But Petrarch is a torch-bearer so far in advance of his successors that the illumination almost dies out again before they arrive. It was not until well into the fifteenth century that the long and numerous line of imitators, translators, adapters, parodists, commentators, editors, and publishers began, which has continued to the present day. The modern-Latin poets in all countries were the first, but their efforts soon gave place to attempts in the vernacular tongues. The German Eduard Stemplinger, in his Life of the Horatian Lyric Since the Renaissance, published in 1906, knows 90 English renderings of the entire Odes of Horace, 70 German, 100 French, and 48 Italian. Some are in prose, some even in dialect. The poet of Venusia is made a Burgundian, a Berliner, and even a Platt-deutsch. All of these are attempts to transfuse Horace into the veins of modern life, and are significant of their authors' conviction as to the vitalizing power of the ancient poet. No author from among the classics has been so frequently translated as Horace.
Petrarch, as we have seen, led the modern world by a century in the appreciation of Horace. It was in 1470, ninety-six years after the laureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of the poet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474 by a printing of Acro's notes, grown by accretion since their origin in the third century into a much larger body of commentary. In 1476 was published the first Horace containing both text and notes, which were those of Acro and Porphyrio, and in 1482 appeared Landinus's notes, the first printed commentary on Horace by a modern humanist. Landinus was prefaced by a Latin poem of Politian's, who, with Lorenzo dei Medici, was a sort of arbiter in taste, and who produced in 1500 a Horace of his own. Mancinelli, who, like many other scholars of the time, gave public readings and interpretations of Horace and other classics, in 1492 dedicated to the celebrated enthusiast Pomponius Laetus an edition of the Odes, Epodes, and Secular Hymn, in which he so successfully integrated the comments of Acro, Porphyrio, Landinus, and himself, that for the next hundred years it remained the most authoritative Horace. In Italy, between 1470 and 1500, appeared no fewer than 44 editions of the poet, while in France there were four and in Germany about ten. Venice alone published, from 1490 to 1500, thirteen editions containing text and commentary by "The Great Four," as they were called. The famous Aldine editions began to appear in 1501. Besides Venice, Florence, and Rome, Ferrara came early to be a brilliant center of Horatian study, Lionel d'Este and the Guarini preparing the way for the more distinguished, if less scholastic, discipleship of Ariosto and Tasso. Naples and the South displayed little activity.
Roughly speaking, the later fifteenth century was the age of manuscript recovery, commentary, and publication; the sixteenth, the century of translation, imitation, and ambitious attempt to rival the ancients on their own ground; the seventeenth and eighteenth, the centuries of critical erudition, with many commentaries and versions and much discussion of the theory of translation; and the nineteenth, the century of scientific revision and reconstruction. In the last movement, Italy had comparatively small part. Among her translators during these centuries must be mentioned Ludovico Dolce, whose excellent rendering of the Satires and Epistles was a product of the early sixteenth; Scipione Ponsa, whose faithful Ars Poetica in ottava rima appeared in the first half of the seventeenth; the advocate Borgianelli, whose brilliant version of Horace entire belongs to the second half; and the Venetian Abriani, whose complete Odes in the original meters, the first achievement of the kind, was a not unsuccessful performance which has taken its place among Horatian curiosities. Among literary critics are the names of Gravina, whose Della Ragione Poetica, full of sound scholarship and refreshing good sense, appeared in 1716 at Naples; Volpi of Padua, author of a treatise on Satire, in which the merits of Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius were effectively discussed; and their followers, Algarotti the Venetian and Vannetti of Roveredo, in whom Horatian criticism reached its greatest altitude.
If we look outside the field of scholastic endeavor and academic imitation, and attempt to discern the effect of Horace in actual literary creation, we are confronted by the difficulty of determining exactly where imitation and adaptation cease to be artificial, and reach the degree of individuality and independence which entitles them to the name of originality. If we are to include here such authors as are manifestly indebted to suggestion or inspiration from Horace, and yet are quite as manifestly modern and Italian, we may note at least the names of Petrarch, already mentioned; the famous Cardinal Bembo, whose ideal, to write "thoughtfully and little," was a reflection of Horace; Ariosto, whose satires are in the Horatian spirit, and who, complaining to his brother Alessandro of the attitude of his patron, Cardinal Hippolyto d'Este, recites the story of the fox and the weasel, changing them to donkey and rat; Chiabrera of Savona, who wrote satire honeycombed with Horatian allusion and permeated by Horatian spirit, and who, in Leopardi's opinion, had he lived in a different age, would have been a second Horace; Testi of Ferrara, whom Ariosto's enthusiasm for Horace so kindled that he gravitated from the modern spirit to the classical; Parini of Milan, whose poem, Alla Musa, is Horatian in spirit and phrase; Leopardi, who composed a parody on the Ars Poetica; Prati, who transmuted Epode II into the Song of Hygieia; and Carducci, whose use of Horatian meters, somewhat strained, is due to the conscious desire of making Italy's past greatness serve the present. The names of Bernardo Tasso and Torquato Tasso might be added.
It is not impossible, also, that the musical debt of the world to Italy is in a measure owing to Horace. Whether the music which accompanied the Odes as they emerged from the Middle Age was only the invention of monks, or the survival of actual Horatian music from antiquity, is a question hardly to be answered; but the setting of Horace to music in the Renaissance was not without an influence. In 1507, Tritonius composed four-voice parts for twenty-two different meters of Horace and other poets. In 1526, Michael engaged in the same effort, and in 1534 Senfl developed the youthful compositions of Tritonius. All this was for school purposes. With the beginnings of Italian opera, these compositions, in which the music was without measure and held strictly to the service of poetry, came to an end. It is not unreasonable to suspect that in these early attempts at the union of ancient verse and music there exist the beginnings of the musical drama.
ii. IN FRANCE
France, where the great majority of Horatian manuscripts were preserved, was the first to produce a translation of the Odes. Grandichan in 1541, and Pelletier in 1545, published translations of the Ars Poetica which had important consequences. The famous Pleiad, whose most brilliant star, Pierre de Ronsard, was king of poetry for more than a score of years, were enthusiastic believers in the imitation of the classics as a means for the improvement of letters in France. Du Bellay, the second in magnitude, published in 1550 his Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, a manifesto of the Pleiad full of quotations from the Ars Poetica refuting a similar work of Sibilet published in 1548. Ronsard himself is said to have been the first to use the word "ode" for Horace's lyrics. The meeting of the two, in 1547, is regarded as the beginning of the French school of Renaissance poetry. Horace thus became at the beginning an influence of the first magnitude in the actual life of modern French letters. In 1579 appeared Mondot's complete translation. The versions of Dacier and Sanadon, in prose, in the earlier eighteenth century, were an innovation provoking spirited opposition in Italy. The line of translators, imitators, and enthusiasts in France is as numerous as that of other countries. The list of great authors inspired by Horace includes such names as Montaigne, "The French Horace," Malherbe, Regnier, Boileau, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Le Brun, André Chénier, De Musset.
iii. IN GERMANY
In Germany, the Renaissance movement had its pronounced beginning at Heidelberg. In that city began also the active study of Horace, in the lectures on Horace in 1456. The Epistles were first printed in 1482 at Leipzig, the Epodes in 1488, and in 1492 appeared the first complete Horace. Up to 1500, about ten editions had been published, only those of 1492 and 1498 being Horace entire, and none of them with commentary except that of 1498, which had a few notes and metrical signs to indicate the structure of the verse. The first German to translate a poem of Horace was Johann Fischart, 1550-90, who rendered the second Epode in 145 rhymed couplets. The famous Silesian, Opitz, "father of German poetry," and his followers, were to Germany what the Pleiad were to France. His work on poetry, 1624, was grounded in Horace, and was long the canon. Bucholz, in 1639, produced the first translation of an entire book of the Odes in German. Weckherlin, 1548-1653, translated three Odes, Gottsched of Leipzig, 1700-66, and Breitinge of Zurich, confess Horace as master of the art of poetry, and their cities become the centers of many translations. Günther, 1695-1728, the most gifted lyric poet of his race before Klopstock, made Horace his companion and confidant of leisure hours. Hagedorn, 1708-54, forms his philosophy from Horace,—"my friend, my teacher, my companion." Of Ramler, for thirty-five years dictator of the Berlin literary world, who translated and published some of the Odes in 1769 and was called the German Horace, Lessing said that no sovereign had ever been so beautifully addressed as was Frederick the Great in his imitation of the Maecenas ode. The epoch-making Klopstock, 1724-1803, quotes, translates, and imitates Horace, and uses Horatian subjects. Heinse reads him and writes of him enthusiastically, and Platen, 1796-1835, is so full of Homer and Horace that he can do nothing of his own. Lessing and Herder are devoted Horatians, though Herder thinks that Lessing and Winckelmann are too unreserved in their enthusiasm for the imitation of classical letters. Goethe praises Horace for lyric charm and for understanding of art and life, and studies his meters while composing the Elegies. Nietzsche's letters abound in quotation and phrase. Even the Church in Germany shows the impress of Horace in some of her greatest hymns, which are in Alcaics and Sapphics of Horatian origin. To speak of the German editors, commentators, and critics of the nineteenth century would be almost to review the history of Horace in modern school and university; such has been the ardor of the German soul and the industry of the German mind.