Horace and His Influence Part 5

Horace will not be popular. He will remain the poet of the few who enjoy the process of thinking and recognize the charm of skillful expression.

Tacitus and Juvenal esteem him, the Emperor Alexander Severus reads him in leisure hours, the long list of mediocrities representing the course of literary history demonstrate by their content that the education of men of letters in general includes a knowledge of him. The greatest of the late pagans,--Ausonius and Claudian at the end of the fourth century; Boethius, philosopher-victim of Theodoric in the early sixth; Ca.s.siodorus, the chronicler, imperial functionary in the same century,--disclose a familiarity whose foundations are to be looked for in love and enthusiasm rather than in mere cultivation. It may be safely a.s.sumed that, in general, appreciation of Horace was proportionate to greatness of soul and real love of literature.

The same a.s.sumption may be made in the realm of Christian literature.

Minucius Felix, calmly and logically arguing the case of Christianity against paganism, Tertullian the fiery preacher, Cyprian the enthusiast and martyr, Arn.o.bius the rhetorical, contain no indications of familiarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that they did not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, the intense, the irascible, Prudentius, the most original and the most vigorous of the Christian poets, and even Venantius Fortunatus, bishop and traveler in the late sixth century, and last of the Christian poets while Latin was still a native tongue, display a knowledge of Horace which argues also a love for him.

The name of Venantius Fortunatus brings us to the very brink of the centuries called the Middle Age. If there are those who object to the name of Dark Age as doing injustice to the life of the times, they must at any rate agree that for Horace it was really dark. That his light was not totally lost in the shadows which enveloped the art of letters was due to one aspect of his immortality which we must notice before leaving the era of ancient Rome.

Thus far, in accounting for Horace's continued fame, we have considered only his appeal to the individual intellect and taste, the admiration which represented an interest spontaneous and sincere. There was another phase of his fame which expressed an interest less inspired, though its first cause was none the less in the enthusiasm of the elect. It was the phase foreseen by Horace himself, and its first manifestations had probably appeared in his own life-time. It was the immortality of the text-book and the commentary.

Quintilian's estimate of Horace in the _Inst.i.tutes_ is an indication that the poet was already a subject of school instruction in the latter half of the first century. Juvenal, in the first quarter of the next, gives us a chiaroscuro glimpse into a Roman school-interior where little boys are sitting at their desks in early morning, each with odorous lamp s.h.i.+ning upon school editions of Horace and Virgil smudged and discolored by soot from the wicks,

_totidem olfecisse lucernas_, Q_uot stabant pueri, c.u.m totus decolor esset_ F_laccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni_.

(VII. 225 ff.)

The use of the poet in the schools meant that lovers of learning as well as lovers of literary art were occupying themselves with Horace. The first critical edition of his works, by Marcus Valerius Probus, appeared as early as the time of Nero. A native of Berytus, the modern Beirut, disappointed in the military career, he turned to the collection, study, and critical editing of Latin authors, among whom, besides Horace, were Virgil, Lucretius, Persius, and Terence. His method, comprising careful comparison of ma.n.u.scripts, emendations, and punctuation, with annotations explanatory and aesthetic, all prefaced by the author's biography, won him the reputation of the most erudite of Roman men of letters. It is in no small measure due to him that the tradition of Horace's text is so comparatively good.

There were many other critics and interpreters of Horace. Of many of them, the names as well as the works have been lost. Modestus and Clara.n.u.s, perhaps not long after Probus, are two names that survive.

Suetonius, as we have seen, wrote the poet's _Life_, though it contains almost nothing not found in the works of Horace themselves. In the time of Hadrian appeared also the edition of Quintus Terentius Scaurus, in ten books, of which the _Odes_ and _Epodes_ made five, and the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ five, the _Ars Poetica_ being set apart as a book in itself. At the end of the second or the beginning of the third century, Helenius Acro wrote commentaries on certain plays of Terence and on Horace, giving special attention to the persons appearing in the poet's pages, a favorite subject on which a considerable body of writing sprang up. Not long afterward appeared the commentary of Pomponius Porphyrio, originally published with the text of Horace, but later separately. In spite of modifications wrought in the course of time, only Porphyrio's, of all the commentaries of the first three hundred years, has preserved an approximation to its original character and quant.i.ty. Acro's has been overlaid by other commentators until the ident.i.ty of his work is lost.

The purpose of Porphyrio was to bring poetic beauty into relief by clarifying construction and sense, rather than to engage in learned exposition of the subject matter.

Finally, in the year 527, the consul Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius, with the collaboration of one Felix, revised the text of at least the _Odes_ and _Epodes_, and perhaps also of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_.

That there were many other editions intervening between Porphyrio's and his, there can be little doubt.

This review of scant and scattered, but consistent, evidence is proof enough of Horace's hold upon the intellectual and literary leaders of the ancient Roman world. For the individual pagan who clung to the old order, he represented more acceptably than anyone else, or anyone else but Virgil, the ideal of a glorious past, and afforded consequently something of inspiration for the decaying present. Upon men who, whether pagan or Christian, were possessed by literary enthusiasms, and upon men who delighted in contemplation of the human kind, he cast the spell of art and humanity. Those who caught the fire directly may indeed have been few, but they were men of parts whose fire was communicated.

As for the influence exercised by Horace upon Roman society at large through generation after generation of schoolboys as the centuries pa.s.sed, its depth and breadth cannot be measured. It may be partly appreciated, however, by those who realize from their own experience both as pupils and teachers the effect upon growing and impressionable minds of a literature rich in morality and patriotism, and who reflect upon the greater amplitude of literary instruction among the ancients, by whom a Homer, a Virgil, or a Horace was made the vehicle of discipline so broad and varied as to be an education in itself.

3. HORACE AND THE MIDDLE AGE

There is no such thing as a line marking definitely the time when ancient Rome ceased to be itself and became the Rome of the Middle Age.

If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already, whether in recording the last real Roman setting of the Horatian house in order by Mavortius in 527, or in referring to Venantius Fortunatus, the last of the Latin Christian poets. The usual date marking the end of the Western Empire, 476, is only the convenient sign for the culmination of the movement long since begun in the interferences of an army composed more and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and ending in a final mutiny or revolt which a.s.sumed the character of invasion and the permanent seizure of civil as well as military authority. The coming of Odoacer is the ultimate stage in the process of Roman and Italian exhaustion, the sign that life is not longer possible except through infusion of northern blood.

The military and political change itself was only exterior, the outward demonstration of deep-seated maladies. The too-successful bureaucratization of Augustus and such of his successors as were really able and virtuous, the development of authority into tyranny by such as were neither able nor virtuous, but mad and wilful, had removed from Roman citizens.h.i.+p the responsibility which in the olden time had made it strong; and the increase of taxes, a.s.sessments, and compulsory honors involving personal contribution, had subst.i.tuted for responsibility and privilege a burden so heavy that under it the civic life of the Empire was crushed to extinction. In Italy, above all, the ancient seed was running out. Under the influence of economic and social movement, the old stock had died and disappeared, or changed beyond recognition. The old language, except in the mouths and from the pens of the few, was fast losing its ident.i.ty. Uncertainty, indifference, stagnation, weariness of body, mind, and soul, leaden resignation and despair, forgetfulness of the glories of the past in art and even in heroism, were the inheritance of the last generations of the old order. Jerome felt barbarism closing in: _Roma.n.u.s...o...b..s ruit_, he says,--the Roman world is tumbling in ruins.

In measure as the vitality of pagan Rome was sapped, into the inert and decaying ma.s.s there penetrated gradually the two new life-currents of a new religion and a new blood. The change they wrought from the first century to the descent of the Northerners was not sudden, nor was it rapid. Nor was it always a change that carried visible warrant of virtue. The mingling of external races in the army and in trade, the interference of a Northern soldiery in the affairs of the throne, the more peaceful but more intimate shuffling of the population through the social and economic emergence of the one-time nameless and poor, whether of native origin or foreign, may have contributed fresh blood to an anaemic society, but the result most apparent to the eye and most disturbing to the soul was the debas.e.m.e.nt of standards and the fears that naturally come with violent, sudden, or merely unfamiliar change.

The new religion may have contributed new hope and erected new standards, but it also contributed exaggerations, contradictions, and new uncertainties. The life of logic began to be displaced by the life of feeling.

The change and turmoil of the times that attended and followed the crumbling of the Roman world were favorable neither to the production of letters nor to the enjoyment of a literary heritage. Goth, Byzantine, Lombard, Frank, German, Saracen, and Norman made free of the soil of Italy. If men were not without leisure, they were without the leisure of peaceful and careful contemplation, and lacked the buoyant heart without which a.s.similation of art is hardly less possible than creation.

Ignorance had descended upon the world, and gross darkness covered the people. The cla.s.sical authors were solid, the meat of vigorous minds.

Their language, never the facile language of the people and the partially disciplined, now became a resisting medium that was foreign to the general run of men. Their syntax was archaic and crabbed, their metres forgotten. Their substance, never grasped without effort, was now not only difficult, but became the abstruse matter of another people and another age. To all but the cultivated few, they were known for anything but what they really were. It was an age of Virgil the mysterious prophet of the coming of Christ, of Virgil the necromancer. Real knowledge withdrew to secret and secluded refuges.

If the cla.s.sical authors in general were beyond the powers and outside the affection of men, Horace was especially so. More intellectual than Virgil, and less emotional, in metrical forms for the most part lost to their knowledge and liking, the poet of the individual heart rather than of men in the national or racial ma.s.s, the poet strictly of this world and in no respect of the next, he almost vanished from the life of men.

Yet the cla.s.sics were not all lost, and not even Horace perished.

Strange to say, and yet not really strange, the most potent active influence in the destruction of his appeal to men was also the most effective instrument of his preservation. Through the darkness and the storms of the nine hundred years following the fall of the Western Empire, Horace was sheltered under the wing of the Church.

It was a natural exaggeration for Christianity to begin by teaching absolute separation from the world, and to declare, through the mouths of such as Tertullian, that the blood of Christ alone sufficed and nothing more was needed, and that literature and all the other arts of paganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from its religion that every part was anathema. It was natural that Horace, more than Virgil, should be the object of its neglect, and even of its active enmity. Horace is the most completely pagan of poets whose works are of spiritual import. The only immortality of which he takes account is the immortality of fame. Aside from this, the end of man is dust and shadow.

It is true that in the depth of his heart he does not feel with Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius that "Dust thou art, to dust returnest" is spoken of soul as well as body. The old Roman instinct for ancestor-communion is too strong in him for that. But he acquiesces in their doctrine in so far as shadowy existence in another world inspires in him no pleasing hope. He displays no trace of the faith in the supernatural which accompanies the Christian hope of happy immortality.

He contains none of the expressions of yearning for communion with the divine, of self-abas.e.m.e.nt in the presence of the eternal, which belong to Christian poetry. The flights of his muse rarely take him into the realm of a divine love and providence. His aspirations are for things achievable in this world: for faithfulness in friends.h.i.+p, for enduring courage, for irreproachable patriotism,--in short, for ideal _human_ relations.

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 G.o.d, will he trust.

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, G.o.ds and men, directly in the face, and expects other men to do the same. Life and its duties are for him clear-cut. He is no propounder of problems, no searcher after hidden purposes. He lacks almost absolutely the feverish aspiration and unrest which characterize Christian and other humanitarian modes of thought and sentiment, and whose manifestation is one of the best known features of recent modern times, as it was of the earliest Christian experience.

But Christianity was a religion of men, and therefore human. If its exaggerations were natural, its reservations and its reactions were also natural. There were men whose admiration continued to be roused and whose affections continued to be touched by Virgil and Horace. There were men whose reason as well as whose instinct impelled them to employ the cla.s.sic authors and the cla.s.sic arts in the service of the new religion. Christianity possessed no distinct and separate media of expression and no separate body of knowledge which could bear fruit as matter of instruction. Pagan art and literature were indispensable whether for the study of history or of mere humanity. Christianity was therefore compelled to employ the old forms of art, which involved the use of the old instrumentalities of literary education. When, finally, paganism had fallen under its repeated a.s.saults, what had been forced use became a matter of choice, and the cla.s.sics were taken under the Church's protection and marked with her approval.

The data regarding Horace in the Middle Age are few, but they are clear.

We need not examine them all in order to draw conclusions.

The monastic idea, of eastern origin and given currency in the West by Jerome, was first reduced to systematic practice by Benedict, who created the first Rule at Monte Ca.s.sino about the time of the Mavortian recension of Horace, in 527. New moral strength issued from the cloisters now rapidly established. Ca.s.siodorus, especially active in promoting the spiritual phase of monkish retreat, made the intellectual life also his concern. Monte Ca.s.sino, between Naples and Rome, and Bobbio, in the northern part of the peninsula, were the great Italian centers. The Benedictine influence spread to Ireland, which before the end of the sixth century became a stronghold of the movement and an inspiration to England, Germany, France, and even Italy, where Bobbio itself was founded by Columban and his companions. St. Gall in Switzerland, Fulda at Hersfeld in Hesse-Na.s.sau, Corvey in Saxony, Iona in Scotland, Tours in France, Reichenau on Lake Constance, were all active centers of religion and learning within two hundred years from Benedict's death.

The monasteries not only afforded the spiritual enthusiast the opportunity of separation from the world of temptation and storm, but were equally inviting to men devoted first of all to the intellectual life. The scholar and the educator found within their walls not only peaceful escape from the harshnesses of political change and military broil, but the opportunity to labor usefully and unmolested in the occupation that pleased them most. The cloister became a Christian inst.i.tute. The example of Ca.s.siodorus was followed two hundred years later on a larger scale by Charlemagne. Schools were founded both in cloister and at court, scholars summoned, ma.n.u.scripts copied, the life of pagan antiquity studied, and the bond between the languages and cultures of present and past made firmer. The schools of the old regime had fallen away in the sixth century, when Northern rule had closed the civic career to natives of Italy. A great advance in the intellectual life now laid the foundations of all cultural effort in the Middle Age.

No small part of this advance was due to the preservation of ma.n.u.scripts by copying. In this activity France was first, so far as Horace was concerned. The copies by the scribes of Charlemagne went back to Mavortius and Porphyrio, the originals of which were probably discovered at Bobbio by his scholars. Of the two hundred and fifty ma.n.u.scripts in existence, the greater part are French in origin, the oldest being the Bernensis, of the ninth or tenth century, from near Orleans. Germany was a worthy second to France. The finds in monastery libraries of both countries in the humanist movement of the fifteenth century were especially rich. Italy, on the contrary, preserved few ma.n.u.scripts of her poet, and none that is really ancient. Italy began the great monastery movement, but disorder and change were against the diffusion of culture. Charlemagne's efforts probably had little to do with Italy.

The Church seems to have had no care to preserve the ancient culture of her native land.

What this meant in terms of actual acquaintance with the poet would not be clear without evidence of other kinds. By the end of the sixth century, knowledge of Horace was already vague. He was not read in Africa, Spain, or Gaul. Read in Italy up to Charlemagne's time, a hundred years later his works are not to be found in the catalogue of Bobbio, one of the greatest seats of learning. What the general att.i.tude of the Church's leaders.h.i.+p toward him was, may be conjectured from the declaration of Gregory the Great against all beauty in writing. Its general capacity for Horace may perhaps be surmised also from the confession of the Pope's contemporary, Gregory of Tours, that he is unfamiliar with the ancient literary languages. The few readers of the late Empire had become fewer still. The difficult form and matter of the _Odes_, and their unadaptability to religious and moral use, disqualified them for the approval of all but the individual scholar or literary enthusiast. The moralities of the _Epistles_ were more tractable, and formed the largest contribution to the _Florilegia_, or flower-collections, that were circulated by themselves. Horace did not contain the facile and stimulating tales of Ovid, he was not a Virgil the story-teller and almost Christian, his lines did not exercise a strong appeal to the ear, he was not an example of the rhetorical, like Lucan, his satire did not lend itself, like a Juvenal's, to universal condemnation of paganism.

In the eighth century, Columban knows Horace, the Venerable Bede cites him four times, and Alcuin is called a Flaccus. The York catalogue of Alcuin shows the presence of most of the cla.s.sic authors. Paul the Deacon, who wrote a poem in the Sapphics he learned from Horace, is declared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, but ungratefully and ungraciously adds, "men like that I'll compare with dogs." In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventh century, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monastic legislators, forbade the use of pagan authors without special permission; yet the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, and the struggle between the Gothic, Christian, and Islamic civilizations resulted, for the next six or seven centuries, in what seems total oblivion of the poet.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the impulse of the Carolingian favor, France, in which there is heretofore no evidence of Horace's presence from the end of Roman times, becomes the greatest center of ma.n.u.script activity, the Bernensis and six Parisian exemplars dating from this period. Yet the indexes of St. Gall, Reichenau, and Bobbio contain the name of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loesch contained his complete works. The _Ecbasis Captivi_, an animal-epic appearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out of Horace in the manner of the _cento_, or patchwork. At about the same time, the famous Hrosvitha of Gandersheim writes her six Christian dramas patterned after Terence, and in them uses Horace. Mention by Walter of Speyer, and interest shown by the active monastery on the Tegernsee, are of the same period. The tenth century is sometimes spoken of as the Latin Renaissance under the Ottos, the first of whom, called the Great, crowned Emperor at Rome in 962, welcomed scholars at his court and made every effort to promote learning.

The momentum of intellectual interest is not lost in the eleventh century. Paris becomes its most ardent center, with Reims, Orleans, and Fleury also of note. The _Codex Parisinus_ belongs to this period.

German activity, too, is at its height, especially in the education of boys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horace copied under Desiderius. Peter Damian was its man of greatest learning, but the times were intellectually stagnant. The popes were occupied by rivalry with the emperors. It was the century of Gregory the Seventh and Canossa.

In the twelfth century came the struggle of the Hohenstaufen with the Italian cities, and the disorder and turmoil of the rise of the communes and the division of Italy. One catalogue shows a Horace, and one ma.n.u.script dates from the time. England and France are united by the Norman Conquest in much the same way as Germany and France had been a.s.sociated in the kingdom of Charlemagne. It is the century of Roger Bacon. Especially in Germany, England, and France, it is the age of the Crusades and the knightly orders. It is an age of the spread of culture among the common people. In France, it is the age of the monastery of Cluny, and the age of Abelard. Education and travel became the mode. In general, acquaintance with Horace among cultivated men may now be taken for granted. The _Epistles_ and _Satires_ find more favor than the _Odes_. Five hundred and twenty citations of the former and seventy-seven of the latter have been collected for the twelfth century.

The thirteenth century marks a decline in the intellectual life. The Crusades exhaust the energies of the time, and detract from its literary interest. The German rulers and the Italian ecclesiasts are absorbed in the struggle for supremacy between pope and emperor. Scholasticism overshadows humanism. The humanistic tradition of Charlemagne has died out, and the intellectual ideal is represented by Vincent of Beauvais and the _Speculum Historiale_. There is no mention of Horace in the catalogues of Italy. The ma.n.u.scripts of France are careless, the comments and glosses poor. The decline will continue until arrested by the Renaissance.

It must not be forgotten that among all these scattered and flickering attentions to Horace there was the constant nucleus of instruction in the school. That he was used for this purpose first in the Carolingian cloister-schools, and later in the secular schools which grew to independent existence as a result of the vigorous spread of educational spirit, cannot be doubtful. Gerbert, dying at the beginning of the eleventh century as Pope Sylvester II, is known to have interpreted Horace in his school. This is the oldest direct evidence of the scholastic use of Horace, but other proofs are to be seen in the commentaries of the medieval period, all of which are of a kind suitable for school use, and in the marginal annotations, often in the native tongue.

The decline of humane studies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries meant also the decline of interest in Horace, who had always been above all the poet of the cultivated few. At the beginning of the thirteenth century in Italy, nowhere but at Bologna and Rome was Latin taught except as the elementary instruction necessary to the study of civil and canonical law. Gaufried of Vinesaux, coming from England to Italy, and composing an _Ars Dictaminis_ and a _Poietria Nova_ containing Horatian reminiscences, is one of two or three significant examples of Latin teachers who concerned themselves with literature as well as language.

Coluccio Salutati, wanting to buy a copy of Horace in 1370, is apparently unable to find it. The decline of interest in Horace will be arrested only by the Rebirth of Learning.

The intellectual movement back to the cla.s.sical authors and the cla.s.sical civilizations is well called the Rebirth. 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 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.

4. HORACE AND MODERN TIMES

THE REBIRTH OF HORACE

The national character of the _Aeneid_ gave Virgil a greater appeal than Horace in ancient Roman times. In the Middle Age, his qualities as story-teller and poet of the compa.s.sionate heart, together with his fame as necromancer and prophet, made still more p.r.o.nounced the favor in which he was held. The ignorance of the earlier centuries of the period could not appreciate Horace the logical, the intellectual, the difficult, while the schematized religion and knowledge of the later were not attracted by Horace the philosophical and individual.

With the Renaissance and its quickening of intellectual life in general, and in particular the value it set upon personality and individualism, the positions of the poets were reversed. For four hundred years now it can hardly be denied that Horace rather than Virgil has been the representative Latin poet of humanism.