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If we are to understand the character, then, of Roman poetry in its best period, in the period, that is, which ends with the death of Augustus, we must figure to ourselves a great and prosaic people, with a great and prosaic language, directing and controlling to their own ends spiritual forces deeper and more subtle than themselves. Of these forces one is the Greek, the other may for convenience be called the Italian. In the Italian we must allow for a considerable intermixture of races: and we must remember that large tracts at least of Northern Italy, notably Transpadane Gaul and Umbria, have been penetrated by Celtic influence. No one can study Roman poetry at all deeply or sympathetically without feeling how un-Roman much of it really is: and again—despite its Hellenic forms and its constant study of Hellenism—how un-Greek. It is not Greek and not Roman, and we may call it Italian for want of a better name. The effects of this Italian quality in Roman poetry are both profound and elusive; and it is not easy to specify them in words. But it is important to seize them: for unless we do so we shall miss that aspect of Roman poetry which gives it its most real title to be called poetry at all. Apart from it it is in danger of passing at its best for rhetoric, at its worst for prose.
E
adest, adest fax obuoluta sanguine atque incendio:
multos a
iamque mari magno classis cita
texitur, exitium examen rapit:
adueniet, fera ueliuolantibus
navibus complebit manus litora.
Mr. Sellar has called attention to the 'prophetic fury' of these lines, their 'wild agitated tones'. They seem, indeed, wrought in fire. Nor do they stand alone in E
molle atque facetum
Vergilio a
Horace is speaking there of the Vergil of the Transpadane period: the reference is to the Eclogues. The Romans had hardminds. And in the Ecloguesthey marvelled primarily at the revelation of temperament which Horace denotes by the word molle. Propertius, in whose Umbrian blood there was, it has been conjectured, probably some admixture of the Celtic, speaks of himself as mollis in omnes. The ingenium molle, whether in passion, as with Propertius, or, as with Vergil, in reflection, is that deep and tender sensibility which is the least Roman thing in the world, and which, in its subtlest manifestations, is perhaps the peculiar possession of the Celt. The subtle and moving effects, in the Eclogues, of this molle ingenium, are well characterized by Mr. Mackail, when he speaks of the 'note of brooding pity' which pierces the 'immature and tremulous cadences' of Vergil's earliest period. This molle ingenium, that here quivers beneath the half-divined 'pain-of-the-world', is the same temperament as that which in Catullus gives to the pain of the individual immortally poignant expression. It is the same temperament, again, which created Dido. Macrobius tells us that Vergil's Dido is just the Medea of Apollonius over again. And some debt Vergil no doubt has to Apollonius. To the Attic drama his debt is far deeper; and he no doubt intended to invest the story of Dido with the same kind of interest as that which attaches to, say, the Phaedra of Euripides. Yet observe. Vergil has not hardnessenough. He has not the unbending righteousness of the tragic ma
I will not mention Lesbia by the side of Dido. The Celtic spirit too often descends into hell. But I will take from Catullus in a different mood two other examples of the Italic romanticism. Consider these three lines:
usque dum tremulum mouens
cana tempus anilitas
omnia omnibus a
—'till that day when gray old age shaking its palsied head nods in all things to all assent.' That is not Greek nor Roman. It is the unelaborate magic of the Celtic temperament. Keats, I have often thought, would have 'owed his eyes' to be able to write those three lines. He hits sometimes a like matchless felicity:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
But into the effects which Catullus just happens upon by a luck of temperament Keats puts more of his life-blood than a man can well spare.
Take, again, this from the Letter to Hortalus. Think not, says Catullus, that your words have passed from my heart,
ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum
procurrit casto uirginis e gremio,
quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum,
dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur;
atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,
huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor,
—'as an apple, sent by some lover, a secret gift, falls from a maid's chaste bosom. She placed it, poor lass, in the soft folds of her robe and forgot it. And when her mother came towards her out it fell; fell and rolled in headlong course. And vexed and red and wet with tears are her guilty cheeks!'
That owes something, no doubt, to Alexandria. But in its exquisite sensibility, its supreme delicacy and tenderness, it belongs rather to the romantic than to the classical literatures.
Molle atque facetum: the deep and keen fire of mind, the quick glow of sensibility—that is what redeems literature and life alike from dullness. The Roman, the typical Roman, was what we call a 'dull man'. But the Italian has this fire. And it is this that so often redeems Roman literature from itself. We are accustomed to associate the word facetuswith the idea of 'wit'. It is to be co