No More Learning

But the Celtic
spirit--for that is what it is--is over-mastering. It is its
characteristic that it constantly girds a man--or a poet--and carries
him whither he would not. The fourth _Aeneid_ is the triumph of an
unconscionable Celticism over the whole moral plan of Vergil's epic.

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 annuit,

--'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
_facetus_ with the idea of 'wit'. It is to be connected, it would seem,
etymologically with _fax_, 'a torch'. Its primitive meaning is
'brightness', 'brilliance': and if we wish to understand what Horace
means when he speaks of the element of '_facetum_' in Vergil, perhaps
'glow' or 'fire' will serve us better than 'wit'. _Facetus_, _facetiae_,
_infacetus_, _infacetiae_ are favourite words with Catullus. With
_lepidus_, _illepidus_, _uenustus_, _inuenustus_ they are his usual
terms of literary praise and dispraise. These words hit, of course,
often very superficial effects. Yet with Catullus and his friends they
stand for a literary ideal deeper than the contexts in which they occur:
and an ideal which, while it no doubt derives from the enthusiasm of
Alexandrian study, yet assumes a distinctively Italian character. Poetry
must be _facetus_: it must glow and dance.