Horace Part 14

[1] So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:--

"He was my friend, the truest friend on earth; A strong and mighty influence joined our birth."

What the poet, in this burst of loving sympathy, said would happen, did happen almost as he foretold it. Maecenas "first deceased;" and Horace, like the wife in the quaint, tender, old epitaph,

"For a little tried To live without him, liked it not, and died."

But this was not till many years after this Ode was written, which must have been about the year B.C. 36, when Horace was thirty-nine. Maecenas lived for seventeen years afterwards, and often and often, we may believe, turned to read the Ode, and be refreshed by it, when his pulse was low, and his heart sick and weary.

Horace included it in the first series of the Odes, containing Books I.

and II., which he gave to the world (B.C. 24). The first of these Odes, like the first of the Satires, is addressed to Maecenas. They had for the most part been written, and were, no doubt, separately in circulation several years before. That they should have met with success was certain; for the accomplished men who led society in Rome must have felt their beauty even more keenly than the scholars of a more recent time. These lyrics brought the music of Greece, which was their ideal, into their native verse; and a feeling of national pride must have helped to augment their admiration. Horace had tuned his ear upon the lyres of Sappho and Alcaeus. He had even in his youth essayed to imitate them in their own tongue,--a mistake as great as for Goethe or Heine to have tried to put their lyrical inspiration into the language of Herrick or of Burns. But Horace was preserved from perseverance in this mistake by his natural good sense, or, as he puts it himself, with a fair poetic licence (Satires, I. 10), by Rome's great founder Quirinus warning him in a dream, that

"To think of adding to the mighty throng Of the great paragons of Grecian song, Were no less mad an act than his who should Into a forest carry logs of wood."

These exercises may not, however, have been without their value in enabling him to transfuse the melodic rhythm of the Greeks into his native verse. And as he was the first to do this successfully, if we except Catullus in some slight but exquisite poems, so he was the last.

"Of lyrists," says Quintilian, "Horace is alone, one might say, worthy to be read. For he has bursts of inspiration, and is full of playful delicacy and grace; and in the variety of his images, as well as in expression, shows a most happy daring." Time has confirmed the verdict; and it has recently found eloquent expression in the words of one of our greatest scholars:--

"Horace's style," says Mr H. A. J. Munro, in the introduction to his edition of the poet, "is throughout his own, borrowed from none who preceded him, successfully imitated by none who came after him. The Virgilian heroic was appropriated by subsequent generations of poets, and adapted to their purposes with signal success. The hendecasyllable and scazon of Catullus became part and parcel of the poetic heritage of Rome, and Martial employs them only less happily than their matchless creator. But the moulds in which Horace cast his lyrical and his satirical thoughts were broken at his death. The style neither of Persius nor of Juvenal has the faintest resemblance to that of their common master. Statius, whose hendecasyllables are pa.s.sable enough, has given us one Alcaic and one Sapphic ode, which recall the bald and constrained efforts of a modern schoolboy. I am sure he could not have written any two consecutive stanzas of Horace; and if he could not, who could?"

Before he published the first two books of his Odes, Horace had fairly felt his wings, and knew they could carry him gracefully and well. He no longer hesitates, as he had done while a writer of Satires only (p. 55), to claim the t.i.tle of poet; but at the same time he throws himself, in his introductory Ode, with a graceful deference, upon the judgment of Maecenas. Let that only seal his lyrics with approval, and he will feel a.s.sured of his t.i.tle to rank with the great sons of song:--

"Do thou but rank me 'mong The sacred bards of lyric song, I'll soar beyond the lists of time, And strike the stars with head sublime."

In the last Ode, also addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book, the poet gives way to a burst of joyous antic.i.p.ation of future fame, figuring himself as a swan soaring majestically across all the then known regions of the world. When he puts forth the Third Book several years afterwards, he closes it with a similar paean of triumph, which, unlike most prophecies of the kind, has been completely fulfilled. In both he alludes to the lowliness of his birth, speaking of himself in the former as a child of poor parents--"_pauperum sanguis parentum_;"

in the latter as having risen to eminence from a mean estate-"_ex humili potens_." These touches of egotism, the sallies of some brighter hour, are not merely venial; they are delightful in a man so habitually modest.

"I've reared a monument, my own, More durable than bra.s.s; Yea, kingly pyramids of stone In height it doth surpa.s.s.

"Rain shall not sap, nor driving blast Disturb its settled base, Nor countless ages rolling past Its symmetry deface.

"I shall not wholly die. Some part, Nor that a little, shall Escape the dark Destroyer's dart, And his grim festival.

"For long as with his Vestals mute Rome's Pontifex shall climb The Capitol, my fame shall shoot Fresh buds through future time.

"Where brawls loud Aufidus, and came Parch'd Daunus erst, a horde Of rustic boors to sway, my name Shall be a household word;

"As one who rose from mean estate, The first with poet fire Aeolic song to modulate To the Italian lyre.

"Then grant, Melpomene, thy son Thy guerdon proud to wear, And Delphic laurels, duly won.

Bind thou upon my hair!"

CHAPTER IX.

HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS.--HIS LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE.

No intimate friend of Maecenas was likely to be long a stranger to Augustus; and it is most improbable that Augustus, who kept up his love of good literature amid all the distractions of conquest and empire, should not have early sought the acquaintance of a man of such conspicuous ability as Horace. But when they first became known to each other is uncertain. In more than one of the Epodes Horace speaks of him, but not in terms to imply personal acquaintance. Some years further on it is different. When Trebatius (Satires, II. 1) is urging the poet, if write he must, to renounce satire, and to sing of Caesar's triumphs, from which he would reap gain as well as glory, Horace replies,--

"Most worthy sir, that's just the thing I'd like especially to sing; But at the task my spirits faint, For 'tis not every one can paint Battalions, with their bristling wall Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul, With, s.h.i.+vered spear, in death-throe bleed, Or Parthian stricken from his steed."

Then why not sing, rejoins Trebatius, his justice and his fort.i.tude,

"Like sage Lucilius, in his lays To Scipio Africa.n.u.s' praise?"

The reply is that of a man who had obviously been admitted to personal contact with the Caesar, and, with instinctive good taste, recoiled from doing what he knew would be unacceptable to him, unless called for by some very special occasion:--

"When time and circ.u.mstance suggest, I shall not fail to do my best; But never words of mine shall touch Great Caesar's ear, but only such As are to the occasion due, And spring from my conviction, too; For stroke him with an awkward hand, And he kicks out--you understand?"

an allusion, no doubt, to the impatience entertained by Augustus, to which Suetonius alludes, of the indiscreet panegyrics of poetasters by which he was persecuted. The gossips of Rome clearly believed (Satires, II. 6) that the poet was intimate with Caesar; for he is "so close to the G.o.ds"--that is, on such a footing with Augustus and his chief advisers--that they a.s.sume, as a matter of course, he must have early tidings of all the most recent political news at first hand. However this may be, by the time the Odes were published Horace had overcome any previous scruples, and sang in no measured terms the praises of him, the back-stroke of whose rebuke he had professed himself so fearful of provoking.

All Horace's prepossessions must have been against one of the leaders before whose opposition Brutus, the ideal hero of his youthful enthusiasm, had succ.u.mbed. Neither were the sanguinary proscriptions and ruthless spoliations by which the triumvirate a.s.serted its power, and from a large share of the guilt of which Augustus could not shake himself free, calculated to conciliate his regards. He had much to forget and to forgive before he could look without aversion upon the blood-stained avenger of the great Caesar. But in times like those in which Horace's lot was cast, we do not judge of men or things as we do when social order is unbroken, when political crime is never condoned, and the usual standards of moral judgment are rigidly enforced. Horace probably soon came to see, what is now very apparent, that when Brutus and his friends struck down Caesar, they dealt a deathblow to what, but for this event, might have proved to be a well-ordered government.

Liberty was dead long before Caesar aimed at supremacy. It was dead when individuals like Sulla and Marius had become stronger than the laws; and the death of Caesar was, therefore, but the prelude to fresh disasters, and to the ultimate invest.i.ture with absolute power of whoever, among the compet.i.tors for it, should come triumphantly out of what was sure to be a protracted and a sanguinary struggle. In what state did Horace find Italy after his return from Philippi? Drenched in the blood of its citizens, desolated by pillage, hara.s.sed by daily fears of internecine conflict at home and of invasion from abroad, its sovereignty a stake played for by political gamblers. In such a state of things it was no longer the question, how the old Roman const.i.tution was to be restored, but how the country itself was to be saved from ruin. Prestige was with the nephew of the Caesar whose memory the Roman populace had almost from his death wors.h.i.+pped as divine; and whose conspicuous ability and address, as well as those of his friends, naturally attracted to his side the ablest survivors of the party of Brutus. The very course of events pointed to him as the future chief of the state. Lepidus, by the sheer weakness and indecision of his character, soon went to the wall; and the power of Antony was weakened by his continued absence from Rome, and ultimately destroyed by the malign influence exerted upon his character by the fascinations of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The disastrous failure of his Parthian expedition (B.C. 36), and the tidings that reached Rome from time to time of the mad extravagance of his private life, of his abandonment of the character of a Roman citizen, and his a.s.sumption of the barbaric pomp and habits of an oriental despot, made men look to his great rival as the future head of the state, especially as they saw that rival devoting all his powers to the task of reconciling divisions and restoring peace to a country exhausted by a long series of civil broils, of giving security to life and property at home, and making Rome once more a name of awe throughout the world. Was it, then, otherwise than natural that Horace, in common with many of his friends, should have been not only content to forget the past, with its b.l.o.o.d.y and painful records, but should even have attached himself cordially to the party of Augustus? Whatever the private aims of the Caesar may have been, his public life showed that he had the welfare of his country strongly at heart, and the current of events had made it clear that he at least was alone able to end the strife of faction by a.s.suming the virtual supremacy of the state.

Pollio, Messalla, Varus, and others of the Brutus party, have not been denounced as renegades because they arrived at a similar conclusion, and lent the whole influence of their abilities and their names to the cause of Augustus. Horace has not been so fortunate; and because he has expressed,--what was no doubt the prevailing feeling of his countrymen,--grat.i.tude to Augustus for quelling civil strife, for bringing glory to the empire, and giving peace, security, and happiness to his country by the power of his arms and the wisdom of his administration, the poet has been called a traitor to the n.o.bler principles of his youth--an obsequious flatterer of a man whom he ought to have denounced to posterity as a tyrant. _Adroit esclave_ is the epithet applied to him in this respect by Voltaire, who idolises him as a moralist and poet. But it carries little weight in the mouth of the cynic who could fawn with more than courtierly complaisance on a Frederick or a Catherine, and weave graceful flatteries for the Pompadour, and who "dearly loved a lord" in his practice, however he may have sneered at aristocracy in his writings. But if we put ourselves as far as we can into the poet's place, we shall come to a much more lenient conclusion. He could no doubt appreciate thoroughly the advantages of a free republic or of a purely const.i.tutional government, and would, of course, have preferred either of these for his country.

But while theory pointed in that direction, facts were all pulling the opposite way. The materials for the establishment of such a state of things did not exist in a strong middle cla.s.s or an equal balance of parties. The choice lay between the anarchy of a continued strife of selfish factions, and the concentration of power in the hands of some individual who should be capable of enforcing law at home and commanding respect abroad. So at least Horace obviously thought; and surely it is reasonable to suppose that the man, whose integrity and judgment in all other matters are indisputable, was more likely than the acutest critic or historian of modern times can possibly be to form a just estimate of what was the possible best for his country, under the actual circ.u.mstances of the time.

Had Horace at once become the panegyrist of the Caesar, the sincerity of his convictions might have, been open to question. But thirteen years at least had elapsed between the battle of Philippi and the composition of the Second Ode of the First Book, which is the first direct acknowledgment by Horace of Augustus as the chief of the state. This Ode is directly inspired by grat.i.tude for the cessation of civil strife, and the skilful administration which had brought things to the point when the whole fighting force of the kingdom, which had so long been wasted in that strife, could be directed to spreading the glory of the Roman name, and securing its supremacy throughout its conquered provinces.

The allusions to Augustus in this and others of the earlier Odes are somewhat cold and formal in their tone. There is a visible increase in glow and energy in those of a later date, when, as years went on, the Caesar established fresh claims on the grat.i.tude of Rome by his firm, sagacious, and moderate policy, by the general prosperity which grew up under his administration, by the success of his arms, by the great public works which enhanced the splendour and convenience of the capital, by the restoration of the laws, and by his zealous endeavour to stem the tide of immorality which had set in during the protracted disquietudes of the civil wars. It is true that during this time Augustus was also establis.h.i.+ng the system of Imperialism, which contained in itself the germs of tyranny, with all its brutal excesses on the one hand, and its debasing influence upon the subject nation on the other. But we who have seen into what it developed must remember that these baneful fruits of the system were of lengthened growth; and Horace, who saw no farther into the future than the practical politicians of his time, may be forgiven if he dwelt only upon the immediate blessings which the government of Augustus effected, and the peace and security which came with a tenfold welcome after the long agonies of the civil wars.

The glow and sincerity of feeling of which we have spoken are conspicuous in the following Ode (IV. 2), addressed to Iulus Antonius, the son of the triumvir, of whose powers as a poet nothing is known beyond the implied recognition of them contained in this Ode. The Sicambri, with two other German tribes, had crossed the Rhine, laid waste part of the Roman territory in Gaul, and inflicted so serious a blow on Lollius, the Roman legate, that Augustus himself repaired to Gaul to retrieve the defeat and resettle the province. This he accomplished triumphantly (B.C. 17); and we may a.s.sume that the Ode was written while the tidings of his success were still fresh, and the Romans, who had been greatly agitated by the defeat of Lollius, were looking eagerly forward to his return. Apart from, its other merits, the Ode is interesting from the estimate Horace makes in it of his own powers, and his avowal of the labour which his verses cost him.

"Iulus, he who'd rival Pindar's fame, On waxen wings doth sweep The Empyrean steep, To fall like Icarus, and with his name Endue the gla.s.sy deep.

"Like to a mountain stream, that roars From bank to bank along, When Autumn rains are strong, So deep-mouthed Pindar lifts his voice, and pours His fierce tumultuous song.

"Worthy Apollo's laurel wreath, Whether he strike the lyre To love and young desire, While bold and lawless numbers grow beneath His mastering touch of fire;

"Or sings of G.o.ds, and monarchs sprung Of G.o.ds, that overthrew The Centaurs, hideous crew, And, fearless of the monster's fiery tongue, The dread Chimaera slew;

"Or those the Elean palm doth lift To heaven, for winged steed, Or st.u.r.dy arm decreed, Giving, than hundred statues n.o.bler gift, The poet's deathless meed;

"Or mourns the youth s.n.a.t.c.hed from his bride, Extols his manhood clear, And to the starry sphere Exalts his golden virtues, scattering wide The gloom of Orcus drear.

"When the Dircean swan doth climb Into the azure sky, There poised in ether high, He courts each gale, and floats on wing sublime, Soaring with steadfast eye.

"I, like the tiny bee, that sips The fragrant thyme, and strays Humming through leafy ways, By Tibur's sedgy banks, with trembling lips Fas.h.i.+on my toilsome lays.

"But thou, when up the sacred steep Caesar, with garlands crowned, Leads the Sicambrians bound, With bolder hand the echoing strings shalt sweep, And bolder measures sound.

"Caesar, than whom a n.o.bler son The Fates and Heaven's kind powers Ne'er gave this earth of ours, Nor e'er will give though backward time should run To its first golden hours.

"Thou too shalt sing the joyful days, The city's festive throng, When Caesar, absent long, At length returns,--the Forum's silent ways, Serene from strife and wrong.

"Then, though in statelier power it lack, My voice shall swell the lay, And sing, 'Oh, glorious day, Oh, day thrice blest, that gives great Caesar back To Rome, from hostile fray!'

"'Io Triumphe!' thrice the cry; 'Io Triumphe!' loud Shall shout the echoing crowd The city through, and to the G.o.ds on high Raise incense like a cloud.