Part 9 (2/2)
The height of my disdain shall be To laugh at him, to blush for thee; To love thee still, yet go no more A-begging to a beggar's door.”
Note how Horace deals with the same theme in his Ode to Pyrrha, famous in Milton's overrated translation, and the difference between the young man writing under the smart of wounded feeling and the poet, calmly though intensely elaborating his subject as a work of art, becomes at once apparent.
”Pyrrha, what slender boy, in perfume steeped, Doth in the shade of some delightful grot Caress thee now on couch with roses heaped?
For whom dost thou thine amber tresses knot
”With all thy seeming-artless grace? Ah me, How oft will he thy perfidy bewail, And joys all flown, and shudder at the sea Rough with the chafing of the bl.u.s.t'rous gale,
”Who now, fond dreamer, revels in thy charms; Who, all unweeting how the breezes veer, Hopes still to find a welcome in thine arms As warm as now, and thee as loving-dear!
”Ah, woe for those on whom thy spell is flung!
My votive tablet, in the temple set, Proclaims that I to ocean's G.o.d have hung The vestments in my s.h.i.+pwreck smirched and wet.”
It may be that among Horace's odes some were directly inspired by the ladies to whom they are addressed; but it is time that modern criticism should brush away all the elaborate nonsense which has been written to demonstrate that Pyrrha, Chloe, Lalage, Lydia, Lyde, Leuconoe, Tyndaris, Glycera, and Barine, not to mention others, were real personages to whom the poet was attached. At this rate his occupations must have rather been those of a Don Giovanni than of a man of studious habits and feeble health, who found it hard enough to keep pace with the milder dissipations of the social circle. We are absolutely without any information as to these ladies, whose liquid and beautiful names are almost poems in themselves; nevertheless the most wonderful romances have been spun about them out of the inner consciousness of the commentators. Who would venture to deal in this way with the Eleanore, and ”rare pale Margaret,” and Cousin Amy, of Mr Tennyson? And yet to do so would be quite as reasonable as to conclude, as some critics have done, that such a poem as the following (Odes, I. 23) was not a graceful poetical exercise merely, but a serious appeal to the object of a serious pa.s.sion:--
”Nay, hear me, dearest Chloe, pray!
You shun me like a timid fawn, That seeks its mother all the day By forest brake and upland, lawn, Of every pa.s.sing breeze afraid, And leaf that twitters in the glade.
”Let but the wind with sudden rush The whispers of the wood awake, Or lizard green disturb the hush, Quick-darting through the gra.s.sy brake, The foolish frightened thing will start, With trembling knees and beating heart.[1]
”But I am neither lion fell Nor tiger grim to work you woe; I love you, sweet one, much too well, Then cling not to your mother so, But to a lover's fonder arms Confide your ripe and rosy charms.”
[1] The same idea has been beautifully worked out by Spenser, in whom, and in Milton, the influence of Horace's poetry is perhaps more frequently traceable than in any of our poets:--
”Like as an hynde forth singled from the herde, That hath escaped from a ravenous beast, Yet flies away, of her own feet afearde; And every leaf, that shaketh with the least Murmure of winde, her terror hath encreast; So fled fayre Florimel from her vaine feare, Long after she from perill was releast; Each shade she saw, and each noyse she did heare, Did seeme to be the same, which she escaypt whileare.”
Fairy Queen, III. vii. 1.
Such a poem as this, one should have supposed, might have escaped the imputation of being dictated by mere personal desire. But no; even so acute a critic as Walckenaer will have it that Chloe was one of Horace's many mistresses, to whom he fled for consolation when Lydia, another of them, played him false, ”et qu'il l'a recherchee avec empress.e.m.e.nt.” And his sole ground for this conclusion is the circ.u.mstance that a Chloe is mentioned in this sense in the famous Dialogue, in which Horace and Lydia have quite gratuitously been a.s.sumed to be the speakers. That is to say, he first a.s.sumes that the dialogue is not a mere exercise of fancy, but a serious fact, and, having got so far, concludes as a matter of course that the Chloe of the one ode is the Chloe of the other! ”The ancients,” as b.u.t.tmann has well said, ”had the skill to construct such poems so that each speech tells us by whom it is spoken; but we let the editors treat us all our lives as schoolboys, and interline such dialogues, as we do our plays, with the names. Even in an English poem we should be offended at seeing Collins by the side of Phyllis.” Read without the prepossession which the constant mention of it as a dialogue between Horace and Lydia makes it difficult to avoid, the Ode commends itself merely as a piece of graceful fancy. Real feeling is the last thing one looks for in two such excessively well-bred and fickle personages as the speakers. Their pouting and reconciliation make very pretty fooling, such as might be appropriate in the wonderful beings who people the garden landscapes of Watteau. But where are the fever and the strong pulse of pa.s.sion which, in less ethereal mortals, would be proper to such a theme? Had there been a real lady in the case, the tone would have been less measured, and the strophes less skilfully balanced.
”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 Calas--and I Am all his pa.s.sion, 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, And lighter thou than cork--ah why?
More churlish, too, than Adria's sea, With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die!”
In this graceful trifle Horace is simply dealing with one of the commonplaces of poetry, most probably only transplanting a Greek flower into the Latin soil. There is more of the vigour of originality and of living truth in the following ode to Barine (II. 8), where he gives us a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that _beaute de diable_, ”dallying and dangerous,” as Charles Lamb called Peg Woffington's, and, what hers was not, heartless, which never dies out of the world. A real person, Lord Lytton thinks, ”was certainly addressed, and in a tone which, to such a person, would have been the most exquisite flattery; and as certainly the person is not so addressed by a lover”--a criticism which, coming from such an observer, outweighs the opposite conclusions of a score of pedantic scholars:--
”If for thy perjuries and broken truth, Barine, thou hadst ever come to harm, Hadst lost, but in a nail or blackened tooth, One single charm,
”I'd trust thee; but when thou art most forsworn, Thou blazest forth with beauty most supreme, And of our young men art, noon, night, and morn, The thought, the dream.
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