Horace

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In the fourth Satire of the Second Book, Horace ridicules, in a vein
of exquisite irony, the _gourmets_ of his day, who made a
philosophy of flavours, with whom sauces were a science, and who had
condensed into aphorisms the merits of the poultry, game, or fish of
the different and often distant regions from which they were brought
to Rome. Catius has been listening to a dissertation by some Brillât-
Savarin of this class, and is hurrying home to commit to his tablets
the precepts by which he professes himself to have been immensely
struck, when he is met by Horace, and prevailed upon to repeat some of
them in the very words of this philosopher of the dinner-table.
Exceedingly curious they are, throwing no small light both upon the
materials of the Roman cuisine and upon the treatment by the Romans of
their wines. Being delivered, moreover, with the epigrammatic
precision of philosophical axioms, their effect is infinitely amusing.
Thus:--

"Honey Aufidius mixed with strong
Falernian; he was very wrong."

"The flesh of kid is rarely fine,
That has been chiefly fed on vine."

"To meadow mushrooms give the prize,
And trust no others, if you're wise."

"Till I had the example shown,
The art was utterly unknown
Of telling, when you taste a dish,
The age and kind of bird or fish."

Horace professes to be enraptured at the depth of sagacity and beauty
of expression in what he hears, and exclaims,--

"Oh, learned Catius, prithee, by
Our friendship, by the gods on high,
Take me along with you, to hear
Such wisdom, be it far or near!
For though you tell me all--in fact,
Your memory is most exact--
Still there must be some grace of speech,
Which no interpreter can reach.
The look, too, of the man, the mien!
Which you, what fortune! having seen,
May for that very reason deem
Of no account; but to the stream,
Even at its very fountain-head,
I fain would have my footsteps led,
That, stooping, I may drink my fill,
Where such life-giving saws distil."

Manifestly the poet was no gastronome, or he would not have dealt thus
sarcastically with matters so solemn and serious as the gusts, and
flavours, and "sacred rage" of a highly-educated appetite. At the same
time, there is no reason to suppose him to have been insensible to the
attractions of the "_haute cuisine_," as developed by the genius
of the Vattel or Francatelli of Maecenas, and others of his wealthy
friends. Indeed, he appears to have been prone, rather than otherwise,
to attack these with a relish, which his feeble digestion had frequent
reason to repent. His servant Davus more than hints as much in the
passage above quoted (p. 83); and the consciousness of his own frailty
may have given additional vigour to his assaults on the ever-
increasing indulgence in the pleasures of the table, which he saw
gaining ground so rapidly around him.

CHAPTER VI.

HORACE'S LOVE POETRY.

When young, Horace threw himself ardently into the pleasures of youth;
and his friends being, for the most part, young and rich, their
banquets were sure to be sumptuous, and carried far into the night.
Nor in these days did the "_blanche aux yeux noirs_," whose
beauty and accomplishments formed the crowning grace of most
bachelors' parties, fail to engage a liberal share of his attention.
He tells us as much himself (Epistles, I. 14), when contrasting to the
steward of his farm the tastes of his maturer years with the habits of
his youth.

"He, whom fine clothes became, and glistering hair,
Whom Cinara welcomed, that rapacious fair,
As well you know, for his own simple sake,
Who on from noon would wine in bumpers take,
Now quits the table soon, and loves to dream
And drowse upon the grass beside a stream,"

adding, with a sententious brevity which it is hopeless to imitate,
"_Nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum_,"--

"Nor blushes that of sport he took his fill;
He'd blush, indeed, to be tomfooling still."

Again, when lamenting how little the rolling years have left him of
his past (Epistles, II. 2), his regrets are for the "_Venerem,
convivia, ludum_," to which he no longer finds himself equal--

"Years following years steal something every day,
Love, feasting, frolic, fun, they've swept away;"--

and to the first of these, life "in his hot youth" manifestly owed
much of its charm.

To beauty he would appear to have been always susceptible, but his was
the lightly-stirred susceptibility which is an affair of the senses
rather than of the soul. "There is in truth," says Rochefoucauld,
"only one kind of love; but there are a thousand different copies of
it." Horace, so far at least as we can judge from his poetry, was no
stranger to the spurious form of the passion, but his whole being had
never been penetrated by the genuine fire. The goddess of his worship
is not Venus Urania, pale, dreamy, spiritual, but _Erycina ridens,
quam Jocus circum volat et Cupido,_ who comes

"With laughter in her eyes, and Love
And Glee around her flying."

Accordingly, of all those infinitely varied chords of deep emotion and
imaginative tenderness, of which occasional traces are to be found in
the literature of antiquity, and with which modern poetry, from Dante
to Tennyson, is familiar, no hint is to be found in his pages. His
deepest feeling is at best but a ferment of the blood; it is never the
all-absorbing devotion of the heart. He had learned by his own
experience just enough of the tender passion to enable him to write
pretty verses about it, and to rally, not unsympathetically, such of
his friends as had not escaped so lightly from the flame. Therefore it
is that, as has been truly said, "his love-ditties are, as it were,
like flowers, beautiful in form and rich in hues, but without the
scent that breathes to the heart." We seek in them in vain for the
tenderness, the negation of self, the passion and the pathos, which
are the soul of all true love-poetry.

At the same time, Horace had a subtle appreciation of the beauty and
grace, the sweetness and the fascination, of womanhood. Poet as he
was, he must have delighted to contemplate the ideal elevation and
purity of woman, as occasionally depicted in the poetry of Greece, and
of which he could scarcely fail to have had some glimpses in real
life. Nay, he paints (Odes, III. 11) the devotion of Hypermnestra for
her husband's sake "magnificently false" (_splendide mendax_) to
the promise which, with her sister Danaids, she had given to her
father, in a way that proves he was not incapable of appreciating, and
even of depicting, the purer and higher forms of female worth. But
this exquisite portrait stands out in solitary splendour among the
Lydes and Lalages, the Myrtales, Phrynes, and Glyceras of his other
poems. These ladies were types of the class with which, probably, he
was most familiar, those brilliant and accomplished _hetairae_,
generally Greeks, who were trained up in slavery with every art and
accomplishment which could heighten their beauty or lend a charm to
their society. Always beautiful, and by force of their very position
framed to make themselves attractive, these "weeds of glorious
feature," naturally enough, took the chief place in the regards of men
of fortune, in a state of society where marriage was not an affair of
the heart but of money or connection, and where the wife so chosen
seems to have been at pains to make herself more attractive to
everybody rather than to her husband. Here and there these Aspasias
made themselves a distinguished position, and occupied a place with
their protector nearly akin to that of wife. But in the ordinary way
their reign over any one heart was shortlived, and their career,
though splendid, was brief,--a youth of folly, a premature old age of
squalor and neglect. Their habits were luxurious and extravagant. In
dress they outvied the splendour, not insignificant, of the Roman
matrons; and they might be seen courting the admiration of the wealthy
loungers of Rome by dashing along the Appian Way behind a team of
spirited ponies driven by themselves. These things were often paid for
out of the ruin of their admirers. Their society, while in the bloom
and freshness of their charms, was greatly sought after, for wit and
song came with them to the feast. Even Cicero, then well up in years,
finds a pleasant excuse (Familiar Letters, IX. 26) for enjoying till a
late hour the society of one Cytheris, a lady of the class, at the
house of Volumnius Eutrapelus, her protector. His friend Atticus was
with him; and although Cicero finds some excuse necessary, it is still
obvious that even grave and sober citizens might dine in such
equivocal company without any serious compromise of character.

It was perhaps little to be wondered at that Horace did not squander
his heart upon women of this class. His passions were too well
controlled, and his love of ease too strong, to admit of his being
carried away by the headlong impulses of a deeply-seated devotion.
This would probably have been the case even had the object of his
passion been worthy of an unalloyed regard. As it was,

"His loves were like most other loves,
A little glow, a little shiver;"

and if he sometimes had, like the rest of mankind, to pay his homage
to the universal passion by "sighing upon his midnight pillow" for the
regards of a mistress whom he could not win, or who had played him
false, he was never at a loss to find a balm for his wounds elsewhere.
He was not the man to nurse the bitter-sweet sorrows of the heart--to
write, and to feel, like Burns--

"'Tis sweeter for thee despairing,
Than aught in the world beside."

_Parabilem amo Venerem facilemque_, "Give me the beauty that is
not too coy," is the Alpha and Omega of his personal creed. How should
it have been otherwise? Knowing woman chiefly, as he obviously did,
only in the ranks of the _demi-monde_, he was not likely to
regard the fairest face, after the first heyday of his youth was past,
as worth the pain its owner's caprices could inflict. For, as seen
under that phase, woman was apt to be both mercenary and capricious;
and if the poet suffered, as he did, from the fickleness of more than
one mistress, the probability is--and this he was too honest not to
feel--that they had only forestalled him in inconstancy.

If Horace ever had a feeling which deserved the name of love, it was
for the Cinara mentioned in the lines above quoted. She belonged to
the class of hetairae, but seems to have preferred him, from a genuine
feeling of affection, to her wealthier lovers. Holding him as she did
completely under her thraldom, it was no more than natural that she
should have played with his emotions, keeping him between ecstasy and
torture, as such a woman, especially if her own heart were also
somewhat engaged, would delight to do with a man in whose love she
must have rejoiced as something to lean upon amid the sad frivolities
of her life. The exquisite pain to which her caprices occasionally
subjected him was more than he could bear in silence, and drove him,
despite his quick sense of the ridiculous, into lachrymose avowals to
Maecenas of his misery over his wine, which were, doubtless, no small
source of amusement to the easy-going statesman, before his wife
Terentia had taught him by experience what infinite torture a charming
and coquettish woman has it in her power to inflict. Long years
afterwards, when he is well on to fifty, Horace reminds his friend
(Epistles, I. 7) of

"The woes blabbed o'er our wine, when Cinara chose
To tease me, cruel flirt--ah, happy woes!"--

words in which lurks a subtle undercurrent of pathos, like that in
Sophie Arnould's exclamation in Le Brun's Epigram,--

"Oh, le bon temps! J'etais bien malheureuse!"

Twice also in his later odes (IV. 1 and 13), Horace recurs with
tenderness to the "gentle Cinara" as having held the paramount place
in his heart. She was his one bit of romance, and this all the more
that she died young. _Cinarae breves annos fata dederunt_--"Few
years the fates to Cinara allowed;" and in his meditative rambles by
the Digentia, the lonely poet, we may well believe, often found
himself sighing "for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a
voice that is still."

In none of his love-poems is the ring of personal feeling more
perceptible than in the following. It is one of his earliest, and if
we are to identify the Neaera to whom it is addressed with the Neaera
referred to in Ode 14, Book III., it must have been written _Consule
Planco_, that is, in the year of Horace's return to Rome after the
battle of Philippi.--

"'Twas night!--let me recall to thee that night!
The silver moon in the unclouded sky
Amid the lesser stars was shining bright,
When, in the words I did adjure thee by,
Thou with thy clinging arms, more tightly knit
Around me than the ivy clasps the oak,
Didst breathe a vow--mocking the gods with it--
A vow which, false one, thou hast foully broke;
That while the ravening wolf should hunt the flocks,
The shipman's foe, Orion, vex the sea,
And zephyrs waft the unshorn Apollo's locks,
So long wouldst thou be fond, be true to me!

"Yet shall thy heart, Neaera, bleed for this,
For if in Flaccus aught of man remain,
Give thou another joys that once were his,
Some other maid more true shall soothe his pain;
Nor think again to lure him to thy heart!
The pang once felt, his love is past recall;
And thou, more favoured youth, whoe'er thou art,
Who revell'st now in triumph o'er his fall,
Though thou be rich in land and golden store,
In lore a sage, with shape framed to beguile,
Thy heart shall ache when, this brief fancy o'er,
She seeks a new love, and I calmly smile."

This is the poetry of youth, the passion of wounded vanity; but it is
clearly the product of a strong personal feeling--a feeling which has
more often found expression in poetry than the higher emotions of
those with whom "love is love for evermore," and who have infinite
pity, but no rebuke, for faithlessness. The lines have been often
imitated; and in Sir Robert Aytoun's poem on "Woman's Inconstancy,"
the imitation has a charm not inferior to the original.

"Yet do thou glory in thy choice,
Thy choice of his good fortune boast;
I'll neither grieve nor yet rejoice
To see him gain what I have lost;

The height of my disdain shall be
To laugh at him, to blush for thee;
To love thee still, yet go no more
A-begging to a beggar's door."

Note how Horace deals with the same theme in his Ode to Pyrrha, famous
in Milton's overrated translation, and the difference between the
young man writing under the smart of wounded feeling and the poet,
calmly though intensely elaborating his subject as a work of art,
becomes at once apparent.

"Pyrrha, what slender boy, in perfume steeped,
Doth in the shade of some delightful grot
Caress thee now on couch with roses heaped?
For whom dost thou thine amber tresses knot

"With all thy seeming-artless grace? Ah me,
How oft will he thy perfidy bewail,
And joys all flown, and shudder at the sea
Rough with the chafing of the blust'rous gale,

"Who now, fond dreamer, revels in thy charms;
Who, all unweeting how the breezes veer,
Hopes still to find a welcome in thine arms
As warm as now, and thee as loving-dear!

"Ah, woe for those on whom thy spell is flung!
My votive tablet, in the temple set,
Proclaims that I to ocean's god have hung
The vestments in my shipwreck smirched and wet."

It may be that among Horace's odes some were directly inspired by the
ladies to whom they are addressed; but it is time that modern
criticism should brush away all the elaborate nonsense which has been
written to demonstrate that Pyrrha, Chloe, Lalage, Lydia, Lyde,
Leuconoë, Tyndaris, Glycera, and Barine, not to mention others, were
real personages to whom the poet was attached. At this rate his
occupations must have rather been those of a Don Giovanni than of a
man of studious habits and feeble health, who found it hard enough to
keep pace with the milder dissipations of the social circle. We are
absolutely without any information as to these ladies, whose liquid
and beautiful names are almost poems in themselves; nevertheless the
most wonderful romances have been spun about them out of the inner
consciousness of the commentators. Who would venture to deal in this
way with the Eleanore, and "rare pale Margaret," and Cousin Amy, of Mr
Tennyson? And yet to do so would be quite as reasonable as to
conclude, as some critics have done, that such a poem as the following
(Odes, I. 23) was not a graceful poetical exercise merely, but a
serious appeal to the object of a serious passion:--

"Nay, hear me, dearest Chloe, pray!
You shun me like a timid fawn,
That seeks its mother all the day
By forest brake and upland, lawn,
Of every passing breeze afraid,
And leaf that twitters in the glade.

"Let but the wind with sudden rush
The whispers of the wood awake,
Or lizard green disturb the hush,
Quick-darting through the grassy brake,
The foolish frightened thing will start,
With trembling knees and beating heart.[1]

"But I am neither lion fell
Nor tiger grim to work you woe;
I love you, sweet one, much too well,
Then cling not to your mother so,
But to a lover's fonder arms
Confide your ripe and rosy charms."

[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!--

"Why, Lydia, why,
I pray, by all the gods above,
Art so resolved that Sybaris should die,
And all for love?

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