Let me
illustrate
this point by one poem on each
theme.
theme.
Catullus - 1866b - Poetry - Slater
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! "
But the love and the laughter die away. It is the heart-
ache that inspired what are, after all, his most haunting
poems. From the first, in the dirge on Lesbia's love-bird
there is a suggestion that Catullus--" Catullus, whose dead
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? 21
songster never dies"--was a man of quicker sensibilities
than his fellows, and the lines to Calvus on the death of
his young bride, Quintilia, bear out the estimate. But
after the two great sorrows of his life, the loss of Lesbia
and the death of his brother, he wrote what are certainly
three of the saddest laments in all literature. They
represent the waning, I will not say the passing, of his
youth. Perhaps it is well that he did not survive so cruel
a disillusionment long. The eighth poem, with its
pitiful refrain:--
"Lost is the lost, thou knowest it, and the past is past. "
The fifty-first, a sort of fugue on the theme which the
Odi et amo supplied, a death struggle between love and
reason, in which only by taking hatred for his bosom
friend can the poor passion-ridden lover, "too unhappy to
be kind," win back for himself some hold upon life: --
. . . No more for answering love I sue,
No more that her untruth be true:
Purge but my heart, my strength renew,
And doom me not my faith to rue.
Upon these it is almost too painful to dwell. Macaulay's
comment is well known: "One thing Catullus has. I do
not know whether it belongs to him or to myself, but there
are chords of my mind which he touches as no one else
does. " And he adds that three of the poems affect him
more than he can explain. They always move him to
tears.
But in these two poems there is an alloy of hate. In
the lament on his brother's death, written seemingly by
the graveside in the Troad, which he had travelled far to
visit, we have a purer and a more chastened sorrow. It
may be possible, with the help of a refrain, though there
is no refrain in the Latin, to suggest something of the
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? 22
sustained sadness of the original and the terrible sense of
desolation it conveys : --
Brother of mine, o'er land and sea
At last, at last I have won to thee,
To lay my head on thy grave and weep
The blinding tears for thy tearless sleep,
Brother of mine.
Brother of mine, oh unheeding dust,
That the fire has seared and the urn has crushed,
"Listen," I cry with a fruitless faith
As I lean my lips to the ear of death,
"Brother of mine! "
Brother of mine, who art gone from me,
Was Life so blind to the worth of thee?
I come, as our fathers bade us come,
With a last sad gift to thy lonely tomb,
Brother of mine.
Brother of mine, to the end of time
Thy death shall live in my tear-stained rhyme.
Comrade of old, be my comrade still,
Hail yet again, and again farewell,
Brother of mine.
[ It might be thought to argue a morbid taste if one should
dwell longer upon this side of Catullus. And yet it is in
j the poems of sorrow that we seem to have his deepest and
I most earnest thought. They are a marvel of self-
"Tevelation. Nor is this only a revelation of self. For,
like Death in Sir Walter Raleigh's famous Epilogue,
Catullus, "the human," holds up a glass before the eyes
of us all in which we may see our own humanity--and we
acknowledge it. And the note is quite distinct from
every other note but Virgil's in Latin Poetry. If
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? 23
it admits analysis at all, it is the tingling
protest of full-blooded life against a seemingly inscrut-
able and unjust decree. It is the child's or the pagan's
attitude of rebellion against inevitable law; the blank
despair of the soul, without faith in immortality, which
has dreamed of life that it is very good and awakes to
realise that it is also very short.
It is fortunate for us that in life, as in literature, such
agony is shortlived. And that, unless the sufferer dies of
his wounds, after the horror of the revelation, comes the
cold serenity of middle-age; that the lover with his woeful
ballad quits the stage, and to him succeeds the matter-of-
fact man, who has shed his enthusiasms and parted with
his ambitions, and who is either, as George Meredith says
of Horace, "turning to fat in the %in," hugging a little
hoard of comfortable maxims, which tell him that content
lies here or lies there, and learning the hard and imprac-
ticable lesson to love nothing, hate nothing, value nothing,
except, it may be, the even-balanced mind, with its " perfect
philosophic tolerance " and garish devotion to the pleasure
of the moment, "the little crow and croon" of Omar-
Fitzgerald : --
Ah fill the Cup: what boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our Feet?
Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet!
Or else, like the hero of Rugby Chapel, he becomes a slave
to the idea of duty, pressing on with a more virile motive
"to a clear-purposed goal," with the same indifference
to all else and with the conscious strenuousness with which
Milton invests the hero of Paradise Lost:--
The unconquerable will
And courage never to submit or yield
And what else is not to be overcome.
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? 24
In either case, be he Epicurean or Stoic, the man has lost
the light of his youth, the spirit of Catullus. The vision
and the agony return no more.
It is to the sheaf of "unassailable" lyrics that
Catullus owes his immortality. But he is as remarkable,
in a way, for his lighter verse, short pieces, every one of
them. There is, if we may so say, a kind of "other-
dayishness " about the occasional poems. Slight incidents
and passing episodes, described in language which in point
of diction differs hardly, if at all, from the prose of every
day, take under his hand as vivid a reality as if they had
occurred this week in England, not "nineteen-hundred
years ago " in Rome. Translations can only suggest this;
but two may perhaps be cited--an acknowledgment to the
great orator Cicero and an invitation to a frivolous friend;
for the former I am indebted to an old student,* for the
latter to an anonymous writer in the Press:--
O Marcus, Master of the Roman Bar,
Prince of all Counsels that have been, that are,
And shrewdest of all Counsels yet to be
To guide or gull us,--
His thanks the worst of poets offers thee:
Thee, of all advocates the very first,
He of all poets quite the very worst--
Your friend--Catullus!
If you're in luck's way, by and by
We'll feast, old crony, you and I
Right royally; but don't omit
Rare and refreshing stores of wit
And wine--in short of everything: --
We'll feast like lords if these you'll bring;
* The Rev. Cyril Martindale.
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? 25
For cobwebs fill my money-coffer
And I have nothing else to offer
But mere affection. . . . As I live
There's just one dainty left to give--
A scent, distilled by Love and Venus
For Lesbia, which we'll share between us.
So fragrant 'tis, you'll cry, I know:
"Gods, make me nose from top to toe. "
The figures, too, are as true to life in the gay as in the
serious poems: Egnatius with the recurring smile, the
prototype of the man with the teeth in Dickens; Sulla, the
litterateur, how he would have vexed the soul of Dr.
Johnson! (the type is perennial); the man who would not
rest till his friends had read and criticised his work;
Pollio, the shameless cleptomaniac; and Arrius, the Roman
cockney. These portraits form a gallery in which one
would gladly linger. But let me conclude with a poem of
a different stamp, the Hymn to Diana, written for boys
and girls to sing at a public festival. I give it as rendered
by Professor Jebb. "There are few more entirely success-
ful pieces of translation," says the Professor of Poetry at
Oxford in his recent Essays of Poets and Poetry, "than
Sir Richard Jebb's poetic rendering of Catullus's lovely
little lyric. " The poem illustrates the detachment and the
purity that are one side of this chameleon Catullus.
Diana guardeth our estate,
Girls and boys immaculate;
Boys and maidens pure of stain,
Be Diana our refrain.
O Latonia, pledge of love
Glorious to most glorious Jove,
Near the Delian olive-tree
Latona gave thy life to thee,
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? 26
That thou should'st be for ever queen
Of mountains and of forests green;
Of every deep glen's mystery;
Of all streams and their melody.
Women in travail ask their peace
From thee, our Lady of Release:
Thou art the watcher of the ways:
Thou art the Moon with borrowed rays:
And, as thy full or waning tide
Marks how the monthly seasons glide,
Thou, Goddess, sendest wealth of store
To bless the farmer's thrifty floor.
Whatever name delights thine ear,
By that name be thou hallowed here;
And, as of old, be good to us,
The lineage of Romulus.
There is a steady glow of tranquil beauty about this
poem, which is worlds away from the volcanic fire and
fury of the epigrams. The contrast is so marked that as
we turn from the one to the other we find ourselves asking
whether they can both be the work of the same man,
unless, indeed, we accept the Diana and the Sirmto as
fruits of study--an acquired calm, and say that the " fever
and the pain" were in the blood--an inheritance and a
birthright. For, indeed, no student of Catullus can live
long among Celts without feeling irresistibly drawn to an
old theory recently revived by a great authority on Celtic
literature, Dr. Kuno Meyer;* the theory, I mean, that
Catullus was a Celt or that at least he had Celtic blood in
* In a University Lecture given at Oxford last autumn. In
what follows I am indebted to Dr. Meyer for the benefit of some
brief remarks which he sent me privately on the subject.
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? 27
his veins. The native Latin took from time to time fresh
hues in a Greek school, a Spanish school, an African
school of Roman literature, in all of which a racial pattern
is clearly discernible upon the groundwork of the mother
tongue. Even from different parts of Italy itself came
writers with a local temperament so strongly marked that
it is unhesitatingly declared to have been characteristic of
their native district. Thus the arrogance of Naevius is
ascribed to his Campanian stock and the melancholy of
Propertius to his Umbrian descent. Now there is no
external evidence in the case of Catullus. But we all
know the Celtic temperament. It is the Irish plays of
Mr. Synge; it is Ulster Hall; it is Committee Room
Fifteen; it is the dreamy mysticism of the Highlander;
it is the haunting pathos of those wonderful dirges which
make up the most distinctive element in Welsh music. It
is subject to many moods--a close sympathy with nature
and a keen relish for life. It is compact of gall and
honey, of fire and gloom. It is that strange medley of
stormy optimism and brooding melancholy that we must
often have marvelled to see mixed and commingled in
some Celt of our acquaintance. In a word, it is the
temperament of Catullus. And when we find that the
poet had a Celtic name of which the modern Cadwall or
Cadell is said to be the lineal descendant;* that he came
from a district peopled almost from time immemorial with
Celtic settlers, full of Celtic traditions and Celtic associa-
tions; and when Professor Meyer assures us that " for all
the un-Roman features in his work parallels may be cited
in plenty from Irish and Welsh poetry," we shall be
strangely sceptical if we do not admit that here is perhaps
the clue to the paradox of Catullus, the eager, wayward,
* For this derivation I have to thank my friend Mr. T. H.
Thomas, of Cardiff.
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? 28
passionate child, at whose touch the cold Latin took on the
warm humanity and poignant pathos which meet us again
and again in that other quasi-Celt, the Master, Virgil,* and
which through some mysterious medium of racial sym-
pathy never fail to awaken a responsive echo of vivid
affection in Celtic students to-day. t
Here, then, is one clue. But a greater marvel remains.
For, given the Celtic temperament and the bitter-sweet
experience, who shall say how it was all to be embodied
in language? That is the triumph which Art achieves
although it is denied to Science. A famous teacher cf
Science, at the close of a long life devoted to experi-
mental research, declared his work to be, after all, a
failure, because on his laboratory tables he had never been
able to create life. And yet that is just the miracle which
Catullus performed and which the true poet must always
perform. Unless the characters "breathe and move and
have their being" in his song, the work does not count.
Two streams of life, with ebb and flow,
Throughout the world forever go,
Two currents that set steadily
From century to century.
But one runs in the veins of man
And has done since the race began;
The other floods the unchanging page
With changing hues from age to age.
The men that were, the men that are,
Look ever to the self-same star,
* Cf. (e. g. ) Sellar's Virgil, p. 104.
t This theory might help to solve the enigma of the Attis.
Traditions which assigned an Oriental origin to the Celts may
have interested Catullus in Eastern legends, just as in modern
times they drew Mangan to handle Oriental themes. See Lionel
Johnson in the Treasury of Irish Poetry, edited by Stopford A.
Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (Smith, Elder & Co. ), p. 245.
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? 29
And Nature on her living loom
Weaves still the pattern of our doom,
Impulse and effort, love and strife,
The travail and the joy of life,
The hope, the fear, the rage, the lust,
That will not mingle with the dust,
But still incarnate, vocal still,
Their destiny and ours fulfil.
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! "
But the love and the laughter die away. It is the heart-
ache that inspired what are, after all, his most haunting
poems. From the first, in the dirge on Lesbia's love-bird
there is a suggestion that Catullus--" Catullus, whose dead
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? 21
songster never dies"--was a man of quicker sensibilities
than his fellows, and the lines to Calvus on the death of
his young bride, Quintilia, bear out the estimate. But
after the two great sorrows of his life, the loss of Lesbia
and the death of his brother, he wrote what are certainly
three of the saddest laments in all literature. They
represent the waning, I will not say the passing, of his
youth. Perhaps it is well that he did not survive so cruel
a disillusionment long. The eighth poem, with its
pitiful refrain:--
"Lost is the lost, thou knowest it, and the past is past. "
The fifty-first, a sort of fugue on the theme which the
Odi et amo supplied, a death struggle between love and
reason, in which only by taking hatred for his bosom
friend can the poor passion-ridden lover, "too unhappy to
be kind," win back for himself some hold upon life: --
. . . No more for answering love I sue,
No more that her untruth be true:
Purge but my heart, my strength renew,
And doom me not my faith to rue.
Upon these it is almost too painful to dwell. Macaulay's
comment is well known: "One thing Catullus has. I do
not know whether it belongs to him or to myself, but there
are chords of my mind which he touches as no one else
does. " And he adds that three of the poems affect him
more than he can explain. They always move him to
tears.
But in these two poems there is an alloy of hate. In
the lament on his brother's death, written seemingly by
the graveside in the Troad, which he had travelled far to
visit, we have a purer and a more chastened sorrow. It
may be possible, with the help of a refrain, though there
is no refrain in the Latin, to suggest something of the
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? 22
sustained sadness of the original and the terrible sense of
desolation it conveys : --
Brother of mine, o'er land and sea
At last, at last I have won to thee,
To lay my head on thy grave and weep
The blinding tears for thy tearless sleep,
Brother of mine.
Brother of mine, oh unheeding dust,
That the fire has seared and the urn has crushed,
"Listen," I cry with a fruitless faith
As I lean my lips to the ear of death,
"Brother of mine! "
Brother of mine, who art gone from me,
Was Life so blind to the worth of thee?
I come, as our fathers bade us come,
With a last sad gift to thy lonely tomb,
Brother of mine.
Brother of mine, to the end of time
Thy death shall live in my tear-stained rhyme.
Comrade of old, be my comrade still,
Hail yet again, and again farewell,
Brother of mine.
[ It might be thought to argue a morbid taste if one should
dwell longer upon this side of Catullus. And yet it is in
j the poems of sorrow that we seem to have his deepest and
I most earnest thought. They are a marvel of self-
"Tevelation. Nor is this only a revelation of self. For,
like Death in Sir Walter Raleigh's famous Epilogue,
Catullus, "the human," holds up a glass before the eyes
of us all in which we may see our own humanity--and we
acknowledge it. And the note is quite distinct from
every other note but Virgil's in Latin Poetry. If
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? 23
it admits analysis at all, it is the tingling
protest of full-blooded life against a seemingly inscrut-
able and unjust decree. It is the child's or the pagan's
attitude of rebellion against inevitable law; the blank
despair of the soul, without faith in immortality, which
has dreamed of life that it is very good and awakes to
realise that it is also very short.
It is fortunate for us that in life, as in literature, such
agony is shortlived. And that, unless the sufferer dies of
his wounds, after the horror of the revelation, comes the
cold serenity of middle-age; that the lover with his woeful
ballad quits the stage, and to him succeeds the matter-of-
fact man, who has shed his enthusiasms and parted with
his ambitions, and who is either, as George Meredith says
of Horace, "turning to fat in the %in," hugging a little
hoard of comfortable maxims, which tell him that content
lies here or lies there, and learning the hard and imprac-
ticable lesson to love nothing, hate nothing, value nothing,
except, it may be, the even-balanced mind, with its " perfect
philosophic tolerance " and garish devotion to the pleasure
of the moment, "the little crow and croon" of Omar-
Fitzgerald : --
Ah fill the Cup: what boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our Feet?
Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet!
Or else, like the hero of Rugby Chapel, he becomes a slave
to the idea of duty, pressing on with a more virile motive
"to a clear-purposed goal," with the same indifference
to all else and with the conscious strenuousness with which
Milton invests the hero of Paradise Lost:--
The unconquerable will
And courage never to submit or yield
And what else is not to be overcome.
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? 24
In either case, be he Epicurean or Stoic, the man has lost
the light of his youth, the spirit of Catullus. The vision
and the agony return no more.
It is to the sheaf of "unassailable" lyrics that
Catullus owes his immortality. But he is as remarkable,
in a way, for his lighter verse, short pieces, every one of
them. There is, if we may so say, a kind of "other-
dayishness " about the occasional poems. Slight incidents
and passing episodes, described in language which in point
of diction differs hardly, if at all, from the prose of every
day, take under his hand as vivid a reality as if they had
occurred this week in England, not "nineteen-hundred
years ago " in Rome. Translations can only suggest this;
but two may perhaps be cited--an acknowledgment to the
great orator Cicero and an invitation to a frivolous friend;
for the former I am indebted to an old student,* for the
latter to an anonymous writer in the Press:--
O Marcus, Master of the Roman Bar,
Prince of all Counsels that have been, that are,
And shrewdest of all Counsels yet to be
To guide or gull us,--
His thanks the worst of poets offers thee:
Thee, of all advocates the very first,
He of all poets quite the very worst--
Your friend--Catullus!
If you're in luck's way, by and by
We'll feast, old crony, you and I
Right royally; but don't omit
Rare and refreshing stores of wit
And wine--in short of everything: --
We'll feast like lords if these you'll bring;
* The Rev. Cyril Martindale.
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? 25
For cobwebs fill my money-coffer
And I have nothing else to offer
But mere affection. . . . As I live
There's just one dainty left to give--
A scent, distilled by Love and Venus
For Lesbia, which we'll share between us.
So fragrant 'tis, you'll cry, I know:
"Gods, make me nose from top to toe. "
The figures, too, are as true to life in the gay as in the
serious poems: Egnatius with the recurring smile, the
prototype of the man with the teeth in Dickens; Sulla, the
litterateur, how he would have vexed the soul of Dr.
Johnson! (the type is perennial); the man who would not
rest till his friends had read and criticised his work;
Pollio, the shameless cleptomaniac; and Arrius, the Roman
cockney. These portraits form a gallery in which one
would gladly linger. But let me conclude with a poem of
a different stamp, the Hymn to Diana, written for boys
and girls to sing at a public festival. I give it as rendered
by Professor Jebb. "There are few more entirely success-
ful pieces of translation," says the Professor of Poetry at
Oxford in his recent Essays of Poets and Poetry, "than
Sir Richard Jebb's poetic rendering of Catullus's lovely
little lyric. " The poem illustrates the detachment and the
purity that are one side of this chameleon Catullus.
Diana guardeth our estate,
Girls and boys immaculate;
Boys and maidens pure of stain,
Be Diana our refrain.
O Latonia, pledge of love
Glorious to most glorious Jove,
Near the Delian olive-tree
Latona gave thy life to thee,
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? 26
That thou should'st be for ever queen
Of mountains and of forests green;
Of every deep glen's mystery;
Of all streams and their melody.
Women in travail ask their peace
From thee, our Lady of Release:
Thou art the watcher of the ways:
Thou art the Moon with borrowed rays:
And, as thy full or waning tide
Marks how the monthly seasons glide,
Thou, Goddess, sendest wealth of store
To bless the farmer's thrifty floor.
Whatever name delights thine ear,
By that name be thou hallowed here;
And, as of old, be good to us,
The lineage of Romulus.
There is a steady glow of tranquil beauty about this
poem, which is worlds away from the volcanic fire and
fury of the epigrams. The contrast is so marked that as
we turn from the one to the other we find ourselves asking
whether they can both be the work of the same man,
unless, indeed, we accept the Diana and the Sirmto as
fruits of study--an acquired calm, and say that the " fever
and the pain" were in the blood--an inheritance and a
birthright. For, indeed, no student of Catullus can live
long among Celts without feeling irresistibly drawn to an
old theory recently revived by a great authority on Celtic
literature, Dr. Kuno Meyer;* the theory, I mean, that
Catullus was a Celt or that at least he had Celtic blood in
* In a University Lecture given at Oxford last autumn. In
what follows I am indebted to Dr. Meyer for the benefit of some
brief remarks which he sent me privately on the subject.
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? 27
his veins. The native Latin took from time to time fresh
hues in a Greek school, a Spanish school, an African
school of Roman literature, in all of which a racial pattern
is clearly discernible upon the groundwork of the mother
tongue. Even from different parts of Italy itself came
writers with a local temperament so strongly marked that
it is unhesitatingly declared to have been characteristic of
their native district. Thus the arrogance of Naevius is
ascribed to his Campanian stock and the melancholy of
Propertius to his Umbrian descent. Now there is no
external evidence in the case of Catullus. But we all
know the Celtic temperament. It is the Irish plays of
Mr. Synge; it is Ulster Hall; it is Committee Room
Fifteen; it is the dreamy mysticism of the Highlander;
it is the haunting pathos of those wonderful dirges which
make up the most distinctive element in Welsh music. It
is subject to many moods--a close sympathy with nature
and a keen relish for life. It is compact of gall and
honey, of fire and gloom. It is that strange medley of
stormy optimism and brooding melancholy that we must
often have marvelled to see mixed and commingled in
some Celt of our acquaintance. In a word, it is the
temperament of Catullus. And when we find that the
poet had a Celtic name of which the modern Cadwall or
Cadell is said to be the lineal descendant;* that he came
from a district peopled almost from time immemorial with
Celtic settlers, full of Celtic traditions and Celtic associa-
tions; and when Professor Meyer assures us that " for all
the un-Roman features in his work parallels may be cited
in plenty from Irish and Welsh poetry," we shall be
strangely sceptical if we do not admit that here is perhaps
the clue to the paradox of Catullus, the eager, wayward,
* For this derivation I have to thank my friend Mr. T. H.
Thomas, of Cardiff.
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? 28
passionate child, at whose touch the cold Latin took on the
warm humanity and poignant pathos which meet us again
and again in that other quasi-Celt, the Master, Virgil,* and
which through some mysterious medium of racial sym-
pathy never fail to awaken a responsive echo of vivid
affection in Celtic students to-day. t
Here, then, is one clue. But a greater marvel remains.
For, given the Celtic temperament and the bitter-sweet
experience, who shall say how it was all to be embodied
in language? That is the triumph which Art achieves
although it is denied to Science. A famous teacher cf
Science, at the close of a long life devoted to experi-
mental research, declared his work to be, after all, a
failure, because on his laboratory tables he had never been
able to create life. And yet that is just the miracle which
Catullus performed and which the true poet must always
perform. Unless the characters "breathe and move and
have their being" in his song, the work does not count.
Two streams of life, with ebb and flow,
Throughout the world forever go,
Two currents that set steadily
From century to century.
But one runs in the veins of man
And has done since the race began;
The other floods the unchanging page
With changing hues from age to age.
The men that were, the men that are,
Look ever to the self-same star,
* Cf. (e. g. ) Sellar's Virgil, p. 104.
t This theory might help to solve the enigma of the Attis.
Traditions which assigned an Oriental origin to the Celts may
have interested Catullus in Eastern legends, just as in modern
times they drew Mangan to handle Oriental themes. See Lionel
Johnson in the Treasury of Irish Poetry, edited by Stopford A.
Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (Smith, Elder & Co. ), p. 245.
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And Nature on her living loom
Weaves still the pattern of our doom,
Impulse and effort, love and strife,
The travail and the joy of life,
The hope, the fear, the rage, the lust,
That will not mingle with the dust,
But still incarnate, vocal still,
Their destiny and ours fulfil.
