Part 5 (2/2)

It was a natural exaggeration for Christianity to begin by teaching absolute separation from the world, and to declare, through the mouths of such as Tertullian, that the blood of Christ alone sufficed and nothing more was needed, and that literature and all the other arts of paganism, together with its manners, were so inseparable from its religion that every part was anathema. It was natural that Horace, more than Virgil, should be the object of its neglect, and even of its active enmity. Horace is the most completely pagan of poets whose works are of spiritual import. The only immortality of which he takes account is the immortality of fame. Aside from this, the end of man is dust and shadow.

It is true that in the depth of his heart he does not feel with Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius that ”Dust thou art, to dust returnest” is spoken of soul as well as body. The old Roman instinct for ancestor-communion is too strong in him for that. But he acquiesces in their doctrine in so far as shadowy existence in another world inspires in him no pleasing hope. He displays no trace of the faith in the supernatural which accompanies the Christian hope of happy immortality.

He contains none of the expressions of yearning for communion with the divine, of self-abas.e.m.e.nt in the presence of the eternal, which belong to Christian poetry. The flights of his muse rarely take him into the realm of a divine love and providence. His aspirations are for things achievable in this world: for faithfulness in friends.h.i.+p, for enduring courage, for irreproachable patriotism,--in short, for ideal _human_ relations.

Horace's idealism is not Christian idealism, and is only in a limited way even spiritual idealism. When he prays, it is likely to be for others rather than himself, and for temporal blessings only: for the success of Augustus at home and in the field, for prolongation of Maecenas' life and happiness, for the weal of the State, for the nurslings of his little flock, for health of body and contentment of heart. His dwelling is not in the secret place of the Most High.

Philosophy, not religion, is his refuge and his fortress. In philosophy, not in G.o.d, will he trust.

In a word, Horace is logical, self-reliant, and self-sufficient. He sees no happy future after this life, is conscious of no providence watching over him, is involved in no obligation to the beings of an eternal world. He looks this world and the next, G.o.ds and men, directly in the face, and expects other men to do the same. Life and its duties are for him clear-cut. He is no propounder of problems, no searcher after hidden purposes. He lacks almost absolutely the feverish aspiration and unrest which characterize Christian and other humanitarian modes of thought and sentiment, and whose manifestation is one of the best known features of recent modern times, as it was of the earliest Christian experience.

But Christianity was a religion of men, and therefore human. If its exaggerations were natural, its reservations and its reactions were also natural. There were men whose admiration continued to be roused and whose affections continued to be touched by Virgil and Horace. There were men whose reason as well as whose instinct impelled them to employ the cla.s.sic authors and the cla.s.sic arts in the service of the new religion. Christianity possessed no distinct and separate media of expression and no separate body of knowledge which could bear fruit as matter of instruction. Pagan art and literature were indispensable whether for the study of history or of mere humanity. Christianity was therefore compelled to employ the old forms of art, which involved the use of the old instrumentalities of literary education. When, finally, paganism had fallen under its repeated a.s.saults, what had been forced use became a matter of choice, and the cla.s.sics were taken under the Church's protection and marked with her approval.

The data regarding Horace in the Middle Age are few, but they are clear.

We need not examine them all in order to draw conclusions.

The monastic idea, of eastern origin and given currency in the West by Jerome, was first reduced to systematic practice by Benedict, who created the first Rule at Monte Ca.s.sino about the time of the Mavortian recension of Horace, in 527. New moral strength issued from the cloisters now rapidly established. Ca.s.siodorus, especially active in promoting the spiritual phase of monkish retreat, made the intellectual life also his concern. Monte Ca.s.sino, between Naples and Rome, and Bobbio, in the northern part of the peninsula, were the great Italian centers. The Benedictine influence spread to Ireland, which before the end of the sixth century became a stronghold of the movement and an inspiration to England, Germany, France, and even Italy, where Bobbio itself was founded by Columban and his companions. St. Gall in Switzerland, Fulda at Hersfeld in Hesse-Na.s.sau, Corvey in Saxony, Iona in Scotland, Tours in France, Reichenau on Lake Constance, were all active centers of religion and learning within two hundred years from Benedict's death.

The monasteries not only afforded the spiritual enthusiast the opportunity of separation from the world of temptation and storm, but were equally inviting to men devoted first of all to the intellectual life. The scholar and the educator found within their walls not only peaceful escape from the harshnesses of political change and military broil, but the opportunity to labor usefully and unmolested in the occupation that pleased them most. The cloister became a Christian inst.i.tute. The example of Ca.s.siodorus was followed two hundred years later on a larger scale by Charlemagne. Schools were founded both in cloister and at court, scholars summoned, ma.n.u.scripts copied, the life of pagan antiquity studied, and the bond between the languages and cultures of present and past made firmer. The schools of the old regime had fallen away in the sixth century, when Northern rule had closed the civic career to natives of Italy. A great advance in the intellectual life now laid the foundations of all cultural effort in the Middle Age.

No small part of this advance was due to the preservation of ma.n.u.scripts by copying. In this activity France was first, so far as Horace was concerned. The copies by the scribes of Charlemagne went back to Mavortius and Porphyrio, the originals of which were probably discovered at Bobbio by his scholars. Of the two hundred and fifty ma.n.u.scripts in existence, the greater part are French in origin, the oldest being the Bernensis, of the ninth or tenth century, from near Orleans. Germany was a worthy second to France. The finds in monastery libraries of both countries in the humanist movement of the fifteenth century were especially rich. Italy, on the contrary, preserved few ma.n.u.scripts of her poet, and none that is really ancient. Italy began the great monastery movement, but disorder and change were against the diffusion of culture. Charlemagne's efforts probably had little to do with Italy.

The Church seems to have had no care to preserve the ancient culture of her native land.

What this meant in terms of actual acquaintance with the poet would not be clear without evidence of other kinds. By the end of the sixth century, knowledge of Horace was already vague. He was not read in Africa, Spain, or Gaul. Read in Italy up to Charlemagne's time, a hundred years later his works are not to be found in the catalogue of Bobbio, one of the greatest seats of learning. What the general att.i.tude of the Church's leaders.h.i.+p toward him was, may be conjectured from the declaration of Gregory the Great against all beauty in writing. Its general capacity for Horace may perhaps be surmised also from the confession of the Pope's contemporary, Gregory of Tours, that he is unfamiliar with the ancient literary languages. The few readers of the late Empire had become fewer still. The difficult form and matter of the _Odes_, and their unadaptability to religious and moral use, disqualified them for the approval of all but the individual scholar or literary enthusiast. The moralities of the _Epistles_ were more tractable, and formed the largest contribution to the _Florilegia_, or flower-collections, that were circulated by themselves. Horace did not contain the facile and stimulating tales of Ovid, he was not a Virgil the story-teller and almost Christian, his lines did not exercise a strong appeal to the ear, he was not an example of the rhetorical, like Lucan, his satire did not lend itself, like a Juvenal's, to universal condemnation of paganism.

In the eighth century, Columban knows Horace, the Venerable Bede cites him four times, and Alcuin is called a Flaccus. The York catalogue of Alcuin shows the presence of most of the cla.s.sic authors. Paul the Deacon, who wrote a poem in the Sapphics he learned from Horace, is declared, he says, to be like Homer, Flaccus, and Virgil, but ungratefully and ungraciously adds, ”men like that I'll compare with dogs.” In Spain, Saint Isidore of Seville knew Horace in the seventh century, though the Rule of Isidore, as of some other monastic legislators, forbade the use of pagan authors without special permission; yet the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, and the struggle between the Gothic, Christian, and Islamic civilizations resulted, for the next six or seven centuries, in what seems total oblivion of the poet.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the impulse of the Carolingian favor, France, in which there is heretofore no evidence of Horace's presence from the end of Roman times, becomes the greatest center of ma.n.u.script activity, the Bernensis and six Parisian exemplars dating from this period. Yet the indexes of St. Gall, Reichenau, and Bobbio contain the name of no work of Horace, and only Nevers and Loesch contained his complete works. The _Ecbasis Captivi_, an animal-epic appearing at Toul in 940, has one fifth of its verses formed out of Horace in the manner of the _cento_, or patchwork. At about the same time, the famous Hrosvitha of Gandersheim writes her six Christian dramas patterned after Terence, and in them uses Horace. Mention by Walter of Speyer, and interest shown by the active monastery on the Tegernsee, are of the same period. The tenth century is sometimes spoken of as the Latin Renaissance under the Ottos, the first of whom, called the Great, crowned Emperor at Rome in 962, welcomed scholars at his court and made every effort to promote learning.

The momentum of intellectual interest is not lost in the eleventh century. Paris becomes its most ardent center, with Reims, Orleans, and Fleury also of note. The _Codex Parisinus_ belongs to this period.

German activity, too, is at its height, especially in the education of boys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horace copied under Desiderius. Peter Damian was its man of greatest learning, but the times were intellectually stagnant. The popes were occupied by rivalry with the emperors. It was the century of Gregory the Seventh and Canossa.

In the twelfth century came the struggle of the Hohenstaufen with the Italian cities, and the disorder and turmoil of the rise of the communes and the division of Italy. One catalogue shows a Horace, and one ma.n.u.script dates from the time. England and France are united by the Norman Conquest in much the same way as Germany and France had been a.s.sociated in the kingdom of Charlemagne. It is the century of Roger Bacon. Especially in Germany, England, and France, it is the age of the Crusades and the knightly orders. It is an age of the spread of culture among the common people. In France, it is the age of the monastery of Cluny, and the age of Abelard. Education and travel became the mode. In general, acquaintance with Horace among cultivated men may now be taken for granted. The _Epistles_ and _Satires_ find more favor than the _Odes_. Five hundred and twenty citations of the former and seventy-seven of the latter have been collected for the twelfth century.

The thirteenth century marks a decline in the intellectual life. The Crusades exhaust the energies of the time, and detract from its literary interest. The German rulers and the Italian ecclesiasts are absorbed in the struggle for supremacy between pope and emperor. Scholasticism overshadows humanism. The humanistic tradition of Charlemagne has died out, and the intellectual ideal is represented by Vincent of Beauvais and the _Speculum Historiale_. There is no mention of Horace in the catalogues of Italy. The ma.n.u.scripts of France are careless, the comments and glosses poor. The decline will continue until arrested by the Renaissance.

It must not be forgotten that among all these scattered and flickering attentions to Horace there was the constant nucleus of instruction in the school. That he was used for this purpose first in the Carolingian cloister-schools, and later in the secular schools which grew to independent existence as a result of the vigorous spread of educational spirit, cannot be doubtful. Gerbert, dying at the beginning of the eleventh century as Pope Sylvester II, is known to have interpreted Horace in his school. This is the oldest direct evidence of the scholastic use of Horace, but other proofs are to be seen in the commentaries of the medieval period, all of which are of a kind suitable for school use, and in the marginal annotations, often in the native tongue.

The decline of humane studies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries meant also the decline of interest in Horace, who had always been above all the poet of the cultivated few. At the beginning of the thirteenth century in Italy, nowhere but at Bologna and Rome was Latin taught except as the elementary instruction necessary to the study of civil and canonical law. Gaufried of Vinesaux, coming from England to Italy, and composing an _Ars Dictaminis_ and a _Poietria Nova_ containing Horatian reminiscences, is one of two or three significant examples of Latin teachers who concerned themselves with literature as well as language.

Coluccio Salutati, wanting to buy a copy of Horace in 1370, is apparently unable to find it. The decline of interest in Horace will be arrested only by the Rebirth of Learning.

The intellectual movement back to the cla.s.sical authors and the cla.s.sical civilizations is well called the Rebirth. The brilliance of the new era as compared with the thousand years that lead to it from the most high and palmiest days of Rome is such as to dim almost to darkness the brightest days of medieval culture. The new life into which Horace is now to enter will be so spirited and full that the old life, though by no means devoid of active influence in society at large and in the individual soul, will seem indeed like a long death and a waiting for the resurrection into a new heaven and a new earth.

4. HORACE AND MODERN TIMES

THE REBIRTH OF HORACE

The national character of the _Aeneid_ gave Virgil a greater appeal than Horace in ancient Roman times. In the Middle Age, his qualities as story-teller and poet of the compa.s.sionate heart, together with his fame as necromancer and prophet, made still more p.r.o.nounced the favor in which he was held. The ignorance of the earlier centuries of the period could not appreciate Horace the logical, the intellectual, the difficult, while the schematized religion and knowledge of the later were not attracted by Horace the philosophical and individual.

With the Renaissance and its quickening of intellectual life in general, and in particular the value it set upon personality and individualism, the positions of the poets were reversed. For four hundred years now it can hardly be denied that Horace rather than Virgil has been the representative Latin poet of humanism.

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