The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 50

was utterly careless of her, and insensible to the perils to which she was exposed. To rouse him from his sloth and stupor, Catullus asks to have him thrown head over heels--

Munus hoc mihi maximi da, Colonia, risus--

from a rickety old bridge into the deepest and dirtiest part of the quagmire over which it was built. In another piece Catullus laughs at the affectation of one of his rivals, Egnatius,--a black-bearded fop from the Celtiberian wilds,--who had a trick of perpetually smiling in order to show the whiteness of his teeth;--a trick which did not desert him at a criminal trial, during the most pathetic part of the speech for the defence, or when he stood beside a weeping mother at the funeral pyre of her only son. In another of his elegiac pieces he gives expression to the relief felt on the departure for the East of a bore who afflicted the ears of the polite world by a superfluous use of his aspirates--

Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda vellet Dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias, etc.[58]

Just as the ears of men had recovered from this infliction--

Subito affertur nuntius horribilis, Ionios fluctus, postquam illuc Arrius isset, Iam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.

Like fastidious and irritable poets of other times (Horace, Pope, Byron, etc.), Catullus waged internecine war against pedants, literary pretenders, and poetasters. He remonstrates in a vein of humorous exaggeration with his friend Licinius Calvus, for palming off on him as a gift on the Saturnalia (corresponding to our Christmas presents) a collection of the works of these 'miscreants' ('impiorum'), originally sent to him by some pedantic grammarian, in acknowledgment of his services as an advocate--

Dii magni, horribilem ac sacrum libellum.

In the 36th poem he represents Lesbia as offering a holocaust to Venus of the work of 'the worst of all poets,' 'The Annals of Volusius,'

in quittance of a vow on her reconcilement with Catullus. In another (xxii), addressed to Varus, probably the fastidious critic whom Horace quotes in the 'Ars Poetica[59],' he exposes the absurdity of one of their friends, who, though in other respects a man of sense, wit, and agreeable manners, entertained the delusion that he was a poet, and was never so happy as when he had surrounded himself with the newest and finest literary materials, and was plying his uncongenial occupation. In another he records the nemesis, in the form of a severe cough, which overtook him for allowing himself to be seduced by the hopes of a good dinner to read (or perhaps listen to the reading of) a speech of Cicero's friend and client Sestius,--

Plenam veneni et pestilentiae.

About one half of the shorter poems, and more than half of the epigrams, are to be cla.s.sed among his personal lampoons or light satiric pieces. Many of these show Catullus to us on that side of his character, which it is least pleasant or profitable to dwell on. He could not indeed write anything which did not bear the stamp of the vital force and sincerity of his nature: but even his vigour of expression does not compensate for the survival in literature of the feelings and relations which are most ign.o.ble in actual life. Yet some of these satiric pieces have an interest which amply justifies their preservation. The greatest of all his lampoons, the 29th, has an historical as well as a literary value. Tacitus, as well as Suetonius, refers to it. It is not only a masterpiece of terse invective, but, like the 11th, it is a powerful specimen of imaginative irony. The momentous events of a most momentous era--the Eastern conquests of Pompey, the first Spanish campaign of Caesar, the subjugation of Gaul, the invasion of Britain, the revolutionary measures of 'father-in-law and son-in-law,'--are all made to look as if they had had no other object or result than that of pampering the appet.i.tes of a worthless favourite. Other lampoons, such as those against Memmius and Piso, have also an historical interest. They testify to the republican freedom of speech, the open expression of which was soon to be silenced for ever. They enable us to understand how strong a social and political weapon the power of epigram was in ancient Rome,--a power which continued to be exercised, though no longer with republican freedom, under the Empire. The pen of the poet was employed in the warfare of parties as fiercely as the tongue of the orator; and although Catullus did not spare partisans of the Senate, such as Memmius, yet all his a.s.sociations and tastes combined to turn his hostility chiefly against the popular leaders and their tools. The more genial satiric pieces, again, are chiefly interesting as throwing light on the social and literary life of Rome and the provincial towns of Italy. They give us an idea of the lighter talk, the criticism, and merriment of the younger men in the world of letters and fashion during the last age of the Republic. If they are not master-pieces of humour, they are full of gaiety, animal spirits, shrewd observation, and not very unkindly comment on men and manners.

Besides the poems which show Catullus in various relations of love, affection, animosity, and humorous criticism, there are still a few of the shorter pieces which have a personal interest. He had the purest capacity of enjoying simple pleasures; and some of his most delightful poems are vivid records of happy experiences procured to him by this youthful freshness of feeling. Three of these are especially beautiful,--the dedication of his yacht to Castor and Pollux,--the lines written immediately before quitting Bithynia,--

Iam ver egelidos refert tepores,--

and the famous lines on Sirmio. They all belong to the same period of his life, and all show how happy and serene his spirit became, when it was untroubled by the pa.s.sions and rancours of city life. The lines on his yacht--

Phaselus ille quem videtis, hospites,--

express with much vivacity the feelings of affectionate pride which a strong and kindly nature lavishes not only on living friends, but on inanimate objects, a.s.sociated with the memory of past happiness and adventure. His fancy endows it with a kind of life from the earliest time when, under the form of a clump of trees, it 'rustled its leaves'

on Cytorus, till it obtained its rest in a peaceful age on the fair waters of Benacus. The 46th poem is inspired by the new sense of life which comes to early youth with the first approach of spring, and by the eager flutter of antic.i.p.ation--

Iam mens praetrepidans avet vagari, Iam laeti studio pedes vigesc.u.n.t--

with which a cultivated mind forecasts the pleasure of travelling among famous and beautiful scenes. But perhaps the most perfect of his smaller pieces is that in which the love of home and of Nature, the sense of rest and security after toil and danger, the glee of a boy and the strong happiness of a man unite to form the charm of the lines on Sirmio, of which it is as impossible to a.n.a.lyse the secret as it is to reproduce in another tongue the language in which it is expressed.

Catullus is one of the great poets of the world, not so much through gifts of imagination--though with these he was well endowed--as through his singleness of nature, his vivid impressibility, and his keen perception. He received the gifts of the pa.s.sing hour so happily, that, to produce pure and lasting poetry, it was enough for him to utter in natural words something of the fulness of his heart. His interests, though limited in range, were all genuine and human. His poems inspired by personal feeling seem to come from him without any effort. He says, on every occasion, exactly what he wanted to say, in clear, forcible, direct language. There are, indeed, even in his simplest poems, a few strokes of imaginative expression, as, for instance,--

Aut quam sidera multa, c.u.m tacet nox, Furtivos hominum vident amores[60],--

and this, written with the feeling and with the application which Burns makes of the same image,--

Velut prati Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est[61];--

and these two touches of tenderness and beauty, which appear in a poem otherwise characterised by a tone of careless drollery,--

Nec sapit pueri instar Bimuli, tremula patris dormientis in ulna,--

and--

Et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo, Adservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis[62].

But the great charm of the style in these shorter poems is its simple directness, and its popular idiomatic ring. It largely employs, especially in the poems which express his coa.r.s.er feelings, common, often archaic and provincial words, forms, and idioms. There is nothing, apparently, studied about it, no ornament or involution, no otiose epithets, no subtle allusiveness. Yet in the poems expressive of his finer feelings it shows the happiest selection, not only of the most appropriate, but of the most exquisite words. To no style, in prose or verse, in any language, could the words 'simplex munditiis'

be with more propriety applied. It has all the ease of refined and vigorous conversation, combined with the grace of consummate art.

Though this perfection of expression could not have been attained without study and labour, yet it bears no trace of them.

In these smaller poems he shows himself as great a master of metre as of language. The more sustained power which he has over the flow of his verse, is best exemplified by the skylark ring of his great Nuptial Ode, by the hurrying agitation of the Attis, and the stately calm of the Peleus and Thetis, giving place to a more impa.s.sioned movement in the 'Ariadne' episode. But in his shorter poems, also, he shows the true gift of the [Greek: aoidos]--the power of using musical language as a symbol of the changing impulses of feeling. Thus the delicate playfulness and tenderness of his phalaecians,--the lingering long-drawn-out sweetness, and the calm subdued sadness of the scazon, as exemplified in the 'Sirmio,' and the

Miser Catulle desinas ineptire,--

the 'bright speed' of the pure iambic, so happily answering to the subject of the 'phaselus,' and its bold impetus as it is employed in the attack on Julius Caesar--the irregular but sonorous grandeur of his Sapphic[63],--the majesty which in the Hymn to Diana blends with the buoyant movement of the glyconic,--all attest that the words and melody of the poems were born together with the feeling and meaning animating them. Although his elegiac poems are not written with the smoothness and fluency which was attained by the Augustan poets, yet those among them which record his graver and sadder moods have a plaintive force and natural pathos, which their roughness seems to enhance. If his epigrammatic pieces, written in that metre, want the polish and point to which his brilliant disciple attained under the Empire, we may believe that Catullus experienced the difficulty which Lucilius found, and which Horace at last successfully overcame, of adapting a metre originally framed for the expression of serious feeling to the commoner interests and experiences of life.

The language of Catullus in these shorter poems is his own, or, where not his own, is drawn from such wells of Latin undefiled as Plautus and Terence. His metres are happy applications of those invented or largely used by the earlier lyric poets of Greece,--Sappho, Anacreon, Archilochus,--and the later Phalaecus. For the form of some of his longer poems he has taken, and not with the happiest result, the Alexandrine poets for his models. But in these shorter poems, so far as he has had any models, he has tried to emulate the perfection attained in the older and purer era of Greek inspiration. But it is not through imitation that he has attained a perfection of form like to theirs. It is owing to the singleness and strength of his feeling and impression, that these poems are so exquisite in their unity and simplicity. Catullus does not care to present the gem of his own thought in an alien setting, as Horace, in his earlier Odes at least, has often done. It is one of the surest notes of his lyrical genius that, while more modest in his general self-estimate than any of the great Roman poets, he trusts more implicitly than any of them to his own judgment and inspiration to find the most fitting and telling medium for the communication of his thought. Thus he presents only what is essential, unenc.u.mbered with any a.s.sociations from older poetry. The form is indeed so perfect that we scarcely think of it. We feel only that nothing mars or interrupts the revelation of the poet's heart and soul. We apprehend, as perhaps we never apprehended before, some one single feeling of great potency and great human influence in a poem of some ten or twenty lines, every word of which adds something to the whole impression. Thus for instance, in the poems--

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,--

Acmen Septimius suos amores,--

Verani, omnibus e meis amicis,--

Iam ver egelidos refert tepores,--

Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque,--

Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,--

we apprehend through a perfectly pure medium, and by a single intuition, the highest pitch of the pa.s.sionate love of man and woman, the perfect beauty and joy of self-forgetful friendship, the eager enthusiasm for travel and adventure, the deep delight of returning to a beautiful and well-loved home, the 'sorrow's crown of sorrows' in 'remembering happier things.' We may see, too, in a totally different sphere of experience, how Catullus instinctively seizes the moment of supreme intensity of emotion, and utters what is vitally characteristic of it. He is not, in any sense, one of the Anacreontic singers of the pleasures of wine, of whom Horace is the typical example in ancient times. Neither was he one, who, like Burns, habitually forgot, in the excitement of good fellowship, the perils of Baccha.n.a.lian merriment. Yet even the drinking songs of the Scottish poet scarcely realise with more vivacity the moment of mad elevation when a revel is at its height, than Catullus has done in the song of seven short lines--

Minister vetuli puer Falerni Inger mi calices amariores, etc.

The 'Hymn to Diana' occupies an intermediate place between the poems founded on personal feelings and the longer and more purely artistic pieces. Like the first it seems unconsciously, or at least without leaving any trace of conscious purpose, to have conformed to the conditions of the purest art. It is, like them, a perfect whole, one of those, to quote Mr. Munro, '"cunningest patterns" of excellence, such as Latium never saw before or after, Alcaeus, Sappho, and the rest then and only then having met their match[64]'. It resembles some of the longer poems in being a creation of sympathetic imagination, not an immediate expression of personal feeling. It must have been written for some public occasion; and the selection of Catullus to compose it would imply that he was recognised as the greatest lyrical poet in his lifetime, and that it was written after his reputation was established. It is a poem not only of pure artistic excellence, but of imaginative conception, like that exemplified in the 'Attis' and the 'Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis.' The 'Diana' of Catullus is not a vague abstraction or conventional figure, as the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses in the Odes of Horace are apt to be. The mythology of Greece received a new life from his imagination. In this poem he shows too, what he hardly indicates elsewhere[65], that he could identify himself in sympathy with the national feeling and religion of Rome. The G.o.ddess addressed is a living Power, blending in her countenance the human and picturesque aspects of the Greek Artemis with the more spiritual and beneficent attributes of the Roman Diana. Yet no confusion or incongruity arises from the union into one concrete representation of these originally diverse elements. She lives to the imagination as a Power who, in the fresh morning of the world, had roamed in freedom over the mountains, the woods, the secret dells, and the river-banks of earth[66],--and now from a far away sphere watched over women in travail, increased the store of the husbandman, and was the especial guardian of the descendants of Romulus.

This poem affords a natural transition to the longer and more purely artistic pieces in the centre of the volume. Yet with some even of these a personal element is interfused. The hymn in honour of the nuptials of Manlius, is, like the short poem on the loves of Acme and Septimius, inspired by the poet's sympathy with the happiness of a friend. The 68th poem attempts to weave into one texture his own love of Lesbia, and the romance of Laodamia and Protesilaus. But in general these poems bring before us a new side of the art of Catullus. In one way indeed they add to our knowledge of his personal tastes. The larger place given in them to ornament and ill.u.s.tration lets us know what objects in Nature afforded him most delight. His life was too full of human interest to allow him to devote his art to the celebration of Nature: yet he could not have been the poet he was if he had not been susceptible to her influence. And this susceptibility, indicated in occasional touches in the shorter poems, finds greater scope in the poems of impersonal art which still remain to be considered.

Among the more purely artistic pieces none is more beautiful than the Nuptial Ode in celebration of the marriage of his friend Manlius, a member of the great house of the Torquati, and one of the most accomplished men of his time, with Vinia Aurunculeia. In this poem Catullus pours forth the fulness of his heart

'In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'

It is marked by the excellence of his shorter pieces and by poetical beauty of another order. Resembling his shorter poems in being called forth by an event within his own experience, it breathes the same spirit of affection and of sympathy with beauty and pa.s.sion. It is written with the same gaiety of heart, blending indeed with a graver sense of happiness. The feeling of the hour does not merely express itself in graceful language: it awakens the active power of imagination, clothes itself in radiant imagery, and rises into the completeness and sustained melody of the highest lyrical art. The tone of the whole poem is one of joy, changing from the rapture of expectation in the opening lines to the more tranquil happiness of the close. The pa.s.sion is ardent, but, on the whole, free from grossness or effeminate sentiment. Even where, in accordance with the Roman marriage customs, he abandons himself for a few stanzas to the spirit of raillery and banter--

Ne diu taceat procax Fescennina locutio[67]--

he remembers the respect due to the innocence of the bride. Thoughts of her are a.s.sociated with the purest objects in Nature,--with ivy clinging round a tree, or branches of myrtle,--

Quos Hamadryades deae Ludicrum sibi roscido Nutriunt humore,--

or with a hyacinth growing in some rich man's garden. Like the eager lover of beauty among our own poets, he sees in other flowers--