Chapter 4
Horace was now thirty-five years old: the Epodes had taught him his power over lyric verse. He had imitated at first the older Roman satirists; here by Maecenas' advice he copied from Greek models, from Alcaeus and Sappho, claiming ever afterwards with pride that he was the first amongst Roman poets to wed Aeolian lays to notes of Italy (Od. III, xxx, 13). He spent seven years in composing the first three Books of the Odes, which appeared in a single volume about B.C. 23. More than any of his poems they contain the essence of his indefinable magic art. They deal apparently with dull truisms and stale moralities, avowals of simple joys and simple sorrows. They tell us that life is brief and death is sure, that light loves and ancient wines are good, that riches are burdensome, and enough is better than a feast, that country life is delightful, that old age comes on us apace, that our friends leave us sorrowing and our sorrow does not bring them back. Trite sayings no doubt; but embellished one and all with an adorable force and novelty at once sadly earnest and vividly exact; not too simple for the profound and not too artful for the shallow; consecrated by the verbal felicity which belongs only to an age of peculiar intellectual refinement, and which flashed diamond-like from the facets of his own highly polished mind. "He is the Breviary of the natural man, his poetry is the Imitation not of Christ but of Epicurus."
His Odes may be roughly classified as Religious, Moral, Philosophical, Personal, Amatory.
1. RELIGIOUS. Between the classic and the Christian hymn, as Matthew Arnold has reminded us, there is a great gulf fixed. The Latin conception of the gods was civic; they were superior heads of the Republic; the Roman church was the invisible Roman state; religion was merely exalted patriotism. So Horace's addresses to the deities for the most part remind them of their coronation oaths, of the terms on which they were worshipped, their share in the bargain with humanity, a bargain to be kept on their side if they expected tribute of lambs and piglings, of hallowed cakes and vervain wreaths. Very little of what we call devotion seasons them. In two Odes (I, ii, xii), from a mere litany of Olympian names he passes to a much more earnest deification of Augustus. Another (III, xix) is a grace to Bacchus after a wine-bout. Or Faunus is bidden to leave pursuing the nymphs (we think of Elijah's sneer at Baal) and to attend to his duties on the Sabine farm, of blessing the soil and protecting the lambs (III, xviii). The hymn to Mercury recounts mythical exploits of the winged god, his infantile thefts from Apollo, his guiding Priam through the Grecian camp, his gift of speech to men, his shepherding souls to Hades (I, x). Venus is invoked in a dainty prayer to visit the chapel which Glycera is building for her (I, xxx):
O come, and with thee bring thy glowing boy, The Graces all, with kirtles flowing free, Youth, that without thee knows but little joy, The jocund nymphs and blithesome Mercury.
The doctrine of an overruling Providence Horace had expressly rejected in the Satires (Sat. iv, 101), holding that the gods are too happy and too careless in their superior aloof security to plague themselves with the affairs of mortals. But he felt sometimes, as all men feel, the need of a supreme celestial Guide: in the noble Ode which Ruskin loved he seems to find it in Necessity or Fortune (Od. I, xxxv); and once, when scared by thunder resounding in a cloudless sky, recants what he calls his "irrational rationalism," and admits that God may, if He will, put down the mighty and exalt the low (I, xxxiv). So again in his hymn for the dedication of Apollo's Temple on the Palatine (I, xxxi) a serious note is struck. He will not ask the God for rich cornfields and fat meadow land, for wines of Cales proffered in a golden cup. A higher boon than these his prayer demands:
O grant me, Phoebus, calm content, Strength unimpaired, a mind entire, Old age without dishonour spent, Nor unbefriended of the lyre.
On the other hand, his Ode to Melpomene (IV, iii), written in the consciousness of accepted eminence as the national poet, "harpist of the Roman lyre," breathes a sentiment of gratitude to Divinity far above the typical poetic cant of homage to the Muse. And his fine Secular Hymn, composed by Augustus's request for the great Century Games, strikes a note of patriotic aspiration and of moral earnestness, not unworthy to compare with King Solomon's Dedication Prayer; and is such as, with some modernization of the Deities invoked, would hardly misbecome a national religious festival to-day. It was sung by twenty-seven noble boys and as many high-born maidens, now in antiphon, now in chorus, to Apollo and Diana, as representing all the gods. Apollo, bless our city! say the boys. Dian, bless our women and our children, say the girls, and guard the sanctity of our marriage laws. Bring forth Earth's genial fruits, say both; give purity to youth and peace to age. Bring back the lapsed virtues of the Golden Age; Faith, Honour, antique Shame-fastness and Worth, and Plenty with her teeming horn. Hear, God! hear, Goddess! Yes, we feel our prayers are heard--
Now homeward we repair, Full of the blessed hope which will not fail, That Jove and all the gods have heard our prayer, And with approving smiles our homage hail: We, skilled in choral harmonies to raise The hymn to Phoebus and Diana's praise.
Of course in all this there is no touch of ecstasy; no spark of the inspiration which in a St. Francis, a St. Teresa, or a Charles Wesley, scales the heights of hymnody. And, as the unimaginative Roman temperament lacked the instinct of adoration, so was it deficient in that other constituent of supernatural faith, the belief in immortality. There might be a shadowy world--the poets said so--Odysseus visited its depths and brought back its report--but it was a gloomy place at best. Horace alludes to it always in the tone of the Hebrew Psalmists, or of Hezekiah sick to death, utilizing Minos and Cerberus and Tantalus and Sisyphus for poetic effect, yet ever with an undertone of sadness and alarm. Not Orpheus' self, he says (I, xxiv, 13), in his exquisite lament for dead Quinctilius, can bring back life-blood to the phantom pale who has joined the spectral band that voyage to Styx: the gods are pitiless--we can only bear bereavements patiently (II, iii). You must leave, my Dellius, your pleasant groves and your cottage upon Tiber's banks, since Orcus, ruthless king, swoops equally on all:
Land, home, and winsome wife must all be left; And cypresses abhorred, Alone of all the trees That now your fancy please, Shall shade his dust who was awhile their lord.
(II, xiv, 21.)
2. MORAL. But if the gods are beyond our ken, and if the world to come is misty, we still have this world with us; a world not always to be daffed aside with love and wine and comradeship, since behind its frolic wantonness lie the ennobling claims of duty and of conscience. As with Fielding, as with Thackeray, the light current tone of sportiveness or irony heightens the rare solemnity of didactic moral earnestness. Of all the Latin poets, says Sir Richard Fanshaw, Horace is the fullest fraught with excellent morality. In the six stately Odes which open the third book, together with a later Ode (xxiv) which closes the series and ought never to have been severed from it, Horatian poetry rises to its greatest height of ethical impressiveness. Ushered in with the solemn words of a hierophant bidding the uninitiated avaunt at the commencement of a religious ceremony (III, i, 1-2), delivered with official assumption in the fine frenzy of a muse-inspired priest, their unity of purpose and of style makes them virtually a continuous poem. It lashes the vices and the short-sighted folly of society; with the Sword of Damocles above his head the rich man sits at a luxurious board (III, i, 17); sails in his bronzed galley, lolls in his lordly chariot, with black Care ever at the helm or on the box (III, i, 40). By hardihood in the field and cheerful poverty at home Rome became great of yore; such should be the virtues of to-day. Let men be _moral_; it was immorality that ruined Troy; _heroic_--read the tale of Regulus; _courageous_, but with courage ordered, disciplined, controlled (III, iii; v; iv, 65). Brute force without mind, he says almost in Milton's words, falls by its own strength, as the giants fell encountering the gods:
For what is strength without a double share Of wisdom? vast, unwieldy, burdensome; Proudly secure, yet liable to fall By weakest subtleties, not made to rule, But to subserve where wisdom bears command.
("Samson Ag.," 53.)
Self-discipline, he reminds his audience, need not be sullen and austere; in regenerated Rome the Muses still may rule. Mild thoughts they plant, and they joy to see mild thoughts take root; refinement of manners and of mind, and the gladsomeness of literary culture (III, iv, 41).
He turns to reprove the ostentation of the rich; their adding field to field, poor families evicted from farmstead and cottage to make way for spreading parks and ponds and gardens;
driven from home Both wife and husband forth must roam, Bearing their household gods close pressed, With squalid babes, upon their breast.
(II, xviii, 23.)
Not thus was it in the good old times. Then rich men lavished marble on the temples of the gods, roofed their own cottages with chance-cut turf (II, xv, 13). And to what end all this splendour? Behind your palace walls lurks the grim architect of a narrower home; the path of glory leads but to the grave (II, xviii, 17). And as on the men, so on the women of Rome his solemn warnings are let fall. Theirs is the task to maintain the sacred family bond, the purity of marriage life. Let them emulate the matrons of the past, severe mothers of gallant sons (III, vi, 37). Let men and women join to stay the degeneracy which has begun to set in, and which, unchecked, will grow deadlier with each generation as it succeeds.
How Time doth in its flight debase Whate'er it finds? our fathers' race, More deeply versed in ill Than were their sires, hath born us yet More wicked, destined to beget A race more vicious still.
(III, vi, 45.)
3. PHILOSOPHICAL. "How charming is divine philosophy?" said the meek younger brother in "Comus" to his instructive senior. Speaking as one of the profane, I find not less charming the humanist philosophy of Horace. Be content! be moderate! seize the present! are his maxims.
_Be content!_ A mind without anxiety is the highest good (II, xvi). Great desires imply great wants (III, xvi, 42). 'Tis well when prayer seeks and obtains no more than life requires.
Happy he, Self-centred, who each night can say, "My life is lived": the morn may see A clouded or a sunny day: That rests with Jove; but what is gone He will not, can not, turn to nought, Nor cancel as a thing undone What once the flying hour has brought.
(III, xxix, 41.)
_Be moderate!_ He that denies himself shall gain the more (III, xvi, 21). He that ruleth his spirit is better than the lord of Carthage. Hold fast the golden mean (II, x, 5). The poor man's supper, spare but neat and free from care, with no state upon the board except his heirloom silver saltcellar, is better than a stalled ox and care therewith (II, xvi, 13). And he practised what he preached, refusing still fresh bounties which Maecenas pressed upon him. What more want I than I have? he says:
Truth is mine with genius mixed, The rich man comes and knocks at my poor gate. Favoured thus I ne'er repine, Nor weary Heaven for more, nor to the great For larger bounty pray, My Sabine farm my one sufficient boon.
(II, xviii, 9.)
_Seize the Present!_ _Now_ bind the brow with late roses and with myrtle crowns; now drown your cares in wine, counting as gain each day that Chance may give (I, vii, 31; I, ix, 14). Pale Death will be here anon; even while I speak time slips away: seize to-day, trust nothing to the morrow.
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears _To-day_ of past regrets and future fears: _To-morrow?_ why to-morrow I may be Myself with yesterday's seven thousand years.
What more commonplace than this saying that we all must die? but he brings it home to us ever and again with pathetic tearful fascinating force. Each time we read him, his sweet sad pagan music chants its ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and we hear the earth fall upon the coffin lid amongst the flowers.
Ah, Postumus, they fleet away Our years, nor piety one hour Can win from wrinkles, and decay, And death's indomitable power;
Not though three hundred steers you heap Each day, to glut the tearless eyes Of Him, who guards in moated keep Tityos, and Geryon's triple size:
All, all, alas! that watery bound Who eat the fruits that Nature yields, Must traverse, be we monarchs crowned, Or humblest tillers of the fields.
(II, xiv.)
The antipathy is not confined to heathenism; we distrust the Christian who professes to ignore it; many of us felt drawn by a brotherhood of humanity to the late scholarly Pope, when we learned that, as death looked him in the face, he clung to Pagan Horace as a truthful and sympathetic oracle. "And we all go to-day to this singer of the ancient world for guidance in the deceptions of life, and for steadfastness in the face of death."
[_Capitol Museum, Rome._
VIRGIL.]
4. PERSONAL. Something, but not very much, we learn of Horace's intimates from this class of Odes. Closest to him in affection and oftenest addressed is Maecenas. The opening Ode pays homage to him in words closely imitated by Allan Ramsay in addressing the chief of his clan:
Dalhousie of an auld descent, My chief, my stoup, my ornament;
and at the end of the volume the poet repeats his dedication (III, xxix). Twice he invites his patron to a feast; to drink wine bottled on the day some years before when entering the theatre after an illness he was received with cheers by the assembled multitude (I, xx); again on March 1st, kept as the festal anniversary of his own escape from a falling tree (III, viii). To a querulous letter from his friend written when sick and dreading death, he sends the tender consolation and remonstrance of which we spoke before (p. 29). In a very different tone he sings the praises of Licymnia (II, xii), supposed to be Terentia, Maecenas' newly-wedded wife, sweet voiced, witty, loving, of whom her husband was at the time passionately enamoured. He recounts finally, with that delicate respectful gratitude which never lapses into servility, his lifelong obligation, lauding gratefully the still removed place which his friend's bounty has bestowed:
A clear fresh stream, a little field, o'ergrown With shady trees, a crop that ne'er deceives.
(III, xvi, 29.)
Not less tenderly affectionate is the exquisite Ode to Virgil on the death of Quinctilius.
By many a good man wept Quinctilius dies, By none than you, my Virgil, trulier wept;
(I, xxiv.)
or to his devoted young friend Septimius (p. 39) (II, vi), who would travel with him to the ends of the world, to Moorish or Cantabrian wilds. Not so far afield need they go; but when age steals on they will journey to Tarentum, sweetest spot on earth:
That spot, those happy heights, desire Our sojourn; there, when life shall end, Your tear shall dew my yet warm pyre, Your bard and friend.
To the great general Agrippa (I, vi), rival of Maecenas in the good graces of Augustus, he sends a tribute complimentary, yet somewhat stiffly and officially conceived; lines much more cordial to the high-born Aelius Lamia (III, 17), whose statue stands to-day amid the pale immortalities of the Capitoline Museum. We have a note of tonic banter to Tibullus, "jilted by a fickle Glycera," and "droning piteous elegies" (I, xxxiii); a merry riotous impersonation of an imaginary symposium in honour of the newly-made augur Murena (III, 19), with toasts and tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and rose-wreaths flung about the board; a delicious mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II, iv), who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of it. He may yet find out that though fallen into obscurity she is in truth high-born and noble, and will present him with a patrician mother-in-law.
For aught that you know now, fair Phyllis may be The shoot of some highly respectable stem; Nay, she counts, I'll be sworn, a few kings in her tree, And laments the lost acres once lorded by them.
Never think that a creature so exquisite grew In the haunts where but vice and dishonour are known, Nor deem that a girl so unselfish, so true, Had a mother 'twould shame thee to take for thine own.
Several of his correspondents we can only name; the poet Valgius, the tragedians Pollio and Fuscus; Sallust, grandson of the historian; Pompeius, his old comrade in the Brutus wars; Lollius, defeated in battle and returning home in disgrace. Nor need we labour to identify a host of others; Iccius, Grosphus, Dellius; who figure as mere dedicatory names; nor persons mentioned casually, such as Telephus of the rosy neck and clustering hair (I, xiii; III, xix), whom Bulwer Lytton, with fine memories of his own ambrosial petted youth, calls a "typical beautyman and lady-killer." The Horatian personages, remarks Dean Milman, would contain almost every famous name of the Augustan age.
5. AMATORY. "Speak'st thou of nothing but ladies?" says Feste the Jester to poor Malvolio. He might have said the same to Horace; for of the Odes in the first three Books one third part is addressed to or concerned with women. How many of the pretty female names which musicalize his love songs, in syllables that breathe of the sweet south and melt like kisses in the utterance, are representative of real girls, we cannot guess; with none of them except perhaps one, who died young, does he seem to have been really in love. He was forty years old when most of his amorous Odes were written; an age at which, as George Eliot has reminded us, the baptism of passion is by aspersion rather than immersion. Something he must have known of love, or he could not write as he has done; but it is the superficial gallantry of a flirt rather than the impassioned self-surrender of a lover; of a gay bachelor, with roving critical eye, heart whole yet fancy free, too practised a judge of beauty to become its slave. Without emotion, without reverence, but with keen relishing appreciation, he versifies Pyrrha's golden curls, and Lycoris' low forehead--feminine beauties both to a Roman eye--and Phyllis' tapering arms and shapely ankles, and Chia's dimpled cheek, and the tangles of Neaera's hair, and the gadabout baggage Lyde, and Glycera's dazzling complexion that blinds the gazer's eye (I, v, xix, xxxiii; II, iv, 21; III, xiv, 21). They are all inconstant good-for-noughts, he knows; but so are men, and so is he; keep up the pleasant give-and-take, the quarrels and the reconciliations. All the youths of Rome are in love with a beautiful Ninon D'Enclos named Barine--Matthew Arnold declared this to be the finest of all the Odes (II, viii)--she perjures herself with every one in turn. But it seems to answer; she shines forth lovelier than ever. Venus and the nymphs only laugh, and her lovers, young and old, continue to hug their chains.
New captives fill the nets you weave; New slaves are bred; and those before, Though oft they threaten, never leave Your perjured door.
Sometimes he plays the monitor. Asterie's husband is laid up in Greece by contrary winds: he is faithful to his wife, though his hostess tempts him: let the wife be on her guard against her handsome neighbour Enipeus (III, vii). His own charmers are sometimes obdurate: Chloe and Lyde run away from him like fawns (I, xxiii): that is because they are young; he can wait till they are older; they will come to him then of themselves: "they always come," says Disraeli in "Henrietta Temple." He has quarrelled with an old flame (I, xvi), whom he had affronted by some libellous verses. He entreats her pardon; was young and angry when he wrote; will burn the offending lines, or fling them into the sea:
Come, let me change my sour for sweet, And smile complacent as before; Hear me my palinode repeat, And give me back your heart once more.
He professes bitter jealousy of a handsome stripling whose beauty Lydia praises (I, xiii). She is wasting her admiration; she will find him unfaithful; Horace knows him well:
Oh, trebly blest, and blest for ever, Are they, whom true affection binds, In whom no doubts nor janglings sever The union of their constant minds; But life in blended current flows, Serene and sunny to the close.
If anyone now reads "Lalla Rookh," he will recall an exquisite rendering of these lines from the lips of veiled Nourmahal:
There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, When two, that are linked in one heavenly tie, With heart never changing and brow never cold, Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.
One hour of a passion so sacred is worth Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss; And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth, It is this, it is this!
But, perhaps, if a jury of scholars could be polled as to the most enchanting amongst all Horace's lovesongs, the highest vote would be cast in favour of the famous "Reconciliation" of the roving poet with this or with some other Lydia (III, ix). The pair of former lovers, mutually faithless, exchange defiant experience of their several infidelities; then, the old affection reviving through the contact of their altercation, agree to discard their intervening paramours, and return to their first allegiance.
_He._
Whilst I was dear and thou wert kind, And I, and I alone, might lie Upon thy snowy breast reclined, Not Persia's king so blest as I.
_She._
Whilst I to thee was all in all, Nor Chloe might with Lydia vie, Renowned in ode or madrigal, Not Roman Ilia famed as I.
_He._
I now am Thracian Chloe's slave, With hand and voice that charms the air, For whom even death itself I'd brave, So fate the darling girl would spare.
_She._
I dote on Calais; and I Am all his passion, all his care, For whom a double death I'd die, So fate the darling boy would spare.
_He._
What if our ancient love return, And bind us with a closer tie, If I the fair-haired Chloe spurn, And, as of old, for Lydia sigh?
_She._
Though lovelier than yon star is he, Thou fickle as an April sky, More churlish too than Adria's sea, With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die.
The austere Scaliger used to say that he would rather have written this ode than be King of Spain and the Indies: Milton's Eve expresses her devotion to Adam in an apostrophe paraphrased from its closing lines.