FOOTNOTES:
[40] Agis, xvii., xviii.
[41] De Mulierum Virtutibus.
[42] See particularly lines 180-185.
MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS' POEMS [43]
[43] Poems. By Stephen Phillips. London and New York John Lane.
The accent here is unmistakable, it is the accent of a new and a true poet. Mr. Phillips gives us no mere variations on familiar melodies, no clever copies of classical archetypes, and what is more, he has not employed any illegitimate means of attracting attention and giving distinction to his work. An audacious choice of subjects, the adoption of the stones which the builders have rejected, and, it may be added, disdained, has, when coupled with elaborate affectations and eccentricities of treatment and style, often enabled mediocrity to pass, temporarily at least, for genius, and the specious counterfeit of originality for the thing itself. But these poems are marked by simplicity, sincerity, spontaneity. If a discordant note is sometimes struck, here in an over-strained conceit, and there in an incongruous touch of preciosity or false sentiment, this is but an accident; in essentials all is genuine. Nature and passion affect to be speaking, and nature and passion really speak. A poet, of whom this may be said with truth, has passed the line which divides talent from genius, the true singer from the accomplished artist or imitator. He has taken his place, wherever that place may be, among authentic poets. To that high honour the present volume undoubtedly entitles Mr. Phillips. It would now, perhaps, be premature to say more than "Ingens omen habet magni clarique triumphi," but we may predict with confidence that, if fate is kind and his muse is true to him, he has a distinguished future before him. It may be safely said that no poet has made his début with a volume which is at once of such extraordinary merit and so rich in promise.
Mr. Phillips is not a poet who has "one plain passage of few notes." He strikes many chords, and strikes them often with thrilling power. The awful story narrated in The Wife is conceived and embodied with really Dantesque intensity and vividness; it has the master's suggestive reservation, smiting phrase, and clairvoyant picture wording, as "in the red shawl sacredly she burned," "smiled at him with her lips, not with her eyes"; while "Mother and child that food together ate" is, in pregnancy of tragic suggestiveness, almost worthy to stand with the "poscia, più che il dolor, poté il digiuno." Equally distinguished, though on another plane of interest, is The woman with the dead Soul, the soul which could once "wonder, laugh, and weep," but over which the days began to fall "dismally, as rain on ocean blear," till—
"Existence lean, in sky dead grey
Withholding steadily, starved it away."
If the pathos in these poems is almost "too deep for tears," it is gentler in the second and third of the lyrics, which are as exquisite as they are affecting. The idea in the lines To Milton Blind, is worthy of Milton's own sublime conceit, that the darkness which had fallen on his eyes was but the shadow of God's protecting wings. The whole poem, indeed, is a beautiful paraphrase of the noble passage in the Second Defence of the People of England: "For the Divine law"—we give it in the English translation—"not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack, not indeed so much from the privation of my sight as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity; and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure."
In The Lily, which is a little obscure—a fault against which Mr. Phillips would do well to guard, for he frequently offends in this respect—we have the note of Petrarch, but Petrarch would not have ended the poem so flatly. Tennyson is recalled, too nearly perhaps, in "By the Sea," but it is a poem of great charm and beauty. The New De Profundis is, unhappily, the key to Mr. Phillips' characteristic mood; it reminds us of the curse imposed on the worldling in Browning's Easter Day, before he has learned the use of life and doubt.
Mr. Phillips' two most ambitious poems are Christ in Hades and Marpessa. In Christ in Hades he fails, as Mrs. Browning failed in The Drama of Exile. He attempts a theme—a stupendous theme—to which his genius is not equal, and which could only have been adequately treated by such poets as Dante and Milton, in the maturity of their powers. It has neither basis nor superstructure. It is what the Greeks would call "meteoric" as distinguished from "sublime." It is a weird, wild, and chaotic dream; and yet for all this its appeal to the heart and the imagination is piercing and direct. Like Tennyson, Mr. Phillips has the art of unfolding the full significance of a few suggestive words in a great classic; and nothing could be more effective than the use to which he has applied the famous lines which Homer places in the mouth of Achilles. Poetry has few things more pathetic than Homer's picture of Hades and the dead, and that pathos Mr. Phillips has given us in quintessence, as few would question after reading the lines which describe Persephone yearning for her return to the spring-illumined world, the speech of the Athenian ghost, and the woman's address to Christ. If the world depicted has something of Horace's artistic monster, or, to change the image, something of the anarchy of dreams in its composition, the vividness and picturesqueness with which particular figures and scenes are flashed into light and definition is extraordinarily impressive. It is so with the central figure, Christ; it is so with Prometheus; and the contrast between these martyrs for man has both pathos and grandeur.
There is more originality, more power in Christ in Hades than in Marpessa, but Marpessa has more balance, more sanity, more of the stuff out of which good and abiding poetry is made, than its predecessor. The one savours of the spasmodic school, the productions of which have rarely been found to have the principle of life, however rich they may have been in promise; the other is a return to a school in which most of those who have gained permanent fame have studied. And we are glad to find a young poet there.
But it would be doing Mr. Phillips great injustice not to note that, though he has had many predecessors in the semi-classical, semi-romantic re-treatment of the Greek myths, notably Keats in Hyperion, Wordsworth in Dion and Laodamia, Landor in his Hellenics, and Tennyson in Ænone and Tithonus, he has treated his theme with a distinction which is all his own, and has impressed on it an intense individuality. In comparison with these masters he may be pauper, but he is pauper in suo ære.
It would be easy to point to faults in Mr. Phillips' work. His sense of rhythm, even allowing for what are plainly deliberate experiments in discord, seems often curiously defective. How stiff and limping, for example, is the following:—
"O pity us,
For I would ask of thee only to look
Upon the wonderful sunlight and to smell
Earth in the rain. Is not the labourer
Returning heavy through the August sheaves
Against the setting sun, who gladly smells
His supper from the opening door—is he
Not happier than these melancholy kings?
How good it is to live, even at the worst!
God was so lavish to us once, but here
He hath repented, jealous of His beams."
Lines, again, like "Pierced her, and odour full of arrows was," "Realizes all the uncoloured dawn," "Yet followed a riddled memorable flag," are, no doubt, extreme instances, but they are typical of many bad lines. Occasionally he falls flat on some harsh prosaic phrase, like "beautiful indolence was on our brains." Nor is he always happy in his attempts at novelty in phraseology, as in his employment of the words "liable," "inaccurate," "pungent"; and these faults in rhythm and diction are the more remarkable, as the really subtle mastery over rhythmic expression which he exhibits at times, and his singularly felicitous epithets, turns, and phrases are among his most striking gifts. Take a few out of very many: "A bleak magnificence of endless hope," "That common trivial face, of endless needs," "The mystic river, floating wan," "And the moist evening fallow, richly dark," "That palest rose sweet on the night of life." How noble is the rhythm and imagery of the following:—
"All the dead
The melancholy attraction of Jesus felt:
And millions, like a sea, wave upon wave,
Heaved dreaming to that moonlight face, or ran
In wonderful long ripples, sorrow-charmed.
Toward him, in faded purple, pacing came
Dead emperors, and sad, unflattered kings;
Unlucky captains, listless armies led:
Poets with music frozen on their lips
Toward the pale brilliance sighed."
And it would be easy to multiply illustrations from Marpessa and By the Sea. Occasionally there is a certain incongruity between the form and the matter. A poem so essentially, so intensely realistic as The Wife should not have such quaintnesses as "palèd in her thought." Nor should we have
"The constable, with lifted hand,
Conducting the orchestral Strand";
nor should a railway station be described as a "moonèd terminus." Nothing is so disenchanting as affectation.
One cannot but add that these poems, welcome as they are, would have been more welcome still, had they been less profoundly melancholy. Their monotonous sadness, the persistency with which they dwell on all those grim and melancholy realities which poetry should help us to forget, or cheer us in enduring, is not merely their leading, but their pervading characteristic. This note will, we hope, change. Leopardi is immortal, and could not be spared; but one Leopardi is enough for a single century.
THE ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE [44]
[44] West Country Poets: Their Lives and Works, etc. Illustrated with Portraits. By W. H. Kearley Wright, F.R.H.S. London: Elliot Stock. 1896.
Some nineteen hundred years ago Horace observed that there was one thing which neither gods, nor men, nor bookstalls would tolerate in a poet—and that was mediocrity. The verdict of gods, men, and the bookstalls is probably still what it was then; but to such tribunals the rhymesters of our time can afford to be quite indifferent. Paper and printing are cheap; small poets and small critics are now so numerous that they form a world, and a populous world, in themselves; and, well understanding the truth of the old proverb, "Concordiâ, parvæ res crescunt," they mutually manufacture the wreaths with which they crown each other's modest vanity. There are hundreds of "poets" and "critics" of whom the great world knows nothing, who are thus enabled, in their little day, to taste all the sweets of fame, and "walk with inward glory crown'd." To wage serious war against such a tribe as this would be as absurd as to break butterflies upon a wheel; but we really think it high time that some protest should be made against the indefinite multiplication of the rubbish for which these people and their patrons are responsible, and still more against its importation into what purports to be a contribution to serious literature. As long as these geniuses confine themselves to their proper sphere, the poets' corners of provincial newspapers, we have nothing to say. But it becomes quite another matter when the skill of an ingenious projector enables—we are really sorry to have to speak so harshly—a rabble of poetasters to figure side by side with poets of classical fame, and to appear in all the dignity of contributors to a national anthology. Yet such is the design of this volume, which was, it seems, published by subscription, the subscribers being for the most part the various candidates for poetical fame, who have obligingly sent their portraits and their biographies for insertion in Mr. Kearley Wright's "monumental work." As Mr. Kearley Wright's collection begins with the fifteenth century, and includes the really eminent poets who happen to have been born in the West of England, many of his worthies are naturally apud plures, but the majority, in whose honour the anthology appears to have been compiled, adorn the living. And very gratifying it must be for these gentlemen, and for Mr. Kearley Wright himself—for he also has a niche—to find themselves side by side with Sir Walter Raleigh, Herrick, Gay, and Coleridge.
Mr. Kearley Wright's "company of makers" is certainly a motley one. First comes among his living bards an inspired porter at the Teignmouth railway station, who asks in rapture,—
"Along the glitt'ring streets of gold,
Amid the brilliant glare,
Shall we God's banner there unfold,
His righteous helmet wear?"
At no great distance follows, with a portrait looking intensely intellectual, "the manager of the Bristol and South Wales Railway Waggon Company, Limited," whose poems are described as "lacking here and there logical sequence and literary method," but "evincing undoubtedly a great poetical disposition and philosophical drift." The two poems which illustrate this poet's genius afford very little proof either of "a great poetical disposition" or of "a philosophical drift," but painfully conclusive proof that much more is lacking than "logical sequence and literary method," the lack of which may certainly be conceded as well. Next comes Mr. Jonas Coaker, "the landlord of the Warren House Inn," whose verses "disclose a poetic spirit, and, had he possessed the advantages of education, would doubtless have attracted some attention." Mr. Coaker is in the main autobiographical.
"I drew my breath first on the moor,
There my forefathers dwelled;
Its hills and dales I've traversed o'er,
Its desert parts beheld.
*****
It's oft envelop'd in a fog,
Because it's up so high."
And Mr. Coaker continues in the same strain further than we care to transcribe. Then we have Mr. John Goodwin, "formerly a coach-guard, who sung of the days when there was such a thing, if we may so phrase it, as the poetry of locomotion." In his poetry, we are told, "there is a genuine ring," as here, for example:—
"I mind the time, when I was guard,
The lord, the duke, or squire
Would travel by the old stage-coach,
Or post-chaise they would hire."
Mr. Charles Chorley, who is, we are informed, submanager of the Truro Savings Bank, in verses which are presumably a parody of Sir William Jones' Imitation of Alcæus, inquires, not without a certain propriety, "What constitutes a mine?" On a par with all these are the verses of the bard who "in summer hawked gooseberries and in winter shoelaces," and those of the "uneducated journeyman woolcomber."
Now, we need hardly say that the humble vocations of these poets are neither derogatory to them nor in any way detrimental to merit where merit exists; but there is no merit whatever in the poems assigned to them in this volume; they are simply such poems as hawkers, woolcombers, railway porters, and submanagers of provincial banks—"who pen a stanza when they should engross"—might be expected to write. The same may be said of almost every copy of verses, produced by amateurs, to be found in this collection. We have scarcely noticed a single poem which rises above mediocrity; a very large proportion are below even a mediocre standard—they are simply rubbish. In one poet only, among those whose names were not before known to us, do we discern genius, and that is in Mr. John Dryden Hosken, whose poem, entitled My Masters, is really excellent.
The editor of this anthology is plainly incompetent, both in point of taste and critical discernment, and in point of knowledge, for the task which he has undertaken. The first is proved by the extracts which he has selected from the works of well-known poets. Coleridge, for example, is represented by two comparatively inferior poems, The Devil's Thoughts and Fancy in Nubibus; Thomas Carew, by two short poems, one of which is probably the worst he ever wrote; Herrick, by two of his very worst; Praed, by two of the feeblest and least characteristic of his poems; Walcot, by mere trash. It is quite possible that their less illustrious brethren may have suffered from the deplorable inability of this editor to discern between what is good and what is bad. Certainly Capern, who was a poet with a touch of genius, suffers, for the lyric given is very far indeed from representing or illustrating his best or even his characteristic work. In giving an account of Alexander Barclay, who, by the way, is called Andrew in the Preface, Mr. Wright says nothing about his most important poems—his Eclogues. If Eustace Budgell is included among the poets, why are not his poems specified and represented? Of Aaron Hill it is observed that "neither his reputation as a poet nor his connexion with the county of Devon is sufficient to warrant more than a mere notice of his name." Aaron Hill was the author of more than one poem of conspicuous merit. The verses attributed on page 488 to Sir William Yonge were written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But these are trifles. What we wish to protest against is the foisting of such volumes as these on our libraries; and it is appalling to learn that it is the intention of Mr. Kearley Wright, if he is sufficiently encouraged by subscribers, to follow this with another similar collection. If poets like these wish to gratify their vanity, let them not gratify it to the detriment of serious literature; for, if the few can discriminate, the many cannot, and the multiplication of works like these must infallibly tend to lower the standard of current literature, by furthering the disastrous "cult of the average man." In our opinion criticism can have no more imperative duty than to discountenance and discourage in every way such projectors as Mr. Kearley Wright and such poets as those for whose merits he and critics like him stand sponsors.
VIRGIL IN ENGLISH HEXAMETERS [45]
[45] The Eclogues of Virgil. Translated into English Hexameter Verse by the Right Hon. Sir George Osborne Morgan, Bart., Q.C., M.P. London.
Sir George Osborne Morgan has served his generation in much more important capacities than those of a scholar and a translator of Virgil, and had this little work, therefore, been less meritorious than it is, no critic with a sense of the becoming would deal harshly with it. But it challenges and deserves serious consideration, not only as an attempt to solve a problem of singular interest to students of classical poetry, but as a somewhat ambitious contribution to the literature of translation. Sir Osborne Morgan is, however, mistaken in supposing that in translating Virgil into his own metre he "has undertaken a task which has never been attempted before." In 1583 Richard Stanihurst published a translation of the first four books of the Æneid in English hexameters; and, if Sir Osborne will turn to Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie, published as early as 1586, he will find versions in English hexameters of the First and Second Eclogues, while Abraham Fraunce, in a curious volume, entitled The Countess of Pembroke's Ivy Church, which appeared in 1591, has, among the other hexameters in the collection, given a version of the Second Eclogue in this measure. But Sir Osborne Morgan has been more immediately anticipated in his experiment. In 1838 Dr. James Blundell published anonymously, under the title of Hexametrical Experiments, versions in hexameters of the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Eclogues, and to this translation he prefixed an elaborate preface, vindicating the employment of the hexameter in English, and explaining its mechanism to the unlearned. Indeed, Blundell arrived at the same conclusion as Sir Osborne Morgan, that the proper medium for an English translation of hexametrical poems in Greek and Latin is the English hexameter. We may, however, hasten to add that Sir Osborne has little to fear from a comparison with his predecessors, who have, indeed, done their best to refute by example their own theory. It may be observed, in passing, that the translations of Virgil into rhymed decasyllabic verse are far more numerous than Sir Osborne Morgan seems to suppose. He is, he says, acquainted only with two—the version by Dryden and Joseph Warton—not seeming to be aware that Warton translated only the Georgics and Eclogues, printing Pitt's version of the Æneid. The whole of Virgil was translated into this measure by John Ogilvie between 1649-50, and by the Earl of Lauderdale about 1716, while versions of the Æneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues, in the same metre, have abounded in every era of our literature, from Gawain Douglas's translation of the Æneid printed in 1553, to Archdeacon Wrangham's version of the Eclogues in 1830.
It is no reproach to Sir Osborne Morgan that, in the occupations of a busy political life, his scholarship should have become a little rusty, but it is a pity that he should so often have allowed himself to be caught tripping, when a little timely counsel in the correction of his proof sheets might have prevented this. In the First Eclogue the line
"Non insueta graves temptabunt pabula fetas"
is translated
"Here no unwonted herb shall tempt the travailing cattle."
What it really means is, no change of fodder, no fodder which is strange to them, shall "infect" or "try" the pregnant cattle, "insueta" being used in exactly the same sense as in Eclogue V. 56, "insuetum miratur limen Olympi," and "temptare" as it is used in Georg. III. 441, and commonly in classical Latin. It is, to say the least, questionable whether in the couplet—
"Pauperis et tuguri congestum cæspite culmen,
Post aliquot, mea regna videns, mirabor aristas?"—
the last line can mean
"Gaze on the straggling corn, the remains of what once was my kingdom."
"Aristas" is much more likely to be a metonymy for "messes," i.e. "annos," like αροτου in Sophocles' Trachiniæ, 69, τον μεν παρελθοντ' αροτον, a confirmative illustration which seems to have escaped the commentators; but it is difficult to say, and Sir Osborne has, it must be owned, excellent authority for his interpretation. In Eclogue III. the somewhat difficult passage
"pocula ponam
Fagina....
Lenta quibus torno facili superaddita vitis
Diffusos hedera vestit pallente corymbos"—
i.e. "where the limber vine wreathed round them by the deft graving tool is twined with pale ivy's spreading clusters,"—is translated:
"Over whose side the vine by a touch of the graving tool added
Mantles its clustering grapes in the paler leaves of the ivy."
This is quite wrong. "Corymbos" cannot possibly mean clusters of grapes, but clusters of ivy berries, "hederâ pallente" being substituted, after Virgil's manner, for "hederæ pallentis." In Eclogue IV. 24 there is no reason for supposing that the "fallax herba veneni" is hemlock; it is much more likely to be aconite. In line 45 "sandyx" should be translated not "purple" but "crimson," vague as the colour indicated by "purple" is. In Eclogue V.
"Si quos aut Phyllidis ignes,
Aut Alconis habes laudes, aut jurgia Codri"
is not
"Phyllis's fiery loves you would sing or the quarrels of Codrus,"
but "your passion for Phyllis, your invectives against Codrus," "ignes" being used far more becomingly for a man's love than for a woman's. So, again, "pro purpureo narcisso" cannot mean what nature never saw, "purple daffodil," but the white narcissus. In Eclogue VIII. "Sophocleo tua carmina digna cothurno" is turned by what is obviously a lapsus calami, "worthy of Sophocles' sock." A scholar like Sir Osborne Morgan does not need reminding that the "sock" is a metonymy for Comedy, as Milton anglicizes it in L'Allegro, "if Jonson's learned sock be on." In the exquisite passage in Eclogue VIII. 41—
"Jam fragiles poteram ab terrâ contingere ramos"—
to translate "fragiles" as "frail" is to miss the whole point of the epithet. What Virgil means is, "I could just reach the branches from the ground and break them off"; if it is to be translated by one epithet, it must be "brittle." Again in the Ninth Eclogue the words
"quâ se subducere colles
Incipiunt, mollique jugum demittere clivo,"
do not mean "where the hills with gentle depression steal away into the plain," but the very opposite: i.e. "Where the hills begin to draw themselves up from the plain," the ascent being contemplated from below. In Eclogue IX., in turning the couplet
"Nam neque adhuc Vario videor, nec dicere Cinnâ
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores,"
the translator has no authority for turning the last verse into "a cackling goose in a chorus of cygnets," for there is no tradition that cygnets sang, and goose should have been printed with a capital letter to preserve the pun, the allusion being to a poetaster named Anser. Unfortunately for the English translator, our literature can boast no counterpart to "Anser" totidem literis, but Goose printed with a capital is near enough to preserve, or suggest the sarcasm. There is another slip in Eclogue X.: "Ferulas" is not "wands of willow" but "fennel."
Occasionally a touch is introduced which is neither authorized by the original, nor true to nature. There is nothing, for instance to warrant, in Eclogue I. 56, the epithet "odorous" as applied to the willow, nor does "salictum" mean a "willow" but a "willow-bed or plantation." To translate "ubi tempus erit" by "when the hour shall have struck" reminds us of Shakespeare's famous anachronism in Julius Cæsar and is as surprising in the work of a scholar as the lengthening of the penultimate in arbutus, "Sweet is the shower to the blade, To the newly weaned kid the arbutus." As a rule, the translator turns difficult passages very skilfully, but this is not the case with the couplet which concludes the "Pollio":—
"Incipe, parve puer: cui non risere parentes
Nec deus hunc mensâ, dea nec dignata cubili est";
that is, the "babe on whom the parent never smiled, no god ever deemed worthy of his board, no goddess of her bed"—in other words, he can never enjoy the rewards of a hero like Hercules; but there is neither sense nor skill, and something very like a serious grammatical error, in
"Who knows not the smile of a parent,
Neither the board of a god nor the bed of a goddess is worthy."
But to turn from comparative trifles. No one who reads this version of the Eclogues can doubt that Sir Osborne Morgan has proved his point, that the English hexameter, when skilfully used, is the measure best adapted for reproducing Virgil's music in English. The following passage (Ec. VII. 45-48) is happily turned; let us place the original beside the translation:—
"Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,
Et quæ vos rarâ viridis tegit arbutus umbrâ,
Solstitium pecori defendite: jam venit æstas
Torrida, jam læto turgent in palmite gemmæ."
"Moss-grown fountains and sward more soft than the softest of slumbers,
Arbutus tree that flings over both its flickering shadows,
Shelter my flock from the sun. Already the summer is on us,
Summer that scorches up all! See the bud on the glad vine is swelling."
Again (Ec. X. 41-48):—
"Serta mihi Phyllis legeret, cantaret Amyntas:
Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori,
Hic nemus: hic ipso tecum consumerer ævo.
Nunc insanus amor duri me Martis in armis
Tela inter media atque adversos detinet hostes:
Tu procul a patriâ—nec sit mihi credere tantum!—
Alpinas, ah dura, nives et frigora Rheni
Me sine sola vides."
"Phyllis would gather me flowers and Amyntas a melody chant me;
Cool is the fountain's wave and soft is the meadow, Lycoris;
Shady the grove! Here with thee I would die of old age in the greenwood.
Mad is the lust of war, that now in the heart of the battle
Chains me where darts fall fast, and the charge of the foemen is fiercest,
Far, far away from your home—Oh, would that I might not believe it—
Lost amid Alpine snows or the frozen desolate Rhineland,
Lonely without me you wander."
Many other felicitous passages might be quoted; indeed, there is no Eclogue without them; but the translator is not sure-footed, and, if he occasionally illustrates the hexameter in its excellence, he illustrates, unhappily too often, some of its worst defects. Two qualities are indispensable to the success of this measure in English. Our language, unlike the classical languages, being accentual and not quantitative, if the long syllable is not represented where the stress naturally falls, and the short syllables where it does not fall, the effect is sometimes grotesque, sometimes distressing, and always unsatisfactory. Nothing, for example, could be worse in their various ways than the following:—
"Wept when you saw they were given the lad, and had you not managed."
"Let not the frozen air harm you."
"Scatter the sand with his hind hoofs."
"The pliant growth of the osier."
"Worthy of Sophocles' sock, trumpet-tongued through the Universe echo."
"Own'd it himself, and yet he would not deliver it to me."
A very nice ear, too, is required to adjust the collocation of words in which either vowels or consonants predominate, and the relative position of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, the predominance of the former in our language increasing enormously the difficulty. No measure, moreover, so easily runs into intolerable monotony—a monotony which Clough sought to avoid by overweighting his verses with spondees, and which Longfellow illustrates by the cloying predominance of the dactylic movement. Sir Osborne Morgan tells us that he took Kingsley as his model. Kingsley's hexameters are respectable, but they have no distinction, and he had certainly not a good ear. Longfellow's are far better, and are sometimes exquisitely felicitous, as in a couplet like the following, which, with the exception of one word, is flawless:—
"Men whose lives glided on like the rivers that water the woodlands,
Darken'd by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of Heaven."
Probably the best hexameters which have been composed in English are those in William Watson's Hymn to the Sea and those in which Hawtry translated Iliad III. 234-244, and the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Iliad, models—these versions—not merely of translation, but of hexametrical structure. There are, however, certain magical effects, particularly in the Virgilian hexameter, produced by an exquisite but audacious tact in the employment of licences, which can never be reproduced in English.
Such would be—
"Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga, nam neque Pindi
Ulla moram fecere, neque Aonie Aganippe.
Illum etiam lauri, etiam flevere myricæ;
Pinifer illum etiam solâ sub rupe jacentem
Mænalus et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycæi."
Milton, and Milton alone among Englishmen, had the secret of this music, but he elicited it from another instrument.
THE LATEST EDITION OF THOMSON [46]
[46] The Poetical Works of James Thomson. A New Edition, with Memoir and Critical Appendices, by the Rev. D. C. Tovey. 2 vols. London.
"Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts"—a forgotten poet of the eighteenth century—such is the title of a recent monograph on the author of The Seasons by Dr. G. Schmeding. Dr. G. Schmeding is, however, so obliging as to pronounce that, in his opinion, this ought not to be Thomson's fate; that there remains in his work, especially in The Seasons merit enough to entitle him to be "enrolled among poets," and to find appreciation, at all events in schools and reading societies. Dr. Schmeding may rest assured that Thomson's fame is quite safe. It has no doubt suffered, as that of all the poets of the eighteenth century has suffered, by the great revolution which has, in the course of the last ninety years, passed over literary tastes and fashions. But during the present century there have been no less than twenty editions of his poems, to say nothing of separate editions of The Seasons; while his works, or portions of them, have been translated into German, Italian, modern Greek, and Russian. Only two years ago M. Léon Morel, in his J. Thomson, sa vie et ses œuvres, published an elaborate and admirable monograph on this "forgotten poet." And now Mr. Tovey, who, we are glad to see, has been appointed Clarke Lecturer at Cambridge, has given us a new biography of him and a new edition of his works, making, if we are not mistaken, the thirty-second memoir of him and the twenty-first edition of his works which have appeared since the beginning of the century. This is pretty well for a forgotten poet!
Mr. Tovey's name is a sufficient guarantee for accurate and scholarly work. But it might naturally be asked, what is there to justify another edition of this poet, when so many editions are already in the field and so easily accessible? We have little difficulty in answering this question. The special features of Mr. Tovey's edition are as important as they are interesting. In the first place, he has given us a much fuller biography than has hitherto appeared in English; in the second place, he has thrown much interesting light on the political bearing of Thomson's dramas; and, in the third place, he has given, what no other editor of Thomson has given, a full collation of Thomson's own MS. corrections, preserved in Mitford's copy, now deposited in the British Museum. The critical notes have cost him, he says, and we can quite believe it, much time and labour, and in his preface he half apologizes for what may seem "a ridiculous travesty of more important labours." There was no necessity for such an apology: he observes justly that he has "not spent more pains on Thomson's text than so many of our scholars bestow upon some Greek and Latin poets whose intrinsic merit is no greater than Thomson's."
To serious readers these critical notes will constitute the most valuable part of Mr. Tovey's labours; they are, in truth, the speciality of this particular edition, and will make it indispensable to all students of this most interesting poet. And now Mr. Tovey will, we trust, forgive us if, with due deference, we point out what seem to us to be defects in his work. The first thing that might have been expected from so learned and careful an editor of Thomson was an adequate discussion of the great problem of the authorship of Rule Britannia, and the second an exposure of one of the most extraordinary "mare's-nests" to be found in English literature. But nothing, we regret to say, can be more perfunctory and inadequate than the two notes in which the first question is hurried over with references to Notes and Queries, and nothing more irritating than the confusion worse confounded in which Mr. Tovey leaves the second. We shall therefore make no apology for entering somewhat at length into [both these questions.]
And first for the authorship of Rule Britannia. The facts are these. In 1740 Thomson and Mallet wrote, in conjunction, a masque entitled Alfred, which, on 1st August in that year, was represented before the Prince and Princess of Wales at Clifden. It was in two acts, and it contained six lyrics, the last being Rule Britannia, which is entitled an "Ode," the music being by Dr. Arne. In 1745 Arne turned the piece into an opera, and also into "a musical drama." By this time the lyric had become very popular, but there is no evidence to show that it had been definitely attributed to either of the coadjutors. In 1748 Thomson died. In 1751 Mallet re-issued Alfred, but in another form. It was entirely remodelled, and almost entirely re-written, and, in an advertisement prefixed to the work, he says: "According to the present arrangement of the fable I was obliged to reject a great deal of what I had written in the other: neither could I retain, of my friend's part, more than three or four speeches, and a part of one song." Now, of the parts retained from the former work, there were the first three stanzas of Rule Britannia, the three others being excised, and their place supplied by three stanzas written by Lord Bolingbroke. If Mallet is to be believed, then, "part of one song" must refer, either to a song in the third scene of the second act, beginning "From those eternal regions bright," or to Rule Britannia, for these are the only lyrics in which portions of the lyrics in the former edition are retained. Rule Britannia is, it is true, entitled "An Ode" in the former edition, and the other lyric "A Song," so that Mallet would certainly seem to imply that what he had retained of his friend's work was the portion of the song referred to, and not Rule Britannia. But, as Mallet was notoriously a man who could not be believed on oath, and was an adept in all those bad arts by which little men filch honours which do not belong to them, if he is to be allowed to have any title to the honour of composing this lyric, it ought to rest on something better than the ambiguity between the word "Ode" and the word "Song."
There is no evidence that, while both were alive, either Thomson or Mallet claimed the authorship; but this is certain, it was printed at Edinburgh, during Mallet's lifetime, in the second edition of a well-known song book, entitled The Charmer, with Thomson's initials appended to it. It is certain that Mallet had friends in Edinburgh, and it is equally certain that neither he nor any of his friends raised any objection to its ascription to Thomson. In 1743, in 1759, and in 1762 Mallet published collections of poems, but in none of these collections does he lay claim to Rule Britannia, and, though it was printed in song-books in 1749, 1750, and 1761, it is in no case assigned to Mallet. None of his contemporaries, so far as we know, attributed it to him, and it is remarkable that, in a brief obituary notice of him which appeared in the Scots Magazine in 1765, he is spoken of as the author of the famous ballad William and Margaret, but not a word is said about Rule Britannia. A further presumption in Thomson's favour is this: in all probability Dr. Arne, who set it to music, knew the authorship, and he survived both Thomson and Mallet, dying in 1778. The song had become very popular and celebrated, so that if Mallet had desired to have the credit of its composition, it is strange that he should not have laid claim to it, had his claim been a good one. But if his claim was not good, he could hardly have ventured to claim the authorship, as Dr. Arne would have been in his way. It is quite possible that the ambiguity in the advertisement to the recension of 1751 was designed; it certainly left the question open, and we cannot but think there is something very suspicious in what follows the sentence in Mallet's advertisement, where he speaks of his having used so little of his friend's work. "I mention this expressly," he adds, "that, whatever faults are found in the present performance, they may be charged, as they ought to be, entirely to my account." A vainer and more unscrupulous man than Mallet never existed; and, while it is simply incredible that he should not have claimed what would have constituted his chief title to popularity as a poet, had he been able to do so, it is in exact accordance with his established character that he should, as he did in the advertisement of 1751, have left himself an opportunity of asserting that claim, should those who were privy to the secret have predeceased him, and thus enabled him to do so with impunity.
The internal evidence—and on this alone the question must now be argued—seems to us conclusive in Thomson's favour. The Ode is simply a translation into lyrics of what finds embodiment in Thomson's Britannia, in the fourth and fifth parts of Liberty, and in his Verses to the Prince of Wales. Coming to details, there can be no doubt that the third stanza—
"Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak"—
was suggested by Horace's
"Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido,
Per damna, per cædes, ab ipso
Ducit opes animumque ferro."
Now, not only was Horace, as innumerable imitations and reminiscences prove, one of Thomson's favourite poets, but Thomson has, in the third part of Liberty translated this very passage:—
"Like an oak,
Nurs'd on feracious Algidum, whose boughs
Still stronger shoot beneath the rigid axe
By loss, by slaughter, from the steel itself
E'en force and spirit drew."
He has, elsewhere, two other reminiscences of the same passage, once in the third part of Liberty—
"Every tempest sung
Innoxious by, or bade it firmer stand"—
and once in Sophonisba (Act V. sc. ii.):—
"Thy rooted worth
Has stood these wintry blasts, grown stronger by them."
The epithet "azure" employed in the first stanza is, with "cerulean" and "aerial," one of the three commonest epithets in Thomson, the three occurring at least twenty times in his poetry. A somewhat cursory examination of his works has enabled us to find that "azure" or "azured" alone occurs ten times. "Generous," too, in the Latin sense of the term, is another of his favourite words, it being used no less than sixteen times in Britannia and Liberty alone. Another of his favourite allusions is to England's "native oaks." Thus in Britannia he speaks of—
"Your oaks, peculiar harden'd, shoot
Strong into sturdy growth;"
in the last part of Liberty we find "Let her own naval oak be basely torn," and in the same part of the poem he speaks of the "venerable oaks" and "kindred floods." The epithet "manly" and the phrase "the fair"—"manly hearts to guard the fair"—are also peculiarly Thomsonian, being repeatedly employed by him, the phrase "the fair" occurring in his poetry at least six times, if not oftener. "Flame," too, is another of his favourite words.
"All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse," etc.,
is exactly the sentiment in Britannia.
"Your hearts
Swell with a sudden courage, growing still
As danger grows."
The stanza beginning "To thee belongs," etc., is simply a lyrical paraphrase of the passage in Britannia commencing "Oh first of human blessings," and of a couplet in the last part of Liberty:—
"The winds and seas are [Britain's wide domain;]
And not a sail but by permission spreads."
The couplet
"All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine"
is simply the echo of a couplet in the fifth part of Liberty—
"All ocean is her own, and every land
To whom her ruling thunder ocean bears."
The phrase "blessed isle," as applied to England, he employs three times in Liberty. Again, the stanza in which Rule Britannia is written is the stanza in which the majority of Thomson's minor lyrics are written, and the rhythm and cadence, not less than the tone, colour and sentiment, are exactly his.
Mallet was undoubtedly an accomplished man and a respectable poet, as his ballad William and Margaret, his Edwin and Emma, and his Birks of Invermay sufficiently prove, but he has written nothing tolerable in the vein of Rule Britannia. Neatness, and tenderness bordering on effeminacy, mark his characteristic lyrics, and, if we except a few lines in his Tyburn and the eight concluding lines in a poem entitled A Fragment, there is no virility in his poetry at all. Of the patriotism and ardent love of liberty which pervade Thomson's poems, and which glow so intensely in Rule Britannia, he has absolutely nothing. Nor are there any analogues or parallels in his poems to this lyric either in form—for if we are not mistaken, he has never employed the stanza in which it is written—or in imagery, or phraseology. Like Thomson, whom, in his narrative blank-verse poems, he servilely imitates, he is fond of the words "azure" and "aerial"; and the word "azure" is the only verbal coincidence linking the phraseology of his acknowledged poems with the lyric in question. It may be added, too, that a man who was capable of the jingling rubbish of such a masque as Britannia, and who had the execrable taste to substitute Bolingbroke's stanzas for the stanzas which they supersede, could hardly have been equal to the production of this lyric. We believe, then, that there can be no reasonable doubt that the honour of composing Rule Britannia belongs to Thomson the bard, and not to Mallet the fribble.
But to return to Mr. Tovey and the "mare's-nest" to which we have referred. This mare's-nest is the assumption that Pope assisted Thomson in revising The Seasons. Since Robert Bell's edition this has come to be received as an established fact, but we propose to show that it rests on a hypothesis demonstrably baseless.
There is, in the British Museum, an interleaved copy of the first volume of the London edition of Thomson's works, dated 1738, and the part of the volume which contains The Seasons is full of manuscript deletions, corrections, and additions. These are in two handwritings, the one being unmistakably the handwriting of Thomson, the other beyond all question the handwriting of some one else. Almost all these corrections were inserted in the edition prepared for the press in 1744, and now, consequently, form part of the present text. The corrections in the hand which is not the hand of Thomson are, in many cases, of extraordinary merit, showing a fineness of ear and delicacy of touch quite above the reach of Thomson himself. We will give two or three samples. Thomson had written in Autumn 290 seqq.:—
"With harvest shining all these fields are thine,
And if my rustics may presume so far,
Their master, too, who then indeed were blest
To make the daughter of Acasto so."
The unknown corrector substitutes the present reading:—
"The fields, the master, all, my fair, are thine;
If to the various blessings which thy house
Has lavished on me thou wilt add that bliss,
That dearest bliss, the power of blessing thee!"
The other is famous. Thomson had written:—
"Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self,
Recluse among the woods, if City-dames
Will deign their faith. And thus she went compell'd
By strong necessity, with as serene
And pleased a look as patience can put on,
To glean Palemon's fields."
For these vapid and dissonant verses is substituted by the corrector, who very properly retains the first verse, what is now the text:—
"Recluse amid the close embow'ring woods,
As in the hollow breast of Apennine,
Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eyes,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild.
So flourished blooming, and unseen by all,
The sweet Lavinia," etc.
The transformation of a single line is often most felicitous: thus in Winter the flat line
"Through the lone night that bids the waves arise"
is grandly altered into
"Through the black night that sits immense around."
Thus, in Spring, Thomson had merely written
"Whose aged oaks and venerable gloom
Invite the noisy rooks;"
but his corrector alters and extends the passage into
"Whose aged elms and venerable oaks
Invite the rooks, who high amid the boughs
In early spring their airy city build,
And caw with ceaseless clamour."
Indeed, throughout The Seasons Thomson's indebtedness to his corrector is incalculable; many of the most felicitous touches are due to him. Now, who was this corrector? Let Mr. Tovey answer. "It has long been accepted as a fact among scholars that Pope assisted Thomson in the composition of The Seasons. Our original authority is, we suppose, Warton." The truth is that our original authority for this statement is neither Warton nor any other writer of the eighteenth century, but simply the conjecture of Mitford—in other words, Mitford's mere assumption that the handwriting of the corrector is the handwriting of Pope; and, if we are not mistaken,—for Mitford may have given earlier currency to it in some other place—the conjecture appeared for the first time in Mitford's edition of Gray, published in 1814. In his copy of the volume, containing the MS. notes, he bolsters up his statement by two assertions and references: "That Pope saw some pieces of Thomson's in manuscript is clear from a letter in Bowles's Supplement, page 194" (an obvious misprint for 294). But on turning to the references all that we find is—it is in a letter dated February 1738/9—"I have yet seen but three acts of Mr. Thomson's, but I am told, and believe by what I have seen that it excels in the pathetic"; the reference is plainly to Thomson's tragedy, Edward and Eleonora. Again, Mitford writes: "On Thomson's submitting his poems to Pope" (see Warton's edition, vol. viii., page 340), and again we get no proof. All that Pope says is, "I am just taken up"—he is writing to Aaron Hill under date November 1732—"by Mr. Thomson in the perusal of a new poem he has brought me;" this new poem being almost certainly Liberty, in the composition of which Thomson was then engaged. So far from the tradition having any countenance from Warton, it is as certain as anything can be, that Warton knew nothing about it. In his Essay on Pope he gives an elaborate account of The Seasons, and he has more than once referred to Pope and Thomson together; but he says not a word, either in this Essay or in his edition of Pope's Works, about Pope having corrected Thomson's poetry. If Pope assisted Thomson, to the extent indicated in these corrections, such an incident, considering the fame of Thomson and the fame of Pope, must have been known to some at least of the innumerable editors, biographers, and anecdotists between 1742 and 1814. It could hardly have escaped being recorded by Murdoch, Mallet, or Warburton, by Ruffhead, by Savage or Spence, by Theophilus Cibber or Johnson. It is incredible that such an interesting secret should have been kept either by Thomson himself or by Pope. Again, whoever the corrector was, he had a fine ear for blank verse, and must indeed have been a master of it. There is no proof that Pope ever wrote in blank verse; indeed, we have the express testimony of Lady Wortley Montagu that he never attempted it, and his Shakespeare conclusively proves that he had anything but a nice ear for its rhythm. With all this collateral evidence against the probability of the corrector being Pope, we come to the evidence which should settle the question, the evidence of handwriting. There is no lack of material for forming an opinion on this point. Pope's autograph MSS. are abundant, illustrating his hand at every period in his life. It is amazing to find Mitford asserting that his friends Ellis and Combe, at the British Museum, had no doubt about the hand of the corrector being the hand of Pope. Mr. Tovey candidly admits that, "if the best authorities at the Museum many years ago were positive that the handwriting was Pope's, their successors at the present time are equally positive that it is not." Such is the very decided opinion of Mr. Warner; such, also, as Mr. Tovey acknowledges, is the opinion of Professor Courthope, and such, we venture to think, will be the opinion of every one who will take the trouble to compare the hands. Mr. Tovey himself is plainly very uneasy, and indeed goes so far as to say that "it has all along been perplexing to me how the opinion that this was Pope's handwriting could ever have been confidently" (the italics are his) "entertained"; and yet in his notes he follows Bell, and inserts these corrections with Pope's initials.
We search in vain among those who are known to have been on friendly terms with Thomson for a probable claimant. It could not, as his other stupid revisions of Thomson's verses sufficiently show, have been Lyttleton. Mallet's blank verse is conclusive against his having had any hand in the corrections. Collins and Hammond are out of the question. It is just possible, though hardly likely, that the corrector was Armstrong. He was on very intimate terms with Thomson. His own poem proves that he could sometimes write excellent blank verse, but the touch and rhythm of the corrections are, it must be admitted, not the touch and rhythm of Armstrong.
What has long, therefore, been represented and circulated as an undisputed fact—namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of The Seasons—rests not, as all Thomson's modern editors have supposed, on the traditions of the eighteenth century, and on the testimony of authenticated handwriting, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections are originals, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is, of course, possible that the corrections are Thomson's own, and that the differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some cases he was his own scribe, that in others he employed an amanuensis; but the intrinsic unlikeness of the corrections, made in the strange hand, to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the corrector was Pope.
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. [47]
[47] The Lesbia of Catullus. Arranged and translated by J. H. A. Tremenheere. London.
Perhaps the best thing in this world is youth, and the poetry of Catullus is its very incarnation. The "young Catullus" he was to his contemporaries, and the young Catullus he will be to the end of time. To turn over his pages is to recall the days when all within and all without conspire to make existence a perpetual feast, when life's lord is pleasure, its end enjoyment, its law impulse, before experience and satiety have disillusioned and disgusted, and we are still in Dante's phrase, "trattando l'ombre come cosa salda." And the poet of youth had the good fortune not to survive youth; of the dregs and lees of the life he chose he had no taste. While the cup which "but sparkles near the brim" was still sparkling for him, death dashed it from his lips. At thirty his tale was told,—and a radiant figure, a sunny memory and a golden volume were immortal.
Revelling alike in the world of nature, and in the world of man, at once simple and intense, at once playful and pathetic, his poetry has a freshness as of the morning, an abandon as of a child at play. He has not, indeed, escaped the taint of Alexandrinism any more than Burns escaped the taint of the pseudo-classicism of the conventional school of his day, but this is the only note of falsetto discernible in what he has left us. It is when we compare him with Horace, Propertius, and Martial that his incomparable charm is most felt. As a lyric poet, except when patriotic, and when dealing with moral ideas, Horace is as commonplace as he is insincere; he had no passion; he had little pathos; he had not much sentiment; he had no real feeling for nature, he was little more than a consummate craftsman, to adopt an expression from Scaliger "ex alienis ingeniis poeta, ex suo tantum versificator." In his Greek models he found not merely his form, but his inspiration. Most of his love odes have all the appearance of being mere studies in fancy. When he attempts threnody he is as frigid as Cowley. Whose heart was ever touched by the verses to Virgil on the death of Quintilian, or by the verses to Valgius on the death of his son? The real Horace is the Horace of the Satires and Epistles, and the real Horace had as little of the temperament of a poet as La Fontaine and Prior. Propertius had passion, and he had certainly some feeling for nature, but he was an incurable pedant both in temper and in habit. Martial applied the epigram, in elegiacs and in hendecasyllabics, to the same purposes to which it was applied by Catullus, with more brilliance and finish, but he had not the power of informing trifles with emotion and soul. What became with Catullus the spontaneous expression of the dominant mood, became in the hands of Martial the mere tour de force of the ingenious wit. Catullus is the most Greek of all the Roman poets; Greek in the simplicity, chastity and propriety of his style, in his exquisite responsiveness to all that appeals to the senses and the emotions, in his ardent and abounding vitality. But, in his enthusiasm for nature, in the intensity of his domestic affections, and in his occasional touches of moral earnestness—and we have seldom to go far for them—he was Roman. His sketches from nature are delightful. What could be more perfect than the following? Has even Tennyson equalled it?—
Hic, qualis flatu placidum mare matutino
Horrificans Zephyrus proclivas incitat undas,
Aurorâ exoriente, vagi sub lumina solis;
Quæ tarde primum clementi flamine pulsæ
Procedunt, leviterque sonant plangore cachinni:
Post, vento crescente, magis magis increbescunt,
Purpureâque procul nantes a luce refulgent.
"As in early morning when Zephyr's breath, ruffling the stilly sea, stirs it into slanting waves up against the glow of the travelling sun; and at first, while the impelling breeze is gentle, they move in slow procession, and the plash of their ripples is not loud; but then, as the breeze freshens, they crowd faster and faster on, and far out at sea, as they float, flash back the splendour of the crimsoning day in their front."
Or, again, in the epistle to Manlius—
Qualis in aerii pellucens vertice montis
Rivus muscoso prosilit e lapide.
How vivid is the picture of the rising sun and of early morning in the Attis, 39-41.
Ubi oris aurei sol radiantibus oculis
Lustravit æthera album, sola dura, mare ferum,
Pepulitque noctis umbras vegetis sonipedibus.
In his "Asian Myrtle, in all the beauty of its blossom-laden branches, which the Wood-Nymphs feed with honey dew to be their toy:"—
Floridis velut enitens
Myrtus Asia ramulis,
Quos Hamadryades Deæ
Ludicrum sibi roscido
Nutriunt humore.—
—who does not recognise Matthew Arnold's "natural magic"?
Flowers he loved, as Shakespeare loved them. What tenderness there is in the image of the love that perished—
Prati
Ultimi flos, prætereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est,
(xi. 19-21.)
—in the beautiful simile, so often imitated in every language in Europe, where the unmarried maiden is compared to the uncropped flower, lxii., 39-45; or where in the
Alba parthenice,
Luteumve papaver,
(lxi. 194-5.)
he sees the symbol of maidenhood; or where Ariadne is compared to the myrtles on the banks of the Eurotas, and to the "flowers of diverse hues which the spring breezes evoke"; and, again, the exquisite simile picturing the husband's love binding fast the bride's thoughts, as a tree is entwined in the clinging clasp of the gadding ivy—
Mentem amore revinciens,
Ut tenax hedera huc et huc
Arborem implicat errans.
Then we have the garland of Priapus with its felicitous epithets (xix., xx.).
It may be said of Catullus as Shelley said of his Alastor—
Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart their choicest impulses.
What rapture inspires and informs the lines to his yacht, and to Sirmio, as well as the Jam ver egelidos refert tepores!
As the author of the Attis Catullus stands alone among poets. There was, so far as we know, nothing like it before, and there has been nothing like it since. If it be a study from the Greek, as it is generally supposed to be, it is very difficult to conjecture at what period its original could have been produced. There is nothing at all resembling it which has come down from the lyric period; its theme is not one which would have been likely to attract the Attic poets. If its model was the work of some Alexandrian, we can only say that such a poem must have been an even greater anomaly in that literature than Smart's Song to David is to our own literature, in the eighteenth century. It may, of course, be urged that it is equally anomalous in Latin poetry, and that, if resolved into its elements, it has much more affinity with what may be traced to Greek than to Roman sources. In its compound epithets, and more particularly in the singular use of "foro," so plainly substituted for the Greek αγορα and its associations, it certainly reads like a translation from the Greek; and yet, in the total impression made by it, the poem has not the air of a translation, but of an original, and of an original struck out, in inspiration, at white heat.
Only by an extraordinary effort of imaginative sympathy are we now able to realize to ourselves the tragedy of the Attis, while its rushing galliambics whirl us through the panorama of its swift-succeeding pictures. But home to every heart must come the poems which Catullus dedicates to the memory of his brother, and the poem in which he tries to soothe Calvus for the death of Quintilia.
Multas per gentes, et multa per aequora vectus
Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis,
Et mutum nequidquam alloquerer cinerem:
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum:
Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi!
Nunc tamen interea prisco quæ more parentum
Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
Accipe, fraterno multum manantia fletu:
Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
"Many are the peoples, many the seas I have passed through to be here, dear brother, at this, thine untimely grave, that I might pay thee death's last tribute, and greet,—how vainly,—the dust that has no response. For well I know Fortune hath bereft me of thy living self—Ah! hapless brother, cruelly torn from me! Yet here, see, be the offerings which, from of old, the custom of our fathers hath handed down as a sad oblation to the grave—take them—they are streaming with a brother's tears. And now—for evermore—brother, hail and farewell!"
Could pathos go further? How exquisite, too, is the following:—
Si quidquam mutis gratum acceptumque sepulcris
Accidere a nostro, Calve, dolore potest,
Quum desiderio veteres renovamus amores,
Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias:
Certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est
Quintiliæ, quantum gaudet amore tuo.[48]
Shakespeare merely unfolded what was included here, when he wrote those haunting lines:—
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight.
Never, too, has any poet given such pathetic expression to a sorrow, which to the young is even harder to bear than the loss inflicted by death, the perfidy and treachery of friends. The verses to Alphenus (xxx.), to the anonymous friend in lxviii., and the epigram to Rufus (lxxvii.), are indescribably touching. What infinite sadness there is in:—
Si tu oblitus es, at Dii meminerunt, meminit Fides,
Quæ te ut pæniteat postmodo facti faciet tui.
What passion of grief in:—
Heu, heu, nostræ crudele venenum
Vitæ, heu, heu, nostræ pestis amicitiæ!
But nothing that Catullus has left us equals in fascinating interest, or exceeds in charm, the poems inspired by the woman who was at once the bliss and the curse of his life—
Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
Plusquam se, atque suos amavit omnes.
Whether she is to be identified with the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher, and the wife of Metellus Celer, seems to us, in spite of the arguments of Schwaber, Munro, Ellis, and Sellar, extremely doubtful. It is a point which need not be discussed here, and is, indeed, of little importance. That she was a woman of superb and commanding beauty, a false wife, a false mistress, and of immeasurable profligacy, Catullus has himself told us. There could only be one end to a passion of which such a siren was the object; and, exquisite as the poems are which precede the breaking of the spell, it is in the poems recording the gradual process of disenchantment, and the struggle between the old love and the new loathing, that Catullus touches us most. How piercing is the pathos of such a poem as the Si qua recordanti (lxxvi.), or the epigram in which he says that he loves and loathes, but knows not why, only knows that it is so, and that he is on the rack:—
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio: sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Or where he says that, pest as she is, he cannot curse a love who is dearer to him than both his eyes:—
Credis me potuisse meæ maledicere vitæ,
Ambobus mihi quæ carior est oculis?
Non potui, nec, si possem, tam perdite amarem.
And he suffered the more, as he had lavished on her the purest affections of his heart. His love for her—such was his own expression—was not simply that which men ordinarily feel for their mistresses, but such as the father feels for his sons and his sons-in-law:—
Dilexi tum te, non tantum ut vulgus amicam,
Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.
But shameless as she is, and it is an impossibility for her to be otherwise, he cannot abandon her. Do what she will he is her slave. His mind, he says, was so straitened by her frailty, so beggared by its own devotion, that, even if she became virtuous, he could not love her with absolute goodwill, and if she stuck at nothing—drained vice to its very dregs—he could not give her up:—
Huc est mens deducta tuâ, mea Lesbia, culpâ
Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo,
Ut jam nec bene velle queam tibi, si optima fias,
Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.
He compares himself to a man labouring under a cruel and incurable disease, a disease which is paralysing his energy, and draining life of its joy:—
Me miserum adspicite, et si vitam puriter egi,
Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi,
Quæ mihi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus
Expulit ex omni pectore lætitias.
Nearly sixteen hundred years had to pass before the world was to have any parallel to these poems. And the parallel is certainly a remarkable one. In the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Lesbia lives again; in the lover of the dark lady, Lesbia's victim. Once more a false wife and a false mistress, not indeed beautiful, but with powers of fascination so irresistible that deformity itself becomes a charm, makes havoc of a poet's peace. Once more a passion, as degraded as it is degrading, sows feuds among friends, and "infects with jealousy the sweetness of affiance." Once more rises the bitter cry of a soul, conscious of the unspeakable degradation of a thraldom which it is agony to endure, and from which it would be agony to be emancipated. Compare for instance:—
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
······
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest,
My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are,
(Sonnet cxlvii.)
with Catullus, lxxvi.
And:—
Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds.
Who taught thee how to make me love thee more,
The more I hear and see just cause of hate?
(Sonnet cl.)
with Catullus, lxxii., lxxiii., lxxv.; while Sonnet cxxxvii. presents a ghastly parallel with Catullus, lviii. Again, how exactly analogous is the adjuration to Quintius in Epigram lxxxii., with what finds expression in Sonnets xl.-xlii., and Sonnet cxx. But it would be tedious as well as superfluous to cite particular parallels where the whole position—which may be summed up in the two words of Catullus, "Odi et amo,"—is identical.
Not the least remarkable thing about Catullus is his range and his versatility. It is truly extraordinary that the same pen should have given us such finished social portraits as "Suffenus iste" (xxii.), "Ad Furium" (xxiii.), "In Egnatium" (xxxix.); the perfection of such serious fooling as we find in the "Lugete, O Veneres" (iii.), and, if we may apply such an expression to the most delicious love poem ever written, the "Acme and Septimius" (xlv.); of such humorous fooling as we find in the "Varus me meus ad suos amores" (x.), the "O Colonia quæ cupis" (xvii.), the "Adeste, hendecasyllabi," the "Oramus, si forte non molestum" (lv.); such epic as we have in the "Peleus and Thetis"; such triumphs of richness, splendour, and grace as we have in the three marriage poems; such a superb expression of the highest imaginative power, penetrated with passion and enthusiasm, as we have in the Attis; such concentrated invective and satire as mark some of the lampoons; such mock heroic as we have in the Coma Berenices; such piercing pathos as penetrates the autobiographical poems, and the poems dedicated to Lesbia.
Catullus has been compared to Keats, but the comparison is not a happy one. His nearest analogy among modern poets is Burns. Both were, in Tennyson's phrase, "dowered with the love of love, the scorn of scorn," and, in the poems of both, those passions find the intensest expression. Both had an exquisite sympathy with all that appeals, either in nature or in humanity, to the senses and the affections. Both were sensualists and libertines without being effeminate, or without being either depraved or hardened. In both, indeed, an infinite tenderness is perhaps the predominating feature. Both had humour, that of Catullus being the more caustic, that of Burns the more genial. Both were distinguished by sincerity and simplicity; both waged war with charlatanry and baseness. Burns had the richer nature and was the greater as a man; Catullus was the more accomplished artist.
But it is time to turn to the book which has recalled Catullus and Lesbia. Mr. Tremenheere has, with great ingenuity, succeeded in concocting by a process of elaborate dovetailing a very pretty romance which he divides into nine chapters, the first being "The Birth of Love," the second, third and fourth, "Possession," "Quarrels" and "Reconciliation," the fifth, sixth, and seventh, "Doubt," "A Brother's Death" and "Unfaithfulness," the last two, "Avoidance" and "The Death of Love." The chief objection to this is that it is for the most part fanciful, and is absolutely without warrant, either from tradition or from probability. Many of the poems pressed into the service of his narrative by Mr. Tremenheere have nothing whatever to do with Lesbia. Such would be xiii., "The invitation to Fabullus," xiv., "The Acme and Septimius."
The translations are very unequal. Of many of them it may be said in Dogberry's phrase that they "are tolerable and not to be endured," or to borrow an expression from Byron "so middling bad were better." Thus the powerful poem to Gellius (xci.) is attenuated into:—
'Twas not that I esteem'd you were
As constant or incapable
Of vulgar baseness, but that she
For whom great love was wasting me,
The spice of incest lacked for you;
And though we were old friends, 'tis true,
That seem'd poor cause to my poor mind,
Not so to yours.
Sometimes the versions are detestable. Nothing could be worse than to turn:—
Nulli illum pueri nullæ optavere puellæ
No more is she glad to the eyes of a lad,
To the lasses a pride,—
or
Dulcis pueri ebrios ocellos
as
Her minion's passion-sodden eyes,—
which might do very well for a coarse phrase like "In Venerem putres," but not for "Ebrios." But sometimes the renderings are very felicitous. As here:—
Quid vis? quâlubet esse notus optas
Eris: quandoquidem meos amores
Cum longâ voluisti amare pœnâ.
Cost what it may, you'll win renown!
You shall, such longing you exhibit
Both for my mistress—and a gibbet!
And the following is happy:—
Nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium
Ilia rumpens.
Nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem
Qui illius culpâ cecidit; velut prati
Ultimi flos, prætereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est.
Ah, shameless, loveless lust, sweet, seek no more
To win love back, by thine own fault it fell,
In the far corner of the field though hid,
Touch'd by the plough at last,—the flower is dead.
The following also is neat and skilful, but how inferior to the almost terrible impressiveness of the original:—
O Di si vostrûm est misereri, aut si quibus unquam
Extremâ jam ipsâ in morte tulistis opem.
Me miserum adspicite, et si vitam puriter egi,
Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi,
Quæ mihi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus
Expulit ex omni pectore lætitias.
Oh God! if Thine be pity, and if Thou
E'en in the jaws of death ere now,
Hast wrought salvation—look on me;
And if my life seem fair to Thee
O tear this plague, this curse away,
Which gaining on me day by day,
A creeping slow paralysis,
Hath driven away all happiness.
Six love stories stand out conspicuous in the records of poetry—those which find expression in the Elegies of Propertius, in the Sonnets and Canzoni of Dante and Petrarch, in the Sonnets of Camoens, in the Astrophel and Stella of Sidney, in the Sonnets of Shakespeare. But never has passion, never has pathos, thrilled in intenser or more piercing utterance than in the poems which that fatal "Clytemnestra quadrantaria"—to employ the phrase which may actually have been applied to her—inspired, and in which the rapture and loathing and despair of Catullus found a voice.