Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Latin Literature by J. W. (John William) Mackail
page 106 of 298 (35%)
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
DigitalOcean Referral Badge