adest, adest fax obuoluta sanguine atque incendio:
multos annos latuit, ciues, ferte opem et restinguite.
iamque mari magno classis cita
texitur, exitium examen rapit:
adueniet, fera ueliuolantibus
navibus complebit manus litora.
Mr. Sellar has called attention to the 'prophetic fury' of these lines, their 'wild agitated tones'. They seem, indeed, wrought in fire. Nor do they stand alone in Ennius. Nor is their fire and swiftness Roman. They are preserved to us in a passage of Cicero's treatise De Diuinatione: and in the same passage Cicero applies to another fragment of Ennius notable epithets. He speaks of it as poema tenerum et moratum et molle. The element of moratum, the deep moral earnestness, is Roman. The other two epithets carry us outside the typically Roman temperament. Everybody remembers Horace's characterization of Vergil:
molle atque facetum
Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae.
Horace is speaking there of the Vergil of the Transpadane period: the reference is to the Eclogues. The Romans had hard minds. And in the Eclogues they marvelled primarily at the revelation of temperament which Horace denotes by the word molle. Propertius, in whose Umbrian blood there was, it has been conjectured, probably some admixture of the Celtic, speaks of himself as mollis in omnes. The ingenium molle, whether in passion, as with Propertius, or, as with Vergil, in reflection, is that deep and tender sensibility which is the least Roman thing in the world, and which, in its subtlest manifestations, is perhaps the peculiar possession of the Celt. The subtle and moving effects, in the Eclogues, of this molle ingenium, are well characterized by Mr. Mackail, when he speaks of the 'note of brooding pity' which pierces the 'immature and tremulous cadences' of Vergil's earliest period. This molle ingenium, that here quivers beneath the half-divined 'pain-of-the-world', is the same temperament as that which in Catullus gives to the pain of the individual immortally poignant expression. It is the same temperament, again, which created Dido. Macrobius tells us that Vergil's Dido is just the Medea of Apollonius over again. And some debt Vergil no doubt has to Apollonius. To the Attic drama his debt is far deeper; and he no doubt intended to invest the story of Dido with the same kind of interest as that which attaches to, say, the Phaedra of Euripides. Yet observe. Vergil has not hardness enough. He has not the unbending righteousness of the tragic manner. The rather hard moral grandeur of the great Attic dramatists, their fine spiritual steel, has submitted to a strange softening process. Something melting and subduing, something neither Greek nor Roman, has come in. We are passed out of classicism: we are moving into what we call romanticism. Aeneas was a brute. There is nobody who does not feel that. Yet nobody was meant to feel that. We were meant to feel that Aeneas was what Vergil so often calls him, pius. But the Celtic spirit—for that is what it is—is over-mastering. It is its characteristic that it constantly girds a man—or a poet—and carries him whither he would not. The fourth Aeneid is the triumph of an unconscionable Celticism over the whole moral plan of Vergil's epic.
I will not mention Lesbia by the side of Dido. The Celtic spirit too often descends into hell. But I will take from Catullus in a different mood two other examples of the Italic romanticism. Consider these three lines:
usque dum tremulum mouens
cana tempus anilitas
omnia omnibus annuit,
—'till that day when gray old age shaking its palsied head nods in all things to all assent.' That is not Greek nor Roman. It is the unelaborate magic of the Celtic temperament. Keats, I have often thought, would have 'owed his eyes' to be able to write those three lines. He hits sometimes a like matchless felicity:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
But into the effects which Catullus just happens upon by a luck of temperament Keats puts more of his life-blood than a man can well spare.