H. G. Wells and Horace

THE small library to which the narrator Prendick has access in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) consists of ‘an array of old books, chiefly, I found, surgical works and editions of the Latin and Greek classics (languages I cannot read with any comfort), on a shelf near the hammock’.1 These are Moreau’s books, and although Prendick is disinclined to engage with the classics, he is soon found reading ‘a small crib of Horace’2 to distract himself from the agonized crying of the puma being vivisected in the adjoining room. The choice of Horace is not accidental, and this note will suggest a new reason for Wells’s selection of this particular detail. Wells did not have much familiarity with ancient sources.3 Other contemporary authors demonstrate that ‘Horace was the best-remembered classical author in nineteenth-century England’,4 and that references to the works of the Latin poet are predominantly to the four books of lyric Odes.5 Other works, including the Ars Poetica, ‘were often largely ignored’.6 This is commensurate with what is seen in the opening chapter of Wells’s Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), where the title character struggles to understand Odes 1.19 at school. The arduous progress of the young translator contrasts comically with the ardour of the Roman poet extolling Venus, ‘the untameable mother of desires’ (Wells’s translation of Mater saeva cupidinum),7 and describing how ‘the beauty of Glycera inflamed me’ (urit me Glycerae nitor, left untranslated by Wells).8 Later, Lewisham is reading Odes 1.14, where Horace addresses the ship of state, cautioning it to ‘Beware, lest you become the plaything of the winds’ (tu, nisi ventis | debes ludibrium, cave, also left untranslated). For the character, Horace offers ‘the route by which he too hopes to achieve gentlemanly respectability’.9 Lewisham is eventually diverted from his academic course, and himself becomes a plaything for the winds, but that outcome is not known when the reader is told that the passage ‘was the appropriate matter of Mr Lewisham’s thoughts, and he was mechanically trying to keep the book open in three places at once, at the text, the notes, and the literal translation’.10

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