PREVAILING BELIEF IN ASTROLOGY.—HORACE'S VIEWS OF A HEREAFTER.—RELATIONS WITH MAECENAS.—BELIEF IN THE PERMANENCE OF HIS OWN FAME.

"When all looks fair about," says Sir Thomas Browne, "and thou seest not a cloud so big as a hand to threaten thee, forget not the wheel of things; think of sudden, vicissitudes, but beat not thy brains to foreknow them." It was characteristic of an age of luxury that it should be one of superstition and mental disquietude, eager to penetrate the future, and credulous in its belief of those who pretended to unveil its secrets. In such an age astrology naturally found many dupes. Rome was infested with professors of that so-called science, who had flocked thither from the East, and were always ready, like other oracles, to supply responses acceptable to their votaries. In what contempt Horace held their prognostications the following Ode (I. 11) very clearly indicates. The women of Rome, according to Juvenal, were great believers in astrology, and carried manuals of it on their persons, which they consulted before they took an airing or broke their fast. Possibly on this account Horace addressed the ode to a lady. But in such things, and not under the Roman Empire only, there have always been, as La Fontaine says, "bon nombre d'hommes qui sont femmes." If Augustus, and his great general and statesman Agrippa, had a Theogenes to forecast their fortunes, so the first Napoleon had his Madame Lenormand.

In the verses of Horace we are perpetually reminded that our life is compassed round with darkness, but he will not suffer this darkness to overshadow his cheerfulness. On the contrary, the beautiful world, and the delights it offers, are made to stand out, as it were, in brighter relief against the gloom of Orcus. Thus, for example, this very gloom is made the background in the following Ode (I. 4) for the brilliant pictures which crowd on the poet's fancy with the first burst of Spring. Here, he says, oh Sestius, all is fresh and joyous, luxuriant and lovely! Be happy, drink in "at every pore the spirit of the season," while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cup flashes ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointed mansion, and filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, to swell their joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas! too soon; but the golden present is yours, so drain it of its sweets.

A modern would no more think of using such images as those of the last two verses to stimulate the festivity of his friends than he would of placing, like the old Egyptians, a skull upon his dinner-table, or of decorating his ball-room with Holbein's "Dance of Death." We rebuke our pride or keep our vanities in check by the thought of death, and our poets use it to remind us that

Horace does this too; but out of the sad certainty of mortality he seems to extract a keener zest for the too brief enjoyment of the flying hours. Why is this? Probably because by the pagan mind life on this side the grave was regarded as a thing more precious, more noble, than the life beyond. That there was a life beyond was undoubtedly the general belief. "Sunt aliquid Manes; letum non omnia finit, Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos,"—

says Propertius (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would be no meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades—in the "domus exilis Plutonia;" in the Hermes driving the spirits of the dead across the Styx; in the "judicantem Aeacum, sedesque, discretas piorum"—the "Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fields serene" (Odes, II. 13). But this after-life was a cold, sunless, unsubstantial thing, lower in quality and degree than the full, vigorous, passionate life of this world. The nobler spirits of antiquity, it hardly need be said, had higher dreams of a future state than this. For them, no more than for us, was it possible to rest in the conviction that their brief and troubled career on earth was to be the "be all and the end all" of existence, or that those whom they had loved and lost in death became thenceforth as though they had never been. It is idle to draw, as is often done, a different conclusion from such phrases as that after death we are a shadow and mere dust, "pulvis et umbra sumus!" or from Horace's bewildered cry (Odes, I. 24), when a friend of signal nobleness and purity is suddenly struck down—"Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor urget?"—"And is Quinctilius, then, weighed down by a sleep that knows no waking?" We might as reasonably argue that Shakespeare did not believe in a life after death because he makes Prospero say—

Horace and Shakespeare both believed in an immortality, but it was an immortality different in its kind. Horace, indeed,—who, as a rule, is wisely silent on a question which for him had no solution, however much it may have engaged his speculations,—has gleams not unlike those which irradiate our happier creed, as when he writes (Odes, III. 2) of "Virtus, recludens immeritis mori coelum, negata tentat iter via"—

But they are only gleams, impassioned hopes, yearnings of the unsatisfied soul in its search for some solution of the great mystery of life. To him, therefore, it was of more moment than it was to us, to make the most of the present, and to stimulate his relish for what it has to give by contrasting it with a phantasmal future, in which no single faculty of enjoyment should be left.

Take from life the time spent in hopes or fears or regrets, and how small the residue! For the same reason, therefore, that he prized life intensely, Horace seems to have resolved to keep these consumers of its hours as much at bay as possible. He would not look too far forward even for a pleasure; for Hope, he knew, comes never unaccompanied by her twin sister Fear. Like the Persian poet, Omar KhayyÁm, this is ever in his thoughts—

To-day—that alone is ours. Let us welcome and note what it brings, and, if good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep our eyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of an irretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. "Write it on your heart," says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you never learn that as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glories between To-day and us, these passing hours shall glitter, and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?" Horace would have hailed a brother in the philosopher of New England.

Even in inviting Maecenas to his Sabine farm (Odes, III. 29), he does not think it out of place to remind the minister of state, worn with the cares of government, and looking restlessly ahead to anticipate its difficulties, that it may, after all, be wiser not to look so far ahead, or to trouble himself about contingencies which may never arise. We must not think that Horace undervalued that essential quality of true statesmanship, the "animus rerum prudens" (Odes, IV. 9), the forecasting spirit that "looks into the seeds of Time," and reads the issues of events while they are still far off. He saw and prized the splendid fruits of the exercise of this very power in the growing tranquillity and strength of the Roman empire. But the wisest may over-study a subject. Maecenas may have been working too hard, and losing under the pressure something of his usual calmness; and Horace, while urging him to escape from town for a few days, may have had it in view to insinuate the suggestion, that Jove smiles, not at the common mortal merely, but even at the sagacious statesman, who is over-anxious about the future—"ultra fas trepidat"—and to remind him that, after all,

Dryden's splendid paraphrase of this Ode is one of the glories of our literature, but it is a paraphrase, and a version closer to the original may be more appropriate here:—

The poet here passes, by one of those sudden transitions for which he is remarkable, into the topic of the fickleness of fortune, which seems to have no immediate connection with what has gone before,—but only seems, for this very fickleness is but a fresh reason for making ourselves, by self-possession and a just estimate of what is essential to happiness, independent of the accidents of time or chance.

Maecenas was of a melancholy temperament, and liable to great depression of spirits. Not only was his health at no time robust, but he was constitutionally prone to fever, which more than once proved nearly fatal to him. On his first appearance in the theatre after one of these dangerous attacks, he was received with vehement cheers, and Horace alludes twice to this incident in his Odes, as if he knew that it had given especial pleasure to his friend. To mark the event the poet laid up in his cellar a jar of Sabine wine, and some years afterwards he invites Maecenas to come and partake of it in this charming lyric (Odes, I. 20):—

About the same time that Maecenas recovered from this fever, Horace made a narrow escape from being killed by the fall of a tree, and, what to him was a great aggravation of the disaster, upon his own beloved farm (Odes, II. 13). He links the two events together as a marked coincidence in the following Ode (II. 17). His friend had obviously been a prey to one of his fits of low spirits, and vexing the kindly soul of the poet by gloomy anticipations of an early death. Suffering, as Maecenas did, from those terrible attacks of sleeplessness to which he was subject, and which he tried ineffectually to soothe by the plash of falling water and the sound of distant music, {Footnote: Had Horace this in his mind when he wrote "Non avium citharoeque cantus somnum reducent?"—(Odes, III. 1.) "Nor song of birds, nor music of the lyre, Shall his lost sleep restore."} such misgivings were only too natural. The case was too serious this time for Horace to think of rallying his friend into a brighter humour. He may have even seen good cause to share his fears; for his heart is obviously moved to its very depths, and his sympathy and affection well out in words, the pathos of which is still as fresh as the day they first came with comfort to the saddened spirits of Maecenas himself.

{1} So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:—

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,

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

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 passable 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 title 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 assured of his title to rank with the great sons of song:—

In the last Ode, also addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book, the poet gives way to a burst of joyous anticipation 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.