The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 51

Alba parthenice velut Luteumve papaver--

the symbol of maidens--

'Whom youth makes so fair and pa.s.sion so pale.'

The grace of trees and the bloom of flowers were prized by him among the fairest things in Nature. The charm in woman which most moves his imagination is virgin innocence unfolding into love, or pa.s.sion enn.o.bled by truth and constancy of affection. So too, in the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis, he compares Ariadne in her maidenhood to the myrtle trees growing on the banks of Eurotas, and to the bloom of vernal flowers:--

Quales Eurotae progignunt flumina myrtos Aurave distinctos educit verna colores[68].

In this Ode he expresses not merely, as in the Acme and Septimius, his sympathy with the joy of the hour. He recognises in marriage a greater good than in the love for a mistress. He a.s.sociates it with thoughts of the power and security of the household, of the pure happiness of parental love, of the continuance of a time-honoured name, and of the birth of new defenders of the State.

The charm of the poem does not arise from its tone of feeling and its clear ringing melody alone. The bright spirit of the day awakens the inward eye which creates pictures and images of beauty in harmony with itself. The poet sees Hymenaeus coming from the distant rocks of Helicon, robed in saffron, and wreathed with fragrant amaracus, in radiant power and glory, chanting the song with his ringing voice, beating the ground with his foot, shaking the pine-torch in his hand.

As the doors of the house are opened, and the bride is expected by the singers outside, by one vivid flash of imagination he reveals all their eager excitement--

Viden ut faces Splendidas quatiunt comas?

The two pictures, further on in the poem, of a peaceful old age prolonged to the utmost limit of human life--

Usque dum tremulum movens Cana tempus anilitas Omnia omnibus annuit,--

and of infancy, awakening into consciousness and affection,--

Torquatus volo parvulus Matris e gremio suae Porrigens teneras ma.n.u.s, Dulce rideat ad patrem Semihiante labello;

Sit suo similis patri Manlio et facile insciis Noscitetur ab omnibus, Et pudicitiam suae Matris indicet ore[69];

are drawn with the truest and most delicate hand.

The whole conception and execution of this poem, as also of the Attis and of the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis, leave no doubt that Catullus was richly endowed with the vision and the faculty of genius, as well as with impa.s.sioned feeling and the gift of musical expression.

The poem which immediately follows is also an Epithalamium, intended to be sung by young men and maidens, in alternate parts. It is written in hexameter verse, and in rhythm, thought, and feeling resembles some of the golden fragments from the Epithalamia of Sappho. The whole poem sounds like a song in a rich idyll. Its charm consists in its calm and mellow tone, in the dramatic truth with which the feelings and thoughts natural to the young men and maidens are alternately expressed, and especially in the beauty of its two famous similes.

In the first of these a flower is again the symbol of the bloom and innocence of maidenhood, growing up apart and safe from all rude contact. The idea in the concluding lines of the simile--

Idem c.u.m tenui carptus defloruit ungui, Nulli illum pueri, nullae optavere puellae,--

may probably have been suggested by a pa.s.sage in Sappho, of which these two lines remain,

[Greek: hoian tan hyakinthon en oresi poimenes andres possi katasteiboisi, chamai de te porphyron anthos.]

In the second simile, which is supposed to be spoken by the young men, the vine growing upon a bare field, scarcely rising above the ground, unheeded and untended, is compared to the maid who

'Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness;'

while the same vine, when wedded to the elm, is regarded as the symbol of the usefulness, dignity, and happiness which await the bride.

The absence of all personal allusion in this poem, and its resemblance in tone and rhythm to some fragments of the Lesbian poetess, might suggest the idea that it was translated, or at least imitated, from the Greek. But, on the other hand, from its harmony with the kind of subject and imagery in which Catullus most delights, and from the close observation of Italian Nature, shown in such lines as this--

Iam iam contingit summum radice flagellum,--

it seems more probable that it was an adaptation of the style of his great model to some occasion within his own experience, than that it was a mere exercise in translation, like his 'Coma Berenices.'

The 'Attis' is the most original of all his poems. As a work of pure imagination, it is the most remarkable poetical creation in the Latin language. In this poem Catullus throws himself, with marvellous power, into a character and situation utterly alien to common experience, and pours an intense flood of human feeling and pa.s.sion into a legend of strange Oriental fanaticism. The effect of the piece is, in a great measure, produced by the startling vividness of its language and imagery, and by the impetuous rush of its metre. Though the poem may have been partly founded on Greek materials, yet Catullus has treated the subject in a thoroughly original manner. It is difficult to believe that any translation could produce that impression of genuine creative power, which is forced upon every reader of the Attis.

There is nothing at all like the spirit of this poem in extant Greek literature. No other writer has presented so life-like an image of the frantic exultation and fierce self-sacrificing spirit of an inhuman fanaticism; and of the horror and sense of desolation which the natural man, more especially a Greek or Roman, would feel in the midst of the wild and strange scenes described in the poem, when first awaking to the consciousness of his voluntary bondage, and of the forfeiture of his country and parents, and the free social life of former days. A few touches in the poem--as, for instance, the expressions, 'niveis manibus,' 'roseis labellis,' and 'Ego gymnasii fui flos,'--all introduced incidentally,--force upon the mind the contrast between the tender youth and beauty of Attis and the fierce power of the pa.s.sion that possesses him. The false excitement and noisy tumult of the evening deepen the sense of the terrible reality and blank despair of the morning.

The effect of the whole drama of human pa.s.sion and agony is intensified by the vividness of all its pictorial environment;--by the vision of the wild surging seas, through which the swift ship and its mad crew were borne, and of the gloom and horror of the woods that hid the sounding rites of the G.o.ddess, and the tall columns of her temple.

With what a powerful and rapid touch he paints the aspect of sky, earth, and sea in the early morning--

Sed ubi oris aurei Sol radiantibus oculis l.u.s.travit aethera alb.u.m, sola dura, mare ferum, Pepulitque noctis umbras vegetis sonipedibus.

Everything is seen in those sharply-defined forms, which imprint themselves on the brain in moments of intense excitement or agony.

These three poems are composed with the unity and simplicity of the purest art. Like the shorter poems they have taken shape under the influence of one powerful motive; and the feeling with which they were conceived is sustained at its height through the whole composition. It is more difficult to find any single motive which combines into unity the original nucleus of the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis with the long episode of the desertion of Ariadne, which interrupts the continuity of the 64th poem. The form of art to which it belongs is the 'Epyllion' or heroic idyll, of which several specimens are found among the poems of Theocritus. This form was due to the invention of the Alexandrians; and Catullus in the selection of his subject and in his manner of treating it takes up the position of an imitator. But there is no reason to suppose that he is reproducing, still less translating, any particular work of these poets, or that his contemporaries--Cinna, Calvus, and Cornificius,--merely reproduced some Alexandrine original in their Zmyrna, Io, and Glaucus. A comparison of the imagery of this poem with that of the earlier Epithalamia, and a consideration of the pa.s.sionate beauty with which the subject of love and marriage is treated, favour the conclusion that the style and substance of the poem are the workmanship of Catullus. It may be doubted whether any Alexandrine poet, except perhaps Apollonius, whom Catullus in this poem[70] often imitates, but does not translate, had sufficient imagination to produce the original which Catullus is supposed to have copied. But the plan of the poem may have been suggested by some Alexandrine model. The more complicated structure of the 68th poem is fashioned after a particular style of Greek art: and on entering upon a new and larger adventure, Catullus may have trusted to the guidance of those whom he regarded as his masters. The Alexandrians studied pictorial representation of outward scenes and of pa.s.sionate situations, and works of tapestry on which such representations were wrought were common among their 'deliciae vitae[71].' Thus, the mode in which the story of Ariadne is told is one likely to have occurred to an Alexandrine poet. It would be also in keeping with the over-subtlety of a cla.s.s of poets who owed more to learning than to inspiration, to combine apparently incongruous parts into one whole by some obscure link of connexion.

Thus Catullus may have intended, in imitation of Callimachus or some other Alexandrian, to paint two pictures of the love of an immortal for a mortal,--the love of Thetis for Peleus, and of Bacchus for Ariadne,--and to heighten the effect of each by the contrast presented in the pendent picture. The original good fortune and the unbroken happiness of Peleus are more vividly realised by the contrast presented to the imagination in the betrayal and pa.s.sionate agitation of Ariadne. The thought of the crowds of mortals and immortals who come together to celebrate the marriage of the Thessalian prince brings into greater relief the utter loneliness of Ariadne, when first discovered by 'Bacchus and his crew.' Or the original unifying motive of both pictures might be sought in the concluding lines, written in a graver tone than anything else in Catullus; and it might be supposed that he intended by the two pictures of divine favour granted to mortals (in one of which retribution is exacted for what he regards as the greatest sin in actual life--a violation of good faith) to enforce the lesson that it is owing to the sins of the latter time that the G.o.ds have withdrawn their gracious presence from the earth. The thought contained in the lines

Sed postquam tellus scelerest imbuta nefando, etc.,

is pure and n.o.ble, and purely and n.o.bly expressed. These lines reveal a genuine and unexpected vein of reverence in the nature of Catullus.

The sins which he specifies as alienating the G.o.ds from men are those most rife in his own time, with which he has dealt in a more realistic fashion in his satiric epigrams. All this may, perhaps, be said. But on the other hand, Catullus is the least didactic of poets. He is also the least abstract and reflective. We cannot suppose (in the case of such a writer) all the concrete pa.s.sionate life of the poem taking shape in his imagination in order to embody any idea however n.o.ble.

The idea was the afterthought, not the creative germ. Nor can we think that the conception of the whole poem existed in his mind before, or independently of, the separate conception of its parts. He was attracted to both subjects by the charm which the Greek mythology and the bright spectacle of the heroic age had for his imagination, by their harmony with the feelings and pa.s.sions with which he had most sympathy in real life, and by the scope which they afforded to his peculiar power as a pictorial artist. The device of the tapestry, by which the tale of Ariadne is told, was especially favourable to the exercise of this gift. He looked back upon an ideal vision of the golden morning of the world, when men were so stately and n.o.ble, and women so fair and true, that even the blessed G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses deigned to visit them, and to unite with them in marriage. The original motive of the two poems appears to be purely imaginative.

If there was any intention to give artificial unity to the poem, by pointing the contrast between a love calm and happy from the beginning, and one at first pa.s.sionate and afterwards betrayed, or between the holiness and n.o.bleness of an ideal past, and the sin and baseness of the actual present, that intention was probably not present to the mind of the poet when he first contemplated his subject, but came to him in the course of its development.

It may be said, therefore, that if any principle of unity is aimed at in the poem, it is one so artificial as rather to detract from the artistic merit of the composition. There is a similar want of unity in the 'Pastor Aristaeus' of Virgil, which was also composed in the manner of the Alexandrine Epyllion. The Alexandrians seem to have aimed rather at a combination of diverse effects than at a composition 'simplex et unum.' They cared much for the elaboration of details, little for the consistency of the whole. And the same tendency appears in their imitators. Neither can the poem be called a successful specimen of narrative. There is scarcely any story to tell in connexion with the marriage of Peleus. It is a succession of pictures, not a tale of pa.s.sion or adventure. The romance of Theseus and Ariadne is told much less distinctly and simply than the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in Virgil. There is dramatic power in the soliloquy of Ariadne, as in that of Attis, but the dramatic faculty in Catullus is rather a phase of his special lyrical gift, which enables him to identify himself with some single pa.s.sionate situation, than the power of giving life to various types of character. The imaginative excellence of the poem is idyllic rather than epic or dramatic. There is a wonderful harmony of tone in his whole conception of the heroic age. He does not attempt to reproduce the picturesque life represented by Homer, nor the majestic pa.s.sions imagined by the Attic tragedians, but he has his own vision of the stately and beautiful figures belonging to an ideal foretime,--

O nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati Heroes, saluete, deum genus.

There is a sense of the freshness and brightness of the early morning in his conception of the time when the first ship, manned by the flower of Greek warriors, 'broke the silence of the seas'

(Illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten),

and when the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of Olympus, the mysterious Powers over-ruling mortal destiny, and the other beings, half-human, half-divine, whom Greek imagination so lavishly created, appeared in their bodily presence to do honour to the union of a mortal with an immortal. The poem abounds in pictures, or suggestions of pictures, taken from the world of divine and human life, and of outward Nature.

Such are those of the Nereids gazing on the Argo--

Emersere feri candenti e gurgite vultus Aequoreae monstrum Nereides admirantes,--

of Ariadne watching with pale and anxious face the perilous encounter of Theseus with the Minotaur--

Quam tum saepe magis fulgore expalluit auri,--

and again, looking on the distant fleet--

Saxea ut effigies bacchantis,--

of the advent of Bacchus--

c.u.m thiaso Satyrorum et Nysigenis Silenis,--

a pa.s.sage which has inspired one of the masterpieces of modern art,--of Prometheus--

Extenuata gerens veteris vestigia poenae--