Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
CATULLUS AND LESBIA.
Although chronology would plead for the postponement till much later of the record of Catullus's love-fever, and it might seem more in order to set first the floating epigrams and occasional pieces which treat of town or country jokes, witticisms, petits soupers, and the like, and to make the reader acquainted with the everyday life of the poet at home or abroad; yet the passion for Lesbia was so absorbing when it was lighted, and possessed its victim so thoroughly, that we must needs treat it first in our sketch of his writings. A poet's love has mostly been inseparable from his after-fame; and in a higher degree than the Cynthia of Propertius, the Corinna of Ovid, or the Delia, probably, of Tibullus, does the Lesbia of Catullus fasten her spell around him, to the exclusion of other and fresh loves, of which he was apparently cautious and forbearing both before and after the crisis of his master-passion. His erotic verses, save those to Lesbia, are but few. Ipsithilla, Aufilena, and Ametina are mere passing and casual amours, soon forgotten; he is oftener found supping with a friend and his chère amie than flirting on his own account; and there is nothing in Catullus that betrays the almost certainty that his mistress has justification in his infidelity for any number of her own lâches and transgressions, such as is always peeping out in the elegies of Propertius. On the contrary, it is fair to believe that in his case "the heart that once truly loved ne'er could forget," however unfortunate and direful its choice and the issue of it. He was true to the ideal and stanch to the championship of Lesbia's resplendent beauty, long after he had proved that it was not for him; and however disastrous to his peace of mind, health, and even life, the results of her coldness and fickleness, the spell clung to his heart, even after his mind was cured; and so Lesbia asserts foremost mention when we call up the surroundings of Catullus.
Who, then, was this potent enchantress? The elder sister, it is pretty well agreed, of that notorious P. Clodius who was slain by Milo, and a member of the great Claudian house at Rome. Like brother, like sister! The former had added a grave sacrilege to unheard-of profligacy, and outraged even the lax standard of Roman society in his day by the versatility of his shamelessness. To the character of an unbridled libertine he added that of an unscrupulous political incendiary, with whom poison and assassination were wonted modes of removing a rival from his path. The Clodia whom we identify by almost common consent with the Lesbia of Catullus was the second of his three sisters, and unequally yoked with Metellus Celer, who was consul in 60 B.C., and on frequent occasions a correspondent of Cicero. But, like her sisters, she was notorious for her infidelities; and, like her brother, was not nice as to methods of getting rid of such as slighted her advances or tired of her fickleness. Even Cicero was credited with having stirred her passion unwittingly. A gay friend of Catullus, Cælius Rufus, had incurred her persecutions and false accusations of an attempt to poison her, by freeing himself from his liaison with her; and Cicero had defended him in a speech which furnishes the details of her abandoned life of intrigue and profligacy. With her husband she was at constant war; and his death by poison in 59 B.C. was freely laid at his wife's door. So, at least, we gather from Cicero's defence of Cælius, delivered in the following year, which saddles her with epithets betokening the depths to which she had descended in her career of vice and licence. After her husband's death, and her release from a yoke which she had never seriously respected, she appears to have given herself over to the licentious pleasures of Baiæ, kept open house with the young roués of the capital at her mansion on the Palatine, and consorted with them without shame or delicacy by the Tiber's bank, or on the Appian Road. In such company Catullus, as an intimate of Cælius, Gellius, and others whose names were at one time or another in her visitors' book, most probably first met her; and the woman had precisely the fascinations to entangle one so full of the tender and voluptuous, and withal so cultivated and accomplished as Catullus must have been. It has been epigrammatically said of the women of that epoch at Rome that "the harp and books of Simonides and Anacreon had replaced the spindle and distaff; and that with a dearth of Lucretias," or chaste matrons, "there was no lack, unfortunately, of Sempronias"[1]—i.e., unchaste blue-stockings. But had Clodia's or Lesbia's culture and cleverness been the head and front of her offending, the poet might less have rued his introduction to a sorceress who, "insatiable of love, and almost incapable of loving," had ambition, vanity, and woman's pride sufficient to covet a name in connection with the foremost lyric poet of the day. On his part there seems to have been no resistance to the toils; and no wonder if, with the ends of her vanity to achieve, she bent her literary talents, as well as her coquetry and natural graces of mien and person, to his captivation. Cicero has recorded that she was talked of, like Juno, as βοῶπις, in compliment to her grand and flashing eyes; and there is no lack of evidence that her beauty, grace, figure, and wit were rare. It might be asked on what certitude this description of Clodia is transferred so confidently to Lesbia. In the first place, let it be admitted that, after the fashion of the Alexandrian poets, the custom prevailed with such Roman writers as Varro, Atacinus, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, to celebrate their mistresses under the feigned names of Leucadia, Lycoris, Delia, Cynthia, Corinna; and it will not seem unlikely that Catullus should choose for the nom de plume of his enslaver a name recalling Sappho the Lesbian, especially as it was probably by a sympathetic translation into Latin sapphics of her famous ode to Phaon that he first announced his suit and evinced his passion. After this is granted, it will remain to decide from internal evidence whether there are grounds of identification between the Lesbia of Catullus's poetry and the famous or infamous sister of Publius Clodius. They need only be summarised to establish a verdict in the affirmative, and confirm the statement of Apuleius that she whom Ovid tells us Catullus loved under the feigned name of Lesbia, was the Clodia whose character Cicero painted in such undisguised force of colours. First, both lay under the stigma of guilty relations with a brother. Secondly, both appear to have at one time indulged an amour with Cælius Rufus, and both were unmistakably married women. Thirdly, the characters of both coincide in point of wit, learning, and cultivation, their persons in exceptional beauty, and their tempers in caprice and occasional violence. Fourthly, the rank of Clodia was distinctly high and patrician; and though an evil name attached to her on Cicero's showing, there is no reason to suppose that she utterly disregarded appearances. Lesbia's rank, indeed, is not indicated in plain terms by her poet, but it comes out in a probable interpretation of some expressions in an elegiac poem to Allius, that she was certainly no vulgar intriguante, but met her lover at the house of that noble, and so far paid the outward respect to decency, which is wont to be retained later than most other characteristics by the well-born.
The remains of Catullus would be deprived of three parts of their interest, had the Lesbian odes and ditties been unfortunately lost. Not only, however, is this not the case, inasmuch as, of many extant, she is the distinct burden: but many poems, not professedly addressed to her, are really referable to her inspiration. Accordingly, it is a part of the rôle of every critic of Catullus to arrange, according to his skill in divination or conjecture, the sequence of the poems of the Lesbian series; and that which it has been thought most convenient to follow in these pages is the plausible and clear arrangement of Theodore Martin, the most congenial and appreciative of the poet's English translators. It is a happy and shrewd instinct which places first in the series that model translation from Sappho's Greek fragment, which seems at once a naming-day ode and a declaration of passion, fenced and shielded under the guise of being an imitative song. The poet, in the fervour of his new-kindled devotion, in the flutter of hope and yearning, and not yet in the happiness of even short-lived assurance, pours forth a wonderful representation of one of the most passionate of Greek love-songs; and therein (if we strike out an alien stanza, which reads quite out of place, and must have been inserted, in dark days, by some blundering botcher or wrong-headed moralist) transfers from the isles of Greece burning words which have suffered nothing in the process, and which perhaps served the poet for a confession of his flame:—
And mightier far, if that may be,
Who, sitting face to face with thee,
Can there serenely gaze;
Can hear thee sweetly speak the while,
Can see thee, Lesbia, sweetly smile;
Joys that from me my senses wile
And leave me in a maze.
My voice is to its task untrue.
My tongue is paralysed, and through
Each limb a subtle flame
Runs swiftly; murmurs dim arise
Within my ears, across my eyes
A sudden darkness spreads, and sighs
And tremors shake my frame."[2]
Nothing that we could add by way of comment could enhance the truth to nature of the sensations, which the poet renders more vivid as he endorses them, and which Tennyson and Shelley have, consciously or unconsciously, enumerated in kindred sequence in "Eleonore" and the "Lines to Constantia singing." There is something in their reality and earnest truth from the heart, for which we look in vain for imitation in the Elizabethan lyrists. Probably to the same season of hope and wooing must be referred the two pretty ditties on Lesbia's sparrow, in life and in death, which the most casual of readers connects with Catullus, and which have given the key-note to any number of imitations, parodies, and kindred conceits, though, it may be confidently averred, at a marked abatement of ease and grace. In the first, he pictures with vivid touches the coy and witching charmer, inflaming her jealous and impatient lover, and haply disguising her own passion, by playful toying with her pet birdie, to which she surrenders her finger-tip in mock provocation. He has plainly no sympathy with misplaced favours, as he regards the privileges vouchsafed the favourite, whilst he hungers in the very reach of enjoyment. And his moral from what he witnesses is the simple suggestion of a less trifling and more worthy object—himself—though there is a little obscurity in the connection with Atalanta and the apples. We give it, in this instance, from a stray version by the author of 'Lorna Doone'—
Like herself, and we could find
For sad harassings of mind
Something gay to set them free!
That the nimble demoiselle,
Charmed by golden fruit, betrayed
All her vows to die a maid."—R. D. B.
Perchance the poet did not take into account that the fruit, once grasped, was scarce worth the effort to secure it; that all was not gold that glittered; that Lesbia was incapable of deeper feeling than wantoning with a bird-pet. But the birdie's elegy is a yet more memorable poem,—one, too, that elicits the poet's element of pathos. Written to ingratiate himself with Lesbia, its burden is a loyal commemoration of his quondam rival; but a line or two, even if suggested by an Alexandrian idyllist, on the greed of Orcus and the brief life of all that is lovely and lovable, touch a chord which was never far from the vein of Catullus, though he is soon recalled to the sensible detriment which his lady's eyes are likely to suffer from her tears:—
Mourn, fair youths, where'er ye be!
Dead my Lesbia's sparrow is—
Sparrow that was all her bliss;
Than her very eyes more dear;
For he made her dainty cheer,
Knew her well, as any maid
Knows her mother; never strayed
From her bosom, but would go
Hopping round her, to and fro;
And to her, and her alone,
Chirruped with such pretty tone.
Now he treads that gloomy track
Whence none ever may come back.
Out upon you, and your power,
Which all fairest things devour,
Orcus' gloomy shades, that e'er
Ye took my bird that was so fair!
Ah, the pity of it! Thou
Poor bird, thy doing 'tis, that now
My loved one's eyes are swollen and red
With weeping for her darling dead."
It only needs to compare this delicate and musical piece, and the subtle infusion of its (in the original) tender diminutives, with Ovid's "On the Death of a Parrot," in which the parrot is very secondary to its mistress, and we shall discern the elements of popularity which made it a household word up to the time of Juvenal, and still preserve it as a trial-ground for neatness and finish in translators.
But soon we find a song that gives a note of progress in Lesbia's good graces. A sense of enjoyment and abandon animates the strain in which Catullus pleads for licence to love his fill, on the ground that to-morrow death may terminate the brief reign of fruition. In sharp contrast with the heyday of present joy he sets the drear prospect which had made itself felt in the poem last quoted; but now it is as an incentive to "living while we may:"—
Brighter in the morning skies;
But when sets our little light,
We must sleep in endless night."
The moral, or conclusion, is not that which commends itself to faith or hope; but the pagan mind of the erotic poets delighted, as we may see in Ovid, Tibullus, and Propertius, also in the contrast of now and then—the gay brightness of the passing hour with the dark shadow looming in the background—and drew from it no profounder suggestion than—love and kisses! In the rationale or arithmetic of these, Catullus shows himself an adept. In the piece just quoted he piles up an addition sum that takes away the breath, and eventually gives a reason for
Until we lose all calculation;
So envy shall not mar our blisses
By numbering up our tale of kisses."
The ancients had a motive for letting their kisses pass counting, which does not appear in the love-ditties of our Herricks and Drummonds, though both betray the influence of Catullus—the deprecation, to wit, of magic, mischance, ill-luck, or an evil-eye, which their superstition considered unascertained numbers to secure. Exemption from such, then, was a stimulus to the lover's appetite for kisses, as is pleaded again by the poet "To Lesbia Kind" in C. vii., where he exhausts the round of similes for numbers numberless—the sea-sands, the stars of night, and so forth—and doubts whether the very largest definite number
Or with tongue malignant blast,"
could satisfy his thirst and fever. One could wish that to the Lesbian series might be linked a short poem in kindred vein (C. xlviii.) which may well sum up the poet's dicta upon the subject, inscribed "To a Beauty"—
And my kisses were not crimes,
I would snatch that honeyed bliss
Full three hundred thousand times!
Not though that sweet crop should yield
Kisses far outnumbering
Corn-ears in the harvest-field."
But whilst as yet Catullus enjoys a dream of successful love, and the fancied happiness of possession, with no misgivings arising from awakened jealousy or fears of fickleness, has he left any hint whereby we may reach the secret of Lesbia's witchery? There is one which does pre-eminently supply this—his comparison of her with a contemporary beauty generally admired, by name Quinctia. The latter, he admits, has several feminine charms; but Lesbia's attraction is the concentration in herself of all the perfections of the most peerless women. Hers is a gathering of "every creature's best" into one ineffable grace, "so perfect and so peerless" is she![3] But let Catullus speak through his eloquent interpreter— :
Is Quinctia, and in mine
Her shape is tall, and straight withal,
And her complexion fine.
I grant that she can show;
But all the concentrated grace
Of 'beautiful,' oh no!
That subtle voiceless art—
That something which delights the mind,
And satisfies the heart.
And for herself she stole
The charms most rare of every fair,
To frame a perfect whole."
But anon comes a change over the poet's complacent satisfaction. This perfect creature is only outwardly and bodily perfect; or, if her mental endowments enhance the attractions of her form and beauty, he soon finds that the heart is wanting. It was her pride in the homage of a brilliant and popular poet that had bidden her win him to her feet: the effort to retain him there was too great for her fickle temperament, if indeed she did not trust her fascinations to keep him attached to her train—at fast or loose, as it suited her purpose. It would hardly seem that he could have counted upon much more, if we are to connect with Lesbia, as there is every reason to do, the poem to Manius Acilius Glabrio, in which he professes toleration of rivals, and goes so far as to say that—
Possess her on the days she culls for me,
And signalises with a whiter stone,
I care not how inconstant she may be."
—(C. lxviii. ad fin.)
Perhaps for a while it sufficed him to act as his own detective, and warn off such fops as Gellius, Alfenus, Egnatius, and Ravidus with sarcasms, innuendos, and threats of biting iambics, if they forestalled his privileged visits. He may have trusted also somewhat to the gratitude he might quicken in Lesbia's bosom by such compliments by contrast as the skit he wrote on the mistress of Mamurra of Formiæ, a creature of Julius Cæsar, who had raised him in Gaul from a low station, and put him in the way of acquiring wealth for the simple purpose of squandering it. Its tenor is a mock compliment to a provincial belle of features nowise so perfect and well matched as they might be. And the suggestion that this is she about whom the province raves, leads up to what Catullus deems the ne plus ultra of absurdity:—
My Lesbia's, mine, surpasses!
Oh woe, to live with such a race
Of buzzards, owls, and asses!"—(C. xliii.)
Lesbia, however, most probably felt her hold on her poet to be sufficiently tenable for her taste or purpose, and, wanton-like, shrank not from trespassing on a love which, however sensual, might have been counted as stanch for the period. And so she doubtless trespassed upon it, and outraged him by some more than common heartlessness; for such must have been the provocation for his touching verses to "Lesbia False," which open a new phase in the history of this attachment, and discover a depth of pathos and tenderness in the contemplation of eternal separation, which in the brief sunshine of her favour he had had no scope for developing. The feeling which is aroused is not one of pique or retaliation, or any like selfish resort of vengeance: he steels himself, theoretically, against the weakness of further dalliance with one so faithless; but his concern is for the most part about her fall from a pedestal whereon his love had set her:—
No woman e'er by thee again!"
Some lingering glances are indeed thrown in the direction of past delights, and of "love for love;" but the burden of his song is the change it will be to her when she realises that
Has made her to be loved by none."
There is no consolation to be drawn from a bitter smile at this. Catullus sees the course which self-respect dictates to him, but cannot keep from the thought as to Lesbia—
Who'll woo thee now? who praise thy charms?
Who now be all in all to thee,
And live but in thy loving arms?
Whose lip wilt thou in rapture bite?
But thou, Catullus, think of this,
And spurn her in thine own despite."—(C. viii.)
Fine resolves "to let the wanton go," which she, on her part, appears to have faintly opposed by offhand professions and general assurances, which Catullus, for the matter of that, was quite sharp enough to see through. "My mistress," he writes in C. lxx.—
Of all the many that she knows,
She'd rather wed than me, not one,
Though Jove himself were to propose.
To him who fancies he has caught her,
'Tis only fit it should be writ
In air or in the running water."
The last line of the first stanza is a commonplace for a Roman fair one's assurance of stanchness which, if analysed, will prove to be a very safe averment. Jove the resistless was never likely to put her constancy to the test, though Ovid and his brother poets fabled otherwise. In their view, as Theodore Martin remarks, "the purity was too sublime for belief which could withstand the advances of the sire of gods and men." It is something, then, to find our lovelorn poet retaining enough strength of mind to meet the lady's oath by a counter-commonplace; though it must be owned that his good resolutions and steeled heart do not count for much, when the next poem in Martin's arrangement exhibits him not only declining, as generosity might prompt him, to abuse the frail one himself, but also disposed to turn a sceptical ear to certain scandals which had been brought to his notice:—
Profane her name I hold so dear?
Pshaw! you with any libels let
Your pot-house gossips cram your ear!"
Perhaps to this state of suspense and partial estrangement may be referable the verses about Lesbia's vow to burn the 'Annals' of Volusius, a wretched poet whom she had professed to favour, if Catullus would only return to her arms, and cease brandishing his iambic thunderbolts. The crisis at last has come when the idol has been shattered; but the votary cannot yet shake off the blind servitude which his better judgment repudiates. As yet he can comfort himself with those fallacious tokens of mutual love which appear in his ninety-second piece, and which may be given, for a change, from Swift's translation:—
To talk of me she never fails.
Now, hang me, but for all her art
I find that I have gained her heart.
My proof is this, I plainly see
The case is just the same with me;
I curse her every hour sincerely,
Yet hang me but I love her dearly!"
Unfortunately, the love has vitality and elements of steadfastness only on the one side. Repeated sins against it open wide the eyes of Catullus, till he is forced to own to himself that the sole link that is left between them is rather a passion of wild desire than the purer and tenderer flame, which burned for her whilst he believed her true. Here is his confession of the new phase of his love, the love that's merely a madness:—
As thou hast been by me,
Nor lover yet was ever seen
So true as I to thee.
Hast by thy falsehood wrought
Such havoc in my soul, and now
So madly 'tis distraught,
All pure and chaste as ice;
Nor could it cease to love thee, though
Besmirched with every vice."—(C. lxxv.)
He can now condone the past for the mere bribe of a passing favour. He is one moment lifted to ecstasies by the "agreeable surprise" of Lesbia's unexpected kindness, and pours out his soul in transports breathing passionate prayers for a reunion which his secret heart seems to whisper has no elements of continuance. When he sings in C. cix.—
While others change with life's still changing hue,
The ties that bind us now more firmly twined,
Our hearts as fond, our love as warm and true"—
the petition is rendered of none effect by the misgiving implied in his fond hope that Lesbia's professions may be sincere. Full soon must the truth have undeceived him, for it must have been after, but not long after, this revival of his transient bliss, that, on the eve of foreign travel with a view to placing the sea between himself and his fickle mistress, he commissioned Furius and Aurelius, friends and comrades for whom he elsewhere shows his regard, to carry her a message of plaintive adieu, which reads like a threnody of buried love:—
Sweep gaily on in passion's whirl!
By scores caressed, but loving none
Of all the fools by thee undone;
Nor give that love a thought, which I
So nursed for thee in days gone by,
Now by thy guile slain in an hour,
Even as some little wilding flower,
That on the meadow's border blushed,
Is by the passing ploughshare crushed."—(C. xii.)
The crushed hope, which is likened to the frail flower on the meadow's edge next the furrow (or, as we call it, the "adland"), is one of the most graceful images in the whole of Catullus, and speaks volumes for his freshness of fancy, whilst asserting the depth of his passion. After this, there seems to have remained for the poet little save pathetic retrospects, which he can scarce have hoped would wake remorse. Perhaps it was not the way to quicken this, to plead in formâ pauperis his own deserts and good deeds of happier days, nor yet the fell disease which is wasting him away, in the form of a broken heart. In the 76th poem, such, however, was one of his last references to the subject, a burden of passionate regrets, which are mingled with distinct admissions that he knows Lesbia to be wholly past reclaiming. The whole tone of it bespeaks emancipation and return to a free mind, purchased, however, at the cost of an abiding heartache. But was it not time? Would the poet have deserved a niche in the temple of fame, could he have still dallied with one of whom he could write to Cælius Rufus, an old admirer, who had found her out much earlier, in terms we can only approach by free translation, as follows?—
Lesbia I loved past self, and home, and light,
And all my friends,—has sunk i' th' mire so low,
That in its lanes and alleys Rome doth know
No name so cheap, no fame so held at naught
By coarse-grained striplings of the basest sort."
—(C. lviii.) D.