Horace and His Influence Part 7

We have followed in such manner and at such length as is possible for our purpose the fortunes of Horace through the ages from his death and the death of the Empire in whose service his pen was employed to our own times. We have seen that he never was really forgotten, and that there never was a time of long duration when he ceased to be of real importance to some portion of mankind.

The recital of historical fact is at best a narration of circ.u.mstance to which there clings little of the warmth of life. An historical event itself is but the c.u.mulated and often frigid result of intimate original forces that may have meant long travail of body and soul before the act of realization became possible. The record of the event in chronicle or its commemoration in monument is only the sign that at some time there occurred a significant moment rendered inevitable by previous stirrings of life whose intensity, if not whose very ident.i.ty, are forgotten or no longer realized.

Thus the enumeration of ma.n.u.script revisions, translations, imitations, and scholastic editions of Horace may also seem at first sight the narrative of cold detail. There may be readers who, remembering the scant stream of the cultivated few who tided the poet through the centuries of darkness, and the comparative rareness of cultivated men at all times, will be slow to be convinced of any real impress of Horace upon the life of men. They especially who reflect that during all the long sweep of time the majority of those who have known him, and even of those who have been stirred to enthusiasm by him, have known him through the compulsion of the school, and who reflect farther on the artificialities, the insincerities, the pettinesses, the abuses, and the hatreds of the cla.s.s-room, the joy with which at the end the text-book is dropped or bidden an even more violent farewell, and the apparently total oblivion that follows, will be inclined to view as exaggeration the most moderate estimate of our debt to him.

Yet skepticism would be without warrant. The presence of any subject in an educational scheme represents the sincere, and often the fervent, conviction that it is worthy of the place. In the case of literary subjects, the nearer the approach to pure letters, the less demonstrable the connection between instruction and the winning of livelihood, the more intense the conviction. The immortality of literature and the arts, which surely has been demonstrated by time, the respect in which they are held by a world so intent on mere living that of its own motion it would never heed, is the work of the pa.s.sionate few whose enthusiasms and protestations never allow the common crowd completely to forget, and keep forever alive in it the uneasy sense of imperfection. That Horace was preserved for hundreds of years by monastery and school, that the fact of acquaintance with him is due to his place in modern systems of education, are not mere statements empty of life. They represent the n.o.ble enthusiasms of enlightened men. The history of human progress has been the history of enthusiasms. Without enthusiasms, the fabric of civilization would collapse in a day into the chaos of barbarism.

To give greater completeness and reality to our account of Horace's place among men, ancient and modern, we must in some way add to the narrative of formal fact the demonstration of his influence in actual operation. In the case of periods obscure and remote, this is hardly possible. In the case of modern times it is not so difficult. For the recent centuries, as proof of the peculiar power of Horace, we have the abundant testimony of literature and biography.

Let us call this influence the Dynamic Power of Horace. Dynamic power is the power that explodes men, so to speak, into physical or spiritual action, that operates by inspiration, expansion, fertilization, vitalization, and results in the living of a fuller life. If we can be shown concrete instances of Horace enriching the lives of men by increasing their love and mastery of art or multiplying their means of happiness, we shall not only appreciate better the poet's meaning for the present day, but be better able to imagine his effect upon men in the remoter ages whose life is less open to scrutiny.

Our purpose will best be accomplished by demonstrating the very specific and p.r.o.nounced effect of Horace, first, upon the formation of the literary ideal; second, upon the actual creation of literature; and, third, upon living itself.

1. HORACE AND THE LITERARY IDEAL

There is no better example of the direct effect of Horace than the part played in the discipline of letters by the _Ars Poetica_. This work is a literary _causerie_ inspired in part by the reading of Alexandrian criticism, but in larger part by experience. In it the author's uppermost themes, as in characteristic manner he allows himself to be led on from one thought to another, are unity, consistency, propriety, truthfulness, sanity, and carefulness. Such has been its power by reason of inner substance and outward circ.u.mstance that it has been at times exalted into a court of appeal hardly less authoritative than Aristotle himself, from whom in large part it ultimately derives.

We have seen how the Pleiad, with Du Bellay and Ronsard leading, seized upon the cla.s.sics as a means of elevating the literature of France, and how the treatise of Du Bellay which was put forth as their manifesto was full of matter from the _Ars Poetica_, which two years previously has served Sibilet also, whose work Du Bellay attacked. A century later, Boileau's _L'Art Poetique_ testifies again to the inspiration of Horace, who is made the means of riveting still more firmly upon French drama, for good or ill, the strict rules that have always governed it; and by the time of Boileau's death the program of the Pleiad is revived a second time by Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Opitz and Gottsched in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are for Germany what Du Bellay and Boileau were for France in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Literary Spain of the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was under the same influence. The Spanish peninsula, according to Menendez y Pelayo, has produced no fewer than forty-seven translations of the _Ars Poetica_.

Even in England, always less tractable in the matter of rules than the Latin countries, Ben Jonson and his friends are in some sort another Pleiad, and the treatise possesses immense authority throughout the centuries. We turn the pages of Cowl's _The Theory of Poetry in England_, a book of critical extracts ill.u.s.trating the development of poetry "in doctrines and ideas from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century," and note Ben Jonson and Wordsworth referring to or quoting Horace in the section on Poetic Creation; Dryden and Temple appealing to him and Aristotle on the Rules; Hurd quoting him on Nature and the Stage; Roger Ascham, Ben Jonson, and Dryden citing him as an example on Imitation; Dryden and Chapman calling him master and law-giver on Translation; Samuel Johnson referring to him on the same subject; and Ben Jonson and Dryden using him on Functions and Principles of Criticism. "Horace," writes Jonson, "an author of much civility, ...

an excellent and true judge upon cause and reason, not because he thought so, but because he knew so out of use and experience." Pope, in the _Essay on Criticism_, describes with peculiar felicity both Horace's critical manner and the character of the authority, persuasive rather than tyrannical, which he exercises over Englishmen:

"H_orace still charms with graceful negligence_, A_nd without method talks us into sense_; W_ill, like a friend, familiarly convey_ T_he truest notions in the easiest way_."

But the dynamic power of the _Ars Poetica_ will be still better appreciated if we a.s.semble some of its familiar principles. Who has not heard of and wondered at the hold the "Rules" have had upon modern drama, especially in France,--the rule of five acts, no more and no less; the rule of three actors only, liberalized into the rule of economy; the rule of the unities in time, place, and action; the rule against the mingling of the tragic and comic "kinds"; the rule against the artificial denouement? Who has not heard of French playwrights composing "with one eye on the clock" for fear of violating the unity of time, or of their delight in the writing of drama as in "a difficult game well played?" If Alexandrian criticism, and, back of it, Aristotle, were ultimately responsible for the rules, Horace was their disseminator in later times, and was looked up to as final authority. Who has not heard and read repeatedly the now common-place injunctions to be appropriate and consistent in character-drawing; to avoid, on the one hand, clearness at the cost of diffuseness, and, on the other, brevity at the cost of obscurity; to choose subject-matter suited to one's powers; to respect the authority of the masterpiece and to con by night and by day the great Greek exemplars; to feel the emotion one wishes to rouse; to stamp the universal with the mark of individual genius; to be straightforward and rapid and omit the unessential; to be truthful to life; to keep the improbable and the horrible behind the scenes; to be appropriate in meter and diction; to keep clear of the fallacy of poetic madness; to look for the real sources of successful writing in sanity, depth of knowledge, and experience with men; to remember the mutual indispensability of genius and cultivation; to combine the pleasant and the useful; to deny one's self the indulgence of mediocrity; never to compose unless under inspiration; to give heed to solid critical counsel; to lock up one's ma.n.u.script for nine years before giving it to the world; to destroy what does not measure up to the ideal; to take ever-lasting pains; to beware of the compliments of good-natured friends? Not less familiar are the apt figurative ill.u.s.trations of the woman beautiful above and an ugly fish below, the purple patch, the painter who would forever put in his cypress tree, the amphora that came out a pitcher, the dolphin in the wood and the boar in the waters, the sesquipedalian word, the mountains in travail and the birth of the ridiculous mouse, the plunge _in medias res_, the praiser of the good old times, the exclusion of sane poets from Helicon, the counsellor who himself can write nothing, but will serve as whetstone for genius, the nodding of Homer.

Nor did the effects of this diffusion of Horatian precept consist merely in restraint upon the youthful and the impulsive, or confine themselves to the drama, with which the _Ars Poetica_ was mainly concerned. The persuasive and authoritative counsels of the Roman poet have entered, so to speak, into the circulatory system of literary effort and become part of the life-blood of modern enlightenment. Their great effect has been formative: the cultivation of character in literature.

2. HORACE AND LITERARY CREATION

_i_. THE TRANSLATOR'S IDEAL

Besides the invisible, and the greatest, effect of Horace in the moulding of character in literature, is the visible effect in literary creation. His inspiration wrought by performance as well as by precept.

The numerous essays in verse and prose on the art of letters which have been prompted by the _Ars Poetica_ are themselves examples of this effect. They are not alone, however, though perhaps the most apparent.

The purer literature of the lyric also inspired to creation, with results that are far more charming, if less substantial.

In the case of the lyric inspired by the _Odes_, as well as in the case of the critical essay inspired by the _Ars Poetica_, it is not always easy to distinguish adaptation or imitation from actual creation.

Bernardo Ta.s.so's _Ode_, for example, and Giovanni Prati's _Song of Hygieia_, while really independent poems, are so charged with Horatian matter and spirit that one hesitates to call them original. The same is true of the many inspirations traceable to the famous _Beatus Ille Epode_, which, with such _Odes_ as _The Bandusian Spring_, _Pyrrha_, _Phidyle_, and _Chloe_, have captured the fancy of modern poets. Pope's _Solitude_, on the other hand, while surely an inspiration of the second _Epode_, shows hardly a mark affording proof of the fact.

To some of the most manifest imitations and adaptations, it is impossible to deny originality. The _Fifth Book of Horace_, by Kipling and Graves, is an example. Thackeray's delightful _Ad Ministram_ is another example which must be cla.s.sed as adaptation, yet such is its spontaneity that not to see in it an inspiration would be stupid and unjust:

AD MINISTRAM

D_ear Lucy, you know what my wish is_-- I_ hate all your Frenchified fuss_: Y_our silly entrees and made dishes_ W_ere never intended for us_.

N_o footman in lace and in ruffles_ N_eed dangle behind my arm-chair_; A_nd never mind seeking for truffles_ A_lthough they be ever so rare_.

B_ut a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy_, I_ prithee get ready at three_: H_ave it smoking, and tender, and juicy_, A_nd what better meat can there be?_ A_nd when it has feasted the master_, 'T_will amply suffice for the maid_; M_eanwhile I will smoke my canaster_, A_nd tipple my ale in the shade_.

In similar strain of exquisite humor are the adaptations of the Whichers, American examples of spirit and skill not second to that of Thackeray:

MY SABINE FARM

LAUDABUNT ALII

S_ome people talk about "Noo Yo'k"_; O_f Cleveland many ne'er have done_; T_hey sing galore of Baltimore_, C_hicago, Pittsburgh, Washington_.

O_thers unasked their wit have tasked_ T_o sound unending praise of Boston_-- O_f bean-vines found for miles around_ A_nd crooked streets that I get lost on_.

G_ive me no jar of truck or car_, N_o city smoke and noise of mills_; R_ather the slow Connecticut's flow_ A_nd sunny orchards on the hills_.

T_here like the haze of summer days_ B_efore the wind flee care and sorrow_.

I_n sure content each day is spent_, U_nheeding what may come to-morrow_.

VITAS HINNULEO

DONE BY MR. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I _met a little Roman maid_; S_he was just sixteen (she said)_, A_nd O! but she was sore afraid_, A_nd hung her modest head_.

A _little fawn, you would have vowed_, T_hat sought her mother's side_, A_nd wandered lonely as a cloud_ U_pon the mountain wide_.

W_hene'er the little lizards stirred_ S_he started in her fear_; I_n every rustling bush she heard_ S_ome awful monster near_.

"I_'m not a lion; fear not so_; S_eek not your timid dam_."-- B_ut Chloe was afraid, and O!_ S_he knows not what I am_:

A creature quite too bright and good To be so much misunderstood.

Again, in Austin Dobson's exquisite _Triolet_, whether the inspiration of the poem itself is in Horace, or the inspiration, so far as Horace is concerned, lies in the choice of t.i.tle after the verses were written, we must in either case confess a debt of great delight to the author of the _Ars Poetica_:

URCEUS EXIT

I_ intended an Ode_, A_nd it turned to a Sonnet_.

I_t began_ a la mode, I_ intended an Ode_; B_ut Rose crossed the road_ I_n her latest new bonnet_; I_ intended an Ode_, A_nd it turned to a Sonnet_.

The same observation applies equally to the same author's _Iocosa Lyra_:

IOCOSA LYRA

I_n our hearts is the great one of Avon_ E_ngraven_, A_nd we climb the cold summits once built on_ B_y Milton_;

B_ut at times not the air that is rarest_ I_s fairest_, A_nd we long in the valley to follow_ A_pollo_.