No More Learning

Often he is wise and mild and
friendly. But as often as not he is merely the _uindemiator_, thinly
disguised, pert and ready and unscrupulous, 'slinging vinegar' not only
at what is morally wrong but at anything which he happens either to
dislike or not to understand. The vices of his--often
imaginary--antagonist are recounted with evident relish and with parade
of detail.

It is not only in Satire that we meet this _Italum acetum_. We meet it
also in the poetry of personal invective. This department of Roman
poetry would hardly perhaps reward study--and it might very well revolt
the student--if it were not that Catullus has here achieved some of his
most memorable effects. In no writer is the _Italum acetum_ found in so
undiluted a sort. And he stands in this perhaps not so much for himself
as for a Transpadane school. The lampoons of his compatriot Furius
Bibaculus were as famous as his own. Vergil himself--if, as seems
likely, the _Catalepton_ be a genuine work of Vergil--did not escape the
Transpadane fashion. In fact the Italian aptitude for invective seems in
North Italy, allied with the study of Archilochus, to have created a new
type in Latin literature--a type which Horace essays not very
successfully in the _Epodes_ and some of the _Odes_. The invective of
Catullus has no humbug of moral purpose. It has its motive in mere hate.
Yet Catullus knew better than any one how subtle and complex an emotion
is hate. Two poems will illustrate better than anything I could say his
power here: and will at the same time make clear what I mean when I
distinguish the Italian from the Roman temperament in Latin poetry.
Let any one take up the eleventh poem of Catullus:

cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullam amans uere sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens.

There is invective. There is the lash with a vengeance. Yet the very
stanza that follows ends in a sob:

nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratrost.

Turn now for an inverse effect to the fifty-eighth poem:

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes . . .

Note the dragging cadences, the pathetic iteration, the scarce-concealed
agony of longing. Yet this five-line poem ends in a couplet of
intolerable obscenity.

There once more you have the unpredictable Celtic temperament--obscenity
of wrath dissolving in the tenderness of unbidden tears, fond regret
stung suddenly to a rage foul and unscrupulous.

But let me here guard against a misapprehension. The more closely we
study Roman poetry the more clearly do we become aware of the presence
in it of a non-Roman element: and the more does it seem as though this
non-Roman element were the originative force, as though it were to this
that Roman poetry owes most of that in it which we regard as essentially
poetical. The quickening force in the best Roman poetry is the Italian
blood. Yet we speak of this poetry as Roman: and it is not without
reason that we do so. If it was to a great extent made by Italians, it
was made by Italians who were already Romanized. Indeed the Italian and
the Roman elements are never so separate or so disparate in actuality as
they appear in literary analysis.