Each clung pitifully while the world abused and reviled him, to the only real thing he could find, to the only thing that gave pleasure, that intoxicating world of the senses whose too frequent kiss, like that of the Slavic Venus, brings death.
The Greek had the sanest view of this world’s life, the surest sense of beauty. The Hebrew had such a pitiful thirst for love, for something stable amid change, it stung him to desperation. The Persian thought most deeply, most logically of the mystery of life. The result of his thinking was, We can not know. We can not know. In expression each was an artist. And each was great because he was sincere. Palmam qui meruit ferat.
I read Horace first in an old university town in the north. Each night as I walked home from lectures, autumn leaves were being burned in fragrant piles, under long rows of trees that still were faintly amber, faintly crimson. I came from the burned plains where there were no trees. And at night over these same richly tree-shaded streets, and over the broad lonely campus where dark pointed evergreens grew, the Hunter’s Moon hung, large and lustrous.
Because of this, and likewise because of something in the nature of the Roman poet, it has always seemed to me that Horace is read best in the autumn. There is something in his mind that is native to the season. He came from the ripe, mellow autumn of a rich, a prodigious civilization that time was just beginning to touch with the shadows of age. Quintillian takes pains to tell us old Latin writers were stronger in genius than art. The opposite was true of Horace. With him poetry was not inspiration. He did not know its self-forgetful fury. Instead, it was one of the ornaments of a well-tempered life, out of which he wished to procure as much comfort as he could. In his verse there is nothing wonderful. At the same time it has an immortal touch. He was not a great imaginative poet. He was not a gifted dramatic poet. He seldom stirs the blood. But he has a smooth, even excellence, a companionableness, a marvelous proportion of word to thought. He is master of felicitous expression.
What was he to the Rome of his day? Was he what through accomplished Latin lecturers and study, he has become to us? Was he great as an artist? Or have years colored him, and the modern mind thrown over him a romantic halo? Or do we find him charming because he opens a door into the vanished world of Rome, where existed so many alluring pictures of memory, which we have loved, then dumbly longed for? Did he ripen with years? Did the smoke of time do for him what it did for Sabine wine, sweeten, mellow? Are there poets read best centuries after their day?
In him there is no restless modernity, no futile chasing of rainbows. Yet this serene art could not picture our world. We can measure changes which have come. It requires something tumultuous, less smooth, equable; less definite in outline. The model is at fault for sketchiness of written art, and a certain unsatisfactoriness as regards presentation. The reproduction must be nervous, with harsh lights, crude shadows. In the finished product absolutism is lacking. There is something that is trivial, infinitesimal, that sees darkly. Art has become uncertain. It no longer moves boldly. It has become a thing of temperament, instead of mind. The art of the pagan world was firmer. It approached life differently. Roman poets praise the masculine sound of the Latin lyre.
The philosophy, the thinking, of that antique day was muscled. It was sure, unwavering in line, as marbles. They had a firmer grasp upon life, the fact. We find Horace firm amid the shifting present. We can not find poetry so satisfying as his calm surveyal of things as they are. The pagan’s philosophic view of the inevitable, the nothingness which confronts man, tempered their natures. It made them truer, fonder, more pitiful. Regret for loss by death was greater. They lived like guests flower-crowned at a banquet, unseen above whose head Fate shoots death’s arrows down. Therefore it was pleasant to grasp hands, feel sympathy. Christianity has weakened friendship. Strangely enough it has made us love each other less. Having God we do not need man.
At times Horace is soberly meditative, but he is seldom sad with haunting modern sadness. Perhaps blitheness was pagan sadness, too deep for tears. He was not subject to blues, ill temper. A cultivated pagan did not take these liberties with himself or others. Byronic madness had not come. Reason still had power. Time was precious. There was not a heaven in which to find it restored. We are misers with dollars, in addition to being foolish egoists. They were wiser misers with time, with its joy.
It is pleasant, occasionally, to dream back into this serene age, to move, a little space, among calm, griefless white Wedgewood-figures that have given over regret, that neither hope nor fear, yet whose joy was tempered by clear consciousness of the end. No one can see all things from the beginning. We must be satisfied with the day’s vision.
Horace had a calm, disillusioned mind, without ideals. Life was too short to grow vain things. Ideals were insistent, therefore bad taste. The world was as it was. He could remake, change nothing. For this reason he decided to be the poet of things as they are.