Laudator Temporis Acti

Ford Madox Ford (1892-1939), The March of Literature: From Confucius' Day to Our Own (1938; rpt. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), p. 204:

No one could deny that, ever since his own day, Horace has stood along with the ten or the dozen greatest poets on the slopes of Olympus.

It is because he fulfills the need of one side of the human heart. We must have — or we die — some figure forever prosperous, forever sunny, forever frugally generous, and we must have, above all, the views of life and the poetry of such a figure to take about with us. The fortunate, however, seldom find the need to express themselves; so it is only by the rarest and most blessed of coincidences that the poet and the happy man are found to inhabit the same skin. It was not merely that Horace, like Browning, held that we fall to rise, are beaten to fight better. It was that Horace established the claim for humanity to live in unruffled felicity or at least in a felicity no more shadowed than by the casting away of one's little shield at one Battle of Philippi or another. This, Horace appeared to be able to claim as of right; and, if Horace, why not we or some millions or some tens of millions of our compatriots and fellow citizens? Still more, he seems to present us with a picture of a Utopia such as we might find just around the corner if human good will did not lack.

Id., p. 210:

And of this, one may be certain: It is not merely that if there had been no Horace we should have had to invent him; it is that without him we should have been thirty, forty, fifty — I don't care if you say a hundred per cent more savage brutes than we have made ourselves today. For the essence of civilization consists in its domination by a mood of frugal happiness: we are the best citizens who most have been tamed by the Horatian note.

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Horace (via his spokesman Eric Thomson) replies:

"Frugally generous"? I'll grant you that oxymoron, Mr. Ford, but no, not "forever sunny" please. Who could ever put up with a poet that was forever sunny? There were doldrums after the Odes and I could also be fickle and thrawn.

If he [Celsus Albinovinus] asks me how I am, tell him that in spite of good resolutions
my life is neither right nor pleasant; not because hail
has beaten down my vines, or heat has blighted my olives,
nor because herds of mine are sick on a distant pasture,
but because, while I'm physically fit, I'm spiritually ill.
And yet I don't want to hear or know about possible treatment
I'm rude to the doctors who wish me well, and can't think why
My friends are fussing to rid me of this accursed depression.    Epistles 1, 8 3-10 (trans. Niall Rudd)

Si quaeret quid agam, dic multa et pulchra minantem
vivere nec recte nec suaviter; haud quia grando
contuderit vitis oleamque momorderit aestus,
nec quia longinquis armentum aegrotet in agris;
sed quia mente minus validus quam corpore toto
nil audire velim, nil discere, quod levet aegrum;
fidis offendar medicis, irascar amicis,
cur me funesto properent arcere veterno.

If I've had a haircut from a rather uneven barber, you laugh
when you meet me; if a grubby vest is visible under my smart
tunic, or say my toga is askew and sloppily folded,
you laugh. Yet what if my mind is at odds with itself,
rejects what it asks for, returns to what it has just put down,
ebbs and flows, and disrupts the entire pattern of my life,
demolishing then rebuilding, changing round to square?    Epistles 1, 1 97-100

Si curatus inaequali tonsore capillos
occurri, rides; si forte subucula pexae
trita subest tunicae vel si toga dissidet impar,
rides: quid, mea cum pugnat sententia secum,
quod petiit spernit, repetit quod nuper omisit,
aestuat et vitae disconvenit ordine toto,
diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis?