There is more love, more understanding of home, in Propertius, Tibullus, than in Horace. Each had had his dream. If Horace had, his words give no hint. He hides from us. Persius says of him: Sly Horace does not give us his heart to sift. It may have been his dream was too tenderly cherished to unveil for a greedy world. His emotions, his longings are as carefully concealed as the veiled face of Isis.
It is not often we find a poet without enthusiasms. Horace had none. He is the only poet of the world without an ideal. He believed, in his indifferent way, with Goethe, that life is more important than art. He could have said with Wilde: “To my life I have given my genius, to my writing, my talent.” He saw it clearly. He judged sanely. It is true, perhaps, that he had toward it, as was his habit, an air of de haut en bas.
His Satires tell his real life. They, strangely enough, are poetry of fact, something which (the poetry of fact) has not been invented again until our day, and Verhaeren. Horace set about making life a work of art in the same calm way Goethe did. With both, the thing to be lived was superior to the thing created.
He is never confidential. With him, the world is present. He wears a charming manner of indifference. He was too worldly to show his heart. The human interest element is lacking. He would scorn the heart-throbs upon which inquisitive modernity insists.
There is a sensuous spirituality in poets of the Augustan Age, in scorn of gold, in clear understanding it can not buy the best, because genuine things belong to all. With them spirituality was striving for the best of earth. There is its sadness, in lack of conception of anything beyond.
But how grateful, how appreciative were they for pleasant things! Having no heaven they had kindlier nearness to earth. They were brothers to the trees, streams. Among them Catullus and Propertius are most modern. In their technique, their emotional view point, there is something that startles. Their heart cry, their rebellion against time and its ravages, shiver with new iridescence, the pagan calm. It plays over their poems like rainbow-shimmer across Murano glass, in contrast to the calm of chiseled marble. Some fretful, wandering wind of modernity touched them, then made them tremble with prophetic wisdom in the comfort of their gay, Greek garden.
Most sonnet writers in America, except George Sterling, overweight the sonnet line, just as in my opinion Brangwyn, delightful draftsman, when he leaves paint brush and colors, overweights the etched line. This crowding of the small, clean room of the sonnet, is the chief fault of that accomplished sonneteer, Mahlon Leonard Fisher. The sonnet line should be noble, clean, and of gracious curve. It should be pure, unvexed, like skies of great etchers, Rembrandt for example.
The American sonnet writer, again excepting Sterling, who to my mind has written the best sonnets in our country, (see his Sequence to Oblivion), is like a pretty debutante, a very pretty debutante, who, in addition to being pretty, insists upon being brilliant, insists upon using a mouth so lovely that is evidently what God made it for, to say clever things. This is worse than mixing metaphors. It is like insisting upon putting furniture that belongs by right to a large house into one small room, one very small room, the sonnet-room.
The world is mad about information, about knowing everything there is to know, and it insists upon displaying it. No one has courage to admit ignorance. Everyone pretends wisdom that surpasses Solomon. One should learn to wear learning lightly, as a jester his bells. And for the same good reason, to mark the ways of joy.
Modern sonnet writing is becoming an exhibition of acrobatics, of how to put the greatest possible number of objects dangling, pirouetting, balancing, upon one little line until its loveliness, its clean, clear profile is obscured. Art is not made to astonish. It is not an acrobat who performs feats upon lines either long or short. It is made to charm, to ennoble, bring refreshment to the spirit. It is divine play. It is cream-skimming joy. It is plucking the invisible flower of the heart, for a moment’s showing. Assuredly an unvexed thing, from which imperfections have been taken!