This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying,you whom the laurels of Mr.Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy.You kindly ask my opinion on vers de societe in general.Well,I think them a very difficult sort of thing to write well,as one may infer from this,that the ancients,our masters,could hardly write them at all.In Greek poetry of the great ages I only remember one piece which can be called a model--the AEolic verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany the gift of the ivory distaff.It was a present,you remember,to the wife of his friend Nicias,the physician of Miletus.The Greeks of that age kept their women in almost Oriental reserve.One may doubt whether Nicias would have liked it if Theocritus had sent,instead of a distaff,a fan or a jewel.But there is safety in a spinning instrument,and all the compliments to the lady,"the dainty-ankled Theugenis,"turn on her skill,and industry,and housewifery.So Louis XIV.,no mean authority,called this piece of vers de societe "a model of honourable gallantry."I have just looked all through Pomtow's pretty little pocket volumes of the minor Greek poets,and found nothing more of the nature of the lighter verse than this of Alcman's--[Greek text which cannot be reproduced].Do you remember the pretty paraphrase of it in "Love in Idleness"?
"Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness that breathe desire,Would that I were a sea bird with wings that could never tire,Over the foam-flowers flying,with halcyons ever on wing,Keeping a careless heart,a sea-blue bird of the spring."It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended,the lament for his limbs weary with old age--with old age sadder for the sight of the honey-voiced girls.
The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of "Society Verses,"where,as Mr.Locker says,"a boudoir decorum is,or ought always to be,preserved,where sentiment never surges into passion,and where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment."Honest women were estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.
The Romans were little more fortunate.You cannot expect the genius of Catullus not to "surge into passion,"even in his hours of gayer song,composed when Multum lusimus in meis tabellis,Ut convenerat esse delicatos,Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum.
Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus,like the dedication of his book,are addressed to men,his friends,and thus they scarcely come into the category of what we call "Society Verses."Given the character of Roman society,perhaps we might say that plenty of this kind of verse was written by Horace and by Martial.The famous ode to Pyrrha does not exceed the decorum of a Roman boudoir,and,as far as love was concerned,it does not seem to have been in the nature of Horace to "surge into passion."So his best songs in this kind are addressed to men,with whom he drinks a little,and talks of politics and literature a great deal,and muses over the shortness of life,and the zest that snow-clad Soracte gives to the wintry fire.
