Inger mi calices amariores, etc.
The 'Hymn to Diana' occupies an intermediate place between the poems founded on personal feelings and the longer and more purely artistic pieces. Like the first it seems unconsciously, or at least without leaving any trace of conscious purpose, to have conformed to the conditions of the purest art. It is, like them, a perfect whole, one of those, to quote Mr. Munro, '"cunningest patterns" of excellence, such as Latium never saw before or after, Alcaeus, Sappho, and the rest then and only then having met their match[64]'. It resembles some of the longer poems in being a creation of sympathetic imagination, not an immediate expression of personal feeling. It must have been written for some public occasion; and the selection of Catullus to compose it would imply that he was recognised as the greatest lyrical poet in his lifetime, and that it was written after his reputation was established. It is a poem not only of pure artistic excellence, but of imaginative conception, like that exemplified in the 'Attis' and the 'Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis.' The 'Diana' of Catullus is not a vague abstraction or conventional figure, as the Gods and Goddesses in the Odes of Horace are apt to be. The mythology of Greece received a new life from his imagination. In this poem he shows too, what he hardly indicates elsewhere[65], that he could identify himself in sympathy with the national feeling and religion of Rome. The Goddess addressed is a living Power, blending in her countenance the human and picturesque aspects of the Greek Artemis with the more spiritual and beneficent attributes of the Roman Diana. Yet no confusion or incongruity arises from the union into one concrete representation of these originally diverse elements. She lives to the imagination as a Power who, in the fresh morning of the world, had roamed in freedom over the mountains, the woods, the secret dells, and the river-banks of earth[66],—and now from a far away sphere watched over women in travail, increased the store of the husbandman, and was the especial guardian of the descendants of Romulus.
This poem affords a natural transition to the longer and more purely artistic pieces in the centre of the volume. Yet with some even of these a personal element is interfused. The hymn in honour of the nuptials of Manlius, is, like the short poem on the loves of Acme and Septimius, inspired by the poet's sympathy with the happiness of a friend. The 68th poem attempts to weave into one texture his own love of Lesbia, and the romance of Laodamia and Protesilaus. But in general these poems bring before us a new side of the art of Catullus. In one way indeed they add to our knowledge of his personal tastes. The larger place given in them to ornament and illustration lets us know what objects in Nature afforded him most delight. His life was too full of human interest to allow him to devote his art to the celebration of Nature: yet he could not have been the poet he was if he had not been susceptible to her influence. And this susceptibility, indicated in occasional touches in the shorter poems, finds greater scope in the poems of impersonal art which still remain to be considered.
Among the more purely artistic pieces none is more beautiful than the Nuptial Ode in celebration of the marriage of his friend Manlius, a member of the great house of the Torquati, and one of the most accomplished men of his time, with Vinia Aurunculeia. In this poem Catullus pours forth the fulness of his heart
'In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'
It is marked by the excellence of his shorter pieces and by poetical beauty of another order. Resembling his shorter poems in being called forth by an event within his own experience, it breathes the same spirit of affection and of sympathy with beauty and passion. It is written with the same gaiety of heart, blending indeed with a graver sense of happiness. The feeling of the hour does not merely express itself in graceful language: it awakens the active power of imagination, clothes itself in radiant imagery, and rises into the completeness and sustained melody of the highest lyrical art. The tone of the whole poem is one of joy, changing from the rapture of expectation in the opening lines to the more tranquil happiness of the close. The passion is ardent, but, on the whole, free from grossness or effeminate sentiment. Even where, in accordance with the Roman marriage customs, he abandons himself for a few stanzas to the spirit of raillery and banter—
Ne diu taceat procax
Fescennina locutio[67]—
he remembers the respect due to the innocence of the bride. Thoughts of her are associated with the purest objects in Nature,—with ivy clinging round a tree, or branches of myrtle,—