Horace: Odes

Odes
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
(Wordsworth Classics, 1997) [23-13 BC]
lvii + 282 p.

Horace is one of the authors whom I’ve most looked forward to reading during the Roman reading project in which I’m engaged. I have known him only by reputation; to my knowledge, before taking up this volume I’d never read a line of his poetry.

The Odes are his most famous poems, admired for their graceful artistry. Horace was the master of the polished miniature; the elegant turn of phrase; the marriage of form and content; the personal touch. There are four books, published between 23 and 13 BC, comprising about 100 poems altogether.

Each ode is, as a rule (occasionally broken), addressed to a particular individual: to a friend returned from war, or to a friend who has fallen in love with his servant-girl, or to someone writing a book, or mourning a death, or to an unfaithful beauty. One is addressed to a lute. The subject matter is as wide as the heavens: love, friendship, the vanity of riches and power, the fleetingness of life, the virtues of wine. The tone is largely whimsical and tender, poetry on a small, domestic scale, but not a hint of rusticity. Horace professes a love for the countryside, but his own personality, it seems, was gently urbane.

This is personal poetry, then, far from the high style of epic, akin in some ways to Catullus, but more guarded, using meticulous poetic construction to put a little distance between the finished poem and the poet.

*

Let’s look at a few examples. This volume of Horace that I have been reading is an anthology in which the work of many different translators are combined. Therefore where I quote lines I shall indicate in brackets the name and date of the translator.

A recurring theme is the small ambition of Horace the poet, who is content with a simple, domestic sphere, and whose style is not fit for great matters like war and affairs of state:

Small wits, small themes! I know my humble place,
Nor would the Muse of my unwarlike lyre
Suffer my verse with ineffectual fire
Your fame or Caesar’s to disgrace.
(I, 6) [Edward Marsh; 1941]

*

And as for Caesar — you in your great prose
Will tell his battles better, and display
Proud kings with necks enchained, his vanquished foes,
Led captive down the Sacred Way.

Me the sage Muse assigns an apter part,
To praise your fair Licymnia’s radiant eyes,
Her thrilling voice that lifts you to the skies,
The treasure of her faithful heart;

How all she does becomes her, the swift play
Of parrying wit, the dance of frolic grace
When with the bright-robed girls she takes her place
To hymn Diana’s festal day.
(II, 12) [Edward Marsh; 1941]

Yet this modesty is a subterfuge of sorts, for he does occasionally turn his pen to Caesar’s advantage:

Come then, auspicious prince, and bring
To thy long gloomy country light,
For in thy countenance the spring
Shines forth to cheer thy people’s sight;
Then hasten thy return for, thou away,
Nor lustre has the sun, nor joy the day.
(IV, 5) [Philip Francis; 1746]

This was consistent with his social position; though the son of a freedman, and so not part of the Roman aristocratic circles, his talent earned him a place among the powerful in Roman society. His special artistic patron was Maecenas, Augustus’ adviser and confidant.

In any case, it is equally clear that his quaint subject matter is but a vehicle to greatness of another sort:

Restrain your tears and cease your cries,
Nor grace with fading flowers my hearse;
I without funeral elegies
Shall live forever in my verse.
(II, 20) [Dr Johnson; 1726]

This poetic conceit — that the poet’s immortality, or that of his subject, is assured because of the poetry itself — is familiar from Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I wonder (but do not know) if Shakespeare inherited it from Horace.

The shortness of life is another theme that comes up again and again. It ought to spur us, says Horace, to live each day with determination to wring from it all that it can yield:

Tomorrow and its works defy;
Lay hold upon the present hour,
And snatch the pleasures passing by
To put them out of Fortune’s power;
Nor love nor love’s delights disdain –
Whate’er thou getts’t today, is gain.

Secure those golden early joys
That youth unsoured with sorrow bears,
Ere with’ring time the taste destroys
With sickness and unwieldy years.
For active sports, for pleasing rest.
This is the time to be posesst;
The best is but in season best.
(I, 9) [Dryden; 1685]

Or, again, in an ode addressed to Virgil, he argues that the brevity of life should encourage us not to take ourselves too seriously, but to enjoy levity and folly:

Then leave delays, and gain’s desire,
And mindful of black funeral fire,
Short folly mix with counsels best:
‘Tis sweet sometimes to be in jest.
(IV, 12) [Sir Thomas Hawkins; 1625)

All of this, of course, under the shadow of death, which loomed over all:

One end awaits us all. Our fate
Is fixed. The ferry-boat is sent
To carry all men, soon or late,
To their perpetual banishment.
(II, 3) [John Gielgud; 1951]

*

The indifferent earth, an equal friend,
As willingly opens her wide womb
For beggar’s grave as prince’s tomb.
(II, 18) [Thomas Hawkins; 1625]

**

I enjoyed these poems a good deal. Reading poetry in translation — especially non-narrative poetry — is something of a fool’s game. I cannot name a single poem which has achieved eminence or widespread admiration in the English speaking world that was not originally written in English. Translations, however talented the translator, somehow fail to really take wing. Yet there are wonderfully talented poets in this volume, Dryden and Milton being the most eminent. The reader, if innocent of the original tongue, is unsure whether whatever elegance or artistry they perceive in the translation is a reflection of something present in the original, or not. As such, it is difficult to form any precise view of, in this case, Horace the poet from reading the poems.

Why bother then? In part, I think, because of the personal tone of the poetry, which comes through quite clearly despite the mediating voices. There is a man behind the lines whom we can, in some measure, get to know, whether that man is Horace himself or his artful public persona. The point is that there is a “character” there, who speaks to us across the centuries with a startlingly immediate voice.

Another reason would be simply to appreciate, in some measure, a poet whose influence over subsequent European poetry, and English poetry specifically, has been great. If the translations in this volume are representative (and they are consistent with what I found in the even more extensive collection Horace in English), an interest in re-expressing Horace’s poetry in English forms began in roughly the sixteenth century and has extended up to the present. This is not the same thing, of course, as saying that an interest in Horace began then; educated readers before the twentieth century could, and did, read him in the original, and he has been considered one of the great poets of our tradition since antiquity. Wikipedia has a nice potted history of his reception in European cultures.

*

[Complicated love]
No sooner hast thou, with false vows,
Provoked the powers above;
But thou art fairer than before
And we are more in love.
Thus Heaven and Earth seem to declare
They pardon falsehood in the fair.
(II, 8) [Sir Charles Sedley; 1701]

[The glory of the past]
Time sensibly all things impairs;
Our fathers have been worse than theirs;
And we than ours; next age will see
A race more profligate than we,
With all the pains we take, have skill enough to be.
(III, 6) [Wentworth Dillon; 1684]

[Against riches]
We barbarously call those bless’d
Who are of largest tenements possess’d,
Whilst swelling coffers break their owner’s rest.
More truly happy those, who can
Govern the little empire, man.
(IV, 9) [George Stepney; 1689]

Here and there

First, some film notes:

• Terrence Malick’s long-awaited film, A Hidden Life, premiered this week at Cannes, and the critics seemed to like it, calling it his best since The Tree of Life and, perhaps on account of its World War II setting, something of a partner to The Thin Red Line, all of which is wonderfully good news. It’s the film I’ve been most anticipating this year, though whether I’ll actually get to see it this year is another matter.
• Deal Hudson praises First Reformed, while sketching out its relationship to the so-called transcendental style of film-making.
• Another good film from last year was the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Ross Douthat argues that it’s “a particularly transparent window into their unique sort of metaphysical agnosticism” — which, if it wasn’t clear, he sees as a good thing. It’s a thoughtful take on the film.
• There is a documentary from a few years ago — it never found a distributor, which tells you something — called An Open Secret which argues that the grooming system for child actors in Hollywood includes networks of sexual abuse and exploitation. The highest ranking Hollywood brass named in that film was Bryan Singer, director of several X-Men films. A few months ago The Atlantic ran a good piece in which his accusers told their stories.

Then, some book notes:

• Will Lloyd laments the rise of politicized books for children.
• It’s my favourite colour and yours, and now Michel Pastoureau has written a book about it. The book was in our home, courtesy the public library, where, alas, it sat in a place of honour for some weeks before being returned, unread. But I would like to read it, and in the meantime Jesse Russell has written an appreciative review.
• James Panero writes perceptively about the ghost stories of Russell Kirk (which I read a few years ago around about All Hallows Eve).
• Finally, I have to recommend Michael Weingrad’s superbly barbed exploration of Harold Bloom’s life-long antagonism toward the Inklings, and especially toward C.S. Lewis.

For an envoi, let’s watch Buster Scruggs’ death scene, featuring Gillian Welch and David Rawlings singing “Spurs for Wings”:

Barzun: Classic, Romantic, and Modern

Classic, Romantic, and Modern
Jacques Barzun
(Little, Brown; 1961) [1943]
255 p.

“Romantic” is a complicated word. Even if we use it just in an historical sense, applying to the period covering, roughly speaking, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, what do we mean? Do we mean that it was a period that exemplified

“a return to the Middle Ages, a love of the exotic, a revolt from Reason, an exaggeration of individualism, a liberation of the unconscious, a reaction against scientific method, a revival of pantheism, idealism, and catholicism, a rejection of artistic conventions, a preference for emotion, a movement back to nature, or a glorification of force[?]”

The word has been used to mean these and many other things. (This book has an entertaining chapter in which Barzun does nothing but compile usage examples and try to tease out the implied meaning.) Barzun’s purpose in this book is to clarify our understanding of the romantic period, to defend it against its critics, and, in the process, to set forth a theory of historical development in which romanticism, whether under that name or another smelling as sweet, plays an essential part.

**

Following conventional usage, Barzun takes ‘romanticism’ to refer to a movement in European culture by a group of artists and thinkers whose births fell roughly between 1770 and 1815. We are talking about Blake, Goethe, Keats, Kant, Byron, Schiller, Emerson, Beethoven, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Thoreau, Chopin, and Scott, among (of course) many others. This was a group that was far from united, but Barzun argues that they are all justly ‘romantics’ because of two essential features: first, they understood themselves to be doing something in contrast to the “dissolving eighteenth century”, doing something constructive and creative, in search of new ideas and new institutions; and, second, that they shared a double awareness that man is simultaneous both great and vulnerable, he is “created and limited, a doer and a sufferer, infinite in spirit and finite in action”. These two characteristics Barzun argues are basic to romanticism, underlying the welter of different ideas and forms that sprung from it.

As an effort to find common ground uniting these many different figures, this is worth considering. At the same time, the idea that man is an intersection of the infinite and the finite is hardly an idea distinctive of romanticism. You’ll find it in Dante and Augustine. It is in some sense just a Christian idea. And, indeed, later Barzun argues that romantic life was basically Christian in character, “for it [combined] the infinite worth of the individual soul in its power and weakness, the search for union with the infinite, and the gospel of work for one’s fellow men.” The argument, then, must be not that this duality was unique to the romantics, but only that it exercised a particular influence over their thought.

He discerns four main phases in the career of romanticism, and it is worth sketching them. The first, from roughly 1780 to 1850, was the heyday of the romantics, during which most of the most eminent figures did their most creative work. The subsequent phases were “efforts at specialization, selection, refinement, and intensification” of the paths forged in the first phase.

The second phase Barzun calls “realism”, which he dates to about 1850-1885. This was an exploration of the political ramifications of romanticism (especially in Marx) and involved a turn toward materialism and coercion, under the tutelage of the physical sciences: “realism meant force without principle, matter without mind, mechanism without life.” It was a simplification of the original complexity of romanticism, but shared the goals of the romantics: “nationhood, social order, intellectual unity, the improvement of the human lot”.

The third and fourth phases were more properly a split, as they occurred simultaneously. One was the symbolist movement originated by the pre-Raphaelites, rooted in Coleridge and Keats, that influenced Debussy, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Whistler. The other was what Barzun calls naturalism, exemplified by Dostoyevsky, Zola, and Huysmans; it was humanistic, and retained an interest in political and social issues that the symbolists largely lacked. Both movements lasted into the early twentieth century but were eventually displaced by “the modern”, about which more anon.

**

Barzun is keen to defend romanticism against its critics, or at least against unjust criticism. Reading between the lines, for instance, I infer that a strand of criticism at the time of writing — during WWII — was that romanticism was to blame for the rise of fascism and totalitarian politics. The idea seems to have been that with its elevation of national, local character and its revolutionary attitude toward social institutions, romanticism enabled or even abetted the revolutionary politics that produced the Russian Revolution and the Third Reich. The charge has a certain plausibility, for the romantics generally lauded both the American and French Revolutions. But Barzun argues that the romantics’ commitment to variety and innovation and their rejection of authority make a poor case for them as nascent totalitarians; for him, “the romantic style of doing things is the precise opposite of the totalitarian”. It is a fair point, yet I am reminded of Eliot’s argument that cultural movements, precisely because of the energies they release, might well tend toward a terminus that achieves the opposite of what they intend. (Eliot thought this true of liberalism.) The course of a cultural and intellectual movement sometimes overflows the bounds foreseen by its founders.

Romantics, in part because of their interest in fable and supernaturalism, were sometimes charged with “escapism”; in the twentieth century Tolkien met with a similar criticism for similar reasons. Barzun vigorously contests the charge; he sees them as unprejudiced realists, like explorers and scientists who opened up new vistas and experimented with different possibilities, all in an effort to adopt forms and subject matter which could convey their meaning. “They tried to meet the claim of every existing reality, both internal and external” and “they admitted the widest possible range of experience as real”. For them, life was the test of thought, not the other way around, and they were willing to stress accepted conventions and push boundaries of good taste in order to clear space for adequate expression of lived experience. With the benefit of hindsight, I think we understand this better today than did their critical contemporaries.

*

The book is not called simply “Romantic”, so let me say a word about the two foils: Classic and Modern. Classicism is the (if I may so say) classic foil for romanticism. Where romanticism is restless, iconoclastic, and questing, classicism values stable norms and social unity, for “no matter how arbitrary, conventions are useful and can be relied upon in proportion as they are held inviolable”. If Berlioz is a romantic, Haydn, I suppose, could be an exemplar of classicism. Societies with a strong classicist tendency are strong on hierarchies and clear social conventions. Barzun is sensible of the appeal and very real strengths of classicism:

It calls for intelligence, discipline, unselfish renunciation of private desires, a sense of social solidarity, and punctilious behaviour towards other members of one’s own caste.

At the same time, classicism has a kind of brittleness that makes it vulnerable. The unanimity it presents can be more apparent than real, imposed by social expectations rather than organically grown. Tumult may be concealed beneath a smooth exterior. When new problems arise classicism has a difficult time adapting.

Romanticism, too, has its weaknesses of course: it is turbulent, disorienting, and disruptive. It may be irrational. Societies which feel a need to break free of the constraints of a classical order may soon enough come to wish it back again. For this reason, Barzun sets forth in this book a theory of social change in which classical periods and romantic periods alternate, like the boom and bust cycle of an economy:

Periods of absorption alternate with periods of elimination; after diversity, simplification. Though both tendencies are at times present together, one dominates. Man explores and is romantic; man wants repose and becomes classical.

The nineteenth century was romantic; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe were classical; the Renaissance was romantic, the late middle ages were classical. I think we could argue that the High Middle Ages — say, the 12th and 13th centuries — were romantic by Barzun’s definition, with many innovations in literature, architecture, and music. It’s an intriguing theory with a certain prima facie plausibility.

If it were true, it raises a question about our own times: is modernism a romanticism or a classicism? If modernism has yielded to something else — call it postmodernism — is that classical or romantic? Or has something happened to disrupt the cycle?

Barzun was writing in the 1940s, and at that time modernism was still in full swing. It seems he saw it is a defective species of classicism: elite and perfectionist, as classicism often is, but unable to tolerate solidification of any conventions, morbidly self-conscious and distrustful of its own desires, and skeptical. “It looks for certainties, guarantees of permanence and safety without, often, believing that they exist.” It searched for new, unassailable grounds on which to build, but was afflicted by a sense of universal purposelessness. Hardly promising material on which to found a stable social order.

This second edition of the book also includes, however, an epilogue written in 1960, a vantage point which allowed Barzun more perspective on cultural and social developments after WWII. He discerned two principal lines of development worthy of comment: first, the wholesale rebellion of artists against the Western inheritance, and, at the same time, nearly the opposite movement in the general public, who evinced a fresh desire for “the classics”. Rather than counterbalancing one another, Barzun saw them as working together to destroy the artistic tradition of the past five centuries. The artists were revolutionary, aiming “to produce in man a wholly new consciousness — not a new outlook upon the old makings of life, but a life made of a new substance.” They looked on the artistic heritage with contempt, as an obstacle rather than an inspiration. And the public — well, the public has bad taste, and when their appetite fixes on “the classics” it can only corrupt them. One problem is the cheapening effect of promulgating art through the channels of middle class commerce:

All the new media make arbitrary demands on the materials fed through them… To see the works of the Impressionists twisted into backgrounds for advertising perfume; to hear the melodies of Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, and Chopin rehandled by Tin Pan Alley; to listen to absent-minded hacks giving the lowdown on high art, not solely in blurbs for books and discs, in mass media, or over the air, but also on the walls of museums and in the glass cases of propagandistic libraries — all this is destructive in the same measure that it is communicative.

and another is the sheer abundance of material and ease of access, which sickens and sours the aesthetic sensibility:

Too much art in too many places means art robbed of its right associations, its exact forms, its concentrated power. We are grateful for the comprehensive repertoire which modern industry for the first time puts within our reach, but we turn sick at the aggressive temptation, like the novice in the sweetshop.

In our own time the general public’s interest in classic literature, music, and art has subsided, eclipsed, I would argue, by new media, but the opportunities for over-saturation have only become more common and more tempting.

**

Barzun, even in his epilogue, was writing only at the beginning of the 1960s, and, astute as he was, he seems not to have foreseen the cultural upheavals just a few years in his future. How I wish that he could have written a third edition in, say, the 1980s. It’s pretty clear that the 1960s were, in his taxonomy, a romantic period, with a rapid development of new artistic expressions, and a general breakdown of norms in art, sexuality, and society. Its aftermath is all around us, though I wonder if there are, perhaps, nascent signs of a return to classicism? Many people have documented the marked contrast between the children of the 1960s and the new “millenial” generation, which is more likely to be risk averse, less tolerant of unfamiliar ideas and the free expression of them, and more narrowly moralistic, though its list of sins runs along novel lines. The efforts of the baby boomers, now occupying the heights of power, to shore up their revolution by legal means is also typical, says, Barzun, of classicism, the unanimity of which is more often imposed than grown:

To suppose that one can have classicism without authoritarianism is like supposing that one can have braking power without friction.

We shall see what we shall see. In the meantime, Classic, Romantic, and Modern is a thoughtful and learned reflection on the last quarter-millenium of our cultural history, and remains well worth reading.

le Carré: The Honourable Schoolboy

The Honourable Schoolboy
John Le Carré
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1977)
532 p.

It is fair to say that I have next to no idea what happened in this book. I do know — because I read it on the dust jacket — that the story has something to do with George Smiley’s efforts to revenge himself on the Russian spymaster Karla, whom we remember from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but what Karla has to do with what happens in the book is for someone else to answer. I can at least confirm that his name comes up a few times.

The story, insofar as I was able to discern it, concerns the infiltration of an opium smuggling operation into China. Some events take place in Cambodia, and some in Thailand, and others in Hong Kong. I gather that these smugglers are somehow working for Karla for some reason. There is a character whom Smiley is trying to capture — his name is Nelson — and it seems, from the hullabaloo that accompanies his eventual capture, that he is important in some way. Unless I am mistaken, he never appears on the page until the very end, so it is odd that he should be the novel’s focus. Actually, for much of the book I thought he was a child who had died.

There are some characters in the book. An English fellow called Westerby. A woman called Liz. Someone called Drake. Back in England there is a Circus operative called Collins, and he seemed suspicious to me, but that went nowhere. These characters did many things in the book and, by and large, I failed to understand their motives.

None of this amounts to a criticism of le Carré or his book, exactly. He is by reputation a very good spy novelist. He is comfortable with subtlety and elaborate hidden motives, and good for him. This book took the palm for crime novels in the year it was published, so others have appreciated, and presumably understood, it. Meanwhile, I am wondering if I should persist with my plans to read Smiley’s People, the final volume in the Karla trilogy. Nobody likes to feel a fool, much less twice over.

Wodehouse: Psmith II

Psmith in the City
P.G. Wodehouse
(Overlook, 2003) [1910]
208 p.

Psmith and Mike both leave school for a life of responsibility and upward mobility, and, as chance would have it, both land in the postage department of the New Asiatic Bank in London. Hilarity ensues. Befriending their excitable and meticulous supervisor by feigning to share his interest in football, they acquire the leisure to take tea and circle in the orbit of the bank’s manager, Mr Bickersdyke, on whose good will Psmith is intent on playing for his own amusement. Eventually Mike hears the call of the cricket field too strongly and, deserting his post, abandons bank life, Psmith following. In the end, Psmith is bound for Cambridge University, intent on studying law, and offers Mike an all-expense-paid berth at the same in the capacity of his personal secretary. The future is bright.

This was one of my favourite Wodehouse novels so far. Psmith is a splendid character who enlivens every page. Mike, thoughtfully, withdraws to the shadows so as not to distract. The sequence in which Psmith attends a political speech by “Comrade Bickersdyke” and rises to point out Bickersdyke’s appropriation of an episode in Three Men in a Boat was raucously funny. Really delightful.

**

Psmith, Journalist
P.G. Wodehouse
(Overlook, 2008) [1915]
256 p.

A year has passed, and Psmith and Mike have a term off at Cambridge. Mike and the cricket team head state-side, and Psmith follows.

The events of the story take place in New York City, with Mike mostly off-screen. Psmith encounters the Acting Editor of a homely little magazine called Cosy Moments, and, sensing an opportunity for adventure, convinces him to reboot his rag as an edgy political agitator; their cause: the degredations of New York’s tenement housing.

It’s a good premise, giving Psmith scope to talk his way into, and then out of, trouble, in his inimitable manner. The story goes places I’d not have expected, including into the world of boxing, and of gangsters, where Psmith is out of place. I enjoyed the book, but it lacked some of the sparkle of the earlier Psmith stories. It could be that I need to give him a rest for a while, to sharpen the appetite.

Regina caeli

For Eastertide, a two-voiced riff on Regina caeli, by Jacob Obrecht, and played on the organ. The video shows how fifteenth-century performers would have read their parts, and is, on that account, both fascinating and instructive.

Happy Easter to all!

Weinberg: String Quartet No.13

Weinberg’s thirteenth quartet was written in 1977, just a few years after the death of Shostakovich, and it’s reminiscent of Shostakovich’s late quartets, with an untraditional structure and a tonal, if somewhat thorny, complexion. In fact, like Shostakovich’s own thirteenth quartet, it is composed in one continuous movement, though one in which several different sections are discernible.

I listened to it this evening, and was so taken with it that I thought I’d share it here, in a performance by the Silesian Quartet, who are engaged in what appears to be a project to record all of the quartets. It begins in this way: