Horace and His Influence | Page 7

by many good men;--when would
incorruptible Faith and Truth find his equal? There was Maecenas,
well-bred and worldly-wise, the pillar and ornament of his fortunes.
There was Septimius, the hoped-for companion of his mellow old age
in the little corner of earth that smiled on him beyond all others. There

was Iccius, procurator of Agrippa's estates in Sicily, sharing Horace's
delight in philosophy. There was Agrippa himself, son-in-law of
Augustus, grave hero of battles and diplomacy. There was elderly
Trebatius, sometime friend of Cicero and Caesar, with dry legal humor
early seasoned in the wilds of Gaul. There were Pompeius and
Corvinus, old-soldier friends with whom he exchanged reminiscences
of the hard campaign. There was Messalla, a fellow-student at Athens,
and Pollio, soldier, orator, and poet. There were Julius Florus and other
members of the ambitious literary cohort in the train of Tiberius. There
was Aristius Fuscus, the watch of whose wit was ever wound and ready
to strike. There was Augustus himself, busy administrator of a world,
who still found time for letters.
It is through the medium of personalities like these that Horace's
message was delivered to the world of his time and to later generations.
How far the finished elegance of his expression is due to their
discriminating taste, and how much of the breadth and sanity of his
content is due to their vigor of character and cosmopolitan culture, we
may only conjecture. Literature is not the product of a single individual.
The responsive and stimulating audience is hardly less needful than the
poet's inspiration.
Such were the variety and abundance of Horace's experience. It was
large and human. He had touched life high and low, bond and free,
public and private, military and civil, provincial and urban, Hellenic,
Asiatic, and Italian, urban and rustic, ideal and practical, at the cultured
court and among the ignorant, but not always unwise, common people.
And yet, numbers of men possessed of experience as abundant have
died without being poets, or even wise men. Their experience was held
in solution, so to speak, and failed to precipitate. Horace's experience
did precipitate. Nature gave him the warm and responsive soul by
reason of which he became a part of all he met. Unlike most of his
associates among the upper classes to which he rose, his sympathies
could include the freedman, the peasant, and the common soldier.
Unlike most of the multitude from which he sprang, he could extend
his sympathies to the careworn rich and the troubled statesman. He had

learned from his own lot and from observation that no life was wholly
happy, that the cares of the so-called fortunate were only different from,
not less real than, those of the ordinary man, that every human heart
had its chamber furnished for the entertainment of Black Care, and that
the chamber was never without its guest.
But not even the precipitate of experience called wisdom will alone
make the poet. Horace was again endowed by nature with another and
rarer and equally necessary gift,--the sense of artistic expression. It
would be waste of time to debate how much he owed to native genius,
how much to his own laborious patience, and how much to the good
fortune of generous human contact. He is surely to be classed among
examples of what for want of a better term we call inspiration. The poet
is born. We may account for the inspiration of Horace by supposing
him of Greek descent (as if Italy had never begotten poets of her own),
but the mystery remains. In the case of any poet, after everything has
been said of the usual influences, there is always something left to be
accounted for only on the ground of genius. It was the possession of
this that set Horace apart from other men of similar experience.
The poet, however, is not the mere accident of birth. Horace is aware of
a power not himself that makes for poetic righteousness, and realizes
the mystery of inspiration. The Muse cast upon him at birth her placid
glance. He expects glory neither on the field nor in the course, but
looks to song for his triumphs. To Apollo,
"Lord of the enchanting shell, P_arent of sweet and solemn-breathing
airs_,"
who can give power of song even unto the mute, he owes all his power
and all his fame. It is the gift of Heaven that he is pointed out by the
finger of the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, that he
breathes the divine fire and pleases men. But he is as perfectly
appreciative of the fact that poets are born and also made, and
condemns the folly of depending upon inspiration unsupported by
effort. He calls himself the bee of Matinum, industriously flitting with
honeyed thigh about