The Ship of State and the Stroke of Fate

THERE has been in the last year a great revival of interest in Horace, — if one can speak of reviving what has never died or even slept. When Augustus Cæsar, in the year 17 B. C., called the whole people to behold the more than Centennial show, which none had ever seen before, nor ever should see again, the solemn record which he entrusted to marble, and which has only been unearthed in the last few years, set forth that “Quintus Horatius Flaccus composed the song; ” the hymn, that is, to Apollo and Diana, which we call Carmen Sæculare. Horace had then risen, in spite of all detraction, to the first place among the Roman poets ; Virgil, whose claims he would have been the last to dispute, had been cut off two years before. From that time to this, Horace has been awarded the darling object of his ambition, a rank among the lyric bards.

In the last year he has had the honor of being translated by the first orator and statesman of our time; nor has this version deterred a younger Oxonian brother, Mr. Deasley, from entering on the same field, while Mr. Graves has transferred the themes of sixteen odes into as many delicious satires on modern English politics, offering themselves as spoken by the same great statesman, but of which, we may fear, Mr. Gladstone on earth does not enjoy the humor as much as Horace in Elysium. The Roman has indeed, as he prophesied, visited the Britons ; but they have not proved fierce to their guest. But his boldest visions never pictured that in a land beyond the utmost limit of his blessed fields and rich islands, and certainly endowed with no such heavenly climate, in a university whose name and the name of its site he could not have pronounced to save his life, a descendant of the blue-eyed German youth should edit him with love and learning.¹

There can hardly be said to live the civilized man for whom Horace has not some message ; nay, it may be said that he has been read and enjoyed by more men, in more countries, than any other writer, certainly than any other poet. He had sixteen hundred years’ start of Cervantes and Shakespeare; Homer never began to compete with him in circulation ; Horace is read by men who have forgotten the Virgil of their boyhood; he is indeed immortal and universal.

This wide acceptance he owes to many things combined : the charm of his verse, the sparkle and terseness of his language, the pungency and truth of his sentiments, and a rich stream of feeling which runs deepest when most still. Professor Sellar and Professor Tyrrell have pointed out that Horace is the perfect type of that urbanitas which the Romans claimed as one of their distinguishing qualities ; and as a great and beautiful city surely draws to her the observant and thoughtful souls from every district, and if she does not keep them, sends them home refined and transmuted, so Horace exercises upon thousands of men the mystic influence of the Eternal City, in a way that more passionate, loftier, and deeper poets, Catullus, Virgil, and Lucretius, fail to do.

And just as Rome, though she has been for twenty centuries the home of all the world, has a character her own and inimitable ; as ancient Rome and mediæval Rome are as different in their separate fascinations as each is from modern Rome, and all from any other city; so Horace, plainly and intimately as he speaks to every man, has a character belonging to his age, —incommunicable, although so attractive. It has been remarked again and again that he is untranslatable. This is absolutely true, and is not in the least disproved by exhibiting one or another ode where some clever man has made a respectable version. Let any one who admires and loves Horace read consecutively his ten favorite odes in the ten least unsuccessful versions, and the sad truth will be patent.

This is largely due to the fact that Horace was completely a man of his time and place, and those a time and a place where all sorts of influences united to set a brand — one hardly dares use a weaker word — on the minds of men. We call it the Augustan age; but we hardly realize what that means. It means that after a civil war lasting over a hundred years, when all the force and all the wealth and all the wit of the world had been combined to make Roman citizens cut each other’s throats, a young man of thirty-three gave the imperial city peace, — a peace which the oldest man had not seen before for twenty continuous years, and which Marius and Sylla and Pompey and Cicero and Julius Cæsar, and scores of other public men who would have been accounted giants in any other age, had been powerless to effect. When Horace declared that two more victories would prove Augustus a present god, just as thunder proved Jupiter to be the king of heaven, that was not the gross adulation one now supposes; he was simply saying what every one at the time felt, — that the grand-nephew of Julius had wrought a miracle.

Horace, though born on the other side of Italy, was a Roman patriot; and it is an interesting fact, and a cheering one for Americans, that, the very provinces which, twenty-five years before his birth, had revolted from Rome in the interest of a free Italy proved her most loyal subjects when admitted to full rights ; such of them, that is, as survived the Social War. He claims for his own Apulians the highest right in the ancient symbols of Roman glory, — "the fire that burns for aye, and the shield that fell from heaven.” As a patriot, the last and worst of the civil strifes, the thirty years’ war from the consulship of Metellus to the rout of Actium, had shaken his soul back and forward. We call Cicero vacillating, but he vacillated more than others only because he was wiser and better. As Macaulay says about the vicissitudes of the French Revolution, a Roman who held the same views in Pompey’s consulship, after the battle of Pharsalus, and after those of Philippi and of Actium, must have been either a divinely inspired prophet or a fool. From Horace’s twenty-fourth year to his thirty-fourth, it is hard to imagine his drawing a free breath for three months together.

Accordingly, many of Horace’s earlier lyrics show a strain of uncertainty and perplexity which never appears in the mass of those written after the nation had thoroughly settled down under its first real master. And In none is this strain more apparent than in the fourteenth ode of the first book,— O navis. which, Quintilian tells us with authority, is, being interpreted, “ the ship of state.” The very name suggests the closing lines of our own Longfellow’s Building of the Ship ; and with that passion for attempting the impossible which is not to be controlled, I have transferred — not translated — Horace’s ode into Longfellow’s metre: —

Where this or any version is likely to misrepresent the original is in failing to catch the very bold construction of the verse, the lines running one into another, so that four fifths of the poem form one continuous strain, which tosses about from side to side, like the ship herself. The succession of vowels and consonants is also very remarkable in the Latin. Every kind of change is rung on both, but there is a constant recurrence to i. the thinnest of vowels, and n, the most sonorous of consonants, giving the whole a keen, resonant pitch. There is an effect of quiver about the whole strain, answering exactly to unsteadiness, doubt, and fear in the writer’s mind.

No one can avoid trying to read between the lines, and see what special allusions the ode contains to public men and events. It is easy to be too curious in this matter, attempting to detect, as some commentators have done, a specific indication of some person or transaction in every part of the ship’s armor ; but it is pretty plain that the poet cautions his countrymen against any attempt to recall the old aristocratic commonwealth, which had been struck down with Porapey, revived for an instant under Brutus, and only galvanized by Pompey’s son. The total want in the old Roman constitution of any restraining or tightening force when party spirit chose to break loose is almost certainly indicated in the seventh and eighth lines, where the practice is alluded to, rarely seen in modern navigation, but common in ancient, of “undergirding the ship,” as we have it in Acts xxvii. 17, drawing the ribs and keel together by sails and ropes.

The ode must have been written at some time when the old Republicans, with whom Horace had once associated, were trying to throw off the harness which Augustus — not yet so named — was tightening on them, and once more to revive the old unchecked plunges from aristocracy to democracy, and back again, which had been shaking Rome for a century. It is the composition of a patriot, but of a patriot who will give up anything — all the historic adventure and glory, all the chances of victory and wealth, that ocean always offers to the bold—for the inglorious but comfortable peace of harbor. The strange word fortiter, as strange as Dante’s use of forte at the opening of the Divina Commedia, expresses a belief that not only discretion, but fear may be the better part of valor.

In shorter words, the note of cheer or hope is wanting; there is anxiety, caution. prudence, wisdom, and all that content which is akin to disgrace, but hope, in a lively sense, that one’s best aspirations may be nearly or quite realized there is none. There could not be. The ancient Epicureanism did not admit it, nor, for the matter of that, the ancient Stoicism either. In a mild way Horace strikes the note of hope in his ode to Licinius, — Rectius vives, — where the same metaphor of a ship is used; but it is the sort of hope that is founded on the revolutions of nature, where good and bad weather occur in a fated round. The hope that is founded on the patience which comes from experience, and that from faith, is scarcely known to that training whose liveliest happiness is unruffled content.

In the year 1849 Mr. Longfellow published a new volume of poems, called The Seaside and the Fireside. The first piece was on the subject dear to every New England coast lad, and perhaps dearest of all to a son of Maine, — the entire work of building a ship, which leads up to a launch, the most supremely thrilling and touching exhibition of the mechanic arts in time of peace, or war either. He interwove with the actual history of the ship a delicate and tender underplot, which redeemed the poem from the faintest touch of materialism and “ pathetic fallacy,” the wedding and the launch uniting at the end. But in the last stanza the poet rises, unexpectedly, yet with perfect ease and propriety, into his renowned apostrophe to the ship of state, which it would be impertinent to quote at length. He evidently had Horace in mind. Every detail of the earlier poem finds its counterpart in the later : the winds and the rocks, the keel and the mast, the ropes and the sails, the history and ancestral glory, the anxious fears and longings, — they are all in the English as in the Latin. Moreover, it is no academic adaptation ; like Horace’s versions from Sappho and Alcæus, it was called out by a real crisis in American and in human history.

There have been few more anxious periods in the whole course of time than the year 1849, when The Building of the Ship was written. The great continental earthquake of 1848, which had shaken every throne in Central Europe, and driven sovereign after sovereign from his capital, had all subsided, leaving the edifice of despotism rooted more firmly than ever to the soil, and the hopes of humanity blighted. In fact, the reaction was so complete that it is impossible for the present generation to realize the feelings which made men who had lived under the first Napoleon believe that the revolution of 1848 was unparalleled for ages. In the United States, politics were in a most anxious state. General Taylor had been elected President by the Whigs, but under circumstances that permanently alienated many strong spirits from the Whig cause. A third party had been organized, and was strong among Mr. Longfellow’s immediate friends. Everything pointed to a fierce strife in the new Congress over the admission of California as a State, and the organization of the rest of the Mexican acquisitions. The slavery question had been pushed to the front as never before; the Union was openly threatened at the South, and not always heartily defended at the North ; and at this very time, when our internal state was most anxious, there was pouring in upon us an unprecedented flood of emigrants from what we believed to be the worst populations of Europe. Nor were our own people alone concerned for the safety of the republic. “ Humanity, with all its fears, was hanging breathless on our fate.” Many of Mr. Longfellow’s best friends, both the old Whigs and the new Freesoilers, were disposed to gloomy views of public affairs, or believed that the only chance for the country was in the unquestioned triumph of one party after sharp discussions. Yet, from the beginning to the end of his ode, there is the single call to faith, to hope, to encouragement, to triumph; one promise of loyal, unquestioning support of the Union; and instead of the timid advice to hold the harbor, an appeal to “ sail on, nor fear to breast the sea.” It would be impossible for any one who did not know the poet’s private associations to guess whom he meant by the “ false lights on the shore.” The lines were quoted with supreme satisfaction by hundreds who did not like the way Mr. Longfellow voted, and by thousands who did not know nor care how he voted. They have confirmed and inspired millions of patriots from that day to this. They stand at this hour our grandest national lyric ; and they are so because they are instinct with the feeling that to Horace and Horace’s age was impossible, — a Christian’s faith and hope as opposed to an Epicurean’s apathy and content. The hopes of future years are as essential a part of them as the “ prayers and tears.”

The same contrast may be seen even better by comparing a still finer ode of Horace with a very modest lyric which is scarcely known outside a limited circle, but which has softened the flow of tears from many aching eyes. Very few of Horace’s lyrical passages rank higher than that one in the twenty-ninth ode of the third book — Tyrrhena regum— where he sets forth the temper of the self-sufficing man, who cares nothing for the morrow, because he rests calm in the possession of the unalterable past. It has been recast by Dryden in one of bis most audacious yet most thrilling paraphrases; and when Dryden is at his height he can produce matchless effects by the simplest English words. Certainly with no idea of emulating him is the following version offered of a short passage, but in order, by keeping more closely to Horace’s thought as developed in his verse, to enforce the contrast indicated: —

This is manly, but it is the manliness of despair. It is pious, but it is the piety that hardly regards Jupiter as a friend, and certainly not as essentially superior to man, even if mightier. There is content, but such content as rests wholly in the past.

Early in this century, Mr. Andrews Norton, a man of the most accurate scholarship and most positive convictions, but calm and deliberate to a fault, the very reverse of the typical lyrist, and who would have felt insulted, and not complimented, by being compared to Horace, entrusted the feelings of a heart wrung with suffering to the following lines, which may be left without comment to mark the irreconcilable conflict between ancient and modern religious emotion: —

William Everett.