No More Learning

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.

Ennius is a poet in whom the Roman, as distinct from the Italian,
temperament has asserted itself strongly. It has asserted itself most
powerfully, of course, in the _Annals_. Even in the _Annals_, however,
there is a great deal that is neither Greek nor Roman. There is an
Italian vividness. The coloured phraseology is Italian. And a good deal
more. But it is in the tragedies--closely as they follow Greek
models--that the Italian element is most pronounced. Take this from the
_Alexander_:

adest, adest fax obuoluta sanguine atque incendio:
multos annos latuit, ciues, ferte opem et restinguite.
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 Ennius. Nor is their fire and swiftness Roman. They
are preserved to us in a passage of Cicero's treatise _De Diuinatione_:
and in the same passage Cicero applies to another fragment of Ennius
notable epithets. He speaks of it as _poema tenerum et moratum et
molle_. The element of _moratum_, the deep moral earnestness, is Roman.
The other two epithets carry us outside the typically Roman
temperament. Everybody remembers Horace's characterization of Vergil:

molle atque facetum
Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae.

Horace is speaking there of the Vergil of the Transpadane period: the
reference is to the _Eclogues_. The Romans had _hard_ minds. And in the
_Eclogues_ they 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.