is pure and noble, and purely and nobly expressed. These lines reveal a genuine and unexpected vein of reverence in the nature of Catullus. The sins which he specifies as alienating the Gods from men are those most rife in his own time, with which he has dealt in a more realistic fashion in his satiric epigrams. All this may, perhaps, be said. But on the other hand, Catullus is the least didactic of poets. He is also the least abstract and reflective. We cannot suppose (in the case of such a writer) all the concrete passionate life of the poem taking shape in his imagination in order to embody any idea however noble. The idea was the afterthought, not the creative germ. Nor can we think that the conception of the whole poem existed in his mind before, or independently of, the separate conception of its parts. He was attracted to both subjects by the charm which the Greek mythology and the bright spectacle of the heroic age had for his imagination, by their harmony with the feelings and passions with which he had most sympathy in real life, and by the scope which they afforded to his peculiar power as a pictorial artist. The device of the tapestry, by which the tale of Ariadne is told, was especially favourable to the exercise of this gift. He looked back upon an ideal vision of the golden morning of the world, when men were so stately and noble, and women so fair and true, that even the blessed Gods and Goddesses deigned to visit them, and to unite with them in marriage. The original motive of the two poems appears to be purely imaginative. If there was any intention to give artificial unity to the poem, by pointing the contrast between a love calm and happy from the beginning, and one at first passionate and afterwards betrayed, or between the holiness and nobleness of an ideal past, and the sin and baseness of the actual present, that intention was probably not present to the mind of the poet when he first contemplated his subject, but came to him in the course of its development.
It may be said, therefore, that if any principle of unity is aimed at in the poem, it is one so artificial as rather to detract from the artistic merit of the composition. There is a similar want of unity in the 'Pastor Aristaeus' of Virgil, which was also composed in the manner of the Alexandrine Epyllion. The Alexandrians seem to have aimed rather at a combination of diverse effects than at a composition 'simplex et unum.' They cared much for the elaboration of details, little for the consistency of the whole. And the same tendency appears in their imitators. Neither can the poem be called a successful specimen of narrative. There is scarcely any story to tell in connexion with the marriage of Peleus. It is a succession of pictures, not a tale of passion or adventure. The romance of Theseus and Ariadne is told much less distinctly and simply than the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in Virgil. There is dramatic power in the soliloquy of Ariadne, as in that of Attis, but the dramatic faculty in Catullus is rather a phase of his special lyrical gift, which enables him to identify himself with some single passionate situation, than the power of giving life to various types of character. The imaginative excellence of the poem is idyllic rather than epic or dramatic. There is a wonderful harmony of tone in his whole conception of the heroic age. He does not attempt to reproduce the picturesque life represented by Homer, nor the majestic passions imagined by the Attic tragedians, but he has his own vision of the stately and beautiful figures belonging to an ideal foretime,—
O nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati
Heroes, saluete, deum genus.
There is a sense of the freshness and brightness of the early morning in his conception of the time when the first ship, manned by the flower of Greek warriors, 'broke the silence of the seas'
(Illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten),
and when the Gods and Goddesses of Olympus, the mysterious Powers over-ruling mortal destiny, and the other beings, half-human, half-divine, whom Greek imagination so lavishly created, appeared in their bodily presence to do honour to the union of a mortal with an immortal. The poem abounds in pictures, or suggestions of pictures, taken from the world of divine and human life, and of outward Nature. Such are those of the Nereids gazing on the Argo—
Emersere feri candenti e gurgite vultus
Aequoreae monstrum Nereides admirantes,—