THE HORATIAN MODEL

IN ENGLISH VERSE

BEFOR

I

EFORE discussing as I am engaged to do this morning the Horatian model in English verse, give me leave, Gentlemen, to delimit the ground.

I am not going to discuss the many attempts to translate Horace to turn him straight into English verse—with their various degrees of ill-success. They are so many, so various, as to raise one's moral estimate of Man-improbus homo, indomitable still-against all experience and the advice of his friends-'still clutching the inviolable shade!' The talents of the late Mr Gladstone were multifarious and large indeed in their ambit; yet we may agree that the Odes of Horace were not haunts meet for him:

Piscium et summâ genus haesit ulmo...

as he translated

The elm-tree top to fishy kind

Gave harbour....

Or we might paraphrase-in words addressed to another
Father William:

And yet you incessantly stand on your head:
Do you think, at your age, it is right?

My own judgment would place Conington first among competitors, with Sir Theodore Martin second (surpassing him in occasional brilliance but falling some way behind

on the long run), De Vere third. But these preferences are idle; since, in the ordinary sense, Horace defies translation.

Secondly I shall ask your leave, this morning, to plant our Deus Terminus yet nearer-on this side of the Satires and Epistles. I do not deny that this fences off a deal of the genuine Horace, or pretend that we can either summarise or appreciate the total Horace if we leave the Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica out of account. But I shall take little more than a glance at them because his magic secret does not hide anywhere in these, and as a fact their style, in all its essentials, has been caught and transferred into modern literature-certainly into French and Englishby a number of writers. I am not talking of satire as we commonly understand it today. When we think of satire we think of Juvenal and of Swift, of Pope, of Churchill, who derive from Juvenal-not from Horace, save but occasionally and then at a remove. Satire has come to connote something of savagery, of castigation: and I am glad to be quit of it this morning because (to be frank) it is a form of art that appeals to me very faintly, especially in warm weather-and this not merely because bad temper is troublesome, but for the reason that anger-valuable, indeed, now and then-is a passion of which it behoves all men to be economical. To be indignant is better than to be cynical: to rage is manlier than to sneer. Yet to be constitutionally an angry man-to commence satirist and set up in business as a professionally angry man-has always seemed to me, humanly speaking (and therefore artistically), more than a trifle absurd. Few will deny Juvenal's force: yet after all as we open a volume entitled Sixteen Satires of Juvenal, what are we promised but this -'Go to! I, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, propose to lose my temper on sixteen several occasions'? In fact, when

we have been scolded through eleven or so of these efforts, even such a genius as his is left laboriously flogging a dead horse; reduced to vituperating some obscure Egyptians for an alleged indulgence in cannibalism. Say, now, that you pick up tomorrow's newspaper and read that a missionary has been eaten in the Friendly Islands. You will pay his exit the tribute of a sigh: but the distance, and anthropology, will soften the blow. You will not fly into a passion. At the most you will write to The Times calling for a punitive visit by one of His Majesty's ships. More likely you will reckon your debt of humanity discharged by ingeminating, after Sir Isaac Newton, 'O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest what thou hast devoured!'

II

But the Satires of Horace were not satires in this sense at all: no more satires than this week's Punch is the London Charivari. Satura literally translated, is a 'hotch potch': in letters it becomes (as we should say) a 'miscellany,' a familiar discourse upon this, that and the other. With a man of Horace's temperament such sermones could not miss to be urbane, gossipy, sententious a little, wise a great deal, smooth in address, pointed in wit; and I dare to say that these qualities have been achieved by his English and French descendants. To prove that the trick can be done even in a straight translation, let me quote you an example from Conington's version of Epistle 2, Book 11.-Luculli miles, etc.:

A soldier of Lucullus's, they say,

Worn out at night by marching all the day,
Lay down to sleep, and, while at ease he snored,
Lost to a farthing all his little hoard.

This woke the wolf in him;-'tis strange how keen
The teeth will grow with but the tongue between ;-
Mad with the foe and with himself, off-hand
He stormed a treasure-city, wall'd and manned,
Destroys the garrison, becomes renowned,
Gets decorations and two hundred pound.
Soon after this the general had in view
To take some fortress-where, I never knew;
He singles out our friend, and makes a speech
That e'en might drive a coward to the breach:
'Go, my fine fellow! go where valour calls!
There's fame and money too inside those walls.'
'I'm not your man,' returned the rustic wit:
'He makes a hero who has lost his kit.'

At Rome I had my schooling, and was taught
Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought;
At classic Athens, where I went erelong,

I learnt to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong,
And search for truth, if so she might be seen,
In academic groves of blissful green;
But soon the stress of civil strife removed
My adolescence from the scenes it loved,

And ranged me with a force that could not stand
Before the might of Caesar's conquering hand.
Then when Philippi turned me all adrift
A poor plucked fledgling, for myself to shift,
Bereft of property, impaired of purse,

Sheer penury drove me into scribbling verse:
But now, when times are altered, having got
Enough, thank Heaven, at least to boil my pot,
I were the veriest madman if I chose

To write a poem rather than to doze.

Now I would repeat here an observation of Newman's which I have quoted before to you, that to invent a style is in itself a triumph of genius-'It is like crossing a country

before roads are made between place and place' and the author who does this deserves to be a classic both because of what he does and because he can do it. But this originality being granted in the Horace of the Satires and Epistles, I do think that our English translator has caught the trick of the Latin, or very nearly. But he derives it, of course, through countless English imitators of Horace who repeat the model at short intervals, mile after mile, for two centuries and more. Here, for example, is Bishop Hall (15741656):

Late travelling along in London way,

We met as seem'd by his disguised array-
A lusty courtier, whose curlèd head

With abron locks was fairly furnished.
I him saluted in our lavis wise;
He answers my untimely courtesies.
His bonnet vail'd, or ever he could think,
The unruly wind blows off his periwinke.
He 'lights, and runs, and quickly hath him sped
To overtake his overrunning head.

Here is the note in Cleiveland (1613-1658):

Lord! what a goodly thing is want of shirts!

Here in Oldham (1653–1683):

Some think themselves exalted to the Sky
If they light in some noble Family:
Diet, an Horse, and thirty Pounds a Year,
Besides th' Advantage of his Lordship's ear.

Here it is in Dryden:

Shimei, whose youth did early promise bring
Of zeal to God and hatred to his King,
Did wisely from expensive sins refrain,
And never broke the Sabbath, but for gain.