Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. O ubi campi
Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis
Taygeta, etc.[58]
of the Georgics.
The literature of the Augustan Age has often been compared with that of England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In so far as each literature is the literature of town life, in so far as it has a moral and didactic purpose, the comparison holds good. The Satires and Epistles of Horace present a parallel both to the poetical Satires of Pope, which in outward form are imitated from them, and still more to the prose Essays of the Spectator. They resemble those Essays in their union of humour and seriousness, in the use they make of character-painting, anecdote, and moral reflection, in the justice and at the same time the limitation of their criticism both on life and literature, in the colloquial ease combined with the studied propriety of their style. But while Horace, in addition to his powers as a moralist and painter of character, ranks high among those poets who enable us to feel the secret and the charm of Nature, latent in particular places, the only period [pg 35]of English literature from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. ‘C’est cet amour,’ says M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘cette pratique de la nature champêtre qui a un peu manqué à notre Racine, dont le goût et le talent de peindre ont été presque uniquement tournés du côté de la nature morale.’
The ease of their circumstances and the fact that they owed this ease to others (‘Deus nobis haec otia fecit’) have impressed themselves in other ways on the character of the Augustan poetry. The spirit of that poetry is certainly tamer than that of other great literary epochs. Even the enjoyment of Nature is a passive rather than an active enjoyment derived from adventurous or contemplative energy. There is no suggestion, as there is in Homer and in many modern poets, of vivid contact with the sterner forces of Nature. The sense of discomfort as well as of danger was then, as it has been till the present century, sufficient to repress the imaginative love of the sea or of mountain scenery[59]. Horace expresses a shrinking from the dangers of the sea, nor is there in Virgil any trace of that enjoyment of perilous adventure which is one of the great sources of delight in the Odyssey.
The profuse expenditure and luxury of the age called forth in its poets a spirit of reaction to a simpler and more primitive ideal, as they did in the French literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. By contrast with the unreal enjoyment of luxury and the ennui occasioned by it, which Lucretius had satirised in the previous generation, a stronger sense of the [pg 36]purer sources of human enjoyment, of friendly and intellectual society, of family affection, of the beauty of Nature, of the simpler tastes of the country, was awakened even in those who in their actual lives did not realise all these sources of happiness. But in Horace this feeling of contrast does not express itself in the tones of vehement antagonism which appear a century later in Juvenal. Luxury and profuse expenditure are indeed repugnant to his taste, and they suggest to him, as they do to Virgil, the purer enjoyment of simple living. There is no doctrine which Horace preaches more constantly in all his works, or with more apparent sincerity, than that of being independent of fortune, and of the greater happiness enjoyed in the mean station in life between great wealth and poverty. Yet, while preaching the same doctrine, he does not express it in terms of such deep and earnest conviction as the
Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce
Aequo animo[60]
of Lucretius. In at least the earlier part of his poetic career he had had his share of the luxurious living and the other pleasures of Roman life. Experience had satisfied him that the ‘slight repast, and sleep on the grass by a river’s side[61],’ contributed more to his happiness in later life than drinking Falernian from midday; and as years went on, it gave him more pleasure to recall the memory of his old loves in song than to involve himself in new engagements. The Horatian maxims in favour of simplicity have this recommendation, that they are the result of experience in both ways of living. The luxurious life of the capital seems at no time to have possessed charms for Virgil or Tibullus. Though the latter was a man of refinement, and not averse to pleasure, yet he has a feeling similar to that of Rousseau in favour of an ideal of rudeness and simplicity as compared with the pomp and profusion of life in Rome. The more active and energetic [pg 37]temperament of Propertius and of Ovid induced them to participate with less restraint in the pleasures of the city, and they appealed to congenial tastes among their contemporaries in the choice of the topics treated in their poems.