Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/90

78 tion, he owes to Callimachus characteristics which his intrinsic poetic gifts enabled him to dress out acceptably for the critics of his day. The singular and powerful poem of "Atys" belongs to the same class, by reason of its mythological subject. A recent French critic of Catullus, in a learned chapter on Alexandrinism, defines it as the absence of sincerity in poetry, and the exclusive preoccupation of form. "He," writes M. Couat, "who, instead of looking around him, or, better, within himself, parades over all countries and languages his adventurous curiosity, and prefers l'esprit to l'âme—the new, the pretty, the fine, to the natural and simple—such an one, to whatever literature he belongs, is an Alexandrinist. Alexandrinism in excess is what in this writer's view is objectionable; and whilst we are disposed to think that few will demur to this moderate dogma, it is equally certain that none of the Roman cultivators of the Alexandrine school have handled it with more taste and less detriment to their natural gifts than Catullus. With him the elaborateness which, in its home, Alexandrinism exhibits as to metre and prosody, is exchanged for a natural and unforced power, quite consistent with simplicity. As is well observed by Professor Sellar, "His adaptation of the music of language to embody the feeling or passion by which he is possessed, is most vividly felt in the skylark ring of his great nuptial ode, in the wild hurrying agitation of the Atys, in the stately calm of the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis." Herein, as indeed in the tact and art evinced generally in these