his ballad _William and Margaret_, his _Edwin and Emma_, and his _Birks
of Invermay_ sufficiently prove, but he has written nothing tolerable in
the vein of _Rule Britannia_. Neatness, and tenderness bordering on
effeminacy, mark his characteristic lyrics, and, if we except a few
lines in his _Tyburn_ and the eight concluding lines in a poem entitled
_A Fragment_, there is no virility in his poetry at all. Of the
patriotism and ardent love of liberty which pervade Thomson’s poems, and
which glow so intensely in _Rule Britannia_, he has absolutely nothing.
Nor are there any analogues or parallels in his poems to this lyric
either in form--for if we are not mistaken, he has never employed the
stanza in which it is written--or in imagery, or phraseology. Like
Thomson, whom, in his narrative blank-verse poems, he servilely
imitates, he is fond of the words “azure” and “aerial”; and the word
“azure” is the only verbal coincidence linking the phraseology of his
acknowledged poems with the lyric in question. It may be added, too,
that a man who was capable of the jingling rubbish of such a masque as
_Britannia_, and who had the execrable taste to substitute Bolingbroke’s
stanzas for the stanzas which they supersede, could hardly have been
equal to the production of this lyric. We believe, then, that there can
be no reasonable doubt that the honour of composing _Rule Britannia_
belongs to Thomson the bard, and not to Mallet the fribble.
But to return to Mr. Tovey and the “mare’s-nest” to which we have
referred. This mare’s-nest is the assumption that Pope assisted Thomson
in revising _The Seasons_. Since Robert Bell’s edition this has come to
be received as an established fact, but we propose to show that it rests
on a hypothesis demonstrably baseless.
There is, in the British Museum, an interleaved copy of the first volume
of the London edition of Thomson’s works, dated 1738, and the part of
the volume which contains _The Seasons_ is full of manuscript deletions,
corrections, and additions. These are in two handwritings, the one being
unmistakably the handwriting of Thomson, the other beyond all question
the handwriting of some one else. Almost all these corrections were
inserted in the edition prepared for the press in 1744, and now,
consequently, form part of the present text. The corrections in the hand
which is not the hand of Thomson are, in many cases, of extraordinary
merit, showing a fineness of ear and delicacy of touch quite above the
reach of Thomson himself. We will give two or three samples. Thomson
had written in _Autumn_ 290 seqq.:--
“With harvest shining all these fields are thine,
And if my rustics may presume so far,
Their master, too, who then indeed were blest
To make the daughter of Acasto so.”
The unknown corrector substitutes the present reading:--
“The fields, the master, all, my fair, are thine;
If to the various blessings which thy house
Has lavished on me thou wilt add that bliss,
That dearest bliss, the power of blessing thee!”
The other is famous. Thomson had written:--
“Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty’s self,
Recluse among the woods, if City-dames
Will deign their faith. And thus she went compell’d
By strong necessity, with as serene
And pleased a look as patience can put on,
To glean Palemon’s fields.”
For these vapid and dissonant verses is substituted by the corrector,
who very properly retains the first verse, what is now the text:--
“Recluse amid the close embow’ring woods,
As in the hollow breast of Apennine,
Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,
A myrtle rises, far from human eyes,
And breathes its balmy fragrance o’er the wild.
So flourished blooming, and unseen by all,
The sweet Lavinia,” etc.
The transformation of a single line is often most felicitous: thus in
_Winter_ the flat line
“Through the lone night that bids the waves arise”
is grandly altered into
“Through the black night that sits immense around.”
Thus, in _Spring_, Thomson had merely written
“Whose aged oaks and venerable gloom
Invite the noisy rooks;”
but his corrector alters and extends the passage into
“Whose aged elms and venerable oaks
Invite the rooks, who high amid the boughs
In early spring their airy city build,
And caw with ceaseless clamour.”
Indeed, throughout _The Seasons_ Thomson’s indebtedness to his corrector
is incalculable; many of the most felicitous touches are due to him.
Now, who was this corrector? Let Mr. Tovey answer. “It has long been
accepted as a fact among scholars that Pope assisted Thomson in the
composition of _The Seasons_. Our original authority is, we suppose,
Warton.” The truth is that our original authority for this statement is
neither Warton nor any other writer of the eighteenth century, but
simply the conjecture of Mitford--in other words, Mitford’s mere
assumption that the handwriting of the corrector is the handwriting of
Pope; and, if we are not mistaken,--for Mitford may have given earlier
currency to it in some other place--the conjecture appeared for the
first time in Mitford’s edition of Gray, published in 1814. In his copy
of the volume, containing the MS. notes, he bolsters up his statement
by two assertions and references: “That Pope saw some pieces of
Thomson’s in manuscript is clear from a letter in Bowles’s _Supplement_,
page 194” (an obvious misprint for 294). But on turning to the
references all that we find is--it is in a letter dated February
1738/9--“I have yet seen but three acts of Mr. Thomson’s, but I am told,
and believe by what I have seen that it excels in the pathetic”; the
reference is plainly to Thomson’s tragedy, _Edward and Eleonora_. Again,
Mitford writes: “On Thomson’s submitting his poems to Pope” (see
Warton’s edition, vol. viii., page 340), and again we get no proof. All
that Pope says is, “I am just taken up”--he is writing to Aaron Hill
under date November 1732--“by Mr. Thomson in the perusal of a new poem
he has brought me;” this new poem being almost certainly _Liberty_, in
the composition of which Thomson was then engaged. So far from the
tradition having any countenance from Warton, it is as certain as
anything can be, that Warton knew nothing about it. In his _Essay on
Pope_ he gives an elaborate account of _The Seasons_, and he has more
than once referred to Pope and Thomson together; but he says not a word,
either in this Essay or in his edition of Pope’s Works, about Pope
having corrected Thomson’s poetry. If Pope assisted Thomson, to the
extent indicated in these corrections, such an incident, considering
the fame of Thomson and the fame of Pope, must have been known to some
at least of the innumerable editors, biographers, and anecdotists
between 1742 and 1814. It could hardly have escaped being recorded by
Murdoch, Mallet, or Warburton, by Ruffhead, by Savage or Spence, by
Theophilus Cibber or Johnson. It is incredible that such an interesting
secret should have been kept either by Thomson himself or by Pope.
Again, whoever the corrector was, he had a fine ear for blank verse, and
must indeed have been a master of it. There is no proof that Pope ever
wrote in blank verse; indeed, we have the express testimony of Lady
Wortley Montagu that he never attempted it, and his Shakespeare
conclusively proves that he had anything but a nice ear for its rhythm.
With all this collateral evidence against the probability of the
corrector being Pope, we come to the evidence which should settle the
question, the evidence of handwriting. There is no lack of material for
forming an opinion on this point. Pope’s autograph MSS. are abundant,
illustrating his hand at every period in his life. It is amazing to find
Mitford asserting that his friends Ellis and Combe, at the British
Museum, had no doubt about the hand of the corrector being the hand of
Pope. Mr. Tovey candidly admits that, “if the best authorities at the
Museum many years ago were positive that the handwriting was Pope’s,
their successors at the present time are equally positive that it is
not.” Such is the very decided opinion of Mr. Warner; such, also, as Mr.
Tovey acknowledges, is the opinion of Professor Courthope, and such, we
venture to think, will be the opinion of every one who will take the
trouble to compare the hands. Mr. Tovey himself is plainly very uneasy,
and indeed goes so far as to say that “it has all along been perplexing
to me how the opinion that this was Pope’s handwriting could ever have
been _confidently_” (the italics are his) “entertained”; and yet in his
notes he follows Bell, and inserts these corrections with Pope’s
initials.
We search in vain among those who are known to have been on friendly
terms with Thomson for a probable claimant. It could not, as his other
stupid revisions of Thomson’s verses sufficiently show, have been
Lyttleton. Mallet’s blank verse is conclusive against his having had any
hand in the corrections. Collins and Hammond are out of the question. It
is just possible, though hardly likely, that the corrector was
Armstrong. He was on very intimate terms with Thomson. His own poem
proves that he could sometimes write excellent blank verse, but the
touch and rhythm of the corrections are, it must be admitted, not the
touch and rhythm of Armstrong.
What has long, therefore, been represented and circulated as an
undisputed fact--namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of
_The Seasons_--rests not, as all Thomson’s modern editors have supposed,
on the traditions of the eighteenth century, and on the testimony of
authenticated handwriting, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the
volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections
are originals, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the
pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is,
of course, possible that the corrections are Thomson’s own, and that the
differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some
cases he was his own scribe, that in others he employed an amanuensis;
but the intrinsic unlikeness of the corrections, made in the strange
hand, to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case
there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the corrector was Pope.
CATULLUS AND LESBIA.[47]
[Footnote 47: _The Lesbia of Catullus._ Arranged and translated by J. H.
A. Tremenheere. London.]
Perhaps the best thing in this world is youth, and the poetry of
Catullus is its very incarnation. The “young Catullus” he was to his
contemporaries, and the young Catullus he will be to the end of time. To
turn over his pages is to recall the days when all within and all
without conspire to make existence a perpetual feast, when life’s lord
is pleasure, its end enjoyment, its law impulse, before experience and
satiety have disillusioned and disgusted, and we are still in Dante’s
phrase, “trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.” And the poet of youth had
the good fortune not to survive youth; of the dregs and lees of the life
he chose he had no taste. While the cup which “but sparkles near the
brim” was still sparkling for him, death dashed it from his lips. At
thirty his tale was told,--and a radiant figure, a sunny memory and a
golden volume were immortal.
Revelling alike in the world of nature, and in the world of man, at once
simple and intense, at once playful and pathetic, his poetry has a
freshness as of the morning, an abandon as of a child at play. He has
not, indeed, escaped the taint of Alexandrinism any more than Burns
escaped the taint of the pseudo-classicism of the conventional school of
his day, but this is the only note of falsetto discernible in what he
has left us. It is when we compare him with Horace, Propertius, and
Martial that his incomparable charm is most felt. As a lyric poet,
except when patriotic, and when dealing with moral ideas, Horace is as
commonplace as he is insincere; he had no passion; he had little pathos;
he had not much sentiment; he had no real feeling for nature, he was
little more than a consummate craftsman, to adopt an expression from
Scaliger “ex alienis ingeniis poeta, ex suo tantum versificator.” In his
Greek models he found not merely his form, but his inspiration. Most of
his love odes have all the appearance of being mere studies in fancy.
When he attempts threnody he is as frigid as Cowley. Whose heart was
ever touched by the verses to Virgil on the death of Quintilian, or by
the verses to Valgius on the death of his son? The real Horace is the
Horace of the Satires and Epistles, and the real Horace had as little of
the temperament of a poet as La Fontaine and Prior. Propertius had
passion, and he had certainly some feeling for nature, but he was an
incurable pedant both in temper and in habit. Martial applied the
epigram, in elegiacs and in hendecasyllabics, to the same purposes to
which it was applied by Catullus, with more brilliance and finish, but
he had not the power of informing trifles with emotion and soul. What
became with Catullus the spontaneous expression of the dominant mood,
became in the hands of Martial the mere _tour de force_ of the ingenious
wit. Catullus is the most Greek of all the Roman poets; Greek in the
simplicity, chastity and propriety of his style, in his exquisite
responsiveness to all that appeals to the senses and the emotions, in
his ardent and abounding vitality. But, in his enthusiasm for nature, in
the intensity of his domestic affections, and in his occasional touches
of moral earnestness--and we have seldom to go far for them--he was
Roman. His sketches from nature are delightful. What could be more
perfect than the following? Has even Tennyson equalled it?--
Hic, qualis flatu placidum mare matutino
Horrificans Zephyrus proclivas incitat undas,
Aurorâ exoriente, vagi sub lumina solis;
Quæ tarde primum clementi flamine pulsæ
Procedunt, leviterque sonant plangore cachinni:
Post, vento crescente, magis magis increbescunt,
Purpureâque procul nantes a luce refulgent.
“As in early morning when Zephyr’s breath, ruffling the stilly
sea, stirs it into slanting waves up against the glow of the
travelling sun; and at first, while the impelling breeze is
gentle, they move in slow procession, and the plash of their
ripples is not loud; but then, as the breeze freshens, they
crowd faster and faster on, and far out at sea, as they float,
flash back the splendour of the crimsoning day in their front.”
Or, again, in the epistle to Manlius--
Qualis in aerii _pellucens_ vertice montis
Rivus _muscoso prosilit e lapide_.
How vivid is the picture of the rising sun and of early morning in the
Attis, 39-41.
Ubi oris aurei sol radiantibus oculis
Lustravit æthera album, sola dura, mare ferum,
Pepulitque noctis umbras vegetis sonipedibus.
In his “Asian Myrtle, in all the beauty of its blossom-laden branches,
which the Wood-Nymphs feed with honey dew to be their toy:”--
Floridis velut enitens
Myrtus Asia ramulis,
Quos Hamadryades Deæ
Ludicrum sibi roscido
Nutriunt humore.--
--who does not recognise Matthew Arnold’s “natural magic”?
Flowers he loved, as Shakespeare loved them. What tenderness there is in
the image of the love that perished--
Prati
Ultimi flos, prætereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est,
(xi. 19-21.)
--in the beautiful simile, so often imitated in every language in
Europe, where the unmarried maiden is compared to the uncropped flower,
lxii., 39-45; or where in the
Alba parthenice,
Luteumve papaver,
(lxi. 194-5.)
he sees the symbol of maidenhood; or where Ariadne is compared to the
myrtles on the banks of the Eurotas, and to the “flowers of diverse hues
which the spring breezes evoke”; and, again, the exquisite simile
picturing the husband’s love binding fast the bride’s thoughts, as a
tree is entwined in the clinging clasp of the gadding ivy--
Mentem amore revinciens,
Ut tenax hedera huc et huc
Arborem implicat errans.
Then we have the garland of Priapus with its felicitous epithets (xix.,
xx.).
It may be said of Catullus as Shelley said of his Alastor--
Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart their choicest impulses.
What rapture inspires and informs the lines to his yacht, and to Sirmio,
as well as the _Jam ver egelidos refert tepores_!
As the author of the _Attis_ Catullus stands alone among poets. There
was, so far as we know, nothing like it before, and there has been
nothing like it since. If it be a study from the Greek, as it is
generally supposed to be, it is very difficult to conjecture at what
period its original could have been produced. There is nothing at all
resembling it which has come down from the lyric period; its theme is
not one which would have been likely to attract the Attic poets. If its
model was the work of some Alexandrian, we can only say that such a poem
must have been an even greater anomaly in that literature than Smart’s
_Song to David_ is to our own literature, in the eighteenth century. It
may, of course, be urged that it is equally anomalous in Latin poetry,
and that, if resolved into its elements, it has much more affinity with
what may be traced to Greek than to Roman sources. In its compound
epithets, and more particularly in the singular use of “foro,” so
plainly substituted for the Greek αγορα and its associations,
it certainly reads like a translation from the Greek; and yet, in the
total impression made by it, the poem has not the air of a translation,
but of an original, and of an original struck out, in inspiration, at
white heat.
Only by an extraordinary effort of imaginative sympathy are we now able
to realize to ourselves the tragedy of the _Attis_, while its rushing
galliambics whirl us through the panorama of its swift-succeeding
pictures. But home to every heart must come the poems which Catullus
dedicates to the memory of his brother, and the poem in which he tries
to soothe Calvus for the death of Quintilia.
Multas per gentes, et multa per aequora vectus
Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis,
Et mutum nequidquam alloquerer cinerem:
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum:
Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi!
Nunc tamen interea prisco quæ more parentum
Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
Accipe, fraterno multum manantia fletu:
Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
“Many are the peoples, many the seas I have passed through to
be here, dear brother, at this, thine untimely grave, that I
might pay thee death’s last tribute, and greet,--how
vainly,--the dust that has no response. For well I know Fortune
hath bereft me of thy living self--Ah! hapless brother, cruelly
torn from me! Yet here, see, be the offerings which, from of
old, the custom of our fathers hath handed down as a sad
oblation to the grave--take them--they are streaming with a
brother’s tears. And now--for evermore--brother, hail and
farewell!”
Could pathos go further? How exquisite, too, is the following:--
Si quidquam mutis gratum acceptumque sepulcris
Accidere a nostro, Calve, dolore potest,
Quum desiderio veteres renovamus amores,
Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias:
Certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est
Quintiliæ, quantum gaudet amore tuo.[48]
Shakespeare merely unfolded what was included here, when he wrote those
haunting lines:--
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Never, too, has any poet given such pathetic expression to a sorrow,
which to the young is even harder to bear than the loss inflicted by
death, the perfidy and treachery of friends. The verses to Alphenus
(xxx.), to the anonymous friend in lxviii., and the epigram to Rufus
(lxxvii.), are indescribably touching. What infinite sadness there is
in:--
Si tu oblitus es, at Dii meminerunt, meminit Fides,
Quæ te ut pæniteat postmodo facti faciet tui.
What passion of grief in:--
Heu, heu, nostræ crudele venenum
Vitæ, heu, heu, nostræ pestis amicitiæ!
But nothing that Catullus has left us equals in fascinating interest, or
exceeds in charm, the poems inspired by the woman who was at once the
bliss and the curse of his life--
Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
Plusquam se, atque suos amavit omnes.
Whether she is to be identified with the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher,
and the wife of Metellus Celer, seems to us, in spite of the arguments
of Schwaber, Munro, Ellis, and Sellar, extremely doubtful. It is a point
which need not be discussed here, and is, indeed, of little importance.
That she was a woman of superb and commanding beauty, a false wife, a
false mistress, and of immeasurable profligacy, Catullus has himself
told us. There could only be one end to a passion of which such a siren
was the object; and, exquisite as the poems are which precede the
breaking of the spell, it is in the poems recording the gradual process
of disenchantment, and the struggle between the old love and the new
loathing, that Catullus touches us most. How piercing is the pathos of
such a poem as the _Si qua recordanti_ (lxxvi.), or the epigram in which
he says that he loves and loathes, but knows not why, only knows that it
is so, and that he is on the rack:--
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio: sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Or where he says that, pest as she is, he cannot curse a love who is
dearer to him than both his eyes:--
Credis me potuisse meæ maledicere vitæ,
Ambobus mihi quæ carior est oculis?
Non potui, nec, si possem, tam perdite amarem.
And he suffered the more, as he had lavished on her the purest
affections of his heart. His love for her--such was his own
expression--was not simply that which men ordinarily feel for their
mistresses, but such as the father feels for his sons and his
sons-in-law:--
Dilexi tum te, non tantum ut vulgus amicam,
Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.
But shameless as she is, and it is an impossibility for her to be
otherwise, he cannot abandon her. Do what she will he is her slave. His
mind, he says, was so straitened by her frailty, so beggared by its own
devotion, that, even if she became virtuous, he could not love her with
absolute goodwill, and if she stuck at nothing--drained vice to its very
dregs--he could not give her up:--
Huc est mens deducta tuâ, mea Lesbia, culpâ
Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo,
Ut jam nec bene velle queam tibi, si optima fias,
Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.
He compares himself to a man labouring under a cruel and incurable
disease, a disease which is paralysing his energy, and draining life of
its joy:--
Me miserum adspicite, et si vitam puriter egi,
Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi,
Quæ mihi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus
Expulit ex omni pectore lætitias.
Nearly sixteen hundred years had to pass before the world was to have
any parallel to these poems. And the parallel is certainly a remarkable
one. In the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lesbia lives again; in
the lover of the dark lady, Lesbia’s victim. Once more a false wife and
a false mistress, not indeed beautiful, but with powers of fascination
so irresistible that deformity itself becomes a charm, makes havoc of a
poet’s peace. Once more a passion, as degraded as it is degrading, sows
feuds among friends, and “infects with jealousy the sweetness of
affiance.” Once more rises the bitter cry of a soul, conscious of the
unspeakable degradation of a thraldom which it is agony to endure, and
from which it would be agony to be emancipated. Compare for instance:--
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
* * * * *
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest,
My thoughts and my discourse as madman’s are,
(Sonnet cxlvii.)
with Catullus, lxxvi.
And:--
Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds.
Who taught thee how to make me love thee more,
The more I hear and see just cause of hate?
(Sonnet cl.)
with Catullus, lxxii., lxxiii., lxxv.; while Sonnet cxxxvii. presents a
ghastly parallel with Catullus, lviii. Again, how exactly analogous is
the adjuration to Quintius in Epigram lxxxii., with what finds
expression in Sonnets xl.-xlii., and Sonnet cxx. But it would be tedious
as well as superfluous to cite particular parallels where the whole
position--which may be summed up in the two words of Catullus, “Odi et
amo,”--is identical.