If we are to understand the character, then, of Roman poetry in its best period, in the period, that is, which ends with the death of Augustus, we must figure to ourselves a great and prosaic people, with a great and prosaic language, directing and controlling to their own ends spiritual forces deeper and more subtle than themselves. Of these forces one is the Greek, the other may for convenience be called the Italian. In the Italian we must allow for a considerable intermixture of races: and we must remember that large tracts at least of Northern Italy, notably Transpadane Gaul and Umbria, have been penetrated by Celtic influence. No one can study Roman poetry at all deeply or sympathetically without feeling how un-Roman much of it really is: and again—despite its Hellenic forms and its constant study of Hellenism—how un-Greek. It is not Greek and not Roman, and we may call it Italian for want of a better name. The effects of this Italian quality in Roman poetry are both profound and elusive; and it is not easy to specify them in words. But it is important to seize them: for unless we do so we shall miss that aspect of Roman poetry which gives it its most real title to be called poetry at all. Apart from it it is in danger of passing at its best for rhetoric, at its worst for prose.

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

adest, adest fax obuoluta sanguine atque incendio:

multos annos latuit, ciues, ferte opem et restinguite.

iamque mari magno classis cita

texitur, exitium examen rapit:

adueniet, fera ueliuolantibus

navibus complebit manus litora.

Mr. Sellar has called attention to the 'prophetic fury' of these lines, their 'wild agitated tones'. They seem, indeed, wrought in fire. Nor do they stand alone in Ennius. Nor is their fire and swiftness Roman. They are preserved to us in a passage of Cicero's treatise De Diuinatione: and in the same passage Cicero applies to another fragment of Ennius notable epithets. He speaks of it as poema tenerum et moratum et molle. The element of moratum, the deep moral earnestness, is Roman. The other two epithets carry us outside the typically Roman temperament. Everybody remembers Horace's characterization of Vergil:

molle atque facetum

Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae.

Horace is speaking there of the Vergil of the Transpadane period: the reference is to the Eclogues. The Romans had hardminds. And in the Ecloguesthey marvelled primarily at the revelation of temperament which Horace denotes by the word molle. Propertius, in whose Umbrian blood there was, it has been conjectured, probably some admixture of the Celtic, speaks of himself as mollis in omnes. The ingenium molle, whether in passion, as with Propertius, or, as with Vergil, in reflection, is that deep and tender sensibility which is the least Roman thing in the world, and which, in its subtlest manifestations, is perhaps the peculiar possession of the Celt. The subtle and moving effects, in the Eclogues, of this molle ingenium, are well characterized by Mr. Mackail, when he speaks of the 'note of brooding pity' which pierces the 'immature and tremulous cadences' of Vergil's earliest period. This molle ingenium, that here quivers beneath the half-divined 'pain-of-the-world', is the same temperament as that which in Catullus gives to the pain of the individual immortally poignant expression. It is the same temperament, again, which created Dido. Macrobius tells us that Vergil's Dido is just the Medea of Apollonius over again. And some debt Vergil no doubt has to Apollonius. To the Attic drama his debt is far deeper; and he no doubt intended to invest the story of Dido with the same kind of interest as that which attaches to, say, the Phaedra of Euripides. Yet observe. Vergil has not hardnessenough. He has not the unbending righteousness of the tragic manner. The rather hard moral grandeur of the great Attic dramatists, their fine spiritual steel, has submitted to a strange softening process. Something melting and subduing, something neither Greek nor Roman, has come in. We are passed out of classicism: we are moving into what we call romanticism. Aeneas was a brute. There is nobody who does not feel that. Yet nobody was meant to feel that. We were meant to feel that Aeneas was what Vergil so often calls him, pius. But the Celtic spirit—for that is what it is—is over-mastering. It is its characteristic that it constantly girds a man—or a poet—and carries him whither he would not. The fourth Aeneidis the triumph of an unconscionable Celticism over the whole moral plan of Vergil's epic.

I will not mention Lesbia by the side of Dido. The Celtic spirit too often descends into hell. But I will take from Catullus in a different mood two other examples of the Italic romanticism. Consider these three lines:

usque dum tremulum mouens

cana tempus anilitas

omnia omnibus annuit,

—'till that day when gray old age shaking its palsied head nods in all things to all assent.' That is not Greek nor Roman. It is the unelaborate magic of the Celtic temperament. Keats, I have often thought, would have 'owed his eyes' to be able to write those three lines. He hits sometimes a like matchless felicity:

She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu.

But into the effects which Catullus just happens upon by a luck of temperament Keats puts more of his life-blood than a man can well spare.

Take, again, this from the Letter to Hortalus. Think not, says Catullus, that your words have passed from my heart,

ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum

procurrit casto uirginis e gremio,

quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum,

dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur;

atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,

huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor,

—'as an apple, sent by some lover, a secret gift, falls from a maid's chaste bosom. She placed it, poor lass, in the soft folds of her robe and forgot it. And when her mother came towards her out it fell; fell and rolled in headlong course. And vexed and red and wet with tears are her guilty cheeks!'

That owes something, no doubt, to Alexandria. But in its exquisite sensibility, its supreme delicacy and tenderness, it belongs rather to the romantic than to the classical literatures.

Molle atque facetum: the deep and keen fire of mind, the quick glow of sensibility—that is what redeems literature and life alike from dullness. The Roman, the typical Roman, was what we call a 'dull man'. But the Italian has this fire. And it is this that so often redeems Roman literature from itself. We are accustomed to associate the word facetuswith the idea of 'wit'. It is to be connected, it would seem, etymologically with fax, 'a torch'. Its primitive meaning is 'brightness', 'brilliance': and if we wish to understand what Horace means when he speaks of the element of ' facetum' in Vergil, perhaps 'glow' or 'fire' will serve us better than 'wit'. Facetus, facetiae, infacetus, infacetiaeare favourite words with Catullus. With lepidus, illepidus, uenustus, inuenustusthey are his usual terms of literary praise and dispraise. These words hit, of course, often very superficial effects. Yet with Catullus and his friends they stand for a literary ideal deeper than the contexts in which they occur: and an ideal which, while it no doubt derives from the enthusiasm of Alexandrian study, yet assumes a distinctively Italian character. Poetry must be facetus: it must glow and dance. It must have lepor: it must be clean and bright. There must be nothing slipshod, no tarnish. 'Bright is the ring of words when the right man rings them.' It must have uenustas, 'charm', a certain melting quality. This ideal Roman poetry never realizes perhaps in its fullness save in Catullus himself. In the lighter poets it passes too easily into an ideal of mere cleverness: until with Ovid (and in a less degree Martial) leporis the whole man. In the deeper poets it is oppressed by more Roman ideals.