Nulla fugae ratio, nulla spes; omnia muta
Omnia sunt deserta, ostentant omnia mortem, etc.
The phrases are to a much greater extent cast in a Greek mould[73]. The words follow one another in a less natural order. Ornamental epithets, metaphorical phrases, and the substitution of abstract for concrete words, occur much more frequently. Latin poetry creates for itself an artificial diction by assimilating, to a much greater extent than in any earlier work of genius, the long-accumulated wealth of Greek poetry. This was a gain to its resources, opening up and giving expression to a new range of emotions, but a gain against which must be set off a considerable loss of freshness and naïveté.
The rhythm also is elaborately constructed after a Greek model,—the model, not of Homer, but of the later poets who wrote in his metre. It is much more carefully and correctly finished than the rhythm of Lucretius. Each separate line has a smoother cadence. The whole movement is more regular, more calm, and more stately. But with all the occasional roughness of Lucretius there is much more life and force in his general movement. It is much more capable of presenting a continuous thought or action to the mind. The lines of Catullus seem intended to be dwelt on separately, and each to bring out some point of detail. There is generally a pause in the sense at the end of each line, and thus the lines, when read continuously, produce an impression of monotony[74], which is increased by the frequent use of spondaic lines. The uniformity of his pauses, and the sameness of structure in a large number of his hexameters, enable us to appreciate the great improvement in rhythmical art which appeared some ten years later in the Bucolics of Virgil. Yet if Catullus does not, in this his most elaborate work, equal the natural force of language and rhythm displayed in his simpler pieces, the poem, as a whole, has a noble and stately movement, in unison with the noble and stately pictures of an ideal fore-time which it brings before the imagination.
The four longer elegiac pieces which follow add little to our impression of the art of Catullus. In the 'Epistle to Manlius'—perhaps owing to the trouble by which his mind was darkened at the time of its composition—he does not use the elegiac metre, as a vehicle of his personal feelings, with much force or clearness. There is much more than in his phalaecians and iambics the appearance of effort, and there is much greater uncertainty as to his meaning. The 67th poem keeps alive with some vivacity a scandalous story of his native province which might well have been allowed to sink into oblivion. In the 'Coma Berenices,' and the poem addressed to Allius, he again writes under the influence of his Alexandrian masters. He seems to have regarded the 'Carmina Battiadae' with the admiration which youthful genius, not yet sure of its own powers, entertains for culture and established reputation,—the kind of admiration which led Burns to imagine that his own early inspiration might be of less value to the world than 'Shenstone's art.' Like Burns, too, Catullus is least happy when he gives up his own language, which he wields easily and powerfully, and the forms of art which came naturally to him, in deference to the standard of poetic taste recognised in his day. His selection of the 'Coma Berenices' as a task in translation, illustrates the attraction which the union of beauty and passion with truth and constancy of affection had for his imagination. The poem to Allius is the most artificially constructed of all his pieces. He endeavours to unite in it three distinct threads of interest,—that of his passion for Lesbia, that of the romance of Laodamia and Protesilaus, and that of his brother's death in the Troad. Although this triple combination is accomplished with much mechanical ingenuity[75], yet the effect of the poem as a whole is disappointing, and its motive,—gratitude for a service which no honourable man, according to our modern ideas of honour, would have rendered,—does not make amends for the want of simplicity in its structure. Yet as written in the heyday of his passion for Lesbia, and largely inspired by that passion, it has, along with an Alexandrian superfluity of ornament and illustration, many beauties of expression and feeling. The passionate devotion of Laodamia for Protesilaus is conceived with sympathetic power,—
Quo tibi tum casu pulcherrima Laudamia,
Ereptum est vita dulcius atque anima
Coniugium[76].
There is an exquisite picture of his own stolen meetings with his 'candida diva'; and depth and sincerity of affection are purely and simply expressed in the last two lines—
Et longe ante omnes mihi quae me carior ipse'st,