Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/38

 18 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS placed his incomparable volume of epistles, which in grace, ease, good sense, and wit mark as high a level as the odes do in terseness, melody, and exquisite finish. These two works are Horace's great achievement. The remainder of his writings demand but brief notice. They are the " Carmen Seculare ; " a fourth book of odes, with all the perfection of style of the others, but show- ing a slight decline in freshness ; and three more epistles, one, that addressed to Florus, the most charming in its lively and graceful ease of all Horace's familiar writings ; the other two, somewhat fragmentary essays in literary criti- cism. One of them, generally known as the " Ars Poetica," was perhaps left un- finished at his death. In his youth Horace had been an aristocrat, but his choice of sides was per- haps more the result of accident than of conviction, and he afterward acquiesced without great difficulty in the imperial government. His acquiescence was not at first untempered with regret ; and in the odes modern critics have found touches of veiled sarcasm against the new monarchy and even a certain sympathy with the abortive conspiracy of Murena in 22 b.c. But as the empire grew stronger and the advantages which it brought became more evident the repair of the destruction caused by the civil wars, the organization of government, the development of agriculture and commerce, the establishment at home and abroad of the peace of Rome his tone passes into real enthusiasm for the new order. Horace professed himself a follower of the doctrines of Epicurus, which he took as a reasonable mean between the harshness of stoicism and the low moral- ity of the Cyrenaics. In his odes, especially those written on public occasions, he uses, as all public men did, the language of the national religion. But both in religion and in philosophy he remains before all things a man of the world ; his satire is more of manners and follies than of vice or impiety ; and his excel- lent sense keeps him always to that " golden mean " in which he sums up the lesson of Epicurus. As a critic he shows the same general good sense, but his criticisms do not profess to be original or to go much beneath the surface. In Greek literature he follows Alexandrian taste ; in Latin he represents the ten- dency of his age to undervalue the earlier efforts of the native genius and lay great stress on the technical finish of his own day. From his own lifetime till now Horace has had a popularity unexampled in literature. A hundred generations who have' learned him as school-boys have re- membered and returned to him in mature age as to a personal friend. He is one of those rare examples, like Julius Caesar in politics, of genius which ripens late and leaves the more enduring traces. Up to the age of thirty-five his work is still crude and tentative ; afterward it is characterized by a jewel finish, an ex- quisite sense of language which weighs every word accurately and makes every word inevitable and perfect. He was not a profound thinker; his philosophy is rather that of the market-place than of the schools, he does not move among high ideals or subtle emotions. The romantic note which makes Virgil so magi- cal and prophetic a figure at that turning-point of the world's history has no place in Horace ; to gain a universal audience he offers nothing more and noth-