“Chloris, shining with fair shoulders in the midnight sea.”
“Bacchus dictating strains among the rocks, while the nymphs, the goat-footed satyrs, listen.”
“The Thracian Priestess upon the mountain, her knotted hair bound with vipers.”
The carver of gems could find inspiration as frequently as poets. To prove he did, we have only to look into cabinets of collectors. The poets who copied him have been many. There were Ronsard, the Pleiad, in old French days. Tennyson, Ernest Dowson, in our own day, and in English, to mention few.
He left indelible trace upon poets of Italy. They found a model ready made in a tongue their own. There are lines of d’Annunzio that suggest Horace because they keep interest in natural things; fresh, loving vision. However, it is not Latin poets who influenced d’Annunzio, but Greek. He drank from the fountain from which Horace drank when he boasted he was first to attune Greek meters to the Latin lyre. D’Annunzio likes better the Greeks of a later day, in Alexandria, who were softer muscled, more luxurious, although his tragedies show the fate—motif of a sterner, artistically speaking, purer age. Carducci dreamed architecturally of the Rome of Horace and Augustus. He has built pictures in the Odi Barbare that are memorable, splendid.
As society poet Horace set a model which has been imitated but never equaled. He brought to it polished, perfect expression, and the savoir faire of a courtier. The most perfect society verse in the world is the Ode to Pyrrha (Ode V), because of equilibrium between matter and form, grace of poise, bantering lightness. In such verse no one has said more endearing things, more gracefully insincere. We may presume his social gift was considerable. In the portraits we find a touch at times, that is almost Japanesque; the habit of fixing fleeting, inconsequential thoughts without logical beginning. They are airy fancies that strike the mind obliquely in rapid flight. Centuries ago he sounded, tentatively, the shrill clarions of today.
Two of Horace’s admirable qualities were capability for friendship and just estimate of self. A gentle unenvious kindness radiates toward his friends. There was no condescension, superiority, no literary posing. Friends! How old-fashioned the word! Are they something that vanished with the manhood of Rome? Who loves his friends! Many memories of pleasant days with them his verse recalls! We judge of their importance by the fact he deemed them worth his art. Today friendship plays slight part in life. There are spaces of the self where there is not any judgment of wrong, of right, where there remains only the observing mind. We have grown narrow, selfish, enlarged of ego. We can love only those united by ties of blood. Is there less heart? Is that a reason there are few poets? Great, ennobling pitifulness which could shelter the world and his neighbor is not of today. We imitate. We do not create. At the test there is sound of something broken. Poetry is language of the emotions. When they are enfeebled they cannot speak. Where is the poet who pays tribute to a brother, a friend? Who is capable of feeling that sways the heart! We are tin toys. Love is of the heart. Without it the intellect can not create. Love was mainspring of those fluent opening lines of Horace, love that vibrated richly in his heart, then attuned it to sympathetic singing.
We have become drier, less inclined to giving. We are old with the world. We have less to give! At least writers can no longer picture life fatly. We have lost sight of so many things. The tide of time has swept us upon a barren shore where nothing is important save gold.
The philosophic poise of Horace was universal love, perhaps, too great to be given to an individual. It touched all evenly, like light. We have missed the sunny, friendly way. We must go back. We must find it if we can, before it is too late.
They who have been great, have been so by loving something better than self. The heart has share in fame. Love is productive of creative qualities such as vigor, joy. Vigor, joy, beat behind the lines of Horace.