Part 7

A few Odes remain, too casual to be classified; rejoicings over the vanishing of winter and the return of spring (I, iv); praises of the Tibur streams, of Tarentum (II, vi) which he loved only less than Tibur, of the Lucretilis Groves (I, xvii) which overhung his Sabine valley, of the Bandusian spring beside which he played in boyhood. We have the Pindaric or historic Odes, with tales of Troy, of the Danaid brides, of Regulus, of Europa (III, iii, v, xi, xvii); the dramatic address to Archytas (I, xxviii), which soothed the last moments of Mark Pattison; the fine epilogue which ends the book, composed in the serenity of gained renown;

And now 'tis done: more durable than brass My monument shall be, and raise its head O'er royal pyramids: it shall not dread Corroding rain or angry Boreas, Nor the long lapse of immemorial time. I shall not wholly die; large residue Shall 'scape the Queen of funerals. Ever new My after fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb With silent maids the Capitolian height. "Born," men will say, "where Aufidus is loved, Where Danaus scant of streams beneath him bowed The rustic tribes, from dimness he waxed bright, First of his race to wed the Aeolian lay To notes of Italy." Put glory on, My own Melpomene, by genius won, And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay.

SWAN SONG

When a well-graced actor has left the stage amid trumpeted farewells from an admiring but regretful audience, we somewhat resent his occasional later reappearance. So, when a poet's last word has been spoken, and spoken emotionally, an Afterword is apt to offend: and we may wish that the fine poem just quoted had been reserved as finish to the volume yet to come, which lacks a closing note, or even that the volume itself had not been published. The fourth Book of the Odes was written nearly ten years after the other three, and Horace wrote it not as Poet but as Laureate. His Secular Hymn appeared in B.C. 17, when he was forty-eight years old; and after it Augustus pressed him to celebrate the victories of his two stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, over the tribes of the Eastern Alps. If he wrote unwillingly, his hand had not lost its cunning. The sentiment is paler and more artificial, but the old condensation and felicity remain. He begins with rather sad reluctance. He is old; the one woman whom he loved is dead; his lyric raptures and his love campaignings are at an end; he is tired of flattering hopes, of noisy revels, of flower garlands fresh with dew. Or are they war songs, not love songs, that are wanted? There he is more helpless still. It needs a Pindar worthily to extol a Caesar: he is no Pindar; and so we have an ode in honour of the Theban bard. And yet, as chosen lyrist of the Roman race, he cannot altogether refuse the call. Melpomene, who from his cradle marked him for her own, can still shed on him if she will the power to charm, can inspire in him "music of the swan." So, slowly, the wasting lyric fire revives; we get the martial odes to conquering Drusus and to Lollius, the panegyrics on Augustus and Tiberius, all breathing proud consciousness that "the Muse opens the good man's grave and lifts him to the gods"; that immortality can be won only by the poet's pen, and that it is in his own power to confer it.

THE FORUM RESTORED AS IN A.D. 80.

(Reproduced by special permission.)]

The remaining poems are in the old spirit, but are somewhat mournful echoes of the past. They remind us of the robin's winter song--"Hark to him weeping," say the country folk, as they listen to the music which retains the sweetness but has lost what Wordsworth calls the gushes of the summer strains. There is still an ode to Venus; its prayer not now "come to bless thy worshipper"; but "leave an old heart made callous by fifty years, and seek some younger votary." There is an ode to Spring. Spring brought down from heaven his earliest Muse; it came to him charged with youthful ardours, expectations, joys; now its only message is that change and death attend all human hopes and cares. Like an army defeated, the snow has retreated; the Graces and the Nymphs can dance unclad in the soft warm air. But summer will thrust out spring, autumn summer, then dull winter will come again; will come to the year, will come to you and me. Not birth nor eloquence nor virtue can save from Minos' judgement seat; like Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus, like all the great ones of the earth, we shall soon be nameless shades and a poor pinch of dust. More of the old buoyant glee comes back in a festal invitation to one Virgilius, not the poet. There is a ring of Tom Moore in Sir Theodore Martin's rendering of it.

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On the young grass reclined, near the murmur of fountains, The shepherds are piping the song of the plains, And the god who loves Arcady's purple-hued mountains, The god of the flocks, is entranced by their strains.

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To the winds with base lucre and pale melancholy! In the flames of the pyre these, alas! will be vain; Mix your sage ruminations with glimpses of folly, 'Tis delightful at times to be somewhat insane!

There follows a savage assault on one Lyce, an ancient beauty who had lost her youthful charms, but kept up her youthful airs:

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! Poor 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.

Poor Lyce indeed! what had she done to be so scourged? One address we miss: there is no ode in this book to Maecenas, who was out of favour with Augustus, and had lost all political influence. But the friend is not sunk in the courtier. The Ides or 13th of April is his old patron's birthday--a nativity, says Horace, dearer to him almost than his own, and he keeps it always as a feast. With a somewhat ghostly resurrection of voluptuousness dead and gone he bids Phyllis come and keep it with him. All things are ready, a cask of Alban nine years old is broached, the servants are in a stir, the altar wreathed for sacrifice, the flames curling up the kitchen chimney, ivy and parsley gathered to make a wreath for Phyllis' hair. Come then, sweet girl, last of my loves; for never again shall this heart take fire at a woman's face--come, and learn of me a tune to sing with that dear voice, and drive away dull care. I am told that every man in making love assures the charmer that no woman shall ever succeed her in his regards; but this is probably a veritable amorous swan-song. He was older than are most men at fifty-two. Years as they pass, he sadly says, bereave us one by one of all our precious things; of mirth, of loves, of banquets; at last the Muse herself spreads wings to follow them. "You have sported long enough," she says, "with Amaryllis in the shade, you have eaten and drunk your fill, it is time for you to quit the scene." And so the curtain falls.

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To our great loss there is no contemporary portrait of Horace. He tells us himself (Ep. II, ii, 214; I, xx, 29) that he was short of stature, his hair black but early tinged with grey; that he loved to bask in sunshine, that his temper was irascible but easily appeased. In advanced life he became fat; Augustus jests with him rather coarsely on his protuberant figure. The portrait prefixed to this volume is from a Contorniate, or bronze medallion of the time of Constantine, representing the poet's likeness as traditionally preserved amongst his countrymen three hundred years after his death.

The oldest extant manuscript of his works is probably that in the public library of Berne, and dates from the ninth century. The earliest printed edition, bearing neither date nor printer's name, is supposed to have been published at Milan in 1470. Editions were also printed at Florence and at Venice in 1482, and a third at Venice in 1492. An illustrated edition on vellum was brought out by Aldus in 1501, and reissued in 1509, 1514, 1519. The Florence Press of the Giunti produced splendid specimens in 1503, 1514, 1519. Between this date and the end of the century seven more came forth from famous presses. Of modern editions we may notice the vellum Bodoni folio of 1791, and the matchless Didot of 1799 with its exquisite copperplate vignettes. Fortunate is the collector who possesses the genuine first edition of Pine's "Horace," 1733. It is known by an error in the text, corrected in the subsequent and less bibliographically valuable impression of the same year. A beautifully pictorial book is Dean Milman's; the student will prefer Orelli, Macleane, Yonge, Munro and King, or Dean Wickham's scholarly volumes.

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In composing this modest little book I have had in view principally readers altogether ignorant of Latin, but wishing to know something of a writer lauded enthusiastically by all classical scholars: they will observe that I have not introduced into its pages a single Latin word. I have nourished also the hope that it might be serviceable to those who have forgotten, but would like to recover, the Horace which they learned at school; and to them I would venture to recommend the little copy of the Latin text with Conington's version attached, in "Bell's Pocket Classics." Latinless readers of course must read him in English or not at all. No translation can quite convey the cryptic charm of any original, whether poetry or prose. "Only a bishop," said Lord Chesterfield, "is improved by translation." But prose is far easier to render faithfully than verse; and I have said that either Conington's or Dean Wickham's version of the Satires and Epistles, which are both virtually in prose, will tell them what Horace said, and sometimes very nearly how he said it. On the Odes a host of English writers have experimented. Milton tried his hand on one, with a result reflecting neither Milton nor Horace. Dryden has shown what he could have done but would not do in his tantalising fragment of the Ode to Fortune. Pope transformed the later Ode to Venus into a purely English poem, with a gracefully artificial mechanism quite unlike the natural flow of the original. Marvell's noble "Horatian Ode," with its superb stanzas on the death of Charles I, shows what he might have achieved, but did not attempt. Francis' rendering of 1765 is generally respectable, and in default of a better was universally read and quoted by his contemporaries: once, in the Ode to Pyrrhus (III, xx) he attains singular grace of phrase and metre. Cowper translated two Odes and imitated two more, not without happy touches, but with insertions and omissions that lower poetry into commonplace. Of Calverley's few attempts three are notably good; a resounding line in his "Leuconoe" (I, xi):

Which flings now the flagging sea-wave on the obstinate sandstone reef,

is at once Horatian and Tennysonian; and his "Oh! where is all thy loveliness?" in the later Ode to Lyce has caught marvellously the minor key of tender memory which relieves the brutality of that ruthless flagellation. Mr. Goldwin Smith's more numerous "Bay Leaves" are fashioned all in goodly measure; and his "Blest man who far from care and strife" well transfers to English the breathlessness of Horace's sham pastoral ecstasy. Of more ambitious translators Bulwer Lytton catches now and then the careless rapture of his original; Sir Theodore Martin is always musical and flowing, sometimes miraculously fortunate in his metres, but intentionally unliteral and free. Conington is rigidly faithful, oftentimes tersely forcible; but misses lyrical sweetness. Perhaps, if Marvell, Herrick, Cowley, Prior, the now forgotten William Spencer, Tom Moore, Thackeray, could be alchemized into one, they might combine to yield an English Horace. Until eclectic nature, emulating the Grecian sculptor, shall fashion an archetype from these seven models, the vernacular student, with his Martin and his Conington, sipping from each alternately, like Horace's Matine bee (IV, ii, 27), the terseness of the professor and the sweetness of the poet, may find in them some echo from the ever-shifting tonality of the Odes, something of their verbal felicity, something of their thrilling wistfulness; may strive not quite unsuccessfully, in the words of Tennyson's "Timbuctoo," to attain by shadowing forth the unattainable.

ON THE "WINES" OF HORACE'S POETRY

The wines whose historic names sparkle through the pages of Horace have become classical commonplaces in English literature. "Well, my young friend, we must for once prefer the Falernian to the vile Sabinum?" says Monkbarns to Lovel when the landlord of the Hawes Inn at Queensferry brings them claret instead of port. It may be well that we should know somewhat of them.

The choicest of the Italian wines was Caecuban, from the poplar-trained vines grown amongst the swamps of Amyclae in Campania. It was a heady, generous wine, and required long keeping; so we find Horace speaking of it as ranged in the farthest cellar end, or "stored still in our grandsire's binns"(III, xxviii, 2, 3; I, xxxvii, 6); it was reserved for great banquets, kept carefully under lock and key: "your heir shall drain the Caecuban you hoarded under a hundred padlocks" (II, xiv, 25). It was beyond Horace's means, and only rich men could afford to drink it; we hear of it at Maecenas' table and on board his galley (I, xx, 9); and it appeared at the costly banquet of Nasidienus (page 27). With the Caecuban he couples the Formian (I, xx, 11), and Falernian (I, xx, 10), grown on the southern slopes of the hills dividing Campania from Latium. "In grassy nook your spirit cheer with old Falernian vintage," he says to his friend Dellius (II, iii, 6). He calls it fierce, rough, fiery; recommends mixing it with Chian wine, or with wine from Surrentum (Sat. II, iv, 55), or sweetening and diluting it with honey from Mount Hymettus (Sat. II, ii, 15). From the same district came the Massic wine, also strong and fiery. "It breeds forgetfulness" (II, vii, 21), he says; advises that it should be softened by exposure to the open sky (Sat. II, iv, 51). He had a small supply of it, which he kept for a "happy day" (III, xxi, 6). The Calenian wine, from Cales near Falernum, was of similar character. He classes it with Caecuban as being too costly for a poor man's purse (I, xx, 10): writing late in life to a friend, promises to find him some, but says that his visitor must bring in exchange an alabaster box of precious spikenard (IV, xii, 17). Next after these Campanian vintages came the Alban. He tells Phyllis that he will broach for her a cask of it nine years old (IV, xi, 1). It was offered, too, at Nasidienus' dinner as an alternative to Caecuban; and Horace praises the raisins made from its berries (Sat. II, iv, 72). Of the Sabine, poorest of Italian wines, we have spoken (page 23).

The finest Greek wine was Chian, thick and luscious; he couples it in the Epode to Maecenas (IX, 34) with Lesbian which he elsewhere (I, xvii, 21) calls "innocent" or mild. Coan wine he mentions twice, commending its medicinal value (Sat. II, iv, 29; II, viii, 9).

In justice to Horace and his friends, it is right to observe that connoisseurship in wine must not be confounded with inebriety. They drank to exhilarate, not to stupefy themselves, to make them what Mr. Bradwardine called ebrioli not ebrii; and he repeatedly warns against excess. The vine was to him "a sacred tree," its god, Bacchus, a gentle, gracious deity (I, xviii, 1):

'Tis thine the drooping heart to heal, Thy strength uplifts the poor man's horn; Inspired by thee, the soldier's steel, The monarch's crown, he laughs to scorn.

III, xxi, 17.