Part 20

Indeed, throughout _The Seasons_ Thomson’s indebtedness to his corrector is incalculable; many of the most felicitous touches are due to him. Now, who was this corrector? Let Mr. Tovey answer. “It has long been accepted as a fact among scholars that Pope assisted Thomson in the composition of _The Seasons_. Our original authority is, we suppose, Warton.” The truth is that our original authority for this statement is neither Warton nor any other writer of the eighteenth century, but simply the conjecture of Mitford--in other words, Mitford’s mere assumption that the handwriting of the corrector is the handwriting of Pope; and, if we are not mistaken,--for Mitford may have given earlier currency to it in some other place--the conjecture appeared for the first time in Mitford’s edition of Gray, published in 1814. In his copy of the volume, containing the MS. notes, he bolsters up his statement by two assertions and references: “That Pope saw some pieces of Thomson’s in manuscript is clear from a letter in Bowles’s _Supplement_, page 194” (an obvious misprint for 294). But on turning to the references all that we find is--it is in a letter dated February 1738/9--“I have yet seen but three acts of Mr. Thomson’s, but I am told, and believe by what I have seen that it excels in the pathetic”; the reference is plainly to Thomson’s tragedy, _Edward and Eleonora_. Again, Mitford writes: “On Thomson’s submitting his poems to Pope” (see Warton’s edition, vol. viii., page 340), and again we get no proof. All that Pope says is, “I am just taken up”--he is writing to Aaron Hill under date November 1732--“by Mr. Thomson in the perusal of a new poem he has brought me;” this new poem being almost certainly _Liberty_, in the composition of which Thomson was then engaged. So far from the tradition having any countenance from Warton, it is as certain as anything can be, that Warton knew nothing about it. In his _Essay on Pope_ he gives an elaborate account of _The Seasons_, and he has more than once referred to Pope and Thomson together; but he says not a word, either in this Essay or in his edition of Pope’s Works, about Pope having corrected Thomson’s poetry. If Pope assisted Thomson, to the extent indicated in these corrections, such an incident, considering the fame of Thomson and the fame of Pope, must have been known to some at least of the innumerable editors, biographers, and anecdotists between 1742 and 1814. It could hardly have escaped being recorded by Murdoch, Mallet, or Warburton, by Ruffhead, by Savage or Spence, by Theophilus Cibber or Johnson. It is incredible that such an interesting secret should have been kept either by Thomson himself or by Pope. Again, whoever the corrector was, he had a fine ear for blank verse, and must indeed have been a master of it. There is no proof that Pope ever wrote in blank verse; indeed, we have the express testimony of Lady Wortley Montagu that he never attempted it, and his Shakespeare conclusively proves that he had anything but a nice ear for its rhythm. With all this collateral evidence against the probability of the corrector being Pope, we come to the evidence which should settle the question, the evidence of handwriting. There is no lack of material for forming an opinion on this point. Pope’s autograph MSS. are abundant, illustrating his hand at every period in his life. It is amazing to find Mitford asserting that his friends Ellis and Combe, at the British Museum, had no doubt about the hand of the corrector being the hand of Pope. Mr. Tovey candidly admits that, “if the best authorities at the Museum many years ago were positive that the handwriting was Pope’s, their successors at the present time are equally positive that it is not.” Such is the very decided opinion of Mr. Warner; such, also, as Mr. Tovey acknowledges, is the opinion of Professor Courthope, and such, we venture to think, will be the opinion of every one who will take the trouble to compare the hands. Mr. Tovey himself is plainly very uneasy, and indeed goes so far as to say that “it has all along been perplexing to me how the opinion that this was Pope’s handwriting could ever have been _confidently_” (the italics are his) “entertained”; and yet in his notes he follows Bell, and inserts these corrections with Pope’s initials.

We search in vain among those who are known to have been on friendly terms with Thomson for a probable claimant. It could not, as his other stupid revisions of Thomson’s verses sufficiently show, have been Lyttleton. Mallet’s blank verse is conclusive against his having had any hand in the corrections. Collins and Hammond are out of the question. It is just possible, though hardly likely, that the corrector was Armstrong. He was on very intimate terms with Thomson. His own poem proves that he could sometimes write excellent blank verse, but the touch and rhythm of the corrections are, it must be admitted, not the touch and rhythm of Armstrong.

What has long, therefore, been represented and circulated as an undisputed fact--namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of _The Seasons_--rests not, as all Thomson’s modern editors have supposed, on the traditions of the eighteenth century, and on the testimony of authenticated handwriting, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections are originals, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is, of course, possible that the corrections are Thomson’s own, and that the differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some cases he was his own scribe, that in others he employed an amanuensis; but the intrinsic unlikeness of the corrections, made in the strange hand, to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the corrector was Pope.

CATULLUS AND LESBIA.[47]

[Footnote 47: _The Lesbia of Catullus._ Arranged and translated by J. H. A. Tremenheere. London.]

Perhaps the best thing in this world is youth, and the poetry of Catullus is its very incarnation. The “young Catullus” he was to his contemporaries, and the young Catullus he will be to the end of time. To turn over his pages is to recall the days when all within and all without conspire to make existence a perpetual feast, when life’s lord is pleasure, its end enjoyment, its law impulse, before experience and satiety have disillusioned and disgusted, and we are still in Dante’s phrase, “trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.” And the poet of youth had the good fortune not to survive youth; of the dregs and lees of the life he chose he had no taste. While the cup which “but sparkles near the brim” was still sparkling for him, death dashed it from his lips. At thirty his tale was told,--and a radiant figure, a sunny memory and a golden volume were immortal.

Revelling alike in the world of nature, and in the world of man, at once simple and intense, at once playful and pathetic, his poetry has a freshness as of the morning, an abandon as of a child at play. He has not, indeed, escaped the taint of Alexandrinism any more than Burns escaped the taint of the pseudo-classicism of the conventional school of his day, but this is the only note of falsetto discernible in what he has left us. It is when we compare him with Horace, Propertius, and Martial that his incomparable charm is most felt. As a lyric poet, except when patriotic, and when dealing with moral ideas, Horace is as commonplace as he is insincere; he had no passion; he had little pathos; he had not much sentiment; he had no real feeling for nature, he was little more than a consummate craftsman, to adopt an expression from Scaliger “ex alienis ingeniis poeta, ex suo tantum versificator.” In his Greek models he found not merely his form, but his inspiration. Most of his love odes have all the appearance of being mere studies in fancy. When he attempts threnody he is as frigid as Cowley. Whose heart was ever touched by the verses to Virgil on the death of Quintilian, or by the verses to Valgius on the death of his son? The real Horace is the Horace of the Satires and Epistles, and the real Horace had as little of the temperament of a poet as La Fontaine and Prior. Propertius had passion, and he had certainly some feeling for nature, but he was an incurable pedant both in temper and in habit. Martial applied the epigram, in elegiacs and in hendecasyllabics, to the same purposes to which it was applied by Catullus, with more brilliance and finish, but he had not the power of informing trifles with emotion and soul. What became with Catullus the spontaneous expression of the dominant mood, became in the hands of Martial the mere _tour de force_ of the ingenious wit. Catullus is the most Greek of all the Roman poets; Greek in the simplicity, chastity and propriety of his style, in his exquisite responsiveness to all that appeals to the senses and the emotions, in his ardent and abounding vitality. But, in his enthusiasm for nature, in the intensity of his domestic affections, and in his occasional touches of moral earnestness--and we have seldom to go far for them--he was Roman. His sketches from nature are delightful. What could be more perfect than the following? Has even Tennyson equalled it?--

Hic, qualis flatu placidum mare matutino Horrificans Zephyrus proclivas incitat undas, Aurorâ exoriente, vagi sub lumina solis; Quæ tarde primum clementi flamine pulsæ Procedunt, leviterque sonant plangore cachinni: Post, vento crescente, magis magis increbescunt, Purpureâque procul nantes a luce refulgent.

“As in early morning when Zephyr’s breath, ruffling the stilly sea, stirs it into slanting waves up against the glow of the travelling sun; and at first, while the impelling breeze is gentle, they move in slow procession, and the plash of their ripples is not loud; but then, as the breeze freshens, they crowd faster and faster on, and far out at sea, as they float, flash back the splendour of the crimsoning day in their front.”

Or, again, in the epistle to Manlius--

Qualis in aerii _pellucens_ vertice montis Rivus _muscoso prosilit e lapide_.

How vivid is the picture of the rising sun and of early morning in the Attis, 39-41.

Ubi oris aurei sol radiantibus oculis Lustravit æthera album, sola dura, mare ferum, Pepulitque noctis umbras vegetis sonipedibus.

In his “Asian Myrtle, in all the beauty of its blossom-laden branches, which the Wood-Nymphs feed with honey dew to be their toy:”--

Floridis velut enitens Myrtus Asia ramulis, Quos Hamadryades Deæ Ludicrum sibi roscido Nutriunt humore.--

--who does not recognise Matthew Arnold’s “natural magic”?

Flowers he loved, as Shakespeare loved them. What tenderness there is in the image of the love that perished--

Prati Ultimi flos, prætereunte postquam Tactus aratro est,

(xi. 19-21.)

--in the beautiful simile, so often imitated in every language in Europe, where the unmarried maiden is compared to the uncropped flower, lxii., 39-45; or where in the

Alba parthenice, Luteumve papaver,

(lxi. 194-5.)

he sees the symbol of maidenhood; or where Ariadne is compared to the myrtles on the banks of the Eurotas, and to the “flowers of diverse hues which the spring breezes evoke”; and, again, the exquisite simile picturing the husband’s love binding fast the bride’s thoughts, as a tree is entwined in the clinging clasp of the gadding ivy--

Mentem amore revinciens, Ut tenax hedera huc et huc Arborem implicat errans.

Then we have the garland of Priapus with its felicitous epithets (xix., xx.).

It may be said of Catullus as Shelley said of his Alastor--

Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart their choicest impulses.

What rapture inspires and informs the lines to his yacht, and to Sirmio, as well as the _Jam ver egelidos refert tepores_!

As the author of the _Attis_ Catullus stands alone among poets. There was, so far as we know, nothing like it before, and there has been nothing like it since. If it be a study from the Greek, as it is generally supposed to be, it is very difficult to conjecture at what period its original could have been produced. There is nothing at all resembling it which has come down from the lyric period; its theme is not one which would have been likely to attract the Attic poets. If its model was the work of some Alexandrian, we can only say that such a poem must have been an even greater anomaly in that literature than Smart’s _Song to David_ is to our own literature, in the eighteenth century. It may, of course, be urged that it is equally anomalous in Latin poetry, and that, if resolved into its elements, it has much more affinity with what may be traced to Greek than to Roman sources. In its compound epithets, and more particularly in the singular use of “foro,” so plainly substituted for the Greek αγορα and its associations, it certainly reads like a translation from the Greek; and yet, in the total impression made by it, the poem has not the air of a translation, but of an original, and of an original struck out, in inspiration, at white heat.

Only by an extraordinary effort of imaginative sympathy are we now able to realize to ourselves the tragedy of the _Attis_, while its rushing galliambics whirl us through the panorama of its swift-succeeding pictures. But home to every heart must come the poems which Catullus dedicates to the memory of his brother, and the poem in which he tries to soothe Calvus for the death of Quintilia.

Multas per gentes, et multa per aequora vectus Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis, Et mutum nequidquam alloquerer cinerem: Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum: Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi! Nunc tamen interea prisco quæ more parentum Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, Accipe, fraterno multum manantia fletu: Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

“Many are the peoples, many the seas I have passed through to be here, dear brother, at this, thine untimely grave, that I might pay thee death’s last tribute, and greet,--how vainly,--the dust that has no response. For well I know Fortune hath bereft me of thy living self--Ah! hapless brother, cruelly torn from me! Yet here, see, be the offerings which, from of old, the custom of our fathers hath handed down as a sad oblation to the grave--take them--they are streaming with a brother’s tears. And now--for evermore--brother, hail and farewell!”

Could pathos go further? How exquisite, too, is the following:--

Si quidquam mutis gratum acceptumque sepulcris Accidere a nostro, Calve, dolore potest, Quum desiderio veteres renovamus amores, Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias: Certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est Quintiliæ, quantum gaudet amore tuo.[48]

Shakespeare merely unfolded what was included here, when he wrote those haunting lines:--

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.

Never, too, has any poet given such pathetic expression to a sorrow, which to the young is even harder to bear than the loss inflicted by death, the perfidy and treachery of friends. The verses to Alphenus (xxx.), to the anonymous friend in lxviii., and the epigram to Rufus (lxxvii.), are indescribably touching. What infinite sadness there is in:--

Si tu oblitus es, at Dii meminerunt, meminit Fides, Quæ te ut pæniteat postmodo facti faciet tui.

What passion of grief in:--

Heu, heu, nostræ crudele venenum Vitæ, heu, heu, nostræ pestis amicitiæ!

But nothing that Catullus has left us equals in fascinating interest, or exceeds in charm, the poems inspired by the woman who was at once the bliss and the curse of his life--

Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa, Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam Plusquam se, atque suos amavit omnes.

Whether she is to be identified with the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher, and the wife of Metellus Celer, seems to us, in spite of the arguments of Schwaber, Munro, Ellis, and Sellar, extremely doubtful. It is a point which need not be discussed here, and is, indeed, of little importance. That she was a woman of superb and commanding beauty, a false wife, a false mistress, and of immeasurable profligacy, Catullus has himself told us. There could only be one end to a passion of which such a siren was the object; and, exquisite as the poems are which precede the breaking of the spell, it is in the poems recording the gradual process of disenchantment, and the struggle between the old love and the new loathing, that Catullus touches us most. How piercing is the pathos of such a poem as the _Si qua recordanti_ (lxxvi.), or the epigram in which he says that he loves and loathes, but knows not why, only knows that it is so, and that he is on the rack:--

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio: sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Or where he says that, pest as she is, he cannot curse a love who is dearer to him than both his eyes:--

Credis me potuisse meæ maledicere vitæ, Ambobus mihi quæ carior est oculis? Non potui, nec, si possem, tam perdite amarem.

And he suffered the more, as he had lavished on her the purest affections of his heart. His love for her--such was his own expression--was not simply that which men ordinarily feel for their mistresses, but such as the father feels for his sons and his sons-in-law:--

Dilexi tum te, non tantum ut vulgus amicam, Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.

But shameless as she is, and it is an impossibility for her to be otherwise, he cannot abandon her. Do what she will he is her slave. His mind, he says, was so straitened by her frailty, so beggared by its own devotion, that, even if she became virtuous, he could not love her with absolute goodwill, and if she stuck at nothing--drained vice to its very dregs--he could not give her up:--

Huc est mens deducta tuâ, mea Lesbia, culpâ Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo, Ut jam nec bene velle queam tibi, si optima fias, Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.

He compares himself to a man labouring under a cruel and incurable disease, a disease which is paralysing his energy, and draining life of its joy:--

Me miserum adspicite, et si vitam puriter egi, Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi, Quæ mihi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus Expulit ex omni pectore lætitias.

Nearly sixteen hundred years had to pass before the world was to have any parallel to these poems. And the parallel is certainly a remarkable one. In the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lesbia lives again; in the lover of the dark lady, Lesbia’s victim. Once more a false wife and a false mistress, not indeed beautiful, but with powers of fascination so irresistible that deformity itself becomes a charm, makes havoc of a poet’s peace. Once more a passion, as degraded as it is degrading, sows feuds among friends, and “infects with jealousy the sweetness of affiance.” Once more rises the bitter cry of a soul, conscious of the unspeakable degradation of a thraldom which it is agony to endure, and from which it would be agony to be emancipated. Compare for instance:--

My love is as a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please.

* * * * *

Past cure I am, now reason is past care, And frantic mad with evermore unrest, My thoughts and my discourse as madman’s are,

(Sonnet cxlvii.)

with Catullus, lxxvi.

And:--

Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill, That in the very refuse of thy deeds There is such strength and warrantise of skill, That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds. Who taught thee how to make me love thee more, The more I hear and see just cause of hate?

(Sonnet cl.)

with Catullus, lxxii., lxxiii., lxxv.; while Sonnet cxxxvii. presents a ghastly parallel with Catullus, lviii. Again, how exactly analogous is the adjuration to Quintius in Epigram lxxxii., with what finds expression in Sonnets xl.-xlii., and Sonnet cxx. But it would be tedious as well as superfluous to cite particular parallels where the whole position--which may be summed up in the two words of Catullus, “Odi et amo,”--is identical.

Not the least remarkable thing about Catullus is his range and his versatility. It is truly extraordinary that the same pen should have given us such finished social portraits as “Suffenus iste” (xxii.), “Ad Furium” (xxiii.), “In Egnatium” (xxxix.); the perfection of such serious fooling as we find in the “Lugete, O Veneres” (iii.), and, if we may apply such an expression to the most delicious love poem ever written, the “Acme and Septimius” (xlv.); of such humorous fooling as we find in the “Varus me meus ad suos amores” (x.), the “O Colonia quæ cupis” (xvii.), the “Adeste, hendecasyllabi,” the “Oramus, si forte non molestum” (lv.); such epic as we have in the “Peleus and Thetis”; such triumphs of richness, splendour, and grace as we have in the three marriage poems; such a superb expression of the highest imaginative power, penetrated with passion and enthusiasm, as we have in the _Attis_; such concentrated invective and satire as mark some of the lampoons; such mock heroic as we have in the _Coma Berenices_; such piercing pathos as penetrates the autobiographical poems, and the poems dedicated to Lesbia.

Catullus has been compared to Keats, but the comparison is not a happy one. His nearest analogy among modern poets is Burns. Both were, in Tennyson’s phrase, “dowered with the love of love, the scorn of scorn,” and, in the poems of both, those passions find the intensest expression. Both had an exquisite sympathy with all that appeals, either in nature or in humanity, to the senses and the affections. Both were sensualists and libertines without being effeminate, or without being either depraved or hardened. In both, indeed, an infinite tenderness is perhaps the predominating feature. Both had humour, that of Catullus being the more caustic, that of Burns the more genial. Both were distinguished by sincerity and simplicity; both waged war with charlatanry and baseness. Burns had the richer nature and was the greater as a man; Catullus was the more accomplished artist.

But it is time to turn to the book which has recalled Catullus and Lesbia. Mr. Tremenheere has, with great ingenuity, succeeded in concocting by a process of elaborate dovetailing a very pretty romance which he divides into nine chapters, the first being “The Birth of Love,” the second, third and fourth, “Possession,” “Quarrels” and “Reconciliation,” the fifth, sixth, and seventh, “Doubt,” “A Brother’s Death” and “Unfaithfulness,” the last two, “Avoidance” and “The Death of Love.” The chief objection to this is that it is for the most part fanciful, and is absolutely without warrant, either from tradition or from probability. Many of the poems pressed into the service of his narrative by Mr. Tremenheere have nothing whatever to do with Lesbia. Such would be xiii., “The invitation to Fabullus,” xiv., “The Acme and Septimius.”

The translations are very unequal. Of many of them it may be said in Dogberry’s phrase that they “are tolerable and not to be endured,” or to borrow an expression from Byron “so middling bad were better.” Thus the powerful poem to Gellius (xci.) is attenuated into:--