the commentaries of the first three hundred years, has preserved
an approximation to its original character and quantity. Acro's has been
overlaid by other commentators until the identity of his work is lost.
The purpose of Porphyrio was to bring poetic beauty into relief by
clarifying construction and sense, rather than to engage in learned
exposition of the subject matter.
Finally, in the year 527, the consul Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius,
with the collaboration of one Felix, revised the text of at least the
_Odes_ and _Epodes_, and perhaps also of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_.
That there were many other editions intervening between Porphyrio's and
his, there can be little doubt.
This review of scant and scattered, but consistent, evidence is proof
enough of Horace's hold upon the intellectual and literary leaders of
the ancient Roman world. For the individual pagan who clung to the old
order, he represented more acceptably than anyone else, or anyone else
but Virgil, the ideal of a glorious past, and afforded consequently
something of inspiration for the decaying present. Upon men who, whether
pagan or Christian, were possessed by literary enthusiasms, and upon men
who delighted in contemplation of the human kind, he cast the spell of
art and humanity. Those who caught the fire directly may indeed have
been few, but they were men of parts whose fire was communicated.
As for the influence exercised by Horace upon Roman society at large
through generation after generation of schoolboys as the centuries
passed, its depth and breadth cannot be measured. It may be partly
appreciated, however, by those who realize from their own experience
both as pupils and teachers the effect upon growing and impressionable
minds of a literature rich in morality and patriotism, and who reflect
upon the greater amplitude of literary instruction among the ancients,
by whom a Homer, a Virgil, or a Horace was made the vehicle of
discipline so broad and varied as to be an education in itself.
3. HORACE AND THE MIDDLE AGE
There is no such thing as a line marking definitely the time when
ancient Rome ceased to be itself and became the Rome of the Middle Age.
If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already,
whether in recording the last real Roman setting of the Horatian house
in order by Mavortius in 527, or in referring to Venantius Fortunatus,
the last of the Latin Christian poets. The usual date marking the end of
the Western Empire, 476, is only the convenient sign for the culmination
of the movement long since begun in the interferences of an army
composed more and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and ending
in a final mutiny or revolt which assumed the character of invasion and
the permanent seizure of civil as well as military authority. The coming
of Odoacer is the ultimate stage in the process of Roman and Italian
exhaustion, the sign that life is not longer possible except through
infusion of northern blood.
The military and political change itself was only exterior, the outward
demonstration of deep-seated maladies. The too-successful
bureaucratization of Augustus and such of his successors as were really
able and virtuous, the development of authority into tyranny by such as
were neither able nor virtuous, but mad and wilful, had removed from
Roman citizenship the responsibility which in the olden time had made it
strong; and the increase of taxes, assessments, and compulsory honors
involving personal contribution, had substituted for responsibility and
privilege a burden so heavy that under it the civic life of the Empire
was crushed to extinction. In Italy, above all, the ancient seed was
running out. Under the influence of economic and social movement, the
old stock had died and disappeared, or changed beyond recognition. The
old language, except in the mouths and from the pens of the few, was
fast losing its identity. Uncertainty, indifference, stagnation,
weariness of body, mind, and soul, leaden resignation and despair,
forgetfulness of the glories of the past in art and even in heroism,
were the inheritance of the last generations of the old order. Jerome
felt barbarism closing in: _Romanus orbis ruit_, he says,--the Roman
world is tumbling in ruins.
In measure as the vitality of pagan Rome was sapped, into the inert and
decaying mass there penetrated gradually the two new life-currents of a
new religion and a new blood. The change they wrought from the first
century to the descent of the Northerners was not sudden, nor was it
rapid. Nor was it always a change that carried visible warrant of
virtue. The mingling of external races in the army and in trade, the
interference of a Northern soldiery in the affairs of the throne, the
more peaceful but more intimate shuffling of the population through the
social and economic emergence of the one-time nameless and poor, whether
of native origin or foreign, may have contributed fresh blood to an
anaemic society, but the result most apparent to the eye and most
disturbing to the soul was the debasement of standards and the fears
that naturally come with violent, sudden, or merely unfamiliar change.
The new religion may have contributed new hope and erected new
standards, but it also contributed exaggerations, contradictions, and
new uncertainties. The life of logic began to be displaced by the life
of feeling.
The change and turmoil of the times that attended and followed the
crumbling of the Roman world were favorable neither to the production of
letters nor to the enjoyment of a literary heritage. Goth, Byzantine,
Lombard, Frank, German, Saracen, and Norman made free of the soil of
Italy. If men were not without leisure, they were without the leisure of
peaceful and careful contemplation, and lacked the buoyant heart without
which assimilation of art is hardly less possible than creation.
Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered the
people. The classical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds.
Their language, never the facile language of the people and the
partially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign to
the general run of men. Their syntax was archaic and crabbed, their
metres forgotten. Their substance, never grasped without effort, was now
not only difficult, but became the abstruse matter of another people and
another age. To all but the cultivated few, they were known for anything
but what they really were. It was an age of Virgil the mysterious
prophet of the coming of Christ, of Virgil the necromancer. Real
knowledge withdrew to secret and secluded refuges.
If the classical authors in general were beyond the powers and outside
the affection of men, Horace was especially so. More intellectual than
Virgil, and less emotional, in metrical forms for the most part lost to
their knowledge and liking, the poet of the individual heart rather than
of men in the national or racial mass, the poet strictly of this world
and in no respect of the next, he almost vanished from the life of men.
Yet the classics were not all lost, and not even Horace perished.
Strange to say, and yet not really strange, the most potent active
influence in the destruction of his appeal to men was also the most
effective instrument of his preservation. Through the darkness and the
storms of the nine hundred years following the fall of the Western
Empire, Horace was sheltered under the wing of the Church.
It was a natural exaggeration for Christianity to begin by teaching
absolute separation from the world, and to declare, through the mouths
of such as Tertullian, that the blood of Christ alone sufficed and
nothing more was needed, and that literature and all the other arts of
paganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from its
religion that every part was anathema. It was natural that Horace, more
than Virgil, should be the object of its neglect, and even of its active
enmity. Horace is the most completely pagan of poets whose works are of
spiritual import. The only immortality of which he takes account is the
immortality of fame. Aside from this, the end of man is dust and shadow.
It is true that in the depth of his heart he does not feel with
Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius that "Dust thou art, to dust
returnest" is spoken of soul as well as body. The old Roman instinct for
ancestor-communion is too strong in him for that. But he acquiesces in
their doctrine in so far as shadowy existence in another world inspires
in him no pleasing hope. He displays no trace of the faith in the
supernatural which accompanies the Christian hope of happy immortality.
He contains none of the expressions of yearning for communion with the
divine, of self-abasement in the presence of the eternal, which belong
to Christian poetry. The flights of his muse rarely take him into the
realm of a divine love and providence. His aspirations are for things
achievable in this world: for faithfulness in friendship, for enduring
courage, for irreproachable patriotism,--in short, for ideal _human_
relations.
Horace's idealism is not Christian idealism, and is only in a limited
way even spiritual idealism. When he prays, it is likely to be for
others rather than himself, and for temporal blessings only: for the
success of Augustus at home and in the field, for prolongation of
Maecenas' life and happiness, for the weal of the State, for the
nurslings of his little flock, for health of body and contentment of
heart. His dwelling is not in the secret place of the Most High.
Philosophy, not religion, is his refuge and his fortress. In philosophy,
not in God, will he trust.
In a word, Horace is logical, self-reliant, and self-sufficient. He sees
no happy future after this life, is conscious of no providence watching
over him, is involved in no obligation to the beings of an eternal
world. He looks this world and the next, gods and men, directly in the
face, and expects other men to do the same. Life and its duties are for
him clear-cut. He is no propounder of problems, no searcher after hidden
purposes. He lacks almost absolutely the feverish aspiration and unrest
which characterize Christian and other humanitarian modes of thought and
sentiment, and whose manifestation is one of the best known features of
recent modern times, as it was of the earliest Christian experience.
But Christianity was a religion of men, and therefore human. If its
exaggerations were natural, its reservations and its reactions were also
natural. There were men whose admiration continued to be roused and
whose affections continued to be touched by Virgil and Horace. There
were men whose reason as well as whose instinct impelled them to employ
the classic authors and the classic arts in the service of the new
religion. Christianity possessed no distinct and separate media of
expression and no separate body of knowledge which could bear fruit as
matter of instruction. Pagan art and literature were indispensable
whether for the study of history or of mere humanity. Christianity was
therefore compelled to employ the old forms of art, which involved the
use of the old instrumentalities of literary education. When, finally,
paganism had fallen under its repeated assaults, what had been forced
use became a matter of choice, and the classics were taken under the
Church's protection and marked with her approval.
The data regarding Horace in the Middle Age are few, but they are clear.
We need not examine them all in order to draw conclusions.
The monastic idea, of eastern origin and given currency in the West by
Jerome, was first reduced to systematic practice by Benedict, who
created the first Rule at Monte Cassino about the time of the Mavortian
recension of Horace, in 527. New moral strength issued from the
cloisters now rapidly established. Cassiodorus, especially active in
promoting the spiritual phase of monkish retreat, made the intellectual
life also his concern. Monte Cassino, between Naples and Rome, and
Bobbio, in the northern part of the peninsula, were the great Italian
centers. The Benedictine influence spread to Ireland, which before the
end of the sixth century became a stronghold of the movement and an
inspiration to England, Germany, France, and even Italy, where Bobbio
itself was founded by Columban and his companions. St. Gall in
Switzerland, Fulda at Hersfeld in Hesse-Nassau, Corvey in Saxony, Iona
in Scotland, Tours in France, Reichenau on Lake Constance, were all
active centers of religion and learning within two hundred years from
Benedict's death.
The monasteries not only afforded the spiritual enthusiast the
opportunity of separation from the world of temptation and storm, but
were equally inviting to men devoted first of all to the intellectual
life. The scholar and the educator found within their walls not only
peaceful escape from the harshnesses of political change and military
broil, but the opportunity to labor usefully and unmolested in the
occupation that pleased them most. The cloister became a Christian
institute. The example of Cassiodorus was followed two hundred years
later on a larger scale by Charlemagne. Schools were founded both in
cloister and at court, scholars summoned, manuscripts copied, the life
of pagan antiquity studied, and the bond between the languages and
cultures of present and past made firmer. The schools of the old régime
had fallen away in the sixth century, when Northern rule had closed the
civic career to natives of Italy. A great advance in the intellectual
life now laid the foundations of all cultural effort in the Middle Age.
No small part of this advance was due to the preservation of manuscripts
by copying. In this activity France was first, so far as Horace was
concerned. The copies by the scribes of Charlemagne went back to
Mavortius and Porphyrio, the originals of which were probably discovered
at Bobbio by his scholars. Of the two hundred and fifty manuscripts in
existence, the greater part are French in origin, the oldest being the
Bernensis, of the ninth or tenth century, from near Orléans. Germany was
a worthy second to France. The finds in monastery libraries of both
countries in the humanist movement of the fifteenth century were
especially rich. Italy, on the contrary, preserved few manuscripts of
her poet, and none that is really ancient. Italy began the great
monastery movement, but disorder and change were against the diffusion
of culture. Charlemagne's efforts probably had little to do with Italy.
The Church seems to have had no care to preserve the ancient culture of
her native land.
What this meant in terms of actual acquaintance with the poet would not
be clear without evidence of other kinds. By the end of the sixth
century, knowledge of Horace was already vague. He was not read in
Africa, Spain, or Gaul. Read in Italy up to Charlemagne's time, a
hundred years later his works are not to be found in the catalogue of
Bobbio, one of the greatest seats of learning. What the general attitude
of the Church's leadership toward him was, may be conjectured from the
declaration of Gregory the Great against all beauty in writing. Its
general capacity for Horace may perhaps be surmised also from the
confession of the Pope's contemporary, Gregory of Tours, that he is
unfamiliar with the ancient literary languages. The few readers of the
late Empire had become fewer still. The difficult form and matter of the
_Odes_, and their unadaptability to religious and moral use,
disqualified them for the approval of all but the individual scholar or
literary enthusiast. The moralities of the _Epistles_ were more
tractable, and formed the largest contribution to the _Florilegia_, or
flower-collections, that were circulated by themselves. Horace did not
contain the facile and stimulating tales of Ovid, he was not a Virgil
the story-teller and almost Christian, his lines did not exercise a
strong appeal to the ear, he was not an example of the rhetorical, like
Lucan, his satire did not lend itself, like a Juvenal's, to universal
condemnation of paganism.
In the eighth century, Columban knows Horace, the Venerable Bede cites
him four times, and Alcuin is called a Flaccus. The York catalogue of
Alcuin shows the presence of most of the classic authors. Paul the
Deacon, who wrote a poem in the Sapphics he learned from Horace, is
declared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, but
ungratefully and ungraciously adds, "men like that I'll compare with
dogs." In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventh
century, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monastic
legislators, forbade the use of pagan authors without special
permission; yet the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, and the
struggle between the Gothic, Christian, and Islamic civilizations
resulted, for the next six or seven centuries, in what seems total
oblivion of the poet.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the impulse of the Carolingian
favor, France, in which there is heretofore no evidence of Horace's
presence from the end of Roman times, becomes the greatest center of
manuscript activity, the Bernensis and six Parisian exemplars dating
from this period. Yet the indexes of St. Gall, Reichenau, and Bobbio
contain the name of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loesch
contained his complete works. The _Ecbasis Captivi_, an animal-epic
appearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out of
Horace in the manner of the _cento_, or patchwork. At about the same
time, the famous Hrosvitha of Gandersheim writes her six Christian
dramas patterned after Terence, and in them uses Horace. Mention by
Walter of Speyer, and interest shown by the active monastery on the
Tegernsee, are of the same period. The tenth century is sometimes spoken
of as the Latin Renaissance under the Ottos, the first of whom, called
the Great, crowned Emperor at Rome in 962, welcomed scholars at his
court and made every effort to promote learning.
The momentum of intellectual interest is not lost in the eleventh
century. Paris becomes its most ardent center, with Reims, Orléans, and
Fleury also of note. The _Codex Parisinus_ belongs to this period.
German activity, too, is at its height, especially in the education of
boys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horace
copied under Desiderius. Peter Damian was its man of greatest learning,
but the times were intellectually stagnant. The popes were occupied by
rivalry with the emperors. It was the century of Gregory the Seventh and
Canossa.
In the twelfth century came the struggle of the Hohenstaufen with the
Italian cities, and the disorder and turmoil of the rise of the communes
and the division of Italy. One catalogue shows a Horace, and one
manuscript dates from the time. England and France are united by the
Norman Conquest in much the same way as Germany and France had been
associated in the kingdom of Charlemagne. It is the century of Roger
Bacon. Especially in Germany, England, and France, it is the age of the
Crusades and the knightly orders. It is an age of the spread of culture
among the common people. In France, it is the age of the monastery of
Cluny, and the age of Abelard. Education and travel became the mode. In
general, acquaintance with Horace among cultivated men may now be taken
for granted. The _Epistles_ and _Satires_ find more favor than the
_Odes_. Five hundred and twenty citations of the former and
seventy-seven of the latter have been collected for the twelfth century.
The thirteenth century marks a decline in the intellectual life. The
Crusades exhaust the energies of the time, and detract from its literary
interest. The German rulers and the Italian ecclesiasts are absorbed in
the struggle for supremacy between pope and emperor. Scholasticism
overshadows humanism. The humanistic tradition of Charlemagne has died
out, and the intellectual ideal is represented by Vincent of Beauvais
and the _Speculum Historiale_. There is no mention of Horace in the
catalogues of Italy. The manuscripts of France are careless, the
comments and glosses poor. The decline will continue until arrested by
the Renaissance.
It must not be forgotten that among all these scattered and flickering
attentions to Horace there was the constant nucleus of instruction in
the school. That he was used for this purpose first in the Carolingian
cloister-schools, and later in the secular schools which grew to
independent existence as a result of the vigorous spread of educational
spirit, cannot be doubtful. Gerbert, dying at the beginning of the
eleventh century as Pope Sylvester II, is known to have interpreted
Horace in his school. This is the oldest direct evidence of the
scholastic use of Horace, but other proofs are to be seen in the
commentaries of the medieval period, all of which are of a kind suitable
for school use, and in the marginal annotations, often in the native
tongue.
The decline of humane studies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
meant also the decline of interest in Horace, who had always been above
all the poet of the cultivated few. At the beginning of the thirteenth
century in Italy, nowhere but at Bologna and Rome was Latin taught
except as the elementary instruction necessary to the study of civil and
canonical law. Gaufried of Vinesaux, coming from England to Italy, and
composing an _Ars Dictaminis_ and a _Poietria Nova_ containing Horatian
reminiscences, is one of two or three significant examples of Latin
teachers who concerned themselves with literature as well as language.
Coluccio Salutati, wanting to buy a copy of Horace in 1370, is
apparently unable to find it. The decline of interest in Horace will be
arrested only by the Rebirth of Learning.
The intellectual movement back to the classical authors and the
classical civilizations is well called the Rebirth. The brilliance of
the new era as compared with the thousand years that lead to it from the
most high and palmiest days of Rome is such as to dim almost to darkness
the brightest days of medieval culture. The new life into which Horace
is now to enter will be so spirited and full that the old life, though
by no means devoid of active influence in society at large and in the
individual soul, will seem indeed like a long death and a waiting for
the resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth.
4. HORACE AND MODERN TIMES
THE REBIRTH OF HORACE
The national character of the _Aeneid_ gave Virgil a greater appeal than
Horace in ancient Roman times. In the Middle Age, his qualities as
story-teller and poet of the compassionate heart, together with his fame
as necromancer and prophet, made still more pronounced the favor in
which he was held. The ignorance of the earlier centuries of the period
could not appreciate Horace the logical, the intellectual, the
difficult, while the schematized religion and knowledge of the later
were not attracted by Horace the philosophical and individual.
With the Renaissance and its quickening of intellectual life in general,
and in particular the value it set upon personality and individualism,
the positions of the poets were reversed. For four hundred years now it
can hardly be denied that Horace rather than Virgil has been the
representative Latin poet of humanism.
This is not to say that Horace is greater than Virgil, or that he is as
great. Virgil is still the poet of stately movement and golden
narrative, the poet of the grand style. Owing to the greater facility
with which he may be read, he is also still the poet of the young and of
greater numbers. With the coming of the new era he did not lose in the
esteem that is based upon the appreciation of literary art, but rather
gained.
It will be better to say that Horace finally came more fully into his
own. This was not because he changed. He did not change. The times
changed. The barriers of intellectual sloth and artificiality fell away,
and men became accessible to him. Virgil lost nothing of his old-time
appeal to the fancy and to the ear, but Horace's virtues also were
discovered: his distinction in word and phrase, his understanding of the
human heart. Virgil lost nothing of his charm for youth and age, but
Horace was discovered as the poet of the riper and more thoughtful mind.
Virgil remained the admired, but Horace became the friend. Virgil
remained the guide, but Horace became the companion. "Virgil," says
Oliver Wendell Holmes, "has been the object of an adoration amounting
almost to worship, but he will often be found on the shelf, while Horace
lies on the student's table, next his hand."
The nature and extent of Horace's influence upon modern letters and life
will be best brought into relief by a brief historical review. It is not
necessary to this purpose, nor would it be possible, within ordinary
limits, to enter into a detailed account. It will be appropriate to
begin with Italy.
_i_. IN ITALY
Horace did not spring immediately into prominence with the coming of the
Renaissance, whether elsewhere or in Italy. As might be expected, the
essentially epic and medieval Dante found inspiration in Virgil rather
than in Horace, though the _Ars Poetica_ was known to him and quoted
more than once as authority on style. "This is what our master Horace
teaches," runs one of the passages, "when at the beginning of _Poetry_
he says, 'Choose a subject, etc.'" The imperfect idea of Horace formed
in Dante's mind is indicated by the one verse in the _Divina Commedia_
which refers to him:
L' altro è Orazio satiro che viene,--
T_he other coming is Horace the satirist_.
With Petrarch, the first great figure to emerge from the obscure vistas
of medievalism, the case was different. The first modern who really
understood the classics understood Horace also, and did him greater
justice than fell to his lot again for many generations. The copy of
Horace's works which he acquired on November 28, 1347, remained by him
until on the 18th of July in 1374 the venerable poet and scholar was
found dead at the age of seventy among his books. Fond as he was of
Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca, he had an intimate and affectionate
knowledge of Horace, to whom there are references in all his works, and
from whom he enriched his philosophy of life. Even his greatest and most
original creation, the _Canzoniere_, is not without marks of Horace, and
their fewness here, as well as their character, are a sign that
Petrarch's familiarity was not of the artificial sort, but based on real
assimilation of the poet. His letter to Horace begins:
Salve o dei lirici modi sovrano,
Salve o degl' Itali gloria ed onor,--
H_ail! Sovereign of the lyric measure_,
H_ail! Italy's great pride and treasure_;
and, after recounting the qualities of the poet, and acknowledging him
as guide, teacher, and lord, concludes:
Tanto è l' amor che a te m'avvince; tanto
È degli affetti miei donno il tuo canto--
S_o great the love that bindeth me to thee_;
S_o ruleth in my heart thy minstrelsy_.
But Petrarch is a torch-bearer so far in advance of his successors that
the illumination almost dies out again before they arrive. It was not
until well into the fifteenth century that the long and numerous line of
imitators, translators, adapters, parodists, commentators, editors, and
publishers began, which has continued to the present day. The
modern-Latin poets in all countries were the first, but their efforts
soon gave place to attempts in the vernacular tongues. The German Eduard
Stemplinger, in his _Life of the Horatian Lyric Since the Renaissance_,
published in 1906, knows 90 English renderings of the entire _Odes_ of
Horace, 70 German, 100 French, and 48 Italian. Some are in prose, some
even in dialect. The poet of Venusia is made a Burgundian, a Berliner,
and even a Platt-deutsch. All of these are attempts to transfuse Horace
into the veins of modern life, and are significant of their authors'
conviction as to the vitalizing power of the ancient poet. No author
from among the classics has been so frequently translated as Horace.
Petrarch, as we have seen, led the modern world by a century in the
appreciation of Horace. It was in 1470, ninety-six years after the
laureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of the
poet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474
by a printing of Acro's notes, grown by accretion since their origin in
the third century into a much larger body of commentary. In 1476 was
published the first Horace containing both text and notes, which were
those of Acro and Porphyrio, and in 1482 appeared Landinus's notes, the
first printed commentary on Horace by a modern humanist. Landinus was
prefaced by a Latin poem of Politian's, who, with Lorenzo dei Medici,
was a sort of arbiter in taste, and who produced in 1500 a Horace of his
own. Mancinelli, who, like many other scholars of the time, gave public
readings and interpretations of Horace and other classics, in 1492
dedicated to the celebrated enthusiast Pomponius Laetus an edition of
the _Odes_, _Epodes_, and _Secular Hymn_, in which he so successfully
integrated the comments of Acro, Porphyrio, Landinus, and himself, that
for the next hundred years it remained the most authoritative Horace. In
Italy, between 1470 and 1500, appeared no fewer than 44 editions of the
poet, while in France there were four and in Germany about ten. Venice
alone published, from 1490 to 1500, thirteen editions containing text
and commentary by "The Great Four," as they were called. The famous
Aldine editions began to appear in 1501. Besides Venice, Florence, and
Rome, Ferrara came early to be a brilliant center of Horatian study,
Lionel d'Este and the Guarini preparing the way for the more
distinguished, if less scholastic, discipleship of Ariosto and Tasso.
Naples and the South displayed little activity.
Roughly speaking, the later fifteenth century was the age of manuscript
recovery, commentary, and publication; the sixteenth, the century of
translation, imitation, and ambitious attempt to rival the ancients on
their own ground; the seventeenth and eighteenth, the centuries of
critical erudition, with many commentaries and versions and much
discussion of the theory of translation; and the nineteenth, the century
of scientific revision and reconstruction. In the last movement, Italy
had comparatively small part. Among her translators during these
centuries must be mentioned Ludovico Dolce, whose excellent rendering of
the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ was a product of the early sixteenth;
Scipione Ponsa, whose faithful _Ars Poetica_ in _ottava rima_ appeared
in the first half of the seventeenth; the advocate Borgianelli, whose
brilliant version of Horace entire belongs to the second half; and the
Venetian Abriani, whose complete _Odes_ in the original meters, the
first achievement of the kind, was a not unsuccessful performance which
has taken its place among Horatian curiosities. Among literary critics
are the names of Gravina, whose _Della Ragione Poetica_, full of sound
scholarship and refreshing good sense, appeared in 1716 at Naples; Volpi
of Padua, author of a treatise on Satire, in which the merits of
Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius were effectively discussed; and
their followers, Algarotti the Venetian and Vannetti of Roveredo, in
whom Horatian criticism reached its greatest altitude.
If we look outside the field of scholastic endeavor and academic
imitation, and attempt to discern the effect of Horace in actual
literary creation, we are confronted by the difficulty of determining
exactly where imitation and adaptation cease to be artificial, and reach
the degree of individuality and independence which entitles them to the
name of originality. If we are to include here such authors as are
manifestly indebted to suggestion or inspiration from Horace, and yet
are quite as manifestly modern and Italian, we may note at least the
names of Petrarch, already mentioned; the famous Cardinal Bembo, whose
ideal, to write "thoughtfully and little," was a reflection of Horace;
Ariosto, whose satires are in the Horatian spirit, and who, complaining
to his brother Alessandro of the attitude of his patron, Cardinal
Hippolyto d'Este, recites the story of the fox and the weasel, changing
them to donkey and rat; Chiabrera of Savona, who wrote satire
honeycombed with Horatian allusion and permeated by Horatian spirit, and
who, in Leopardi's opinion, had he lived in a different age, would have
been a second Horace; Testi of Ferrara, whom Ariosto's enthusiasm for
Horace so kindled that he gravitated from the modern spirit to the
classical; Parini of Milan, whose poem, _Alla Musa_, is Horatian in
spirit and phrase; Leopardi, who composed a parody on the _Ars Poetica_;
Prati, who transmuted _Epode II_ into the _Song of Hygieia_; and
Carducci, whose use of Horatian meters, somewhat strained, is due to the
conscious desire of making Italy's past greatness serve the present. The
names of Bernardo Tasso and Torquato Tasso might be added.
It is not impossible, also, that the musical debt of the world to Italy
is in a measure owing to Horace. Whether the music which accompanied the
_Odes_ as they emerged from the Middle Age was only the invention of
monks, or the survival of actual Horatian music from antiquity, is a
question hardly to be answered; but the setting of Horace to music in
the Renaissance was not without an influence. In 1507, Tritonius
composed four-voice parts for twenty-two different meters of Horace and
other poets. In 1526, Michael engaged in the same effort, and in 1534
Senfl developed the youthful compositions of Tritonius. All this was for
school purposes. With the beginnings of Italian opera, these
compositions, in which the music was without measure and held strictly
to the service of poetry, came to an end. It is not unreasonable to
suspect that in these early attempts at the union of ancient verse and
music there exist the beginnings of the musical drama.
_ii_. IN FRANCE
France, where the great majority of Horatian manuscripts were preserved,
was the first to produce a translation of the _Odes_. Grandichan in
1541, and Pelletier in 1545, published translations of the _Ars Poetica_
which had important consequences. The famous Pleiad, whose most
brilliant star, Pierre de Ronsard, was king of poetry for more than a
score of years, were enthusiastic believers in the imitation of the
classics as a means for the improvement of letters in France. Du Bellay,
the second in magnitude, published in 1550 his _Deffence et illustration
de la langue françoyse_, a manifesto of the Pleiad full of quotations
from the _Ars Poetica_ refuting a similar work of Sibilet published in
1548. Ronsard himself is said to have been the first to use the word
"ode" for Horace's lyrics. The meeting of the two, in 1547, is regarded
as the beginning of the French school of Renaissance poetry. Horace thus
became at the beginning an influence of the first magnitude in the
actual life of modern French letters. In 1579 appeared Mondot's complete
translation. The versions of Dacier and Sanadon, in prose, in the
earlier eighteenth century, were an innovation provoking spirited
opposition in Italy. The line of translators, imitators, and enthusiasts
in France is as numerous as that of other countries. The list of great
authors inspired by Horace includes such names as Montaigne, "The French
Horace," Malherbe, Regnier, Boileau, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine,
Molière, Voltaire, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Le Brun, André Chénier, De
Musset.
_iii_. IN GERMANY
In Germany, the Renaissance movement had its pronounced beginning at
Heidelberg. In that city began also the active study of Horace, in the
lectures on Horace in 1456. The _Epistles_ were first printed in 1482 at
Leipzig, the _Epodes_ in 1488, and in 1492 appeared the first complete
Horace. Up to 1500, about ten editions had been published, only those of
1492 and 1498 being Horace entire, and none of them with commentary
except that of 1498, which had a few notes and metrical signs to
indicate the structure of the verse. The first German to translate a
poem of Horace was Johann Fischart, 1550-90, who rendered the second
_Epode_ in 145 rhymed couplets. The famous Silesian, Opitz, "father of
German poetry," and his followers, were to Germany what the Pleiad were
to France. His work on poetry, 1624, was grounded in Horace, and was
long the canon. Bucholz, in 1639, produced the first translation of an
entire book of the _Odes_ in German. Weckherlin, 1548-1653, translated
three _Odes_, Gottsched of Leipzig, 1700-66, and Breitinge of Zurich,
confess Horace as master of the art of poetry, and their cities become
the centers of many translations. Günther, 1695-1728, the most gifted
lyric poet of his race before Klopstock, made Horace his companion and
confidant of leisure hours. Hagedorn, 1708-54, forms his philosophy from
Horace,--"my friend, my teacher, my companion." Of Ramler, for
thirty-five years dictator of the Berlin literary world, who translated
and published some of the _Odes_ in 1769 and was called the German
Horace, Lessing said that no sovereign had ever been so beautifully
addressed as was Frederick the Great in his imitation of the Maecenas
ode. The epoch-making Klopstock, 1724-1803, quotes, translates, and
imitates Horace, and uses Horatian subjects. Heinse reads him and writes
of him enthusiastically, and Platen, 1796-1835, is so full of Homer and
Horace that he can do nothing of his own. Lessing and Herder are devoted
Horatians, though Herder thinks that Lessing and Winckelmann are too
unreserved in their enthusiasm for the imitation of classical letters.
Goethe praises Horace for lyric charm and for understanding of art and
life, and studies his meters while composing the _Elegies_. Nietzsche's
letters abound in quotation and phrase. Even the Church in Germany shows
the impress of Horace in some of her greatest hymns, which are in
Alcaics and Sapphics of Horatian origin. To speak of the German editors,
commentators, and critics of the nineteenth century would be almost to
review the history of Horace in modern school and university; such has
been the ardor of the German soul and the industry of the German mind.
_iv_. IN SPAIN
A glance at the use of Horace in Spain will afford not the least
edifying of modern examples. The inventories of Spanish libraries in the
Middle Age rarely contain the name of Horace, or the names of his lyric
brethren, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Virgil, Lucan, Martial,
Seneca, and Pliny are much more frequent. It was not until the fifteenth
century that reminiscences of the style and ideas of Horace began to
appear in quantity. Imitation rather than translation was the vehicle of
Spanish enthusiasm. The fountain of Horatianism in Spain was the
imitation of _Epode II_, _Beatus Ille_, by the Marquis de Santillana,
one of Castile's two first sonneteers, in the first half of the
fifteenth century. Garcilaso also produced many imitations of the
_Odes_. The Horatian lyric seemed especially congenial to the Spanish
spirit and language. Fray Luís de León, of Salamanca, the first real
Spanish poet, and the most inspired of all the Spanish lovers of Horace,
was an example of the poet translating the poet where both were great
men. He not only brought back to life once more "that marvelous
sobriety, that rapidity of idea and conciseness of phrase, that
terseness and brilliance, that sovereign calm and serenity in the spirit
of the artist," which characterized the ancient poet, but added to the
Horatian lyre the new string of Christian mysticism, and thus wedded the
ancient and the modern. "Luís de León is our great Horatian poet," says
Menéndez y Pelayo. Lope de Vega wrote an _Ode to Liberty_, and was
influenced by the _Epistles_. The _Flores de Poetas ilustres de España_,
arranged by Pedro Espinosa and published in 1605 at Valladolid, included
translations of eighteen odes. Hardly a lyric poet of the eighteenth
century failed to turn some part of Horace into Spanish. Salamanca
perfected the ode, Seville the epistle, Aragon the satire. Mendoza in
his nine _Epistles_ shows his debt to Horace. In 1592, Luís de Zapata
published at Lisbon a not very successful verse translation of the _Ars
Poetica_. In 1616, Francisco de Cascales of Murcia published _Fablas
Poeticas_, containing in dialogue the substance of the same composition,
which had been translated by Espinel, 1551-1624, and which was
translated again in 1684, twice in 1777, and in 1827. Seville founded a
Horatian Academy. The greatest of the Spanish translators of Horace
entire was Javier de Burgos, whose edition of four volumes, 1819-1844,
is called by Menéndez y Pelayo the only readable complete translation of
Horace, "one of the most precious and enviable jewels of our modern
literature," and "perhaps the best of all Horaces in the neo-Latin
tongues." The nearest rival of Burgos was Martinez de la Rosa. The
greatest Spanish scholar and critic of Horace is Menéndez y Pelayo,
editor of the _Odes_, 1882, and author of _Horacio en España_, 1885.
In the index of _Horacio en España_ are to be found the names of 165
Castilian translators of the poet, 50 Portuguese, 10 Catalan, 2
Asturian, and 1 Galician. There appear the names of 29 commentators. Of
complete translations, there are 6 Castilian and 1 Portuguese; of
complete translations of the _Odes_, 6 Castilian and 7 Portuguese; of
the _Satires_, 1 Castilian and 2 Portuguese; of the _Epistles_, 1
Castilian and 1 Portuguese; of the _Ars Poetica_, 35 Castilian, 11
Portuguese, and 1 Catalan. The sixteenth century translators were
distinguished in general by facility and grace, the freshness and
abandon of youth, and a considerable degree of freedom, or even license.
Those of the eighteenth show a gain in accuracy and a loss in spirit.
_v_. IN ENGLAND
The appeal of Horace in England and English-speaking countries has been
as fruitful as elsewhere in scholarship, with the possible exception of
Germany. In its effect upon the actual fibre of literature and life, it
has been more fruitful.
A review of Horatian study in England would include the names of Talbot
and Baxter, but, above all, of the incomparably brilliant Richard
Bentley, despite his excesses, themselves due to his very genius, the
most famous and most stimulating critic and commentator of Horace the
world has seen. His edition, appearing in 1711, provoked in 1717 the
anti-Bentleian rejoinder of Richard Johnson, and in 1721 the more
ambitious but equally unsuccessful attempt to discredit him by the
Scotch Alexander Cunningham. The primacy in the study of Horace which
Bentley conferred upon England had been enjoyed previously by the Low
Countries and France, to which it had passed from Italy in the second
half of the sixteenth century. The immediate sign of this transfer of
the center to northern lands was the publication in 1561 at Lyons of the
edition containing the text revision and critical notes of Lambinus and
the commentary of the famous Cruquius of Bruges. The celebrated Scaliger
was unfavorably disposed to Horace, who found a defender in Heinsius,
another scholar of the Netherlands. D'Alembert, who became a sort of
_Ars Poetica_ to translators, published his _Observations_ at Amsterdam
in 1763.
An account of the English translations of the poet would include many
renderings of individual poems, such as those of Dryden, Sir Stephen E.
De Vere, and John Conington, and the version of Theodore Martin,
probably the most successful complete metrical translation of Horace in
any language. It is literally true that "every theory of translation has
been exemplified in some English rendering of Horace."
It is in the field of literature, however, that the manifestations of
Horace's hold upon the English are most numerous and most significant.
Even Shakespeare's "small Latin" includes him, in _Titus Andronicus_:
Demetrius.
W_hat's here? A scroll, and written round about!_
L_et's see_:
Integer vitae scelerisque purus
Non eget Mauri jaculis nec arcu.
Chiron.
O_, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well_:
I_ read it in the grammar long ago_.
The mere mention of English authors in poetry and prose who were touched
and kindled by the Horatian flame would amount to a review of the whole
course of English literature. It would begin principally with Spenser
and Ben Jonson, who in some measure represented in their land what the
Pleiad meant in France, and Opitz and his following in Germany. "Steep
yourselves in the classics," was Jonson's counsel, and his countrymen
did thus steep themselves to such a degree that it is possible for the
student to say of Milton's times: "The door to English literature and
history of the seventeenth century is open wide to those who are at ease
in the presence of Latin. Many writings and events of the time may
doubtless be understood and enjoyed by readers ignorant of the classics,
but to them the heart and spirit of the period as a whole will hardly be
revealed. Poetry, philosophy, history, biography, controversy, sermons,
correspondence, even conversation,--all have come down to us from the
age of Milton either written in or so touched with Latin that one is
compelled to enter seventeenth century England by way of Rome as Rome
must be entered by way of Athens."
Great as was the vogue of Latin in the earlier centuries, it was the
first half of the eighteenth, the most critical period in English
letters, that realized to the full the virtues of Horace. His words in
the _Ars Poetica_ "were accepted, even more widely than the laws of
Aristotle, as the standard of critical judgment. Addison and Steele by
their choice of mottoes for their periodicals, Prior by his adoption of
a type of lyric that has since his time been designated as Horatian, and
Pope with his imposing series of _Imitations_, gave such an impulse to
the already widespread interest that it was carried on through the whole
of the century." "Horace may be said to pervade the literature of the
eighteenth century in three ways: as a teacher of political and social
morality; as a master of the art of poetry; and as a sort of _elegantiae
arbiter_." Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, and Fielding, Gay, Samuel
Johnson, Chesterfield, and Walpole, were all familiar with and fond of
Horace, and took him unto themselves.
In the nineteenth century, Wordsworth has an intimate familiarity with
Virgil, Catullus, and Horace, but loves Horace best; Coleridge thinks
highly of his literary criticism; Byron, who never was greatly fond of
him, frequently quotes him; Shelley reads him with pleasure; Browning's
_The Ring and the Book_ contains many quotations from him; Thackeray
makes use of phrases from the _Odes_ "with an ease and facility which
nothing but close intimacy could produce"; Andrew Lang addresses to him
the most charming of his _Letters to Dead Authors_; and Austin Dobson is
inspired by him in many of his exquisite poems in lighter vein. These
names, and those in the paragraphs preceding, are not all that might be
mentioned. The literature of England is honey-combed with the classic
authors in general, and Horace is among the foremost. Without him and
without the classics, a great part of our literary patrimony is of
little use.
_vi_. IN THE SCHOOLS
Of the place of Horace in the schools and universities of all these
countries, and of the world of western civilization in general, it is
hardly necessary to speak. The enlightened sentiment of the five hundred
years since the death of Petrarch has been enthusiastic in the
conviction that the Greek and Latin classics are indispensable to
instruction of the first quality, and that among them Horace is of
exceeding value as a model of poetic taste and as an influence in the
formation of a philosophy of life. If his place has been less secure in
latter days, it is due less to alteration of that conviction than to
extension of the educational system to the utilitarian arts and
sciences, and to the passing of educational control from the few to the
general average.
III. HORACE THE DYNAMIC
THE CULTIVATED FEW
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.
1. HORACE AND THE LITERARY IDEAL
There is no better example of the direct effect of Horace than the part
played in the discipline of letters by the _Ars Poetica_. This work is a
literary _causerie_ inspired in part by the reading of Alexandrian
criticism, but in larger part by experience. In it the author's
uppermost themes, as in characteristic manner he allows himself to be
led on from one thought to another, are unity, consistency, propriety,
truthfulness, sanity, and carefulness. Such has been its power by reason
of inner substance and outward circumstance that it has been at times
exalted into a court of appeal hardly less authoritative than Aristotle
himself, from whom in large part it ultimately derives.
We have seen how the Pleiad, with Du Bellay and Ronsard leading, seized
upon the classics as a means of elevating the literature of France, and
how the treatise of Du Bellay which was put forth as their manifesto was
full of matter from the _Ars Poetica_, which two years previously has
served Sibilet also, whose work Du Bellay attacked. A century later,
Boileau's _L'Art Poétique_ testifies again to the inspiration of Horace,
who is made the means of riveting still more firmly upon French drama,
for good or ill, the strict rules that have always governed it; and by
the time of Boileau's death the program of the Pleiad is revived a
second time by Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Opitz and Gottsched in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are for Germany what Du Bellay and
Boileau were for France in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Literary Spain
of the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was under the same
influence. The Spanish peninsula, according to Menéndez y Pelayo, has
produced no fewer than forty-seven translations of the _Ars Poetica_.
Even in England, always less tractable in the matter of rules than the
Latin countries, Ben Jonson and his friends are in some sort another
Pleiad, and the treatise possesses immense authority throughout the
centuries. We turn the pages of Cowl's _The Theory of Poetry in
England_, a book of critical extracts illustrating the development of
poetry "in doctrines and ideas from the sixteenth century to the
nineteenth century," and note Ben Jonson and Wordsworth referring to or
quoting Horace in the section on Poetic Creation; Dryden and Temple
appealing to him and Aristotle on the Rules; Hurd quoting him on Nature
and the Stage; Roger Ascham, Ben Jonson, and Dryden citing him as an
example on Imitation; Dryden and Chapman calling him master and
law-giver on Translation; Samuel Johnson referring to him on the same
subject; and Ben Jonson and Dryden using him on Functions and Principles
of Criticism. "Horace," writes Jonson, "an author of much civility, ...
an excellent and true judge upon cause and reason, not because he
thought so, but because he knew so out of use and experience." Pope, in
the _Essay on Criticism_, describes with peculiar felicity both Horace's
critical manner and the character of the authority, persuasive rather
than tyrannical, which he exercises over Englishmen:
"H_orace still charms with graceful negligence_,
A_nd without method talks us into sense_;
W_ill, like a friend, familiarly convey_
T_he truest notions in the easiest way_."
But the dynamic power of the _Ars Poetica_ will be still better
appreciated if we assemble some of its familiar principles. Who has not
heard of and wondered at the hold the "Rules" have had upon modern
drama, especially in France,--the rule of five acts, no more and no
less; the rule of three actors only, liberalized into the rule of
economy; the rule of the unities in time, place, and action; the rule
against the mingling of the tragic and comic "kinds"; the rule against
the artificial dénouement? Who has not heard of French playwrights
composing "with one eye on the clock" for fear of violating the unity of
time, or of their delight in the writing of drama as in "a difficult
game well played?" If Alexandrian criticism, and, back of it, Aristotle,
were ultimately responsible for the rules, Horace was their disseminator
in later times, and was looked up to as final authority. Who has not
heard and read repeatedly the now common-place injunctions to be
appropriate and consistent in character-drawing; to avoid, on the one
hand, clearness at the cost of diffuseness, and, on the other, brevity
at the cost of obscurity; to choose subject-matter suited to one's
powers; to respect the authority of the masterpiece and to con by night
and by day the great Greek exemplars; to feel the emotion one wishes to
rouse; to stamp the universal with the mark of individual genius; to be
straightforward and rapid and omit the unessential; to be truthful to
life; to keep the improbable and the horrible behind the scenes; to be
appropriate in meter and diction; to keep clear of the fallacy of poetic
madness; to look for the real sources of successful writing in sanity,
depth of knowledge, and experience with men; to remember the mutual
indispensability of genius and cultivation; to combine the pleasant and
the useful; to deny one's self the indulgence of mediocrity; never to
compose unless under inspiration; to give heed to solid critical
counsel; to lock up one's manuscript for nine years before giving it to
the world; to destroy what does not measure up to the ideal; to take
ever-lasting pains; to beware of the compliments of good-natured
friends? Not less familiar are the apt figurative illustrations of the
woman beautiful above and an ugly fish below, the purple patch, the
painter who would forever put in his cypress tree, the amphora that came
out a pitcher, the dolphin in the wood and the boar in the waters, the
sesquipedalian word, the mountains in travail and the birth of the
ridiculous mouse, the plunge _in medias res_, the praiser of the good
old times, the exclusion of sane poets from Helicon, the counsellor who
himself can write nothing, but will serve as whetstone for genius, the
nodding of Homer.
Nor did the effects of this diffusion of Horatian precept consist merely
in restraint upon the youthful and the impulsive, or confine themselves
to the drama, with which the _Ars Poetica_ was mainly concerned. The
persuasive and authoritative counsels of the Roman poet have entered, so
to speak, into the circulatory system of literary effort and become part
of the life-blood of modern enlightenment. Their great effect has been
formative: the cultivation of character in literature.
2. HORACE AND LITERARY CREATION
_i_. THE TRANSLATOR'S IDEAL
Besides the invisible, and the greatest, effect of Horace in the
moulding of character in literature, is the visible effect in literary
creation. His inspiration wrought by performance as well as by precept.
The numerous essays in verse and prose on the art of letters which have
been prompted by the _Ars Poetica_ are themselves examples of this
effect. They are not alone, however, though perhaps the most apparent.
The purer literature of the lyric also inspired to creation, with
results that are far more charming, if less substantial.
In the case of the lyric inspired by the _Odes_, as well as in the case
of the critical essay inspired by the _Ars Poetica_, it is not always
easy to distinguish adaptation or imitation from actual creation.
Bernardo Tasso's _Ode_, for example, and Giovanni Prati's _Song of
Hygieia_, while really independent poems, are so charged with Horatian
matter and spirit that one hesitates to call them original. The same is
true of the many inspirations traceable to the famous _Beatus Ille
Epode_, which, with such _Odes_ as _The Bandusian Spring_, _Pyrrha_,
_Phidyle_, and _Chloe_, have captured the fancy of modern poets. Pope's
_Solitude_, on the other hand, while surely an inspiration of the second
_Epode_, shows hardly a mark affording proof of the fact.
To some of the most manifest imitations and adaptations, it is
impossible to deny originality. The _Fifth Book of Horace_, by Kipling
and Graves, is an example. Thackeray's delightful _Ad Ministram_ is
another example which must be classed as adaptation, yet such is its
spontaneity that not to see in it an inspiration would be stupid and
unjust:
AD MINISTRAM
D_ear Lucy, you know what my wish is_--
I_ hate all your Frenchified fuss_:
Y_our silly entrées and made dishes_
W_ere never intended for us_.
N_o footman in lace and in ruffles_
N_eed dangle behind my arm-chair_;
A_nd never mind seeking for truffles_
A_lthough they be ever so rare_.
B_ut a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy_,
I_ prithee get ready at three_:
H_ave it smoking, and tender, and juicy_,
A_nd what better meat can there be?_
A_nd when it has feasted the master_,
'T_will amply suffice for the maid_;
M_eanwhile I will smoke my canaster_,
A_nd tipple my ale in the shade_.
In similar strain of exquisite humor are the adaptations of the
Whichers, American examples of spirit and skill not second to that of
Thackeray:
MY SABINE FARM
LAUDABUNT ALII
S_ome people talk about "Noo Yo'k"_;
O_f Cleveland many ne'er have done_;
T_hey sing galore of Baltimore_,
C_hicago, Pittsburgh, Washington_.
O_thers unasked their wit have tasked_
T_o sound unending praise of Boston_--
O_f bean-vines found for miles around_
A_nd crooked streets that I get lost on_.
G_ive me no jar of truck or car_,
N_o city smoke and noise of mills_;
R_ather the slow Connecticut's flow_
A_nd sunny orchards on the hills_.
T_here like the haze of summer days_
B_efore the wind flee care and sorrow_.
I_n sure content each day is spent_,
U_nheeding what may come to-morrow_.
VITAS HINNULEO
DONE BY MR. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
I _met a little Roman maid_;
S_he was just sixteen (she said)_,
A_nd O! but she was sore afraid_,
A_nd hung her modest head_.
A _little fawn, you would have vowed_,
T_hat sought her mother's side_,
A_nd wandered lonely as a cloud_
U_pon the mountain wide_.
W_hene'er the little lizards stirred_
S_he started in her fear_;
I_n every rustling bush she heard_
S_ome awful monster near_.
"I_'m not a lion; fear not so_;
S_eek not your timid dam_."--
B_ut Chloe was afraid, and O!_
S_he knows not what I am_:
A creature quite too bright and good
To be so much misunderstood.
Again, in Austin Dobson's exquisite _Triolet_, whether the inspiration
of the poem itself is in Horace, or the inspiration, so far as Horace is
concerned, lies in the choice of title after the verses were written, we
must in either case confess a debt of great delight to the author of the
_Ars Poetica_:
URCEUS EXIT
I_ intended an Ode_,
A_nd it turned to a Sonnet_.
I_t began_ à la mode,
I_ intended an Ode_;
B_ut Rose crossed the road_
I_n her latest new bonnet_;
I_ intended an Ode_,
A_nd it turned to a Sonnet_.
The same observation applies equally to the same author's _Iocosa Lyra_:
IOCOSA LYRA
I_n our hearts is the great one of Avon_
E_ngraven_,
A_nd we climb the cold summits once built on_
B_y Milton_;
B_ut at times not the air that is rarest_
I_s fairest_,
A_nd we long in the valley to follow_
A_pollo_.
T_hen we drop from the heights atmospheric_
T_o Herrick_,
O_r we pour the Greek honey, grown blander_,
O_f Landor_,
O_r our cosiest nook in the shade is_
W_here Praed is_,
O_r we toss the light bells of the mocker_
W_ith Locker_.
O_ the song where not one of the Graces_
T_ightlaces_,--
W_here we woo the sweet Muses not starchly_,
B_ut archly_,--
W_here the verse, like a piper a-Maying_
C_omes playing_,--
A_nd the rhyme is as gay as a dancer_
I_n answer_,--
I_t will last till men weary of pleasure_
I_n measure!_
I_t will last till men weary of laughter_ ...
A_nd after!_
Whatever we may say of the indebtedness of things like these to the
letter of the ancient poet, we must acknowledge them all alike as
examples of the dynamic power of Horace.
_ii_. CREATION
But there are other examples whose character as literary creation is
still farther beyond question. Such a one, to mention one brilliant
specimen in prose, is the letter of Andrew Lang to Horace. In verse,
Austin Dobson again affords one of the happiest examples:
TO Q.H.F.
"H_oratius Flaccus_, B.C. 8,"
T_here's not a doubt about the date_,--
Y_ou're dead and buried_:
A_s you observed, the seasons roll_;
A_nd 'cross the Styx full many a soul_
H_as Charon ferried_,
S_ince, mourned of men and Muses nine_,
T_hey laid you on the Esquiline_.
A_nd that was centuries ago!_
Y_ou'd think we'd learned enough, I know_,
T_o help refine us_,
S_ince last you trod the Sacred Street_,
A_nd tacked from mortal fear to meet_
T_he bore Crispinus_;
O_r, by your cold Digentia, set_
T_he web of winter birding-net_.
O_urs is so far-advanced an age!_
S_ensation tales, a classic stage_,
C_ommodious villas!_
W_e boast high art, an Albert Hall_,
A_ustralian meats, and men who call_
T_heir sires gorillas!_
W_e have a thousand things, you see_,
N_ot dreamt in your philosophy_.
A_nd yet, how strange! Our "world," today_,
T_ried in the scale, would scarce outweigh_
Y_our Roman cronies_;
W_alk in the Park,--you'll seldom fail_
T_o find a Sybaris on the rail_
B_y Lydia's ponies_,
O_r hap on Barrus, wigged and stayed_,
O_gling some unsuspecting maid_.
T_he great Gargilius, then, behold!_
H_is "long-bow" hunting tales of old_
A_re now but duller_;
F_air Neobule too! Is not_
O_ne Hebrus here,--from Aldershot?_
A_ha, you colour!_
B_e wise. There old Canidia sits_;
N_o doubt she's tearing you to bits_.
A_nd look, dyspeptic, brave, and kind_,
C_omes dear Maecenas, half behind_
T_erentia's skirting_;
H_ere's Pyrrha, "golden-haired" at will_;
P_rig Damasippus, preaching still_;
A_sterie flirting_,--
R_adiant, of course. We'll make her black_,--
A_sk her when Gyges' ship comes back_.
S_o with the rest. Who will may trace_
B_ehind the new each elder face_
D_efined as clearly_;
S_cience proceeds, and man stands still_;
O_ur "world" today's as good or ill_,--
A_s cultured_ (_nearly_),
A_s yours was, Horace! You alone_,
U_nmatched, unmet, we have not known_.
But it is not only to comparatively independent creation that we must
look. The dynamic power of Horace is to be found at work even in the
translation of the poet. The fact that he has had more translators than
any other poet, ancient or modern, is itself an evidence of
inspirational quality, but a greater proof lies in the variety and
character of his translators and the quality of their achievement. A
list of those who have felt in this way the stirrings of the Horatian
spirit would include the names not only of many great men of letters,
but of many great men of affairs, whose successes are to be counted
among examples of genuine inspiration. Translation at its best is not
mere craftsmanship, but creation,--in Roscommon's lines,
'T_is true, composing is the Nobler Part_,
B_ut good Translation is no easy Art_.
Theodore Martin's rendering of I. 21, _To a Jar of Wine_, already quoted
in part, is an example. Another brilliant success is Sir Stephen E. De
Vere's I. 31, _Prayer to Apollo_, quoted in connection with the poet's
religious attitude. No less felicitous are Conington's spirited twelve
lines, reproducing III. 26, _Vixi puellis_:
VIXI PUELLIS NUPER IDONEUS
F_or ladies' love I late was fit_,
A_nd good success my warfare blest_;
B_ut now my arms, my lyre I quit_,
A_nd hang them up to rust or rest_.
H_ere, where arising from the sea_
S_tands Venus, lay the load at last_,
L_inks, crowbars, and artillery_,
T_hreatening all doors that dared be fast_.
O_ Goddess! Cyprus owns thy sway_,
A_nd Memphis, far from Thracian snow_:
R_aise high thy lash, and deal me, pray_,
T_hat haughty Chloe just one blow!_
To translate in this manner is beyond all doubt to deserve the name of
poet.
We may go still farther and claim for Horace that he has been a dynamic
power in the art of translation, not only as it concerned his own poems,
but in its concern of translation as a universal art. No other poet
presents such difficulties; no other poet has left behind him so long a
train of disappointed aspirants. "Horace remains forever the type of the
untranslatable," says Frederic Harrison. Milton attempts the _Pyrrha_
ode in unrhymed meter, and the light and bantering spirit of Horace
disappears. Milton is correct, polished, restrained, and pure, but heavy
and cold. An exquisite _jeu d'esprit_ has been crushed to death:
W_hat slender youth, bedew'd with liquid odours_,
C_ourts thee on roses in some pleasant cave_,
P_yrrha? For whom bind'st thou_
I_n wreaths thy golden hair_,
P_lain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he_
O_n faith and changèd gods complain, and seas_
R_ough with black winds and storms_
U_nwonted shall admire_!
W_ho now enjoys thee credulous, all gold_,
W_ho, always vacant, always amiable_
H_opes thee, of flattering gales_
U_nmindful! Hapless they_
T_o whom thou untried seem'st fair! Me in my vowed_
P_icture, the sacred wall declares to have hung_
M_y dank and dropping weeds_
T_o the stern God of Sea_.
But let the attempt be made to avoid the ponderous movement and
excessive sobriety of Milton, and to communicate the Horatian airiness,
and there is a loss in conciseness and reserve:
W_hat scented youth now pays you court_,
P_yrrha, in shady rose-strewn spot_
D_allying in love's sweet sport_?
F_or whom that innocent-seeming knot_
I_n which your golden strands you dress_
W_ith all the art of artlessness?_
D_eluded lad! How oft he'll weep_
O_'er changèd gods! How oft, when dark_
T_he billows roughen on the deep_,
S_torm-tossed he'll see his wretched bark_!
U_nused to Cupid's quick mutations_,
I_n store for him what tribulations!_
B_ut now his joy is all in you_;
H_e thinks your heart is purest gold_;
E_xpects you'll always be love-true_,
A_nd never, never, will grow cold_.
P_oor mariner on summer seas_,
U_ntaught to fear the treacherous breeze!_
A_h, wretched whom your Siren call_
D_eludes and brings to watery woes_!
F_or me--yon plaque on Neptune's wall_
S_hows I've endured the seaman's throes_.
M_y drenchèd garments hang there, too_:
H_enceforth I shun the enticing blue._
It is not improbable that the struggle of the centuries with the
difficulties of rendering Horace has been a chief influence in the
development of our present exacting ideal of translation; so exacting
indeed that it has defeated its purpose. By emphasis upon the
impossibility of rendering accurately the content of poetry in the form
of poetry, scholastic discussion of the theory of translation has led
first to despair, and next from despair to the scientific and
unaesthetic principle of rendering into exact prose all forms of
literature alike. The twentieth century has thus opened again and
settled in opposite manner the old dispute of the French D'Alembert and
the Italian Salvini in the seventeen-hundreds, which was resolved by
actual results in favor of D'Alembert and fidelity to spirit as opposed
to Salvini and fidelity to letter.
In what we have said thus far of the dynamic power of Horace in literary
creation, we have dealt with visible results. We should not be misled,
however, by the satisfaction of seeing plainly in imitation, adaptation,
translation, quotation, or real creation, the mark of Horatian
influence. The discipline of the literary ideal in the individual, and
the moulding of character in literature as an organism, are effects less
clearly visible, but, after all, of greater value. If the bread and meat
of human sustenance should appear in the body as recognizable bread and
meat, it would hardly be a sign of health. Its value is in the strength
conferred by assimilation. With all respect and gratitude for creation
manifestly due to Horace, we must also realize that this is but a
superficial result as compared with the chastening restraint of
expression and the health and vigor of content that have been encouraged
by allegiance to him, but are known by no special marks. It is no bad
sign when we turn the pages of the _Oxford Selections of Verse_ in the
various modern languages and find but few examples of the visible sort
of Horatian influence. To detect the more invisible sort requires the
keen eye and the sensitive spirit of the poet-scholar, but the reader
not so specially qualified may have faith that it exists. With Goethe
writing of Horace as a "great, glowing, noble poet, full of heart, who
with the power of his song sweeps us along, lifts us, and inspires us,"
with Menéndez y Pelayo in Spain defining the Horatian lyric, whether
Christian or pagan, by "sobriety of thought, rhythmic lightness, the
absence of artificial adornment, unlimited care in execution, and
brevity," and holding this ideal aloft as the influence needed by the
modern lyric, and with no countries or periods without leaders in poetry
and criticism uttering similar sentiments and exhortations, it would be
difficult not to believe in a substantial Horatian effect on literary
culture, however slight the external marks.
3. HORACE IN THE LIVING OF MEN
Let us take leave of these illustrations of the dynamic power of Horace
in letters, and consider in conclusion his power as shown directly in
the living of men.
First of all, we may include in the dynamic working of the poet his
stirring of the heart by pure delight. If this is not the highest and
the ultimate effect of poetry, it is after all the first and the
essential effect. Without the giving of pleasure, no art becomes really
the possession of men and the instrument of good. As a matter of fact,
many of the most frequently and best translated _Odes_ are devoid both
of moral intent, and, in the ordinary sense, of moral effect. _To
Pyrrha_, _Soracte Covered with Snow_, _Carpe Diem_, _To Glycera_,
_Integer Vitae_, _To Chloe_, _Horace and Lydia_, _The Bandusian Spring_,
_Faunus_, _To an Old Wine-Jar_, _The End of Love_, and _Beatus Ille_ are
merely _jeux-d'esprit_ of the sort that for the moment lighten and clear
the spirit. The same may be said of _The Bore_ and the _Journey to
Brundisium_ among the _Satires_, and of many of the _Epistles_.
But these trifles light as air are nevertheless of the sort for which
mankind is eternally grateful, because men are convinced, without
process of reason, that by them the fibre of life is rested and refined
and strengthened. We may call this familiar effect by the less familiar
name of re-creative. What lover of Horace has not felt his inmost being
cleansed and refreshed by the simple and exquisite art of _The Bandusian
Spring_, whose cameo of sixty-eight Latin words in four stanzas is an
unapproachable model of vividness, elegance, purity, and restraint:
O_ crystal-bright Bandusian Spring_,
W_orthy thou of the mellow wine_
A_nd flowers I give to thy pure depths_:
A_ kid the morrow shall be thine_.
T_he day of lustful strife draws on_,
T_he starting horn begins to gleam_;
I_n vain! His red blood soon shall tinge_
T_he waters of thy clear, cold stream_.
T_he dog-star's fiercely blazing hour_
N_e'er with its heat doth change thy pool_;
T_o wandering flock and ploughworn steer_
T_hou givest waters fresh and cool_.
T_hee, too, 'mong storied founts I'll place_,
S_inging the oak that slants the steep_,
A_bove the hollowed home of rock_
F_rom which thy prattling streamlets leap_.
Or who does not live more abundant life at reading the _Chloe Ode_, with
its breath of the mountain air and its sense of the brooding forest
solitude, and its exquisite suggestion of timid and charming girlhood?
"Y_ou shun me, Chloe, wild and shy_
A_s some stray fawn that seeks its mother_
T_hrough trackless woods. If spring-winds sigh_,
I_t vainly strives its fears to smother_;--
"I_ts trembling knees assail each other_
W_hen lizards stir the bramble dry_;--
Y_ou shun me, Chloe, wild and shy_
A_s some stray fawn that seeks its mother_.
"A_nd yet no Libyan lion I_,--
N_o ravening thing to rend another_;
L_ay by your tears, your tremors by_,--
A_ husband's better than a brother_;
N_or shun me, Chloe, wild and shy_
A_s some stray fawn that seeks its mother_."
But there are those who demand of poetry a usefulness more easily
measurable than that of recreation. In their opinion, it is improvement
rather than pleasure which is the end of art, or at least improvement as
well as pleasure. In this, indeed, the poet himself is inclined to
agree: "He who mingles the useful with the pleasant by delighting and
likewise improving the reader, will get every vote."
Let us look for these more concrete results, and see how Horace the
person still lives in the character of men, as well as Horace the poet
in the character of literature.
To appreciate this better, we must return to the theme of Horace's
personal quality. We have already seen that in no other poet so fully as
in Horace is the reality of personal contact to be felt. The lyrics, as
well as the _Epistles_ and _Satires_, are almost without exception
addressed to actual persons. So successful is this attempt of the poet
to speak from the page that it needs but the slightest touch of
imagination to create the illusion that we ourselves are addressed. We
feel, as if at first hand, all the qualities that went to make up
Horace's character,--his good will, good faith, and good-nature, the
depth and constancy of his friendship, his glow of admiration for the
brave deed, the pure heart, and the steadfast purpose, his patient
endurance of ill, his delight in men and things, his affection for what
is simple and sincere, his charity for human weakness, his mildly
ironical mood, as of one who is aware that he himself is not undeserving
of the good-humored censure he passes on others, his clear vision of the
sources of happiness, his reposeful acquiescence, and his elusive humor,
which never bursts into laughter and yet is never far away from it. We
are taken into his confidence, like old friends. He describes himself
and his ways; he lets us share in his own vision of himself and in his
amusement at the bustling and self-deluded world, and subtly conciliates
us by making us feel ourselves partakers with him in the criticism of
life. There is no better example in literature of personal magnetism.
And he is more than merely personal. He is sincere and unreserved. Were
he otherwise, the delight of intimate acquaintance with him would be
impossible. It is the real Horace whom we meet,--not a person on the
literary stage, with buskins, pallium, and mask. Horace holds the mirror
up to himself; rather, not to himself, but to nature in himself. Every
side of his personality appears: the artist, and the man; the formalist,
and the skeptic; the spectator, and the critic; the gentleman in
society, and the son of the collector; the landlord of five hearths, and
the poet at court; the stern moralist, and the occasional voluptuary;
the vagabond, and the conventionalist. He is independent and unhampered
in his expression. He has no exalted social position to maintain, and
blushes neither for parentage nor companions. His philosophy is not
School-made, and the fear of inconsistency never haunts him. His
religion requires no subscription to dogma; he does not even take the
trouble to define it. Politically, his duties have come to be also his
desires. He will accept the favors of the Emperor and his ministers if
they do not compromise his liberty or happiness. If they withdraw their
gifts, he knows how to do without them, because he has already done
without them. He conceals nothing, pretends to nothing, makes no
excuses, suffers from no self-consciousness, exercises no reserve. There
are few expressions of self in all literature so spontaneous and so
complete. Horace has left us a portrait of his soul much more perfect
than that of his person. It is a truthful portrait, with both shadow and
light.
And there is a corollary to Horace's frankness that constitutes another
element in the charm of his personality. His very unreserve is the proof
of an open and kindly heart. To call him a satirist at all is to
necessitate his own definition of satire, "smilingly to tell the truth."
At least in his riper work, there is no trace of bitterness. He laughs
with some purpose and to some purpose, but his laughter is not sardonic.
Sane judgment and generous experience tell him that the foibles of
mankind are his own as well as theirs, and are not to be changed by so
slight a means as a railing tongue. He reflects that what in himself has
produced no very disastrous results may without great danger be forgiven
also in them.
It is this intimate and warming quality in Horace that prompts Hagedorn
to call him "my friend, my teacher, my companion," and to take the poet
with him on country walks as if he were a living person:
Horaz, mein Freund, mein Lehrer, mein Begleiter,
Wir gehen aufs Land. Die Tage sind so heiter;
and Nietzsche to compare the atmosphere of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_
to the "geniality of a warm winter day"; and Wordsworth to be attracted
by his appreciation of "the value of companionable friendship"; and
Andrew Lang to address to him the most personal of literary letters; and
Austin Dobson to give his Horatian poems the form of personal address;
and countless students and scholars and men out of school and immersed
in the cares of life to carry Horace with them in leisure hours. _Circum
praecordia ludit_, "he plays about the heartstrings," said Persius, long
before any of these, when the actual Horace was still fresh in the
memory of men.
If we were to take detailed account of certain qualities missed in
Horace by the modern reader, we should be even more deeply convinced of
his power of personal attraction. He is not a Christian poet, but a
pagan. Faith in immortality and Providence, penitence and penance, and
humanitarian sentiment, are hardly to be found in his pages. He is
sometimes too unrestrained in expression. The unsympathetic or
unintelligent critic might charge him with being commonplace.
Yet these defects are more apparent than real, and have never been an
obstacle to souls attracted by Horace. His pages are charged with
sympathy for men. His lapses in taste are not numerous, and are, after
all, less offensive than those of European letters today, after the
coming of sin with the law. And he is not commonplace, but universal.
His content is familiar matter of today as well as of his own time. His
delightful natural settings are never novel, romantic, or forced; we
have seen them all, in experience or in literature, again and again, and
they make familiar and intimate appeal. Phidyle is neither ancient nor
modern, Latin nor Teuton; she is all of them at once. The exquisite
expressions of friendship in the odes to a Virgil, or a Septimius, are
applicable to any age or nationality, or any person. The story of the
town mouse and country mouse is always old and always new, and always
true. _Mutato nomine de te_ may be said of it, and of all Horace's other
stories; alter the names, and the story is about you. Their application
and appeal are universal.
"Without sustained inspiration, without profundity of thought, without
impassioned song," writes Duff, "he yet pierces to the universal
heart.... His secret lies in sanity rather than impetus. Kindly and
shrewd observer of the manifold activities of life, he draws vignettes
therefrom and passes judgments thereon which awaken undying interest.
_Non omnis moriar_--he remains fresh because he is human."
Horace's philosophy of life may be imperfect for the militant
humanitarian and the Christian, but, as a matter of fact, it is a
complete and perfect thing in itself. Horace does not fret or fume. He
is not morbid or unpleasantly melancholy. It is true that "his tempered
and polished expression of common experience, free from transports and
free from despairs, speaks more forcibly to ripe middle age than to
youth," but it is not without its appeal also to youth. Horace sums up
an attitude toward existence which all men, of whatever nation or time,
can easily understand, and which all, at some moment or other,
sympathize with. Whether they believe in his philosophy of life or not,
whether they put it into practice or not, it is always and everywhere
attractive,--attractive because founded on clear and sympathetic vision
of the joys and sorrows that are the common lot of men, attractive
because of its frankness and manly courage, and, above all, attractive
because of its object. So long as the one great object of human longing
is peace of mind and heart, no philosophy which recognizes it will be
without followers. The Christian is naturally unwilling to adopt the
Horatian philosophy as a whole, but with its _summum bonum_, and with
many of its recommendations, he is in perfect accord. Add Christian
faith to it, or add it, so far as is consonant, to Christian faith, and
either is enriched.
We are better able now to appreciate the dynamic power of Horace the
person. We may see it at work in the fostering of friendly affection, in
the deepening of love for favorite spots of earth, in the encouragement
of righteous purpose, in the true judging of life's values.
Horace is the poet of friendship. With his address to "Virgil, the half
of my soul," his references to Plotius, Varius, and Virgil as the purest
and whitest souls of earth, his affectionate messages in _Epistle_ and
_Ode_, he sets the heart of the reader aglow with love for his friends.
"Nothing, while in my right mind, would I compare to the delight of a
friend!" What numbers of men have had their hearts stirred to deeper
love by the matchless ode to Septimius:
"S_eptimius, who with me would brave_
F_ar Gades, and Cantabrian land_
U_ntamed by Rome, and Moorish wave_
T_hat whirls the sand_;
"F_air Tibur, town of Argive kings_,
T_here would I end my days serene_,
A_t rest from seas and travelings_,
A_nd service seen_.
"S_hould angry Fate those wishes foil_,
T_hen let me seek Galesus, sweet_
T_o skin-clad sheep, and that rich soil_,
T_he Spartan's seat_.
"O_h, what can match the green recess_,
W_hose honey not to Hybla yields_,
W_hose olives vie with those that bless_
V_enafrum's fields_?
"L_ong springs, mild winters glad that spot_
B_y Jove's good grace, and Aulon, dear_
T_o fruitful Bacchus, envies not_
F_alernian cheer_.
"T_hat spot, those happy heights desire_
O_ur sojourn; there, when life shall end_,
Y_our tear shall dew my yet warm pyre_,
Y_our bard and friend_."
And what numbers of men have taken to their hearts from the same ode the
famous
Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnes
Angulus ridet,--
Y_onder little nook of earth_
B_eyond all others smiles on me_,--
and expressed through its perfect phrase the love they bear their own
beloved nook of earth. "Happy Horace!" writes Sainte-Beuve on the margin
of his edition, "what a fortune has been his! Why, because he once
expressed in a few charming verses his fondness for the life of the
country and described his favorite corner of earth, the lines composed
for his own pleasure and for the friend to whom he addressed them have
laid hold on the memory of all men and have become so firmly lodged
there that one can conceive no others, and finds only those when he
feels the need of praising his own beloved retreat!"
To speak of sterner virtues, what a source of inspiration to
righteousness and constancy men have found in the apt and undying
phrases of Horace! "Cornelius de Witt, when confronting the murderous
mob; Condorcet, perishing in the straw of his filthy cell; Herrick, at
his far-away old British revels; Leo, during his last days at the
Vatican, and a thousand others," strengthened their resolution by
repeating _Iustum et tenacem_:
"T_he man of firm and noble soul_
N_o factious clamors can control_
N_o threat'ning tyrant's darkling brow_
C_an swerve him from his just intent_....
A_y, and the red right arm of Jove_,
H_urtling his lightnings from above_,
W_ith all his terrors then unfurl'd_,
H_e would unmoved, unawed behold_:
T_he flames of an expiring world_
A_gain in crashing chaos roll'd_,
I_n vast promiscuous ruin hurl'd_,
M_ust light his glorious funeral pile_:
S_till dauntless midst the wreck of earth he'd smile_."
Of this passage Stemplinger records thirty-one imitations. How many have
had their patriotism strengthened by _Dulce et decorum est pro patria
mori_, the verse which is aptly found in modern Rome on the monument to
those who fell at Dogali. How many have been supported and comforted in
calamity and sorrow by the poet's immortal words of consolation on the
death of Quintilius:
Durum: sed levius fit patientia
Quicquid corrigere est nefas,--
A_h, hard it is! but patience lends_
S_trength to endure what Heaven sends_.
The motto of Warren Hastings was _Mens aequa in arduis_,--An even temper
in times of trial. Even humorous use of these phrases has served a
purpose. The French minister, compelled to resign, no doubt drew
substantial consolation from _Virtute me involvo_, when he turned it to
fit his case:
I_n the robe of my virtue I wrap me round_
A _solace for loss of all I had_;
B_ut ah! I realize I've found_
W_hat it really means to be lightly clad_!
But the most pronounced effect of Horace's dynamic power is its
inspiration to sane and truthful living. Life seems a simple thing, yet
there are many who miss the paths of happiness and wander in wretched
discontent because they are not bred to distinguish between the false
and the real. We have seen the lesson of Horace: that happiness is not
from without, but from within; that it is not abundance that makes
riches, but attitude; that the acceptation of worldly standards of
getting and having means the life of the slave; that the fraction is
better increased by division of the denominator than by multiplying the
numerator; that unbought riches are better possessions than those the
world displays as the prizes most worthy of striving for. No poet is so
full of inspiration as Horace for those who have glimpsed these simple
and easy yet little known secrets of living. Men of twenty centuries
have been less dependent on the hard-won goods of this world because of
him, and lived fuller and richer lives. Surely, to give our young people
this attractive example of sane solution of the problem of happy living
is to leaven the individual life and the life of the social mass.
IV. CONCLUSION
We have visualized the person of Horace and made his acquaintance. We
have seen in his character and in the character of his times the sources
of his greatness as a poet. We have seen in him the interpreter of his
own times and the interpreter of the human heart in all times. We have
traced the course of his influence through the ages as both man and
poet. We have seen in him not only the interpreter of life, but a
dynamic power that makes for the love of men, for righteousness, and for
happier living. We have seen in him an example of the word made flesh.
"He has forged a link of union," writes Tyrrell, "between intellects so
diverse as those of Dante, Montaigne, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Voltaire,
Hooker, Chesterfield, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Thackeray."
To know Horace is to enter into a great communion of twenty
centuries,--the communion of taste, the communion of charity, the
communion of sane and kindly wisdom, the communion of the genuine, the
communion of righteousness, the communion of urbanity and of friendly
affection.
"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."
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following groups of references are not meant as annotations in the
usual sense. Those to the text of the poet are for such persons as wish
to increase their acquaintance with Horace by reading at first hand the
principal poems which have inspired the essayist's conclusions. The
others are for those who desire to view in detail the working of the
Horatian influence.
HORACE THE PERSON:
_Odes_, I. 27; 38; II. 3; 7; III. 8; IV. 11.
_Satires_, I. 6; 9; II. 6.
_Epistles_, I. 7; 10; 20.
Suetonius, _Life of Horace_. (see below.)
HORACE THE POET:
_Odes_, I. 1; 3; 6; 12; 24; 35; II. 7; 16; III. 1; 21; 29; IV. 2; 3; 4.
_Satires_, I. 4; 6.
_Epistles_, I. 3; 20; II. 2.
HORACE THE INTERPRETER OF HIS TIMES:
Landscape;
_Odes_, I. 4; 31; II. 3; 6; 14; 15; III. 1; 13; 18; 23.
_Epistles_, I. 12; 14.
Living;
_Odes_, I. 1; III. 1; 2; 4; 6; IV. 5; _Epode_, 2.
_Satires_, I. 1; II. 6.
_Epistles_, I. 7; 10.
Religion;
_Odes_, I. 4; 10; 21; 30; 31; 34; III. 3; 13; 16; 18; 22; 23; IV.
5; 6; _Epode_, 2.
Popular Wisdom;
_Epistle_, I. 1; 4; II. 2.
HORACE THE PHILOSOPHER OF LIFE:
The Spectator and Essayist; _Satires_, I. 4; II. 1.
The Vanity of Human Wishes;
_Odes_, I. 4; 24; 28; II. 13; 14; 16; 18; III. 1; 16; 24; 29; IV. 7.
_Satires_, I. 4; 6.
_Epistles_, I. 1.
The Pleasures of this World;
_Odes_, I. 9; 11; 24; II. 3; 14; III. 8; 23; 29; IV. 12.
_Epistles_, I. 4.
Life and Morality;
_Odes_, I. 5; 18; 19; 27; III. 6; 21; IV. 13.
_Epistles_, I. 2; II. 1.
Life and Purpose;
_Odes_, I. 12; II. 2; 15; III. 2; 3; IV. 9; _Epode_, 2.
_Satires_, I. 1.
_Epistles_, I. 1.
The Sources of Happiness;
_Odes_, I. 31; II. 2; 16; 18; III. 16; IV. 9.
_Satires_, I. 1; 6; II. 6.
_Epistles_, I. 1; 2; 6; 10; 11; 12; 14; 16.
HORACE THE PROPHET:
_Odes_, II. 20; III. 1; 4; 30; IV. 2; 3.
HORACE AND ANCIENT ROME:
_Odes_, IV. 3.
_Epistles_, I. 20.
Suetonius, _Vita Horati, Life of Horace_, Translation, J.C. Rolfe,
in _The Loeb Classical Library_, New York, 1914.
Hertz, Martin, _Analecta ad carminum Horatianorum Historiam_, i-v.
Breslau, 1876-82.
Schanz, Martin, _Geschichte der Römischen Litteratur_. München, 1911.
HORACE AND THE MIDDLE AGE:
Manitius, Maximilian, _Analekten zur Geschichte des Horaz im
Mittelalter, bis 1300_. Göttingen, 1893.
HORACE AND MODERN TIMES:
In Italy;
Curcio, Gaetano Gustavo, _Q. Orazio Flacco, studiato in Italia dal
secolo XIII al XVIII_. Catania, 1913.
In France and Germany;
Imelmann, J., _Donec gratus eram tibi, Nachdichtungen und
Nachklänge aus drei Jahrhunderten_. Berlin, 1899.
Stemplinger, Eduard, _Das Fortleben der Horazischen Lyrik seit der
Renaissance_. Leipzig, 1906.
In Spain;
Menéndez y Pelayo, D. Marcelino, _Horacio en España_, 2 vols.
Madrid, 1885.[2]
In England;
Goad, Caroline, _Horace in the English Literature of the Eighteenth
Century_. New Haven, 1918.
Myers, Weldon T., _The Relations of Latin and English as Living
Languages in England during the Age of Milton_. Dayton, Virginia,
1913.
Nitchie, Elizabeth, "Horace and Thackeray," in _The Classical
Journal_, XIII. 393-410 (1918).
Shorey, Paul, and Laing, Gordon J., _Horace: Odes and Epodes_
(Revised Edition). Boston, 1910.
Thayer, Mary R., _The Influence of Horace on the Chief English
Poets of the Nineteenth Century_. New Haven, 1916.
HORACE THE DYNAMIC:
_Ars Poetica._
Cowl, R.P., _The Theory of Poetry in England; its development in
doctrines and ideas from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth
century_. London, 1914.
Dobson, Henry Austin, _Collected Poems_, Vol. I, 135, 181, 219, 222,
224, 231, 236, 245, 263; II. 66, 83, 243, etc. London, 1899.
Gladstone, W.E., _The Odes of Horace_, English Verse Translation.
New York, 1901.
Kipling, Rudyard, et Graves, C.L., _Q. Horati Flacci Carminum Liber
Quintus_. New Haven, 1920.[3]
Lang, Andrew, _Letters to Dead Authors_. New York, 1893.
Martin, Sir Theodore, _The Odes of Horace_; translated into English
verse. London, 1861.[2]
Untermeyer, Louis, "_--and Other Poets_." New York, 1916.
Whicher, G.M. and G.F., _On the Tibur Road, a Freshman's Horace_.
Princeton, 1912.
Besides the works mentioned above, reference should be made to:
CAMPAUX, A., _Des raisons de la popularité d'Horace en France_. Paris,
1895.
D'ALTON, J.F., _Horace and His Age_. London, 1917.
MCCREA, N.G., _Horatian Criticism of Life_. New York, 1917.
STEMPLINGER, EDUARD, _Horaz im Urteil der Jahrhunderte_. Leipzig,
1921.
TAYLOR, HENRY OSBORN, _The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages_. New
York, 1903.[2]
_The Century Horace._
and, also, to the two following works, cited and quoted in the text:
DUFF, J. WIGHT, _A Literary History of Rome_. London, 1910.[2] (p.
545)
TYRRELL, R.Y., _Latin Poetry_. Boston, (lectures delivered at The
Johns Hopkins University, 1893). (p. 164)
_Note_: Translations of Horace, not otherwise assigned or not enclosed
in quotation marks, are those of G.S.
Our Debt to Greece and Rome
AUTHORS AND TITLES
1. HOMER. John A. Scott, Northwestern University.
2. SAPPHO. David M. Robinson, The Johns Hopkins University.
3A. EURIPIDES. F.L. Lucas, King's College, Cambridge.
3B. AESCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES. J.T. Sheppard, King's College,
Cambridge.
4. ARISTOPHANES. Louis E. Lord, Oberlin College.
5. DEMOSTHENES. Charles D. Adams, Dartmouth College.
6. ARISTOTLE'S POETICS. Lane Cooper, Cornell University.
7. GREEK HISTORIANS. Alfred E. Zimmern, University of Wales.
8. LUCIAN. Francis G. Allinson, Brown University.
9. PLAUTUS AND TERENCE. Charles Knapp, Barnard College, Columbia
University.
10A. CICERO. John C. Rolfe, University of Pennsylvania.
10B. CICERO AS PHILOSOPHER. Nelson G. McCrea, Columbia University.
11. CATULLUS. Karl P. Harrington, Wesleyan University.
12. LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. George Depue Hadzsits, University of
Pennsylvania.
13. OVID. Edward K. Rand, Harvard University.
14. HORACE. Grant Showerman, University of Wisconsin.
15. VIRGIL. John William Mackail, Balliol College, Oxford.
16. SENECA. Richard Mott Gummere, The William Penn Charter School.
17. ROMAN HISTORIANS. G. Ferrero, Florence.
18. MARTIAL. Paul Nixon, Bowdoin College.
19. PLATONISM. Alfred Edward Taylor, University of Edinburgh.
20. ARISTOTELIANISM. John L. Stocks, University of Manchester,
Manchester.
21. Stoicism. Robert Mark Wenley, University of Michigan.
22. LANGUAGE AND PHILOLOGY. Roland G. Kent, University of
Pennsylvania.
23. RHETORIC AND LITERARY CRITICISM. (Greek) W. Rhys Roberts, Leeds
University.
24. GREEK RELIGION. Walter W. Hyde, University of Pennsylvania.
25. ROMAN RELIGION. Gordon J. Laing, University of Chicago.
26. MYTHOLOGIES. Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College, Cambridge.
27. THEORIES REGARDING THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. Clifford H. Moore,
Harvard University.
28. STAGE ANTIQUITIES. James T. Allen, University of California.
29. GREEK POLITICS. Ernest Barker, King's College, University of
London.
30. ROMAN POLITICS. Frank Frost Abbott, Princeton University.
31. ROMAN LAW. Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law School.
32. ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY. M.T. Rostovtzeff, Yale University.
33. WARFARE BY LAND AND SEA. E.S. McCartney, University of Michigan.
34. THE GREEK FATHERS. Roy J. Deferrari, The Catholic University of
America.
35. BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE. Henry Osborn Taylor, New York.
36. MATHEMATICS. David Eugene Smith, Teachers College, Columbia
University.
37. LOVE OF NATURE. H.R. Fairclough, Leland Stanford Junior
University.
38. ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY. Franz Cumont, Brussels.
39. THE FINE ARTS. Arthur Fairbanks, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
40. ARCHITECTURE. Alfred M. Brooks, Swarthmore College.
41. ENGINEERING. Alexander P. Gest, Philadelphia.
42. GREEK PRIVATE LIFE, ITS SURVIVALS. Charles Burton Gulick, Harvard
University.
43. ROMAN PRIVATE LIFE, ITS SURVIVALS. Walton B. McDaniel, University
of Pennsylvania.
44. FOLK LORE.
45. GREEK AND ROMAN EDUCATION.
46. CHRISTIAN LATIN WRITERS. Andrew F. West, Princeton University.
47. ROMAN POETRY AND ITS INFLUENCE UPON EUROPEAN CULTURE. Paul Shorey,
University of Chicago.
48. PSYCHOLOGY.
49. MUSIC. Théodore Reinach, Paris.
50. ANCIENT AND MODERN ROME. Rodolfo Lanciani, Rome.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Horace and His Influence" ***
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