Part 13 (1/2)
Oh, Sestius, happy Sestius! use the moments as they pa.s.s; Far-reaching hopes are not for us, the creatures of a day.
”Thee soon shall night enshroud; and the Manes' phantom crowd, And the starveling house unbeautiful of Pluto shut thee in; And thou shalt not banish care by the ruddy wine-cup there, Nor woo the gentle Lycidas, whom all are mad to win.”
A modern would no more think of using such images as those of the last two verses to stimulate the festivity of his friends than he would of placing, like the old Egyptians, a skull upon his dinner-table, or of decorating his ball-room with Holbein's ”Dance of Death.” We rebuke our pride or keep our vanities in check by the thought of death, and our poets use it to remind us that
”The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things.”
Horace does this too; but out of the sad certainty of mortality he seems to extract a keener zest for the too brief enjoyment of the flying hours. Why is this? Probably because by the pagan mind life on this side the grave was regarded as a thing more precious, more n.o.ble, than the life beyond. That there was a life beyond was undoubtedly the general belief. _”Sunt aliquid Manes; letum non omnia finit, Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos,_”--
”The Manes are no dream; death closes not Our all of being, and the wan-visaged shade Escapes unscathed from the funereal fires,”
says Propertius (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would be no meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades--in the ”_domus exilis Plutonia_;” in the Hermes driving the spirits of the dead across the Styx; in the ”_judicantem Aeac.u.m, sedesque, discretas piorum_”--the ”Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fields serene” (Odes, II. 13).
But this after-life was a cold, sunless, unsubstantial thing, lower in quality and degree than the full, vigorous, pa.s.sionate life of this world. The n.o.bler spirits of antiquity, it hardly need be said, had higher dreams of a future state than this. For them, no more than for us, was it possible to rest in the conviction that their brief and troubled career on earth was to be the ”be all and the end all” of existence, or that those whom they had loved and lost in death became thenceforth as though they had never been. It is idle to draw, as is often done, a different conclusion from such phrases as that after death we are a shadow and mere dust, ”_pulvis et umbra sumus_!” or from Horace's bewildered cry (Odes, I. 24), when a friend of signal n.o.bleness and purity is suddenly struck down--”_Ergo Quinctilium perpetuus sopor urget_?”--”And is Quinctilius, then, weighed down by a sleep that knows no waking?” We might as reasonably argue that Shakespeare did not believe in a life after death because he makes Prospero say--
”We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
Horace and Shakespeare both believed in an immortality, but it was an immortality different in its kind. Horace, indeed,--who, as a rule, is wisely silent on a question which for him had no solution, however much it may have engaged his speculations,--has gleams not unlike those which irradiate our happier creed, as when he writes (Odes, III. 2) of ”_Virtus, recludens immeritis mori coelum, negata tentat iter via_”--
”Worth, which heaven's gates to those unbars Who never should have died, A pathway cleaves among the stars, To meaner souls denied.”
But they are only gleams, impa.s.sioned hopes, yearnings of the unsatisfied soul in its search for some solution of the great mystery of life. To him, therefore, it was of more moment than it was to us, to make the most of the present, and to stimulate his relish for what it has to give by contrasting it with a phantasmal future, in which no single faculty of enjoyment should be left.
Take from life the time spent in hopes or fears or regrets, and how small the residue! For the same reason, therefore, that he prized life intensely, Horace seems to have resolved to keep these consumers of its hours as much at bay as possible. He would not look too far forward even for a pleasure; for Hope, he knew, comes never unaccompanied by her twin sister Fear. Like the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, this is ever in his thoughts--
”What boots it to repeat, How Time is slipping underneath our feet?
Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday, Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?”.
To-day--that alone is ours. Let us welcome and note what it brings, and, if good, enjoy it; if evil, endure. Let us, in any case, keep our eyes and senses open, and not lose their impressions in dreaming of an irretrievable past or of an impenetrable future. ”Write it on your heart,” says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), ”that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you never learn that as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glories between To-day and us, these pa.s.sing hours shall glitter, and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?” Horace would have hailed a brother in the philosopher of New England.
Even in inviting Maecenas to his Sabine farm (Odes, III. 29), he does not think it out of place to remind the minister of state, worn with the cares of government, and looking restlessly ahead to antic.i.p.ate its difficulties, that it may, after all, be wiser not to look so far ahead, or to trouble himself about contingencies which may never arise. We must not think that Horace undervalued that essential quality of true statesmans.h.i.+p, the ”_animus rerum prudens_” (Odes, IV. 9), the forecasting spirit that ”looks into the seeds of Time,” and reads the issues of events while they are still far off. He saw and prized the splendid fruits of the exercise of this very power in the growing tranquillity and strength of the Roman empire. But the wisest may over-study a subject. Maecenas may have been working too hard, and losing under the pressure something of his usual calmness; and Horace, while urging him to escape from town for a few days, may have had it in view to insinuate the suggestion, that Jove smiles, not at the common mortal merely, but even at the sagacious statesman, who is over-anxious about the future--”_ultra fas trepidat_”--and to remind him that, after all,
”There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we may.”
Dryden's splendid paraphrase of this Ode is one of the glories of our literature, but it is a paraphrase, and a version closer to the original may be more appropriate here:--
”Scion of Tuscan kings, in store I've laid a cask of mellow wine, That never has been broached before.
I've roses, too, for wreaths to twine, And Nubian nut, that for thy hair An oil shall yield of fragrance rare.
”The plenty quit, that only palls, And, turning from the cloud-capped pile That towers above thy palace halls, Forget to wors.h.i.+p for a while The privileges Rome enjoys, Her smoke, her splendour, and her noise.
”It is the rich who relish best To dwell at times from state aloof; And simple suppers, neatly dressed, Beneath a poor man's humble roof, With neither pall nor purple there, Have smoothed ere now the brow of care.
”Now with his spent and languid flocks The wearied shepherd seeks the shade, The river cool, the s.h.a.ggy rocks, That overhang the tangled glade, And by the stream no breeze's gush Disturbs the universal hush.
”Thou dost devise with sleepless zeal What course may best the state beseem, And, fearful for the City's weal, Weigh'st anxiously each hostile scheme That may be hatching far away In Scythia, India, or Cathay.
”Most wisely Jove in thickest night The issues of the future veils, And laughs at the self-torturing wight Who with imagined terrors quails.
The present only is thine own, Then use it well, ere it has flown.
”All else which may by time be bred Is like a river of the plain, Now gliding gently o'er its bed Along to the Etruscan main, Now whirling onwards, fierce and fast, Uprooted trees, and boulders vast,