and—
Et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
Adservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis.[597]
But the great charm of the style in these shorter poems is its simple directness, and its popular idiomatic ring. There is nothing, apparently, studied about it, no ornament or involution, no otiose epithets, no subtle allusiveness. Yet it shows the happiest selection, not only of the most appropriate, but of the most exquisite words. To no style, in prose or verse, in any language, could the words 'simplex munditiis' be with more propriety applied. It has all the ease of refined and vigorous conversation, combined with the grace of consummate art. Though this perfection of expression could not have been attained without study and labour, yet it bears no trace of them.
In these smaller poems he shows himself as great a master of metre as of language. The more sustained power which he has over the flow of his verse, is best exemplified by the skylark ring of his great Nuptial Ode, by the hurrying agitation of the Attis, and the stately calm of the Peleus and Thetis, giving place to a more impassioned movement in the 'Ariadne' episode. But in his shorter poems, also, he shows the true gift of the ἄοιδος—the power of using musical language as a symbol of the changing impulses of feeling. Thus the delicate playfulness and tenderness of his phalaecians,—the lingering long-drawn out sweetness, and the calm subdued sadness of the scazon, as exemplified in the 'Sirmio,' and the
Miser Catulle desinas ineptire,—
the 'bright speed' of the pure iambic, so happily answering to the subject of the 'phaselus,' and its bold impetus as it is employed in the attack on Julius Caesar,—the irregular but sonorous grandeur of his Sapphic[598],—the majesty which in the Hymn to Diana blends with the buoyant movement of the glyconic,—all attest that the words and melody of the poems were born together with the feeling and meaning animating them. Although his elegiac poems are not written with the smoothness and fluency which was attained by the Augustan poets, yet those among them which record his graver and sadder moods have a plaintive force and natural pathos, which their roughness seems to enhance. If his epigrammatic pieces, written in that metre, want the polish and point to which his brilliant disciple attained under the Empire, we may believe that Catullus experienced the difficulty which Lucilius found, and which Horace at last successfully overcame, of adapting a metre originally framed for the expression of serious feeling to the more prosaic interests and experiences of life.
The language of Catullus in these shorter poems is his own, or, where not his own, is drawn from such wells of Latin undefiled as Plautus and Terence. His metres are happy applications of those invented or largely used by the earlier lyric poets of Greece,—Sappho, Anacreon, Archilochus,—and the later Phalaecus. For the form of some of his longer poems he has taken, and not with the happiest result, the Alexandrine poets for his models. But in these shorter poems, so far as he has had any models, he has tried to emulate the perfection attained in the older and purer era of Greek inspiration. But it is not through imitation that he has attained a perfection of form like to theirs. It is owing to the singleness and strength of his feeling and impression, that these poems are so exquisite in their unity and simplicity. Catullus does not care to present the gem of his own thought in an alien setting, as Horace, in his earlier Odes at least, has often done. It is one of the surest notes of his lyrical genius that, while more modest in his general self-estimate than any of the great Roman poets, he trusts more implicitly than any of them to his own judgment and inspiration to find the most fitting and telling medium for the communication of his thought. Thus he presents only what is essential, unencumbered with any associations from older poetry. The form is indeed so perfect that we scarcely think of it. We feel only that nothing mars or interrupts the revelation of the poet's heart and soul. We apprehend, as perhaps we never apprehended before, some one single feeling of great potency and great human influence in a poem of some ten or twenty lines, every word of which adds something to the whole impression. Thus, for instance, in the poems—
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,—