"Oh, le bon temps! J'etais bien malheureuse!"
Twice also in his later odes (IV. 1 and 13), Horace recurs with tenderness to the "gentle Cinara" as having held the paramount place in his heart. She was his one bit of romance, and this all the more that she died young. Cinarae breves annos fata dederunt—"Few years the fates to Cinara allowed;" and in his meditative rambles by the Digentia, the lonely poet, we may well believe, often found himself sighing "for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still."
In none of his love-poems is the ring of personal feeling more perceptible than in the following. It is one of his earliest, and if we are to identify the Neaera to whom it is addressed with the Neaera referred to in Ode 14, Book III., it must have been written Consule Planco, that is, in the year of Horace's return to Rome after the battle of Philippi.—
"'Twas night!—let me recall to thee that night!
The silver moon in the unclouded sky
Amid the lesser stars was shining bright,
When, in the words I did adjure thee by,
Thou with thy clinging arms, more tightly knit
Around me than the ivy clasps the oak,
Didst breathe a vow—mocking the gods with it—
A vow which, false one, thou hast foully broke;
That while the ravening wolf should hunt the flocks,
The shipman's foe, Orion, vex the sea,
And zephyrs waft the unshorn Apollo's locks,
So long wouldst thou be fond, be true to me!
"Yet shall thy heart, Neaera, bleed for this,
For if in Flaccus aught of man remain,
Give thou another joys that once were his,
Some other maid more true shall soothe his pain;
Nor think again to lure him to thy heart!
The pang once felt, his love is past recall;
And thou, more favoured youth, whoe'er thou art,
Who revell'st now in triumph o'er his fall,
Though thou be rich in land and golden store,
In lore a sage, with shape framed to beguile,
Thy heart shall ache when, this brief fancy o'er,
She seeks a new love, and I calmly smile."
This is the poetry of youth, the passion of wounded vanity; but it is clearly the product of a strong personal feeling—a feeling which has more often found expression in poetry than the higher emotions of those with whom "love is love for evermore," and who have infinite pity, but no rebuke, for faithlessness. The lines have been often imitated; and in Sir Robert Aytoun's poem on "Woman's Inconstancy," the imitation has a charm not inferior to the original.
"Yet do thou glory in thy choice,
Thy choice of his good fortune boast;
I'll neither grieve nor yet rejoice
To see him gain what I have lost;
The height of my disdain shall be
To laugh at him, to blush for thee;
To love thee still, yet go no more
A-begging to a beggar's door."
Note how Horace deals with the same theme in his Ode to Pyrrha, famous in Milton's overrated translation, and the difference between the young man writing under the smart of wounded feeling and the poet, calmly though intensely elaborating his subject as a work of art, becomes at once apparent.
"Pyrrha, what slender boy, in perfume steeped,
Doth in the shade of some delightful grot
Caress thee now on couch with roses heaped?
For whom dost thou thine amber tresses knot
"With all thy seeming-artless grace? Ah me,
How oft will he thy perfidy bewail,
And joys all flown, and shudder at the sea
Rough with the chafing of the blust'rous gale,
"Who now, fond dreamer, revels in thy charms;
Who, all unweeting how the breezes veer,
Hopes still to find a welcome in thine arms
As warm as now, and thee as loving-dear!
"Ah, woe for those on whom thy spell is flung!
My votive tablet, in the temple set,
Proclaims that I to ocean's god have hung
The vestments in my shipwreck smirched and wet."
It may be that among Horace's odes some were directly inspired by the ladies to whom they are addressed; but it is time that modern criticism should brush away all the elaborate nonsense which has been written to demonstrate that Pyrrha, Chloe, Lalage, Lydia, Lyde, Leuconoë, Tyndaris, Glycera, and Barine, not to mention others, were real personages to whom the poet was attached. At this rate his occupations must have rather been those of a Don Giovanni than of a man of studious habits and feeble health, who found it hard enough to keep pace with the milder dissipations of the social circle. We are absolutely without any information as to these ladies, whose liquid and beautiful names are almost poems in themselves; nevertheless the most wonderful romances have been spun about them out of the inner consciousness of the commentators. Who would venture to deal in this way with the Eleanore, and "rare pale Margaret," and Cousin Amy, of Mr Tennyson? And yet to do so would be quite as reasonable as to conclude, as some critics have done, that such a poem as the following (Odes, I. 23) was not a graceful poetical exercise merely, but a serious appeal to the object of a serious passion:—
"Nay, hear me, dearest Chloe, pray!
You shun me like a timid fawn,
That seeks its mother all the day
By forest brake and upland, lawn,
Of every passing breeze afraid,
And leaf that twitters in the glade.
"Let but the wind with sudden rush
The whispers of the wood awake,
Or lizard green disturb the hush,
Quick-darting through the grassy brake,
The foolish frightened thing will start,
With trembling knees and beating heart.{1}
"But I am neither lion fell
Nor tiger grim to work you woe;
I love you, sweet one, much too well,
Then cling not to your mother so,
But to a lover's fonder arms
Confide your ripe and rosy charms."