Horace and His Influence | Page 8

the banks of humid Tibur. What nature begins,
cultivation must develop. Neither training without the rich vein of

native endowment, nor natural talent without cultivation, will suffice;
both must be friendly conspirators in the process of forming the poet.
Wisdom is the beginning and source of writing well. He who would run
with success the race that is set before him must endure from boyhood
the hardships of heat and cold, and abstain from women and wine. The
gift of God must be made perfect by the use of the file, by long waiting,
and by conscious intellectual discipline.

3. HORACE THE INTERPRETER OF HIS TIMES
HORACE THE DUALITY
Varied as were Horace's experiences, they were mainly of two kinds,
and there are two Horaces who reflect them. There is a more natural
Horace, simple and direct, of ordinary Italian manners and ideals, and a
less natural Horace, finished in the culture of Greece and the
artificialities of life in the capital. They might be called the
unconventional and the conventional Horace.
This duality is only the reflection of the two-fold experience of Horace
as the provincial village boy and as the successful literary man of the
city. The impressions received from Venusia and its simple population
of hard-working, plain-speaking folk, from the roaring Aufidus and the
landscape of Apulia, from the freedman father's common-sense
instruction as he walked about in affectionate companionship with his
son, never faded from Horace's mind. The ways of the city were
superimposed upon the ways of the country, but never displaced nor
even covered them. They were a garment put on and off, sometimes
partly hiding, but never for long, the original cloak of simplicity. It is
not necessary to think its wearer insincere when, constrained by social
circumstance, he put it on. As in most dualities not consciously
assumed, both Horaces were genuine. When Davus the slave
reproaches his master for longing, while at Rome, to be back in the
country, and for praising the attractions of the city, while in the country,
it is not mere discontent or inconsistency in Horace which he is
attacking. Horace loved both city and country.

And yet, whatever the appeal of the city and its artificialities, Horace's
real nature called for the country and its simple ways. It is the Horace
of Venusia and the Sabines who is the more genuine of the two. The
more formal poems addressed to Augustus and his house-hold
sometimes sound the note of affectation, but the most exacting critic
will hesitate to bring a like charge against the odes which celebrate the
fields and hamlets of Italy and the prowess of her citizen-soldiers of
time gone by, or against the mellow epistles and lyrics in which the
poet philosophizes upon the spectacle of human life.
i. THE INTERPRETER OF ITALIAN LANDSCAPE
The real Horace is to be found first of all as the interpreter of the beauty
and fruitfulness of Italy. It is no land of mere literary imagination
which he makes us see with such clear-cut distinctness. It is not an Italy
in Theocritean colors, like the Italy of Virgil's Bucolics, but the Italy of
Horace's own time, the Italy of his own birth and experience, and the
Italy of today. Horace is not a descriptive poet. The reader will look in
vain for nature-poems in the modern sense. With a word or a phrase
only, he flashes upon our vision the beautiful, the significant, the
permanent in the scenery of Italy. The features which he loved best, or
which for other reasons caught his eye, are those that we still see. There
are the oak and the opaque ilex, the pine and the poplar, the dark,
funereal cypress, the bright flower of the too-short-lived rose, and the
sweet-scented bed of violets. There are the olive groves of Venafrum.
Most lovely of sights and most beautiful of figures, there is the
purple-clustered vine of vari-colored autumn wedded to the elm. There
is the bachelor plane-tree. There are the long-horned, grey-flanked,
dark-muzzled, liquid-eyed cattle, grazing under the peaceful skies of
the Campagna or enjoying in the meadow their holiday freedom from
the plow; the same cattle that Carducci sings--
"In the grave sweetness of whose tranquil eyes O_f emerald, broad and
still reflected, dwells_ All the divine green silence of the plain."
We are made to see the sterile rust on the corn, and to feel the blazing
heat of dog-days, when not a breath stirs as the languid shepherd leads
his flock to the banks of the stream. The sunny pastures of Calabria lie

spread before us, we see the yellow Tiber at flood, the rushing Anio,
the deep eddyings of Liris' taciturn stream, the secluded valleys of the
Apennines, the leaves flying before the wind at the coming of winter,