No More Learning

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. The Italian spirit worked always under
the spell of Rome, and not under any merely external compulsion. And the
spell of Rome is over the whole of Roman poetry. The Italians were only
a nation _through Rome_: and a great poetry must have behind it a great
life: it must express a great people, their deeds and their ideals.
Roman poetry does, beyond almost any other poetry, bear the impress of a
great nation. And after all the _language_ of this poetry is the
language of the Romans. It is said of it, of course, that it is an
unpoetical language. And it is true that it has not the dance and
brightness of Greek: that it is wanting in fineness and subtlety: that
it is defective in vocabulary. All this is true. Yet the final test of
the poetical character of a language is the poetry that is written in
it. The mere sound of Roman poetry is the sound of a great nation. And
here let us remember what we ought never to forget in reading Roman
poetry. It was not made to be read. It was made to be spoken. The Roman
for the most part did not read. He was read to.