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 pa.s.sion, but his whole being had never been penetrated by the genuine fire. The G.o.ddess of his worship is not Venus Urania, pale, dreamy, spiritual, but _Erycina ridens, quam Jocus circ.u.m 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s. His pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 cla.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sion 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 bl.u.s.t"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 G.o.d 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, Leuconoe, 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 pa.s.sion:--
"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 pa.s.sing 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 gra.s.sy 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 recherchee avec empress.e.m.e.nt." And his sole ground for this conclusion is the circ.u.mstance that a Chloe is mentioned in this sense in the famous Dialogue, in which Horace and Lydia have quite gratuitously been a.s.sumed to be the speakers. That is to say, he first a.s.sumes 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 b.u.t.tmann 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 pa.s.sion 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 Chloe might with Lydia vie, Renowned in ode or madrigal, Not Roman Ilia famed as I.
HE.--I now am Thracian Chloe"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 Calas--and I Am all his pa.s.sion, 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 Chloe 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 Barine (II. 8), where he gives us a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that _beaute 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, Barine, 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.