He is absolutely unrestrained both in regard to the imputations which he makes, and to the choice of the language in which he conveys them; and in these imputations he spares neither rank nor sex. It is one of the strangest paradoxes to find a poet like Catullus, endowed with the purest sense of beauty, and yet capable of turning all his vigorous force of expression to the vilest uses. He is coarser in his language than any of the older poets, and than any of those of the Augustan age. In the time of the former the traditional severity of the old Roman life,—'tetrica ac tristis disciplina Sabinorum,'—had not altogether lost its influence. In the Augustan age, if there was as much immorality as in the age preceding it, there was more outward decorum. The licentiousness of that age expresses itself in tones of refinement; it associates itself with sentimentalism in literature; it was reduced to system and carried out as the serious business of life. The coarseness of Catullus is symptomatic rather of more recklessness than of greater corruption in society. Impurity is less destructive to human nature when it vents itself in bantering or virulent abuse, than when it clings to the imagination, associates itself with the sense of beauty, and expresses itself in the language of passion. Though, in his nobler poetry, Catullus is ardent and impassioned, he is much more free from this taint than Ovid or Propertius. The errors of his life did not deaden his sensibility, harden his heart, or corrupt his imagination. It is only in his careless moods, when he looks on life in the spirit of a humourist, or in moods of bitterness when his antipathies are roused, or in fits of savage indignation against some violation of natural feeling or some prosperous villainy, that he disregards the restraints imposed by the better instincts of men on the use of language.
Many of his Satires, however, are written in a more genial vein, and are not much disfigured by coarseness or indelicacy of expression. As he especially valued good taste and courtesy, wit, and liveliness of mind in his associates, so he is intolerant of all mean and sordid ways of living, of all stupidity, affectation, and pedantry. The pieces in which these characteristics are exposed are marked by keen observation, a lively sense of absurdity, and sometimes by a boisterous spirit of fun. They are expressed with vigour and directness; but they want the subtle irony which pervades the Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace. Among the best of his lighter satires is the poem numbered xvii:—
O Colonia, quae cupis ponte ludere magno,—
which has some touches of graceful poetry as well as of humourous extravagance. It is directed against the dullness and stolid indifference of one of his fellow-townsmen, who, being married to a young and beautiful girl,—
Quoi cum sit viridissimo nupta flore puella
(Et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
Asservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis),—
was utterly careless of her, and insensible to the perils to which she was exposed. To rouse him from his sloth and stupor, Catullus asks to have him thrown head over heels—
Munus hoc mihi maximi da, Colonia, risus—
from a ricketty old bridge into the deepest and dirtiest part of the quagmire over which it was built. In another piece Catullus laughs at the affectation of one of his rivals, Egnatius,—a black-bearded fop from the Celtiberian wilds,—who had a trick of perpetually smiling in order to show the whiteness of his teeth;—a trick which did not desert him at a criminal trial, during the most pathetic part of the speech for the defence, or when he stood beside a weeping mother at the funeral pyre of her only son. In another of his elegiac pieces he gives expression to the relief felt on the departure for the East of a bore who afflicted the ears of the polite world by a superfluous use of his aspirates—