Part 6 (1/2)

This is not to say that Horace is greater than Virgil, or that he is as great. Virgil is still the poet of stately movement and golden narrative, the poet of the grand style. Owing to the greater facility with which he may be read, he is also still the poet of the young and of greater numbers. With the coming of the new era he did not lose in the esteem that is based upon the appreciation of literary art, but rather gained.

It will be better to say that Horace finally came more fully into his own. This was not because he changed. He did not change. The times changed. The barriers of intellectual sloth and artificiality fell away, and men became accessible to him. Virgil lost nothing of his old-time appeal to the fancy and to the ear, but Horace's virtues also were discovered: his distinction in word and phrase, his understanding of the human heart. Virgil lost nothing of his charm for youth and age, but Horace was discovered as the poet of the riper and more thoughtful mind.

Virgil remained the admired, but Horace became the friend. Virgil remained the guide, but Horace became the companion. ”Virgil,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes, ”has been the object of an adoration amounting almost to wors.h.i.+p, but he will often be found on the shelf, while Horace lies on the student's table, next his hand.”

The nature and extent of Horace's influence upon modern letters and life will be best brought into relief by a brief historical review. It is not necessary to this purpose, nor would it be possible, within ordinary limits, to enter into a detailed account. It will be appropriate to begin with Italy.

_i_. IN ITALY

Horace did not spring immediately into prominence with the coming of the Renaissance, whether elsewhere or in Italy. As might be expected, the essentially epic and medieval Dante found inspiration in Virgil rather than in Horace, though the _Ars Poetica_ was known to him and quoted more than once as authority on style. ”This is what our master Horace teaches,” runs one of the pa.s.sages, ”when at the beginning of _Poetry_ he says, 'Choose a subject, etc.'” The imperfect idea of Horace formed in Dante's mind is indicated by the one verse in the _Divina Commedia_ which refers to him:

L' altro e Orazio satiro che viene,--

T_he other coming is Horace the satirist_.

With Petrarch, the first great figure to emerge from the obscure vistas of medievalism, the case was different. The first modern who really understood the cla.s.sics understood Horace also, and did him greater justice than fell to his lot again for many generations. The copy of Horace's works which he acquired on November 28, 1347, remained by him until on the 18th of July in 1374 the venerable poet and scholar was found dead at the age of seventy among his books. Fond as he was of Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca, he had an intimate and affectionate knowledge of Horace, to whom there are references in all his works, and from whom he enriched his philosophy of life. Even his greatest and most original creation, the _Canzoniere_, is not without marks of Horace, and their fewness here, as well as their character, are a sign that Petrarch's familiarity was not of the artificial sort, but based on real a.s.similation of the poet. His letter to Horace begins:

Salve o dei lirici modi sovrano, Salve o degl' Itali gloria ed onor,--

H_ail! Sovereign of the lyric measure_, H_ail! Italy's great pride and treasure_;

and, after recounting the qualities of the poet, and acknowledging him as guide, teacher, and lord, concludes:

Tanto e l' amor che a te m'avvince; tanto e degli affetti miei donno il tuo canto--

S_o great the love that bindeth me to thee_; S_o ruleth in my heart thy minstrelsy_.

But Petrarch is a torch-bearer so far in advance of his successors that the illumination almost dies out again before they arrive. It was not until well into the fifteenth century that the long and numerous line of imitators, translators, adapters, parodists, commentators, editors, and publishers began, which has continued to the present day. The modern-Latin poets in all countries were the first, but their efforts soon gave place to attempts in the vernacular tongues. The German Eduard Stemplinger, in his _Life of the Horatian Lyric Since the Renaissance_, published in 1906, knows 90 English renderings of the entire _Odes_ of Horace, 70 German, 100 French, and 48 Italian. Some are in prose, some even in dialect. The poet of Venusia is made a Burgundian, a Berliner, and even a Platt-deutsch. All of these are attempts to transfuse Horace into the veins of modern life, and are significant of their authors'

conviction as to the vitalizing power of the ancient poet. No author from among the cla.s.sics has been so frequently translated as Horace.

Petrarch, as we have seen, led the modern world by a century in the appreciation of Horace. It was in 1470, ninety-six years after the laureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of the poet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474 by a printing of Acro's notes, grown by accretion since their origin in the third century into a much larger body of commentary. In 1476 was published the first Horace containing both text and notes, which were those of Acro and Porphyrio, and in 1482 appeared Landinus's notes, the first printed commentary on Horace by a modern humanist. Landinus was prefaced by a Latin poem of Politian's, who, with Lorenzo dei Medici, was a sort of arbiter in taste, and who produced in 1500 a Horace of his own. Mancinelli, who, like many other scholars of the time, gave public readings and interpretations of Horace and other cla.s.sics, in 1492 dedicated to the celebrated enthusiast Pomponius Laetus an edition of the _Odes_, _Epodes_, and _Secular Hymn_, in which he so successfully integrated the comments of Acro, Porphyrio, Landinus, and himself, that for the next hundred years it remained the most authoritative Horace. In Italy, between 1470 and 1500, appeared no fewer than 44 editions of the poet, while in France there were four and in Germany about ten. Venice alone published, from 1490 to 1500, thirteen editions containing text and commentary by ”The Great Four,” as they were called. The famous Aldine editions began to appear in 1501. Besides Venice, Florence, and Rome, Ferrara came early to be a brilliant center of Horatian study, Lionel d'Este and the Guarini preparing the way for the more distinguished, if less scholastic, disciples.h.i.+p of Ariosto and Ta.s.so.

Naples and the South displayed little activity.

Roughly speaking, the later fifteenth century was the age of ma.n.u.script recovery, commentary, and publication; the sixteenth, the century of translation, imitation, and ambitious attempt to rival the ancients on their own ground; the seventeenth and eighteenth, the centuries of critical erudition, with many commentaries and versions and much discussion of the theory of translation; and the nineteenth, the century of scientific revision and reconstruction. In the last movement, Italy had comparatively small part. Among her translators during these centuries must be mentioned Ludovico Dolce, whose excellent rendering of the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ was a product of the early sixteenth; Scipione Ponsa, whose faithful _Ars Poetica_ in _ottava rima_ appeared in the first half of the seventeenth; the advocate Borgianelli, whose brilliant version of Horace entire belongs to the second half; and the Venetian Abriani, whose complete _Odes_ in the original meters, the first achievement of the kind, was a not unsuccessful performance which has taken its place among Horatian curiosities. Among literary critics are the names of Gravina, whose _Della Ragione Poetica_, full of sound scholars.h.i.+p and refres.h.i.+ng good sense, appeared in 1716 at Naples; Volpi of Padua, author of a treatise on Satire, in which the merits of Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius were effectively discussed; and their followers, Algarotti the Venetian and Vannetti of Roveredo, in whom Horatian criticism reached its greatest alt.i.tude.

If we look outside the field of scholastic endeavor and academic imitation, and attempt to discern the effect of Horace in actual literary creation, we are confronted by the difficulty of determining exactly where imitation and adaptation cease to be artificial, and reach the degree of individuality and independence which ent.i.tles them to the name of originality. If we are to include here such authors as are manifestly indebted to suggestion or inspiration from Horace, and yet are quite as manifestly modern and Italian, we may note at least the names of Petrarch, already mentioned; the famous Cardinal Bembo, whose ideal, to write ”thoughtfully and little,” was a reflection of Horace; Ariosto, whose satires are in the Horatian spirit, and who, complaining to his brother Alessandro of the att.i.tude of his patron, Cardinal Hippolyto d'Este, recites the story of the fox and the weasel, changing them to donkey and rat; Chiabrera of Savona, who wrote satire honeycombed with Horatian allusion and permeated by Horatian spirit, and who, in Leopardi's opinion, had he lived in a different age, would have been a second Horace; Testi of Ferrara, whom Ariosto's enthusiasm for Horace so kindled that he gravitated from the modern spirit to the cla.s.sical; Parini of Milan, whose poem, _Alla Musa_, is Horatian in spirit and phrase; Leopardi, who composed a parody on the _Ars Poetica_; Prati, who trans.m.u.ted _Epode II_ into the _Song of Hygieia_; and Carducci, whose use of Horatian meters, somewhat strained, is due to the conscious desire of making Italy's past greatness serve the present. The names of Bernardo Ta.s.so and Torquato Ta.s.so might be added.

It is not impossible, also, that the musical debt of the world to Italy is in a measure owing to Horace. Whether the music which accompanied the _Odes_ as they emerged from the Middle Age was only the invention of monks, or the survival of actual Horatian music from antiquity, is a question hardly to be answered; but the setting of Horace to music in the Renaissance was not without an influence. In 1507, Tritonius composed four-voice parts for twenty-two different meters of Horace and other poets. In 1526, Michael engaged in the same effort, and in 1534 Senfl developed the youthful compositions of Tritonius. All this was for school purposes. With the beginnings of Italian opera, these compositions, in which the music was without measure and held strictly to the service of poetry, came to an end. It is not unreasonable to suspect that in these early attempts at the union of ancient verse and music there exist the beginnings of the musical drama.

_ii_. IN FRANCE

France, where the great majority of Horatian ma.n.u.scripts were preserved, was the first to produce a translation of the _Odes_. Grandichan in 1541, and Pelletier in 1545, published translations of the _Ars Poetica_ which had important consequences. The famous Pleiad, whose most brilliant star, Pierre de Ronsard, was king of poetry for more than a score of years, were enthusiastic believers in the imitation of the cla.s.sics as a means for the improvement of letters in France. Du Bellay, the second in magnitude, published in 1550 his _Deffence et ill.u.s.tration de la langue francoyse_, a manifesto of the Pleiad full of quotations from the _Ars Poetica_ refuting a similar work of Sibilet published in 1548. Ronsard himself is said to have been the first to use the word ”ode” for Horace's lyrics. The meeting of the two, in 1547, is regarded as the beginning of the French school of Renaissance poetry. Horace thus became at the beginning an influence of the first magnitude in the actual life of modern French letters. In 1579 appeared Mondot's complete translation. The versions of Dacier and Sanadon, in prose, in the earlier eighteenth century, were an innovation provoking spirited opposition in Italy. The line of translators, imitators, and enthusiasts in France is as numerous as that of other countries. The list of great authors inspired by Horace includes such names as Montaigne, ”The French Horace,” Malherbe, Regnier, Boileau, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Le Brun, Andre Chenier, De Musset.

_iii_. IN GERMANY

In Germany, the Renaissance movement had its p.r.o.nounced beginning at Heidelberg. In that city began also the active study of Horace, in the lectures on Horace in 1456. The _Epistles_ were first printed in 1482 at Leipzig, the _Epodes_ in 1488, and in 1492 appeared the first complete Horace. Up to 1500, about ten editions had been published, only those of 1492 and 1498 being Horace entire, and none of them with commentary except that of 1498, which had a few notes and metrical signs to indicate the structure of the verse. The first German to translate a poem of Horace was Johann Fischart, 1550-90, who rendered the second _Epode_ in 145 rhymed couplets. The famous Silesian, Opitz, ”father of German poetry,” and his followers, were to Germany what the Pleiad were to France. His work on poetry, 1624, was grounded in Horace, and was long the canon. Bucholz, in 1639, produced the first translation of an entire book of the _Odes_ in German. Weckherlin, 1548-1653, translated three _Odes_, Gottsched of Leipzig, 1700-66, and Breitinge of Zurich, confess Horace as master of the art of poetry, and their cities become the centers of many translations. Gunther, 1695-1728, the most gifted lyric poet of his race before Klopstock, made Horace his companion and confidant of leisure hours. Hagedorn, 1708-54, forms his philosophy from Horace,--”my friend, my teacher, my companion.” Of Ramler, for thirty-five years dictator of the Berlin literary world, who translated and published some of the _Odes_ in 1769 and was called the German Horace, Lessing said that no sovereign had ever been so beautifully addressed as was Frederick the Great in his imitation of the Maecenas ode. The epoch-making Klopstock, 1724-1803, quotes, translates, and imitates Horace, and uses Horatian subjects. Heinse reads him and writes of him enthusiastically, and Platen, 1796-1835, is so full of Homer and Horace that he can do nothing of his own. Lessing and Herder are devoted Horatians, though Herder thinks that Lessing and Winckelmann are too unreserved in their enthusiasm for the imitation of cla.s.sical letters.