solemn or softer cadences of his verse, must always exercise a spell over the lovers of poetry who master the difficulties, and are not repelled by the signs, if not of affectation, yet of straining after effect, by his irrevelant mythology, and above all by the iteration with which he harps on a single theme. He has the seriousness of mood which Ovid lacks, yet there is a want of a really masculine tone in his seriousness. In his frequent alternations of mood when he rises out of the depression indicated in the line

Me sine, quem voluit semper fortuna iacere,

it is rather levity than cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirit that he betrays. He remains a great poet-a poet potentially greater than Ovid and Tibullus, not inferior to, in some ways greater than Horace or Catullus-but more than any other classic poet marred by irregularity and incompleteness, occasional want of taste, the inability to conceal the struggles to produce a great effect, the failure in the last accomplishment of art, absolutely harmonious composition.

CHAPTER V.

OVID.

I.

Amores.

THERE is an essential difference between Ovid and Propertius or Tibullus as poets of love. Not only is he much more the poet of pleasure and intrigue, they of serious sentiment or passion; but they treat the feeling of love, not as mere desire, but as the admiration of something above them. They willingly accept the position of servitium, while Ovid in the Amores and the Ars Amandi shows us only transient desire, and regards the whole subject in the spirit of persiflage. He never deals with it seriously, except when it is the love of the woman for the man. With Ovid, love poetry is a study of psychological observation: with the others an utterance of their own feeling. Even in the Amores, still more in the Ars, Ovid is much more disinterested and objective: he is absolutely so in the Heroides.

The Amores, in which he first came before the world, were originally published in five books, but afterwards judiciously restricted to three: in the interval between the first and second draught of this record of his personal experience and feelings, appeared at least ten of his Epistles. In these three books of Amores he carries on the rôle of Tibullus and Propertius, but in a very different spirit. The love poems of the two older poets are essentially elegies, plaintive in the former, passionate and melancholy in the latter. They have their source in actual

experience and real feeling. The persons who inspired the feeling were not only actual women of the time, but one of them certainly lives before us in her lover's verse as a very distinct individuality. The spirit in which Ovid appears as the poet, not of passion but of pleasure, is entirely light and frivolous. His personification of the elegiac Muse-

Forma decens, vestis tenuissima, vultus amantis,

Et pedibus vitium causa decoris erat

declares the scope of his art. While Propertius appropriately calls his elegies 'lacrimae,' and describes his art by the word 'flere,' there are no poems in Latin or indeed in any language to which the words used by Catullus, Virgil, and Horace, as well as by Ovid himself, for the expression of the gayer and lighter fancies and experiences of life,' lusus' and 'ludere,' can be more properly applied. They share with the elegies of Tibullus and Propertius the tone which gained for this kind of verse the epithet 'imbellis'; but for the other epithet expressive of the spirit of the Roman elegy, as it was of the primitive Greek elegy, 'flebilis,' Ovid substitutes the words 'Musa genialis.' He is the poet of fashionable society in its laxest moods: no love-sick youths or maidens could appeal to him as 'ardoris nostri magne poeta.' Once indeed his verse does assume a sadder note, when in words of true feeling and graceful appreciation he mourns for the untimely death of Tibullus; then he utters under the influence of the genuine elegiac spirit -the spirit of the original pĥvos and 'nenia'-not the selfregarding wail of unsatisfied or unrequited passion, but the lament for departed worth and genius and beauty of character:

Flebilis indignos, Elegeïa, solve capillos:

A nimis ex vero nunc tibi nomen erit.

It is indeed as the poet of love that Tibullus is there lamented; but it is not with its pleasures or its fanciful complaints, it is with its tenderness and truth, both in life and in the picture of life beyond death, that the thought of him and of the heroines of his song is associated; with all that can make love and death

more beautiful. The thought of death brings much that is sad, but not the gloom, morbid and unrelieved, with which the thought presents itself to the mind of Propertius. In this, almost the only poem in which he is deeply pathetic, Ovid shows himself a truer master of pathos than Propertius with all his lacrimae.' The only other opportunity which he has for pathos is in the pretty and fanciful lament for the parrot of Corinna, a poem which enters into rivalry with the matchless dead sparrow of Catullus. Here there is a playful fancy rather than any real feeling, though the elegy has the plaintive note and movement as distinct from the rapid and lively movement, the tone of a gay, witty, and pleasure-loving society, which is the note of the purely love elegies:

Quid referam timidae pro te pia vota puellae,

Vota procelloso per mare rapta Noto?

Who was Corinna, the heroine of these poems, and what was Ovid's relation to her and his feeling towards her? Was she, like Lesbia, Delia, Cynthia, a real person whose fascination and waywardness really exercised a great influence on the life and art of her lover? Or is she a mere 'nominis umbra,' a figure round about whom a number of imaginary experiencesimaginary, though reflecting the ordinary life of pleasure and intrigue of the time-are gathered as they might be about the heroine of a modern novel? is she a study of character rather than a portrait? In a poem published twenty years later, he tells us that people in Rome are still asking who Corinna was. This suggestion of mystery led some of the older critics to take up the idea-a belief seen in a writer of the fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris-that Ovid was the favoured lover of the most brilliant, most distinguished, and one of the most beautiful women of the time, the imperial Julia; and that he was capable of writing of her favours as Corinna's. That Ovid may have been a favourite poet of the lover of Iulus Antonius, and that he may have been admitted to her society, as unfortunately for himself he evidently was at a later time to that of her daughter, is extremely probable. But that, either in the time of her young

widowhood or while the wife of Agrippa, she became for the time the mistress of Ovid, and allowed him to celebrate her charms with that absence of reticence which is more conspicuous in him than in Tibullus, is one of the most preposterous suppositions into which the license of learned conjecture has ever been betrayed. A much more probable solution of the secret is that Corinna was no person in particular, but only a name about which Ovid grouped many experiences and memories, and something of a continuous story. As she appears in the poems, she is little more than a kw‡оν пρóσwпоν, with no individuality of temper or circumstances, ñor are her personal traits and accomplishments distinct like those of Cynthia. There is more reality about the 'ancilla' Nape. Ovid represents his heroine as being 'ingenua,' and as accompanied by her 'vir' on one of the early occasions of their meeting. But as a mercenary 'lena' plays her part in the social drama, and as Ovid professes a scrupulous regard for the 'vitta' of the married woman, and in his Tristia declares that he gave rise to no domestic scandal, it follows that whether she was one special mistress to whom for a time his volatile nature was attached, or a generalised creation of fancy, she belonged to the class to which Cynthia and Nemesis belong. She simply serves as the theme of Ovid's poetry, in which he traces the progress of an ordinary intrigue, without any of the passionate alternations of feeling that meet us in Propertius, or the real pain and happiness of Tibullus. It is a tale, not like theirs of true love, but of a love that runs with a smooth enough, not to say a facile course, till it loses itself, one does not exactly see how, in the usual way, the lover professing to be tired of the infidelities of his mistress. The incidents out of which the story, or rather series of sketches, is made up are of the slightest kind, and many of them are suggested by previous poetic treatment. There is the introduction of himself as pierced by Cupid's arrow, the first conventional declaration of his susceptibility, then the statement of who and what he is, and the selection of an object both of his love and art. There is no resistance,