Horace Part 10

"To thee 'tis gain thy mother's dust to mock, To mock the silent watchfires of the night, All heaven, the G.o.ds, on whom death's icy shock Can never light.

"Smiles Venus' self, I vow, to see thy arts, The guileless Nymphs and cruel Cupid smile, And, smiling, whets on b.l.o.o.d.y stone his darts Of fire the while.

"Nay more, our youth grow up to be thy prey, New slaves throng round, and those who crouched at first, Though oft they threaten, leave not for a day Thy roof accurst.

"Thee mothers for their unfledged younglings dread; Thee n.i.g.g.ard old men dread, and brides new-made, In misery, lest their lords neglect their bed, By thee delayed."

Horace is more at home in playful raillery of the bewildering effects of love upon others, than in giving expression to its emotions as felt by himself. In the fourteenth Epode, it is true, he begs Maecenas to excuse his failure to execute some promised poem, because he is so completely upset by his love for a certain naughty Phryne that he cannot put a couple of lines together. Again, he tells us (Odes, I. 19) into what a ferment his whole being has been thrown, long after he had thought himself safe from such emotions, by the marble-like sheen of Glycera's beauty--her _grata protervitas, et voltus nimium lubricus adspici_--

"Her pretty, pert, provoking ways, And face too fatal-fair to see."

The first Ode of the Fourth Book is a beautiful fantasia on a similar theme. He paints, too, the tortures of jealousy with the vigour (Odes, I. 13) of a man who knew something of them:--

"Then reels my brain, then on my cheek The shifting colour comes and goes, And tears, that flow unbidden, speak The torture of my inward throes, The fierce unrest, the deathless flame, That slowly macerates my frame."

And when rallying his friend Tibullus (Odes, I. 23) about his doleful ditties on the fickleness of his mistress Glycera, he owns to having himself suffered terribly in the same way. But despite all this, it is very obvious that if love has, in Rosalind's phrase, "clapped him on the shoulder," the little G.o.d left him "heart-whole." Being, as it is, the source of the deepest and strongest emotions, love presents many aspects for the humorist, and perhaps to no one more than to him who has felt it intensely. Horace may or may not have sounded the depths of the pa.s.sion in his own person; but, in any case, a fellow-feeling for the lover's pleasures and pains served to infuse a tone of kindliness into his ridicule. How charming in this way is the Ode to Lydia (I. 8), of which the late Henry Luttrel's once popular and still delightful 'Letters to Julia' is an elaborate paraphrase!--

"Why, Lydia, why, I pray, by all the G.o.ds above, Art so resolved that Sybaris should die, And all for love?

"Why doth he shun The Campus Martius' sultry glare?

He that once recked of neither dust nor sun, Why rides he there,

"First of the brave, Taming the Gallic steed no more?

Why doth he shrink from Tiber's yellow wave?

Why thus abhor

"The wrestlers' oil, As 'twere from viper's tongue distilled?

Why do his arms no livid bruises soil, He, once so skilled,

"The disc or dart Far, far beyond the mark to hurl?

And tell me, tell me, in what nook apart, Like baby-girl,

"Lurks the poor boy, Veiling his manhood, as did Thetis' son, To 'scape war's b.l.o.o.d.y clang, while fated Troy Was yet undone?"

In the same cla.s.s with this poem may be ranked the following ode (I.

27). Just as the poet has made us as familiar with the lovelorn Sybaris as if we knew him, so does he here transport us into the middle of a wine-party of young Romans, with that vivid dramatic force which const.i.tutes one great source of the excellence of his lyrics.

"Hold! hold! 'Tis for Thracian madmen to fight With wine-cups, that only were made for delight.

'Tis barbarous-brutal! I beg of you all, Disgrace not our banquet with bloodshed and brawl!

"Sure, Median scimitars strangely accord With lamps and with wine at the festival board!

'Tis out of all rule! Friends, your places resume, And let us have order once more in the room!

"If I am to join you in pledging a beaker Of this stout Falernian, choicest of liquor, Megilla's fair brother must say, from what eyes Flew the shaft, sweetly fatal, that causes his sighs.

"How--dumb! Then I drink not a drop. Never blush, Whoever the fair one may be, man! Tush, tush!

She'll do your taste credit, I'm certain--for yours Was always select in its little amours.

"Don't be frightened! We're all upon honour, you know, So out with your tale!--Gracious powers! Is it so?

Poor fellow! Your lot has gone sadly amiss, When you fell into such a Charybdis as this!

"What witch, what magician, with drinks and with charms, What G.o.d can effect your release from her harms?

So fettered, scarce Pegasus' self, were he near you, From the fangs of this triple Chimaera would clear you."

In this poem, which has all the effect of an impromptu, we have a _genre_ picture of Roman life, as vivid as though painted by the pencil of Couture or Gerome.

Serenades were as common an expedient among the Roman gallants of the days of Augustus as among their modern successors. In the fine climate of Greece, Italy, and Spain, they were a natural growth, and involved no great strain upon a wooer's endurance. They a.s.sume a very different aspect under a northern sky, where young Absolute, found by his Lydia Languish "in the garden, in the coldest night in January, stuck like a dripping statue," presents a rather lugubrious spectacle. Horace (Odes, III. 7) warns the fair Asterie, during the absence of her husband abroad, to shut her ears against the musical nocturnes of a certain Enipeus:--

"At nightfall shut your doors, nor then.

Look down into the street again, When quavering fifes complain;"

using almost the words of Shylock to his daughter Jessica:--

"Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum _And the vile squeaking of the wrynecked fife_, Clamber not you up to the cas.e.m.e.nt then, Nor thrust your head into the public street."

The name given to such a serenade, adopted probably, with the serenades themselves, from Greece, was _paraclausithyron_--literally, an out-of-door lament. Here is a specimen of what they were (Odes, III.

10), in which, under the guise of imitating their form, Horace quietly makes a mock of the absurdity of the practice. His serenader has none of the insensibility to the elements of the lover in the Scotch song:--

"Wi' the sleet in my hair, I'd gang ten miles and mair, For a word o' that sweet lip o' thine, o' thine, For ae glance o' thy dark e'e divine."

Neither is there in his pleading the tone of earnest entreaty which marks the wooer, in a similar plight, of Burns's "Let me in this ae nicht"--

"Thou hear'st the winter wind and weet, Nae star blinks through the driving sleet; Tak pity on my weary feet, And shield me frae the rain, jo."

There can be no mistake as to the seriousness of this appeal. Horace's is a mere _jeu-d'esprit_:--

"Though your drink were Tanais, chillest of rivers, And your lot with some conjugal savage were cast, You would pity, sweet Lyce, the poor soul that shivers Out here at your door in the merciless blast.

"Only hark how the doorway goes straining and creaking, And the piercing wind pipes through the trees that surround The court of your villa, while Hack frost is streaking With ice the crisp snow that lies thick on the ground!

"In your pride--Venus hates it--no longer envelop ye, Or haply you'll find yourself laid on the shelf; You never were made for a prudish Penelope, 'Tis not in the blood of your sires or yourself.

"Though nor gifts nor entreaties can win a soft answer, Nor the violet pale of my love-ravaged cheek, To your husband's intrigue with a Greek ballet-dancer, Though you still are blind, and forgiving and meek;

"Yet be not as cruel--forgive my upbraiding-- As snakes, nor as hard as the toughest of oak; To stand out here, drenched to the skin, serenading All night may in time prove too much of a joke."

It is not often that Horace's poetry is vitiated by bad taste. Strangely enough, almost the only instances of it occur where he is writing of women, as in the Ode to Lydia (Book I. 25) and to Lyce (Book IV. 13).

Both ladies seem to have been, former favourites of his, and yet the burden of these poems is exultation in the decay of their charms. The deadening influence of mere sensuality, and of the prevalent low tone of morals, must indeed have been great, when a man "so singularly susceptible," as Lord Lytton has truly described him, "to amiable, graceful, gentle, and n.o.ble impressions of man and of life," could write of a woman whom he had once loved in a strain like this:--

"The G.o.ds have heard, the G.o.ds have heard my prayer; Yes, Lyce! you are growing old, and still You struggle to look fair; You drink, and dance, and trill Your songs to youthful love, in accents weak With wine, and age, and pa.s.sion. Youthful Love!

He dwells in Chia's cheek, And hears her harp-strings move.

Rude boy, he flies like lightning o'er the heath Past withered trees like you; you're wrinkled now; The white has left your teeth, And settled on your brow.

Your Coan silks, your jewels bright as stars-- Ah no! they bring not back the days of old, In public calendars By flying time enrolled.

Where now that beauty? Where those movements? Where That colour? What of her, of her is left, Who, breathing Love's own air, Me of myself bereft, Who reigned in Cinara's stead, a fair, fair face, Queen of sweet arts? But Fate to Cinara gave A life of little s.p.a.ce; And now she cheats the grave Of Lyce, spared to raven's length of days, That youth may see, with laughter and disgust, A firebrand, once ablaze, Now smouldering in grey dust."

What had this wretched Lyce done that Horace should have prayed the G.o.ds to strip her of her charms, and to degrade her from a haughty beauty into a maudlin hag, disgusting and ridiculous? Why cast such very merciless stones at one who, by his own avowal, had erewhile witched his very soul from him? Why rejoice to see this once beautiful creature the scoff of all the heartless young fops of Rome? If she had injured him, what of that? Was it so very strange that a woman trained, like all the cla.s.s to which she belonged, to be the plaything of man's caprice, should have been fickle, mercenary, or even heartless? Poor Lyce might at least have claimed his silence, if he could not do, what Thackeray says every honest fellow should do, "think well of the woman he has once thought well of, and remember her with kindness and tenderness, as a man remembers a place where he has been very happy."

Horace's better self comes out in his playful appeal to his friend Xanthias (Odes, II. 4) not to be ashamed of having fallen in love with his handmaiden Phyllis. That she is a slave is a matter of no account.