Part 9

In Heine’s day art and letters reached highest development in Europe, just as lyric verse did in Persia in the age of Hafiz. And again in China, under Tang Emperors. After them came _le déluge_, which took guise of a wide-spread dilettantism, form without matter. Both Heine and Hafiz were pagans in that they clung to world of the senses; but they were modern in their lack of calmness, their restlessness, and in their dramatic dissatisfaction. Their hearts were lutes upon which the winds of the world blew. And with them love and hate were the destructive passions of an Asiatic race. Both were past masters of the art of expression. They knew how to say much in little. They could condense history or a romance into a quatrain, a couplet. Both were great and fluent artists. And they fought in their own way as best they could the battle of enlightenment of the human spirit. Each hated cant, hypocrisy, cowardliness, and vain seeming. Each felt and suffered the scorn, the hatred of his fellow men, then learned sadly to know that he who wishes to accomplish anything whatsoever, or has ideals of any kind to fight for, must know that the wings of his spirit are strong.

Each clung pitifully while the world abused and reviled him, to the only real thing he could find, to the only thing that gave pleasure, that intoxicating world of the senses whose too frequent kiss, like that of the Slavic Venus, brings death.

The Greek had the sanest view of this world’s life, the surest sense of beauty. The Hebrew had such a pitiful thirst for love, for something stable amid change, it stung him to desperation. The Persian thought most deeply, most logically of the mystery of life. The result of his thinking was, _We can not know. We can not know._ In expression each was an artist. And each was great because he was sincere. _Palmam qui meruit ferat._

I read Horace first in an old university town in the north. Each night as I walked home from lectures, autumn leaves were being burned in fragrant piles, under long rows of trees that still were faintly amber, faintly crimson. I came from the burned plains where there were no trees. And at night over these same richly tree-shaded streets, and over the broad lonely campus where dark pointed evergreens grew, the Hunter’s Moon hung, large and lustrous.

Because of this, and likewise because of something in the nature of the Roman poet, it has always seemed to me that Horace is read best in the autumn. There is something in his mind that is native to the season. He came from the ripe, mellow autumn of a rich, a prodigious civilization that time was just beginning to touch with the shadows of age. Quintillian takes pains to tell us old Latin writers were stronger in genius than art. The opposite was true of Horace. With him poetry was not inspiration. He did not know its self-forgetful fury. Instead, it was one of the ornaments of a well-tempered life, out of which he wished to procure as much comfort as he could. In his verse there is nothing wonderful. At the same time it has an immortal touch. He was not a great imaginative poet. He was not a gifted dramatic poet. He seldom stirs the blood. But he has a smooth, even excellence, a companionableness, a marvelous proportion of word to thought. He is master of felicitous expression.

What was he to the Rome of his day? Was he what through accomplished Latin lecturers and study, he has become to us? Was he great as an artist? Or have years colored him, and the modern mind thrown over him a romantic halo? Or do we find him charming because he opens a door into the vanished world of Rome, where existed so many alluring pictures of memory, which we have loved, then dumbly longed for? Did he ripen with years? Did the smoke of time do for him what it did for Sabine wine, sweeten, mellow? Are there poets read best centuries after their day?

In him there is no restless modernity, no futile chasing of rainbows. Yet this serene art could not picture our world. We can measure changes which have come. It requires something tumultuous, less smooth, equable; less definite in outline. The model is at fault for sketchiness of written art, and a certain unsatisfactoriness as regards presentation. The reproduction must be nervous, with harsh lights, crude shadows. In the finished product absolutism is lacking. There is something that is trivial, infinitesimal, that sees darkly. Art has become uncertain. It no longer moves boldly. It has become a thing of temperament, instead of mind. The art of the pagan world was firmer. It approached life differently. Roman poets praise the masculine sound of the Latin lyre.

The philosophy, the thinking, of that antique day was muscled. It was sure, unwavering in line, as marbles. They had a firmer grasp upon life, _the fact_. We find Horace firm amid the shifting present. We can not find poetry so satisfying as his calm surveyal of things as they are. The pagan’s philosophic view of the inevitable, the nothingness which confronts man, tempered their natures. It made them truer, fonder, more pitiful. Regret for loss by death was greater. They lived like guests flower-crowned at a banquet, unseen above whose head Fate shoots death’s arrows down. Therefore it was pleasant to grasp hands, feel sympathy. Christianity has weakened friendship. Strangely enough it has made us love each other less. Having God we do not need man.

At times Horace is soberly meditative, but he is seldom sad with haunting modern sadness. Perhaps blitheness was pagan sadness, too deep for tears. He was not subject to blues, ill temper. A cultivated pagan did not take these liberties with himself or others. Byronic madness had not come. Reason still had power. Time was precious. There was not a heaven in which to find it restored. We are misers with dollars, in addition to being foolish egoists. They were wiser misers with time, with its joy.

It is pleasant, occasionally, to dream back into this serene age, to move, a little space, among calm, griefless white Wedgewood-figures that have given over regret, that neither hope nor fear, yet whose joy was tempered by clear consciousness of the end. No one can see all things from the beginning. We must be satisfied with the day’s vision.

Horace had a calm, disillusioned mind, without ideals. Life was too short to grow vain things. Ideals were insistent, therefore bad taste. The world was as it was. He could remake, change nothing. For this reason he decided to be _the poet of things as they are_.

In the literatures of Greece and Rome there are no diseases of the spirit. There is no questioning of the supreme facts of existence. They are sane. They are models of right seeing. No energy is wasted in rebellion. Their charm is not that of a wild, erratic view point for the glorifying of self. A thing to be good had to be something besides _new_. _L’art nouveau_ would have met disdain.

They are sane with nature’s unchanging sanity which we are losing. They do not strain the mind to acrobatic seeing. Novelty was not synonymous with quality. This body, this life, belong to earth where they are placed. It is well not to tamper things that do not concern us. Not without reason was the box of Pandora closed. Whenever we open it, we find a new ill. Take things as they are. Be happy. It is sad we can not make pagan sanity contagious as our questioning restlessness.

In Horace there is no madness of the crusader, no fantastic gallantry of knighthood. We are glad of their absence. Pagan literature is a place of mental rehabilitation. To be _en rapport_ with a pagan of Horace’s day it was necessary to enjoy with him. To be _en rapport_ with a modern it is necessary to weep with him. We play the _comédie larmoyante_. Modern art cares for sensations. Heart-throbs are the thing! It might take for its motto:—_Fac me tecum plangere_. Today it is only the artist (whose soul is always pagan) who finds life good. Anatole France says that without him (the artist) we might doubt the fact.

Surely there is no one more fit to read in a garden, under the moon of autumn, than city-bred Horace with his plea for rustic merriment. He loved country life. He pictured it. They had in his day a fresher feeling for simple things, a nymph-like nearness and affection; delight in fresh grass, cool running water, young flowers with dew on them. Simple things were precious enough to be mentioned on equality with chosen guests to make happy a holiday. To the poet is given clearer vision of such things. He is equipped by nature to take pleasure in them. In addition, Latin races have had vivid sense of _reality_. It is one source of their strength.

Horace loved the banks of Tiber, as Keats the green English Thames-side, Hafiz, valley of the Roknabad, and Tu Fu his bamboo-shaded rivers. Each has been emphatic in dislike of going elsewhere. Each painted the home country he loved.

There are scenes among the poets, bits of landscape, more real, more endeared to me than any I see in life. They are changeless. They are superior to time. They give illusion of things that do not grow old. By sympathetic folly I remain young with them. They are always waiting for me untouched by the season. I know just where to find them. After time has made me old, to go back to them, affects me like going home. In fact, one of my ideals has been realized in the changeless things of art.

How different were the adjectives which Horace applied to natural objects from those we use! In them I can see the clear, unvexed mind that observed. He seized description by a different corner. His impressions were fresher, quicker. To him clouds were _steep_ clouds, (_nubibus arduis_). He saw first the striking thing. For this reason his descriptions give the sensation of looking at an etching, crisp, sure, before repeated reproductions have blurred it. An advantage was with him. He had the world before it became second-hand. He has shown attractive scenes.

In Book III, Carmen xxix, what dainty, stepping through measures! What fastidious choosing! What fragile-pointed penciling! Sharp indeed, fine leaved, were the bristling thickets which hid the God, Sylvanus. Here is delicately modeled detail of French line engravers, such as Edelinck. Nowhere else is there such inspiring swinging up and slow, pensive drooping of moons, with such calm vistas. Moons are red gold. The sky is lapis, a Byzantine enamel. The delight when they swing to sight! Nowhere do they rise more majestically than with Latin poets. I like, too, his swift painting of forests, fields, _herds and the black hills of Acadia_, lofty Tusculum where wealthy Romans had country houses, and he went to banquet with his friends, or cool Lucanian pastures overlooking the Tuscan Sea; the ocean flowing among the shining Cyclades. His pictures are sure of line as an etching by Braquemond. They give some the same pleasure. They are crisp. They are oftenest of the outdoor world. Artists of all time have been indebted to this plastic picturing. When he describes wine foaming around white feet of laughing girls, we see a group by Donatello. When he paints Autumn crowned with vine-leaves, lifting his head above level plains, we see the richly colored, fluent art of Boucher. Might not the _oxen with weary necks dragging the inverted plowshare_ be from brush of Breton or L’Hermitte? Latin blood is there!

In Horace there is appreciation of rustic life which French art realized. The order of descriptions is beautiful. One moment does not rush upon another. This is a Latin quality; nothing superimposed; nothing hurried. The influence of Horace, his spirit, is in art of France, Spain, Italy; but not in Holland or the north. There it met a counter current, which swept it back. In the north _the spirit_ triumphed.

It is sanity of Latin races that periodically reclaims art from the crowded vagueness of the north, then shows it the way back to life, which is nature.

Landscape painters of France, Italy, and Spain are spiritual descendants of Roman word-painters. Like them they have united love for the thing they saw with sufficient mental detachment to insure truth. The spirit of Horace is in landscapes of Rousseau, Harpignies, Daubigny, Corot. The same nature looks from the canvasses; the same truth. Love of thing they painted, singleness of purpose, with no momentary side-glancing, stamped success. Love, sincerity, were there, coupled with fidelity that outweighed price. Over these landscapes with their artistic well-being, rests sure tradition of Roman ancestry.

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. Puritanism, a narrow morality, have driven it away. They have given nothing worth while in return. The reformer has driven out the uninsistent Greek. The worshippers of the spirit have done violence to worshippers of the flesh. Beauty is one of the few values. We should be grateful for any reality. Perfection of line is not bad morality. It is at least substitute for folly. In most modern art except that which France created, there is something crude, unseizable. Some wild homesickness! At heart, republican France has always been pagan, aristocratic. It has led nations in the arts.

One reason the human race is no more beautiful is because men have ceased to desire it. It is becoming a negligible quality. Beauty was commoner in pagan days because men loved it.

Who would not prefer the swiftly sketched picture of a vanished city made by such happy observers as Horace, Seneca, Catullus, to travelers’ descriptions! The best picture of Rome of Augustus is in his verse. It would be interesting to know what material world the reader pictures from the verses. No two see alike. One sees, as Heine remarked, with bitter glance of an Archenholz, one with inspired eyes of a Corinne, rarely one with clear Greek eyes of a Goethe.

Who can not picture the circus, shows, baths, the ex-slave Menas made knight, dragging a robe three ells long? Syrian flute-players, and cameo-faced Roman women hastening stealthily to the temple of forbidden, alluring Egyptian gods! He gives good reproduction of the age. He saw its pomp. He enjoyed frivolities. He measured the fleeting shadows of change that were sweeping over it, without caring what the end might be. He lived and loved and he did not regret. I have caught vivid, delightful glimpses of Augustan Rome. I am grateful for the clear, unprejudiced eyes which preserved it. He had no bias of mind to make things other than they are. For him, in joy, there were no regrets. These unemotional poems are the one door that lets us into the Imperial City, that Augustus and Virgil, and Faustine of the unforgettable face and cruel heart, and dissolute Verus, knew.

At other times reading Horace is like holding marble miniatures. No matter how subjectively he may write of his occupations, description makes him a plastic artist. Some of the poems are little cameo chains strung upon a ribbon. Such for instance as the faun who chases fleeing nymphs. (Carmen xviii, Book III.), Cytherean Venus dancing by moonlight, surrounded by Graces. (Ode IV.)

“Pallas fitting her helmet, shield, and her fury.”

“The Corybantes, redoubling strokes upon the cymbals.”

“Chloris, shining with fair shoulders in the midnight sea.”

“Bacchus dictating strains among the rocks, while the nymphs, the goat-footed satyrs, listen.”

“The Thracian Priestess upon the mountain, her knotted hair bound with vipers.”

The carver of gems could find inspiration as frequently as poets. To prove he did, we have only to look into cabinets of collectors. The poets who copied him have been many. There were Ronsard, the Pleiad, in old French days. Tennyson, Ernest Dowson, in our own day, and in English, to mention few.

He left indelible trace upon poets of Italy. They found a model ready made in a tongue their own. There are lines of d’Annunzio that suggest Horace because they keep interest in natural things; fresh, loving vision. However, it is not Latin poets who influenced d’Annunzio, but Greek. He drank from the fountain from which Horace drank when he boasted he was first to attune Greek meters to the Latin lyre. D’Annunzio likes better the Greeks of a later day, in Alexandria, who were softer muscled, more luxurious, although his tragedies show the _fate_—_motif_ of a sterner, _artistically speaking_, purer age. Carducci dreamed architecturally of the Rome of Horace and Augustus. He has built pictures in the _Odi Barbare_ that are memorable, splendid.

As society poet Horace set a model which has been imitated but never equaled. He brought to it polished, perfect expression, and the _savoir faire_ of a courtier. The most perfect society verse in the world is the _Ode to Pyrrha_ (Ode V), because of equilibrium between matter and form, grace of poise, bantering lightness. In such verse no one has said more endearing things, more gracefully insincere. We may presume his social gift was considerable. In the portraits we find a touch at times, that is almost Japanesque; the habit of fixing fleeting, inconsequential thoughts without logical beginning. They are airy fancies that strike the mind obliquely in rapid flight. Centuries ago he sounded, tentatively, the shrill clarions of today.

Two of Horace’s admirable qualities were capability for friendship and just estimate of self. A gentle unenvious kindness radiates toward his friends. There was no condescension, superiority, no literary posing. _Friends!_ How old-fashioned the word! Are they something that vanished with the manhood of Rome? Who loves his friends! Many memories of pleasant days with them his verse recalls! We judge of their importance by the fact he deemed them worth his art. Today friendship plays slight part in life. There are spaces of the self where there is not any judgment of wrong, of right, where there remains only the observing mind. We have grown narrow, selfish, enlarged of ego. We can love only those united by ties of blood. Is there less heart? Is that a reason there are few poets? Great, ennobling pitifulness which could shelter the world and his neighbor is not of today. We imitate. We do not create. At the test there is sound of something broken. Poetry is language of the emotions. When they are enfeebled they cannot speak. Where is the poet who pays tribute to a brother, a friend? Who is capable of feeling that sways the heart! We are tin toys. Love is of the heart. Without it the intellect can not create. Love was mainspring of those fluent opening lines of Horace, love that vibrated richly in his heart, then attuned it to sympathetic singing.

We have become drier, less inclined to giving. We are old with the world. We have less to give! At least writers can no longer picture life fatly. We have lost sight of so many things. The tide of time has swept us upon a barren shore where nothing is important save gold.

The philosophic poise of Horace was universal love, perhaps, too great to be given to an individual. It touched all evenly, like light. We have missed the sunny, friendly way. We must go back. We must find it if we can, before it is too late.

They who have been great, have been so by loving something better than self. The heart has share in fame. Love is productive of creative qualities such as vigor, joy. Vigor, joy, beat behind the lines of Horace.

No other writer has taken his measure so justly. Common sense was basis of his genius. With pride he insists it is his province to sing lightly. He was greater for the justice of his mind than for his poetry. Many have written poetry as good, but where is the person who has seen with vision nothing could dim! He understood he was neither an imaginative nor dramatic poet when he writes: _I am only a little bee gathering thyme by the dewy shores of Tiber_. This is memorable for unenvious grace. Nor did he permit himself to philosophize long enough to forget it is a poet’s province to amuse. There have been few of such balance. And he had been child of fortune, too. He had become friend of Ruler of the World. There was only one world, then, and its center was Rome. Yet upon his face we feel sure there was none of that pallor which Juvenal declares is engendered by wretched friendship with the great.

He resisted the invitation of Augustus to live at court. He knew simple life was better. He realized that to create, it would be well to live humbly, dream richly.

After he became star of the court of Augustus, he did not grow scornful nor inclined to underrate the homely middle-class. He was gracious. There is no better preacher than Horace against money-mad modernness, its absence of leisure, false standards. He is teacher of the simple life. As he grew older he preached it. He proclaimed it boldly to decadent Rome. To be sure, as Juvenal scornfully says: _Well plied with food and wine was Horace when he shouts his evoe_! Evidently meaning to insinuate that well he might be happy, whom the tragedy of life could not touch. Yet it was a small income, the Sabine farm, gift of Maecenas. But he had become rich in the developed resources of mind. He knew wealth is not without, but within. He valued taste above gold. So plain, so persistent was his consciousness of this, that wealth beyond satisfaction of daily needs was folly, useless wasting of life to acquire. It was base prostitution of energy. The life bounded by horizon of the dollar can see no vast horizon. The poet’s gift was superior to what gold gives. One of his illuminating sayings is: _One may be poor amid great wealth_.

At the same time he had no high ideals; no passionate convictions. He was not interested enough in anything to struggle because he felt struggle useless. As satirist he is inferior to Juvenal and Persius. As philosopher, as artist, he is greater. But as a satirist he lacked conviction. He lacked decision. The satires of Horace have neither the eloquence, fire, nor the stern scorn of Juvenal. Bitterness was not in his heart. They are better art but less powerful humanly. Juvenal reaches heights that equal Tyrtæus. Juvenal and Persius wished to make the world better. Horace did not care. He was artist, social exquisite; not moralist, nor reformer. He cared about men’s taste, their appreciation of beauty, the things that make for refined living. He cared nothing about morals if manners were good. He looked at everything with laughing, indifferent disdain. He believed nothing mattered since the end is alike for all. Therefore be kind to your neighbor. Be happy if you can. He was critic of art, not morals. Even to the dissipations of that luxurious age he gave himself with good humored disdain. He lent himself to dissipation with a tolerant smile, without caring one way or the other.