Chapter IX: Part 9

“Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts”--a forgotten poet of the eighteenth century--such is the title of a recent monograph on the author of _The Seasons_ by Dr. G. Schmeding. Dr. G. Schmeding is, however, so obliging as to pronounce that, in his opinion, this ought not to be Thomson’s fate; that there remains in his work, especially in _The Seasons_ merit enough to entitle him to be “enrolled among poets,” and to find appreciation, at all events in schools and reading societies. Dr. Schmeding may rest assured that Thomson’s fame is quite safe. It has no doubt suffered, as that of all the poets of the eighteenth century has suffered, by the great revolution which has, in the course of the last ninety years, passed over literary tastes and fashions. But during the present century there have been no less than twenty editions of his poems, to say nothing of separate editions of _The Seasons_; while his works, or portions of them, have been translated into German, Italian, modern Greek, and Russian. Only two years ago M. Léon Morel, in his _J. Thomson, sa vie et ses œuvres_, published an elaborate and admirable monograph on this “forgotten poet.” And now Mr. Tovey, who, we are glad to see, has been appointed Clarke Lecturer at Cambridge, has given us a new biography of him and a new edition of his works, making, if we are not mistaken, the thirty-second memoir of him and the twenty-first edition of his works which have appeared since the beginning of the century. This is pretty well for a forgotten poet!

Mr. Tovey’s name is a sufficient guarantee for accurate and scholarly work. But it might naturally be asked, what is there to justify another edition of this poet, when so many editions are already in the field and so easily accessible? We have little difficulty in answering this question. The special features of Mr. Tovey’s edition are as important as they are interesting. In the first place, he has given us a much fuller biography than has hitherto appeared in English; in the second place, he has thrown much interesting light on the political bearing of Thomson’s dramas; and, in the third place, he has given, what no other editor of Thomson has given, a full collation of Thomson’s own MS. corrections, preserved in Mitford’s copy, now deposited in the British Museum. The critical notes have cost him, he says, and we can quite believe it, much time and labour, and in his preface he half apologizes for what may seem “a ridiculous travesty of more important labours.” There was no necessity for such an apology: he observes justly that he has “not spent more pains on Thomson’s text than so many of our scholars bestow upon some Greek and Latin poets whose intrinsic merit is no greater than Thomson’s.”

To serious readers these critical notes will constitute the most valuable part of Mr. Tovey’s labours; they are, in truth, the speciality of this particular edition, and will make it indispensable to all students of this most interesting poet. And now Mr. Tovey will, we trust, forgive us if, with due deference, we point out what seem to us to be defects in his work. The first thing that might have been expected from so learned and careful an editor of Thomson was an adequate discussion of the great problem of the authorship of _Rule Britannia_, and the second an exposure of one of the most extraordinary “mare’s-nests” to be found in English literature. But nothing, we regret to say, can be more perfunctory and inadequate than the two notes in which the first question is hurried over with references to _Notes and Queries_, and nothing more irritating than the confusion worse confounded in which Mr. Tovey leaves the second. We shall therefore make no apology for entering somewhat at length into both these questions.

And first for the authorship of _Rule Britannia_. The facts are these. In 1740 Thomson and Mallet wrote, in conjunction, a masque entitled _Alfred_, which, on 1st August in that year, was represented before the Prince and Princess of Wales at Clifden. It was in two acts, and it contained six lyrics, the last being _Rule Britannia_, which is entitled an “Ode,” the music being by Dr. Arne. In 1745 Arne turned the piece into an opera, and also into “a musical drama.” By this time the lyric had become very popular, but there is no evidence to show that it had been definitely attributed to either of the coadjutors. In 1748 Thomson died. In 1751 Mallet re-issued _Alfred_, but in another form. It was entirely remodelled, and almost entirely re-written, and, in an advertisement prefixed to the work, he says: “According to the present arrangement of the fable I was obliged to reject a great deal of what I had written in the other: neither could I retain, of my friend’s part, more than three or four speeches, and a part of one song.” Now, of the parts retained from the former work, there were the first three stanzas of _Rule Britannia_, the three others being excised, and their place supplied by three stanzas written by Lord Bolingbroke. If Mallet is to be believed, then, “part of one song” must refer, either to a song in the third scene of the second act, beginning “From those eternal regions bright,” or to _Rule Britannia_, for these are the only lyrics in which portions of the lyrics in the former edition are retained. _Rule Britannia_ is, it is true, entitled “An Ode” in the former edition, and the other lyric “A Song,” so that Mallet would certainly seem to imply that what he had retained of his friend’s work was the portion of the song referred to, and not _Rule Britannia_. But, as Mallet was notoriously a man who could not be believed on oath, and was an adept in all those bad arts by which little men filch honours which do not belong to them, if he is to be allowed to have any title to the honour of composing this lyric, it ought to rest on something better than the ambiguity between the word “Ode” and the word “Song.”

There is no evidence that, while both were alive, either Thomson or Mallet claimed the authorship; but this is certain, it was printed at Edinburgh, during Mallet’s lifetime, in the second edition of a well-known song book, entitled _The Charmer_, with Thomson’s initials appended to it. It is certain that Mallet had friends in Edinburgh, and it is equally certain that neither he nor any of his friends raised any objection to its ascription to Thomson. In 1743, in 1759, and in 1762 Mallet published collections of poems, but in none of these collections does he lay claim to _Rule Britannia_, and, though it was printed in song-books in 1749, 1750, and 1761, it is in no case assigned to Mallet. None of his contemporaries, so far as we know, attributed it to him, and it is remarkable that, in a brief obituary notice of him which appeared in the _Scots Magazine_ in 1765, he is spoken of as the author of the famous ballad _William and Margaret_, but not a word is said about _Rule Britannia_. A further presumption in Thomson’s favour is this: in all probability Dr. Arne, who set it to music, knew the authorship, and he survived both Thomson and Mallet, dying in 1778. The song had become very popular and celebrated, so that if Mallet had desired to have the credit of its composition, it is strange that he should not have laid claim to it, had his claim been a good one. But if his claim was not good, he could hardly have ventured to claim the authorship, as Dr. Arne would have been in his way. It is quite possible that the ambiguity in the advertisement to the recension of 1751 was designed; it certainly left the question open, and we cannot but think there is something very suspicious in what follows the sentence in Mallet’s advertisement, where he speaks of his having used so little of his friend’s work. “I mention this expressly,” he adds, “that, whatever faults are found in the present performance, they may be charged, as they ought to be, entirely to my account.” A vainer and more unscrupulous man than Mallet never existed; and, while it is simply incredible that he should not have claimed what would have constituted his chief title to popularity as a poet, had he been able to do so, it is in exact accordance with his established character that he should, as he did in the advertisement of 1751, have left himself an opportunity of asserting that claim, should those who were privy to the secret have predeceased him, and thus enabled him to do so with impunity.

The internal evidence--and on this alone the question must now be argued--seems to us conclusive in Thomson’s favour. The Ode is simply a translation into lyrics of what finds embodiment in Thomson’s _Britannia_, in the fourth and fifth parts of _Liberty_, and in his Verses to the Prince of Wales. Coming to details, there can be no doubt that the third stanza--

“Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak”--

was suggested by Horace’s

“Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido,
Per damna, per cædes, ab ipso
Ducit opes animumque ferro.”

Now, not only was Horace, as innumerable imitations and reminiscences prove, one of Thomson’s favourite poets, but Thomson has, in the third part of _Liberty_ translated this very passage:--

“Like an oak,
Nurs’d on feracious Algidum, whose boughs
Still stronger shoot beneath the rigid axe
By loss, by slaughter, from the steel itself
E’en force and spirit drew.”

He has, elsewhere, two other reminiscences of the same passage, once in the third part of _Liberty_--

“Every tempest sung
Innoxious by, or bade it firmer stand”--

and once in _Sophonisba_ (Act V. sc. ii.):--

“Thy rooted worth
Has stood these wintry blasts, grown stronger by them.”

The epithet “azure” employed in the first stanza is, with “cerulean” and “aerial,” one of the three commonest epithets in Thomson, the three occurring at least twenty times in his poetry. A somewhat cursory examination of his works has enabled us to find that “azure” or “azured” alone occurs ten times. “Generous,” too, in the Latin sense of the term, is another of his favourite words, it being used no less than sixteen times in _Britannia_ and _Liberty_ alone. Another of his favourite allusions is to England’s “native oaks.” Thus in _Britannia_ he speaks of--

“Your oaks, peculiar harden’d, shoot
Strong into sturdy growth;”

in the last part of _Liberty_ we find “Let her own naval oak be basely torn,” and in the same part of the poem he speaks of the “venerable oaks” and “kindred floods.” The epithet “manly” and the phrase “the fair”--“manly hearts to guard the fair”--are also peculiarly Thomsonian, being repeatedly employed by him, the phrase “the fair” occurring in his poetry at least six times, if not oftener. “Flame,” too, is another of his favourite words.

“All their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse,” etc.,

is exactly the sentiment in _Britannia_.

“Your hearts
Swell with a sudden courage, growing still
As danger grows.”

The stanza beginning “To thee belongs,” etc., is simply a lyrical paraphrase of the passage in _Britannia_ commencing “Oh first of human blessings,” and of a couplet in the last part of _Liberty_:--

“The winds and seas are Britain’s wide domain;
And not a sail but by permission spreads.”

The couplet

“All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine”

is simply the echo of a couplet in the fifth part of _Liberty_--

“All ocean is her own, and every land
To whom her ruling thunder ocean bears.”

The phrase “blessed isle,” as applied to England, he employs three times in _Liberty_. Again, the stanza in which _Rule Britannia_ is written is the stanza in which the majority of Thomson’s minor lyrics are written, and the rhythm and cadence, not less than the tone, colour and sentiment, are exactly his.

Mallet was undoubtedly an accomplished man and a respectable poet, as 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.

Not the least remarkable thing about Catullus is his range and his versatility. It is truly extraordinary that the same pen should have given us such finished social portraits as “Suffenus iste” (xxii.), “Ad Furium” (xxiii.), “In Egnatium” (xxxix.); the perfection of such serious fooling as we find in the “Lugete, O Veneres” (iii.), and, if we may apply such an expression to the most delicious love poem ever written, the “Acme and Septimius” (xlv.); of such humorous fooling as we find in the “Varus me meus ad suos amores” (x.), the “O Colonia quæ cupis” (xvii.), the “Adeste, hendecasyllabi,” the “Oramus, si forte non molestum” (lv.); such epic as we have in the “Peleus and Thetis”; such triumphs of richness, splendour, and grace as we have in the three marriage poems; such a superb expression of the highest imaginative power, penetrated with passion and enthusiasm, as we have in the _Attis_; such concentrated invective and satire as mark some of the lampoons; such mock heroic as we have in the _Coma Berenices_; such piercing pathos as penetrates the autobiographical poems, and the poems dedicated to Lesbia.

Catullus has been compared to Keats, but the comparison is not a happy one. His nearest analogy among modern poets is Burns. Both were, in Tennyson’s phrase, “dowered with the love of love, the scorn of scorn,” and, in the poems of both, those passions find the intensest expression. Both had an exquisite sympathy with all that appeals, either in nature or in humanity, to the senses and the affections. Both were sensualists and libertines without being effeminate, or without being either depraved or hardened. In both, indeed, an infinite tenderness is perhaps the predominating feature. Both had humour, that of Catullus being the more caustic, that of Burns the more genial. Both were distinguished by sincerity and simplicity; both waged war with charlatanry and baseness. Burns had the richer nature and was the greater as a man; Catullus was the more accomplished artist.

But it is time to turn to the book which has recalled Catullus and Lesbia. Mr. Tremenheere has, with great ingenuity, succeeded in concocting by a process of elaborate dovetailing a very pretty romance which he divides into nine chapters, the first being “The Birth of Love,” the second, third and fourth, “Possession,” “Quarrels” and “Reconciliation,” the fifth, sixth, and seventh, “Doubt,” “A Brother’s Death” and “Unfaithfulness,” the last two, “Avoidance” and “The Death of Love.” The chief objection to this is that it is for the most part fanciful, and is absolutely without warrant, either from tradition or from probability. Many of the poems pressed into the service of his narrative by Mr. Tremenheere have nothing whatever to do with Lesbia. Such would be xiii., “The invitation to Fabullus,” xiv., “The Acme and Septimius.”

The translations are very unequal. Of many of them it may be said in Dogberry’s phrase that they “are tolerable and not to be endured,” or to borrow an expression from Byron “so middling bad were better.” Thus the powerful poem to Gellius (xci.) is attenuated into:--

’Twas not that I esteem’d you were
As constant or incapable
Of vulgar baseness, but that she
For whom great love was wasting me,
The spice of incest lacked for you;
And though we were old friends, ’tis true,
That seem’d poor cause to my poor mind,
Not so to yours.

Sometimes the versions are detestable. Nothing could be worse than to turn:--

Nulli illum pueri nullæ optavere puellæ

No more is she glad to the eyes of a lad,
To the lasses a pride,--

or

Dulcis pueri ebrios ocellos

as

Her minion’s passion-sodden eyes,--

which might do very well for a coarse phrase like “In Venerem putres,” but not for “Ebrios.” But sometimes the renderings are very felicitous. As here:--

Quid vis? quâlubet esse notus optas
Eris: quandoquidem meos amores
Cum longâ voluisti amare pœnâ.

Cost what it may, you’ll win renown!
You shall, such longing you exhibit
Both for my mistress--and a gibbet!

And the following is happy:--

Nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium
Ilia rumpens.
Nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem
Qui illius culpâ cecidit; velut prati
Ultimi flos, prætereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est.

Ah, shameless, loveless lust, sweet, seek no more
To win love back, by thine own fault it fell,
In the far corner of the field though hid,
Touch’d by the plough at last,--the flower is dead.

The following also is neat and skilful, but how inferior to the almost terrible impressiveness of the original:--

O Di si vostrûm est misereri, aut si quibus unquam
Extremâ jam ipsâ in morte tulistis opem.
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.

Oh God! if Thine be pity, and if Thou
E’en in the jaws of death ere now,
Hast wrought salvation--look on me;
And if my life seem fair to Thee
O tear this plague, this curse away,
Which gaining on me day by day,
A creeping slow paralysis,
Hath driven away all happiness.

Six love stories stand out conspicuous in the records of poetry--those which find expression in the _Elegies_ of Propertius, in the _Sonnets and Canzoni_ of Dante and Petrarch, in the _Sonnets_ of Camoens, in the _Astrophel and Stella_ of Sidney, in the _Sonnets_ of Shakespeare. But never has passion, never has pathos, thrilled in intenser or more piercing utterance than in the poems which that fatal “Clytemnestra quadrantaria”--to employ the phrase which may actually have been applied to her--inspired, and in which the rapture and loathing and despair of Catullus found a voice.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 48: “If the silent dead can feel any pleasure, or solace from our sorrow, Calvus, when, in wistful regret, we recall past loves, and weep for the friendships severed long ago, then be sure that Quintilia’s grief for her early death is not so great as the joy she feels in knowing your love for her.”]

THE RELIGION OF SHAKESPEARE[49]

[Footnote 49: _The Religion of Shakespeare._ Chiefly from the writings of the late Mr. Richard Simpson. By Henry Sebastian Bowden. London.]

This book, which is partly a compilation from the uncollected writings of the late Richard Simpson and partly the composition of Father Bowden himself, is an attempt to show that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic. It contains much interesting information; it is well written, and we have read it with pleasure. With much which we find in it we entirely concur and are in full sympathy. We take Shakespeare quite as seriously as Father Bowden does. We believe that the greatest of dramatic poets is also one of the greatest of moral teachers, that his theology and ethics deserve the most careful study, and that they have, too frequently, been either neglected or misinterpreted. We agree with Father Bowden that nothing could be sounder and more persistently emphasised than the ethical element in this poet’s dramas; that his ethics are, in the main, the ethics of Christianity, and that so far from Shakespeare being simply an agnostic and having no religion at all, as Birch and others have contended, he is, if not formally, at least in essence, as religious as Æschylus and Sophocles.

And now Father Bowden must forgive us if we are unable to go further with him. We have no prejudice against Roman Catholicism, or against any of the creeds in which religious faith and reverence have found expression,--“Tros Rutulusve fuat nullo discrimine agetur.” Our sole wish is, if possible, to get at the truth. It is of comparatively little consequence now to what form of religion Shakespeare belonged, but it would be at least interesting, if it could be shown that any particular sect could legitimately claim him.

In discussing this question we must bear in mind that in Shakespeare’s time, as in the time of the ancients, religion had two aspects, its private and its public. In its public aspect it was a part of the machinery of the state, an essential portion of the political fabric. Till the Reformation there had been practically no schism and no difficulty. After the Reformation a most perplexing problem presented itself. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, in a long and terrible conflict, struggled for the mastery. At the accession of Elizabeth the victory had been won, so far as England was concerned, by Protestantism, and Protestantism was the accepted religion of the nation. As such, it was the duty of every loyal citizen to uphold it; it became with the throne one of the two pillars on which the fabric of the state rested. Roman Catholicism became identified with the political rivals and enemies of England. Protestantism became identified with her lovers and upholders. Thus the Church and the Throne became indissoluble, at once the symbols, centres, and securities of political harmony and union. This accounts for the attitude of Hooker, Spenser, Shakespeare and Bacon towards Episcopalian Protestantism on the one hand, and towards Puritanism on the other. About Shakespeare’s political opinions there can be no doubt at all, for, if we except the Comedies, he preaches them emphatically in almost every drama which he has left us. They were those of an uncompromising and intolerant Royalist, in whose eyes the only security for all that is dear to the patriot lay in implicit obedience to the will of the sovereign, and in upholding a system to which that will was law. That he should, therefore, have had any sympathy with the Roman Catholics is, on _a priori_ grounds, exceedingly improbable. We turn to his Dramas, and what do we find? It would be no exaggeration to say, that there is not a line in them which indicates that he regarded the Roman Catholics with favour. On the contrary, they abound in points directed against them. Thus he twice goes out of his way, once in _Henry V._[50] and once in _All’s Well that Ends Well_, to observe that “miracles have ceased.” There is a bitter sneer at them in the reference to the sanctimonious pirate and the commandments, in _Measure for Measure_.[51] There can be little doubt that the words in the porter’s speech in _Macbeth_, “here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven,” have sarcastic reference to the doctrine of equivocation avowed by Garnett and popularly associated with the Jesuits; while the remark about the fitness of “the nun’s lip to the friar’s mouth”[52] in _All’s Well that Ends Well_ is another concession to Protestant prejudice.

In _King John_ such a speech as the following may be dramatic, but who can doubt that it expressed the poet’s own sentiments?--

Tell him this tale; and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more,--that no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;
But, as we under Heaven are supreme head,
So, under Him, that great supremacy,

Where we do reign, we will alone uphold,
Without the assistance of a mortal hand:
So tell the Pope; all reverence set apart
To him, and his usurp’d authority.

_King John_ is, indeed, simply the manifesto of Protestantism against papal aggression. What could be more contemptible than the character of Pandulph and the part which he plays? Is it credible that Shakespeare could have had any sympathy with a religion whose minister is one whom he represents as saying:

Meritorious shall that hand be called,
Canonized, and worshipped as a saint,
That takes away by any secret course
Thy hateful life.

In _Henry VIII._, again, we have an elaborate eulogy of the Reformation, Cranmer being presented in the most favourable light, Gardiner in the most unfavourable, while Wolsey is almost as detestable as Pandulph.

It is really pitiable to see the shifts to which the authors of this book are reduced to make out their theory. They have even pressed into its service Jordan’s palpable and long-exploded forgery of John Shakespeare’s Will, and the fact that John Shakespeare’s name is found on a list of Recusants, when it is, in that very list, expressly stated that he had absented himself from church, simply from fear of process for debt. Passages in the dramas are similarly perverted. Shakespeare’s hostility to the Protestants induced him, we are told, to pour contempt on Oldcastle by depicting him as Falstaff. His delineation of Malvolio, and his frequent sneers at the Puritans, are attributed to the same motive. The famous lines in _Hamlet_, placed in the mouth of the Ghost, are cited to prove his belief in purgatory; the comical penances imposed on Biron and his friends in _Love’s Labour Lost_ to prove his belief in penance. When in _Lear_ it is said of Cordelia that:--

She shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes.

we are to see another indication of Shakespeare’s religion as “they have a Catholic ring about them.” Sentiments which are common to all sects of Christians are regarded as peculiar to Roman Catholicism; mere dramatic utterances are forced into illustrations of supposed personal convictions. What is habitually and systematically ignored is, that Shakespeare, being a dramatic poet, must necessarily make his characters express themselves dramatically, and that, as he was depicting times preceding the Reformation, his sentiments and expressions very naturally took the colour of the world in which his characters moved. The wonder is not that this should have occurred, but that Shakespeare should, in spite of the gross anachronism of such a process, have so _Protestantized_ pre-Reformation times. We are quite willing to concede to Father Bowden that there is enough to warrant us in assuming that Shakespeare did not regard the Puritans with favour. But his dislike to them arose not from the fact that they were Protestants, but that they were not orthodox Protestants. He was opposed to them for the same reasons that Elizabeth and James, Hooker and Bacon were opposed to them. Their hostility to his profession, their sanctimonious cant, and the surly asceticism of their lives, no doubt contributed to his prejudice against them.

Nor are we in any way justified in concluding that Shakespeare accepted the teaching of the Church of Rome in spiritual matters. Nothing could be more unwarranted than what is assumed by Father Bowden in the following passage. He is speaking of Shakespeare’s attitude in relation to death. “‘Ripeness is all’; and he shows us in all his penitents how that ripeness is secured, sin forgiven, and heaven won on the lines of Catholic dogma and by the Sacraments of the Church.”

What are the facts? Shakespeare’s reticence about a future state, and what may await man, in the form of reward and punishment hereafter, is one of his most striking characteristics. Neither Cordelia nor Desdemona, neither Constance nor Imogen in their darkest hours expresses any confidence in the final mercy and justice of Heaven. Othello, falling by a fate as terrible as it was undeserved, dies without a syllable of hope. “The rest is silence” are the ominous words with which Hamlet takes leave of life. When Gloucester believes himself to be standing on the brink of death, in the farewell which he takes of the world he has no anticipation of any other; all he contemplates is “to shake patiently his great affliction off.” So die Lear, Hotspur, Romeo, Antony, Eros, Enobarbus, Macbeth, Beaufort, Mercutio, Laertes. So die Brutus, Coriolanus, King John. In the Duke’s speech in _Measure for Measure_, where he is preparing Claudio to meet death, death is merely contemplated as an escape from the pains and discomforts of life. Macbeth would ‘jump’ the world to come if he could escape punishment in this. Prospero suggests no hope of any waking from the “rounding sleep.” Even Isabella, dedicated as she was to religion, in fortifying Claudio against his fate draws no weapon from the armoury of faith. It is just the same in the dirge in Cymbeline, in the soliloquy of Posthumus, in the consolations addressed by the gaoler to Posthumus.[53]