{1} The same idea has been beautifully worked out by Spenser, in whom,
and in Milton, the influence of Horace's poetry is perhaps more
frequently traceable than in any of our poets:—
"Like as an hynde forth singled from the herde,
That hath escaped from a ravenous beast,
Yet flies away, of her own feet afearde;
And every leaf, that shaketh with the least
Murmure of winde, her terror hath encreast;
So fled fayre Florimel from her vaine feare,
Long after she from perill was releast;
Each shade she saw, and each noyse she did heare,
Did seeme to be the same, which she escaypt whileare."
Fairy Queen, III. vii. 1.
Such a poem as this, one should have supposed, might have escaped the imputation of being dictated by mere personal desire. But no; even so acute a critic as Walckenaer will have it that Chloe was one of Horace's many mistresses, to whom he fled for consolation when Lydia, another of them, played him false, "et qu'il l'a recherchée avec empressement." And his sole ground for this conclusion is the circumstance that a Chloe is mentioned in this sense in the famous Dialogue, in which Horace and Lydia have quite gratuitously been assumed to be the speakers. That is to say, he first assumes that the dialogue is not a mere exercise of fancy, but a serious fact, and, having got so far, concludes as a matter of course that the Chloe of the one ode is the Chloe of the other! "The ancients," as Buttmann has well said, "had the skill to construct such poems so that each speech tells us by whom it is spoken; but we let the editors treat us all our lives as schoolboys, and interline such dialogues, as we do our plays, with the names. Even in an English poem we should be offended at seeing Collins by the side of Phyllis." Read without the prepossession which the constant mention of it as a dialogue between Horace and Lydia makes it difficult to avoid, the Ode commends itself merely as a piece of graceful fancy. Real feeling is the last thing one looks for in two such excessively well-bred and fickle personages as the speakers. Their pouting and reconciliation make very pretty fooling, such as might be appropriate in the wonderful beings who people the garden landscapes of Watteau. But where are the fever and the strong pulse of passion which, in less ethereal mortals, would be proper to such a theme? Had there been a real lady in the case, the tone would have been less measured, and the strophes less skilfully balanced.
"HE.—Whilst I was dear and thou wert kind,
And I, and I alone, might lie
Upon thy snowy breast reclined,
Not Persia's king so blest as I.
SHE.—Whilst I to thee was all in all,
Nor Chloë might with Lydia vie,
Renowned in ode or madrigal,
Not Roman Ilia famed as I.
HE.—I now am Thracian Chloë's slave,
With hand and voice that charms the air,
For whom even death itself I'd brave,
So fate the darling girl would spare!
SHE.—I dote on Calaïs—and I
Am all his passion, all his care,
For whom a double death I'd die,
So fate the darling boy would spare!
HE.—What, if our ancient love return,
And bind us with a closer tie,
If I the fair-haired Chloë spurn,
And as of old, for Lydia sigh?
SHE.—Though lovelier than yon star is he,
And lighter thou than cork—ah why?
More churlish, too, than Adria's sea,
With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die!"
In this graceful trifle Horace is simply dealing with one of the commonplaces of poetry, most probably only transplanting a Greek flower into the Latin soil. There is more of the vigour of originality and of living truth in the following ode to Bariné (II. 8), where he gives us a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that beauté de diable, "dallying and dangerous," as Charles Lamb called Peg Woffington's, and, what hers was not, heartless, which never dies out of the world. A real person, Lord Lytton thinks, "was certainly addressed, and in a tone which, to such a person, would have been the most exquisite flattery; and as certainly the person is not so addressed by a lover"—a criticism which, coming from such an observer, outweighs the opposite conclusions of a score of pedantic scholars:—
"If for thy perjuries and broken truth,
Bariné, thou hadst ever come to harm,
Hadst lost, but in a nail or blackened tooth,
One single charm,
"I'd trust thee; but when thou art most forsworn,
Thou blazest forth with beauty most supreme,
And of our young men art, noon, night, and morn,
The thought, the dream.
"To thee 'tis gain thy mother's dust to mock,
To mock the silent watchfires of the night,
All heaven, the gods, on whom death's icy shock
Can never light.
"Smiles Venus' self, I vow, to see thy arts,
The guileless Nymphs and cruel Cupid smile,
And, smiling, whets on bloody stone his darts
Of fire the while.
"Nay more, our youth grow up to be thy prey,
New slaves throng round, and those who crouched at first,
Though oft they threaten, leave not for a day
Thy roof accurst.
"Thee mothers for their unfledged younglings dread;
Thee niggard old men dread, and brides new-made,
In misery, lest their lords neglect their bed,
By thee delayed."
Horace is more at home in playful raillery of the bewildering effects of love upon others, than in giving expression to its emotions as felt by himself. In the fourteenth Epode, it is true, he begs Maecenas to excuse his failure to execute some promised poem, because he is so completely upset by his love for a certain naughty Phryne that he cannot put a couple of lines together. Again, he tells us (Odes, I. 19) into what a ferment his whole being has been thrown, long after he had thought himself safe from such emotions, by the marble-like sheen of Glycera's beauty—her grata protervitas, et voltus nimium lubricus adspici—
"Her pretty, pert, provoking ways,
And face too fatal-fair to see."
The first Ode of the Fourth Book is a beautiful fantasia on a similar theme. He paints, too, the tortures of jealousy with the vigour (Odes, I. 13) of a man who knew something of them:—
"Then reels my brain, then on my cheek
The shifting colour comes and goes,
And tears, that flow unbidden, speak
The torture of my inward throes,
The fierce unrest, the deathless flame,
That slowly macerates my frame."
And when rallying his friend Tibullus (Odes, I. 23) about his doleful ditties on the fickleness of his mistress Glycera, he owns to having himself suffered terribly in the same way. But despite all this, it is very obvious that if love has, in Rosalind's phrase, "clapped him on the shoulder," the little god left him "heart-whole." Being, as it is, the source of the deepest and strongest emotions, love presents many aspects for the humorist, and perhaps to no one more than to him who has felt it intensely. Horace may or may not have sounded the depths of the passion in his own person; but, in any case, a fellow-feeling for the lover's pleasures and pains served to infuse a tone of kindliness into his ridicule. How charming in this way is the Ode to Lydia (I. 8), of which the late Henry Luttrel's once popular and still delightful 'Letters to Julia' is an elaborate paraphrase!—