vi.  IN THE SCHOOLS

Of the place of Horace in the schools and universities of all these countries, and of the world of western civilization in general, it is hardly necessary to speak.  The enlightened sentiment of the five hundred years since the death of Petrarch has been enthusiastic in the conviction that the Greek and Latin classics are indispensable to instruction of the first quality, and that among them Horace is of exceeding value as a model of poetic taste and as an influence in the formation of a philosophy of life.  If his place has been less secure in latter days, it is due less to alteration of that conviction than to extension of the educational system to the utilitarian arts and sciences, and to the passing of educational control from the few to the general average.

III.  HORACE THE DYNAMIC

THE CULTIVATED FEW

We have followed in such manner and at such length as is possible for our purpose the fortunes of Horace through the ages from his death and the death of the Empire in whose service his pen was employed to our own times.  We have seen that he never was really forgotten, and that there never was a time of long duration when he ceased to be of real importance to some portion of mankind.

The recital of historical fact is at best a narration of circumstance to which there clings little of the warmth of life.  An historical event itself is but the cumulated and often frigid result of intimate original forces that may have meant long travail of body and soul before the act of realization became possible.  The record of the event in chronicle or its commemoration in monument is only the sign that at some time there occurred a significant moment rendered inevitable by previous stirrings of life whose intensity, if not whose very identity, are forgotten or no longer realized.

Thus the enumeration of manuscript revisions, translations, imitations, and scholastic editions of Horace may also seem at first sight the narrative of cold detail.  There may be readers who, remembering the scant stream of the cultivated few who tided the poet through the centuries of darkness, and the comparative rareness of cultivated men at all times, will be slow to be convinced of any real impress of Horace upon the life of men.  They especially who reflect that during all the long sweep of time the majority of those who have known him, and even of those who have been stirred to enthusiasm by him, have known him through the compulsion of the school, and who reflect farther on the artificialities, the insincerities, the pettinesses, the abuses, and the hatreds of the class-room, the joy with which at the end the text-book is dropped or bidden an even more violent farewell, and the apparently total oblivion that follows, will be inclined to view as exaggeration the most moderate estimate of our debt to him.