The "Art of Poetry" is thought to be an unfinished work. Unmethodical and without proportion, it may have been either compiled clumsily after the poet's death, or put together carelessly by himself amid the indolence which grows sometimes upon old age. It declares the essentials of poetry to be unity of conception and ingenuity of diction, urges that mechanical correctness must be inspired by depth of feeling, gives technical rules of dramatic action, of the chorus, of metre. For matter such as this a Horace was not needed, but the felicity of its handling has made it to many Horatian students the most popular of his conversational works. It abounds in passages of finished beauty; such as his comparison of verbal novelties imported into a literature with the changing forest leaves; his four ages of humanity—the childish, the adolescent, the manly, the senile—borrowed from Aristotle, expanded by Shakespeare, and taken up by Keats; his comparison of Poetry to Painting; his delineation of an honest critic. Brief phrases which have become classical abound. The "purple patch" sewn on to a sober narrative; the wine jar turning to a pitcher as the potter's wheel revolves; the injunction to keep a book ten years before you publish it; the near kinship of terseness to obscurity; the laughable outcome of a mountain's labour; the warning to be chary of bringing gods upon the stage; the occasional nod of Homer;—are commonplace citations so crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that even the unlettered scientist imports them into his treatises, sometimes with curious effect.
Alinari photo.]
[Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
AUGUSTUS.
If for a full appreciation of these minor beauties a knowledge of the Latin text is necessary, the more abounding charm of both Satires and Epistles is accessible to the Latinless reader. For the bursts of poetry are brief and rare, issuing from amid what Horace often reminds us are essentially plain prose essays in conversational form, their hexametral garb an unpoetical accident. Two versions present themselves to the unclassical student. The first is Conington's scholarly rendering, hampered sometimes rather than adorned by its metrical shape; the other is the more recent construe of Dean Wickham, clear, flowing, readable, stamping with the translator's high authority many a disputed passage. Both set temptingly before English readers the Rome of Horace's day, and promote them to an intimacy with his own mind, character, history. Preferable to both, no doubt, are the "Imitations" of Pope, which do not aim at literal transference, but work, as does his yet more famous Homer, by melting down the original, and pouring the fused mass into an English mould. Their background is Twit'nam and the Mall instead of Tibur and the Forum; their Maecenas St. John, their Trebatius Fortescue, their Numicius Murray. Where Horace appeals to Ennius and Attius, they cite Shakespeare and Cowley; while the forgotten wits, worthies, courtiers, spendthrifts of Horatian Rome reappear as Lord Hervey or Lady Mary, as Shippen, Chartres, Oldfield, Darteneuf; and Horace's delicate flattery of a Roman Emperor is travestied with diabolical cleverness into bitter mockery of an English king. In these easy and polished metamorphoses we have Pope at his very best; like Horace, an epitome of his time, bearing the same relation, as patriot, scholar, worldling, epicurean, poet, satirist, to the London of Queen Anne, which Horace bore to the Augustan capital; and so reproducing in an English garb something at any rate of the exotic flavour of his original. In an age when Pope is undeservedly and disastrously neglected, I shall do well to present some few Horatian samples from the king-poet of his century; by whose wit and finish, unsurpassed if not unequalled in our literature, the taste of my own contemporaries was formed; and to whom a public which decries or ignores him pays homage every day, by quoting from him unconsciously oftener than from anyone except Shakespeare.
Here is a specimen from the Satires, heightening our interest in Horace's picture by its adaptation to familiar English characters. Great Scipio and Laelius, says Horace (Sat. II, i, 72), could unbend their dignity to trifle and even to romp with Lucilius. Says Pope of his own Twickenham home:
Know, all the distant din that world can keep
Rolls o'er my Grotto, and but sooths my sleep.