Latin Literature by J. W. (John William) Mackail
page 106 of 298 (35%)
page 106 of 298 (35%)
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already developed, he bought or begged himself a small post in the civil
service which just enabled him to live. Three years later he was introduced by Virgil to Maecenas, and his uninterrupted prosperity began. Did we know more of the history of Horace's life in the interval between his leaving the university and his becoming one of the circle of recognised Augustan poets, much in his poetical development might be less perplexing to us. The effect of these years was apparently to throw him back, to arrest or thwart what would have been his natural growth. No doubt he was one of the men who (like Caesar or Cromwell in other fields of action) develop late; but something more than this seems needed to account for the extraordinary weakness and badness of his first volume of lyrical pieces, published by him when he was thirty-five. In the first book of the _Satires,_ produced about five years earlier, he had shown much of his admirable later qualities,--humour, sense, urbanity, perception,--but all strangely mingled with a vein of artistic vulgarity (the worst perhaps of all vulgarities) which is totally absent from his matured writing. It is not merely that in this earlier work he is often deliberately coarse--that was a literary tradition, from which it would require more than ordinary originality to break free,--but that he again and again allows himself to fall into such absolute flatness as can only be excused on the theory that his artistic sense had been checked or crippled in its growth, and here and there disappeared in his nature altogether. How elaborate and severe the self-education must have been which he undertook and carried through may be guessed from the vast interval that separates the spirit and workmanship of the _Odes_ from that of the _Epodes,_ and can partly be traced step by step in the autobiographic passages of the second book of _Satires_ and the later _Epistles_. We are ignorant in what circumstances or under what pressure the _Epodes_ were published; it is a plausible conjecture that their |
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