the one memory of him in the phraseology of modern English (see I, 7, 26, n.) is 'Jupiter Pluvius.'

A scanty record for one whom the greatest of Roman critics did not hesitate to call 'tersus atque maxime elegans' among the elegiac poets. How shall we explain this apparent incongruity ? To answer this important question we must examine the qualities of his genius, and get some vision of the peculiarities of his type against the background furnished by his rivals in the same department.

For variety and scope of talent, for vivacity and sparkling wit, for ease and grace, Ovid unquestionably bears the palm. As a master of technique he has no peer. He can say in verse whatever he likes, and can express it as a poet should. But it is Plessis who warns us, and in this connection (La Poésie Latine, p. * 353), that 'wit and fluency are dangerous gifts for a poet.' The man who follows across country that mischievous sprite, a ready wit, is in danger of trampling upon the tender flower of sentiment. Fluency and prolixity are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the brilliant and the facile easily pass over to the diffuse and the frivolous. We feel that his taste really was on a level with his talent, that no one was more capable than was he of recognizing the danger line in the exercise of his own genius, and our impression is confirmed by Quintilian, who had read the lost Medea, and by an anecdote by the Elder Seneca, who was personally acquainted with the poet himself. Unfortunately however Ovid sometimes lacked the resolution to discipline his genius instead of indulging it. To use the expressive phrase of Quintilian, he was 'nimium amator ingenii sui.'

But for a larger public his eminent virtues were never seriously lowered by occasional lapses of this sort. Hence from his own time until the present generation, as long in other words as the Latin authors were really read by a larger public, Ovid was always the most popular of the elegiac poets. His influence upon Euro

1 Controversiae, 2, 2, 12 f.

pean literature merely for the single century from 1550 to 1650 probably exceeds the sum of that exerted by both his rivals during the entire nineteen centuries since their death.

Propertius is unique. In his personality as well as in his art he is a fascinating puzzle of apparent paradoxes and inconsistencies. An elegiac poet by nature and choice, he nevertheless disregards practically every convention of the department. In an atmosphere of half-ironical sentiment and cultivated persiflage he is for the most part passionately serious and desperately sincere. In a department the ideal of which is clarity and unstudied ease he is a proverb of abruptness, irregularity, startling contrasts, and obscurity. Few Roman poets are so charged with literary reminiscence. No Roman poet is more strikingly original. He did not, nay, he could not, think as others have thought. His emotional insight, his bizarre and powerful imagination, strain at the leash of the distich, and tax every resource of his native tongue. A lover of pleasure, yet with high ideals, a rapid thinker, but a slow and painful composer, a cool head, but an ardent heart, always young in years, yet, matured early as he was in the fierce sun of an absorbing passion, never young in spirit, Propertius has imparted to his poetryif we may borrow from the most penetrating and sympathetic of his modern crities—'a touch of harshness, the suspicion as it were of a bitter after-taste, reminding one of fruit that has ripened without sunlight, of hearts that have loved without happiness.'1 He is, and we should expect him to be, the favourite in the cultivated world of to-day. His temperament and attitude have much in common with the mood of the present generation ; his abruptness, his tendency to exaggeration, his startling contrasts, his very neglect of the conventional canons of classical style, in themselves commend him to readers accustomed to the high relief' of modern literary art. Not however that Propertius will ever be known and admired by a large circle of readers. He is far too difficult. But no one with the intelligence and training to

1 F. Plessis, Étude sur Properce, pp. 297-298.

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master his poetry has ever failed to recognize his remarkable genius.1

Tibullus again belongs to an entirely different type. A standard example of the 'low relief' of antique literary art, his most notable quality is perfect simplicity. He is simplex munditiis, a genuine representative, as Plessis has observed, of the Attic school. As such his taste is simple to the point of severity. There is no apparent effort to impress the reader with his own ability. He is not a man of brilliant passages, he furnishes practically no quotations for lovers of the striking or sententious, he makes no attempt even to depart from the traditional themes and motives of the elegy. So too there is no elaborate use of mythological lore, no deep and recondite learning, no signs of the close and fervid study of specific literary models. His diction, though famous for its beauty and delicacy, is always simple; and the development of his thought, though artistic to the last degree, gives no hint of formality or premeditation. His style is notably sane and sober; indeed as Sellar observes, 'the active power of his imagination is perceptible rather in the collocation of his words than in figures of speech' (i.e. metaphors). Finally his metrical technique, dainty and artistic to the point of a proverb, nevertheless shuns the invariable application of certain less important rules, as conducive to monotony and in itself savouring of affectation. In other words, thought and form are in perfect harmony and are a faithful reflection in every particular of the Tibullian standard of naturalness and simplicity.

Of course his simplicity is not artless. No competent critic in these days, certainly no classical scholar worthy of the name, needs to be reminded that in a literary masterpiece simplicity is always deliberate and naïveté always artistic. Tibullus is a conscious artist.

It would appear too that, apart from the natural bent of his

1' Properz ist das grössere Talent, Tibull der grössere Künstler.' — F. Leo, Röm. Lit. p. 350.

own individual genius, he also had a definite ideal in view. At all events it is significant to observe that, taken point by point, Tibullus reflects faithfully, so far as we know it, the idyllic-erotic elegy, the standard type of Mimnermos as modified by Philetas.

The ideal of Tibullus, the ideal of the traditional type of which he is himself the only representative now surviving, is the art that conceals art. The value and rarity of this style are not always fully appreciated even by those who admire it most. It is peculiarly liable to misinterpretation because, though full of reserves, it betrays no indications of the fact. The reserves of literary art, the things a poet ignores, not because he cannot say them, but because he does not choose to say them, are the last to be detected. In our estimate of Tibullus it is well to keep this in mind. In dealing with any poet, above all with a poet of the Tibullian type, we are somewhat in danger of mistaking choice for necessity, peculiarities and limitations of department for peculiarities and limitations of individual genius.

For example it is frequently stated that the education of Tibullus was probably nothing more than that, let us say, of an average country gentleman in the time of Augustus. The statement can only be derived from the fact that he makes no great show of learning. If so, it rests on the naïve assumption that a poet never fails to tell us all he knows. As a matter of fact any display of learning would be quite out of place in the idyllic elegy, above all, as Marx has observed, in poems ostensibly addressed to women of the people like Delia and Nemesis.1 here as elsewhere Tibullus is a conscious artist is proved, if proof is needed, by the fact that in poems of a non-idyllic character (like 1, 7 and 2, 5), evidences of special learning are by no means absent.

That

So of the fact that he says nothing of the many great contem

1 This point is in no way disturbed by Jacoby's adverse criticism, Rhein. Mus. 65, 68, n. 2. The matter is a question of dramatic propriety. From this point of view whether the poem was actually written for Delia or not makes no difference. It is enough that it is addressed to her.

poraries with whom he was doubtless on the best of terms, that he never mentions or discusses the tradition of his department in the past, that he makes no acknowledgement of literary inspiration, no confession of literary faith-how shall we explain these phenomena? The question is no longer capable of a final and definite reply. It is perhaps worth observing however that all these matters seem out of place in the strictly idyllic type. Even the mollitia with which he has been charged and the absence of certain more serious aspirations, though possibly due to individual limitations, are nevertheless in harmony with the traditions of his model. The conventional love affair of the elegy follows simple lines, the beaten paths of antique as well as of modern sentiment do not lead to the highest ground. Above all the idyllic mood does not and should not mount to the lonely peaks of contemplation and the wider outlooks of the spirit.

We must of course admit the claim that he does not show the daring imagination of Propertius nor betray the same ardour of temperament, but such passages as the awful picture of wolf-madness in 1, 5, 49 ff. (the more awful because merely suggested), the sinister hint of 1, 2, 39-40, the infernal art of the invective in 1, 9, 53 ff., the emotional stress of 2, 4, 5 ff., are momentary glimpses of a new Tibullus; and they suggest a poet quite capable of producing lights and shades of the most startling sort, if he had chosen to transgress the self-imposed laws of his own literary code.

It is also beyond question that he does not possess the inexhaustible vivacity and wit, the infectious animal spirits, of Ovid. At the same time one of the notable characteristics of Tibullus is his humour, and readers of Theokritos and the Bucolic poets will not fail to perceive that the vein is that which was always more or less characteristic of the idyllic mood throughout the Alexandrian Age. The gentle elegiac melancholy' of Tibullus, in reality one of his less important moods, is still a commonplace of criticism. It is hard to see however how any sympathetic reader can succeed in missing the humour of the situation in 1, 2, the satire of 1, 4, the