Complete Works of Horace (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics)
Page 97
(1) May the writer ask indulgence while he recalls how, exactly fifty-eight years ago, as senior boy at Winchester, he recited this Satire publicly, receiving in recompense at Warden Barter’s hands the Queen’s silver medal for elocution.
ODES AND EPODES
I have tried to interpret in some degree the teaching of the Satires and Epistles. Yet had the author’s genius found expression in these Conversations only, he would not have become through nineteen centuries the best beloved of Latin poets: beloved in his own time alike by the weary Atlas Augustus and the refined sensualist Maecenas; “playing round the heartstrings” of the stern censor Persius; endowed by Petronius and Quintilian with the prize of incommunicable felicity; the darling of Dante, Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the “old popular Horace” of Tennyson; the Horace whose “sad earnestness and vivid exactness” pierced the soul and brain of aged John Henry Newman. “His poems,” says a great French critic (St. Beuve, “Horace”), “form a manual of good taste, of poetic feeling, of practical and worldly wisdom. The Christian has his Bible; the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St. Augustine; an earlier philosophy on Montaigne; Horace comes within the range of all: in reading him we break not in any way with modernity, yet retain our hold upon antiquity. I know nothing more delightful as one grows in years, when the mind retains its subtlety, but is conscious of increasing languor, than to test the one and brace the other by companionship with a book familiar and frequently re-read: we walk thereby with a supporting staff, stroll leaning upon a friendly arm. This is what Horace does for us: coming back to him in our old age, we recover our youthful selves, and are relieved to learn while we appreciate afresh his well-remembered lines, that if our minds have become more inert, they are also more feeling, than of yore.”
For full justification of these graceful amenities we must turn to the lyrical poems. The Satires and Epistles, as their author frequently reminds us, were in prose: the revealed Horatian secret, the condensed expression of the Horatian charm, demanded musical verse; and this we have in the Odes and Epodes. The word Ode is Greek for a Song; Epode was merely a metrical term to express an ode which alternated in longer and shorter lines, and we may treat them all alike as Odes. The Epodes are amongst his earliest publications, and bear signs of a ‘prentice hand. “Iambi,” he calls them, a Greek word meaning “lampoons”; and six of them are bitter personal attacks on individuals, foreign to the good breeding and urbanity which distinguish his later writings. More of the same class he is believed to have suppressed, retaining these as specimens of that earlier style, and because, though inchoate, they won the admiration of Virgil, and preferred their author to the patronage of Maecenas. One of the finer Epodes (Epod. ix) has peculiar interest, as written probably on the deck of Maecenas’ galley during or immediately after the battle of Actium; and is in that case the sole extant contemporary record of the engagement. It reflects the loathing kindled in Roman breasts by Antony’s emasculate subjugation to his paramour; imagines with horror a dissolute Egyptian harlot triumphant and supreme in Rome, with her mosquito-curtained beds and litters, and her train of wrinkled eunuchs. It describes with a spectator’s accuracy the desertion of the Gallic contingent during the battle, the leftward flight of Antony’s fleet: then, with his favourite device of lapsing from high-wrought passion into comedy, Horace bewails his own sea-sickness when the excitement of the fight is over, and calls for cups of wine to quell it. In another Epode (Epod. ii) he recalls his boyish memories in praise of country life: the vines wedded to poplars in the early spring, after that the sheepshearing, later still the grape-gathering and honey harvest; when winter comes, the hunting of the boar by day, at night the cheery meal with wife and children upon olives, sorrel, mallows, beside the crackling log-piled hearth. Even here he is not weaned from the tricks of mocking irony manifest in his early writings and born perhaps of his early struggles; for he puts this delicious pastoral, which tinkles through the page like Milton’s “L’Allegro,” into the mouth of a Roman capitalist, who, bitten by transient passion for a country life, calls in all his money that he may buy a farm, pines in country retirement for the Stock Exchange, sells his estate in quick disgust, and returns to city life:
So said old Ten-per-cent, when he
A jolly farmer fain would be.
His moneys he called in amain —
Next week he put them out again.
is the spirited rendering of Mr. Goldwin Smith.
In his remaining Epodes we may trace the germ of his later written Odes. We have the affectionate addresses to Maecenas, the disgust at civil discords, the cheery invitations to the wine cup, the wooing of some coy damsel. By and by Maecenas presses him to bring them out completed in a volume, and he pleads a fugitive amour in excuse for his delay. Published, however, they were, notwithstanding the distractions of Neaera; went, neatly written out in red-lined columns, to the brothers Sosii in the street called Argiletum, to be multiplied by the librarian’s scribes on well-bleached Egyptian papyrus, bound in pumiced parchment, stored in metal boxes on the bookseller’s shelves within, while the names of the author and his work were inscribed upon a pillar outside the shop, as a guide to intending purchasers. Copies were sold, probably, for a few denarii each; what would we not give for one of them to-day? Let us hope that their author was well paid.
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.