Part 6

To the great general Agrippa (I, vi), rival of Maecenas in the good graces of Augustus, he sends a tribute complimentary, yet somewhat stiffly and officially conceived; lines much more cordial to the high-born Aelius Lamia (III, 17), whose statue stands to-day amid the pale immortalities of the Capitoline Museum. We have a note of tonic banter to Tibullus, "jilted by a fickle Glycera," and "droning piteous elegies" (I, xxxiii); a merry riotous impersonation of an imaginary symposium in honour of the newly-made augur Murena (III, 19), with toasts and tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and rose-wreaths flung about the board; a delicious mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II, iv), who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of it. He may yet find out that though fallen into obscurity she is in truth high-born and noble, and will present him with a patrician mother-in-law.

For aught that you know now, fair Phyllis may be The shoot of some highly respectable stem; Nay, she counts, I'll be sworn, a few kings in her tree, And laments the lost acres once lorded by them.

Never think that a creature so exquisite grew In the haunts where but vice and dishonour are known, Nor deem that a girl so unselfish, so true, Had a mother 'twould shame thee to take for thine own.

Several of his correspondents we can only name; the poet Valgius, the tragedians Pollio and Fuscus; Sallust, grandson of the historian; Pompeius, his old comrade in the Brutus wars; Lollius, defeated in battle and returning home in disgrace. Nor need we labour to identify a host of others; Iccius, Grosphus, Dellius; who figure as mere dedicatory names; nor persons mentioned casually, such as Telephus of the rosy neck and clustering hair (I, xiii; III, xix), whom Bulwer Lytton, with fine memories of his own ambrosial petted youth, calls a "typical beautyman and lady-killer." The Horatian personages, remarks Dean Milman, would contain almost every famous name of the Augustan age.

5. AMATORY. "Speak'st thou of nothing but ladies?" says Feste the Jester to poor Malvolio. He might have said the same to Horace; for of the Odes in the first three Books one third part is addressed to or concerned with women. How many of the pretty female names which musicalize his love songs, in syllables that breathe of the sweet south and melt like kisses in the utterance, are representative of real girls, we cannot guess; with none of them except perhaps one, who died young, does he seem to have been really in love. He was forty years old when most of his amorous Odes were written; an age at which, as George Eliot has reminded us, the baptism of passion is by aspersion rather than immersion. Something he must have known of love, or he could not write as he has done; but it is the superficial gallantry of a flirt rather than the impassioned self-surrender of a lover; of a gay bachelor, with roving critical eye, heart whole yet fancy free, too practised a judge of beauty to become its slave. Without emotion, without reverence, but with keen relishing appreciation, he versifies Pyrrha's golden curls, and Lycoris' low forehead--feminine beauties both to a Roman eye--and Phyllis' tapering arms and shapely ankles, and Chia's dimpled cheek, and the tangles of Neaera's hair, and the gadabout baggage Lyde, and Glycera's dazzling complexion that blinds the gazer's eye (I, v, xix, xxxiii; II, iv, 21; III, xiv, 21). They are all inconstant good-for-noughts, he knows; but so are men, and so is he; keep up the pleasant give-and-take, the quarrels and the reconciliations. All the youths of Rome are in love with a beautiful Ninon D'Enclos named Barine--Matthew Arnold declared this to be the finest of all the Odes (II, viii)--she perjures herself with every one in turn. But it seems to answer; she shines forth lovelier than ever. Venus and the nymphs only laugh, and her lovers, young and old, continue to hug their chains.

New captives fill the nets you weave; New slaves are bred; and those before, Though oft they threaten, never leave Your perjured door.

Sometimes he plays the monitor. Asterie's husband is laid up in Greece by contrary winds: he is faithful to his wife, though his hostess tempts him: let the wife be on her guard against her handsome neighbour Enipeus (III, vii). His own charmers are sometimes obdurate: Chloe and Lyde run away from him like fawns (I, xxiii): that is because they are young; he can wait till they are older; they will come to him then of themselves: "they always come," says Disraeli in "Henrietta Temple." He has quarrelled with an old flame (I, xvi), whom he had affronted by some libellous verses. He entreats her pardon; was young and angry when he wrote; will burn the offending lines, or fling them into the sea:

Come, let me change my sour for sweet, And smile complacent as before; Hear me my palinode repeat, And give me back your heart once more.

He professes bitter jealousy of a handsome stripling whose beauty Lydia praises (I, xiii). She is wasting her admiration; she will find him unfaithful; Horace knows him well:

Oh, trebly blest, and blest for ever, Are they, whom true affection binds, In whom no doubts nor janglings sever The union of their constant minds; But life in blended current flows, Serene and sunny to the close.

If anyone now reads "Lalla Rookh," he will recall an exquisite rendering of these lines from the lips of veiled Nourmahal:

There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, When two, that are linked in one heavenly tie, With heart never changing and brow never cold, Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.

One hour of a passion so sacred is worth Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss; And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth, It is this, it is this!

But, perhaps, if a jury of scholars could be polled as to the most enchanting amongst all Horace's lovesongs, the highest vote would be cast in favour of the famous "Reconciliation" of the roving poet with this or with some other Lydia (III, ix). The pair of former lovers, mutually faithless, exchange defiant experience of their several infidelities; then, the old affection reviving through the contact of their altercation, agree to discard their intervening paramours, and return to their first allegiance.

He.

Whilst I was dear and thou wert kind, And I, and I alone, might lie Upon thy snowy breast reclined, Not Persia's king so blest as I.

She.

Whilst I to thee was all in all, Nor Chloe might with Lydia vie, Renowned in ode or madrigal, Not Roman Ilia famed as I.

He.

I now am Thracian Chloe's slave, With hand and voice that charms the air, For whom even death itself I'd brave, So fate the darling girl would spare.

She.

I dote on Calais; and I Am all his passion, all his care, For whom a double death I'd die, So fate the darling boy would spare.

He.

What if our ancient love return, And bind us with a closer tie, If I the fair-haired Chloe spurn, And, as of old, for Lydia sigh?

She.

Though lovelier than yon star is he, Thou fickle as an April sky, More churlish too than Adria's sea, With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die.

The austere Scaliger used to say that he would rather have written this ode than be King of Spain and the Indies: Milton's Eve expresses her devotion to Adam in an apostrophe paraphrased from its closing lines.

Observe, too, how we find in all the Odes as we read them, not only a gallery of historical pictures, nor only an unconscious revelation of the poet's self, of, that is, the least subjective among poets, ever, as says Sir Stephen De Vere, looking outward, never looking in; but they incidentally paint for us in vivid and familiarizing tints the intimate daily life of that far-off ancient queen of cities. We walk with them the streets of Rome. We watch the connoisseurs gazing into the curiosity shops and fingering the bronzes or the silver statuettes; the naughty boys jeering the solemn Stoic as he walks along, staid, superior, absent; the good boys coming home from school with well-thumbed lesson books; the lovers in the cookshops or restaurants shooting apple pips from between finger and thumb, rejoicing in the good omen if they strike the ceiling; the stores of Sulpicius the wine merchant and of Sosius the bookseller; the great white Latian ox, exactly such as you see to-day, driven towards the market, with a bunch of hay upon his horns to warn pedestrians that he is dangerous; the coarse drawings in chalk or colours on the wall advertising some famous gladiator; at dusk the whispering lovers in the Campus, or the romping hide-and-seek of lads and lasses at the corners of the streets or squares, just as you may watch them to-day on spring or winter evenings amongst the lower arches of the Colosseum;--it is a microcosm, a cameo, of that old-world life. Horace knew, and feared not to say, that in his poems, in his Odes especially, he bequeathed a deathless legacy to mankind, while setting up a lasting monument to himself. One thing he could not know, that when near two thousand years had passed, a race of which he had barely heard by name as dwelling "quite beyond the confines of the world," would cherish his name and read his writings with a grateful appreciation even surpassing that of his contemporary Romans.