Grant Showerman

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing is sweeter than to dwell in the lofty citadels secure in the wisdom of the sages, 041 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. ”

“ 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 053 eyes on that part of the stream directly before us, the only part which is ever really seen. ”

“ 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 104 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 071 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is real Italy which Horace cuts on his cameos,—real landscape, real flowers and fruits, real men. 027
"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! ”

“ 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 045 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. ”