Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio: sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Or where he says that, pest as she is, he cannot curse a love who is dearer to him than both his eyes:--
Credis me potuisse meæ maledicere vitæ, Ambobus mihi quæ carior est oculis? Non potui, nec, si possem, tam perdite amarem.
And he suffered the more, as he had lavished on her the purest affections of his heart. His love for her--such was his own expression--was not simply that which men ordinarily feel for their mistresses, but such as the father feels for his sons and his sons-in-law:--
Dilexi tum te, non tantum ut vulgus amicam, Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.
But shameless as she is, and it is an impossibility for her to be otherwise, he cannot abandon her. Do what she will he is her slave. His mind, he says, was so straitened by her frailty, so beggared by its own devotion, that, even if she became virtuous, he could not love her with absolute goodwill, and if she stuck at nothing--drained vice to its very dregs--he could not give her up:--
Huc est mens deducta tuâ, mea Lesbia, culpâ Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo, Ut jam nec bene velle queam tibi, si optima fias, Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.
He compares himself to a man labouring under a cruel and incurable disease, a disease which is paralysing his energy, and draining life of its joy:--
Me miserum adspicite, et si vitam puriter egi, Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi, Quæ mihi subrepens imos, ut torpor, in artus Expulit ex omni pectore lætitias.
Nearly sixteen hundred years had to pass before the world was to have any parallel to these poems. And the parallel is certainly a remarkable one. In the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lesbia lives again; in the lover of the dark lady, Lesbia’s victim. Once more a false wife and a false mistress, not indeed beautiful, but with powers of fascination so irresistible that deformity itself becomes a charm, makes havoc of a poet’s peace. Once more a passion, as degraded as it is degrading, sows feuds among friends, and “infects with jealousy the sweetness of affiance.” Once more rises the bitter cry of a soul, conscious of the unspeakable degradation of a thraldom which it is agony to endure, and from which it would be agony to be emancipated. Compare for instance:--