(On finding his ass in the sultan’s stable)
Through spirit voices thou hast learnedHow into night my day is turned,All in three years thou gavest me,Or that thy Vizier gave for theeWas taken from me in a trice,And vanished stealthily as mice.I found myself but yesterdayIn dreams, in thy broad stable wayAnd trusted not my eyes to seeAn ass eating who thus to meUp-looking from his manger there:Hast thou seen me, pray, anywhere?Now since I am not wise enoughTo understand dream-written stuff,And none in wisdom equal thee,Great Sultan, explain, pray to me!
Through spirit voices thou hast learnedHow into night my day is turned,All in three years thou gavest me,Or that thy Vizier gave for theeWas taken from me in a trice,And vanished stealthily as mice.I found myself but yesterdayIn dreams, in thy broad stable wayAnd trusted not my eyes to seeAn ass eating who thus to meUp-looking from his manger there:Hast thou seen me, pray, anywhere?Now since I am not wise enoughTo understand dream-written stuff,And none in wisdom equal thee,Great Sultan, explain, pray to me!
Through spirit voices thou hast learned
How into night my day is turned,
All in three years thou gavest me,
Or that thy Vizier gave for thee
Was taken from me in a trice,
And vanished stealthily as mice.
I found myself but yesterday
In dreams, in thy broad stable way
And trusted not my eyes to see
An ass eating who thus to me
Up-looking from his manger there:
Hast thou seen me, pray, anywhere?
Now since I am not wise enough
To understand dream-written stuff,
And none in wisdom equal thee,
Great Sultan, explain, pray to me!
Not only the ruler of Shiraz, but rulers of other Persian cities knew Hafiz, gave proofs of favor, and invited him to court. But the traveling! No one ever had greater distaste for it. He did not even make the pilgrimage to Mecca. The thought of leaving his beloved city made him miserable. This attitude recalls Horace, and Keats, too, with his love for the green English country. It is commonly written that he went to Jesd once on the invitation of Shah Jehja, tempted by hope and need of money. But money was not forthcoming. He writes philosophically, glad to get home:
This is the way of a Shah, Hafiz;Therefore be not grieved.
This is the way of a Shah, Hafiz;Therefore be not grieved.
This is the way of a Shah, Hafiz;
Therefore be not grieved.
The historian Muhammed Kasim Firischteh disputes the story of his never having left Shiraz, save on one occasion, for the fruitless journey toJesd. He relates how he went on ship board, on invitation of some distant Sultan, and how a storm came up just as they were ready to sail. Hafiz was in terror. He made hasty pretext of a forgotten farewell in the city. He left the ship, and started post haste back to Shiraz.
Of his family life we know one fact, that on December 23, 1362, he lost a grown son. For this we have his words. He wrote a poem about it. The story is current that in his old age Timur the Conqueror came to Shiraz and destroyed the dynasty of the Muzaffer, then angrily summoned Hafiz: “With my sword have I conquered the greater part of the earth, put the inhabitants of cities, entire provinces to death, in order that my two cities Bokhara and Samarcand might be more splendid. Now how dare you say you would give them both for the mole upon your sweetheart’s cheek!” Hafiz bent to the ground in salutation, replying: “Oh Lord of the World! It is because of such generosity that you see me poor, my robe full of holes.”
Timur was so delighted with the witty answer he not only forgave him, but sent him away with a gift.
The songs of Hafiz are illustrative of the fact that whatever comes from the heart has independent life, regardless of friend or foe. He did not collect his poems. He seems to have given no thought to their preservation. He made them for joy of the making. He gave them carelessly to his disciples, friends. Shortly after his death Muhammed Sulandem, a friend, gathered seven hundred verses which he namedThe Divan. But without this friendly intervention they would have lived. They had become property of the people of Persia. They were preserved by word of mouth. They were on all tongues. They could have been suppressed no more than the wind which bloweth where it listeth. Like the wind they, too, were a natural force and would have their way.
He is the most widely read poet of the world. Hafiz is the favorite of the Mohammedan Orient. He found the heart of the people. And he kept it. He is sung by the tiller of the field, camel driver of the desert, the boatmen upon the Red Sea. When the religious zealots found it was impossible to suppress his poems, they set about making them innocuous. They said they were allegories; that the writer was a master ofdouble entendre, that he wrote one thing and meant another. With this object in view they called himthe mystic tongue, and thetranslator of the unseen. Indeed an attempt was made in Turkey to suppressThe Divan, in Constantinople,under pretext of heresy. The Mufti Abu Su’ud rescued it by saying that when it was read one should keep the good and throw away the evil. It was a Turk who, in the sixteenth century, wrote the first intelligent commentary, showing people its true, long forgotten meaning.
Hafiz lies buried, it is good to know, where he loved to be, Mosella, the pleasure place by Shiraz. Loti, the eloquent, has told us about it inVer Ispahan. He made a journey there. He did some of his most charming writing. In the year 1451, a conquering Sultan erected a splendid tomb in his honor, which has since been neglected and fallen to ruin. But the grave remains a place of pleasant pilgrimage for Persians, just as it was for Loti, and especially for the people of Shiraz. There is kept a holiday spirit in memory of the man who loved, then glorified life.
When that accomplished linguist, Friedrich von Bodenstedt, was living in Tiflis he learned Persian. He wrote of Hafiz:
“I have received and taken up Hafiz as I would an old and honored guest, in order to free him from dust of the highway and introduce him worthily to my circle of friends. He will sing them songs of quite peculiar beauty and voice thoughts of cryptic wisdom that are pleasanter to listen to than those of theblaséSolomon.” M. Carrier exclaims joyously at the name: “A blessing upon thy pleasure, dear inspired drunkard! Thy pleasure is fruit of freedom of the spirit, of deep, noble feeling, of confidence in God whom he had seen face to face. Unceasingly he praises spring, love, wine. He is always offering gems in new settings, but he lacks the epic, the organic. He is purely lyrist, one meant to attune, then harmonize emotion. The zealots have written Hafiz down in the black book of their disapproval. He advised them to pawn their priestly cowls for wine. Silver and gold are to him negligible things in comparison with freedom of soul. He desired greater, better things. And he found them! He brought heaven down upon earth. In intoxication of the spirit he found the flowing light of revelation. In wine he found truth. This is the way to look at Hafiz. Not as a wine tippler after the manner of Falstaff, but as wine’s high priest, crowned with vine-leaves, and its singer.”
Among nations of today the influence of Hafiz has been greatest in Germany, just as the English Byron’s influence was greatest in Russia. And there it is interesting to note the effect upon Goethe. He was an old man as years count, (He who was never old.), in the early seventies, when he first read Hafiz. Straightway he wrote memorable things ofhim: “That you can not end, that makes you great.... Your song is like the whirling star-set sky, on and on, the same.... And should the entire world perish and pass away, with you, with you, Hafiz, I will emulously strive. Let Joy and Pain, the twins, be yours and mine alone! To love, to live, to drink like you, be that my pride!”
This from Goethe, the calm, olympic God! This from Goethe, who believed in Greek standards of unemotional excellence! What was the result? In Hafiz, Goethe found another youth. He bathed in the spring of oriental love, life, was renewed and grew young. And he gave us again a poet’s book of youth, fire, fancy,Der West-Östlicher Divan. This book we owe to Hafiz! It has the fresh charm that distinguishes theVita Nuova. It has all that delights in books of youth, without defects.
Goethe exclaimed with joy: “I will grow young! I will mingle with the herds’ boys in the desert! I will refresh myself in the oasis, in the waste places!”
Sometimes we are forced to think he borrowed from this Eastern poet. But he did not try to conceal it. He was great enough to borrow without bowed head. Hafiz’ meters and somewhat of his manner have become naturalized in Germany, thanks to men like Platen, Rückert. The Germans, too, have translated Hafiz better than other nations. There we find him freest from foreign substance, clearer, lessbetrübt.
Hafiz has the conversational freedom, fluency, which distinguish Tu Fu, and which give his poems freshness. Sometimes they have effect of brilliant improvisation, that promptitude of the moment, which fastidious Watteau held to be the essential of art. He has primal fire. His sunlight dazzles us. It is too strong for eyes accustomed to dilutions, to tempered shadows. His roses are brilliant, richly scented, and of the East; they are unlike pale, pastel tinted shadows into which Eighteenth Century art conventionalized them. He had not learned to like the mixing of light with shadow. He paints as Watteau painted hisItalian Clown, under direct hard light, straight fronting us. We must learn to see with a painter’s trained eye the modulations of white. He knew how toharmonizer le blanc. Watteau, the lyric painter, is his kin in plastic art of the brush. He is likewise his kin in scornful, contemptuous creation of beauty, and in his scorn of things that perish. But it is not wise to write of one art in terms of another.
Strong indeed must have been the personality that burst priestly restraint six hundred years ago! And sure indeed was his realization of self.
What capability for suffering! What a tender heart in the midst of joy that is pagan! He was a tearful jester, a scornful, sardonic romancer, a gentle, heroic reader of the riddle of life. In his plaint there is perhaps something of Verlaine, of Villon. But nothing of their manner. His grief never became the melancholy of a less vigorous age. Always in it there was joy of the struggle, strength to endure. A peculiar mental combination in truth; mediæval seriousness from which thought of death is seldom absent, combined with the reasoned blitheness of a Greek.
Hafiz was a jovial fellow with a host of friends. They played part in his life, we gather from his poems. There we see the shadowy, unnamed forms of a merry, talented company. Youths, handsome as Antinous of old, but of whose name we have no slightest hint, lure us with charm of mystery.
It would be interesting to know the youthful friends with whom he jested, made merry. Like the Greeks, the Persians loved the beauty of men in youth. They have written about them, as the Greeks wrote. There are lines which are made more acceptable by changing the personal pronoun to feminine gender.
In poetry today friendship is seldom celebrated. Nor more do we find eloquence of denunciative wrath. Such elements of power, of rebellion, belong to an earlier age, to the day when Cicero was orating against Cataline, or when Firdusi was writing his splendid satire to Sultan Mahmud. Our poetry, symbolically speaking, is what autumn says to the rose. Hafiz’ poetry is what spring says to the same immortal flower. And the difference is the difference between things that live and things that die ... and rise not.
Many and varied qualities go to this lyric supremacy: the natural art of Petofi, its characteristic lyric freedom, the golden fluency of Puschkin; the pitiful sweetness of Catullus; the intellectual reach of Rûmi, the mystic; the limpid racial charm of Mistral, all are here, but made more direct, informed with fiercer fire.
Hafiz was last of the great ones. After him came imitation, insincerity, mental decay. Dschami, who lived in the century after Hafiz, writing of it says: “The new scholars have invented to be sure verse and rhyme, butexcept bare verse and rhyme everything else has vanished. No one troubles himself whether it contains phantasie, truth, or falsehood. And yet Oh! Great God, how splendid is poetry! How exalted, how dignified! Oh that I were a poet! Where is there an art more splendid, that more mightily ensnares!” Dschami came after the great ones. It has been wittily remarked of him that he possessed all their qualitiesexcept their originality. Rückert says of him:Dschami hat nah daran gedichtet, referring to the masters of Persian poetry.
The heart of every Persian echoes to Hafiz, just as Germany, and indeed Europe, has echoed to the music of Heine. It is interesting to note in passing, that in 1814 a poet was born in Shiraz, Hussein Ali Mirza, who has been accused of imitating Heine. We translate from an orientalist: “... either the translator hasfrisiert à la Europatoo greatly, the new Iranian poet, Prince Hussein Ali, or else he has read Heine. This kind of sentiment does not belong to the East.”
Heine and Hafiz were most alike perhaps in their consuming fear of death. They were so vivid the thought ofnot beingwas terrifying.
It is felt in whatever they wrote. It did not enervate them. It inspired them to eloquence, to rebellion. In technical equipment the poets stand shoulder to shoulder. In grace, in fanciful invention, they were likewise equal. But the Hebrew and the Persian possessed in greater degree the power of passion, anger, and the strength to use them. Tu Fu was a lyric genius, of whom years of training made a master. Yet it seems to us that none has made art so absolute a thing as did Anacreon, in the days when his race were making models for remaining time to copy. However, this is matter of temperament, which helps render criticism uncertain.
There was an interesting superstition in the long ago regarding the two older, Hafiz and Anacreon, to the effect that to read them brought madness. Its origin is as deeply veiled in mystery as origin of the wandering quatrains of Persia. But we recognize gladly a tribute to power.
Both Hafiz and Heine, with Tu Fu, have that inexplainable quality that touches the heart. They say the things we can not forget. But there was an elfish caprice in Heine which Hafiz did not have, just as there was a mystic yearning in the Persian the Hebrew did not know. And in Tu Fu there were heights of lyric rapture none have surpassed. They were not lonely geniuses, seeking solitude, meditation. They lived in the whirl oflife. They learned wisdom of its sadness. Heine had the beauty-loving soul of an ancient Greek, the restless pitiful heart of a modern, and the passionate vengeance, the hate of the Hebrew. He realized in his life, in the few years of health granted him, the fierce, furious ideals of pleasure of Anacreon and Hafiz. He lived like a God. And he received the punishment of a God, in a consuming Promethean fire of pain, that crippled him, then burned up his life. Each lived in an age of mental expansion, when minds were creative. The Paris of Heine was the most brilliant age of that gay city by the Seine, when she best deserved the proud appellation ofthe step-mother of genius. Poland had fallen. Paris was filled with a crowd of brilliant Slav exiles. It was the day, too, of Eugene Sue, Berlioz, George Sand, de Musset, Dumas, Gautier, the Goncourt Brothers, Gavarni, Saint Beuve, Liszt, Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Ary, Sheffer, Delacroix, Horace Vernet. Mickiewicz was there, too, editing the fourth volume of his poetry. And Julius Slowacki, and Count Krasinski. After the period of these men had passed there was no more writing whose inspiration came from deep conviction, and which was indifferent to gold and to the praise of the world. Tu Fu lived at the time lyric verse reached its height under art loving Emperors of Tang, and when one of the proudest periods of plastic art was beginning, the Period of Sung Emperors.
Anacreon was borne on the crest of the wave that was sweeping on to the sublime heights of Greek culture. And Hafiz, who wrote inthe divine, high piping Pehleviof old Omar,the language of heroes, crowns the crest of the great age of Persian lyric poetry.
Anacreon is product of soft, sensuous Ionia, home of art and song. Hafiz is product of the mystic imagination of India, of her unreckoned centuries of culture and meditation, and the dominant clear thinking wisdom of Persia. Tu Fu was the mental product of three thousand years of intensive cultivation.
Heine is product of the prophetic fury and eloquence of Israel and the grace of France. Heine and Hafiz had no little in common. They are to be added to the list of inspired teachers who have come out of Asia. Each was born into a received religion, but neither bore its limitation nor its restraint. Each was receptively tolerant of the religion of others, while having none of his own. Heine said proudly:I am the freest man since Goethe!Hafiz said equally proudly, in his Rubaiyat: “Only he is happywho draws inspiration from all things beautiful just so long as he shall be permitted to live!”
Heine loved the Orient. He longed for it. Heine has written a lyric of a pine in the north girdled with snow and ice, dreaming of a palm in the Orient. Like Gautier he dreamed of life under a bluer sky, its splendor of light. He read and loved the poets of Persia, Hafiz, Firdusi, Rûmi, Nizami. Schlegel was just telling the German world of that day of the literary treasures of Asia. In Heine he found a receptive listener. The oriental blood in his veins answered to call of the Persian poets. He, too, was of the East.
At the same time both Heine and Hafiz are modern, because of their free, their inquiring souls. No other writers have so eloquently expressed grief at the vanity of life. The lyric poets of other races and ages have not had their tragic fire, power of denunciation, nor their philosophic depth. None have so rebelled against life’s briefness, its inexorableness. None have so sounded hollowness of all things human.
At the same time the mind of each has been rainbow-prismed with joy. It is people of Asiatic blood who are capable of transitions from grief to joy. The fog bound lands of Europe can not shelter such chameleon-like changefulness.
The throb of warring ages in which they lived was in their blood. It beat in their verses. It modeled their measures. They were indebted to its storm, its stress for vivid vitality. And they were indebted likewise for warmer blood. Great lyric poets must come of impassioned, Asiatic races. Something hinders their European brothers, binds their utterance. They can not make of their souls a torch of joy to light a moment. They lack the passionate conviction that makes them great.
Each was born upon crest of an age of transition that resembles the one in which we live. A period that followed wars! Heine was born the last year of the Great Century, 1799. He saw blind worship of royal power, prerogative, give way to the modern spirit of freedom. Hafiz was born at end of a period of religious intensity which gave way during his life to a genial culture. Both felt the battling, invigorating influences of two distinct ages, each of which was strongly marked.
In Heine’s day art and letters reached highest development in Europe, just as lyric verse did in Persia in the age of Hafiz. And again in China, under Tang Emperors. After them camele déluge, which took guise of awide-spread dilettantism, form without matter. Both Heine and Hafiz were pagans in that they clung to world of the senses; but they were modern in their lack of calmness, their restlessness, and in their dramatic dissatisfaction. Their hearts were lutes upon which the winds of the world blew. And with them love and hate were the destructive passions of an Asiatic race. Both were past masters of the art of expression. They knew how to say much in little. They could condense history or a romance into a quatrain, a couplet. Both were great and fluent artists. And they fought in their own way as best they could the battle of enlightenment of the human spirit. Each hated cant, hypocrisy, cowardliness, and vain seeming. Each felt and suffered the scorn, the hatred of his fellow men, then learned sadly to know that he who wishes to accomplish anything whatsoever, or has ideals of any kind to fight for, must know that the wings of his spirit are strong.
Each clung pitifully while the world abused and reviled him, to the only real thing he could find, to the only thing that gave pleasure, that intoxicating world of the senses whose too frequent kiss, like that of the Slavic Venus, brings death.
The Greek had the sanest view of this world’s life, the surest sense of beauty. The Hebrew had such a pitiful thirst for love, for something stable amid change, it stung him to desperation. The Persian thought most deeply, most logically of the mystery of life. The result of his thinking was,We can not know. We can not know.In expression each was an artist. And each was great because he was sincere.Palmam qui meruit ferat.
I read Horace first in an old university town in the north. Each night as I walked home from lectures, autumn leaves were being burned in fragrant piles, under long rows of trees that still were faintly amber, faintly crimson. I came from the burned plains where there were no trees. And at night over these same richly tree-shaded streets, and over the broad lonely campus where dark pointed evergreens grew, the Hunter’s Moon hung, large and lustrous.
Because of this, and likewise because of something in the nature of the Roman poet, it has always seemed to me that Horace is read best in the autumn. There is something in his mind that is native to the season. He came from the ripe, mellow autumn of a rich, a prodigious civilizationthat time was just beginning to touch with the shadows of age. Quintillian takes pains to tell us old Latin writers were stronger in genius than art. The opposite was true of Horace. With him poetry was not inspiration. He did not know its self-forgetful fury. Instead, it was one of the ornaments of a well-tempered life, out of which he wished to procure as much comfort as he could. In his verse there is nothing wonderful. At the same time it has an immortal touch. He was not a great imaginative poet. He was not a gifted dramatic poet. He seldom stirs the blood. But he has a smooth, even excellence, a companionableness, a marvelous proportion of word to thought. He is master of felicitous expression.
What was he to the Rome of his day? Was he what through accomplished Latin lecturers and study, he has become to us? Was he great as an artist? Or have years colored him, and the modern mind thrown over him a romantic halo? Or do we find him charming because he opens a door into the vanished world of Rome, where existed so many alluring pictures of memory, which we have loved, then dumbly longed for? Did he ripen with years? Did the smoke of time do for him what it did for Sabine wine, sweeten, mellow? Are there poets read best centuries after their day?
In him there is no restless modernity, no futile chasing of rainbows. Yet this serene art could not picture our world. We can measure changes which have come. It requires something tumultuous, less smooth, equable; less definite in outline. The model is at fault for sketchiness of written art, and a certain unsatisfactoriness as regards presentation. The reproduction must be nervous, with harsh lights, crude shadows. In the finished product absolutism is lacking. There is something that is trivial, infinitesimal, that sees darkly. Art has become uncertain. It no longer moves boldly. It has become a thing of temperament, instead of mind. The art of the pagan world was firmer. It approached life differently. Roman poets praise the masculine sound of the Latin lyre.
The philosophy, the thinking, of that antique day was muscled. It was sure, unwavering in line, as marbles. They had a firmer grasp upon life,the fact. We find Horace firm amid the shifting present. We can not find poetry so satisfying as his calm surveyal of things as they are. The pagan’s philosophic view of the inevitable, the nothingness which confronts man, tempered their natures. It made them truer, fonder, more pitiful. Regret for loss by death was greater. They lived like guestsflower-crowned at a banquet, unseen above whose head Fate shoots death’s arrows down. Therefore it was pleasant to grasp hands, feel sympathy. Christianity has weakened friendship. Strangely enough it has made us love each other less. Having God we do not need man.
At times Horace is soberly meditative, but he is seldom sad with haunting modern sadness. Perhaps blitheness was pagan sadness, too deep for tears. He was not subject to blues, ill temper. A cultivated pagan did not take these liberties with himself or others. Byronic madness had not come. Reason still had power. Time was precious. There was not a heaven in which to find it restored. We are misers with dollars, in addition to being foolish egoists. They were wiser misers with time, with its joy.
It is pleasant, occasionally, to dream back into this serene age, to move, a little space, among calm, griefless white Wedgewood-figures that have given over regret, that neither hope nor fear, yet whose joy was tempered by clear consciousness of the end. No one can see all things from the beginning. We must be satisfied with the day’s vision.
Horace had a calm, disillusioned mind, without ideals. Life was too short to grow vain things. Ideals were insistent, therefore bad taste. The world was as it was. He could remake, change nothing. For this reason he decided to bethe poet of things as they are.
In the literatures of Greece and Rome there are no diseases of the spirit. There is no questioning of the supreme facts of existence. They are sane. They are models of right seeing. No energy is wasted in rebellion. Their charm is not that of a wild, erratic view point for the glorifying of self. A thing to be good had to be something besidesnew.L’art nouveauwould have met disdain.
They are sane with nature’s unchanging sanity which we are losing. They do not strain the mind to acrobatic seeing. Novelty was not synonymous with quality. This body, this life, belong to earth where they are placed. It is well not to tamper things that do not concern us. Not without reason was the box of Pandora closed. Whenever we open it, we find a new ill. Take things as they are. Be happy. It is sad we can not make pagan sanity contagious as our questioning restlessness.
In Horace there is no madness of the crusader, no fantastic gallantry of knighthood. We are glad of their absence. Pagan literature is a place of mental rehabilitation. To been rapportwith a pagan of Horace’s dayit was necessary to enjoy with him. To been rapportwith a modern it is necessary to weep with him. We play thecomédie larmoyante. Modern art cares for sensations. Heart-throbs are the thing! It might take for its motto:—Fac me tecum plangere. Today it is only the artist (whose soul is always pagan) who finds life good. Anatole France says that without him (the artist) we might doubt the fact.
Surely there is no one more fit to read in a garden, under the moon of autumn, than city-bred Horace with his plea for rustic merriment. He loved country life. He pictured it. They had in his day a fresher feeling for simple things, a nymph-like nearness and affection; delight in fresh grass, cool running water, young flowers with dew on them. Simple things were precious enough to be mentioned on equality with chosen guests to make happy a holiday. To the poet is given clearer vision of such things. He is equipped by nature to take pleasure in them. In addition, Latin races have had vivid sense ofreality. It is one source of their strength.
Horace loved the banks of Tiber, as Keats the green English Thames-side, Hafiz, valley of the Roknabad, and Tu Fu his bamboo-shaded rivers. Each has been emphatic in dislike of going elsewhere. Each painted the home country he loved.
There are scenes among the poets, bits of landscape, more real, more endeared to me than any I see in life. They are changeless. They are superior to time. They give illusion of things that do not grow old. By sympathetic folly I remain young with them. They are always waiting for me untouched by the season. I know just where to find them. After time has made me old, to go back to them, affects me like going home. In fact, one of my ideals has been realized in the changeless things of art.
How different were the adjectives which Horace applied to natural objects from those we use! In them I can see the clear, unvexed mind that observed. He seized description by a different corner. His impressions were fresher, quicker. To him clouds weresteepclouds, (nubibus arduis). He saw first the striking thing. For this reason his descriptions give the sensation of looking at an etching, crisp, sure, before repeated reproductions have blurred it. An advantage was with him. He had the world before it became second-hand. He has shown attractive scenes.
In Book III, Carmen xxix, what dainty, stepping through measures! What fastidious choosing! What fragile-pointed penciling! Sharp indeed,fine leaved, were the bristling thickets which hid the God, Sylvanus. Here is delicately modeled detail of French line engravers, such as Edelinck. Nowhere else is there such inspiring swinging up and slow, pensive drooping of moons, with such calm vistas. Moons are red gold. The sky is lapis, a Byzantine enamel. The delight when they swing to sight! Nowhere do they rise more majestically than with Latin poets. I like, too, his swift painting of forests, fields,herds and the black hills of Acadia, lofty Tusculum where wealthy Romans had country houses, and he went to banquet with his friends, or cool Lucanian pastures overlooking the Tuscan Sea; the ocean flowing among the shining Cyclades. His pictures are sure of line as an etching by Braquemond. They give some the same pleasure. They are crisp. They are oftenest of the outdoor world. Artists of all time have been indebted to this plastic picturing. When he describes wine foaming around white feet of laughing girls, we see a group by Donatello. When he paints Autumn crowned with vine-leaves, lifting his head above level plains, we see the richly colored, fluent art of Boucher. Might not theoxen with weary necks dragging the inverted plowsharebe from brush of Breton or L’Hermitte? Latin blood is there!
In Horace there is appreciation of rustic life which French art realized. The order of descriptions is beautiful. One moment does not rush upon another. This is a Latin quality; nothing superimposed; nothing hurried. The influence of Horace, his spirit, is in art of France, Spain, Italy; but not in Holland or the north. There it met a counter current, which swept it back. In the norththe spirittriumphed.
It is sanity of Latin races that periodically reclaims art from the crowded vagueness of the north, then shows it the way back to life, which is nature.
Landscape painters of France, Italy, and Spain are spiritual descendants of Roman word-painters. Like them they have united love for the thing they saw with sufficient mental detachment to insure truth. The spirit of Horace is in landscapes of Rousseau, Harpignies, Daubigny, Corot. The same nature looks from the canvasses; the same truth. Love of thing they painted, singleness of purpose, with no momentary side-glancing, stamped success. Love, sincerity, were there, coupled with fidelity that outweighed price. Over these landscapes with their artistic well-being, rests sure tradition of Roman ancestry.
In Horace, in Quintillian, we see beginning that perspicuity, sense of distinctions, that made Latin races—France in particular, supreme in criticism. There is in Horace a likeness to the French mind that blossomed in 1830.
Who can help loving this antique world Horace shows, which keeps so much that is fine? We love it too because it had no shadows. It was content. We love its persistent search for joy, its disdain of the unworthy. We love conviction that life is supreme. Puritanism, a narrow morality, have driven it away. They have given nothing worth while in return. The reformer has driven out the uninsistent Greek. The worshippers of the spirit have done violence to worshippers of the flesh. Beauty is one of the few values. We should be grateful for any reality. Perfection of line is not bad morality. It is at least substitute for folly. In most modern art except that which France created, there is something crude, unseizable. Some wild homesickness! At heart, republican France has always been pagan, aristocratic. It has led nations in the arts.
One reason the human race is no more beautiful is because men have ceased to desire it. It is becoming a negligible quality. Beauty was commoner in pagan days because men loved it.
Who would not prefer the swiftly sketched picture of a vanished city made by such happy observers as Horace, Seneca, Catullus, to travelers’ descriptions! The best picture of Rome of Augustus is in his verse. It would be interesting to know what material world the reader pictures from the verses. No two see alike. One sees, as Heine remarked, with bitter glance of an Archenholz, one with inspired eyes of a Corinne, rarely one with clear Greek eyes of a Goethe.
Who can not picture the circus, shows, baths, the ex-slave Menas made knight, dragging a robe three ells long? Syrian flute-players, and cameo-faced Roman women hastening stealthily to the temple of forbidden, alluring Egyptian gods! He gives good reproduction of the age. He saw its pomp. He enjoyed frivolities. He measured the fleeting shadows of change that were sweeping over it, without caring what the end might be. He lived and loved and he did not regret. I have caught vivid, delightful glimpses of Augustan Rome. I am grateful for the clear, unprejudiced eyes which preserved it. He had no bias of mind to make things other than they are. For him, in joy, there were no regrets. These unemotional poems are the one door that lets us into the Imperial City, that Augustusand Virgil, and Faustine of the unforgettable face and cruel heart, and dissolute Verus, knew.
At other times reading Horace is like holding marble miniatures. No matter how subjectively he may write of his occupations, description makes him a plastic artist. Some of the poems are little cameo chains strung upon a ribbon. Such for instance as the faun who chases fleeing nymphs. (Carmen xviii, Book III.), Cytherean Venus dancing by moonlight, surrounded by Graces. (Ode IV.)
“Pallas fitting her helmet, shield, and her fury.”
“The Corybantes, redoubling strokes upon the cymbals.”
“Chloris, shining with fair shoulders in the midnight sea.”
“Bacchus dictating strains among the rocks, while the nymphs, the goat-footed satyrs, listen.”
“The Thracian Priestess upon the mountain, her knotted hair bound with vipers.”
The carver of gems could find inspiration as frequently as poets. To prove he did, we have only to look into cabinets of collectors. The poets who copied him have been many. There were Ronsard, the Pleiad, in old French days. Tennyson, Ernest Dowson, in our own day, and in English, to mention few.
He left indelible trace upon poets of Italy. They found a model ready made in a tongue their own. There are lines of d’Annunzio that suggest Horace because they keep interest in natural things; fresh, loving vision. However, it is not Latin poets who influenced d’Annunzio, but Greek. He drank from the fountain from which Horace drank when he boasted he was first to attune Greek meters to the Latin lyre. D’Annunzio likes better the Greeks of a later day, in Alexandria, who were softer muscled, more luxurious, although his tragedies show thefate—motifof a sterner,artistically speaking, purer age. Carducci dreamed architecturally of the Rome of Horace and Augustus. He has built pictures in theOdi Barbarethat are memorable, splendid.
As society poet Horace set a model which has been imitated but never equaled. He brought to it polished, perfect expression, and thesavoir faireof a courtier. The most perfect society verse in the world is theOde to Pyrrha(Ode V), because of equilibrium between matter and form, grace of poise, bantering lightness. In such verse no one has said more endearing things, more gracefully insincere. We may presume his socialgift was considerable. In the portraits we find a touch at times, that is almost Japanesque; the habit of fixing fleeting, inconsequential thoughts without logical beginning. They are airy fancies that strike the mind obliquely in rapid flight. Centuries ago he sounded, tentatively, the shrill clarions of today.
Two of Horace’s admirable qualities were capability for friendship and just estimate of self. A gentle unenvious kindness radiates toward his friends. There was no condescension, superiority, no literary posing.Friends!How old-fashioned the word! Are they something that vanished with the manhood of Rome? Who loves his friends! Many memories of pleasant days with them his verse recalls! We judge of their importance by the fact he deemed them worth his art. Today friendship plays slight part in life. There are spaces of the self where there is not any judgment of wrong, of right, where there remains only the observing mind. We have grown narrow, selfish, enlarged of ego. We can love only those united by ties of blood. Is there less heart? Is that a reason there are few poets? Great, ennobling pitifulness which could shelter the world and his neighbor is not of today. We imitate. We do not create. At the test there is sound of something broken. Poetry is language of the emotions. When they are enfeebled they cannot speak. Where is the poet who pays tribute to a brother, a friend? Who is capable of feeling that sways the heart! We are tin toys. Love is of the heart. Without it the intellect can not create. Love was mainspring of those fluent opening lines of Horace, love that vibrated richly in his heart, then attuned it to sympathetic singing.
We have become drier, less inclined to giving. We are old with the world. We have less to give! At least writers can no longer picture life fatly. We have lost sight of so many things. The tide of time has swept us upon a barren shore where nothing is important save gold.
The philosophic poise of Horace was universal love, perhaps, too great to be given to an individual. It touched all evenly, like light. We have missed the sunny, friendly way. We must go back. We must find it if we can, before it is too late.
They who have been great, have been so by loving something better than self. The heart has share in fame. Love is productive of creative qualities such as vigor, joy. Vigor, joy, beat behind the lines of Horace.
No other writer has taken his measure so justly. Common sense was basis of his genius. With pride he insists it is his province to sing lightly. He was greater for the justice of his mind than for his poetry. Many have written poetry as good, but where is the person who has seen with vision nothing could dim! He understood he was neither an imaginative nor dramatic poet when he writes:I am only a little bee gathering thyme by the dewy shores of Tiber. This is memorable for unenvious grace. Nor did he permit himself to philosophize long enough to forget it is a poet’s province to amuse. There have been few of such balance. And he had been child of fortune, too. He had become friend of Ruler of the World. There was only one world, then, and its center was Rome. Yet upon his face we feel sure there was none of that pallor which Juvenal declares is engendered by wretched friendship with the great.
He resisted the invitation of Augustus to live at court. He knew simple life was better. He realized that to create, it would be well to live humbly, dream richly.
After he became star of the court of Augustus, he did not grow scornful nor inclined to underrate the homely middle-class. He was gracious. There is no better preacher than Horace against money-mad modernness, its absence of leisure, false standards. He is teacher of the simple life. As he grew older he preached it. He proclaimed it boldly to decadent Rome. To be sure, as Juvenal scornfully says:Well plied with food and wine was Horace when he shouts his evoe! Evidently meaning to insinuate that well he might be happy, whom the tragedy of life could not touch. Yet it was a small income, the Sabine farm, gift of Maecenas. But he had become rich in the developed resources of mind. He knew wealth is not without, but within. He valued taste above gold. So plain, so persistent was his consciousness of this, that wealth beyond satisfaction of daily needs was folly, useless wasting of life to acquire. It was base prostitution of energy. The life bounded by horizon of the dollar can see no vast horizon. The poet’s gift was superior to what gold gives. One of his illuminating sayings is:One may be poor amid great wealth.
At the same time he had no high ideals; no passionate convictions. He was not interested enough in anything to struggle because he felt struggle useless. As satirist he is inferior to Juvenal and Persius. As philosopher, as artist, he is greater. But as a satirist he lacked conviction. He lacked decision. The satires of Horace have neither the eloquence,fire, nor the stern scorn of Juvenal. Bitterness was not in his heart. They are better art but less powerful humanly. Juvenal reaches heights that equal Tyrtæus. Juvenal and Persius wished to make the world better. Horace did not care. He was artist, social exquisite; not moralist, nor reformer. He cared about men’s taste, their appreciation of beauty, the things that make for refined living. He cared nothing about morals if manners were good. He looked at everything with laughing, indifferent disdain. He believed nothing mattered since the end is alike for all. Therefore be kind to your neighbor. Be happy if you can. He was critic of art, not morals. Even to the dissipations of that luxurious age he gave himself with good humored disdain. He lent himself to dissipation with a tolerant smile, without caring one way or the other.
Horace lacked the commanding power of greatness, its one sidedness. He never compels us. He wins by grace, good temper. He is a charming companion for the rich. I can fancy him an admirablecauseur, perhaps an ideal talker, whose conversation was greater, imaginatively, more fancifully attractive, than the written word. His temperament needed stimulus of admiration, applause,the moment. He needed candles and love and pretty women and music and wine. He could have said of himself with the oriental lyrist:None know thee, Hafiz, save when candles shine!
Horace insists on nothing. He has no interest in teaching. He tells us, to be sure, that gold is a false standard, that there are better things. Life and manners were simpler, in an early age, as Dante told his Florentines. But he does not care whether we believe it or not. Life was more beautiful when less complicated; money multiplies bad taste, is the extent of his interest. He did not get far from beauty as standard.
His philosophizing is that of a graceful dilettante. But in knowing, in understanding this, he preserved his Epicurean existence, freedom from work. Perhaps there was another Horace whom his writingdared notshow. Perhaps this serene, laughing existence was the price paid for ease. Horace’s age, we must remember, was one when men were busy forgetting the bloody wars of Augustus; they were bowing to a tyrannical demi-god.
Early a note of weariness creeps into his verses, a regretful, late-autumn splendor. It is like light upon rich fields of grain that have been reaped. His life was loveless, given over to men. This was not unusual in his age. Was it this that made his nature cold, and nothing worth while? Love was possible in pagan days and wrought havoc. Catullus knew howto love. So did Propertius, Tibullus. It was not wholly the age. We get impression that he feels old and is weary, even of pleasure, song, when we know he must have been under fifty. Was it because his body was delicate, frail, as we find hint now and then, or were his senses superfine, easily sated? Or had the excessive dissipation of the age made him old before his time?
When he says, somewhere in last of the Epistles, that the only way to be happy is to admire nothing, we know what years have done. Cultivation had enervated him. It had weakened zest for life, or he echoed the age that was growing weary with too much living. That is why Christianity overpowered the pagan world. It was worn out with joy. It had lived too much. It was ready for penitence. It was weakened with luxurious learning.
There is more love, more understanding of home, in Propertius, Tibullus, than in Horace. Each had had his dream. If Horace had, his words give no hint. He hides from us. Persius says of him:Sly Horace does not give us his heart to sift. It may have been his dream was too tenderly cherished to unveil for a greedy world. His emotions, his longings are as carefully concealed as the veiled face of Isis.
It is not often we find a poet without enthusiasms. Horace had none. He is the only poet of the world without an ideal. He believed, in his indifferent way, with Goethe, that life is more important than art. He could have said with Wilde: “To my life I have given my genius, to my writing, my talent.” He saw it clearly. He judged sanely. It is true, perhaps, that he had toward it, as was his habit, an air ofde haut en bas.
His Satires tell his real life. They, strangely enough, are poetry of fact, something which (the poetry of fact) has not been invented again until our day, and Verhaeren. Horace set about making life a work of art in the same calm way Goethe did. With both, the thing to be lived was superior to the thing created.
He is never confidential. With him, the world is present. He wears a charming manner of indifference. He was too worldly to show his heart. Thehuman interestelement is lacking. He would scorn the heart-throbs upon which inquisitive modernity insists.
There is a sensuous spirituality in poets of the Augustan Age, in scorn of gold, in clear understanding it can not buy the best, because genuinethings belong to all. With them spirituality was striving for the best of earth. There is its sadness, in lack of conception of anything beyond.
But how grateful, how appreciative were they for pleasant things! Having no heaven they had kindlier nearness to earth. They were brothers to the trees, streams. Among them Catullus and Propertius are most modern. In their technique, their emotional view point, there is something that startles. Their heart cry, their rebellion against time and its ravages, shiver with new iridescence, the pagan calm. It plays over their poems like rainbow-shimmer across Murano glass, in contrast to the calm of chiseled marble. Some fretful, wandering wind of modernity touched them, then made them tremble with prophetic wisdom in the comfort of their gay, Greek garden.
Most sonnet writers in America, except George Sterling, overweight the sonnet line, just as in my opinion Brangwyn, delightful draftsman, when he leaves paint brush and colors, overweights the etched line. This crowding of the small, clean room of the sonnet, is the chief fault of that accomplished sonneteer, Mahlon Leonard Fisher. The sonnet line should be noble, clean, and of gracious curve. It should be pure, unvexed, like skies of great etchers, Rembrandt for example.
The American sonnet writer, again excepting Sterling, who to my mind has written the best sonnets in our country, (see hisSequence to Oblivion), is like a pretty debutante, a very pretty debutante, who, in addition to being pretty, insists upon being brilliant, insists upon using a mouth so lovely that is evidently what God made it for, to say clever things. This is worse than mixing metaphors. It is like insisting upon putting furniture that belongs by right to a large house into one small room, one very small room,the sonnet-room.
The world is mad about information, about knowing everything there is to know, and it insists upon displaying it. No one has courage to admit ignorance. Everyone pretends wisdom that surpasses Solomon. One should learn to wear learning lightly, as a jester his bells. And for the same good reason, to mark the ways of joy.
Modern sonnet writing is becoming an exhibition of acrobatics, of how to put the greatest possible number of objects dangling, pirouetting, balancing, upon one little line until its loveliness, its clean, clear profile is obscured. Art is not made to astonish. It is not an acrobat who performsfeats upon lines either long or short. It is made to charm, to ennoble, bring refreshment to the spirit. It is divine play. It is cream-skimming joy. It is plucking the invisible flower of the heart, for a moment’s showing. Assuredly an unvexed thing, from which imperfections have been taken!
England did not do any too well by the sonnet in the early days when she took it from Italy. She roughened it. She coarsened it. She made it a trifle pot-bellied. She taught it to drink ale, instead of wine. She took the classic, Latin profile and gave it two round eyes and a turn-up nose.
And yet I know English sonnets that are lovely. Milton wrote one. Keats wrote one. Mrs. Browning wrote more than one. George Pellew wrote three, three great ones, on Greek subjects, I seem to remember. To do it he made himself, in spirit, un-English. He slipped upon his shoulder the graceful garment of another race and turned back, for rare creative moments, toward the red, wine-making south. Mrs. Browning did something similar, although she only went as far as Italy. She was prodigiously instructed, however, in both Greek and Latin.
The calm spaces between words in Italian sonnet writers is vastly more difficult of realizing than people think. It is harder to sit perfectly still than to stand upon your head at stated intervals, wearing bells and motley. You can not catch Art, (with either a large or a small letter) by running after her and sprinkling salt upon her tail. Genuine Success is something besides a large noise and a yellow electric light.
The calm gliding into the first line of an accomplished sonnet writer of old Italy, gives me the same sensation as, after noise, discomfort of a storm, the calm gliding into a harbor, blue, safe, sheltered, smiling, serene. I have felt this strongly in opening lines of Dante’sVita Nuova. They recur to me again and again.