A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of, meet death with—why, I'll not engage
But that, half in a rapture and half in a rage,
I should toss him the thing’s self, ‘’Tis only a duplicate,
A thing of no value—take it, I supplicate.’”
Longinus, one feels, would have been in some danger of losing his literary loves on this principle; the modern critic can “say ditto to Mr Browning” over a thousand passages. But Horace was quite safe. He never felt this enthusiasm for author, or book, or page; and so he never tried, as others in their despairing way do, to render a reason for it.
To those who consider criticism as a whole and historically, the enormous influence which the Ars Poetica has exercised |The Satires and Epistles.| must always give it the prerogative place among its author’s critical work. But it is needless to say that he has other claims to appear here. And the pieces which give him these claims have by some been considered more important, as they certainly are more original. It is unnecessary to pick out Pindarum quisquis and the other literary references in the Odes, universally known, admirably expressed, but as criticism hardly more than a refashioning of publica materies. The Fourth and Sixth Satires of the First book, which are probably a good deal earlier than the adaptation from Neoptolemus, and the two Epistles of the Second book, which may be taken as later, are serious documents. The Satires perhaps give a better opinion of Horace’s talent than of his taste and temper. His critics had praised Lucilius against him; and without denying his predecessor all merit, he makes, though less generously, the sort of comment which even Dryden made on the rough versification and lack of art of the giant race before the flood. This (i. 4) naturally brought fresh attacks on him, and in i. 10 he returns to the subject, lashes the fautores ineptos Lucili, indulges in the too famous sneer at Catullus and Calvus, and with a touch of something which is perhaps not quite alien from snobbishness, boasts his intimacy and agreement not merely with Varius, Virgil, Pollio, Messala, among men of letters, but with Mæcenas and Octavius.
His general position here is easy enough to perceive, and there are of course defences for it. Among all our thousand fragments of Lucilius,[[289]] but two or three at most are long enough to give us any idea of his faculty of sustained composition. And fine as is the fragment to Albinus—with its Elizabethan reiteration of virtus at the beginning of the lines, its straight-hitting sense, and the positive nobility of its ethic—numerous as are the instances in the smaller scraps of Romana simplicitas and picturesque phrase, there is no doubt that the whole is rough and unfinished, not with the roughness of one who uses a rudimentary art, but of one who has not mastered—perhaps, as Horace insinuates, has not taken the trouble to master—one ready to his hand. But there is something of the Frenchman’s “We are all princes or poets” about the tone of Horace himself. He is, mutatis mutandis, too much in the mood of a parvenu who has just been admitted to an exclusive club, and thinks very meanly of poor wretches who are not entitled to use the club-paper.
On the other hand, Mr Nettleship is surely justified in calling the Epistles of the second book “the best of Horace’s critical utterances,” though perhaps they are not the most important. Indeed, their eulogist hastens to add that “it is the incomparable manner of the writer, the ease and sureness of his tread,” which really interests the reader. It is so; but there is more in criticism than manner, and you must be right as well as felicitous. Horace is not exactly wrong, but he is limited—the Chrysostom of Correctness has acquired better breeding than he showed in the Satires, but he has not enlarged his view. The horridus Saturnius still strikes its own horror into him: he still girds at the ancients; and though in the epistle to Julius Florus there is some pleasant self-raillery, as well as an admirable picture of the legitimate poet, yet there is perhaps no piece of Horace which brings more clearly home to us the fact that he was after all, as he has been called, far more a critic of life than of literature, and much more seriously interested in the former than in the latter. So much the better for him perhaps; so much the better for all the ancients who more or less agreed with him. But that is a matter of argument: the fact remains.[[290]]
The third representative selected for Roman criticism of the latest Republic and earliest empire, the elder Seneca—"Seneca Rhetor"—is again of a different class and at a different standpoint, though he is very much nearer to Cicero than to Horace.