Part 14 (1/2)
[1] So Cowley, in his poem on the death of Mr William Harvey:--
”He was my friend, the truest friend on earth; A strong and mighty influence joined our birth.”
What the poet, in this burst of loving sympathy, said would happen, did happen almost as he foretold it. Maecenas ”first deceased;” and Horace, like the wife in the quaint, tender, old epitaph,
”For a little tried To live without him, liked it not, and died.”
But this was not till many years after this Ode was written, which must have been about the year B.C. 36, when Horace was thirty-nine. Maecenas lived for seventeen years afterwards, and often and often, we may believe, turned to read the Ode, and be refreshed by it, when his pulse was low, and his heart sick and weary.
Horace included it in the first series of the Odes, containing Books I.
and II., which he gave to the world (B.C. 24). The first of these Odes, like the first of the Satires, is addressed to Maecenas. They had for the most part been written, and were, no doubt, separately in circulation several years before. That they should have met with success was certain; for the accomplished men who led society in Rome must have felt their beauty even more keenly than the scholars of a more recent time. These lyrics brought the music of Greece, which was their ideal, into their native verse; and a feeling of national pride must have helped to augment their admiration. Horace had tuned his ear upon the lyres of Sappho and Alcaeus. He had even in his youth essayed to imitate them in their own tongue,--a mistake as great as for Goethe or Heine to have tried to put their lyrical inspiration into the language of Herrick or of Burns. But Horace was preserved from perseverance in this mistake by his natural good sense, or, as he puts it himself, with a fair poetic licence (Satires, I. 10), by Rome's great founder Quirinus warning him in a dream, that
”To think of adding to the mighty throng Of the great paragons of Grecian song, Were no less mad an act than his who should Into a forest carry logs of wood.”
These exercises may not, however, have been without their value in enabling him to transfuse the melodic rhythm of the Greeks into his native verse. And as he was the first to do this successfully, if we except Catullus in some slight but exquisite poems, so he was the last.
”Of lyrists,” says Quintilian, ”Horace is alone, one might say, worthy to be read. For he has bursts of inspiration, and is full of playful delicacy and grace; and in the variety of his images, as well as in expression, shows a most happy daring.” Time has confirmed the verdict; and it has recently found eloquent expression in the words of one of our greatest scholars:--
”Horace's style,” says Mr H. A. J. Munro, in the introduction to his edition of the poet, ”is throughout his own, borrowed from none who preceded him, successfully imitated by none who came after him. The Virgilian heroic was appropriated by subsequent generations of poets, and adapted to their purposes with signal success. The hendecasyllable and scazon of Catullus became part and parcel of the poetic heritage of Rome, and Martial employs them only less happily than their matchless creator. But the moulds in which Horace cast his lyrical and his satirical thoughts were broken at his death. The style neither of Persius nor of Juvenal has the faintest resemblance to that of their common master. Statius, whose hendecasyllables are pa.s.sable enough, has given us one Alcaic and one Sapphic ode, which recall the bald and constrained efforts of a modern schoolboy. I am sure he could not have written any two consecutive stanzas of Horace; and if he could not, who could?”
Before he published the first two books of his Odes, Horace had fairly felt his wings, and knew they could carry him gracefully and well. He no longer hesitates, as he had done while a writer of Satires only (p. 55), to claim the t.i.tle of poet; but at the same time he throws himself, in his introductory Ode, with a graceful deference, upon the judgment of Maecenas. Let that only seal his lyrics with approval, and he will feel a.s.sured of his t.i.tle to rank with the great sons of song:--
”Do thou but rank me 'mong The sacred bards of lyric song, I'll soar beyond the lists of time, And strike the stars with head sublime.”
In the last Ode, also addressed to Maecenas, of the Second Book, the poet gives way to a burst of joyous antic.i.p.ation of future fame, figuring himself as a swan soaring majestically across all the then known regions of the world. When he puts forth the Third Book several years afterwards, he closes it with a similar paean of triumph, which, unlike most prophecies of the kind, has been completely fulfilled. In both he alludes to the lowliness of his birth, speaking of himself in the former as a child of poor parents--”_pauperum sanguis parentum_;”
in the latter as having risen to eminence from a mean estate-”_ex humili potens_.” These touches of egotism, the sallies of some brighter hour, are not merely venial; they are delightful in a man so habitually modest.
”I've reared a monument, my own, More durable than bra.s.s; Yea, kingly pyramids of stone In height it doth surpa.s.s.
”Rain shall not sap, nor driving blast Disturb its settled base, Nor countless ages rolling past Its symmetry deface.
”I shall not wholly die. Some part, Nor that a little, shall Escape the dark Destroyer's dart, And his grim festival.
”For long as with his Vestals mute Rome's Pontifex shall climb The Capitol, my fame shall shoot Fresh buds through future time.
”Where brawls loud Aufidus, and came Parch'd Daunus erst, a horde Of rustic boors to sway, my name Shall be a household word;
”As one who rose from mean estate, The first with poet fire Aeolic song to modulate To the Italian lyre.
”Then grant, Melpomene, thy son Thy guerdon proud to wear, And Delphic laurels, duly won.
Bind thou upon my hair!”
CHAPTER IX.
HORACE'S RELATIONS WITH AUGUSTUS.--HIS LOVE OF INDEPENDENCE.
No intimate friend of Maecenas was likely to be long a stranger to Augustus; and it is most improbable that Augustus, who kept up his love of good literature amid all the distractions of conquest and empire, should not have early sought the acquaintance of a man of such conspicuous ability as Horace. But when they first became known to each other is uncertain. In more than one of the Epodes Horace speaks of him, but not in terms to imply personal acquaintance. Some years further on it is different. When Trebatius (Satires, II. 1) is urging the poet, if write he must, to renounce satire, and to sing of Caesar's triumphs, from which he would reap gain as well as glory, Horace replies,--
”Most worthy sir, that's just the thing I'd like especially to sing; But at the task my spirits faint, For 'tis not every one can paint Battalions, with their bristling wall Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul, With, s.h.i.+vered spear, in death-throe bleed, Or Parthian stricken from his steed.”