“That is important,” answers Ogi, “and I want to get it straight. I should like to put an arrow on the cover of this book, directing the attention of all professors to the fact that I do not state or imply that the great leisure-class artists were playing a ‘conscious trick.’ Sometimes they knew what they were doing; but most of the time they just wrote that way, because they were that kind of men. I have tried to make this plain; but evidently the Professor missed it, so let me give an illustration:
“Here is a hive of bees; each of these bees all day long diligently labors to collect the juices of flowers and make it into honey; or to collect wax, and build exact hexagonal architectural structures in which to store the honey. Now comes an entomologist, and studies the life cycle of the bee, and says that the purpose of the hexagonal structures is to hold the honey in the most economical fashion; the purpose of the honey is to nourish the infant bees which will be hatched in the hexagonal cells. Now shall a critic say that this entomologist is ‘silly,’ because no bee can have understood the principles of economy involved in the hexagonal structure, nor can it have performed chemical tests necessary to determine the nutritive qualities of carbohydrates?
“The class feelings of human beings are instinctive and automatic reactions to economic pressure. The reactions of the artist, who seeks fame and success by voicing these class feelings, may be just as instinctive. But now mankind is emerging into consciousness, and social life is becoming rational and deliberate. I say that one of the steps in this process is to go back and study the life cycle of the artist, and find out where he collected his honey, and how he stored it, and what use was made of it by the hive.”
At this point Mrs. Ogi, who has been reading in her Bible—known to the rest of the world as the Works of G. B. S.—produces a text from “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” reading as follows: “The existence of a discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of it.”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE ROMAN FOUR HUNDRED
A few years after Virgil came another Roman poet, whom I learned to read as a lad. He also was taken up by the Emperor Augustus, and wrote fulsome odes in praise of this emperor. Also he found a patron, a wealthy gentleman by the name of Mæcenas, who was really fond of the arts, and gave the poet a Sabine farm to live on. This poet was, I believe, the first author who invited the public into his home, and told them his private affairs, pleasant or otherwise. Being that kind of a tactless author myself, I early conceived a feeling of affection for Mr. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to us as Horace.
For one thing, this worldly wise poet knows how to tip us a wink, even while handing out flattery to his patron. For another thing, his Mæcenas seems to have been a really worthy soul. I know how easy it is to love a rich man; but in Rome it must have been hard to find a rich man who could be loved at any price. Horace was a man of humble tastes; all he wanted was to live in his books, and to escape the brawl and fury of politics. We might have expected him to fall down on his knees and kiss the hand of a man who gave him a quiet home, with fruit-trees around him, and snow-capped mountains in the distance, and a crackling log fire in winter-time.
But, as a matter of fact, the poet was quite decent about it. He asserted the right of a man of letters to live an independent life—quite a “modern” idea, and hard for brutal rich Romans to understand. Every now and then Horace would have to visit his patron and friend, and meet some of these haughty conquerors of the world, and be put in his place by them. The father of Horace was what the Romans called a “freedman”; that is, he had formerly been a slave, and the great world sneered at the poet on that account. But instead of being ashamed of his ancestry, and trying to hide it, Horace put his old father into his books, for all Rome to meet. Yes, said the poet, that fond old freedman father brought his little boy to Rome to get an education, and walked every day to school with him, carrying his books and slate.
We can honor this honest gentleman, and read his charming verses with pleasure—but without committing the absurdities of the classical tradition, which ranks Horace as a great poet. He was a pioneer man of letters, and in that way made history; but there is nothing he wrote that the world has not learned to write better today. There are a score of young fellows writing verses for the columns of American newspapers who can turn out just as witty and clever and human stuff. “F. P. A.” has written “take-offs” on Horace, which shock the purists, but would have delighted Horace. Louis Untermeyer has published volumes of such mingled wisdom and wit; and there is Austin Dobson, and above all, Heine—a man who writes verse of loveliness to tear your heart-strings, and at the same time had the nerve to hit out at the ruling-class brutes of his age.
“Wasn’t there a single artist in Rome who revolted?” asks Mrs. Ogi.