THE INFLUENCE OF CATULLUS I AM sometimes tempted to think, no matter upon what occasions, that English is a dead language. Such paradox never assails one in the case of Greek and Latin. 'Wonderful poet Mr. Southey,' said an enthusiast to Richard Porson. 'Yes indeed,' was the reply. 'His verses will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.' Such conditional immortality might be predicted of more than one poetaster now flourishing, as the biographical dictionaries say, among ourselves. To be read when Catullus is forgotten' might safely be inscribed on many a volume which is not prose because the lines are of uneven length, and it would be a fitting form of eternal farewell. For seven hundred years Catullus, the 'tenderest of Roman poets,' disappeared from the world. Then, by an accident or a miracle, one mutilated manuscript was found at his native town, Verona, surely the loveliest of all Italian cities, and from that time, the beginning of the fourteenth century, his poems have been the secure possession of mankind. An ingenious, but not very instructive, parallel has been drawn between Catullus and Burns. The resemblance, if there be one, is of course purely fortuitous, and means little more than the acknowledged fact that they are two of the greatest lyric poets in all literature, ancient or modern. From the social and material point of view Byron was more like Catullus. The Scottish peasant who broke his birth's invidious bar had little besides poetic genius and human sentiment in common with the voluptuous aristocrat and man of fashion who wasted his substance in riotous living while the old Roman Republic was crumbling beneath the feet of Cicero and his friends. Carlyle said, with as much truth as beauty, that Burns's songs were jets of pure feeling, springing up from the universal depths of things. Burns went deeper, and therefore he rose higher, than Byron or even Shelley. Imperfect as his practice may have been, he was not in theory irreligious. His scorching satire, in which Catullus is immeasurably his inferior, was directed against orthodox bigotry and sanctimonious hypocrisy. The moderates in the Church of Scotland, even ministers, were delighted with Holy Willie's Prayer. Not a hundred years ago a divinity student at Edinburgh, being asked who introduced Christianity into Scotland, answered without hesita tion Robert Burns.' To Catullus religion meant merely a vain scruple, or such superstitious cruelty as moved the indignation of Lucretius when he described the sacrifice of Iphigenia. On the other hand the passion of Burns is cold beside the passion of Catullus, and he wrote much of his best verse in a provincial dialect, whereas Catullus knew Greek literature by heart, and is called learned even by Ovid, whose own learning was pedantic. The name of Catullus is linked for ever with the name of Lesbia. Who thinks of Burns in connection with Anna? Those exquisite verses which Froude so strangely misquotes: Had we never loved so kindly, We had'na now been broken hearted: are perhaps the only lines written in Ayrshire which might have been written in Venetia. There were no unco guid' to persecute Catullus. The society in which he lived, though it contained Cicero, was almost as shameless as it afterwards became in the worst days of the Empire. It is dangerous, even in our own enlightened period, to judge people by their language. The Fescennina locutio, the Saturnalian licence of speech, to which Catullus himself refers, would now be neither written nor printed, and it startles us even in Latin poetry,' Pagan, I regret to say,' as Mr. Pecksniff remarked of the Sirens. Yet the most impure images of Catullus were surpassed by Swift, who was a dean, and wanted to be a bishop. All this dross can be melted away without impairing or disturbing the pure gold which it covers. Catullus's imitator Martial, who copied him at his best and at his worst, was coldly and systematically indecent. Catullus put in passages like actors' gag, such as sometimes disfigure even Shakespeare, a tribute to custom rather than a sign of personal corruption. He was undoubtedly passion's slave. His bondage to Clodia of the blazing eyes, the fine lady to whose beauty and accomplishments even Cicero paid a reluctant homage, extorted from him the most pathetic prayer for deliverance that has come from a lover's lips or pen. But at the same time he was the warmest, the most faithful of friends, and his lamentations for the death of his brother are enshrined in poems that cannot die. His scurrilous attacks upon Cæsar are not more revolting than Swift's rhymed libel upon Salamander Cutts; and Cæsar was alive, while Cutts was dead. Catullus wanted no kind of courage, and he hated the notion of the military dictatorship which he did not live to see. When he finally turned upon Clodia in a savage indignation which still glows with heat, he had far more cause than Pope could claim for his equally scandalous lines on Lady Mary Wortley. Catullus at least did not affect the vices he had no opportunity of committing. It took him a long time to realise that for the sister of Clodius and the wife of Metellus, about the greatest lady in the world,' as a modern professor calls her, compared by her friends with Venus, and by her enemies with Juno, one man was literally as good as another. Manon Lescaut was a saint to the woman whom Catullus loved more than himself and all his house, with as much tenderness as passion. Nobody is quite so modern as the ancients. Catullus delighted in all the social gaiety of Rome without ever forgetting his old fellow citizens of Verona, their quarrels and pleasures, and interests and pursuits. He loved yachting, and wrote faultless iambics about his yacht. His villa at Olive-silvery Sirmio' inspired one of Tennyson's most beautiful poems. His travels in Asia gave him the keenest enjoyment, and yet he longed to be at home again, sleeping quietly in his own bed. Dissipation did not interfere with his study of Greek, and there is no reason to suppose that he was comparatively vicious. Indeed he boasted that his life was purer than his writings, as it may very well have been. It was a short life, hardly longer than Shelley's, and even richer in the highest order of verse. How many of his poems were original we cannot accurately know. Two of them are avowedly translated from the Greek, the Hair of Berenice and the famous rendering of Sappho to which Mr. Swinburne attributes unsurpassable merit. Although it certainly has not the uninteresting merit of fidelity, it is so good a poem that it might have been written independently of Sappho, and it does not, as hers does, confuse the genders. The Hair of Berenice is a Latin version of an elegy by Callimachus on the lock which the Queen of Egypt vowed to the gods on condition that her husband Ptolemy Euergetes came back safe from Syria, which he was invading. This lock was fancifully identified with a group of stars, and upon that somewhat frigid conceit Callimachus founded his ode. Only a passion for Greek literature, almost amounting to a craze, can explain why Catullus should have wasted his time in reproducing the work of a writer so much inferior to himself. Until we come to the great satirist of the silver age, we hardly find a Roman poet who did not copy Greek models. Plautus and Terence did it unblushingly. Horace and Virgil boasted of it. One mighty contemporary of Catullus made himself the mouthpiece of Epicurus through the instruments of Homer and Empedocles. Not to know Greek in the time of Catullus was worse and more illiterate than not to know French now. Horace, who only once mentions Catullus, and that with a sneer, advised young men to study Greek models, night and day, which was exactly what Catullus had done, without the slightest harm to his original powers. The first poet to feel the influence of Catullus was his own contemporary Lucretius, whose commanding and creative mind was as much scientific as poetical. Although he made himself the exponent of Epicurean philosophy, a high and even ascetic creed vulgarised and degraded by the false ideas which the name of epicure now suggests, Lucretius set himself to study what he denounced, especially the phænomena of love. About his life, though it was spent in the full blaze of an epoch not less famous than the Augustan age which succeeded it, we know nothing at all. A single sentence in the chronicle of St. Jerome, written several centuries later, tells us that he was driven mad by a philtre, that he wrote several books during the intervals of his madness, that Cicero corrected them, and that the author took his own life at the age of forty-three. It is incredible that the stately poem, not poems, on the Nature of Things was a fitful episode in recurrent lunacy. Cicero in his voluminous correspondence never once says that he had anything to do with it, and the single passage in which he mentions Lucretius is so hopelessly corrupt that we cannot tell whether he attributes to him art without genius or genius without art. But the splendid lines where Lucretius describes the results of an irregular life might well be a moral on the published verses of Catullus, and it is difficult to suppose that he had not seen them. The most probable inference is that Lucretius used Catullus as Pascal used Montaigne, to prove how fading was the worldling's treasure, all his boasted pomp and show. Tennyson's poem, the most Lucretian thing in English, is founded on Jerome's gossip, and may almost be held to justify it. But it is an idle tale. Although the love-potion administered by the dissatisfied wife may be a tempting fancy, it is pure conjecture that Lucretius had a wife, and mental derangement is as incongruous with the De Rerum Natura as with In Memoriam or the Origin of Species. We can much more easily imagine Lucretius divided between admiration of Catullus's genius and contempt for his amours. The real life of Catullus was Clodia. No one who has read Alphonse Daudet's Sapho can forget how light she seemed when the young man began to carry her upstairs, and how heavy she became before he reached the top. So it was with Catullus and Clodia. As Professor Mackail says in his wonderfully brilliant Manual of Latin Literature, 'that intolerable pride which was the proverbial curse of the Claudian house took in her the form of a flagrant disregard of all conventions.' She belonged to a type which by general consent is assumed to have died out of civilised Christendom. She was a law to herself. So far as she recognised any difference between right and wrong, whatever she did was right. For no human being was entitled to criticise her, and that there was any superhuman being she did not believe. Her dazzling beauty, her keen and cultivated intellect, her haughty selfreliance, and her complete absence of moral scruple, made as dangerous a combination of positive and negative qualities as a young man with warm feelings could well encounter in this world of sin. When Catullus met her he was twenty-five, and unmarried. She was a married woman of thirty-two. Cætera quis nescit ?-as Ovid says. Little did she think that connection with Catullus meant literary immortality, or that she would inspire verses destined to be the common heritage of mankind for centuries after the Claudian and Valerian families had mingled in the dust with commoner clay. Even her pet sparrow would be a household word if she could be associated with any kind of household, and learned commentators have quarrelled over the question, which divided Browning from De Quincey, whether it was a real sparrow or not. The poems of Catullus are arranged in so wild and maddening a disorder that it almost passes the wit of man and the art of chronology to disentangle them. We may, however, take for granted that there are no lines addressed to Clodia of earlier date than the exquisite Vivamus atque amemus, 'let us live and love.' Three verses of this perfect little idyll have the implacable beauty and the imperishable grace of a Greek statue. Soles occidere et redire possunt: Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, I dare not attempt to translate them. They cannot really be translated. The thought, so far as it be not common to the human race, is taken from the greater but more ambitious lines of Moschus, which Wordsworth has adapted and Christianised in the Afterthought to his Sonnets on the Duddon. Ben Jonson comes as near Catullus as is lawful for one born on the wrong side of the Alps, and at least he gives the sense, in Suns that set may rise again, I don't want to be hypercritical. But where is brevis in Jonson, and where is dormienda? On the other hand, the last line of the Latin is not quite on a level with the long roll of Moschus's hexameter: εὔδομες εὖ μάλα μακρὸν ἀτέρμονα νήγρετον ὕπνον. A great French poet of the Renaissance, Pierre de Ronsard, on whom Mr. George Wyndham lately published a charming essay, has imitated this first of Catullus's erotic odes in some rather too elegant verses: La lune est coutumière |