In the briefest but clearest outline it can be read by all in
the sixty-eighth poem, an elegiac chapter of autobio-
graphy, and in the lyric sequence of Lesbia poems (there
are barely twenty altogether), which carries the action
forward, step by step, through homage and rapture to
Thee smiling soft.
the sixty-eighth poem, an elegiac chapter of autobio-
graphy, and in the lyric sequence of Lesbia poems (there
are barely twenty altogether), which carries the action
forward, step by step, through homage and rapture to
Thee smiling soft.
Catullus - 1866b - Poetry - Slater
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? LIBRARY
OF
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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? \
Sbe poetry of Catullus
?
?
<
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? Sherratt & Hughes
Publishers to the University of Manchester
Manchester: 34 Cross Street
London: 33 Soho Square, W.
Agents for the United States
Longmans, Green & Co.
New York: 443-449 Fourth Avenue
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? The Poetry of
Catullus
D. A. SLATER, M. A. ,
Professor of Latin in the University College, Cardiff.
A Lecture delivered to the
Manchester Branch of the Classical Association
on February 2nd, 1912.
MANCHESTER
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1912
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? The Poetry of Catullus.
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,--
As you go into the Bodleian at Oxford, you will see
on the Librarian's right hand a glass-covered case, and in
it, among other relics, a brine-stained book and an old-
fashioned repeater. Read the labels and you learn
that you are looking at the watch and the Sophocles that
were found on Shelley when his body was cast up by the
sea near Via Reggio that July morning in 1829. The
thoughts and associations which these objects, like the
white marble statue of the poet in that corner of
University Quadrangle, conjure up amid their present
austere surroundings are as incongruous and refreshing in
their way as the light of poetry amid the prose of life.
Oxford is not prodigal of such tributes, and, as you pass
into Duke Humphrey's Library, you wonder, it may be,
whether, in thus cherishing at her heart the memory of
Shelley the poet after she had cast out Shelley the atheist,
she is thinking of what was, or of what might have been;
of what the man did or of what it might have been
granted him to do but for the sudden squall that swept
him away. "It was all over," writes Trelawny, "within
twenty minutes. "
Dreamers will say it speaks well for the world that she
has the generosity when a man dies young to judge
him by what he might have done, not by what he did.
If there has been a glint of gold in the promise of his
youth, she sets him, as Shelley himself set Keats, among
"the inheritors of unfulfilled renown," and does more
honour, it may be, to his memory than to the memory of
those " who have lived out all the length of all their days,"
SEP 301913 ol
(RECAP)
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? many of them without fulfilling in their prime the promise
of their youth. This, I take it, is the true meaning of the
old Greek proverb: --
ov ol 9eol <pi\ovaiv airodvrjtrKei veoi.
The favourites of the gods are released from life before
they have had time to outstay their youth. The tribute to
those who died young is tribute to the youth which they
never lived to lose--in part, no doubt, objective, but in part
also subjective, and prompted by the thought expressed in
that line of Thackeray: "Oh, the brave days, when we
/were twenty-one! "
'Youth's a stuff that will not last, and to embody in
poetry or in prose the charm and the fulness of youth, the
poet, or prose-poet, must himself be young. It is only here
and there a Colonel Newcome in fiction or a George
Meredith in life who can keep his hold on " Youth in age. "
You remember the lines with that title which appeared in
Meredith's last volume, written in his eightieth year: --
"Once I was part of the music I heard
On the boughs--or sweet between earth and sky,
For joy of the beating of wings on high
My heart shot into the breast of the bird.
"I hear it now and I see it fly,
And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
My heart shoots into the breast of the bird,
As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh. "
The best of lyric poetry has been the work of youth;
the work of Sappho, Catullus and Shelley, who died, all
three, it is said, before they were thirty, but yet not before
they had left written for all time their record of the
thoughts, and the aspirations, the joys and the sorrows of
youth--youth too, itself and love incarnate--"the glory
and the freshness of a dream. "
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? 7
Of these three Catullus, the Heine (as he has been
called) of Roman Literature, was born, not inappro-
priately, at Verona, the City of Juliet and Romeo,
probably in the year 84 B. C. In a way the date has its
importance, for the period was one of comparative calm.
Great movements were developing and great ideas were in
the air. But the storm of civil war in which the Republic
went down, leaving the poets of the Augustan age to drift
under the patronage and into the service of the court, had
yet to break. Catullus was a child of three when "the
mulberry-faced dictator," Sulla, was in power, and he died
soon after Caesar had for the first time invaded Britain
and five years before he crossed the Rubicon. In a word
Catullus lived free and wrote free. That is half his
charm.
His father was a man of means and a friend of
Caesar. Catullus himself cannot have been poor, for, in
spite of some playful complaints of straitened circum-
stances--a mortgaged villa and a purse full of cobwebs--
we yet gather that he had a yacht of his own and two
country houses, one on the Gaida Lake at Sirmio and the
other at Tibur, the Brighton of Italy.
Of his boyhood and youth very little is known. The
poems--and biography other than the poems we have
practically none--contain a confession that, like Swin-
burne, he wrote verses at sixteen. "When first the garb
of manhood was given me, when my primrose youth was
in its pleasant spring, I played enough at rhyming "--
Multa satis lust* But, like Swinburne again, at sixteen,
or later, he too "had a bonfire. " For these trifles, as he
calls them, seem never to have been published. And
plainly there was study--study in manner and in matter,
as well as in metre; the poems that remain prove that.
But he does not, like Horace, take us into his confidence
* Lxviii. 15 seq.
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? 8
and tell the story of his training. At the age of twenty-
two or twenty-three he migrated to Rome, and at Rome,
except for occasional visits to the country and some travel
abroad, he seems to have spent the last eight years of his
life. It is strange that whereas, according to Horace, the
race of poets "love the country and avoid the town," to
Catullus life in the country was anathema. "Idem
infacetost infacetior rure," he says of a poetaster, "the
fellow is as dull as the hedges and ditches of the
country. " But then Catullus was in many ways a
paradox. Nor does the paradox become any the less
startling when we remember what Sir Archibald Geikie
pointed out in the masterly address which he delivered
to the Classical Association at Liverpool as its President
last year--that no Roman writer had a keener eye than
Catullus for all the manifold beauty of nature or a finer
power of expressing what he saw. And yet his poetry is
the voice less of nature than of life. Now, poets may
learn many lessons in the country. They may find
"sermons in stones, books in the running brooks. " But
to know their fellow-men they must live among them.
Even Wordsworth might have been more human and not
a whit less Wordsworthian--for he would have lost none
of his "healing power"--had he mixed a little more with
the world of men. "There is a sort of knowledge," says
the author of Tom Jones, "which it is beyond the
power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had by
conversation. So necessary is this to the understanding
the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of
them than those learned pedants whose lives have been
entirely consumed . . . among books; for, however
exquisitely human nature may have been described by
writers, the true, practical system can be learnt only in the
world. "
If Catullus was to acquire this knowledge there was no
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? 9
better place in which to seek it than the capital, where he
settled (in the year after Cicero's consulship), while
Catiline was selling his life dear in the uplands of
Etruria.
One needs to be young to realise the zest and the
excitement with which he must have entered into the
new life. Through Caesar, his father's friend, he
could get to know everybody in Rome worth
knowing, both men of action and men of letters, such as
Calvus the Sheridan and Cinna the Lyly of Rome.
Young, reckless, headstrong, he plunged eagerly into all
the gaieties of the capital, "the delightful life of youth,
with full cups and empty purses. " Bohemian he must
have been: there are the poems to tell; but in the midst of
all attractions and distractions he was reading with the
appetite of a Macaulay. To his contemporaries he is above
all else Doctus Catullus--Catullus the scholar. The one
thing lacking soon followed. If a life without a love-
story is indeed only half a life, a vie manquie, the poet of
love must have learnt in rapture and suffering what he is
afterwards to describe in song. It is impossible to
separate his life from his poetry. And it is for his lyrics
of life and of love that Catullus is remembered. Lesbia
was the inspiration of them all; Lesbia dictavit, docte
Catulle, tibi.
The tale is a sad one. It was the old story of Troilus
and Cressida; romance darkening into tragedy; the
raptures of anticipation and possession dying out into
mistrust, jealousy, despair. It seems strange that we
should owe some of the finest poetry in the world to a
sister of the notorious Clodius; less strange, perhaps, that
a story of which she was the heroine should end
unhappily. All the chief characters in the episode are
known to history. Caelius, who played Diomed to
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? 10
Lesbia's Cressid, was undoubtedly the Caelius whom
Cicero defended in the speech Pro Caelio. Ovid, in
the Tristia, assumes everybody to know that the name
Lesbia was an alias, and Apuleius states as a fact that
"Lesbia" was Clodia.
Art has preserved no likeness of Catullus. Nor need
we stop to paint an imaginary portrait of Lesbia. That
portrait may probably be found, sketched by contrasts, in
the forty-third poem; a Juno, a Clytemnestra, so Cicero
and Caelius call her; a tall, imperious, brilliant patrician
with the fine hands and blazing eyes that the age thought
beautiful. But no one is really concerned to know what-
like were Petrarch's "Laura" or the "dark lady" of Shake-
speare's sonnets. It is said to have been at Cicero's house
that the two first met: and it may have been by Cicero's
hand that Catullus sent to Clodia the fifty-first poem in
the collection, the raptures of which I venture to illustrate
from a rendering which a young student* once made for
me: --
God, or more than God he seemeth,
In whose eyes thy bright glance beameth,
In whose ears thy laughter trilleth,
Sitting near to thee;
* Mr. J. C. Rollo, of Glasgow University, in 1003. I have
printed the rendering in the text because I know no other that
represents as happily the bounding, boyish spontaneity of the
Latin; but the reader will thank me, I venture to think, for
adding a statelier version from a greater hand, which is too
little known :--
Him rival to the gods I place,
Him loftier yet, if loftier be,
Who, Lesbia, sits before thy face,
Who listens and who looks on thee;
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? II
For that smile my senses stealeth,
And the look that thee revealeth,
Every word uprising killeth!
Lesbia, love but me!
Through my veins the hot blood boundeth,
Fails my voice--strange murmuring soundeth--
All the world such darkness filleth,
Nought mine eyes can see.
The poem is fragmentary. The original Greek ode, of
which it is an adaptation, was addressed to a Lesbian girl.
Catullus designed it to be a veiled declaration of his love.
If his Lesbia cared, she would understand; if not--it was
"only a translation. " Incidentally the poem gave birth )f
to the title Lesbia.
Into the details of this " soul's tragedy "--or " history of
a heart," as Tyrrell calls it--this is not the time to enter.
In the briefest but clearest outline it can be read by all in
the sixty-eighth poem, an elegiac chapter of autobio-
graphy, and in the lyric sequence of Lesbia poems (there
are barely twenty altogether), which carries the action
forward, step by step, through homage and rapture to
Thee smiling soft. Yet this delight
Doth all my sense consign to death;
For when thou dawnest on my sight,
Ah wretched! flits my labouring breath.
My tongue is palsied. Subtly hid
Fire creeps me through from limb to limb:
My loud ears tingle all unbid:
Twin clouds of night mine eyes bedim.
This was published by Mr. Gladstone in a volume which he and
the then Lord Lyttelton dedicated "ex communi voto in
memoriam duplicum nuptiarum. " Quaritch (1863).
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? 12
doubt and repulsion, on to the sombre close, the final
farewell in the poem numbered eighth, in which the self-
restraint is almost as remarkable as the intensity of the
work. The agony to which Lesbia's inconstancy con-
demned him is summed up in two lines in the most famous
of his epigrams, the Odi et amo, in which the old love and
the new hate are struggling for the mastery: --
Can Love breed hate, Hate love? Ah, who shall say?
And yet I feel it . . . and have torment aye.
The chronology of the Lesbia poems is quite uncertain.
At most the attachment can hardly have extended over
more than four years. It may have been much shorter.
The problem is full of difficulties. In one view the poet
died broken-hearted when, close upon the loss of Lesbia,
followed the death of his favourite brother. Yet external
and internal evidence alike tend to prove that he went
abroad in 57 with an appointment in the Roman Civil
Service on the staff of a provincial governor in Asia, to
forget his troubles. And it seems to have been after his
return that some of the sprightliest and gayest of the
occasional poems were written. The Lines to his Yacht
and the Visit with Varus do not read like the work of a
broken-hearted man. Nor does a broken heart usually
suffer its possessor to collect his own works and dedicate
them--as Catullus did--in buoyant verses to a friend.
The inference is that the detachment for which he prayed
in the Farewell was achieved, before,--with the last of his
lyrics, the "Malest, Cornifici, tuo Catullo" a poem which
reads like the cry of a tired child,--he died in 54, leaving
his last curse to Caesar's satellite Vatinius, who was
already boasting about the consulship which he was to
hold some seven years later.
Such is the outline of a brief and restless career, in which
the one great passion looms , large. It would be easy to
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? 13
dilate upon the friendships and the feuds, the wit and the
revels, about which still clings the very "atmosphere and
breath" of the writer, his zest for life and his passion for
travel. The campaigns of Caesar in Gaul and the wan-
derings of Veranius and Fabullus in Spain fill him too
with the " go-fever" for which his quicksilver temperament
has prepared us. It breathes in his constant use of the
word vagus (a wanderer), and when his own turn comes
his companions must, he tells them, "take wings and fly"
with him. The eagerness with which he anticipates the
journey through the great cities of the East is more
striking than the contentedly happy note of his best-
known poem, his "Home, Sweet Home," when his yacht has
sailed back (with the master on board) to his beloved
lake-land Sirmio. Thither many a pilgrim has come since
to roam over the peninsula of Catullus. Tennyson's life*
tells us how he spent a long summer's day on the
olive-silvery shore making his "Frater ave atque vale"
and how he dwelt on the memory later at his own home-
coming and re-read the poems to enjoy the magic of their
metre and " the perfection of the art. " He came there, after
long wandering, to the cenotaph of Catullus as Catullus
had come to the grave of his brother. And it is as
"brother "t that he greets the Roman. Only to Virgil
and Catullus among Latin poets has Tennyson left the
tribute of a song: --
Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!
So they row'd, and there we landed--" 0 venusta Sirmio /"
There to me thro' all the groves of olive in the summer
glow,
* Popular Edition, Macmillan & Co. , i8gg, page 624 seq.
t So Swinburne in the poem beginning "Catulle frater ut
velim comes tibi. "
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? 14
There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers
grow,
Came that "Ave atque Vale" of the Poet's hopeless woe,
Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago,
"Frater Ave atque Vale "--as we wandered to and fro
Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below
Sweet Catullus' all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!
One of the first things that strikes us in approaching
Catullus is the cold indifference or contempt with which he
seems to be regarded by all but the poets of the ancient
world. It is an old grievance against Quintilian that, in
his survey of Roman literature, when awarding the palm
for lyric poetry to Horace, he bestows but a bare men-
tion--and that not an honourable mention--upon Catullus.
Horace himself condemned a contemporary because he
could recite nothing but Calvus and Catullus, and he
claimed, apparently unchallenged, the distinction of
having himself introduced into Latium the lyrics of
Greece.
History, too, refers only to the Caesar epigrams, the
"carmina referta contumeliis Ctzsaris" which are certainly
one of the least presentable, even though they may be one
of the most powerful portions of the poet's work. Ovid
and Martial make some amends. But compared with the
tribute of a Tennyson or a Landor,* even their eulogies
"are as water unto wine. " We hear of a conspiracy of
silence hatched by the Augustan age against writers of
the Republic. But the real clue to this indifference is, no
doubt, simpler--perhaps less surprising. To the everyday
world of business and action Catullus did not matter.
If the man in the street knew him by name at all it was
* C. f. Lord Houghton's words in his Essay on Landor (Ward's
English Poets, vol. iv. , p. 466) : " Catullus, his lifelong model of
the perfection of literary grace. "
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? 15
only as the author of an attack that failed: the writer of
a handful of political verse, the bitter protest of a dying
Republicanism against^, the advent of an inevitable and
salutary Monarchy. For the rest, he was a child who
never grew up. Professor Mackail, in one of those
flashes of insight with which he "lightens upon
the subject" of Latin Literature, compares him to
an extraordinarily gifted child; and for a child,
however gifted, there was very little room fn
serious, utilitarian, grown-up Rome/ ''The attitude is
natural. Nor is it confined to ancient times^ In one of
the finest scenes of Lorna Doone, the scene in which old
Sir Ensor, after he has tried by fair means and foul to
prevent the marriage of Lorna to Jan Ridd, knowing as
he does the truth about her birth and her position, and
realising that in the great world "people don't do such
things "--old Sir Ensor is represented by Blackmore as
relenting on his death-bed, and relenting with the half-
cynical, half-envious comment, "Boy and girl, be boy
and girl, until you have grandchildren. " Catullus never
lived to have grandchildren. But he kept his freshness
and his boyhood to the last. And it was as a child, a
marvellous child, that the average Roman left him
severely alone, to be recognised in modern times as "the
one Roman poet whom no boy," and it might surely be
added no reader, "has ever failed to appreciate. "
In most writers there are two distinct elements--one
ephemeral and transient, engendered by the fashion of
the moment or the hour; the other essential and perma-
nent, the expression of the writer's innermost self, wrung
from him by necessity--" he can no other. " In Catullus
the line of cleavage is well marked. When he came to
Rome in 62, it is reasonable to suppose that he found the
younger generation in full revolt against the old school
of national poetry and all agog with the fresh fashion of
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? i6
Alexandrianism. A new world had swum into their ken.
And they were busy excerpting, translating, imitating
these modern Greeks, with their microscopic analysis of
the feelings, their tedious elaboration of the unessential,
their artistic embroidery and their inartistic senti-
mentality. It was not for him to set . at defiance the
opinion of the literary world. He swam with the stream,
and the translations and imitations of Callimachus sur-
vive to attest his homage and his success. As literary
exercises these verses are all very well. So are the back
numbers of a Fashion journal--in their own place and for
their proper purpose. But if they were lost, the world
would regard the loss with equanimity. On one of these
essays, the Peleus and Thetis, very different judgments
have been passed. Some rank it with the poet's best work.
Among its eulogists is Sir Theodore Martin, the translator
of Catullus. "From first to last it maintains," he says,
"a high level of imaginative power. The opening picture
of the Nereids" (or Mermaidens) "peering up in wonder
at the adventurous Argonauts, who were the first to break
the solitude of their ocean haunts, takes us at once into
the clearest and brightest region of poetical romance, and
there the poet keeps us to the close, passing before us
picture after picture wrought with a master's hand, and
swaying us at his will upon the waves of passion or of
pathos. " The poem has certainly the simplicity and the
charm of a true fairy-tale: the beauty of the parts makes
generous atonement for the inequality of the whole. And,
as usual with Catullus' best work, the inspiration is drawn
direct from life. It is the reality of Lesbia's unfaith that
Hs told under a thin disguise as the legend of false
Theseus; and if ever a lament was written from the heart,
'it is the lament of Ariadne. Nor can lovers of poetry
afford to forget the influence which the poem exercised on
Virgil. Here was sown at least some of the seed, which
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? 17-
was afterwards to bear first blade and then harvest in the
Fourth Eclogue and the Fourth ^Eneid. Or, to vary the
metaphor, we may say that the Ariadne of Catullus is the
vivid sketch, which in Virgil's hands became the finished
picture, Dido. And in each case the later poet indicates
his debt to the earlier by a literary echo. Music employs a
somewhat similar effect when, for instance, in the opera of
Fra Diavolo, the approach of the master spirit is heralded
on the scene by a certain stave of arresting melody.
Similarly in modern poetry the author of the Shropshire
Lad echoes a phrase from Tarn Lin or a couplet from
Willie's Lady when he wishes to claim kinship with the
old English Ballad. So Virgil, by adapting in his
Messianic Eclogue the refrain from the Song of the Fates
and by borrowing a line from the Ariadne at the crisis of
Dido's passion,* acknowledges, with the skill and the
generosity of a master, his debt to the bard whom the
unwritten law of the Augustan age did not permit him to
mention by name.
The Lock of Berenice's Hair, on the other hand, may be
said to be merely grotesque and only interesting as an
experiment in mock-heroics, which may have supplied
Statius with a hint for his exaggerative descriptions of
Domitian and Mr. Pope with the idea of his Rape of the
Lock. This and a few more such pieces may, after all,
be regarded as mere studies, dictated by fashion and
preserved by friendship. Nor do I hold a brief for the
epigrams. An article was recently published in the
Spectator with the suggestive title, " Insult as a Fine Art. "
That is an art in which the Ancients excelled. But mucfi\
as we may regret that the epigrams were ever written, or
that, having been written, they should have survived to
* Compare Catullus, lxiv. 327, with Virgil, E. iv. 46-47; and
Catullus, lxiv. 141, with Virgil, Aeneid iv. 316.
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? i8
this day, it must never be forgotten that their scurrility
was a convention and that they were no more meant to be
taken literally than is the fiery language of a modern
navvy. Pruned of these excrescences the "Liber Caiulli,"
la volume of 116 poems,* would be shorter than the
Shropshire Lad, a work with which it has more than a
little in common, but, short as it would be, it would also
be immortal. The residue is pure gold.
With an unerring insight and an unrivalled directness,
the true Catullus can paint a word-picture as few other
poets can. Whether it is the babe in his mother's
arms--the Madonna and child of the mediaeval painters--
or the grandam in the chimney-corner; or the flower in a
garden-close; or the wind that comes up out of the sea at
dawn; or the stream of people passing to and fro in the
streets of Rome--such a crowd as we see daily if we
travel by train pouring into or out of a twentieth-century
railway station: --
Isti qui in flatea modo hue modo illuc
In re fraetereunt sua o ecufati
--whatever the scene, the poet has still his eye fixed on the
object. Aspects of nature or aspects of life, all with a
few strokes of the pen, are conjured into an imperishable
reality. It is the triumph of art, because it is the triumph
of truth.
It would be hazardous for a modern to try to gauge
the exact effect of an ancient poem on an ancient reader,
especially when contemporary criticism is silent. Else we
might be tempted to assert with confidence that the famous
translation by Wm. Cory, in lonica, modelled as it is on a
* In this one respect Catullus was Alexandrian to the core.
He accepted whole-heartedly the Alexandrian maxim, fitya
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? 19
Greek original and cast in language of absolute sim-
plicity, must convey to us very much the same impression
that an elegy of Catullus conveyed to a Roman: --
They told me, Heracleitus,
They told me you were dead:,
They brought me bitter news to hear
And bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered,
How often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking
And sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying,
My dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes
Long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices,
Thy nightingales, awake,
For Death--He taketh all away
But them He cannot take.
That poem has just the tones of directness, simplicity
and unreserve that characterise Catullus in his poems of
tears, of laughter and of love.
The chief interest must centre about the intenser
lyrics and elegies. The poet's moods change like the
moods of a child. But throughout his temper never knows
a medium. It is always an agony or an ecstasy or a
rapture. Let me illustrate this point by one poem on each
theme. Take first a love-poem, which Professor
Phillimore has translated: --
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? . 20
Dear love, if it were mine
To kiss for evermore
With kisses million-fold
Those honeyed lips of thine,
I should not have my fill;
Although the harvest store
Of kisses were untold
As the dry cornstalks--still
I should not have my fill.
And then the laughter and the mirth. Now it is
the impish merriment of a Puck, with his "Lord, what
fools these mortals be! "--O saeclum insifiens et
infacetum /--girding at the folly of the world. Some
rival of Lesbia is gibbeted with scorn: --
And can the Town call you a belle,
And say that you're a Lesbia ? --Well!
The poor Town's wits have fled pell-mell!
Now it is the Homeric laughter of the lines on Calvus,
who, though a giant in eloquence, was a dwarf in stature.
The rendering is Sir Theodore Martin's: --
When in that wondrous speech of his
My Calvus had denounced
Vatinius and his infamies
Most mercilessly trounced--
A voice the buzz of plaudits clove,
My sides I nearly split
With laughter, as it cried, "By Jove!
An eloquent--tom-tit!
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? LIBRARY
OF
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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? \
Sbe poetry of Catullus
?
?
<
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? Sherratt & Hughes
Publishers to the University of Manchester
Manchester: 34 Cross Street
London: 33 Soho Square, W.
Agents for the United States
Longmans, Green & Co.
New York: 443-449 Fourth Avenue
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? The Poetry of
Catullus
D. A. SLATER, M. A. ,
Professor of Latin in the University College, Cardiff.
A Lecture delivered to the
Manchester Branch of the Classical Association
on February 2nd, 1912.
MANCHESTER
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1912
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? The Poetry of Catullus.
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,--
As you go into the Bodleian at Oxford, you will see
on the Librarian's right hand a glass-covered case, and in
it, among other relics, a brine-stained book and an old-
fashioned repeater. Read the labels and you learn
that you are looking at the watch and the Sophocles that
were found on Shelley when his body was cast up by the
sea near Via Reggio that July morning in 1829. The
thoughts and associations which these objects, like the
white marble statue of the poet in that corner of
University Quadrangle, conjure up amid their present
austere surroundings are as incongruous and refreshing in
their way as the light of poetry amid the prose of life.
Oxford is not prodigal of such tributes, and, as you pass
into Duke Humphrey's Library, you wonder, it may be,
whether, in thus cherishing at her heart the memory of
Shelley the poet after she had cast out Shelley the atheist,
she is thinking of what was, or of what might have been;
of what the man did or of what it might have been
granted him to do but for the sudden squall that swept
him away. "It was all over," writes Trelawny, "within
twenty minutes. "
Dreamers will say it speaks well for the world that she
has the generosity when a man dies young to judge
him by what he might have done, not by what he did.
If there has been a glint of gold in the promise of his
youth, she sets him, as Shelley himself set Keats, among
"the inheritors of unfulfilled renown," and does more
honour, it may be, to his memory than to the memory of
those " who have lived out all the length of all their days,"
SEP 301913 ol
(RECAP)
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? many of them without fulfilling in their prime the promise
of their youth. This, I take it, is the true meaning of the
old Greek proverb: --
ov ol 9eol <pi\ovaiv airodvrjtrKei veoi.
The favourites of the gods are released from life before
they have had time to outstay their youth. The tribute to
those who died young is tribute to the youth which they
never lived to lose--in part, no doubt, objective, but in part
also subjective, and prompted by the thought expressed in
that line of Thackeray: "Oh, the brave days, when we
/were twenty-one! "
'Youth's a stuff that will not last, and to embody in
poetry or in prose the charm and the fulness of youth, the
poet, or prose-poet, must himself be young. It is only here
and there a Colonel Newcome in fiction or a George
Meredith in life who can keep his hold on " Youth in age. "
You remember the lines with that title which appeared in
Meredith's last volume, written in his eightieth year: --
"Once I was part of the music I heard
On the boughs--or sweet between earth and sky,
For joy of the beating of wings on high
My heart shot into the breast of the bird.
"I hear it now and I see it fly,
And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
My heart shoots into the breast of the bird,
As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh. "
The best of lyric poetry has been the work of youth;
the work of Sappho, Catullus and Shelley, who died, all
three, it is said, before they were thirty, but yet not before
they had left written for all time their record of the
thoughts, and the aspirations, the joys and the sorrows of
youth--youth too, itself and love incarnate--"the glory
and the freshness of a dream. "
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? 7
Of these three Catullus, the Heine (as he has been
called) of Roman Literature, was born, not inappro-
priately, at Verona, the City of Juliet and Romeo,
probably in the year 84 B. C. In a way the date has its
importance, for the period was one of comparative calm.
Great movements were developing and great ideas were in
the air. But the storm of civil war in which the Republic
went down, leaving the poets of the Augustan age to drift
under the patronage and into the service of the court, had
yet to break. Catullus was a child of three when "the
mulberry-faced dictator," Sulla, was in power, and he died
soon after Caesar had for the first time invaded Britain
and five years before he crossed the Rubicon. In a word
Catullus lived free and wrote free. That is half his
charm.
His father was a man of means and a friend of
Caesar. Catullus himself cannot have been poor, for, in
spite of some playful complaints of straitened circum-
stances--a mortgaged villa and a purse full of cobwebs--
we yet gather that he had a yacht of his own and two
country houses, one on the Gaida Lake at Sirmio and the
other at Tibur, the Brighton of Italy.
Of his boyhood and youth very little is known. The
poems--and biography other than the poems we have
practically none--contain a confession that, like Swin-
burne, he wrote verses at sixteen. "When first the garb
of manhood was given me, when my primrose youth was
in its pleasant spring, I played enough at rhyming "--
Multa satis lust* But, like Swinburne again, at sixteen,
or later, he too "had a bonfire. " For these trifles, as he
calls them, seem never to have been published. And
plainly there was study--study in manner and in matter,
as well as in metre; the poems that remain prove that.
But he does not, like Horace, take us into his confidence
* Lxviii. 15 seq.
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? 8
and tell the story of his training. At the age of twenty-
two or twenty-three he migrated to Rome, and at Rome,
except for occasional visits to the country and some travel
abroad, he seems to have spent the last eight years of his
life. It is strange that whereas, according to Horace, the
race of poets "love the country and avoid the town," to
Catullus life in the country was anathema. "Idem
infacetost infacetior rure," he says of a poetaster, "the
fellow is as dull as the hedges and ditches of the
country. " But then Catullus was in many ways a
paradox. Nor does the paradox become any the less
startling when we remember what Sir Archibald Geikie
pointed out in the masterly address which he delivered
to the Classical Association at Liverpool as its President
last year--that no Roman writer had a keener eye than
Catullus for all the manifold beauty of nature or a finer
power of expressing what he saw. And yet his poetry is
the voice less of nature than of life. Now, poets may
learn many lessons in the country. They may find
"sermons in stones, books in the running brooks. " But
to know their fellow-men they must live among them.
Even Wordsworth might have been more human and not
a whit less Wordsworthian--for he would have lost none
of his "healing power"--had he mixed a little more with
the world of men. "There is a sort of knowledge," says
the author of Tom Jones, "which it is beyond the
power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had by
conversation. So necessary is this to the understanding
the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of
them than those learned pedants whose lives have been
entirely consumed . . . among books; for, however
exquisitely human nature may have been described by
writers, the true, practical system can be learnt only in the
world. "
If Catullus was to acquire this knowledge there was no
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? 9
better place in which to seek it than the capital, where he
settled (in the year after Cicero's consulship), while
Catiline was selling his life dear in the uplands of
Etruria.
One needs to be young to realise the zest and the
excitement with which he must have entered into the
new life. Through Caesar, his father's friend, he
could get to know everybody in Rome worth
knowing, both men of action and men of letters, such as
Calvus the Sheridan and Cinna the Lyly of Rome.
Young, reckless, headstrong, he plunged eagerly into all
the gaieties of the capital, "the delightful life of youth,
with full cups and empty purses. " Bohemian he must
have been: there are the poems to tell; but in the midst of
all attractions and distractions he was reading with the
appetite of a Macaulay. To his contemporaries he is above
all else Doctus Catullus--Catullus the scholar. The one
thing lacking soon followed. If a life without a love-
story is indeed only half a life, a vie manquie, the poet of
love must have learnt in rapture and suffering what he is
afterwards to describe in song. It is impossible to
separate his life from his poetry. And it is for his lyrics
of life and of love that Catullus is remembered. Lesbia
was the inspiration of them all; Lesbia dictavit, docte
Catulle, tibi.
The tale is a sad one. It was the old story of Troilus
and Cressida; romance darkening into tragedy; the
raptures of anticipation and possession dying out into
mistrust, jealousy, despair. It seems strange that we
should owe some of the finest poetry in the world to a
sister of the notorious Clodius; less strange, perhaps, that
a story of which she was the heroine should end
unhappily. All the chief characters in the episode are
known to history. Caelius, who played Diomed to
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? 10
Lesbia's Cressid, was undoubtedly the Caelius whom
Cicero defended in the speech Pro Caelio. Ovid, in
the Tristia, assumes everybody to know that the name
Lesbia was an alias, and Apuleius states as a fact that
"Lesbia" was Clodia.
Art has preserved no likeness of Catullus. Nor need
we stop to paint an imaginary portrait of Lesbia. That
portrait may probably be found, sketched by contrasts, in
the forty-third poem; a Juno, a Clytemnestra, so Cicero
and Caelius call her; a tall, imperious, brilliant patrician
with the fine hands and blazing eyes that the age thought
beautiful. But no one is really concerned to know what-
like were Petrarch's "Laura" or the "dark lady" of Shake-
speare's sonnets. It is said to have been at Cicero's house
that the two first met: and it may have been by Cicero's
hand that Catullus sent to Clodia the fifty-first poem in
the collection, the raptures of which I venture to illustrate
from a rendering which a young student* once made for
me: --
God, or more than God he seemeth,
In whose eyes thy bright glance beameth,
In whose ears thy laughter trilleth,
Sitting near to thee;
* Mr. J. C. Rollo, of Glasgow University, in 1003. I have
printed the rendering in the text because I know no other that
represents as happily the bounding, boyish spontaneity of the
Latin; but the reader will thank me, I venture to think, for
adding a statelier version from a greater hand, which is too
little known :--
Him rival to the gods I place,
Him loftier yet, if loftier be,
Who, Lesbia, sits before thy face,
Who listens and who looks on thee;
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? II
For that smile my senses stealeth,
And the look that thee revealeth,
Every word uprising killeth!
Lesbia, love but me!
Through my veins the hot blood boundeth,
Fails my voice--strange murmuring soundeth--
All the world such darkness filleth,
Nought mine eyes can see.
The poem is fragmentary. The original Greek ode, of
which it is an adaptation, was addressed to a Lesbian girl.
Catullus designed it to be a veiled declaration of his love.
If his Lesbia cared, she would understand; if not--it was
"only a translation. " Incidentally the poem gave birth )f
to the title Lesbia.
Into the details of this " soul's tragedy "--or " history of
a heart," as Tyrrell calls it--this is not the time to enter.
In the briefest but clearest outline it can be read by all in
the sixty-eighth poem, an elegiac chapter of autobio-
graphy, and in the lyric sequence of Lesbia poems (there
are barely twenty altogether), which carries the action
forward, step by step, through homage and rapture to
Thee smiling soft. Yet this delight
Doth all my sense consign to death;
For when thou dawnest on my sight,
Ah wretched! flits my labouring breath.
My tongue is palsied. Subtly hid
Fire creeps me through from limb to limb:
My loud ears tingle all unbid:
Twin clouds of night mine eyes bedim.
This was published by Mr. Gladstone in a volume which he and
the then Lord Lyttelton dedicated "ex communi voto in
memoriam duplicum nuptiarum. " Quaritch (1863).
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? 12
doubt and repulsion, on to the sombre close, the final
farewell in the poem numbered eighth, in which the self-
restraint is almost as remarkable as the intensity of the
work. The agony to which Lesbia's inconstancy con-
demned him is summed up in two lines in the most famous
of his epigrams, the Odi et amo, in which the old love and
the new hate are struggling for the mastery: --
Can Love breed hate, Hate love? Ah, who shall say?
And yet I feel it . . . and have torment aye.
The chronology of the Lesbia poems is quite uncertain.
At most the attachment can hardly have extended over
more than four years. It may have been much shorter.
The problem is full of difficulties. In one view the poet
died broken-hearted when, close upon the loss of Lesbia,
followed the death of his favourite brother. Yet external
and internal evidence alike tend to prove that he went
abroad in 57 with an appointment in the Roman Civil
Service on the staff of a provincial governor in Asia, to
forget his troubles. And it seems to have been after his
return that some of the sprightliest and gayest of the
occasional poems were written. The Lines to his Yacht
and the Visit with Varus do not read like the work of a
broken-hearted man. Nor does a broken heart usually
suffer its possessor to collect his own works and dedicate
them--as Catullus did--in buoyant verses to a friend.
The inference is that the detachment for which he prayed
in the Farewell was achieved, before,--with the last of his
lyrics, the "Malest, Cornifici, tuo Catullo" a poem which
reads like the cry of a tired child,--he died in 54, leaving
his last curse to Caesar's satellite Vatinius, who was
already boasting about the consulship which he was to
hold some seven years later.
Such is the outline of a brief and restless career, in which
the one great passion looms , large. It would be easy to
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? 13
dilate upon the friendships and the feuds, the wit and the
revels, about which still clings the very "atmosphere and
breath" of the writer, his zest for life and his passion for
travel. The campaigns of Caesar in Gaul and the wan-
derings of Veranius and Fabullus in Spain fill him too
with the " go-fever" for which his quicksilver temperament
has prepared us. It breathes in his constant use of the
word vagus (a wanderer), and when his own turn comes
his companions must, he tells them, "take wings and fly"
with him. The eagerness with which he anticipates the
journey through the great cities of the East is more
striking than the contentedly happy note of his best-
known poem, his "Home, Sweet Home," when his yacht has
sailed back (with the master on board) to his beloved
lake-land Sirmio. Thither many a pilgrim has come since
to roam over the peninsula of Catullus. Tennyson's life*
tells us how he spent a long summer's day on the
olive-silvery shore making his "Frater ave atque vale"
and how he dwelt on the memory later at his own home-
coming and re-read the poems to enjoy the magic of their
metre and " the perfection of the art. " He came there, after
long wandering, to the cenotaph of Catullus as Catullus
had come to the grave of his brother. And it is as
"brother "t that he greets the Roman. Only to Virgil
and Catullus among Latin poets has Tennyson left the
tribute of a song: --
Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!
So they row'd, and there we landed--" 0 venusta Sirmio /"
There to me thro' all the groves of olive in the summer
glow,
* Popular Edition, Macmillan & Co. , i8gg, page 624 seq.
t So Swinburne in the poem beginning "Catulle frater ut
velim comes tibi. "
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? 14
There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers
grow,
Came that "Ave atque Vale" of the Poet's hopeless woe,
Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago,
"Frater Ave atque Vale "--as we wandered to and fro
Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below
Sweet Catullus' all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!
One of the first things that strikes us in approaching
Catullus is the cold indifference or contempt with which he
seems to be regarded by all but the poets of the ancient
world. It is an old grievance against Quintilian that, in
his survey of Roman literature, when awarding the palm
for lyric poetry to Horace, he bestows but a bare men-
tion--and that not an honourable mention--upon Catullus.
Horace himself condemned a contemporary because he
could recite nothing but Calvus and Catullus, and he
claimed, apparently unchallenged, the distinction of
having himself introduced into Latium the lyrics of
Greece.
History, too, refers only to the Caesar epigrams, the
"carmina referta contumeliis Ctzsaris" which are certainly
one of the least presentable, even though they may be one
of the most powerful portions of the poet's work. Ovid
and Martial make some amends. But compared with the
tribute of a Tennyson or a Landor,* even their eulogies
"are as water unto wine. " We hear of a conspiracy of
silence hatched by the Augustan age against writers of
the Republic. But the real clue to this indifference is, no
doubt, simpler--perhaps less surprising. To the everyday
world of business and action Catullus did not matter.
If the man in the street knew him by name at all it was
* C. f. Lord Houghton's words in his Essay on Landor (Ward's
English Poets, vol. iv. , p. 466) : " Catullus, his lifelong model of
the perfection of literary grace. "
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? 15
only as the author of an attack that failed: the writer of
a handful of political verse, the bitter protest of a dying
Republicanism against^, the advent of an inevitable and
salutary Monarchy. For the rest, he was a child who
never grew up. Professor Mackail, in one of those
flashes of insight with which he "lightens upon
the subject" of Latin Literature, compares him to
an extraordinarily gifted child; and for a child,
however gifted, there was very little room fn
serious, utilitarian, grown-up Rome/ ''The attitude is
natural. Nor is it confined to ancient times^ In one of
the finest scenes of Lorna Doone, the scene in which old
Sir Ensor, after he has tried by fair means and foul to
prevent the marriage of Lorna to Jan Ridd, knowing as
he does the truth about her birth and her position, and
realising that in the great world "people don't do such
things "--old Sir Ensor is represented by Blackmore as
relenting on his death-bed, and relenting with the half-
cynical, half-envious comment, "Boy and girl, be boy
and girl, until you have grandchildren. " Catullus never
lived to have grandchildren. But he kept his freshness
and his boyhood to the last. And it was as a child, a
marvellous child, that the average Roman left him
severely alone, to be recognised in modern times as "the
one Roman poet whom no boy," and it might surely be
added no reader, "has ever failed to appreciate. "
In most writers there are two distinct elements--one
ephemeral and transient, engendered by the fashion of
the moment or the hour; the other essential and perma-
nent, the expression of the writer's innermost self, wrung
from him by necessity--" he can no other. " In Catullus
the line of cleavage is well marked. When he came to
Rome in 62, it is reasonable to suppose that he found the
younger generation in full revolt against the old school
of national poetry and all agog with the fresh fashion of
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? i6
Alexandrianism. A new world had swum into their ken.
And they were busy excerpting, translating, imitating
these modern Greeks, with their microscopic analysis of
the feelings, their tedious elaboration of the unessential,
their artistic embroidery and their inartistic senti-
mentality. It was not for him to set . at defiance the
opinion of the literary world. He swam with the stream,
and the translations and imitations of Callimachus sur-
vive to attest his homage and his success. As literary
exercises these verses are all very well. So are the back
numbers of a Fashion journal--in their own place and for
their proper purpose. But if they were lost, the world
would regard the loss with equanimity. On one of these
essays, the Peleus and Thetis, very different judgments
have been passed. Some rank it with the poet's best work.
Among its eulogists is Sir Theodore Martin, the translator
of Catullus. "From first to last it maintains," he says,
"a high level of imaginative power. The opening picture
of the Nereids" (or Mermaidens) "peering up in wonder
at the adventurous Argonauts, who were the first to break
the solitude of their ocean haunts, takes us at once into
the clearest and brightest region of poetical romance, and
there the poet keeps us to the close, passing before us
picture after picture wrought with a master's hand, and
swaying us at his will upon the waves of passion or of
pathos. " The poem has certainly the simplicity and the
charm of a true fairy-tale: the beauty of the parts makes
generous atonement for the inequality of the whole. And,
as usual with Catullus' best work, the inspiration is drawn
direct from life. It is the reality of Lesbia's unfaith that
Hs told under a thin disguise as the legend of false
Theseus; and if ever a lament was written from the heart,
'it is the lament of Ariadne. Nor can lovers of poetry
afford to forget the influence which the poem exercised on
Virgil. Here was sown at least some of the seed, which
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? 17-
was afterwards to bear first blade and then harvest in the
Fourth Eclogue and the Fourth ^Eneid. Or, to vary the
metaphor, we may say that the Ariadne of Catullus is the
vivid sketch, which in Virgil's hands became the finished
picture, Dido. And in each case the later poet indicates
his debt to the earlier by a literary echo. Music employs a
somewhat similar effect when, for instance, in the opera of
Fra Diavolo, the approach of the master spirit is heralded
on the scene by a certain stave of arresting melody.
Similarly in modern poetry the author of the Shropshire
Lad echoes a phrase from Tarn Lin or a couplet from
Willie's Lady when he wishes to claim kinship with the
old English Ballad. So Virgil, by adapting in his
Messianic Eclogue the refrain from the Song of the Fates
and by borrowing a line from the Ariadne at the crisis of
Dido's passion,* acknowledges, with the skill and the
generosity of a master, his debt to the bard whom the
unwritten law of the Augustan age did not permit him to
mention by name.
The Lock of Berenice's Hair, on the other hand, may be
said to be merely grotesque and only interesting as an
experiment in mock-heroics, which may have supplied
Statius with a hint for his exaggerative descriptions of
Domitian and Mr. Pope with the idea of his Rape of the
Lock. This and a few more such pieces may, after all,
be regarded as mere studies, dictated by fashion and
preserved by friendship. Nor do I hold a brief for the
epigrams. An article was recently published in the
Spectator with the suggestive title, " Insult as a Fine Art. "
That is an art in which the Ancients excelled. But mucfi\
as we may regret that the epigrams were ever written, or
that, having been written, they should have survived to
* Compare Catullus, lxiv. 327, with Virgil, E. iv. 46-47; and
Catullus, lxiv. 141, with Virgil, Aeneid iv. 316.
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? i8
this day, it must never be forgotten that their scurrility
was a convention and that they were no more meant to be
taken literally than is the fiery language of a modern
navvy. Pruned of these excrescences the "Liber Caiulli,"
la volume of 116 poems,* would be shorter than the
Shropshire Lad, a work with which it has more than a
little in common, but, short as it would be, it would also
be immortal. The residue is pure gold.
With an unerring insight and an unrivalled directness,
the true Catullus can paint a word-picture as few other
poets can. Whether it is the babe in his mother's
arms--the Madonna and child of the mediaeval painters--
or the grandam in the chimney-corner; or the flower in a
garden-close; or the wind that comes up out of the sea at
dawn; or the stream of people passing to and fro in the
streets of Rome--such a crowd as we see daily if we
travel by train pouring into or out of a twentieth-century
railway station: --
Isti qui in flatea modo hue modo illuc
In re fraetereunt sua o ecufati
--whatever the scene, the poet has still his eye fixed on the
object. Aspects of nature or aspects of life, all with a
few strokes of the pen, are conjured into an imperishable
reality. It is the triumph of art, because it is the triumph
of truth.
It would be hazardous for a modern to try to gauge
the exact effect of an ancient poem on an ancient reader,
especially when contemporary criticism is silent. Else we
might be tempted to assert with confidence that the famous
translation by Wm. Cory, in lonica, modelled as it is on a
* In this one respect Catullus was Alexandrian to the core.
He accepted whole-heartedly the Alexandrian maxim, fitya
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? 19
Greek original and cast in language of absolute sim-
plicity, must convey to us very much the same impression
that an elegy of Catullus conveyed to a Roman: --
They told me, Heracleitus,
They told me you were dead:,
They brought me bitter news to hear
And bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered,
How often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking
And sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying,
My dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes
Long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices,
Thy nightingales, awake,
For Death--He taketh all away
But them He cannot take.
That poem has just the tones of directness, simplicity
and unreserve that characterise Catullus in his poems of
tears, of laughter and of love.
The chief interest must centre about the intenser
lyrics and elegies. The poet's moods change like the
moods of a child. But throughout his temper never knows
a medium. It is always an agony or an ecstasy or a
rapture. Let me illustrate this point by one poem on each
theme. Take first a love-poem, which Professor
Phillimore has translated: --
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? . 20
Dear love, if it were mine
To kiss for evermore
With kisses million-fold
Those honeyed lips of thine,
I should not have my fill;
Although the harvest store
Of kisses were untold
As the dry cornstalks--still
I should not have my fill.
And then the laughter and the mirth. Now it is
the impish merriment of a Puck, with his "Lord, what
fools these mortals be! "--O saeclum insifiens et
infacetum /--girding at the folly of the world. Some
rival of Lesbia is gibbeted with scorn: --
And can the Town call you a belle,
And say that you're a Lesbia ? --Well!
The poor Town's wits have fled pell-mell!
Now it is the Homeric laughter of the lines on Calvus,
who, though a giant in eloquence, was a dwarf in stature.
The rendering is Sir Theodore Martin's: --
When in that wondrous speech of his
My Calvus had denounced
Vatinius and his infamies
Most mercilessly trounced--
A voice the buzz of plaudits clove,
My sides I nearly split
With laughter, as it cried, "By Jove!
An eloquent--tom-tit!
