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Page 44
What joy there is in these songs! what delight of life, what an exquisite
Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure, what tenderness and
constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that is fair in the glittering
stream, the music of the waterfall, the hum of bees, the silvery grey of the
olive woods on the hillside! How human are all your verses, Horace! what a
pleasure is yours in the straining poplars, swaying in the wind! what gladness
you gain from the white crest of Soracte, beheld through the fluttering
snowflakes while the logs are being piled higher on the hearth. You sing of
women and wine--not all whole-hearted in your praise of them, perhaps, for
passion frightens you, and 't is pleasure more than love that you commend to
the young. Lydia and Glycera, and the others, are but passing guests of a
heart at ease in itself, and happy enough when their facile reign is ended.
You seem to me like a man who welcomes middle age, and is more glad than
Sophocles was to 'flee from these hard masters' the passions. In the 'fallow
leisure of life' you glance round contented, and find all very good save the
need to leave all behind. Even that you take with an Italian good-humour, as
the folk of your sunny country bear poverty and hunger.
_Durum, sed levius fit patientia_!
To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to live for.
None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, seem to me to have
known so well as you, Horace, how happy and fortunate a thing it was to be
born in Italy. You do not say so, like your Virgil, in one splendid passage,
numbering the glories of the land as a lover might count the perfections of
his mistress. But the sentiment is ever in your heart and often on your lips.
Me nec tam patiens Lacedaemon,
Nec tam Larissae percussit campus opimae,
Quam domus Albuneae resonantis
Et praeceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda
Mobilibus pomaria rivis. (1)
(1) 'Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissaean plain so enraptures as
the fane of echoing Albunea, the headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, the
orchards watered by the wandering rills.
So a poet should speak, and to every singer his own land should be dearest.
Beautiful is Italy with the grave and delicate outlines of her sacred hills,
her dark groves, her little cities perched like eyries on the crags, her
rivers gliding under ancient walls; beautiful is Italy, her seas, and her
suns: but dearer to me the long grey wave that bites the rock below the
minster in the north; dearer is the barren moor and black peat-water swirling
in tanny foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, and,
watching over the lochs, the green round-shouldered hills.
In affection for your native land, Horace, certainly the pride in great Romans
dead and gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a lover of your country,
your country's heroes, your country's gods. None but a patriot could have sung
that ode on Regulus, who died, as our own hero died, on an evil day for the
honour of Rome, as Gordon for the honour of England.
Fertur pudicae conjujis osculum,
Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor,
Ab se removisse, et virilem
Torvus humi pusuisse voltum:
Donec labantes consilio patres
Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato,
Interque maerentes amicos
Egregius properaret exul.
Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus
Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen
Dimovit obstantes propinquos,
Et populum reditus morantem,
Quam si clientum longa negotia
Dijudicata lite relinqueret,
Tendens Venafranos in agros
Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. (1)
(1) 'They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife and his little
children, like a man unfree, and with his brave face bowed earthward sternly
he waited till with such counsel as never mortal gave he might strengthen the
hearts of the Fathers, and through his mourning friends go forth, a hero, into
exile. Yet well he knew what things were being prepared for him at the hands
of the tormenters, who, none the less, put aside the kinsmen that barred his
path and the people that would fain have held him back, passing through their
midst as he might have done, if, his retainers' weary business ended and the
suits adjudged, he were faring to his Venafran lands or to Dorian Tarentum.'
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