The passion they celebrated never seems to have inspired one ennobling or generous sentiment, nor to have lifted them for one moment above the grossest selfishness. They had no scruple in exhibiting their mistresses to our eyes, as doubtless they appeared in their own, degraded by every vice, and in every sense contemptible; beings, not only beyond the pale of our sympathy, but of our toleration. Throughout their works, virtue appears a mere jest: Love stript of his divinity, even by those who first deified him, is what we disdain to call by that name; sentiment, as we now understand the word,—that is, the union of fervent love with reverence and delicacy towards its object,—a thing unknown and unheard of,—and all is "of the earth, earthy."
It is for women I write; the fair, pure-hearted, delicate-minded, and unclassical reader will recollect that I do not presume to speak of these poets critically, being neither critic nor scholar; but merely with a reference to my subject, and with a reference to my sex. As monuments of the language and literature of a great and polished people, rich with a thousand beauties of thought and style, doubtless they have their value and their merit: but as monuments also of a state of morals inconceivably gross and corrupt; of the condition of women degraded by their own vices, the vices and tyranny of the other sex, and the prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, the tendency of which, (however disguised by rhetoric,) was ever to lower the tone of the mind; considered in this point of view, they might as well have all burned together in that vast bonfire of love-poetry which the Doctors of the Church raised at Constantinople:—what a flame it must have made![3]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I need scarcely observe, that the following sketch of the lyrical poets of Rome is abridged from the analysis of their works, in Ginguené's Histoire Littéraire, vol. 3.
[2] Clodia, the wife of Quintus Metellus Celer.
[3] "J'ai oui dire dans mon enfance à Demetrius Chalcondyle, homme très instruit de tout ce qui regarde la Grèce, qui les Prétres avaient eu assez d'influence sur les Empereurs de Constantinople, pour les engager à brûler les ouvrages de plusieurs anciens poëtes Grecs, et en particulier de ceux qui parlaient des amours, &c. * * * Ces prètres, sans doute, montrèrent une malveillance honteuse envers les anciens poëtes; mais ils donnèrent une grande preuve d'intégrité, de probité, et de religion."—Alcyonius.
This sentiment is put into the mouth of Leo X. at a time when the mania of classical learning was at its height.—See Roscoe, (Leo X.) and Ginguené.