Horace is Human

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 66, 27 September 1940, Page 5

Horace is Human

ORACE has been described as a short, fat, pre-maturely-grizzled bachelor, good-tempered and easy-going, placid and indolent on the surface but concealing a good brain underneath. Not a type you might "think to make an obvious poet. We are well enough educated, these days, to know that a poetto be a poet-doesn’t have to have long hair and die in a garret, but it is unusual to find a poet who so very definitely seeks the average pleasures of life and takes the ordinary man’s point of view. You will not find in Horace any spontaneous passion or sustained imaginative power, such as is associated with poetry of the highest order. But what he has to give is not to be despised-and that is, a perfection of form which never falters, an unfailing

choice of the apt word (he is the most quoted of all Roman writers), "what oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest," the tempered and polished expression of common experience. More than all this-the quality that really makes him perennial — is the charm of personality which the poems reveal so effortlessly. Horace is human. Although he was the intimate friend of Maecenas, he was not a snob. He had his weaknesses, but he knew what they were, and no one makes fun of them better than himself. He is not vain: he does not take himself seriously. It is this trait that has always made him particularly attractive to English people: his sense of humour is very close to our own. Until recently the site of his famous Sabine farm used to be visited every year by hundreds of English tourists, whose interest, it has been said, once prompted the Italian peasants to ask: "Who is this Horace? Was he an Englishman?"-(Dr. K. J. Sheen, "Horace and the Augustan Age,’ 4YA September 10).