"Pert boys, prim fathers, dine in wreaths of bay,
And 'twixt the courses warble out the lay." (C.)
But this craze is no unmixed evil; for, take him all in all, your poet can scarcely be a bad fellow. Pulse and second bread are a banquet for him. He is sure not to be greedy or close-fisted; for to him, as Tennyson in the same spirit says, "Mellow metres are more than ten per cent." Neither is he likely to cheat his partner or his ward. He may cut a poor figure in a campaign, but he does the state good service at home.
"His lessons form the child's young lips, and wean
The boyish ear from words and tales unclean;
As years roll on, he moulds the ripening mind,
And makes it just and generous, sweet and kind;
He tells of worthy precedents, displays
The examples of the past to after days,
Consoles affliction, and disease allays." (C.)
Horace then goes on to sketch the rise of poetry and the drama among the Romans, glancing, as he goes, at the perverted taste which was making the stage the vehicle of mere spectacle, and intimating his own high estimate of the dramatic writer in words which Shakespeare seems to have been meant to realise:—
"That man I hold true master of his art,
Who with fictitious woes can wring my heart;
Can rouse me, soothe me, pierce me with the thrill
Of vain alarm, and, as by magic skill,
Bear me to Thebes, to Athens, where you will." (C.)
Here, as elsewhere, Horace treats dramatic writing as the very highest exercise of poetic genius; and, in dwelling on it as he does, he probably felt sure of carrying with him the fullest sympathies of Augustus. For among his varied literary essays, the Emperor, like most dilettanti, had tried his hand upon a tragedy. Failing, however, to satisfy himself, he had the rarer wisdom to suppress it. The story of his play was that of Ajax, and when asked one day how it was getting on, he replied that his hero "had finished his career upon a sponge!"—"Ajacem suum in spongio incubuisse."
From the drama Horace proceeds to speak of the more timid race of bards, who, "instead of being hissed and acted, would be read," and who, himself included, are apt to do themselves harm in various ways through over-sensitiveness or simplicity. Thus, for example, they will intrude their works on Augustus, when he is busy or tired; or wince, poor sensitive rogues, if a friend ventures to take exception to a verse; or bore him by repeating, unasked, one or other of their pet passages, or by complaints that their happiest thoughts and most highly-polished turns escape unnoticed; or, worse folly than all, they will expect to be sent for by Augustus the moment he comes across their poems, and told "to starve no longer, and go writing on." Yet, continues Horace, it is better the whole tribe should be disappointed, than that a great man's glory should be dimmed, like Alexander's, by being sung of by a second-rate poet. And wherefore should it be so, when Augustus has at command the genius of such men as Virgil and Varius? They, and they only, are the fit laureates of the Emperor's great achievements; and in this way the poet returns, like a skilful composer, to the motif with which he set out—distrust of his own powers, which has restrained, and must continue to restrain, him from pressing himself and his small poetic powers upon the Emperor's notice.
In the other poems which belong to this period—the Second Epistle of the Second Book, and the Epistle to the Pisos, generally known as the Ars Poetica—Horace confines himself almost exclusively to purely literary topics. The dignity of literature was never better vindicated than in these Epistles. In Horace's estimation it was a thing always to be approached with reverence. Mediocrity in it was intolerable. Genius is much, but genius without art will not win immortality; "for a good poet's made, as well as born." There must be a working up to the highest models, a resolute intolerance of anything slight or slovenly, a fixed purpose to put what the writer has to express into forms at once the most beautiful, suggestive, and compact. The mere trick of literary composition Horace holds exceedingly cheap. Brilliant nonsense finds no allowance from him. Truth—truth in feeling and in thought—must be present, if the work is to have any value. "Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons,"—
"Of writing well, be sure the secret lies
In wisdom, therefore study to be wise." (C.)
Whatever the form of composition, heroic, didactic, lyric, or dramatic, it must be pervaded by unity of feeling and design; and no style is good, or illustration endurable, which, either overlays or does not harmonise with the subject in hand.