Horace

“ Horace hung in his embrace, too deadly weak even to accept the offer of one of the dozen flasks that were thrust at him. Nothing was very clear in his mind; as far as he could make out, his most distinct impression was of a broad, flat beach, a blue sea and a blue sky, a black steamer making a black trail of smoke across them, and a voice soft as an angel’s reading Latin close by him. ”

“ Horace—who, from the other side of the table, with an amused smile in his eyes, watches him, as he "sighs like furnace," while Neaera, to the accompaniment of her lyre, sings one of Sappho's most passionate odes—whispers something in the ear of the brilliant vocalist, which visibly provokes a witty repartee, with a special sting in it for Horace himself, at which the little man winces—for have there not been certain love-passages of old between Neaera and himself? The wine circulates freely. ”

“ Horace looked distressed; his face began to twist itself out of shape.
"This very boy has a good many pieces of silver which were given him to buy fire-crackers. So you see, if he is truly sorry for his fault, he knows the way to atone for it."
Horace's conscience told him, by a twinge, that it would be no more than just for him to pay what he could for mending the watch. ”

“ Horace is the son of a city banker, by the second daughter of an English earl, a young gentleman of considerable expectations, and very amusing qualifications. Horace is a strange composition of all the good-natured whimsicalities of human nature, happily blended together without any very conspicuous counteracting foible. Facetious, lively, and poetical, the cream of every thing that is agreeable, society cannot be dull if Horace lends his presence. His imitations of Anacreon, and the soft bard of Erin, have on many occasions puzzled the cognoscenti of Eton. ”

“ Horace.
[More mildly.] Oh, if you'll do that! But how?
Fakrash.
[Standing in centre of hall.] By procuring thee another bride of far greater beauty and accomplishments.
Horace.
[Striding past him in a fury.] Another! You—you hopeless old ass! Can't you understand?
Fakrash.
[Seizing his arm, and bringing him down the stage.] Wait! Thou hast not yet heard the list of her perfections. A forehead shall she have like the gleaming dome of a temple, eyes like unto blazing lamps, a nose that shineth brighter than a sword, teeth resembling pearls strung on native gold, a bosom——
Horace. ”

“ Horace felt that the Italian at his side was not merely reading this as a chronicled address to suffering saints of old, but receiving it as a rousing call to himself, a watchword to be used on the field of battle, a command from a leader to a soldier of the cross.
"Is it true," asked Raphael, when at last he paused in his reading—"is it true that in your blessed land these Scriptures are open to all?"
"The poorest can have a Bible," replied Horace.
"What a power must be wielded there for the truth!" said the Italian, laying his hand upon the open Testament. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As if any man, much more a Roman to Romans, would make such a confession! Horace could obviously afford to put in this way the fact of his having given up a desperate cause, for this very reason, that he had done his duty on the field of Philippi, and that it was known he had done it. Commentators will be so cruelly prosaic! The poet was quite as serious in saying that Mercury carried him out of the melée in a cloud, like one of Homer's heroes, as that he had left his shield discreditably (non bene) on the battle-field. ”

“ We seek in them in vain for the tenderness, the negation of self, the passion and the pathos, which are the soul of all true love-poetry.
At the same time, Horace had a subtle appreciation of the beauty and grace, the sweetness and the fascination, of womanhood. Poet as he was, he must have delighted to contemplate the ideal elevation and purity of woman, as occasionally depicted in the poetry of Greece, and of which he could scarcely fail to have had some glimpses in real life. ”

“ Over these landscapes with their artistic well-being, rests sure tradition of Roman ancestry.
[89]
In Horace, in Quintillian, we see beginning that perspicuity, sense of distinctions, that made Latin races—France in particular, supreme in criticism. There is in Horace a likeness to the French mind that blossomed in 1830.
Who can help loving this antique world Horace shows, which keeps so much that is fine? We love it too because it had no shadows. It was content. We love its persistent search for joy, its disdain of the unworthy. We love conviction that life is supreme. ”

“ 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! ”

“ For O! if Manhood steels, if Honor warms,
Horace shall fly, shall scorn thy faithless charms;
Seek some bright Maid, whose soul for him shall glow,
Nor art, nor pride, nor wandering wishes know.
Then should'st thou languish, sigh, and weep once more,
And with new vows his injur'd heart implore,
Nor sighs, nor vows, nor tears shall he regard
Cold as the snow and as the marble hard.
And THOU, triumphant Youth, so gay, so vain,
Proud of my fate, exulting in my pain,
Tho' on thy hills the plenteous Herd should feed,
And rich Pactolus roll along thy mead ”

“ The sky and earth were very lovely that evening, and it seemed as if everybody ought to be heart-glad. I doubt if Horace had ever thought before what a beautiful world he lived in, and how glorious a thing it is to be alive! He could run about and do what he pleased with himself; but alas, poor Pincher! ”

“ There is indeed nothing more remarkable in Horace than the independence, or rather the self-dependence, of his character. The enjoyment which he drew from his Sabine farm consisted partly in the refreshment to his spirit from the familiar beauty of the place, partly in the “otia liberrima” from the claims of business and society which it afforded him. His love poems, when compared with those of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius, show that he never, in his mature years at least, allowed his peace of mind to be at the mercy of any one. ”

“ At the time of Horace's introduction to him, Maecenas was probably at his best, in the full vigour of his intellect, and alive with the generous emotions which must have animated a man bent as he was on securing tranquillity for the state, and healing the strife of factions, which were threatening it with ruin. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Turns, as the door opens and Horace Ventimore comes in briskly. Horace is a pleasant-looking young man, with a cheery and rather boyish manner; he comes down and greets the Futvoyes without seeing Pringle for the moment; Sylvia has risen, delighted at his arrival. ”

“ No writer is more Roman in the stateliness and dignity, the terseness, occasionally even in the sobriety and bare literalness, of his diction.
While it is mainly owing to the extreme care which Horace gave to form, rhythm and diction that his own prophecy
has been so amply fulfilled, yet no greater injustice could be done to him than to rank him either as poet or critic with those who consider form everything in literature. With Horace the mastery over the vehicle of expression was merely an essential preliminary to making a worthy and serious use of that vehicle. ”

“ Thus interrupted in his rhyme,
The Theologian needs must wait;
But quoted Horace, where he sings
The dire Necessity of things,
That drives into the roofs sublime
Of new-built houses of the great
The adamantine nails of Fate. ”

“ SHE.—I dote on Calaïs—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 Chloë spurn, And as of old, for Lydia sigh? SHE.—Though lovelier than yon star is he, And lighter thou than cork—ah why? More churlish, too, than Adria's sea, With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die!"
In this graceful trifle Horace is simply dealing with one of the commonplaces of poetry, most probably only transplanting a Greek flower into the Latin soil. ”

“ But the spirit and sentiment of his practical philosophy is quite genuine and original. The individuality of the great Roman moralists, such as Lucretius and Horace, appears not in any difference in the results at which they have arrived, but in the difference of spirit with which they regard the spectacle of human life. In reading Lucretius we are impressed by his earnestness, his pathos, his elevation of feeling; in Horace we are charmed by the serenity of his temper and the flavour of a delicate and subtle wisdom. ”

“ With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his pulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction of over-excitement; no one, as a rule, is more apt to tire of the homely and uneventful life which the country offers, or to find that, for him at least, its quietude does not bring peace. ”

“ Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;— (I forget which) —besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;—for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived. ”

“ Throughout the first half of the Ode, however, Horace has rather failed to mark the transitions of thought. He begins by assuring himself and, by implication, those whom he celebrates, of immortality, on the ground that the greatest poets are not the only poets; he then exchanges this thought for another, doubtless suggested by it, that the heroes of poetry are not the only heroes, though the very fact that there have been uncelebrated heroes is used to show that celebration by a poet is everything. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You praise the townsman's, I the rustic's state:
Admiring others' lots, our own we hate:
Each blames the place he lives in: but the mind
Is most in fault, which ne'er leaves self behind.
A town-house drudge, for farms you used to sigh;
Now towns and shows and baths are all your cry:
But I'm consistent with myself: you know
I grumble, when to Rome I'm forced to go.
Truth is, our standards differ: what your taste
Condemns, forsooth, as so much savage waste,
The man who thinks with Horace thinks divine,
And hates the things which you believe so fine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So they'd squelch the muse caloric,
And to students sophomoric
They'd present as metaphoric
What old Horace meant for facts.
We have always thought 'em lazy;
Now we adjudge 'em crazy!
Why, Horace was a daisy
That was very much alive!
And the wisest of us know him
As his Lydia verses show him,—
Go, read that virile poem,—
It is No. 25.
He was a very owl, sir,
And starting out to prowl, sir,
You bet he made Rome howl, sir,
Until he filled his date;
With a massic-laden ditty
And a classic maiden pretty,
He painted up the city,
And Mæcenas paid the freight! ”