DELICACY OF HORACE'S HEALTH.—HIS CHEERFULNESS.—LOVE OF BOOKS.—HIS PHILOSOPHY PRACTICAL.—EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS.—DEATH.

Horace had probably passed forty when the Epistle just quoted was written. Describing himself at forty-four (Epistles, I. 20), he says he was "prematurely grey,"—his hair, as we have just seen, having been originally black,—adding that he is

His health demanded constant care; and we find him writing (Epistles, I. 15) to a friend, to ask what sort of climate and people are to be found at Velia and Salernum,—the one a town of Lucania, the other of Campania,—as he has been ordered by his doctor to give up his favourite watering-place, Baiae, as too relaxing. This doctor was Antonius Musa, a great apostle of the cold-water cure, by which he had saved the life of Augustus when in extreme danger. The remedy instantly became fashionable, and continued so until the Emperor's nephew, the young Marcellus, died under the treatment. Horace's inquiries are just such as a valetudinarian fond of his comforts would be likely to make:—

{1} The Phaeacians were proverbially fond of good living.

Valetudinarian though he was, Horace maintains, in his later as in his early writings, a uniform cheerfulness. This never forsakes him; for life is a boon for which he is ever grateful. The gods have allotted him an ample share of the means of enjoyment, and it is his own fault if he suffers self-created worries or desires to vex him. By the questions he puts to a friend in one of the latest of his Epistles (II. 2), we see what was the discipline he applied to himself—

And to this beautiful catalogue of what should be a good man's aims, let us add the picture of himself which Horace gives us in another and earlier Epistle (I. 18):—

"Let me have books!" These play a great part in Horace's life. They were not to him, what Montaigne calls them, "a languid pleasure," but rather as they were to Wordsworth—

Next to a dear friend, they were Horace's most cherished companions. Not for amusement merely, and the listless luxury of the self-wrapt lounger, were they prized by him, but as teachers to correct his faults, to subdue his evil propensities, to develop his higher nature, to purify his life (Epistles, I. 1), and to help him towards attaining "that best of blessings, a contented mind:"—

Horace's taste was as catholic in philosophy as in literature. He was of no school, but sought in the teachings of them all such principles as would make life easier, better, and happier: "Condo et compono, quae mox depromere possum"—

He is evermore urging his friends to follow his example;—to resort like himself to these "spells,"—the verba et voces, by which he brought his own restless desires and disquieting aspirations into subjection, and fortified himself in the bliss of contentment. He saw they were letting the precious hours slip from their grasp,—hours that might have been so happy, but were so weighted with disquiet and weariness; and he loved his friends too well to keep silence on this theme. We, like them, it has been admirably said, {Footnote: Étude Morale et LittÉraire sur les Epitres d'Horace; par J. A. Estienne. Paris, 1851. P.212.} are "possessed by the ambitions, the desires, the weariness, the disquietudes, which pursued the friends of Horace. If he does not always succeed with us, any more than with them, in curing us of these, he at all events soothes and tranquillises us in the moments which we spend with him. He augments, on the other hand, the happiness of those who are already happy; and there is not one of us but feels under obligation to him for his gentle and salutary lessons,—verbaque et voces,—for his soothing or invigorating balsams, as much as though this gifted physician of soul and body had compounded them specially for ourselves."

When he published the First Book of Epistles he seems to have thought the time come for him to write no more lyrics (Epistles, I. 1):—

Graver habits, and a growing fastidiousness of taste, were likely to give rise to this feeling. But a poet can no more renounce his lyre than a painter his palette; and his fine "Secular Hymn," and many of the Odes of the Fourth Book, which were written after this period, prove that, so far from suffering any decay in poetical power, he had even gained in force of conception, and in that curiosa felicitas, that exquisite felicity of expression, which has been justly ascribed to him by Petronius. Several years afterwards, when writing of the mania for scribbling verse which had beset the Romans, as if, like Dogberry's reading and writing, the faculty of writing poetry came by nature, he alludes to his own sins in the same direction with a touch of his old irony (Epistles, II. 1):—

Or, as Pope with a finer emphasis translates his words—

It was very well for Horace to laugh at his own inability to abstain from verse-making, but, had he been ever so much inclined to silence, his friends would not have let him rest. Some wanted an Ode, some an Epode, some a Satire (Epistles, II. 2)—

And there was one friend, whose request it was not easy to deny. This was Augustus. Ten years after the imperial power had been placed in his hands (B.C. 17) he resolved to celebrate a great national festival in honour of his own successful career. Horace was called on to write an Ode, known in his works as "The Secular Hymn," to be sung upon the occasion by twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls of noble birth. "The Ode," says Macleane, "was sung at the most solemn part of the festival, while the Emperor was in person offering sacrifice at the second hour of the night, on the river side, upon three altars, attended by the fifteen men who presided over religious affairs. The effect must have been very beautiful, and no wonder if the impression on Horace's feelings was strong and lasting." He was obviously pleased at being chosen for the task, and not without pride,—a very just one,—at the way it was performed. In the Ode (IV. 6), which seems to have been a kind of prelude to the "Secular Hymn," he anticipates that the virgins who chanted it will on their marriage-day be proud to recall the fact that they had taken part in this oratorio under his baton:—

It was probably at the suggestion of Augustus, also, that he wrote the magnificent Fourth and Fourteenth Odes of the Fourth Book. These were written, however, to celebrate great national victories, and were pitched in the high key appropriate to the theme. But this was not enough for Augustus. He wanted something more homely and human, and was envious of the friends to whom Horace had addressed the charming Epistles of the First Book, a copy of which the poet had sent to him by the hands of a friend (Epistles, I. 13), but only to be given to the Caesar,

And so he wrote to Horace—the letter is quoted by Suetonius—"Look you, I take it much amiss that none of your writings of this class are addressed to me. Are you afraid it will damage your reputation with posterity to be thought to have been one of my intimates?" Such a letter, had Horace been a vain man or an indiscreet, might have misled him into approaching Augustus with the freedom he courted. But he fell into no such error. There is perfect frankness throughout the whole of the Epistle, with which he met the Emperor's request (II. 1), but the social distance between them is maintained with an emphasis which it is impossible not to feel. The Epistle opens by skilfully insinuating that, if the poet has not before addressed the Emperor, it is that he may not be suspected of encroaching on the hours which were due to the higher cares of state:—

It is not while they live, he continues, that, in the ordinary case, the worth of the great benefactors of mankind is recognised. Only after they are dead, do misunderstanding and malice give way to admiration and love. Rome, it is true, has been more just. It has appreciated, and it avows, how much it owes to Augustus. But the very same people who have shown themselves wise and just in this are unable to extend the same principle to living literary genius. A poet must have been long dead and buried, or he is nought. The very flaws of old writers are cried up as beauties by pedantic critics, while the highest excellence in a writer of the day meets with no response.

Let us then look the facts fairly in the face; let us "clear our minds of cant." If a poem be bad in itself, let us say so, no matter how old or how famous it be; if it be good, let us be no less candid, though the poet be still struggling into notice among us.

Thanks, he proceeds, to our happy times, men are now devoting themselves to the arts of peace. "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit"—"Her ruthless conqueror Greece has overcome." The Romans of the better class, who of old thought only of the triumphs of the forum, or of turning over their money profitably, are now bitten by a literary furor.

But this craze is no unmixed evil; for, take him all in all, your poet can scarcely be a bad fellow. Pulse and second bread are a banquet for him. He is sure not to be greedy or close-fisted; for to him, as Tennyson in the same spirit says, "Mellow metres are more than ten per cent." Neither is he likely to cheat his partner or his ward. He may cut a poor figure in a campaign, but he does the state good service at home.

Horace then goes on to sketch the rise of poetry and the drama among the Romans, glancing, as he goes, at the perverted taste which was making the stage the vehicle of mere spectacle, and intimating his own high estimate of the dramatic writer in words which Shakespeare seems to have been meant to realise:—

Here, as elsewhere, Horace treats dramatic writing as the very highest exercise of poetic genius; and, in dwelling on it as he does, he probably felt sure of carrying with him the fullest sympathies of Augustus. For among his varied literary essays, the Emperor, like most dilettanti, had tried his hand upon a tragedy. Failing, however, to satisfy himself, he had the rarer wisdom to suppress it. The story of his play was that of Ajax, and when asked one day how it was getting on, he replied that his hero "had finished his career upon a sponge!"—"Ajacem suum in spongio incubuisse."

From the drama Horace proceeds to speak of the more timid race of bards, who, "instead of being hissed and acted, would be read," and who, himself included, are apt to do themselves harm in various ways through over-sensitiveness or simplicity. Thus, for example, they will intrude their works on Augustus, when he is busy or tired; or wince, poor sensitive rogues, if a friend ventures to take exception to a verse; or bore him by repeating, unasked, one or other of their pet passages, or by complaints that their happiest thoughts and most highly-polished turns escape unnoticed; or, worse folly than all, they will expect to be sent for by Augustus the moment he comes across their poems, and told "to starve no longer, and go writing on." Yet, continues Horace, it is better the whole tribe should be disappointed, than that a great man's glory should be dimmed, like Alexander's, by being sung of by a second-rate poet. And wherefore should it be so, when Augustus has at command the genius of such men as Virgil and Varius? They, and they only, are the fit laureates of the Emperor's great achievements; and in this way the poet returns, like a skilful composer, to the motif with which he set out—distrust of his own powers, which has restrained, and must continue to restrain, him from pressing himself and his small poetic powers upon the Emperor's notice.

In the other poems which belong to this period—the Second Epistle of the Second Book, and the Epistle to the Pisos, generally known as the Ars Poetica—Horace confines himself almost exclusively to purely literary topics. The dignity of literature was never better vindicated than in these Epistles. In Horace's estimation it was a thing always to be approached with reverence. Mediocrity in it was intolerable. Genius is much, but genius without art will not win immortality; "for a good poet's made, as well as born." There must be a working up to the highest models, a resolute intolerance of anything slight or slovenly, a fixed purpose to put what the writer has to express into forms at once the most beautiful, suggestive, and compact. The mere trick of literary composition Horace holds exceedingly cheap. Brilliant nonsense finds no allowance from him. Truth—truth in feeling and in thought—must be present, if the work is to have any value. "Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons,"—

Whatever the form of composition, heroic, didactic, lyric, or dramatic, it must be pervaded by unity of feeling and design; and no style is good, or illustration endurable, which, either overlays or does not harmonise with the subject in hand.

The Epistle to the Pisos does not profess to be a complete exposition of the poet's art. It glances only at small sections of that wide theme. So far as it goes, it is all gold, full of most instructive hints for a sound critical taste and a pure literary style. It was probably meant to cure the younger Piso of that passion for writing verse which had, as we have seen, spread like a plague among the Romans, and which made a visit to the public baths a penance to critical ears,—for there the poetasters were always sure of an audience,—and added new terrors to the already sufficiently formidable horrors of the Roman banquet. {Footnote: This theory has been worked out with great ability by the late M. A. Baron, in his 'Epitre d'Horace aux Pisons sur l'Art PoÉtique'—Bruxelles, 1857; which is accompanied by a masterly translation and notes of great value.} When we find an experienced critic like Horace urging young Piso, as he does, to keep what he writes by him for nine years, the conclusion is irresistible, that he hoped by that time the writer would see the wisdom of suppressing his crude lucubrations altogether. No one knew better than Horace that first-class work never wants such protracted mellowing.

Soon, after this poem was written the great palace on the Esquiline lost its master. He died (B.C. 8) in the middle of the year, bequeathing his poet-friend to the care of Augustus in the words "Horati Flacci, ut mei, esto memor,"—"Bear Horace in your memory as you would myself." But the legacy was not long upon the emperor's hands. Seventeen years before, Horace had written:

The lines must have rung in the poet's ears like a sad refrain. The Digentia lost its charm; he could not see its crystal waters for the shadows of Charon's rueful stream. The prattle of his loved Bandusian spring could not wean his thoughts from the vision of his other self wandering unaccompanied along that "last sad road." We may fancy that Horace was thenceforth little seen in his accustomed haunts. He who had so often soothed the sorrows of other bereaved hearts, answered with a wistful smile to the friendly consolations of the many that loved him. His work was done. It was time to go away. Not all the skill of Orpheus could recall him whom he had lost. The welcome end came sharply and suddenly; and one day, when, the bleak November wind was whirling down the oak-leaves on his well-loved brook, the servants of his Sabine farm heard that they should no more see the good, cheery master, whose pleasant smile and kindly word had so often made their labours light. There was many a sad heart, too, we may be sure, in Rome, when the wit who never wounded, the poet who ever charmed, the friend who never failed, was laid in a corner of the Esquiline, close to the tomb of his "dear knight Maecenas." He died on the 27th November B.C. 8, the kindly, lonely man, leaving to Augustus what little he possessed. One would fain trust his own words were inscribed upon his tomb, as in the supreme hour the faith they expressed was of a surety strong within his heart,—

NON OMNIS MORIAR.