Part 4 (2/2)
”Maecenas, Virgil, Varius,--if I please In my poor writings these and such as these,-- If Plotius, Valgius, Fuscus will commend, And good Octavius, I've achieved my end.
You, n.o.ble Pollio (let your friend disclaim All thoughts of flattery, when he names your name), Messala and his brother, Servius too, And Bibulus, and Furnius kind and true, With others, whom, despite their sense and wit, And friendly hearts, I purposely omit; Such I would have my critics; men to gain Whose smiles were pleasure, to forget them pain.” (C.)
It is not strange that Horace, even in these early days, numbered so many distinguished men among his friends, for, the question of genius apart, there must have been something particularly engaging in his kindly and affectionate nature. He was a good hater, as all warm-hearted men are; and when his blood was up, he could, like Diggory, ”remember his swas.h.i.+ng blow.” He would fain, as he says himself (Satires, II. 1), be at peace with all men:--
”But he who shall my temper try-- 'Twere best to touch me not, say I-- Shall rue it, and through all the town My verse shall d.a.m.n him with renown.”
But with his friends he was forbearing, devoted, lenient to their foibles, not boring them with his own, liberal in construing their motives, and as trustful in their loyalty to himself as he was a.s.sured of his own to them; clearly a man to be loved--a man pleasant to meet and pleasant to remember, constant, and to be relied on in suns.h.i.+ne or in gloom. Friends.h.i.+p with him was not a thing to be given by halves.
He could see a friend's faults-no man quicker-but it did not lie in his mouth to babble about them. He was not one of those who ”whisper faults and hesitate dislikes.” Love me, love my friend, was his rule. Neither would he sit quietly by, while his friends were being disparaged. And if he has occasion himself to rally their foibles in his poems, he does so openly, and does it with such an implied sympathy and avowal of kindred weakness in himself, that offence was impossible. Above all, he possessed in perfection what Mr Disraeli happily calls ”the rare gift of raillery, which flatters the self-love of those whom it seems not to spare.” These characteristics are admirably indicated by Persius (I.
116) in speaking of his Satires--
”Arch Horace, while he strove to mend, Probed all the foibles of his smiling friend; Played lightly round and round each peccant part, And won, unfelt, an entrance to his heart.” (Gifford.)
And we may be sure the same qualities were even more conspicuous in his personal intercourse with his friends. Satirist though he was, he is continually inculcating the duty of charitable judgments towards all men.
”What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted,”
is a thought often suggested by his works. The best need large grains of allowance, and to whom should these be given if not to friends? Here is his creed on this subject (Satires, I. 3):--
”True love, we know, is blind; defects, that blight The loved one's charms, escape the lover's sight, Nay, pa.s.s for beauties; as Balbinus shows A pa.s.sion for the wen on Agna's nose.
Oh, with our friends.h.i.+ps that we did the same, And screened our blindness under virtue's name!
For we are bound to treat a friend's defect With touch most tender, and a fond respect; Even as a father treats a child's, who hints, The urchin's eyes are roguish, if he squints: Or if he be as stunted, short, and thick, As Sisyphus the dwarf, will call him 'chick!'
If crooked all ways, in back, in legs, and thighs, With softening phrases will the flaw disguise.
So, if one friend too close a fist betrays, Let us ascribe it to his frugal ways; Or is another--such we often find-- To flippant jest and braggart talk inclined, 'Tis only from a kindly wish to try To make the time 'mongst friends go lightly by; Another's tongue is rough and over-free, Let's call it bluntness and sincerity; Another's choleric; him we must screen, As cursed with feelings for his peace too keen.
This is the course, methinks, that makes a friend, And, having made, secures him to the end.”
What wonder, such being his practice--for Horace in this as in other things acted up to his professions--that he was so dear, as we see he was, to so many of the best men of his time? The very contrast which his life presented to that of most of his a.s.sociates must have helped to attract them to him. Most of them were absorbed in either political or military pursuits. Wealth, power, dignity, the splendid prizes of ambition, were the dream of their lives. And even those whose tastes inclined mainly towards literature and art were not exempt from the prevailing pa.s.sion for riches and display. Rich, they were eager to be more rich; well placed in society, they were covetous of higher social distinction. Now at Rome, gay, luxurious, dissipated; anon in Spain, Parthia, Syria, Africa, or wherever duty, interest, or pleasure called them, encountering perils by land and sea with reckless indifference to fatigue and danger, always with a hunger at their hearts for something, which, when found, did not appease it; they must have felt a peculiar interest in a man who, without apparent effort, seemed to get so much more out of life than they were able to do, with all their struggles, and all their much larger apparent means of enjoyment. They must have seen that wealth and honour were both within his grasp, and they must have known, too, that it was from no lack of appreciation of either that he deliberately declined to seek them. Wealth would have purchased for him many a refined pleasure which he could heartily appreciate, and honours might have saved him from some of the social slights which must have tested his philosophy. But he told them, in every variety of phrase and ill.u.s.tration--in ode, in satire, and epistle--that without self-control and temperance in all things, there would be no joy without remorse, no pleasure without fatigue--that it is from within that happiness must come, if it come at all, and that unless the mind has schooled itself to peace by the renunciation of covetous desires,
”We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest.”
And as he spoke, so they must have seen he lived. Wealth and honours would manifestly have been bought too dearly at the sacrifice of the tranquillity and independence which he early set before him as the objects of his life.
”The content, surpa.s.sing wealth, The sage in meditation found;”
the content which springs from living in consonance with the dictates of nature, from healthful pursuits, from a conscience void of offence; the content which is incompatible with the gnawing disquietudes of avarice, of ambition, of social envy,--with that in his heart, he knew he could be true to his genius, and make life worth living for. A man of this character must always be rare; least of all was he likely to be common in Horace's day, when the men in whose circle he was moving were engaged in the great task of crus.h.i.+ng the civil strife which had shaken the stability of the Roman power, and of consolidating an empire greater and more powerful than her greatest statesmen had previously dreamed of.
But all the more delightful to these men must it have been to come into intimate contact with a man who, while perfectly appreciating their special gifts and aims, could bring them back from the stir and excitement of their habitual life to think of other things than social or political successes,--to look into their own hearts, and to live for a time for something better and more enduring than the triumphs of vanity or ambition.
Horace from the first seems to have wisely determined to keep himself free from those shackles which most men are so eager to forge for themselves, by setting their heart on wealth and social distinction.
With perfect sincerity he had told Maecenas, as we have seen, that he coveted neither, and he gives his reasons thus (Satires, I. 6):--
”For then a larger income must be made, Men's favour courted, and their whims obeyed; Nor could I then indulge a lonely mood, Away from town, in country solitude, For the false retinue of pseudo-friends, That all my movements servilely attends.
More slaves must then be fed, more horses too, And chariots bought. Now have I nought to do, If I would even to Tarentum ride, But mount my bobtailed mule, my wallets tied Across his flanks, which, napping as we go, With my ungainly ankles to and fro, Work his unhappy sides a world of weary woe.”
From this wise resolution he never swerved, and so through life he maintained an att.i.tude of independence in thought and action which would otherwise have been impossible. He does not say it in so many words, but the sentiment meets us all through his pages, which Burns, whose mode of thinking so often reminds us of Horace, puts into the line,
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