Horace Part 13

Oh, Sestius, happy Sestius! use the moments as they pa.s.s; Far-reaching hopes are not for us, the creatures of a day.

"Thee soon shall night enshroud; and the Manes' phantom crowd, And the starveling house unbeautiful of Pluto shut thee in; And thou shalt not banish care by the ruddy wine-cup there, Nor woo the gentle Lycidas, whom all are mad to win."

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

"The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things."

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 n.o.ble, 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,_"--

"The Manes are no dream; death closes not Our all of being, and the wan-visaged shade Escapes unscathed from the funereal fires,"

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 Aeac.u.m, 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, pa.s.sionate life of this world. The n.o.bler 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 n.o.bleness 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--

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

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_"--

"Worth, which heaven's gates to those unbars Who never should have died, A pathway cleaves among the stars, To meaner souls denied."

But they are only gleams, impa.s.sioned 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 Khayyam, this is ever in his thoughts--

"What boots it to repeat, How Time is slipping underneath our feet?

Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday, Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?".

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 pa.s.sing 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 antic.i.p.ate 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,

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we may."

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:--

"Scion of Tuscan kings, in store I've laid a cask of mellow wine, That never has been broached before.

I've roses, too, for wreaths to twine, And Nubian nut, that for thy hair An oil shall yield of fragrance rare.

"The plenty quit, that only palls, And, turning from the cloud-capped pile That towers above thy palace halls, Forget to worship for a while The privileges Rome enjoys, Her smoke, her splendour, and her noise.

"It is the rich who relish best To dwell at times from state aloof; And simple suppers, neatly dressed, Beneath a poor man's humble roof, With neither pall nor purple there, Have smoothed ere now the brow of care.

"Now with his spent and languid flocks The wearied shepherd seeks the shade, The river cool, the s.h.a.ggy rocks, That overhang the tangled glade, And by the stream no breeze's gush Disturbs the universal hush.

"Thou dost devise with sleepless zeal What course may best the state beseem, And, fearful for the City's weal, Weigh'st anxiously each hostile scheme That may be hatching far away In Scythia, India, or Cathay.

"Most wisely Jove in thickest night The issues of the future veils, And laughs at the self-torturing wight Who with imagined terrors quails.

The present only is thine own, Then use it well, ere it has flown.

"All else which may by time be bred Is like a river of the plain, Now gliding gently o'er its bed Along to the Etruscan main, Now whirling onwards, fierce and fast, Uprooted trees, and boulders vast,

"And flocks, and houses, all in drear Confusion tossed from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, While mountains far, and forests near Reverberate the rising roar, When lashing rains among the hills To fury wake the quiet rills.

"Lord of himself that man will be, And happy in his life alway, Who still at eve can say with free Contented soul, 'I've lived to-day!

Let Jove to-morrow, if he will, With blackest clouds the welkin fill,

"'Or flood it all with sunlight pure, Yet from the past he cannot take Its influence, for that is sure, Nor can he mar or bootless make Whate'er of rapture and delight The hours have borne us in their flight.'"

The poet here pa.s.ses, 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.

"Fortune, who with malicious glee Her merciless vocation plies, Benignly smiling now on me, Now on another, bids him rise, And in mere wantonness of whim Her favours shifts from me to him.

"I laud her whilst by me she holds, But if she spread her pinions swift, I wrap me in my virtue's folds, And, yielding back her every gift, Take refuge in the life so free Of bare but honest poverty.

"You will not find me, when the mast Groans 'neath the stress of southern gales, To wretched prayers rush off, nor cast Vows to the great G.o.ds, lest my bales From Tyre or Cyprus sink, to be Fresh booty for the hungry sea.

"When others then in wild despair To save their c.u.mbrous wealth essay, I to the vessel's skiff repair, And, whilst the Twin Stars light my way, Safely the breeze my little craft Shall o'er the Aegean billows waft."

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 const.i.tutionally p.r.o.ne 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):--

"Our common Sabine wine shall be The only drink I'll give to thee, In modest goblets, too; 'Twas stored in crock of Grecian delf, Dear knight Maecenas, by myself, That very day when through The theatre thy plaudits rang, And sportive echo caught the clang, And answered from the banks Of thine own dear paternal stream, Whilst Vatican renewed the theme Of homage and of thanks!

Old Caecuban, the very best, And juice in vats Calenian pressed, You drink at home, I know: My cups no choice Falernian fills, Nor unto them do Formiae's hills Impart a tempered glow."

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 antic.i.p.ations 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.

"Why wilt thou kill me with thy boding fears?

Why, oh Maecenas, why?

Before thee lies a train of happy years: Yes, nor the G.o.ds nor I Could brook that thou shouldst first be laid in dust, Who art my stay, my glory, and my trust!

"Ah, if untimely Fate should s.n.a.t.c.h thee hence, Thee, of my soul a part, Why should I linger on, with deadened sense, And ever-aching heart, A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine?

No, no, one day shall see thy death and mine!

"Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath; Yes, we shall go, shall go, Hand link'd in hand, whene'er thou leadest, both The last sad road below!

Me neither the Chimaera's fiery breath, Nor Gyges, even could Gyges rise from death,

"With all his hundred hands from thee shall sever; For in such sort it hath Pleased the dread Fates, and Justice potent ever, To interweave our path. [1]

Beneath whatever aspect thou wert born, Libra, or Scorpion fierce, or Capricorn,

"The bl.u.s.tering tyrant of the western deep, This well I know, my friend, Our stars in wondrous wise one orbit keep, And in one radiance blend.

From thee were Saturn's baleful rays afar Averted by great Jove's refulgent star,

"And His hand stayed Fate's downward-swooping wing, When thrice with glad acclaim The teeming theatre was heard to ring, And thine the honoured name: So had the falling timber laid me low, But Pan in mercy warded off the blow,

"Pan who keeps watch o'er easy souls like mine.

Remember, then, to rear In grat.i.tude to Jove a votive shrine, And slaughter many a steer, Whilst I, as fits, an humbler tribute pay, And a meek lamb upon his altar lay."