Posts
Grice e Curcio: all’isola -- la ragione
conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale dei corpi esistenti – lucrezio
epicureo – scuola di Noto – filosofia notese – filosofia siracusana – filosofia
siciliana -- filosofia italiana – Luigi Speranza (Noto). Filosofo notese. Filosofo siracusano. Filosofo
siciliano. Filosofo Italiano. Noto, Siracusa, Sicilia. Grice: “Curcio is what
we could call at Oxford a poet; he wrote a little book ‘Esistentee,’ an obvious
parody on Sartre, ‘L’essistentialismo e un umanesimo.’ – His background is
philososophical though, and it shows!” Ensegna
a Noto e Messina. Direttore Generale per l'Ordine Ginnasiale. Altre opere: “Armonia e dissonanza” –
consonanza e dissonanza (Noto) – etimologia di armonia – cognata con ‘armento’
e ‘aritmetica’ – “La sfinge” – “La piramide”. “Il prezzo della salute” (Noto).
Commenti, libri I-XXIV – Roma” – “Il giro del templo” (Bonacci, Roma);
“Mottetto” (Bonacci, Roma); “Fugato” (Bonacci, Roma); “II grano di follia”
(Bonacci, Roma); “Senza più peso” (Bonacci, Roma); “Assolo, (Bonacci, Roma); “A
due voci” (Bonacci, Roma); “L'avita vocazione” (Bonacci, Roma); “Esistente”
(Bonacci, Roma); “Altri occhi” (Bonacci, Roma); “Le due cene” (Bonacci, Roma);
“Sitio” (Bonacci, Roma); “Consummatum” (Bonacci, Roma); “Derelictus” (Bonacci,
Roma); “In horto” (Bonacci, Roma); “Paradossale” (Bonacci, Roma); “Felix”
(Bonacci, Roma); “Deliramentum” (Bonacci, Roma). MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. THE RENAISSANCE : Studies in Art and Poetry.
Globe. IMAGINARY PORTRAITS : A Prince of Court Painters— Denys
I'Auxerrois — Sebastian van Storck — Diike Carl of Rosen- mold. Globe, APPRECIATIONS,
with an Essay on Style. Globe. PLATO AND PLATONISM : A Series of Lectures.
Globe. MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS. WALTER PATER. FELLOW OF
BRASENOSE. a Xfiiiepivis Svapos, Sre fi^Kiarai ai
viKTCs m^ LIBRARY MACMILLAN AND CO.,
Ltd. The Religion of Numa. White-nights. Change of Air. The Tree of
Knowledge 5. The Golden Book 6. Euphuism. A Pagan End. Animula
Vagula. New Cyrenaicism. On the Way. The Most Religious City in the World. The
Divinity that doth hedge a King. The "Mistress and Mother" of Palaces
.Manly Amusement. Stoicism at Court. Second Thoughts. Beata Urbs. The Ceremony
of the Dart. The Will as Vision Two Curious Houses. Guests. Two Curious
Houses. The Church in Cecilia's House. The Minor Peace of the
Church. Divine Service. A Conversation not Imaginary . . Sunt Lacrim^e Rerum. The
Martyrs. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius. Anima naturaliter Christiana. MARIUS
THE EPICUREAN BY WALTER PATER. ESSAYS FROM THE
GUARDIAN. Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. G ASTON DE LATOUR : An Unfinished
Romance. Prepared for the Press by CHARLES L. SHADWELL, Fellow of
Oriel College. Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES
: A Series of Essays. Pre- pared for the Press by CHARLES L. SHADWELL,
Fellow of Oriel College. Extra Crown GREEK STUDIES : A Series of
Essays. Prepared for the Press by SHADWELL, Fellow of Oriel. MARIUS THE
EPICUREAN. His Sensations and Ideas. IMAGINARY PORTRAITS : A Prince of
Court Painters ; Denys 1'Auxerrois : Sebastian van Storck ; Duke Carl
of Rosenmold. THE RENAISSANCE : Studies in Art and Poetry. Extra. PLATO
AND PLATONISM : A Series of Lectures. Extra Crown 8vo. 8s.
APPRECIATIONS, with an Essay on Style. Extra Crown. LIFE OF WALTER PATER. By
ARTHUR C. BENSON. English Men of Letters Series. MACMILLAN
AND CO., LTD., LONDON. MARIUS THE EPICUREAN HIS
SENSATIONS AND IDEAS WALTER PATER. FELLOW OF BRASENOSE, OXFORD. Xet/u/nvos
oVetpos, ore pjjcurrat at MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON. STOICISM AT COURT. SECOND THOUGHTS. BEATA
URBS. THE CEREMONY OF THE DART. THE WILL AS VISION. TWO CURIOUS HOUSES i.
GUESTS .TWO CURIOUS HOUSES 2. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA'S HOUSE. THE MINOR PEACE OF THE CHURCH. DIVINE SERVICE.
A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINARY. SUNT LACRIM^E RERUM. THE MARTYRS. THE TRIUMPH OF
MARCUS AURELIUS . . 197 28. ANIMA NATURALITER CHRISTIANA. Marius
the Epicurean HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS. PATER. London. (The Library
Edition.). The Religion of Numa. White-Nights 3. Change of Air 4.
The Tree of Knowledge 5. The Golden Book 6. Euphuism. A Pagan End. Animula
Vagula. New Cyrenaicism On the Way. The Most Religious City in the World.
The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King. The “Mistress and Mother” of Palaces
14. Manly Amusement. I have placed an asterisk immediately after each of
Pater’s footnotes and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each of my
notes at that chapter’s end. Greek typeface: For this full-text edition,
I have transliterated Pater’s Greek quotations. If there is a need for the
original Greek, it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many
other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions. MARIUS THE
EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE WALTER PATER Χειμερινὸς ὄνειρος, ὅτε μήκισται αἱ νύκτες+ +“A winter’s
dream, when nights are longest.” Lucian, The Dream MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.
“THE RELIGION OF NUMA” As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old
religion lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as but
paganism—the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian
Church; so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that
the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest. While,
in Rome, new religions had arisen with bewildering complexity around the dying
old one, the earlier and simpler patriarchal religion, “the religion of Numa,”
as people loved to fancy, lingered on with little change amid the pastoral
life, out of the habits and sentiment of which so much of it had grown.
Glimpses of such a survival we may catch below the merely artificial attitudes
of Latin pastoral poetry; in Tibullus especially, who has preserved for us many
poetic details of old Roman religious usage. At mihi contingat patrios
celebrare Penates, Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari: —he
prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical, with repetitions of a
consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of his elegies, as part of the
order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which, as one form
of old legend related, the child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still
indeed an altar; and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical
sanity of the young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion
of the hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment rather
than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the
oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some
dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed
involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it
was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of
rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus
expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old
wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little
shrines. And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his
golden image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (now
about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the world would at
last find itself happy, could it detach some reluctant philosophic student from
the more desirable life of celestial contemplation, and compel him to rule it),
there was a boy living in an old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for
himself, recruited that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous force of
religious veneration such as had originally called them into being. More than a
century and a half had past since Tibullus had written; but the restoration of
religious usages, and their retention where they still survived, was meantime
come to be the fashion through the influence of imperial example; and what had
been in the main a matter of family pride with his father, was sustained by a
native instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A sense of conscious powers
external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of
every circumstance of daily life—that conscience, of which the old Roman
religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a powerful
current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the
power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry,
had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot, “touched
of heaven,” where the lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field:
an upright stone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place. He
brought to that system of symbolic usages, and they in turn developed in him
further, a great seriousness—an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of
lifeand its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship; of such gifts
to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour on which they live, really
understood by him as gifts—a sense of eligious responsibility in the
reception of them. It was a religion for the most part of fear, of
multitudinous scruples, of a year-long burden of forms; yet rarely (on clear
summer mornings, for instanrce) the thought of those heavenly powers afforded a
welcome channel for the almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and
relieved it as gratitude to the gods. The day of the “little” or private
Ambarvalia was come, to be celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all
belonging to it, as the great college of the Arval Brothers offici ated at
Rome in the interest of the whole state. At the appointed time all work ceases;
the instruments of labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers, while
masters and servants together go in solemn procession along the dry paths of
vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims whose blood is presently to be
shed for the purification from all natural or supernatural taint o f the
lands they have “gone about.” The old Latin words of the liturgy, to be said as
the procession moved on its way, though their precise meaning was long since
become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient illuminated roll, kept in
the painted chest in the hall, together with the family records. Early on that
day the girls of the farm had been busy in the great portico, filling large
baskets with flowers plucked short from branches of apple and cherry, then in
spacious bloom, to strew before the quaint images of the gods—Ceres and BACCO
and the yet more mysterious Dea Dia—as they passed through the fields, carried
in their little houses on the shoulders of white-clad youths, who were
understood to proceed to this office in perfect temperance, as pure in soul and
body as the air they breathed in the firm weather of that early summer-time.
The clean lustral water and the full incense-box were carried after them. The
altars were gay with garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of blossom
and green herbs to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered this
morning from a particular plot in the old garden, set apart for the purpose.
Just then the young leaves were almost as fragrant as flowers, and the scent of
the bean-fields mingled pleasantly with the cloud of incense. But for the
monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the priests, clad in their strange,
stiff, antique vestments, and bearing ears of green corn upon their heads,
secured by flowing bands of white, the procession moved in absolute stillness,
all persons, even the children, abstaining from speech after the utterance of
the pontifical formula, Favete linguis!—Silence! Propitious Silence!—lest any
words save those proper to the occasion should hinder the religious efficacy of
the rite. With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a
leading part in the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to
complete this impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of mind,
esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of these sacred
functions. To him the sustained stillness without seemed really but to be
waiting upon that interior, mental condition of preparation or expectancy, for
which he was just then intently striving. The persons about him, certainly, had
never been challenged by those prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the
divine nature: they conceived them rather to be the appointed means of setting
such troublesome movements at rest. By them, “the religion of Numa,” so staid,
ideal and comely, the object of so much jealous conservatism, though of direct
service as lending sanction to a sort of high scrupulosity, especially in the
chief points of domestic conduct, was mainly prized as being, through its
hereditary character, something like a personal distinction—as contributing,
among the other accessories of an ancient house, to the production of that
aristocratic atmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But in the
young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all definite
history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much speculative
activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of the divine service,
some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were
moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all
day among the trees, and were like the passing of some mysterious influence
over all the elements of his nature and experience. One thing only distracted
him—a certain pity at the bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the
sacrificial victims and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at the
central act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher’s work, such
as we decorously hide out of sight; though some then present certainly
displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted them on a religious
pretext. The old sculptors of the great procession on the frieze of the
Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placid heads of the victims led in it
to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for animals in forcible contrast with any
indifference as to their sufferings. It was this contrast that distracted
Marius now in the blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption
upon the scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the
procession approached the altars. The names of that great populace of
“little gods,” dear to the Roman home, which the pontiffs had placed on the
sacred list of the Indigitamenta, to be invoked, because they can help, on
special occasions, were not forgotten in the long litany—Vatican who causes the
infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his first word, Cuba who
keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca especially, for whom Marius had through
life a particular memory and devotion, the goddess who watches over one’s safe
coming home. The urns of the dead in the family chapel received their due
service. They also were now become something divine, a goodly company of
friendly and protecting spirits, encamped about the place of their former abode—above
all others, the father, dead ten years before, of whom, remembering but a tall,
grave figure above him in early childhood, Marius habitually thought as a
genius a little cold and severe. Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi, Sub pedibusque
videt nubes et sidera.— Perhaps!—but certainly needs his altar here below, and
garlands to-day upon his urn. But the dead genii were satisfied with little—a
few violets, a cake dipped in wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, from the
time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had Marius taken them
their portion of the family meal, at the second course, amidst the silence of
the company. They loved those who brought them their sustenance; but, deprived
of these services, would be heard wandering through the house, crying
sorrowfully in the stillness of the night. And those simple gifts, like
other objects as trivial—bread, oil, wine, milk—had regained for him, by their
use in such religious service, that poetic and as it were moral significance,
which surely belongs to all the means of daily life, could we but break through
the veil of our familiarity with things by no means vulgar in themselves. A
hymn followed, while the whole assembly stood with veiled faces. The fire rose
up readily from the altars, in clean, bright flame—a favourable omen, making it
a duty to render the mirth of the evening complete. Old wine was poured out
freely for the servants at supper in the great kitchen, where they had worked
in the imperfect light through the long evenings of winter. The young Marius
himself took but a very sober part in the noisy feasting. A devout, regretful
after-taste of what had been really beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished
took him early away, that he might the better recall in reverie all the
circumstances of the celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant
with all the influences of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be
moving in procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That
feeling was still upon him as he awoke amid the beating of violent rain on the
shutters, in the first storm of the season. The thunder which startled him from
sleep seemed to make the solitude of his chamber almost painfully complete, as
if the nearness of those angry clouds shut him up in a close place alone in the
world. Then he thought of the sort of protection which that day’s ceremonies
assured. To procure an agreement with the gods—Pacem deorum exposcere: that was
the meaning of what they had all day been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but
half-suspicious, he would fain have those Powers at least not against him. His
own nearer household gods were all around his bed. The spell of his religion as
a part of the very essence of home, its intimacy, its dignity and security, was
forcible at that moment; only, it seemed to involve certain heavy demands upon
him. To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the
childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as you
first caught sight of that coy, retired place,—surely nothing could happen
there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie. White-nights! so
you might interpret its old Latin name.* “The red rose came first,” says a
quaint German mystic, speaking of “the mystery of so-called white things,” as
being “ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and
themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the
white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to
evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the
priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal.” So, white-nights,
I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be nights not of quite
blank forgetfulness, but passed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by
sleep. Certainly the place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in
this, that you might very well conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in
the daytime might come to much there. * _Ad Vigilias Albas_. The
young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had come down to him
much curtailed through the extravagance of a certain Marcellus two generations
before, a favourite in his day of the fashionable world at Rome, where he had
at least spent his substance with a correctness of taste MARIO might seem to
have inherited from him; as he was believed also to resemble him in a
singularly pleasant smile, consistent however, in the younger face, with some
degree of sombre expression when the mind within was but slightly moved.
As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and nearer to the
dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a trace of workday negligence
or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some, for the young master
himself among them. The more observant passer-by would note, curious as to the
inmates, a certain amount of dainty care amid that neglect, as if it came in
part, perhaps, from a reluctance to disturb old associations. It was
significant of the national character, that a sort of elegant gentleman
farming, as we say, had been much affected by some of the most cultivated
Romans. But it became something more than an elegant diversion, something of a
serious business, with the household of Marius; and his actual interest in the
cultivation of theearth and the care of flocks had brought him, at least,
intimately near to those elementary conditions of life, a reverence for which,
the great Roman poet, as he has shown by his own half-mystic pre-occupation
with them, held to be the ground of primitive Roman religion, as of primitive
morals. But then, farm-life in Italy, including the culture of the olive and
the vine, has a grace of its own, and might well contribute to the
production of an ideal dignity of character, like that of nature itself in this
gifted region. Vulgarity seemed impossible. The place, though impoverished, was
still deservedly dear, full of venerable memories, and with a living sweetness
of its own for to-day. To hold by such ceremonial traditions had been a
part of the struggling family pride of the lad’s father, to which the example
of the head of the state, old Antoninus Pius—an example to be still further
enforced by his successor—had given a fresh though perhaps somewhat artificial
popularity. It had been consistent with many another homely and old-fashioned
trait in him, not to undervalue the charm of exclusiveness and immemorial
authority, which membership in a local priestly college, hereditary in his
house, conferred upon him. To set a real value on these things was but one element
in that pious concern for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as
Marius afterwards discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. The
ancient hymn—Fana Novella!—was still sung by his people, as the new moon grew
bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leaping through heaps of
blazing straw on a certain night in summer was not discouraged. The privilege
of augury itself, according to tradition, had at one time belonged to his race;
and if you can imagine how, once in a way, an impressible boy might have an
inkling, an inward mystic intimation, of the meaning and consequences of all
that, what was implied in it becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the
mind of Marius, in whose house the auspices were still carefully consulted
before every undertaking of moment. The devotion of the father then had
handed on loyally—and that is all many not unimportant persons ever find to
do—a certain tradition of life, which came to mean much for the young Marius.
The feeling with which he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively
that of awe; though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as
he could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty
and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman religion and
Roman law gave to the parent over the son. On the part of his mother, on the
other hand, entertaining the husband’s memory, there was a sustained freshness
of regret, together with the recognition, as MARIO fancies, of some costly
self-sacrifice to be credited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and
shadowy enough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long service
to the departed soul; its many annual observances centering about the funeral
urn—a tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white and fair, in the
family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowers from the garden. To the
dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a somewhat closer neighbourhood to
the old homes they were thought still to protect, than is usual with us, or was
usual in Rome itself—a closeness which the living welcomed, so diverse are the
ways of our human sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the
country, might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout
interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother’s sorrow. After the
deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so much as
to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images. To Marius the whole
of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar
collectedness. The severe and archaic religion of the villa, as he conceived
it, begot in him a sort of devout circumspection lest he should fall short at
any point of the demand upon him of anything in which deity was concerned. He
must satisfy with a kind of sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest he be
found wanting to, the claims of others, in their joys and calamities—the
happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself felt.
And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world of men and
things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side, came to
be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept him serious and dignified amid
the Epicurean speculations which in after years much engrossed him, and when he
had learned to think of all religions as indifferent, serious amid many
fopperies and through many languid days, and made him anticipate all his life
long as a thing towards which he must carefully train himself, some great
occasion of self-devotion, such as really came, that should consecrate his
life, and, it might be, its memory with others, as the early Christian looked
forward to martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon
it. The traveller, descending from the slopes of LUNA, even as he got his
first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the face, as
it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the white road, at
the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below.
The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age, which he saw
beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and
sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet
of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and
there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds
had forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm
gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a still more
scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. The old Roman architects seem to
have well understood the decorative value of the floor—the real economy there
was, in the production of rich interior effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure
upon the surface they trod on. The pavement of the hall had lost something of
its evenness; but, though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for
like a piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old
age. Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn chest
below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant Marcellus, with the
quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to Marius, just then so full of
animation and country colour. A chamber, curved ingeniously into oval form,
which he had added to the mansion, still contained his collection of works of
art; above all, that head of Medusa, for which the villa was famous. The
spoilers of one of the old Greek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the
thing, as it seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the
sands of which it was drawn up in a fisherman’s net, with the fine golden
laminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellus also who
had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the white pigeon-house
above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazed windows in the
uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape—the pallid crags of Carrara,
like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant harbour
with its freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus
Speciosa on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers.
Even on summer nights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the
scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house. Something
pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral or monastic, as we
should say, united to this exquisite order, made the whole place seem to
Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still
in real widowhood, provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary
sort of life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of
them—the “subjective immortality,” to use a modern phrase, for which many a
Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still in
the land of the living. Certainly, if any such considerations regarding them do
reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place
still left, in thought at least, beside the living, the desire for which is
actually, in various forms, so great a motive with most of us. And Marius the
younger, even thus early, came to think of women’s tears, of women’s hands to
lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural
want. The soft lines of the white hands and face, set among the many folds of
the veil and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music
sometimes, defined themselves for him as the typical expression of maternity.
Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for her musical
instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such things, an urbane and
feminine refinement, qualifying duly his country-grown habits—the sense of a
certain delicate blandness, which he relished, above all, on returning to the
“chapel” of his mother, after long days of open-air exercise, in winter or
stormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than
the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in
its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is
beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit afterwards in his Roman
life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the winters
especially, when the sufferings of the animal world became so palpable even to
the least observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the
almost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It was a
feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for life as such—for
that mysterious essence which man is powerless to create in even the feeblest
degree. One by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished
traps and springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird,
she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his
bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul was like that! Would it reach
the hands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled? And
as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing
pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;—so,
that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a
peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid
many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain. And a certain
vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced still further this
sentiment of home as a place of tried security. His religion, that old Italian
religion, in contrast with the really light-hearted religion of Greece, had its
deep undercurrent of gloom, its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively
confined to the walls of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not
always as the prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as his
accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it; and the
sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made him oddly
suspicious of particular places and persons. Though his liking for animals was
so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow
road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and ever afterwards avoided that place
and its ugly associations, for there was something in the incident which made
food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of
it however had almost passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he
came upon an African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the
reptile writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into
the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all sweetness
from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the
secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake’s bite, like
one of his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of an old garden-god
and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with his
aversion, and he could hardly have killed or injured the animals, which seemed
already to suffer by the very circumstance of their life, being what they were.
It was something like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral
feeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or feathers, so
different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect in its
spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and sordid and as if
far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into one
metallic spring of pure enmity against him. Long afterwards, when it happened
that at Rome he saw, a second time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered
the night which had then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine’s vein, on the
real greatness of those little troubles of children, of which older people make
light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected how richly possessed
his life had actually been by beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing how greatly
what was repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace. Thus the boyhood of
Marius passed; on the whole, more given to contemplation than to action. Less
prosperous in fortune than at an earlier day there had been reason to expect,
and animating his solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the
traditions of the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination,
and became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an
idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by
the exercise of meditative power. A vein of subjective philosophy, with the
individual for its standard of all things, there would be always in his
intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly
to accept other men’s valuations. And the generation of this peculiar element
in his temper he could trace up to the days when his life had been so like the
reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful
word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense,
might describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal
function hereditary in his family—the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the
abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such preparation
involved. Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of the play of Euripides,
who every morning sweeps the temple floor with such a fund of cheerfulness in
his service, he was apt to be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to
their peculiar influences which he never outgrew; so that often in after-times,
quite unexpectedly, this feeling would revive in him with undiminished
freshness. That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of
dedication, survived through all the distractions of the world, and when all
thought of such vocation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in spirit
at least, towards a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct of
life. And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the
lad’s pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble to the
coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and delightful
signs, one after another—the abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock
of wild birds—that one was approaching the sea; the long summer-day of idleness
among its vague scents and sounds. And it was characteristic of him that he
relished especially the grave, subdued, northern notes in all that—the charm of
the French or English notes, as we might term them—in the luxuriant Italian
landscape. Dilexi decorem domus tuae. That almost morbid religious
idealism, and his healthful love of the country, were both alike developed by
the circumstances of a journey, which happened about this time, when Marius was
taken to a certain temple of Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was
then usual in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. The religion of
Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been naturalised in Rome in the
old republican times; but had reached under the Antonines the height of its
popularity throughout the Roman world. That was an age of valetudinarians, in
many instances of imaginary ones; but below its various crazes concerning
health and disease, largely multiplied a few years after the time of which I am
speaking by the miseries of a great pestilence, lay a valuable, because partly
practicable, belief that all the maladies of the soul might be reached through
the subtle gateways of the body. Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had
come to mean bodily sanity. The religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator,
as they called him absolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one
religion; that mild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing,
all other pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral
or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to have a
kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more serious
minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious
bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly, in that case, but a
quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthood or “family” of Aesculapius, a vast
college, believed to be in possession of certain precious medical secrets, came
nearest perhaps, of all the institutions of the pagan world, to the Christian
priesthood; the temples of the god, rich in some instances with the accumulated
thank-offerings of centuries of a tasteful devotion, being really also a kind
of hospitals for the sick, administered in a full conviction of the
religiousness, the refined and sacred happiness, of a life spent in the
relieving of pain. Elements of a really experimental and progressive
knowledge there were doubtless amid this devout enthusiasm, bent so faithfully
on the reception of health as a direct gift from God; but for the most part his
care was held to take effect through a machinery easily capable of misuse for
purposes of religious fraud. Through dreams, above all, inspired by
Aesculapius himself, information as to the cause and cure of a malady was
supposed to come to the sufferer, in a belief based on the truth that dreams do
sometimes, for those who watch them carefully, give many hints concerning the
conditions of the body—those latent weak points at which disease or death may
most easily break into it. In the time of Marcus Aurelius these medical dreams
had become more than ever a fashionable caprice. Aristeides, the “Orator,” a
man of undoubted intellectual power, has devoted six discourses to their
interpretation; the really scientific Galen has recorded how beneficently they
had intervened in his own case, at certain turning-points of life; and a belief
in them was one of the frailties of the wise emperor himself. Partly for the
sake of these dreams, living ministers of the god, more likely to come to one
in his actual dwelling-place than elsewhere, it was almost a necessity that the
patient should sleep one or more nights within the precincts of a temple
consecrated to his service, during which time he must observe certain rules
prescribed by the priests. For this purpose, after devoutly saluting the
Lares, as was customary before starting on a journey, Marius set forth one
summer morning on his way to the famous temple which lay among the hills beyond
the valley of the Arnus. It was his greatest adventure hitherto; and he had
much pleasure in all its details, in spite of his feverishness. Starting early,
under the guidance of an old serving-man who drove the mules, with his wife who
took all that was needful for their refreshment on the way and for the offering
at the shrine, they went, under the genial heat, halting now and then to pluck
certain flowers seen for the first time on these high places, upwards, through
a long day of sunshine, while cliffs and woods sank gradually below their path.
The evening came as they passed along a steep white road with many windings
among the pines, and it was night when they reached the temple, the lights of
which shone out upon them pausing before the gates of the sacred enclosure,
while MARIO becomes alive to a singular purity in the air. A rippling of water
about the place was the only thing audible, as they waited till two priestly
figures, speaking Greek to one another, admitted them into a large,
white-walled and clearly lighted guest-chamber, in which, while he partook of a
simple but wholesomely prepared supper, MARIO still seems to feel pleasantly
the height they had attained to among the hills. The agreeable sense of
all this was spoiled by one thing only, his old fear of serpents; for it was
under the form of a serpent that Aesculapius had come to Rome, and the last definite
thought of his weary head before he fell asleep had been a dread either that
the god might appear, as he was said sometimes to do, under this hideous
aspect, or perhaps one of those great sallow-hued snakes themselves, kept in
the sacred place, as he had also heard was usual. And after an hour’s
feverish dreaming he awoke—with a cry, it would seem, for some one had entered
the room bearing a light. The footsteps of the youthful figure which approached
and sat by his bedside were certainly real. Ever afterwards, when the thought
arose in his mind of some unhoped-for but entire relief from distress, like
blue sky in a storm at sea, would come back the memory of that gracious
countenance which, amid all the kindness of its gaze, had yet a certain air of
predominance over him, so that he seemed now for the first time to have found
the master of his spirit. It would have been sweet to be the servant of him who
now sat beside him speaking. He caught a lesson from what was then said,
still somewhat beyond his years, a lesson in the skilled cultivation of life,
of experience, of opportunity, which seemed to be the aim of the young priest’s
recommendations. The sum of them, through various forgotten intervals of
argument, as might really have happened in a dream, was the precept, repeated
many times under slightly varied aspects, of a diligent promotion of the
capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eye would lie for him the determining
influence of life: he was of the number of those who, in the words of a poet
who came long after, must be “made perfect by the love of visible beauty.” The
discourse was conceived from the point of view of a theory Marius found
afterwards in Plato’s Phaedrus, which supposes men’s spirits susceptible to
certain influences, diffused, after the manner of streams or currents, by fair
things or persons visibly present—green fields, for instance, or children’s
faces—into the air around them, acting, in the case of some peculiar natures,
like potent material essences, and conforming the seer to themselves as with
some cunning physical necessity. This theory,* in itself so fantastic, had
however determined in a range of methodical suggestions, altogether quaint here
and there from their circumstantial minuteness. And throughout, the possibility
of some vision, as of a new city coming down “like a bride out of heaven,” a
vision still indeed, it might seem, a long way off, but to be granted perhaps
one day to the eyes thus trained, was presented as the motive of this
laboriously practical direction. Ê
aporroê tou kallous. “Emanation from a
thing of beauty.If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some
fresh picture, in a clear light,” so the discourse recommenced after a pause,
“be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in all things, and of
a peaceful heart with thy fellows.” To keep the eye clear by a sort of
exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending even to his
dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and more fastidiously, select form
and colour in things from what was less select; to meditate much on beautiful
visible objects, on objects, more especially, connected with the period of
youth—on children at play in the morning, the trees in early spring, on young
animals, on the fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by him if it
were but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token and
representative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid jealously, in his
way through the world, everything repugnant to sight; and, should any
circumstance tempt him to a general converse in the range of such objects, to
disentangle himself from that circumstance at any cost of place, money, or
opportunity; such were in brief outline the duties recognised, the rights
demanded, in this new formula of life. And it was delivered with conviction; as
if the speaker verily saw into the recesses of the mental and physical being of
the listener, while his own expression of perfect temperance had in it a
fascinating power—the merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom from
taint or flaw, in exercise as a positive influence. Long afterwards, when
Marius read the Charmides—that other dialogue of Plato, into which he seems to
have expressed the very genius of old Greek temperance—the image of this
speaker came back vividly before him, to take the chief part in the
conversation. It was as a weighty sanction of such temperance, in almost
visible symbolism (an outward imagery identifying itself with unseen
moralities) that the memory of that night’s double experience, the dream of the
great sallow snake and the utterance of the young priest, always returned to
him, and the contrast therein involved made him revolt with unfaltering
instinct from the bare thought of an excess in sleep, or diet, or even in
matters of taste, still more from any excess of a coarser kind. When he
awoke again, still in the exceeding freshness he had felt on his arrival, and
now in full sunlight, it was as if his sickness had really departed with the
terror of the night: a confusion had passed from the brain, a painful dryness from
his hands. Simply to be alive and there was a delight; and as he bathed in the
fresh water set ready for his use, the air of the room about him seemed like
pure gold, the very shadows rich with colour. Summoned at length by one of the
white-robed brethren, he went out to walk in the temple garden. At a distance,
on either side, his guide pointed out to him the Houses of Birth and Death,
erected for the reception respectively of women about to become mothers, and of
persons about to die; neither of those incidents being allowed to defile, as
was thought, the actual precincts of the shrine. His visitor of the previous
night he saw nowhere again. But among the official ministers of the place there
was one, already marked as of great celebrity, whom Marius saw often in later
days at Rome, the physician Galen, now about thirty years old. He was standing,
the hood partly drawn over his face, beside the holy well, as Marius and his
guide approached it. This famous well or conduit, primary cause of the
temple and its surrounding institutions, was supplied by the water of a spring
flowing directly out of the rocky foundations of the shrine. From the rim of
its basin rose a circle of trim columns to support a cupola of singular
lightness and grace, itself full of reflected light from the rippling surface,
through which might be traced the wavy figure-work of the marble lining below
as the stream of water rushed in. Legend told of a visit of Aesculapius to this
place, earlier and happier than his first coming to Rome: an inscription around
the cupola recorded it in letters of gold. “Being come unto this place the son
of God loved it exceedingly:”—Huc profectus filius Dei maxime amavit hunc
locum;—and it was then that that most intimately human of the gods had given
men the well, with all its salutary properties. The element itself when
received into the mouth, in consequence of its entire freedom from adhering
organic matter, was more like a draught of wonderfully pure air than water; and
after tasting, Marius was told many mysterious circumstances concerning it, by
one and another of the bystanders:—he who drank often thereof might well think
he had tasted of the Homeric lotus, so great became his desire to remain always
on that spot: carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative
of its fine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and it
flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume so oddly rhythmical
that the well stood always full to the brim, whatever quantity might be drawn
from it, seeming to answer with strange alacrity of service to human needs,
like a true creature and pupil of the philanthropic god. Certainly the little
crowd around seemed to find singular refreshment in gazin g on it. The
whole place appeared sensibly influenced by the amiable and healthful spirit of
the thing. All the objects of the country were there at their freshest. In the
great park-like enclosure for the maintenance of the sacred animals offered by
the convalescent, grass and trees were allowed to grow with a kind of graceful
wildness; otherwise, all was wonderfully nice. And thatfreshness seemed to have
something moral in its influence, as if it acted upon the body and the merely
bodily powers of apprehension, through the intelligence; and to the end of his
visit Marius saw no more serpents. A lad was just then drawing water for
ritual uses, and Marius followed him as he returned from the well, more and
more impressed by the religiousness of all he saw, on his way through a long
cloister or corridor, the walls well-nigh hidden under votive inscriptions
recording favours from the son of Apollo, and with a distant fragrance of
incense in the air, explained when he turned aside through an open doorway into
the temple itself. His heart bounded as the refined and dainty magnificence of
the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood of early sunshine, with the
ceremonial lights burning here and there, and withal a singular expression of
sacred order, a surprising cleanliness and simplicity. Certain priests, men
whose countenances bore a deep impression of cultivated mind, each with his
little group of assistants, were gliding round silently to perform their
morning salutation to the god, raising the closed thumb and finger of the right
hand with a kiss in the air, as the y came and went on their sacred
business, bearing their frankincense and lustral water. Around the walls, at
such a level that the worshippers might read, as in a book, the story of the
god and his sons, the brotherhood of the Asclepiadae, ran a series of
imageries, in low relief, their delicate light and shade being heightened, here
and there, with gold. Fullest of inspired and sacred expression, as if in this
place the chisel of the artist had indeed dealt not with marble but
with the very breath of feeling and thought, was the scene in which the
earliest generation of the sons of Aesculapius were transformed into healing
dreams; for “grown now too glorious to abide longer among men, by the aid of
their sire they put away their mortal bodies, and came into another country,
yet not indeed into Elysium nor into the Islands of the Blest. But being made
like to the immortal gods, they began to pass about through the world, changed
thus far from their first form that they appear eternally young, as many
persons have seen them in many places—ministers and heralds of their father,
passing to and fro over the earth, like gliding stars. Which thing is, indeed,
the most wonderful concerning them!” And in this scene, as throughout the series,
with all its crowded personages, Marius noted on the carved faces the same
peculiar union of unction, almost of hilarity, with a certain self-possession
and reserve, which was conspicuous in the living ministrants around him.
In the central space, upon a pillar or pedestal, hung, ex voto, with the
richest personal ornaments, stood the image of Aesculapius himself, surrounded
by choice flowering plants. It presented the type, still with something of the
severity of the earlier art of Greece about it, not of an aged and crafty
physician, but of a youth, earnest and strong of aspect, carrying an ampulla or
bottle in one hand, and in the other a traveller’s staff, a pilgrim among his
pilgrim worshippers; and one of the ministers explained to Marius this pilgrim
guise.—One chief source of the master’s knowledgeof healing had been
observation of the remedies resorted to by animals labouring under disease or
pain—what leaf or berry the lizard or dormouse lay upon its wounded fellow; to
which purpose for long years he had led the life of a wanderer, in wild places.
The boy took his place as the last comer, a little way behind the group of
worshippers who stood in front of the image. There, with uplifted face, the
palms of his two hands raised and open before him, and taught by the priest, he
said his collect of thanksgiving and prayer (Aristeides has recorded it at the
end of his Asclepiadae) to the Inspired Dreams:— “O ye children of
Apollo! who in time past have stilledthe waves of sorrow for many people,
lighting up a lamp of safety before those who travel by sea and land, be
pleased, in your great condescension, though ye be equal in glory with your
elder brethren the Dioscuri, and your lot in immortal youth be as theirs, to
accept this prayer, which in sleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it
arig ht, I pray you, according to your loving-kindness to men. Preserve me
from sickness; and endue my body with such a measure of health as may suffice
it for the obeying of the spirit, that I maypass my days unhindered and in
quietness.” On the last morning of his visit Marius entered the shrine
again, and just before his departure the priest, who had been his special
director during his stay at the place, lifting a cunningly contrived panel,
which formed the back of one of the carved seats, bade him look through. What
he saw was like the vision of a new world, by the opening of some unsuspected
window in a familiar dwelling-place. He looked out upon a long-d rawn
valley of singularly cheerful aspect, hidden, by the peculiar conformation of
the locality, from all points of observation but this. In a green meadow at the
foot of the steep olive-clad rocks below, the novices were taking their
exercise. The softly sloping sides of the vale lay alike in full sunlight; and
its distant opening was closed by a beautifully formed mountain, from which the
last wreaths of morning mist were rising under the heat. It might have seemed
the very presentment of a land of hope, its hollows brimful of a shadow of blue
flowers; and lo! on the one level space of the horizon, in a long dark line,
were towers and a dome: and that was Pisa.—Or Rome, was it? asked Marius, ready
to believe the utmost, in his excitement. All this served, as he
understood afterwards in retrospect, at once to strengthen and to purify a
certain vein of character in him. Developing the ideal, pre-existent there, of
a religious beauty, associated for the future with the exquisite splendour of
the temple of Aesculapius, as it dawned upon him on that morning of his first visit—it
developed that ideal in connexion with a vivid sense of the value of mental and
bodily sanity. And this recognition of the beauty, even for the aesthetic
sense, of mere bodily health, now acquired, operated afterwards as an influence
morally salutary, counteracting the less desirable or hazardous tendencies of
some phases of thought, through which he was to pass. He came home brown
with health to find the health of his mother failing; and about her death,
which occurred not long afterwards, there was a circumstance which rested with
him as the cruellest touch of all, in an event which for a time seemed to have
taken the light out of the sunshine. She died away from home, but sent for him
at the last, with a painful effort on her part, but to his great gratitude,
pondering, as he always believed, that he might chance otherwise to look back
all his life long upon a single fault with something like remorse, and find the
burden a great one. For it happened that, through some sudden, incomprehensible
petulance there had been an angry childish gesture, and a slighting word, at
the very moment of her departure, actually for the last time. Remembering this
he would ever afterwards pray to be saved from offences against his own
affections; the thought of that marred parting having peculiar bitterness for
one, who set so much store, both by principle and habit, on the sentiment of
home. O mare! O littus! verum secretumque Mouseion,+ quam multa invenitis,
quam multa dictatis! PLINIO (si veda)’s Letters. It would hardly
have been possible to feel more seriously than did Marius in those grave years
of his early life. But the death of his mother turned seriousness of feeling
into a matter of the intelligence: it made him a questioner; and, by bringing
into full evidence to him the force of his affections and the probable
importance of their place in his future, developed in him generally the more
human and earthly elements of character. A singularly virile consciousness of
the realities of life pronounced itself in him; still however as in the main a
poetic apprehension, though united already with something of personal ambition
and the instinct of self-assertion. There were days when he could suspect,
though it was a suspicion he was careful at first to put from him, that that
early, much cherished religion of the villa might come to count with him as but
one form of poetic beauty, or of the ideal, in things; as but one voice, in a
world where there were many voices it would be a moral weakness not to listen
to. And yet this voice, through its forcible pre-occupation of his childish
conscience, still seemed to make a claim of a quite exclusive character,
defining itself as essentially one of but two possible leaders of his spirit,
the other proposing to him unlimited self-expansion in a world of various
sunshine. The contrast was so pronounced as to make the easy, light-hearted,
unsuspecting exercise of himself, among the temptations of the new phase of
life which had now begun, seem nothing less than a rival religion, a rival
religious service. The temptations, the various sunshine, were those of the old
town of Pisa, where Marius was now a tall schoolboy. Pisa was a place lying
just far enough from home to make his rare visits to it in childhood seem like
adventures, such as had never failed to supply new and refreshing impulses to
the imagination. The partly decayed pensive town, which still had its commerce
by sea, and its fashion at the bathing-season, had lent, at one time the vivid
memory of its fair streets of marble, at another the solemn outline of the dark
hills of Luna on its background, at another the living glances of its men and
women, to the thickly gathering crowd of impressions, out of which his notion
of the world was then forming. And while he learned that the object, the
experience, as it will be known to memory, is really from first to last the
chief point for consideration in the conduct of life, these things were feeding
also the idealism constitutional with him—his innate and habitual longing for a
world altogether fairer than that he saw. The child could find his way in
thought along those streets of the old town, expecting duly the shrines at
their corners, and their recurrent intervals of garden-courts, or side-views of
distant sea. The great temple of the place, as he could remember it, on turning
back once for a last look from an angle of his homeward road, counting its tall
gray columns between the blue of the bay and the blue fields of blossoming flax
beyond; the harbour and its lights; the foreign ships lying there; the sailors’
chapel of VENERE, and her gilded image, hung with votive gifts; the seamen
themselves, their women and children, who had a whole peculiar colour-world of
their own—the boy’s superficial delight in the broad light and shadow of all
that was mingled with the sense of power, of unknown distance, of the danger of
storm and possible death. To this place, then, Marius came down now from
White-nights, to live in the house of his guardian or tutor, that he might
attend the school of a famous rhetorician, and learn, among other things,
Greek. The school, one of many imitations of L’ACCADEMIA in the old Athenian
garden, lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove of cypresses, its
porticoes, a house for the master, its chapel and images. For the memory of
Marius in after-days, a clear morning sunlight seemed to lie perpetually on
that severe picture in old gray and green. The lad went to this school daily
betimes, in state at first, with a young slave to carry the books, and
certainly with no reluctance, for the sight of his fellow-scholars, and their
petulant activity, coming upon the sadder sentimental moods of his childhood,
awoke at once that instinct of emulation which is but the other side of
sympathy; and he was not aware, of course, how completely the difference of his
previous training had made him, even in his most enthusiastic participation in
the ways of that little world, still essentially but a spectator. While all
their heart was in their limited boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was
already entertaining himself, very pleasurably meditative, with the tiny drama
in action before him, as but the mimic, preliminary exercise for a larger
contest, and already with an implicit epicureanism. Watching all the gallant
effects of their small rivalries—a scene in the main of fresh delightful
sunshine—he entered at once into the sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into
the passion of men, and had already recognised a certain appetite for fame, for
distinction among his fellows, as his dominant motive to be. The fame he
conceived for himself at this time was, as the reader will have anticipated, of
the intellectual order, that of a poet perhaps. And as, in that gray monastic
tranquillity of the villa, inward voices from the reality of unseen things had
come abundantly; so here, with the sounds and aspects of the shore, and amid the
urbanities, the graceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was the reality, the
tyrannous reality, of things visible that was borne in upon him. The real world
around—a present humanity not less comely, it might seem, than that of the old
heroic days—endowing everything it touched upon, however remotely, down to its
little passing tricks of fashion even, with a kind of fleeting beauty,
exercised over him just then a great fascination. That sense had come
upon him in all its power one exceptionally fine summer, the summer when, at a
somewhat earlier age than was usual, he had formally assumed the dress of
manhood, going into the Forum for that purpose, accompanied by his friends in
festal array. At night, after the full measure of those cloudless days, he would
feel well-nigh wearied out, as if with a long succession of pictures and music.
As he wandered through the gay streets or on the sea-shore, the real world
seemed indeed boundless, and himself almost absolutely free in it, with a
boundless appetite for experience, for adventure, whether physical or of the
spirit. His entire rearing hitherto had lent itself to an imaginative
exaltation of the past; but now the spectacle actually afforded to his untired
and freely open senses, suggested the reflection that the present had, it might
be, really advanced beyond the past, and he was ready to boast in the very fact
that it was modern. If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of that day
went back to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of a
fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature, and even, as we
have seen, of religion, at least it improved, by a shade or two of more
scrupulous finish, on the old pattern; and the new era, like the Neu-zeit of
the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our own century, might perhaps be
discerned, awaiting one just a single step onward—the perfected new manner, in
the consummation of time, alike as regards the things of the imagination and
the actual conduct of life. Only, while the pursuit of an ideal like this
demanded entire liberty of heart and brain, that old, staid, conservative
religion of his childhood certainly had its being in a world of somewhat narrow
restrictions. But then, the one was absolutely real, with nothing less than the
reality of seeing and hearing—the other, how vague, shadowy, problematical!
Could its so limited probabilities be worth taking into account in any
practical question as to the rejecting or receiving of what was indeed so real,
and, on the face of it, so desirable? And, dating from the time of his
first coming to school, a great friendship had grown up for him, in that life
of so few attachments—the pure and disinterested friendship of schoolmates. He
had seen Flavian for the first time the day on which he had come to Pisa, at
the moment when his mind was full of wistful thoughts regarding the new life to
begin for him to-morrow, and he gazed curiously at the crowd of bustling
scholars as they came from their classes. There was something in Flavian a
shade disdainful, as he stood isolated from the others for a moment, explained
in part by his stature and the distinction of the low, broad forehead; though
there was pleasantness also for the newcomer in the roving blue eyes which
seemed somehow to take a fuller hold upon things around than is usual with
boys. Marius knew that those proud glances made kindly note of him for a
moment, and felt something like friendship at first sight. There was a tone of
reserve or gravity there, amid perfectly disciplined health, which, to his
fancy, seemed to carry forward the expression of the austere sky and the clear
song of the blackbird on that gray March evening. Flavian indeed was a creature
who changed much with the changes of the passing light and shade about him, and
was brilliant enough under the early sunshine in school next morning. Of all
that little world of more or less gifted youth, surely the centre was this lad
of servile birth. Prince of the school, he had gained an easy dominion over the
old Greek master by the fascination of his parts, and over his fellow-scholars
by the figure he bore. He wore already the manly dress; and standing there in
class, as he displayed his wonderful quickness in reckoning, or his taste in
declaiming Homer, he was like a carved figure in motion, thought Marius, but
with that indescribable gleam upon it which the words of Homer actually
suggested, as perceptible on the visible forms of the gods—hoia theous
epenênothen aien eontas.+ A story hung by him, a story which his comrades
acutely connected with his habitual air of somewhat peevish pride. Two points
were held to be clear amid its general vagueness—a rich stranger paid his
schooling, and he was himself very poor, though there was an attractive
piquancy in the poverty of Flavian which in a scholar of another figure might
have been despised. Over Marius too his dominion was entire. Three years older
than he, Flavian was appointed to help the younger boy in his studies, and
Marius thus became virtually his servant in many things, taking his humours
with a sort of grateful pride in being noticed at all, and, thinking over all
this afterwards, found that the fascination experienced by him had been a
sentimental one, dependent on the concession to himself of an intimacy, a
certain tolerance of his company, granted to none beside. That was in the
earliest days; and then, as their intimacy grew, the genius, the intellectual
power of Flavian began its sway over him. The brilliant youth who loved dress,
and dainty food, and flowers, and seemed to have a natural alliance with, and
claim upon, everything else which was physically select and bright, cultivated
also that foppery of words, of choice diction which was common among the élite
spirits of that day; and Marius, early an expert and elegant penman,
transcribed his verses (the euphuism of which, amid a genuine original power,
was then so delightful to him) in beautiful ink, receiving in return the profit
of Flavian’s really great intellectual capacities, developed and accomplished
under the ambitious desire to make his way effectively in life. Among other
things he introduced him to the writings of a sprightly wit, then very busy
with the pen, one Lucian—writings seeming to overflow with that intellectual
light turned upon dim places, which, at least in seasons of mental fair
weather, can make people laugh where they have been wont, perhaps, to pray.
And, surely, the sunlight which filled those well-remembered early mornings in
school, had had more than the usual measure of gold in it! Marius, at least,
would lie awake before the time, thinking with delight of the long coming hours
of hard work in the presence of FLAVIANO, as others dream of a holiday.
It was almost by accident at last, so wayward and capricious was he, that
reserve gave way, and Flavian told the story of his father—a freedman,
presented late in life, and almost against his will, with the liberty so fondly
desired in youth, but on condition of the sacrifice of part of his peculium—the
slave’s diminutive hoard—amassed by many a self-denial, in an existence
necessarily hard. The rich man, interested in the promise of the fair child
born on his estate, had sent him to school. The meanness and dejection,
nevertheless, of that unoccupied old age defined the leading memory of Flavian,
revived sometimes, after this first confidence, with a burst of angry tears
amid the sunshine. But nature had had her economy in nursing the strength of
that one natural affection; for, save his half-selfish care for Marius, it was
the single, really generous part, the one piety, in the lad’s character. In him
Marius saw the spirit of unbelief, achieved as if at one step. The much-admired
freedman’s son, as with the privilege of a natural aristocracy, believed only
in himself, in the brilliant, and mainly sensuous gifts, he had, or meant to
acquire. And then, he had certainly yielded himself, though still with
untouched health, in a world where manhood comes early, to the seductions of
that luxurious town, and Marius wondered sometimes, in the freer revelation of
himself by conversation, at the extent of his early corruption. How often,
afterwards, did evil things present themselves in malign association with the
memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of borrowed sanction and charm
in its natural grace! To Marius, at a later time, he counted for as it were an
epitome of the whole pagan world, the depth of its corruption, and its perfection
of form. And still, in his mobility, his animation, in his eager capacity for
various life, he was so real an object, after that visionary idealism of the
villa. His voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the solid world upon
one, amid the flimsy fictions of a dream. A shadow, handling all things as
shadows, had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them. Meantime,
under his guidance, Marius was learning quickly and abundantly, because with a
good will. There was that in the actual effectiveness of his figure which
stimulated the younger lad to make the most of opportunity; and he had
experience already that education largely increased one’s capacity for
enjoyment. He was acquiring what it is the chief function of all higher
education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic
traits, the elements of distinction, in our everyday life—of so exclusively
living in them—that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or débris of
our days, comes to be as though it were not. And the consciousness of this aim
came with the reading of one particular book, then fresh in the world, with
which he fell in about this time—a book which awakened the poetic or romantic
capacity as perhaps some other book might have done, but was peculiar in giving
it a direction emphatically sensuous. It made him, in that visionary reception
of every-day life, the seer, more especially, of a revelation in colour and
form. If our modern education, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of
us that kind of idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as its
professed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of ancient
literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened also, long ago,
with Marius and his friend. Transliteration: Mouseion. The word means
“seat of the muses.” Translation: “O sea! O shore! my own Helicon, / How many
things have you uncovered to me, how many things suggested!” Pliny, Letters,
Book I, ix, to Minicius Fundanus. 50. +Transliteration: hoia theous
epenênothen aien eontas. Translation: “such as the gods are endowed with.”
Homer, Odyssey, 8.365. The two lads were lounging together over a book,
half-buried in a heap of dry corn, in an old granary—the quiet corner to which they
had climbed out of the way of their noisier companions on one of their blandest
holiday afternoons. They looked round: the western sun smote through the broad
chinks of the shutters. How like a picture! and it was precisely the scene
described in what they were reading, with just that added poetic touch in the
book which made it delightful and select, and, in the actual place, the ray of
sunlight transforming the rough grain among the cool brown shadows into heaps
of gold. What they were intent on was, indeed, the book of books, the “golden”
book of that day, a gift to Flavian, as was shown by the purple writing on the
handsome yellow wrapper, following the title Flaviane!—it said, Flaviane!
lege Felicitur! Flaviane! Vivas! Fioreas! Flaviane! Vivas! Gaudeas!
It was perfumed with oil of sandal-wood, and decorated with carved and
gilt ivory bosses at the ends of the roller. And the inside was something
not less dainty and fine, full of the archaisms and curious felicities in which
that generation delighted, quaint terms and images picked fresh from the early
dramatists, the lifelike phrases of some lost poet preserved by an old
grammarian, racy morsels of the vernacula r and studied prettinesses:—all
alike, mere playthings for the genuine power and natural eloquence of the
erudite artist, unsuppressed by his erudition, which, however, made some people
angry, chiefly less well “got-up” people, and especially those who were untidy
from indolence. No! it was certainly not that old-fashioned, unconscious
ease of the early literature, which could never come again; which, after all,
had had more in common with the “infinite patience” of Apuleius than with the
hack-work readiness of his detractors, who might so well have been
“self-conscious” of going slip-shod. And at least his success was unmistakable
as to the precise literary effect he had intended, including a certain tincture
of “neology” in expression—nonnihil interdum elocutione novella parum
signatum—in the language of CORNELIO FRONTONE (si veda), the contemporary
prince of rhetoricians. What words he had found for conveying, with a single
touch, the sense of textures, colours, incidents! “Like jewellers’ work! Like a
myrrhine vase!”—admirers said of his writing. “The golden fibre in the hair, the
gold thread-work in the gown marked her as the mistress”—aurum in comis et in
tunicis, ibi inflexum hic intextum, matronam profecto confitebatur—he writes,
with his “curious felicity,” of one of his heroines. Aurum intextum: gold
fibre:—well! there was something of that kind in his own work. And then, in an
age when people, from the emperor Aurelius downwards, prided themselves
unwisely on writing in Greek, he had written for Latin people in their own
tongue; though still, in truth, with all the care of a learned language. Not
less happily inventive were the incidents recorded—story within story—stories
with the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams. He had his humorous touches
also. And what went to the ordinary boyish taste, in those somewhat peculiar readers,
what would have charmed boys more purely boyish, was the adventure:—the bear
loose in the house at night, the wolves storming the farms in winter, the
exploits of the robbers, their charming caves, the delightful thrill one had at
the question—“Don’t you know that these roads are infested by robbers?”
The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land of witchcraft,
and took one up and down its mountains, and into its old weird towns, haunts of
magic and incantation, where all the more genuine appliances of the black art,
left behind her by Medea when she fled through that country, were still in use.
In the city of Hypata, indeed, nothing seemed to be its true self—“You might
think that through the murmuring of some cadaverous spell, all things had been
changed into forms not their own; that there was humanity in the hardness of
the stones you stumbled on; that the birds you heard singing were feathered
men; that the trees around the walls drew their leaves from a like source. The
statues seemed about to move, the walls to speak, the dumb cattle to break out
in prophecy; nay! the very sky and the sunbeams, as if they might suddenly cry
out.” Witches are there who can draw down the moon, or at least the lunar
virus—that white fluid she sheds, to be found, so rarely, “on high, heathy
places: which is a poison. A touch of it will drive men mad.” And in one
very remote village lives the sorceress Pamphile, who turns her neighbours into
various animals. What true humour in the scene where, after mounting the
rickety stairs, LUCIO, peeping curiously through a chink in the door, is a
spectator of the transformation of the old witch herself into a bird, that she
may take flight to the object of her affections—into an owl! “First she
stripped off every rag she had. Then opening a certain chest she took from it
many small boxes, and removing the lid of one of them, rubbed herself over for
a long time, from head to foot, with an ointment it contained, and after much
low muttering to her lamp, began to jerk at last and shake her limbs. And as
her limbs moved to and fro, out burst the soft feathers: stout wings came forth
to view: the nose grew hard and hooked: her nails were crooked into claws; and
Pamphile was an owl. She uttered a queasy screech; and, leaping little by
little from the ground, making trial of herself, fled presently, on full wing,
out of doors.” By clumsy imitation of this process, Lucius, the hero of
the romance, transforms himself, not as he had intended into a showy winged
creature, but into the animal which has given name to the book; for throughout
it there runs a vein of racy, homely satire on the love of magic then
prevalent, curiosity concerning which had led Lucius to meddle with the old
woman’s appliances. “Be you my Venus,” he says to the pretty maid-servant who
has introduced him to the view of Pamphile, “and let me stand by you a winged
Cupid!” and, freely applying the magic ointment, sees himself transformed, “not
into a bird, but into an ass!” Well! the proper remedy for his distress
is a supper of roses, could such be found, and many are his quaintly
picturesque attempts to come by them at that adverse season; as he contrives to
do at last, when, the grotesque procession of Isis passing by with a bear and
other strange animals in its train, the ass following along with the rest
suddenly crunches the chaplet of roses carried in the High-priest’s hand.
Meantime, however, he must wait for the spring, with more than the outside of
an ass; “though I was not so much a fool, nor so truly an ass,” he tells us,
when he happens to be left alone with a daintily spread table, “as to neglect
this most delicious fare, and feed upon coarse hay.” For, in truth, all through
the book, there is an unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold touches
like Swift’s, and a genuine animal breadth. Lucius was the original ass, who
peeping slily from the window of his hiding-place forgot all about the big
shade he cast just above him, and gave occasion to the joke or proverb about
“the peeping ass and his shadow.” But the marvellous, delight in which is
one of the really serious elements in most boys, passed at times, those young
readers still feeling its fascination, into what French writers call the
macabre—that species of almost insane pre-occupation with the materialities of
our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption, which was
connected, in this writer at least, with not a little obvious coarseness. It
was a strange notion of the gross lust of the actual world, that Marius took
from some of these episodes. “I am told,” they read, “that when foreigners are
interred, the old witches are in the habit of out-racing the funeral
procession, to ravage the corpse”—in order to obtain certain cuttings and
remnants from it, with which to injure the living—“especially if the witch has
happened to cast her eye upon some goodly young man.” And the scene of the
night-watching of a dead body lest the witches should come to tear off the
flesh with their teeth, is worthy of Théophile Gautier. But set as one of
the episodes in the main narrative, a true gem amid its mockeries, its coarse
though genuine humanity, its burlesque horrors, came the tale of Cupid and
Psyche, full of brilliant, life-like situations, speciosa locis, and abounding
in lovely visible imagery (one seemed to see and handle the golden hair, the
fresh flowers, the precious works of art in it!) yet full also of a gentle
idealism, so that you might take it, if you chose, for an allegory. With a
concentration of all his finer literary gifts, Apuleius had gathered into it
the floating star-matter of many a delightful old story.— The Story of
Cupid and Psyche. In a certain city lived a king and queen who had
three daughters exceeding fair. But the beauty of the elder sisters, though
pleasant to behold, yet passed not the measure of human praise, while such was
the loveliness of the youngest that men’s speech was too poor to commend it
worthily and could express it not at all. Many of the citizens and of
strangers, whom the fame of this excellent vision had gathered thither,
confounded by that matchless beauty, could but kiss the finger-tips of their
right hands at sight of her, as in adoration to the goddess Venus herself. And
soon a rumour passed through the country that she whom the blue deep had borne,
forbearing her divine dignity, was even then moving among men, or that by some
fresh germination from the stars, not the sea now, but the earth, had put forth
a new Venus, endued with the flower of virginity. This belief, with the
fame of the maiden’s loveliness, went daily further into distant lands, so that
many people were drawn together to behold that glorious model of the age. Men
sailed no longer to Paphos, to Cnidus or Cythera, to the presence of the
goddess Venus: her sacred rites were neglected, her images stood uncrowned, the
cold ashes were left to disfigure her forsaken altars. It was to a maiden that
men’s prayers were offered, to a human countenance they looked, in propitiating
so great a godhead: when the girl went forth in the morning they strewed
flowers on her way, and the victims proper to that unseen goddess were
presented as she passed along. This conveyance of divine worship to a mortal
kindled meantime the anger of the true Venus. “Lo! now, the ancient parent of
nature,” she cried, “the fountain of all elements! Behold me, Venus, benign
mother of the world, sharing my honours with a mortal maiden, while my name,
built up in heaven, is profaned by the mean things of earth! Shall a perishable
woman bear my image about with her? In vain did the shepherd of Ida prefer me!
Yet shall she have little joy, whosoever she be, of her usurped and unlawful
loveliness!” Thereupon she called to her that winged, bold boy, of evil ways,
who wanders armed by night through men’s houses, spoiling their marriages; and
stirring yet more by her speech his inborn wantonness, she led him to the city,
and showed him Psyche as she walked. “I pray thee,” she said, “give thy
mother a full revenge. Let this maid become the slave of an unworthy love.”
Then, embracing him closely, she departed to the shore and took her throne upon
the crest of the wave. And lo! at her unuttered will, her ocean-servants are in
waiting: the daughters of Nereus are there singing their song, and Portunus,
and Salacia, and the tiny charioteer of the dolphin, with a host of Tritons
leaping through the billows. And one blows softly through his sounding
sea-shell, another spreads a silken web against the sun, a third presents the
mirror to the eyes of his mistress, while the others swim side by side below,
drawing her chariot. Such was the escort of Venus as she went upon the
sea. Psyche meantime, aware of her loveliness, had no fruit thereof. All
people regarded and admired, but none sought her in marriage. It was but as on
the finished work of the craftsman that they gazed upon that divine likeness.
Her sisters, less fair than she, were happily wedded. She, even as a widow,
sitting at home, wept over her desolation, hating in her heart the beauty in
which all men were pleased. And the king, supposing the gods were angry,
inquired of the oracle of Apollo, and Apollo answered him thus: “Let the damsel
be placed on the top of a certain mountain, adorned as for the bed of marriage
and of death. Look not for a son-in-law of mortal birth; but for that evil
serpent-thing, by reason of whom even the gods tremble and the shadows of Styx
are afraid.” So the king returned home and made known the oracle to his
wife. For many days she lamented, but at last the fulfilment of the divine
precept is urgent upon her, and the company make ready to conduct the maiden to
her deadly bridal. And now the nuptial torch gathers dark smoke and ashes: the
pleasant sound of the pipe is changed into a cry: the marriage hymn concludes
in a sorrowful wailing: below her yellow wedding-veil the bride shook away her
tears; insomuch that the whole city was afflicted together at the ill-luck of
the stricken house. But the mandate of the god impelled the hapless
Psyche to her fate, and, these solemnities being ended, the funeral of the living
soul goes forth, all the people following. Psyche, bitterly weeping, assists
not at her marriage but at her own obsequies, and while the parents hesitate to
accomplish a thing so unholy the daughter cries to them: “Wherefore torment
your luckless age by long weeping? This was the prize of my extraordinary
beauty! When all people celebrated us with divine honours, and in one voice
named the New Venus, it was then ye should have wept for me as one dead. Now at
last I understand that that one name of Venus has been my ruin. Lead me and set
me upon the appointed place. I am in haste to submit to that well-omened
marriage, to behold that goodly spouse. Why delay the coming of him who was
born for the destruction of the whole world?” She was silent, and with
firm step went on the way. And they proceeded to the appointed place on a steep
mountain, and left there the maiden alone, and took their way homewards
dejectedly. The wretched parents, in their close-shut house, yielded themselves
to perpetual night; while to Psyche, fearful and trembling and weeping sore
upon the mountain-top, comes the gentle Zephyrus. He lifts her mildly, and,
with vesture afloat on either side, bears her by his own soft breathing over
the windings of the hills, and sets her lightly among the flowers in the bosom
of a valley below. Psyche, in those delicate grassy places, lying sweetly
on her dewy bed, rested from the agitation of her soul and arose in peace. And
lo! a grove of mighty trees, with a fount of water, clear as glass, in the
midst; and hard by the water, a dwelling-place, built not by human hands but by
some divine cunning. One recognised, even at the entering, the delightful
hostelry of a god. Golden pillars sustained the roof, arched most curiously in
cedar-wood and ivory. The walls were hidden under wrought silver: all tame and
woodland creatures leaping forward to the visitor’s gaze. Wonderful indeed was
the craftsman, divine or half-divine, who by the subtlety of his art had
breathed so wild a soul into the silver! The very pavement was distinct with
pictures in goodly stones. In the glow of its precious metal the house is its
own daylight, having no need of the sun. Well might it seem a place fashioned
for the conversation of gods with men! Psyche, drawn forward by the
delight of it, came near, and, her courage growing, stood within the doorway.
One by one, she admired the beautiful things she saw; and, most wonderful of
all! no lock, no chain, nor living guardian protected that great treasure
house. But as she gazed there came a voice—a voice, as it were unclothed of
bodily vesture—“Mistress!” it said, “all these things are thine. Lie down, and
relieve thy weariness, and rise again for the bath when thou wilt. We thy
servants, whose voice thou hearest, will be beforehand with our service, and a
royal feast shall be ready.” And Psyche understood that some divine care
was providing, and, refreshed with sleep and the Bath, sat down to the feast.
Still she saw no one: only she heard words falling here and there, and had
voices alone to serve her. And the feast being ended, one entered the chamber
and sang to her unseen, while another struck the chords of a harp, invisible
with him who played on it. Afterwards the sound of a company singing together
came to her, but still so that none were present to sight; yet it appeared that
a great multitude of singers was there. And the hour of evening inviting
her, she climbed into the bed; and as the night was far advanced, behold a
sound of a certain clemency approaches her. Then, fearing for her maidenhood in
so great solitude, she trembled, and more than any evil she knew dreaded that
she knew not. And now the husband, that unknown husband, drew near, and
ascended the couch, and made her his wife; and lo! before the rise of dawn he
had departed hastily. And the attendant voices ministered to the needs of the
newly married. And so it happened with her for a long season. And as nature has
willed, this new thing, by continual use, became a delight to her: the sound of
the voice grew to be her solace in that condition of loneliness and
uncertainty. One night the bridegroom spoke thus to his beloved, “O
Psyche, most pleasant bride! Fortune is grown stern with us, and threatens thee
with mortal peril. Thy sisters, troubled at the report of thy death and
seeking some trace of thee, will come to the mountain’s top. But if by
chance their cries reach thee, answer not, neither look forth at all, lest thou
bring sorrow upon me and destruction upon thyself.” Then Psyche promised that
she would do according to his will. But the bridegroom was fled away again with
the night. And all that day she spent in tears, repeating that she was now dead
indeed, shut up in that golden prison, powerless to console her sisters
sorrowing after her, or to see their faces; and so went to rest weeping. And
after a while came the bridegroom again, and lay down beside her, and embracing
her as she wept, complained, “Was this thy promise, my Psyche? What have I to
hope from thee? Even in the arms of thy husband thou ceasest not from pain. Do
now as thou wilt. Indulge thine own desire, though it seeks what will ruin
thee. Yet wilt thou remember my warning, repentant too late.” Then, protesting
that she is like to die, she obtains from him that he suffer her to see her
sisters, and present to them moreover what gifts she would of golden ornaments;
but therewith he ofttimes advised her never at any time, yielding to pernicious
counsel, to enquire concerning his bodily form, lest she fall, through unholy
curiosity, from so great a height of fortune, nor feel ever his embrace again.
“I would die a hundred times,” she said, cheerful at last, “rather than be
deprived of thy most sweet usage. I love thee as my own soul, beyond comparison
even with Love himself. Only bid thy servant ZEFIRO bring hither my sisters, as
he brought me. My honeycomb! My husband! Thy Psyche’s breath of life!” So he
promised; and after the embraces of the night, ere the light appeared, vanished
from the hands of his bride. And the sisters, coming to the place where
Psyche was abandoned, wept loudly among the rocks, and called upon her by name,
so that the sound came down to her, and running out of the palace distraught,
she cried, “Wherefore afflict your souls with lamentation? I whom you mourn am
here.” Then, summoning ZEFIRO, she reminded him of her husband’s bidding; and
he bare them down with a gentle blast. “Enter now,” she said, “into my house,
and relieve your sorrow in the company of Psyche your sister.” And Psyche
displayed to them all the treasures of the golden house, and its great family
of ministering voices, nursing in them the malice which was already at their
hearts. And at last one of them asks curiously who the lord of that celestial
array may be, and what manner of man her husband? And Psyche answered dissemblingly,
“A young man, handsome and mannerly, with a goodly beard. For the most part he
hunts upon the mountains.” And lest the secret should slip from her in the way
of further speech, loading her sisters with gold and gems, she commanded
Zephyrus to bear them away. And they returned home, on fire with envy.
“See now the injustice of fortune!” cried one. “We, the elder children, are
given like servants to be the wives of strangers, while the youngest is
possessed of so great riches, who scarcely knows how to use them. You saw,
Sister! what a hoard of wealth lies in the house; what glittering gowns; what
splendour of precious gems, besides all that gold trodden under foot. If she
indeed hath, as she said, a bridegroom so goodly, then no one in all the world
is happier. And it may be that this husband, being of divine nature, will make
her too a goddess. Nay! so in truth it is. It was even thus she bore herself.
Already she looks aloft and breathes divinity, who, though but a woman, has
voices for her handmaidens, and can command the winds.” “Think,” answered the
other, “how arrogantly she dealt with us, grudging us these trifling gifts out
of all that store, and when our company became a burden, causing us to be
hissed and driven away from her through the air! But I am no woman if she keep
her hold on this great fortune; and if the insult done us has touched thee too,
take we counsel together. Meanwhile let us hold our peace, and know naught of
her, alive or dead. For they are not truly happy of whose happiness other folk
are unaware.” And the bridegroom, whom still she knows not, warns her
thus a second time, as he talks with her by night: “Seest thou what peril
besets thee? Those cunning wolves have made ready for thee their snares, of
which the sum is that they persuade thee to search into the fashion of my
countenance, the seeing of which, as I have told thee often, will be the seeing
of it no more for ever. But do thou neither listen nor make answer to aught
regarding thy husband. Besides, we have sown also the seed of our race. Even
now this bosom grows with a child to be born to us, a child, if thou but keep
our secret, of divine quality; if thou profane it, subject to death.” And
Psyche was glad at the tidings, rejoicing in that solace of a divine seed, and
in the glory of that pledge of love to be, and the dignity of the name of
mother. Anxiously she notes the increase of the days, the waning months. And
again, as he tarries briefly beside her, the bridegroom repeats his
warning: “Even now the sword is drawn with which thy sisters seek thy
life. Have pity on thyself, sweet wife, and upon our child, and see not those
evil women again.” But the sisters make their way into the palace once more,
crying to her in wily tones, “O Psyche! and thou too wilt be a mother! How
great will be the joy at home! Happy indeed shall we be to have the nursing of
the golden child. Truly if he be answerable to the beauty of his parents, it
will be a birth of Cupid himself.” So, little by little, they stole upon
the heart of their sister. She, meanwhile, bids the lyre to sound for their
delight, and the playing is heard: she bids the pipes to move, the quire to
sing, and the music and the singing come invisibly, soothing the mind of the
listener with sweetest modulation. Yet not even thereby was their malice put to
sleep: once more they seek to know what manner of husband she has, and whence
that seed. And Psyche, simple over-much, forgetful of her first story, answers,
“My husband comes from a far country, trading for great sums. He is already of
middle age, with whitening locks.” And therewith she dismisses them
again. And returning home upon the soft breath of Zephyrus one cried to
the other, “What shall be said of so ugly a lie? He who was a young man with
goodly beard is now in middle life. It must be that she told a false tale: else
is she in very truth ignorant what manner of man he is. Howsoever it be, let us
destroy her quickly. For if she indeed knows not, be sure that her bridegroom
is one of the gods: it is a god she bears in her womb. And let that be far from
us! If she be called mother of a god, then will life be more than I can
bear.” So, full of rage against her, they returned to Psyche, and said to
her craftily, “Thou livest in an ignorant bliss, all incurious of thy real
danger. It is a deadly serpent, as we certainly know, that comes to sleep at
thy side. Remember the words of the oracle, which declared thee destined to a
cruel beast. There are those who have seen it at nightfall, coming back from
its feeding. In no long time, they say, it will end its blandishments. It but
waits for the babe to be formed in thee, that it may devour thee by so much the
richer. If indeed the solitude of this musical place, or it may be the
loathsome commerce of a hidden love, delight thee, we at least in sisterly
piety have done our part.” And at last the unhappy Psyche, simple and frail of
soul, carried away by the terror of their words, losing memory of her husband’s
precepts and her own promise, brought upon herself a great calamity. Trembling
and turning pale, she answers them, “And they who tell those things, it may be,
speak the truth. For in very deed never have I seen the face of my husband, nor
know I at all what manner of man he is. Always he frights me diligently from the
sight of him, threatening some great evil should I too curiously look upon his
face. Do ye, if ye can help your sister in her great peril, stand by her
now.” Her sisters answered her, “The way of safety we have well
considered, and will teach thee. Take a sharp knife, and hide it in that part
of the couch where thou art wont to lie: take also a lamp filled with oil, and
set it privily behind the curtain. And when he shall have drawn up his coils
into the accustomed place, and thou hearest him breathe in sleep, slip then
from his side and discover the lamp, and, knife in hand, put forth thy
strength, and strike off the serpent’s head.” And so they departed in
haste. And Psyche left alone (alone but for the furies which beset her)
is tossed up and down in her distress, like a wave of the sea; and though her
will is firm, yet, in the moment of putting hand to the deed, she falters, and
is torn asunder by various apprehension of the great calamity upon her. She
hastens and anon delays, now full of distrust, and now of angry courage: under
one bodily form she loathes the monster and loves the bridegroom. But twilight
ushers in the night; and at length in haste she makes ready for the terrible
deed. Darkness came, and the bridegroom; and he first, after some faint essay
of love, falls into a deep sleep. And she, erewhile of no strength, the
hard purpose of destiny assisting her, is confirmed in force. With lamp plucked
forth, knife in hand, she put by her sex; and lo! as the secrets of the bed
became manifest, the sweetest and most gentle of all creatures, Love himself,
reclined there, in his own proper loveliness! At sight of him the very flame of
the lamp kindled more gladly! But Psyche was afraid at the vision, and, faint
of soul, trembled back upon her knees, and would have hidden the steel in her
own bosom. But the knife slipped from her hand; and now, undone, yet ofttimes
looking upon the beauty of that divine countenance, she lives again. She sees
the locks of that golden head, pleasant with the unction of the gods, shed down
in graceful entanglement behind and before, about the ruddy cheeks and white
throat. The pinions of the winged god, yet fresh with the dew, are spotless
upon his shoulders, the delicate plumage wavering over them as they lie at
rest. Smooth he was, and, touched with light, worthy of Venus his mother. At
the foot of the couch lay his bow and arrows, the instruments of his power,
propitious to men. And Psyche, gazing hungrily thereon, draws an arrow
from the quiver, and trying the point upon her thumb, tremulous still, drave in
the barb, so that a drop of blood came forth. Thus fell she, by her own act,
and unaware, into the love of Love. Falling upon the bridegroom, with indrawn
breath, in a hurry of kisses from eager and open lips, she shuddered as she
thought how brief that sleep might be. And it chanced that a drop of burning
oil fell from the lamp upon the god’s shoulder. Ah! maladroit minister of love,
thus to wound him from whom all fire comes; though ’twas a lover, I trow, first
devised thee, to have the fruit of his desire even in the darkness! At the
touch of the fire the god started up, and beholding the overthrow of her faith,
quietly took flight from her embraces. And Psyche, as he rose upon the
wing, laid hold on him with her two hands, hanging upon him in his passage
through the air, till she sinks to the earth through weariness. And as she lay
there, the divine lover, tarrying still, lighted upon a cypress tree which grew
near, and, from the top of it, spake thus to her, in great emotion. “Foolish
one! unmindful of the command of Venus, my mother, who had devoted thee to one
of base degree, I fled to thee in his stead. Now know I that this was vainly
done. Into mine own flesh pierced mine arrow, and I made thee my wife, only that
I might seem a monster beside thee—that thou shouldst seek to wound the head
wherein lay the eyes so full of love to thee! Again and again, I thought to put
thee on thy guard concerning these things, and warned thee in loving-kindness.
Now I would but punish thee by my flight hence.” And therewith he winged his
way into the deep sky. Psyche, prostrate upon the earth, and following
far as sight might reach the flight of the bridegroom, wept and lamented; and
when the breadth of space had parted him wholly from her, cast herself down
from the bank of a river which was nigh. But the stream, turning gentle in
honour of the god, put her forth again unhurt upon its margin. And as it
happened, Pan, the rustic god, was sitting just then by the waterside, embracing,
in the body of a reed, the goddess Canna; teaching her to respond to him in all
varieties of slender sound. Hard by, his flock of goats browsed at will. And
the shaggy god called her, wounded and outworn, kindly to him and said, “I am
but a rustic herdsman, pretty maiden, yet wise, by favour of my great age and
long experience; and if I guess truly by those faltering steps, by thy
sorrowful eyes and continual sighing, thou labourest with excess of love.
Listen then to me, and seek not death again, in the stream or otherwise. Put
aside thy woe, and turn thy prayers to Cupid. He is in truth a delicate youth:
win him by the delicacy of thy service.” So the shepherd-god spoke, and
Psyche, answering nothing, but with a reverence to his serviceable deity, went
on her way. And while she, in her search after Cupid, wandered through many
lands, he was lying in the chamber of his mother, heart-sick. And the white
bird which floats over the waves plunged in haste into the sea, and approaching
Venus, as she bathed, made known to her that her son lies afflicted with some
grievous hurt, doubtful of life. And Venus cried, angrily, “My son, then, has a
mistress! And it is Psyche, who witched away my beauty and was the rival of my
godhead, whom he loves!” Therewith she issued from the sea, and returning
to her golden chamber, found there the lad, sick, as she had heard, and cried
from the doorway, “Well done, truly! to trample thy mother’s precepts under
foot, to spare my enemy that cross of anunworthy love; nay, unite her to
thyself, child as thou art, that I might have a daughter-in-law who hates me! I
will make thee repent of thy sport, and the savour of thy marriage bitter.
There is one who shall chasten this body of thine, put out thy torch and
unstring thy bow. Not till she has plucked forth that hair, into which so oft
these hands have smoothed the golden light, and sheared away thy wings, shall I
feel the injury done me avenged.” And with this she hastened in anger from the
doors. And Ceres and Juno met her, and sought to know the meaning of her
troubled countenance. “Ye come in season,” she cried; “I pray you, find for me
Psyche. It must needs be that ye have heard the disgrace of my house.”And they,
ignorant of what was done, would have soothed her anger, saying, “What fault,
Mistress, hath thy son committed, that thou wouldst destroy the girl he loves?
Knowest thou not that he is now of age? Because he wears his years so lightly
must he seem to thee ever but a child? Wilt thou for ever thus pry into the
pastimes of thy son, always accusing his wantonness, and blaming in him those
delicate wiles which are all thine own?” Thus, in secret fear of the boy’s bow,
did they seek to please him with their gracious patronage. But Venus, angry at
their light taking of her wrongs, turned her back upon them, and with hasty
steps made her way once more to the sea. Meanwhile Psyche, tost in soul,
wandering hither and thither, rested not night or day in the pursuit of her
husband, desiring, if she might not soothe his anger by the endearments of a
wife, at the least to propitiate him with the prayers of a handmaid. And seeing
a certain temple on the top of a high mountain, she said, “Who knows whether
yonder place be not the abode of my lord?” Thither, therefore, she turned her
steps, hastening now the more because desire and hope pressed her on, weary as
she was with the labours of the way, and so, painfully measuring out the
highest ridges of the mountain, drew near to the sacred couches. She sees ears
of wheat, in heaps or twisted into chaplets; ears of barley also, with sickles
and all the instruments of harvest, lying there in disorder, thrown at random
from the hands of the labourers in the great heat. These she curiously sets
apart, one by one, duly ordering them; for she said within herself, “I may not
neglect the shrines, nor the holy service, of any god there be, but must rather
win by supplication the kindly mercy of them all.” And Ceres found her
bending sadly upon her task, and cried aloud, “Alas, Psyche! Venus, in the
furiousness of her anger, tracks thy footsteps through the world, seeking for
thee to pay her the utmost penalty; and thou, thinking of anything rather than
thine own safety, hast taken on thee the care of what belongs to me!” Then
Psyche fell down at her feet, and sweeping the floor with her hair, washing the
footsteps of the goddess in her tears, besought her mercy, with many prayers: By
the gladdening rites of harvest, by the lighted lamps and mystic marches of the
Marriage and mysterious Invention of thy daughter Proserpine, and by all beside
that the holy place of Attica veils in silence, minister, I pray thee, to the
sorrowful heart of Psyche! Suffer me to hide myself but for a few days among
the heaps of corn, till time have softened the anger of the goddess, and my
strength, out-worn in my long travail, be recovered by a little rest.”
But Ceres answered her, “Truly thy tears move me, and I would fain help thee;
only I dare not incur the ill-will of my kinswoman. Depart hence as quickly as
may be.” And Psyche, repelled against hope, afflicted now with twofold sorrow,
making her way back again, beheld among the half-lighted woods of the valley
below a sanctuary builded with cunning art. And that she might lose no way of
hope, howsoever doubtful, she drew near to the sacred doors. She sees there
gifts of price, and garments fixed upon the door-posts and to the branches of
the trees, wrought with letters of gold which told the name of the goddess to
whom they were dedicated, with thanksgiving for that she had done. So, with
bent knee and hands laid about the glowing altar, she prayed saying, “Sister
and spouse of Jupiter! be thou to these my desperate fortune’s Juno the
Auspicious! I know that thou dost willingly help those in travail with child;
deliver me from the peril that is upon me.” And as she prayed thus, Juno in the
majesty of her godhead, was straightway present, and answered, “Would that I
might incline favourably to thee; but against the will of Venus, whom I have
ever loved as a daughter, I may not, for very shame, grant thy prayer.”
And Psyche, dismayed by this new shipwreck of her hope, communed thus with
herself, “Whither, from the midst of the snares that beset me, shall I take my
way once more? In what dark solitude shall I hide me from the all-seeing eye of
VENERE? What if I put on at length a man’s courage, and yielding myself unto
her as my mistress, soften by a humility not yet too late the fierceness of her
purpose? Who knows but that I may find him also whom my soul seeketh after, in
the abode of his mother?” And Venus, renouncing all earthly aid in her
search, prepared to return to heaven. She ordered the chariot to be made ready,
wrought for her by Vulcan as a marriage-gift, with a cunning of hand which had
left his work so much the richer by the weight of gold it lost under his tool.
From the multitude which housed about the bed-chamber of their mistress, white
doves came forth, and with joyful motions bent their painted necks beneath the
yoke. Behind it, with playful riot, the sparrows sped onward, and other birds
sweet of song, making known by their soft notes the approach of the goddess.
Eagle and cruel hawk alarmed not the quireful family of Venus. And the clouds
broke away, as the uttermost ether opened to receive her, daughter and goddess,
with great joy. And Venus passed straightway to the house of Jupiter to
beg from him the service of Mercury, the god of speech. And Jupiter refused not
her prayer. And Venus and Mercury descended from heaven together; and as they
went, the former said to the latter, “Thou knowest, my brother of Arcady, that
never at any time have I done anything without thy help; for how long time,
moreover, I have sought a certain maiden in vain. And now naught remains but
that, by thy heraldry, I proclaim a reward for whomsoever shall find her. Do
thou my bidding quickly.” And therewith she conveyed to him a little scrip, in
the which was written the name of Psyche, with other things; and so returned
home. And Mercury failed not in his office; but departing into all lands,
proclaimed that whosoever delivered up to Venus the fugitive girl, should
receive from herself seven kisses—one thereof full of the inmost honey of her
throat. With that the doubt of Psyche was ended. And now, as she came near to
the doors of Venus, one of the household, whose name was Use-and-Wont, ran out
to her, crying, “Hast thou learned, Wicked Maid! now at last! that thou hast a
mistress?” And seizing her roughly by the hair, drew her into the presence of
Venus. And when Venus saw her, she cried out, saying, “Thou hast deigned then
to make thy salutations to thy mother-in-law. Now will I in turn treat thee as
becometh a dutiful daughter-in-law!” And she took barley and millet and
poppy-seed, every kind of grain and seed, and mixed them together, and laughed,
and said to her: “Methinks so plain a maiden can earn lovers only by
industrious ministry: now will I also make trial of thy service. Sort me this
heap of seed, the one kind from the others, grain by grain; and get thy task
done before the evening.” And Psyche, stunned by the cruelty of her bidding,
was silent, and moved not her hand to the inextricable heap. And there came
forth a little ant, which had understanding of the difficulty of her task, and
took pity upon the consort of the god of Love; and he ran deftly hither and
thither, and called together the whole army of his fellows. “Have pity,” he
cried, “nimble scholars of the Earth, Mother of all things!—have pity upon the
wife of Love, and hasten to help her in her perilous effort.” Then, one upon
the other, the hosts of the insect people hurried together; and they sorted
asunder the whole heap of seed, separating every grain after its kind, and so
departed quickly out of sight. And at nightfall Venus returned, and
seeing that task finished with so wonderful diligence, she cried, “The work is
not thine, thou naughty maid, but his in whose eyes thou hast found favour.”
And calling her again in the morning, “See now the grove,” she said, “beyond
yonder torrent. Certain sheep feed there, whose fleeces shine with gold. Fetch
me straightway a lock of that precious stuff, having gotten it as thou
mayst.” And Psyche went forth willingly, not to obey the command of
Venus, but even to seek a rest from her labour in the depths of the river. But
from the river, the green reed, lowly mother of music, spake to her: “O Psyche!
pollute not these waters by self-destruction, nor approach that terrible flock;
for, as the heat groweth, they wax fierce. Lie down under yon plane-tree, till
the quiet of the river’s breath have soothed them. Thereafter thou mayst shake
down the fleecy gold from the trees of the grove, for it holdeth by the
leaves.” And Psyche, instructed thus by the simple reed, in the humanity
of its heart, filled her bosom with the soft golden stuff, and returned to
Venus. But the goddess smiled bitterly, and said to her, “Well know I who was
the author of this thing also. I will make further trial of thy discretion, and
the boldness of thy heart. Seest thou the utmost peak of yonder steep mountain?
The dark stream which flows down thence waters the Stygian fields, and swells
the flood of Cocytus. Bring me now, in this little urn, a draught from its
innermost source.” And therewith she put into her hands a vessel of wrought
crystal. And Psyche set forth in haste on her way to the mountain,
looking there at last to find the end of her hapless life. But when she came to
the region which borders on the cliff that was showed to her, she understood
the deadly nature of her task. From a great rock, steep and slippery, a
horrible river of water poured forth, falling straightway by a channel
exceeding narrow into the unseen gulf below. And lo! creeping from the rocks on
either hand, angry serpents, with their long necks and sleepless eyes. The very
waters found a voice and bade her depart, in smothered cries of, Depart hence!
and What doest thou here? Look around thee! and Destruction is upon thee! And
then sense left her, in the immensity of her peril, as one changed to
stone. Yet not even then did the distress of this innocent soul escape
the steady eye of a gentle providence. For the bird of Jupiter spread his wings
and took flight to her, and asked her, “Didst thou think, simple one, even
thou! that thou couldst steal one drop of that relentless stream, the holy
river of Styx, terrible even to the gods? But give me thine urn.” And the bird
took the urn, and filled it at the source, and returned to her quickly from
among the teeth of the serpents, bringing with him of the waters, all
unwilling—nay! warning him to depart away and not molest them. And she,
receiving the urn with great joy, ran back quickly that she might deliver it to
Venus, and yet again satisfied not the angry goddess. “My child!” she said, “in
this one thing further must thou serve me. Take now this tiny casket, and get
thee down even unto hell, and deliver it to Proserpine. Tell her that Venus
would have of her beauty so much at least as may suffice for but one day’s use,
that beauty she possessed erewhile being foreworn and spoiled, through her tendance
upon the sick-bed of her son; and be not slow in returning.” And Psyche
perceived there the last ebbing of her fortune—that she was now thrust openly
upon death, who must go down, of her own motion, to Hades and the Shades. And
straightway she climbed to the top of an exceeding high tower, thinking within
herself, “I will cast myself down thence: so shall I descend most quickly into
the kingdom of the dead.” And the tower again, broke forth into speech:
“Wretched Maid! Wretched Maid! Wilt thou destroy thyself? If the breath quit
thy body, then wilt thou indeed go down into Hades, but by no means return
hither. Listen to me. Among the pathless wilds not far from this place lies a
certain mountain, and therein one of hell’s vent-holes. Through the breach a
rough way lies open, following which thou wilt come, by straight course, to the
castle of Orcus. And thou must not go empty-handed. Take in each hand a morsel
of barley-bread, soaked in hydromel; and in thy mouth two pieces of money. And
when thou shalt be now well onward in the way of death, then wilt thou overtake
a lame ass laden with wood, and a lame driver, who will pray thee reach him
certain cords to fasten the burden which is falling from the ass: but be thou
cautious to pass on in silence. And soon as thou comest to the river of the
dead, Charon, in that crazy bark he hath, will put thee over upon the further
side. There is greed even among the dead: and thou shalt deliver to him, for
the ferrying, one of those two pieces of money, in such wise that he take it
with his hand from between thy lips. And as thou passest over the stream, a
dead old man, rising on the water, will put up to thee his mouldering hands,
and pray thee draw him into the ferry-boat. But beware thou yield not to
unlawful pity. “When thou shalt be come over, and art upon the causeway,
certain aged women, spinning, will cry to thee to lend thy hand to their work;
and beware again that thou take no part therein; for this also is the snare of
Venus, whereby she would cause thee to cast away one at least of those cakes
thou bearest in thy hands. And think not that a slight matter; for the loss of
either one of them will be to thee the losing of the light of day. For a
watch-dog exceeding fierce lies ever before the threshold of that lonely house
of Proserpine. Close his mouth with one of thy cakes; so shalt thou pass by
him, and enter straightway into the presence of Proserpine herself. Then do
thou deliver thy message, and taking what she shall give thee, return back
again; offering to the watch-dog the other cake, and to the ferryman that other
piece of money thou hast in thy mouth. After this manner mayst thou return
again beneath the stars. But withal, I charge thee, think not to look into, nor
open, the casket thou bearest, with that treasure of the beauty of the divine
countenance hidden therein.” So spake the stones of the tower; and Psyche
delayed not, but proceeding diligently after the manner enjoined, entered into
the house of Proserpine, at whose feet she sat down humbly, and would neither
the delicate couch nor that divine food the goddess offered her, but did
straightway the business of Venus. And Proserpine filled the casket secretly
and shut the lid, and delivered it to Psyche, who fled therewith from Hades
with new strength. But coming back into the light of day, even as she hasted
now to the ending of her service, she was seized by a rash curiosity. “Lo!
now,” she said within herself, “my simpleness! who bearing in my hands the
divine loveliness, heed not to touch myself with a particle at least therefrom,
that I may please the more, by the favour of it, my fair one, my beloved.” Even
as she spoke, she lifted the lid; and behold! within, neither beauty, nor
anything beside, save sleep only, the sleep of the dead, which took hold upon
her, filling all her members with its drowsy vapour, so that she lay down in
the way and moved not, as in the slumber of death. And Cupid being healed
of his wound, because he would endure no longer the absence of her he loved,
gliding through the narrow window of the chamber wherein he was holden, his
pinions being now repaired by a little rest, fled forth swiftly upon them, and
coming to the place where Psyche was, shook that sleep away from her, and set
him in his prison again, awaking her with the innocent point of his arrow. “Lo!
thine old error again,” he said, “which had like once more to have destroyed
thee! But do thou now what is lacking of the command of my mother: the rest
shall be my care. With these words, the lover rose upon the air; and being
consumed inwardly with the greatness of his love, penetrated with vehement wing
into the highest place of heaven, to lay his cause before the father of the
gods. And the father of gods took his hand in his, and kissed his face and said
to him, “At no time, my son, hast thou regarded me with due honour. Often hast
thou vexed my bosom, wherein lies the disposition of the stars, with those busy
darts of thine. Nevertheless, because thou hast grown up between these mine
hands, I will accomplish thy desire.” And straightway he bade Mercury call the
gods together; and, the council-chamber being filled, sitting upon a high
throne, “Ye gods,” he said, “all ye whose names are in the white book of the
Muses, ye know yonder lad. It seems good to me that his youthful heats should
by some means be restrained. And that all occasion may be taken from him, I
would even confine him in the bonds of marriage. He has chosen and embraced a
mortal maiden. Let him have fruit of his love, and possess her for ever.”
Thereupon he bade MERCURIO produce Psyche in heaven; and holding out to her his
ambrosial cup, “Take it,” he said, “and live for ever; nor shall CUPIDO ever
depart from thee.” And the gods sat down together to the marriage-feast.
On the first couch lay the bridegroom, and Psyche in his bosom. His rustic
serving-boy bare the wine to Jupiter; and Bacchus to the rest. The Seasons
crimsoned all things with their roses. Apollo sang to the lyre, while a little
Pan prattled on his reeds, and VENERE danced very sweetly to the soft music.
Thus, with due rites, did Psyche pass into the power of Cupid; and from them
was born the daughter whom men call Voluptas. So the famous story
composed itself in the memory of Marius, with an expression changed in some
ways from the original and on the whole graver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of APULEIO
was become more like that “Lord, of terrible aspect,” who stood at Dante’s
bedside and wept, or had at least grown to the manly earnestness of the Erôs of
Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, this episode of
Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation, already familiar
to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative love, centered upon a type
of beauty entirely flawless and clean—an ideal which never wholly faded from
his thoughts, though he valued it at various times in different degrees. The
human body in its beauty, as the highest potency of all the beauty of material
objects, seemed to him just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken
celestial fire, to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, soul or
spirit in things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the pure brilliancy, and
as it were in the happy light, of youth and morning and the springtide, men’s
actual loves, with which at many points the book brings one into close contact,
might appear to him, like the general tenor of their lives, to be somewhat mean
and sordid. The hiddenness of perfect things: a shrinking mysticism, a
sentiment of diffidence like that expressed in Psyche’s so tremulous hope
concerning the child to be born of the husband she had never yet seen—“in the
face of this little child, at the least, shall I apprehend thine”—in hoc saltem
parvulo cognoscam faciem tuam: the fatality which seems to haunt any signal+
beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something illicit
and isolating: the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the
vulgar:—these were some of the impressions, forming, as they do, a constant
tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience, from Medusa and Helen
downwards, which the old story enforced on him. A book, like a person, has its
fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in
our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more
than its independent value. The Metamorphoses of APULEIO, coming to Marius just
then, figured for him as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal
gratitude to its writer, and saw in it doubtless far more than was really there
for any other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in his remembrance,
never quite losing its power in frequent return to it for the revival of that
first glowing impression. Its effect upon the elder youth was a more
practical one: it stimulated the literary ambition, already so strong a motive
with him, by a signal example of success, and made him more than ever an
ardent, indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of the
literary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of that through
which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one can actually take
effect upon others, to over-awe or charm them to one’s side, presented
themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connexion with that desire for
predominance, for the satisfaction of which another might have relied on the
acquisition and display of brilliant military qualities. In him, a fine
instinctive sentiment of the exact value and power of words was connate with
the eager longing for sway over his fellows. He saw himself already a gallant
and effective leader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in
the rehabilitation of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished and languid;
yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the only sort of patriotic
feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves. The popular speech was
gradually departing from the form and rule of literary language, a language
always and increasingly artificial. While the learned dialect was yearly
becoming more and more barbarously pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other
hand, offered a thousand chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression,
rejected or at least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time
was coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understand CICERONE
(si veda); though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius, who,
departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been a fashionable
affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days of Hadrian, had written
in the vernacular. The literary prog ramme which Flavian had already
designed for himself would be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary,
in its dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and
revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of the proletariate of
speech. More than fifty years before, the younger Pliny, himself an effective
witness for the delicate power of the Latin tongue, had said,—“I am one of
those who admire the ancients, yet I do not, like some others, underrate
certain instances of genius which our own times afford. For it is not true that
nature, as if weary and effete, no longer produces what is admirable.” And he,
Flavian, would prove himself the true master of the opportunity thus indicated.
In his eagerness for a not too distant fame, he dreamed over all that, as the
young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns. Others might brutalise or
neglect the native speech, that true “open field” for charm and sway over men.
He would make of it a serious study, weighing the precise power of every phrase
and word, as though it were precious metal, disentangling the later
associations and going back to the original and native sense of each,—restoring
to full significance all its wealth of latent figurative expression, reviving
or replacing its outworn or tarnished images. Latin literature and the Latin
tongue were dying of routine and languor; and what was necessary, first of all,
was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and
expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words their
primitive power. For words, after all, words manipulated with all his
delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forcibly
impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of making
visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful, of lively
interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but middling, tame, or
only half-true even to him—this scrupulousness of literary art actually awoke
in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of chivalrous conscience. What care for
style! what patience of execution! what research for the significant tones of
ancient idiom—sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular
word-building—gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaning of the
sceptical Pliny’s somewhat melancholy advice to one of his friends, that he
should seek in literature deliverance from mortality—ut studiis se literarum a
mortalitate vindicet. And there was everything in the nature and the training
of Marius to make him a full participator in the hopes of such a new literary
school, with Flavian for its leader. In the refinements of that curious spirit,
in its horror of profanities, its fastidious sense of a correctness in external
form, there was something which ministered to the old ritual interest, still
surviving in him; as if here indeed were involved a kind of sacred service
tothe mother-tongue. Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as
manifested in every age in which the literary conscience has been awakened to
forgotten duties towards language, towards the instrument of expression: infact
it does but modify a little the principles of all effective expression at all
times. ’Tis art’s function to conceal itself: ars est celare artem:—is a saying,
which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, has perhaps been oftenest and most
confidently quoted by those who have had little literary or other art to
conceal; and from the very beginning of professional literature, the “labour of
the file”—a labour in the case of L’ACCADEMIA, for instance, or VIRGILIO (si
veda), like that of the oldest of goldsmiths as described by Apuleius,
enriching the work by far more than the weight of precious metal it removed—has
always had its function. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples of it, this
Roman Euphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty in writing—es kallos
graphein+—might lapse into its characteristic fopperies or mannerisms, into the
“defects of its qualities,” in truth, not wholly unpleasing perhaps, or at
least excusable, when looked at as but the toys (so CICERONE (si veda) calls
them), the strictly congenial and appropriate toys, of an assiduously
cultivated age, which could not help being polite, critical, self-conscious.
The mere love of novelty also had, of course, its part there: as with the
Euphuism of the Elizabethan age, and of the modern French romanticists, its
neologies were the ground of one of the favourite charges against it; though
indeed, as regards these tricks of taste also, there is nothing new, but a
quaint family likeness rather, between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here,
as elsewhere, the power of “fashion,” as it is called, is but one minor form,
slight enough, it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper yearning
of human nature towards ideal perfection, which is a continuous force in it;
and since in this direction too human nature is limited, such fashions must
necessarilyreproduce themselves. Among other resemblances to later growths of
Euphuism, its archaisms on the one hand, and its neologies on the other, the
Euphuism of the days of Marcus Aurelius had, in the composition of verse, its
fancy for the refrain. It was a snatch from a popular chorus, something he had
heard sounding all over the town of Pisa one April night, one of the firstbland
and summer-like nights of the year, that Flavian had chosen for the refrain of
a poem he was then pondering—the Pervigilium Veneris—the vigil, or “nocturn,”
of Venus. Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a
constant part in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries are
playing in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation or unreality in
that minute culture of form:—Cannot those who have a thing to say, say it
directly? Why not be simple and broad, like the old writers of Greece? And this
challenge had at least the effect of setting his thoughts at work on
the intellectual situation as it lay between the children of the present and
those earliest masters. Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about
the Greek genius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence
of imitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent, laid upon
every artist, increased since then! It was all around one:—that smoothly built
world of old classical taste, an accomplished fact, with overwhelming authority
on every detail of the conduct of one’s work. With no fardel on its own back,
yet so imperious towards those who came labouring after it, Hellas, in its
early freshness, looked as distant from him even then as it does from
ourselves. There might seem to be no place left for novelty or
originality, —place only for a patient, an infinite, faultlessness. On
this question too Flavian passed through a world of curious art-casuistries, of
self-tormenting, at the threshold of his work. Was poetic beauty a thing ever
one and the same, a type absolute; or, changing always with the soul of time
itself, did it depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick of apprehension, the
fashion, as we say, of each successive age? Might one recover that old, earlier
sense of it, that earlier manner, in a mas terly effort to recall all the
complexities of the life, moral and intellectual, of the earlier age to which
it had belonged? Had there been really bad ages in art or literature? Were all
ages, even those earliest, adventurous, matutinal days, in themselves equally
poetical or unpoetical; and poetry, the literary beauty, the poetic ideal,
always but a borrowed light upon men’s actual life? Homer had said—
Hoi d’hote dê limenos polybentheos entos hikonto, Histia men steilanto, thesan
d’ en nêi melainê... Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phêgmini thalassês.+
And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was
always telling things after this manner. And one might think there had been no
effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical transcript of a time,
naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken
at all without ideal effect, or, the sailors pulled down their boat without
making a picture in “the great style,” against a sky charged with marvels. Must
not the mere prose of an age, itself thus ideal, have coun ted for more
than half of Homer’s poetry? Or might the closer student discover even here,
even in Homer, the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the
reader and the actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak,
in an age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on his
opportunity for the touch of “golden alchemy,” or at least for the pleasantly
lighted side of things themselves? Might not another, in one’s own prosaic and
used-up time, so uneventful as it had been through the long reign of these
quiet Antonines, in like manner, discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it?
Would not a future generation, looking back upon this, under the power of the
enchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with its own
languor—the languor that for some reason (concerning which Augustine will one
day have his view) seemed to haunt men always? Had Homer, even, appeared unreal
and affected in his poetic flight, to some of the people of his own age, as
seemed to happen with every new literature in turn? In any case, the
intellectual conditions of early Greece had been—how different from these! And
a true literary tact would accept that difference in forming the primary
conception of the literary function at a later time. Perhaps the utmost one
could get by conscious effort, in the way of a reaction or return to the
conditions of an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas, artificial
artlessness, naïveté; and this quality too might have its measure of euphuistic
charm, direct and sensible enough, though it must count, in comparison with
that genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, not as the freshness of the
open fields, but only of a bunch of field-flowers in a heated room. There
was, meantime, all this:—on one side, the old pagan culture, for us but a
fragment, for him an accomplished yet present fact, still a living, united,
organic whole, in the entirety of its art, its thought, its religions, its
sagacious forms of polity, that so weighty authority it exercised on every
point, being in reality only the measure of its charm for every one: on the
other side, the actual world in all its eager self-assertion, with Flavian
himself, in his boundless animation, there, at the centre of the situation.
From the natural defects, from the pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous
cultivation of manner, he was saved by the consciousness that he had a matter
to present, very real, at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante
with what might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose
of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong
personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things as really
being, with important results, thus, rather than thus,—intuitions which the
artistic or literary faculty was called upon to follow, with the exactness of
wax or clay, clothing the model within. Flavian too, with his fine clear mastery
of the practically effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as
axiomatic in literature: that to know when one’s self is interested, is the
first condition of interesting other people. It was a principle, the forcible
apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in the selection of his
intellectual food; often listless while others read or gazed diligently; never
pretending to be moved out of mere complaisance to people’s emotions: it served
to foster in him a very scrupulous literary sincerity with himself. And it was
this uncompromising demand for a matter, in all art, derived immediately from
lively personal intuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which
saved his euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice.
Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddess Venus, the
work of his earlier manhood, and designed originally to open an argument less
persistently sombre than that protest against the whole pagan heaven which actually
follows it? It is certainly the most typical expression of a mood, still
incident to the young poet, as a thing peculiar to his youth, when he feels the
sentimental current setting forcibly along his veins, and so much as a matter
of purely physical excitement, that he can hardly distinguish it from the
animation of external nature, the upswelling of the seed in the earth, and of
the sap through the trees. Flavian, to whom, again, as to his later euphuistic
kinsmen, old mythology seemed as full of untried, unexpressed motives and
interest as human life itself, had long been occupied with a kind of mystic
hymn to the vernal principle of life in things; a composition shaping itself,
little by little, out of a thousand dim perceptions, into singularly definite form
(definite and firm as fine-art in metal, thought Marius) for which, as I said,
he had caught his “refrain,” from the lips of the young men, singing because
they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa. And as oftenest happens also,
with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal beginnings came
suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunate incidents, the physical
heat and light, of one singularly happy day. It was one of the first hot
days of March—“the sacred day”—on which, from Pisa, as from many another
harbour on the Mediterranean, the Ship of Isis went to sea, and every one
walked down to the shore-side to witness the freighting of the vessel, its
launching and final abandonment among the waves, as an object really devoted to
the Great Goddess, that new rival, or “double,” of ancient VENERE, and like her
a favourite patroness of sailors. On the evening next before, all the world had
been abroad to view the illumination of the river; the stately lines of
building being wreathed with hundreds of many-coloured lamps. The young men had
poured forth their chorus— Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit
cras amet— as they bore their torches through the yielding crowd,
or rowed their lanterned boats up and down the stream, till far into the night,
when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home. Morning broke,
however, smiling and serene; and the long procession started betimes. The
river, curving slightly, with the smoothly paved streets on either side,
between its low marble parapet and the fair dwelling-houses, formed the main highway
of the city; and the pageant, accompanied throughout by innumerable lanterns
and wax tapers, took its course up one of these streets, crossing the water by
a bridge up-stream, and down the other, to the haven, every possible
standing-place, out of doors and within, being crowded with sight-seers, of
whom Marius was one of the most eager, deeply interested in finding the
spectacle much as Apuleius had described it in his famous book. At the
head of the procession, the master of ceremonies, quietly waving back the
assistants, made way for a number of women, scattering perfumes. They were
succeeded by a company of musicians, piping and twanging, on instruments the
strangest MARIO had ever beheld, the notes of a hymn, narrating the first
origin of this votive rite to a choir of youths, who marched behind them
singing it. The tire-women and other personal attendants of the great goddess
came next, bearing the instruments of their ministry, and various articles from
the sacred wardrobe, wrought of the most precious material; some of them with
long ivory combs, plying their hands in wild yet graceful concert of movement
as they went, in devout mimicry of the toilet. Placed in their rear were the
mirror-bearers of the goddess, carrying large mirrors of beaten brass or
silver, turned in such a way as to reflect to the great body of worshippers who
followed, the face of the mysterious image, as it moved on its way, and their
faces to it, as though they were in fact advancing to meet the heavenly
visitor. They comprehended a multitude of both sexes and of all ages, already
initiated into the divine secret, clad in fair linen, the females veiled, the
males with shining tonsures, and every one carrying a sistrum—the richer sort
of silver, a few very dainty persons of fine gold—rattling the reeds, with a
noise like the jargon of innumerable birds and insects awakened from torpor and
abroad in the spring sun. Then, borne upon a kind of platform, came the goddess
herself, undulating above the heads of the multitude as the bearers walked, in
mystic robe embroidered with the moon and stars, bordered gracefully with a
fringe of real fruit and flowers, and with a glittering crown upon the head.
The train of the procession consisted of the priests in long white vestments,
close from head to foot, distributed into various groups, each bearing, exposed
aloft, one of the sacred symbols of Isis—the corn-fan, the golden asp, the
ivory hand of equity, and among them the votive ship itself, carved and gilt,
and adorned bravely with flags flying. Last of all walked the high priest; the
people kneeling as he passed to kiss his hand, in which were those
well-remembered roses. MARIO follows with the rest to the harbour, where
the mystic ship, lowered from the shoulders of the priests, was loaded with as
much as it could carry of the rich spices and other costly gifts, offered in
great profusion by the worshippers, and thus, launched at last upon the water,
left the shore, crossing the harbour-bar in the wake of a much stouter vessel
than itself with a crew of white-robed mariners, whose function it was, at the
appointed moment, finally to desert it on the open sea. The remainder of the
day was spent by most in parties on the water. Flavian and Marius sailed
further than they had ever done before to a wild spot on the bay, the
traditional site of a little Greek colony, which, having had its eager,
stirring life at the time when Etruria was still a power in Italy, had perished
in the age of the civil wars. In the absolute transparency of the air on this
gracious day, an infinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with
sparkling clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves—Flavian at
work suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land at last.
The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with a tumble-down of
quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine of Venus, fluttering and gay
with the scarves and napkins and gilded shells which these people had offered
to the image. FLAVIANO and MARIO sit down under the shadow of a mass of gray
rock or ruin, where the sea-gate of the Greek town had been, and talked of life
in those old Greek colonies. Of this place, all that remained, besides those
rude stones, was—a handful of silver coins, each with a head of pure and
archaic beauty, though a little cruel perhaps, supposed to represent the Siren
Ligeia, whose tomb was formerly shown here—only these, and an ancient song, the
very strain which Flavian had recovered in those last months. They were records
which spoke, certainly, of the charm of life within those walls. How strong
must have been the tide of men’s existence in that little republican town, so
small that this circle of gray stones, of service now only by the moisture they
gathered for the blue-flowering gentians among them, had been the line of its
rampart! An epitome of all that was liveliest, most animated and adventurous,
in the old Greek people of which it was an offshoot, it had enhanced the effect
of these gifts by concentration within narrow limits. The band of “devoted
youth,”—hiera neotês.+—of the brothers, devoted to the gods and whatever luck
the gods might afford, because there was no room for them at home—went forth,
bearing the sacred flame from the mother hearth; itself a flame, of power to
consume the whole material of existence in clear light and heat, with no
smouldering residue. The life of those vanished townsmen, so brilliant and
revolutionary, applying so abundantly the personal qualities which alone just
then Marius seemed to value, associated itself with the actual figure of his companion,
standing there before him, his face enthusiastic with the sudden thought of all
that; and struck him vividly as precisely the fitting opportunity for a nature
like his, so hungry for control, for ascendency over men. Marius noticed
also, however, as high spirits flagged at last, on the way home through the
heavy dew of the evening, more than physical fatigue in Flavian, who seemed to
find no refreshment in the coolness. There had been something feverish,
perhaps, and like the beginning of sickness, about his almost forced gaiety, in
this sudden spasm of spring; and by the evening of the next day he was lying
with a burning spot on his forehead, stricken, as was thought from the first,
by the terrible new disease. NOTES 93. +Corrected from the
Macmillan edition misprint “singal.” 98. +Transliteration: es
kallos graphein. Translation: “To write beautifully.”Iliad 1.432-33, 437.
Transliteration: Hoi d’ hote dê limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d’ en nêi melainê... Ek de kai autoi bainon epi
phêgmini thalassês. Etext editor’s translation: When
they had safely made deep harbor They took in the sail, laid it in their black
ship... And went ashore just past the breakers. 109.
+Transliteration: hiera neotês. Pater translates the phrase, “devoted
youth.” For the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor Marcus
Aurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in his train, among
the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive. People actually sickened at a
sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as they watched in dense crowds the
pathetic or grotesque imagery of failure or success in the triumphal
procession. And, as usual, the plague brought with it a power to develop all
pre-existent germs of superstition. It was by dishonour done to Apollo himself,
said popular rumour—to Apollo, the old titular divinity of pestilence,
that the poisonous thing had come abroad. Pent up in a golden coffer
consecrated to the god, it had escaped in the sacrilegious plundering of his
temple at Seleucia by the soldiers of Lucius Verus, after a traitorous surprise
of that town and a cruel massacre. Certainly there was something which baffled
all imaginable precautions and all medical science, in the suddenness with
which the disease broke out simultaneously, here and there, among both soldiers
and citizens, even in places far remote from the main line of its march in the
rear of the victorious army. It seemed to have invaded the whole empire, and
some have even thought that, in a mitigated form, it permanently remained
there. In Rome itself many thousands perished; and old authorities tell of
farmsteads, whole towns, and even entire neighbourhoods, which from that time
continued without inhabitants and lapsed into wildness or ruin. Flavian
lay at the open window of his lodging, with a fiery pang in the brain, fancying
no covering thin or light enough to be applied to his body. His head being
relieved after a while, there was distress at the chest. It was but the fatal
course of the strange new sickness, under many disguises; travelling from the
brain to the feet, like a material resident, weakening one after another of the
organic centres; often, when it did not kill, depositing various degrees of
lifelong infirmity in this member or that; and after such descent, returning
upwards again, now as a mortal coldness, leaving the entrenchments of the
fortress of life overturned, one by one, behind it. Flavian lay there,
with the enemy at his breast now in a painful cough, but relieved from that
burning fever in the head, amid the rich-scented flowers—rare Paestum roses,
and the like —procured by Marius for his solace, in a fancied convalescence;
and would, at intervals, return to labour at his verses, with a great
eagerness to complete and transcribe the work, while Marius sat and wrote at
his dictation, one of the latest but not the poorest specimens of genuine Latin
poetry. It was in fact a kind of nuptial hymn, which, taking its start
from the thought of nature as the universal mother, celebrated the preliminary
pairing and mating together of all fresh things, in the hot and genial
spring-time—the immemorial nuptials of the soul of spring itself and the brown
earth; and was full of a delighted, mystic sense of what passed between them in
that fantastic marriage. That mystic burden was relieved, at intervals, by the
familiar playfulness of the Latin verse-writer in dealing with mythology,
which, though coming at so late a day, had still a wonderful freshness in its
old age.—“Amor has put his weapons by and will keep holiday. He was bidden go
without apparel, that none might be wounded by his bowand arrows. But take
care! In truth he is none the less armed than usual, though he be all
unclad.” In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while making it
his chief aim to retain the opulent, many-syllabled vocabulary of the Latin
genius, at some points even to have advanced beyond it, in anticipation of
wholly new laws of taste as regards sound, a new range of sound itself. The
peculiar resultant note, associating itself with certain other experiences of
his, was to Marius like the foretaste of an entirely novel world of poetic
beauty to come. Flavian had caught, indeed, something of the rhyming cadence,
the sonorous organ-music of the medieval Latin, and therewithal something of
its unction and mysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along with the
last splendour of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that
transformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just about to dawn.
The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself with a feeling, the
exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seems to say, You have been
just here, just thus, before!—a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent but
prescient of the future, which passed over him afterwards many times, as he
came across certain places and people. It was as if he detected there the
process of actual change to a wholly undreamed-of and renewed condition of
human body and soul: as if he saw the heavy yet decrepit old Roman
architectureabout him, rebuilding on an intrinsically better pattern. Could it
have been actually on a new musical instrument that Flavian had first heard the
novel accents of his verse? And still Marius noticed there, amid all its
richness of expression and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always
relished so much in the composition of Flavian. Yes! a firmness like that of
some master of noble metal-work, manipulating tenacious bronze or gold. Even
now that haunting refrain, with its impromptu variations, from the throats of
those strong young men, came floating through the window. Cras amet qui
nunquam amavit, Quique amavit cras amet! —repeated Flavian,
tremulously, dictating yet one stanza more. What he was losing, his
freehold of a soul and body so fortunately endowed, the mere liberty of life
above-ground, “those sunny mornings in the cornfields by the sea,” as he
recollected them one day, when the window was thrown open upon the early
freshness—his sense of all this, was from the first singularly near and
distinct, yet rather as of something he was but debarred the use of for a time
than finally bidding farewell to. That was while he was still with no very
grave misgivings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources of life
still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time to time, indeed,
Marius, labouring eagerly at the poem from his dictation, was haunted by a
feeling of the triviality of such work just then. The recurrent sense of some
obscure danger beyond the mere danger of death, vaguer than that and by so much
the more terrible, like the menace of some shadowy adversary in the dark with
whose mode of attack they had no acquaintance, disturbed him now and again
through those hours of excited attention to his manuscript, and to the purely
physical wants of Flavian. Still, during these three days there was much hope
and cheerfulness, and even jesting. Half-consciously Marius tried to prolong
one or another relieving circumstance of the day, the preparations for rest and
morning refreshment, for instance; sadly making the most of the little luxury
of this or that, with something of the feigned cheer of the mother who sets her
last morsels before her famished child as for a feast, but really that he “may
eat it and die.” On the afternoon of the seventh day he allowed Marius
finally to put aside the unfinished manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the
chest quiet at length though much exhausted, had made itself felt with full
power again in a painful vomiting, which seemed to shake his body asunder, with
great consequent prostration. From that time the distress increased rapidly
downwards. Omnia tum vero vitai claustra lababant;+ and soon the cold was
mounting with sure pace from the dead feet to the head. And now Marius
began more than to suspect what the issue must be, and henceforward could but
watch with a sort of agonised fascination the rapid but systematic work of the
destroyer, faintly relieving a little the mere accidents of the sharper forms
of suffering. Flavian himself appeared, in full consciousness at last—in
clear-sighted, deliberate estimate of the actual crisis—to be doing battle with
his adversary. His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the various
suggested modes of relief. He must without fail get better, he would fancy,
might he be removed to a certain place on the hills where as a child he had
once recovered from sickness, but found that he could scarcely raise his head
from the pillow without giddiness. As if now surely foreseeing the end, he
would set himself, with an eager effort, and with that eager and angry look,
which is noted as one of the premonitions of death in this disease, to fashion
out, without formal dictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished
work, in hard-set determination, defiant of pain, to arrest this or that little
drop at least from the river of sensuous imagery rushing so quickly past
him. But at length delirium—symptom that the work of the plague was done,
and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy—broke the coherent order of
words and thoughts; and MARIO, intent on the coming agony, found his best hope
in the increasing dimness of the patient’s mind. In intervals of clearer
consciousness the visible signs of cold, of sorrow and desolation, were very
painful. No longer battling with the disease, he seemed as it were to place
himself at the disposal of the victorious foe, dying passively, like some dumb
creature, in hopeless acquiescence at last. That old, half-pleading petulance,
unamiable, yet, as it might seem, only needing conditions of life a little happier
than they had actually been, to become refinement of affection, a delicate
grace in its demand on the sympathy of others, had changed in those moments of
full intelligence to a clinging and tremulous gentleness, as he lay—“on the
very threshold of death”—with a sharply contracted hand in the hand of Marius,
to his almost surprised joy, winning him now to an absolutely self-forgetful
devotion. There was a new sort of pleading in the misty eyes, just because they
took such unsteady note of him, which made Marius feel as if guilty;
anticipating thus a form of self-reproach with which even the tenderest
ministrant may be sometimes surprised, when, at death, affectionate labour
suddenly ceasing leaves room for the suspicion of some failure of love perhaps,
at one or another minute point in it. Marius almost longed to take his share in
the suffering, that he might understand so the better how to relieve it.
It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the patient, and Marius
extinguished it. The thunder which had sounded all day among the hills, with a
heat not unwelcome to FLAVIANO, had given way at nightfall to steady rain; and
in the darkness MARIO lies down beside him, faintly shivering now in the sudden
cold, to lend him his own warmth, undeterred by the fear of contagion which had
kept other people from passing near the house. At length about day-break he
perceived that the last effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as
Marius understood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of him there.
“Is it a comfort,” he whispered then, “that I shall often come and weep over
you?”—“Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!” The sun shone out on
the people going to work for a long hot day, and Marius was standing by the
dead, watching, with deliberate purpose to fix in his memory every detail, that
he might have this picture in reserve, should any hour of forgetfulness
hereafter come to him with the temptation to feel completely happy again. A
feeling of outrage, of resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony
of pity, as he noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility,
almost abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one,
fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a
merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he would not forget one
circumstance in all that; as a man might piously stamp on his memory the death-scene
of a brother wrongfully condemned to die, against a time that may come.
The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort to watch by it
through the darkness, was a hint of his own failing strength, just in time. The
first night after the washing of the body, he bore stoutly enough the tax which
affection seemed to demand, throwing the incense from time to time on the
little altar placed beside the bier. It was the recurrence of the thing—that
unchanged outline below the coverlet, amid a silence in which the faintest
rustle seemed to speak—that finally overcame his determination. Surely, here,
in this alienation, this sense of distance between them, which had come over
him before though in minor degree when the mind of Flavian had wandered in his
sickness, was another of the pains of death. Yet he was able to make all due
preparations, and go through the ceremonies, shortened a little because of the
infection, when, on a cloudless evening, the funeral procession went forth;
himself, the flames of the pyre having done their work, carrying away the urn
of the deceased, in the folds of his toga, to its last resting-place in the
cemetery beside the highway, and so turning home to sleep in his own desolate
lodging. Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus Tam cari
capitis?—+ What thought of others’ thoughts about one could there
be with the regret for “so dear a head” fresh at one’s heart? NOTES
116. +Lucretius, Book VI.1153. 120. +Horace, Odes
I.xxiv.1-2. Animula, vagula, blandula Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc
abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula. The Emperor Hadrian to
his Soul Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust
and tears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actual
spectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for the
imagination, whatever confidence they may entertain of the soul’s survival in
another life. To Marius, greatly agitated by that event, the earthly end of
Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing less than the soul’s
extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as the fire among those still
beloved ashes. Even that wistful suspense of judgment expressed by the dying
Hadrian, regarding further stages of being still possible for the soul in some
dim journey hence, seemed wholly untenable, and, with it, almost all that
remained of the religion of his childhood. Future extinction seemed just then
to be what the unforced witness of his own nature pointed to. On the other
hand, there came a novel curiosity as to what the various schools of ancient
philosophy had had to say concerning that strange, fluttering creature; and
that curiosity impelled him to certain severe studies, in which his earlier
religious conscience seemed still to survive, as a principle of hieratic
scrupulousness or integrity of thought, regarding this new service to
intellectual light. At this time, by his poetic and inward temper, he
might have fallen a prey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent
souls in many a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all
this, fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, he was
kept by a genuine virility there, effective in him, among other results, as a
hatred of what was theatrical, and the instinctive recognition that in vigorous
intelligence, after all, divinity was most likely to be found a resident. With
this was connected the feeling, increasing with his advance to manhood, of a
poetic beauty in mere clearness of thought, the actually aesthetic charm of a
cold austerity of mind; as if the kinship of that to the clearness of physical
light were something more than a figure of speech. Of all those various
religious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could well appreciate
the picturesque; that was made easy by his natural Epicureanism, already
prompting him to conceive of himself as but the passive spectator of the world
around him. But it was to the severer reasoning, of which such matters as
Epicurean theory are born, that, in effect, he now betook himself.
Instinctively suspicious of those mechanical arcana, those pretended “secrets
unveiled” of the professional mystic, which really bring great and little souls
to one level, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old,
ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and the honest action
of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even the Arcana Celestia of
Platonism—what the sons of Plato had had to say regarding the essential
indifference of pure soul to its bodily house and merely occasional
dwelling-place—seemed to him while his heart was there in the urn with the
material ashes of Flavian, or still lingering in memory over his last agony,
wholly inhuman or morose, as tending to alleviate his resentment at nature’s
wrong. It was to the sentiment of the body, and the affections it defined—the
flesh, of whose force and colour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail
a residue or abstract—he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the
beloved, suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him
a materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee. As a
consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetry had passed
away, to be replaced by the literature of thought. His much-pondered manuscript
verses were laid aside; and what happened now to one, who was certainly to be
something of a poet from first to last, looked at the moment like a change from
poetry to prose. He came of age about this time, his own master though with
beardless face; and at eighteen, an age at which, then as now, many youths of
capacity, who fancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from others chiefly
in affectation and vague dreaming, he secluded himself indeed from others, but
in a severe intellectual meditation, that salt of poetry, without which all the
more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative world. Still with something of
the old religious earnestness of hischildhood, he set himself—Sich im Denken zu
orientiren—to determine his bearings, as by compass, in the world of thought—to
get that precise acquaintance with the creative intelligence itself, its
structure and capacities, its relation to other parts of himself and to other
things, without which, certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young
man rich in this world’s goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, and
ascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact estimate of
realities, as towards himself, he must have—a delicately measured gradation of
certainty in things—from the distant, haunted horizon of mere surmise or
imagination, to the actual feeling of sorrow in his heart, as he reclined one
morning, alone instead of in pleasant company, to ponder the hard sayings of an
imperfect old Greek manuscript, unrolled beside him. His former gay companions,
meeting him in the streets of the old Italian town, and noting the graver lines
coming into the face of the sombre but enthusiastic student of intellectual
structure, who could hold his own so well in the society of accomplished older
men, were half afraid of him, though proud to have him of their company.
Why this reserve?—they asked, concerning the orderly, self-possessed youth,
whose speech and carriage seemed so carefully measured, who was surely no poet like
the rapt, dishevelled Lupus. Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was
so daintily folded, and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent
on his own line of ambition: or even on riches? Marius, meantime, was
reading freely, in early morning for the most part, those writers chiefly who
had made it their business to know what might be thought concerning that
strange, enigmatic, personal essence, which had seemed to go out
altogether, along with the funeral fires. And the old Greek who more than any
other was now giving form to his thoughts was a very hard master. From
Epicurus, from the thunder and lightning of Lucretius—like thunder and
lightning some distance off, one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of
roses—he had gone back to the writer who was in a ce rtain sense the
teacher of both, Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult book “Concerning Nature”
was even then rare, for people had long since satisfied themselves by the
quotation of certain brilliant, isolated, oracles only, out of what was at best
a taxing kind of lore. But the difficulty of the early Greek prose did but spur
the curiosity of Marius; the writer, the superior clearness of whose
intellectual view had so sequestered him from other men, who had had so little
joy of that superiority, being avowedly exacting as to the amount of devout
attention he required from the student. “The many,” he said, always thus
emphasising the difference between the many and the few, are “like people heavy
with wine,” “led by children,” “knowing not whither they go;” and yet, “much
learning doth not make wise;” and again, “the ass, after all, would have his
thistles rather than fine gold.” Heraclitus, indeed, had not under-rated
the difficulty for “the many” of the paradox with which his doctrine begins,
and the due reception of which must involve a denial of habitual impressions,
as the necessary first step in the way of truth. His philosophy had been
developed in conscious, outspoken opposition to the current mode of thought, as
a matter requiring some exceptional loyalty to pure reason and its “dry
light.” Men are subject to an illusion, he protests, regarding matters apparent
to sense. What the uncorrected sense gives was a false impression of permanence
or fixity in things, which have really changed their nature in the very moment
in which we see and touch them. And the radical flaw in the current mode of
thinking would lie herein: that, reflecting this false or uncorrected
sensation, it attributes to the phenomena of experience a durability which does
not really belong to them. Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world
of firmly out-lined objects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and dead
what is in reality full of animation, of vigour, of the fire of life—that
eternal process of nature, of which at a later time Goethe spoke as the “Living
Garment,” whereby God is seen of us, ever in weaving at the “Loom of
Time.” And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made was, in the first
instance, from confused to unconfused sensation; with a sort of prophetic
seriousness, a great claim and assumption, such as we may understand, if we
anticipate in this preliminary scepticism the ulterior scope of his
speculation, according to which the universal movement of all natural things is
but one particular stage, or measure, of that ceaseless activity wherein the
divine reason consists. The one true being—that constant subject of all early
thought—it was his merit to have conceived, not as sterile and stagnant
inaction, but as a perpetual energy, from the restless stream of which, at
certain points, some elements detach themselves, and harden into non-entity and
death, corresponding, as outward objects, to man’s inward condition of
ignorance: that is, to the slowness of his faculties. It is with this paradox
of a subtle, perpetual change in all visible things, that the high speculation
of Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expresses for anything like a
careless, half-conscious, “use-and-wont” reception of our experience, which
took so strong a hold on men’s memories! Hence those many precepts towards a
strenuous self-consciousness in all we think and do, that loyalty to cool and
candid reason, which makes strict attentiveness of mind a kind of religious
duty and service. The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our
ordinary experience, fixed as they seem, are really in perpetual change, had
been, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a large
positive system of almost religious philosophy. Then as now, the illuminated
philosophic mind might apprehend, in what seemed a mass of lifeless matter, the
movement of that universal life, in which things, and men’s impressions of
them, were ever “coming to be,” alternately consumed and renewed. That
continual change, to be discovered by the attentive understanding where
common opinion found fixed objects, was but the indicator of a subtler but
all-pervading motion—the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the
divine reason itself, proceeding always by its own rhythmical logic, and
lendingto all mind and matter, in turn, what life they had. In this “perpetual
flux” of things and of souls, there was, as ERACLITO conceived, a continuance,
if not of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderly intelligible
relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wrought out in and through
the series of their mutations—ordinances of the divine reason, maintained throughout
the changes of the phenomenal world; and this harmony in their mutation and
opposition, was, after all, a principle of sanity, of reality, there. But it
happened, that, of all this, the first, merely sceptical or negative step, that
easiest step on the threshold, had alone remained in general memory; and the
“doctrine of motion” seemed to those who had felt its seduction to make all
fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the still swifter
passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed to reflect them,
might indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but what was ascertained was
that they did pass away like a devouring flame, or like the race of water in
the mid-stream—too swiftly for any real knowledge of them to be attainable.
Heracliteanism had grown to be almost identical with the famous doctrine of the
sophist PROTAGORA, that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual
was the only standard of what is or is not, and each one the measure of all
things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had become but an
authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge. And as it had
been with his original followers in Greece, so it happened now with the later
Roman disciple. He, too, paused at the apprehension of that constant motion of
things—the drift of flowers, of little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in
the stream around him, the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in
regions out of sight, must count with him as but a dim problem. The bold mental
flight of the old Greek master from the fleeting, competing objects of
experience to that one universal life, in which the whole sphere of physical
change might be reckoned as but a single pulsation, remained by him as
hypothesis only—the hypothesis he actually preferred, as in itself most
credible, however scantily realisable even by the imagination—yet still as but
one unverified hypothesis, among many others, concerning the first principle of
things. He might reserve it as a fine, high, visionary consideration, very
remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where that
ladder seemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly no
time left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so close to him,
on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground. And those childish days of
reverie, when he played at priests, played in many another day-dream, working
his way from the actual present, as far as he might, with a delightful sense of
escape in replacing the outer world of other people by an inward world as
himself really cared to have it, had made him a kind of “idealist.” He was
become aware of the possibility of a large dissidence between an inward and
somewhat exclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved,
unheightened reality of the life of those about him. As a consequence, he was
ready now to concede, somewhat more easily than others, the first point of his
new lesson, that the individual is to himself the measure of all things, and to
rely on the exclusive certainty to himself of his own impressions. To move
afterwards in that outer world of other people, as though taking it at their
estimate, would be possible henceforth only as a kind of irony. And as with the
Vicaire Savoyard, after reflecting on the variations of philosophy, “the first
fruit he drew from that reflection was the lesson of a limitation of his
researches to what immediately interested him; to rest peacefully in a profound
ignorance as to all beside; to disquiet himself only concerning those things
which it was of import for him to know.” At least he would entertain no theory
of conduct which did not allow its due weight to this primary element of
incertitude or negation, in the conditions of man’s life. Just here he joined
company, retracing in his individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of
human thought, with another wayfarer on the journey, another ancient Greek
master, the founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weighty traditional
utterances (for he had left no writing) served in turn to give effective
outline to the contemplations of Marius. There was something in the doctrine
itself congruous with the place wherein it had its birth; and for a time Marius
lived much, mentally, in the brilliant Greek colony which had given a dubious
name to the philosophy of pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the mountains
and the sea, among richer than Italian gardens, on a certain breezy table-land
projecting from the African coast, some hundreds of miles southward from
Greece. There, in a delightful climate, with something of transalpine
temperance amid its luxury, and withal in an inward atmosphere of temperance
which did but further enhance the brilliancy of human life, the school of
Cyrene had maintained itself as almost one with the family of its founder;
certainly as nothing coarse or unclean, and under the influence of accomplished
women. Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of judgment as
to what might really lie behind—flammantia moenia mundi: the flaming ramparts
of the world. Those strange, bold, sceptical surmises, which had haunted the
minds of the first Greek enquirers as merely abstract doubt, which had been
present to the mind of Heraclitus as one element only in a system of abstract
philosophy, became with Aristippus a very subtly practical worldly-wisdom. The
difference between him and those obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that
between an ancient thinker generally, and a modern man of the world: it was the
difference between the mystic in his cell, or the prophet in the desert, and
the expert, cosmopolitan, administrator of his dark sayings, translating the
abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first of all, of sentiment. It has
been sometimes seen, in the history of the human mind, that when thus
translated into terms of sentiment—of sentiment, as lying already half-way
towards practice—the abstract ideas of metaphysics for the first time reveal
their true significance. The metaphysical principle, in itself, as it were,
without hands or feet, becomes impressive, fascinating, of effect, when
translated into a precept as to how it were best to feel and act; in other
words, under its sentimental or ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the
great master of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows, and that we,
even as they, never continue in one stay, might indeed have taken effect as a
languid, enervating, consumptive nihilism, as a precept of “renunciation,”
which would touch and handle and busy itself with nothing. But in the reception
of metaphysical formulae, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior
result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which
they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into
the house of thought; there being at least so much truth as this involves in
the theological maxim, that the reception of this or that speculative
conclusion is really a matter of will. The persuasion that all is vanity, with
this happily constituted Greek, who had been a genuine disciple of Socrates and
reflected, presumably, something of his blitheness in the face of the world,
his happy way of taking all chances, generated neither frivolity nor sourness,
but induced, rather, an impression, just serious enough, of the call upon men’s
attention of the crisis in which they find themselves. It became the stimulus
towards every kind of activity, and prompted a perpetual, inextinguishable
thirst after experience. With Marius, then, the influence of the
philosopher of pleasure depended on this, that in him an abstract doctrine,
originally somewhat acrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial nature, well
fitted to transform it into a theory of practice, of considerable stimulative
power towards a fair life. What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of one of
the happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to an understanding with the
most depressing of theories; accepting the results of a metaphysical system
which seemed to concentrate into itself all the weakening trains of thought in
earlier Greek speculation, and making the best of it; turning its hard, bare
truths, with wonderful tact, into precepts of grace, and delicate wisdom, and a
delicate sense of honour. Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are
indeed but a shadow, even so, we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous
self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touch upon—these wonderful
bodies, these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together
for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the intercourse of
society. The most discerning judges saw in him something like the graceful
“humanities” of the later Roman, and our modern “culture,” as it is termed;
while Horace recalled his sayings as expressing best his own consummate amenity
in the reception of life. In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of
that old master of decorous living, those eternal doubts as to the criteria of
truth reduced themselves to a scepticism almost drily practical, a scepticism
which developed the opposition between things as they are and our impressions
and thoughts concerning them—the possibility, if an outward world does really
exist, of some faultiness in our apprehension of it—the doctrine, in short, of
what is termed “the subjectivity of knowledge.” That is a consideration,
indeed, which lies as an element of weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw,
at the very foundation of every philosophical account of the universe; which
confronts all philosophies at their starting, but with which none have really
dealt conclusively, some perhaps not quite sincerely; which those who are not
philosophers dissipate by “common,” but unphilosophical, sense, or by religious
faith. The peculiar strength of Marius was, to have apprehended this weakness
on the threshold of human knowledge, in the whole range of its consequences.
Our knowledge is limited to what we feel, he reflected: we need no proof that
we feel. But can we be sure that things are at all like our feelings? Mere
peculiarities in the instruments of our cognition, like the little knots and
waves on the surface of a mirror, may distort the matter they seem but to
represent. Of other people we cannot truly know even the feelings, nor how far
they would indicate the same modifications, each one of a personality really
unique, in using the same terms as ourselves; that “common experience,” which is
sometimes proposed as a satisfactory basis of certainty, being after all only a
fixity of language. But our own impressions!—The light and heat of that blue
veil over our heads, the heavens spread out, perhaps not like a curtain over
anything! How reassuring, after so long a debate about the rival criteria of
truth, to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one’s aspirations after
knowledge to that! In an age still materially so brilliant, so expert in the
artistic handling of material things, with sensible capacities still in
undiminished vigour, with the whole world of classic art and poetry outspread
before it, and where there was more than eye or ear could well take in—how
natural the determination to rely exclusively upon the phenomena of the senses,
which certainly never deceive us about themselves, about which alone we can
never deceive ourselves! And so the abstract apprehension that the little
point of this present moment alone really is, between a past which has just
ceased to be and a future which may never come, became practical with Marius,
under the form of a resolve, as far as possible, to exclude regret and desire,
and yield himself to the improvement of the present with an absolutely
disengaged mind. America is here and now—here, or nowhere: as Wilhelm Meister
finds out one day, just not too late, after so long looking vaguely across the
ocean for the opportunity of the development of his capacities. It was as if,
recognising in perpetual motion the law of nature, Marius identified his own
way of life cordially with it, “throwing himself into the stream,” so to speak.
He too must maintain a harmony with that soul of motion in things, by
constantly renewed mobility of character. Omnis Aristippum decuit color
et status et res.— Thus ORAZIO (si veda) had summed up that perfect
manner in the reception of life attained by his old Cyrenaic master; and the
first practical consequence of the metaphysic which lay behind that perfect
manner, had been a strict limitation, almost the renunciation, of metaphysical
enquiry itself. Metaphysic—that art, as it has so often proved, in the words of
Michelet, _de s’égarer avec méthode_, of bewildering oneself methodically:—one
must spend little time upon that! In the school of Cyrene, great as was its
mental incisiveness, logical and physical speculation, theoretic interests
generally, had been valued only so far as they served to give a groundwork, an
intellectual justification, to that exclusive concern with practical ethics
which was a note of the Cyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic, how
true to itself, under how many varieties of character, had been the effort of
the Greeks after Theory—Theôria—that vision of a wholly reasonable world,
which, according to the greatest of them, literally makes man like God: how
loyally they had still persisted in the quest after that, in spite of how many
disappointments! In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps, some of them might have
found the kind of vision they were seeking for; but not in “doubtful
disputations” concerning “being” and “not being,” knowledge and appearance.
Men’s minds, even young men’s minds, at that late day, might well seem
oppressed by the weariness of systems which had so far outrun positive
knowledge; and in the mind of Marius, as in that old school of Cyrene, this
sense of ennui, combined with appetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about
reaction, a sort of suicide (instances of the like have been seen since) by
which a great metaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving
metaphysical speculation impossible, or useless. Abstract theory was to be
valued only just so far as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind from
suppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly visionary, leaving it in
flawless evenness of surface to the impressions of an experience, concrete and
direct. To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding
ourselves of such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions—to
be rid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often only
misrepresent the experience of which they profess to be the
representation—_idola_, idols, false appearances, as Bacon calls them later—to
neutralise the distorting influence of metaphysical system by an
all-accomplished metaphysic skill: it is this bold, hard, sober recognition,
under a very “dry light,” of its own proper aim, in union with a habit of
feeling which on the practical side may perhaps open a wide doorway to human
weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic doctrine, to reproductions of this
doctrine in the time of Marius or in our own, their gravity and importance. It
was a school to which the young man might come, eager for truth, expecting much
from philosophy, in no ignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than an
“initiation.” He would be sent back, sooner or later, to experience, to the
world of concrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt by
him; but with a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from the tyranny
of mere theories. So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which
followed the death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt
himself as if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant
school of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, on
its fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life,
was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really
pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, a life of various yet select
sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight.
Liberty of soul, freedom from all partial and misrepresentative doctrine which
does but relieve one element in our experience at the cost of another, freedom
from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on the
future: this would be but preliminary to the real business of
education—insight, insight through culture, into all that the present moment
holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence. From that maxim
of Life as the end of life, followed, as a practical consequence, the
desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition,
of developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising one’s self in
them, till one’s whole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards
the vision—the “beatific vision,” if we really cared to make it such—of our
actual experience in the world. Not the conveyance of an abstract body of
truths or principles, would be the aim of the right education of one’s self, or
of another, but the conveyance of an art—an art in some degree peculiar to each
individual character; with the modifications, that is, due to its special
constitution, and the peculiar circumstances of its growth, inasmuch as no one
of us is “like another, all in all.” Such were the practical conclusions
drawn for himself by Marius, when somewhat later he had outgrown the mastery of
others, from the principle that “all is vanity.” If he could but count upon the
present, if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to conduct one
anywhere beyond itself, if men’s highest curiosity was indeed so persistently
baffled—then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at least fill up the
measure of that present with vivid sensations, and such intellectual
apprehensions, as, in strength and directness and their immediately realised
values at the bar of an actual experience, are most like sensations. So some
have spoken in every age; for, like all theories which really express a strong
natural tendency of the human mind or even one of its characteristic modes of
weakness, this vein of reflection is a constant tradition in philosophy. Every
age of European thought has had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans, under many
disguises: even under the hood of the monk. But—Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die!—is a proposal, the real import of which differs immensely,
according to the natural taste, and the acquired judgment, of the guests who
sit at the table. It may express nothing better than the instinct of ALIGHIERI
(si veda)’s Ciacco, the accomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno;+ or,
since on no hypothesis does man “live by bread alone,” may come to be identical
with—“My meat is to do what is just and kind;” while the soul, which can make
no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil of immediate
experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in conforming to the highest
moral ideal it can clearly define for itself; and actually, though but with so
faint hope, does the “Father’s business.” In that age of Marcus Aurelius,
so completely disabused of the metaphysical ambition to pass beyond “the
flaming ramparts of the world,” but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an
accumulation of intellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all
varieties of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works, the thoughts
of Marius did but follow the line taken by the majority of educated persons,
though to a different issue. Pitched to a really high and serious key, the
precept—Be perfect in regard to what is here and now: the precept of “culture,”
as it is called, or of a complete education—might at least save him from the
vulgarity and heaviness of a generation, certainly of no general fineness of
temper, though with a material well-being abundant enough. Conceded that what
is secure in our existence is but the sharp apex of the present moment between
two hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our experience but a
series of fleeting impressions:—so Marius continued the sceptical argument he
had condensed, as the matter to hold by, from his various philosophical
reading:—given, that we are never to get beyond the walls of the closely shut
cell of one’s own personality; that the ideas we are somehow impelled to form
of an outer world, and of other minds akin to our own, are, it may be, but a
day-dream, and the thought of any world beyond, a day-dream perhaps idler
still: then, he, at least, in whom those fleeting impressions—faces, voices,
material sunshine—were very real and imperious, might well set himself to the
consideration, how such actual moments as they passed might be made to yield
their utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract
metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that experience,
reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of human nature
itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him at least make the
most of what was “here and now.” In the actual dimness of ways from means to
ends—ends in themselves desirable, yet for the most part distant and for him,
certainly, below the visible horizon—he would at all events be sure that the
means, to use the well-worn terminology, should have something of finality or
perfection about them, and themselves partake, in a measure, of the more
excellent nature of ends—that the means should justify the end. With this
view he would demand culture, paideia,+ as the Cyrenaics said, or, in other
words, a wide, a complete, education—an education partly negative, as ascertaining
the true limits of man’s capacities, but for the most part positive, and
directed especially to the expansion and refinement of the power of reception;
of those powers, above all, which are immediately relative to fleeting
phenomena, the powers of emotion and sense. In such an education, an
“aesthetic” education, as it might now be termed, and certainly occupied very
largely with those aspects of things which affect us pleasurably through
sensation, art, of course, including all the finer sorts of literature, would
have a great part to play. The study of music, in that wider Platonic sense,
according to which, music comprehends all those matters over which the Muses of
Greek mythology preside, would conduct one to an exquisite appreciation of all
the finer traits of nature and of man. Nay! the products of the imagination
must themselves be held to present the most perfect forms of life—spirit and
matter alike under their purest and most perfect conditions—the most strictly
appropriate objects of that impassioned contemplation, which, in the world of
intellectual discipline, as in the highest forms of morality and religion, must
be held to be the essential function of the “perfect.” Such manner of life
might come even to seem a kind of religion—an inward, visionary, mystic piety,
or religion, by virtue of its effort to live days “lovely and pleasant” in
themselves, here and now, and with an all-sufficiency of well-being in the
immediate sense of the object contemplated, independently of any faith, or hope
that might be entertained as to their ulterior tendency. In this way, the true
aesthetic culture would be realisable as a new form of the contemplative life,
founding its claim on the intrinsic “blessedness” of “vision”—the vision of
perfect men and things. One’s human nature, indeed, would fain reckon on an
assured and endless future, pleasing itself with the dream of a final home, to
be attained at some still remote date, yet with a conscious, delightful
home-coming at last, as depicted in many an old poetic Elysium. On the other
hand, the world of perfected sensation, intelligence, emotion, is so close to
us, and so attractive, that the most visionary of spirits must needs represent
the world unseen in colours, and under a form really borrowed from it. Let me
be sure then—might he not plausibly say?—that I miss no detail of this life of
realised consciousness in the present! Here at least is a vision, a theory,
theôria,+ which reposes on no basis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no
call upon a future after all somewhat problematic; as it would be unaffected by
any discovery of an Empedocles(improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to
what had really been the origin, and course of development, of man’s actually
attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or spirit in
him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of course have its
precepts to deliver on the embellishment, generally, of what is near at hand,
on the adornment of life, till, in a not impracticable rule of conduct, one’s
existence, from day to day, came to be like a well-executed piece of music;
that “perpetual motion” in things (so Marius figured the matter to himself,
under the old Greek imageries) according itself to a kind of cadence or
harmony. It was intelligible that this “aesthetic” philosophy might find
itself (theoretically, at least, and by way of a curious question in casuistry,
legitimate from its own point of view) weighing the claims of that eager,
concentrated, impassioned realisation of experience, against those of the
received morality. Conceiving its own function in a somewhat desperate temper,
and becoming, as every high-strung form of sentiment, as the religious
sentiment itself, may become, somewhat antinomian, when, in its effort towards
the order of experiences it prefers, it is confronted with the traditional and
popular morality, at points where that morality may look very like a
convention, or a mere stage-property of the world, it would be found, from time
to time, breaking beyond the limits of the actual moral order; perhaps not
without some pleasurable excitement in so bold a venture. With the
possibility of some such hazard as this, in thought or even in practice—that it
might be, though refining, or tonic even, in the case of those strong and in
health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly and temperate wisdom of Montaigne,
“pernicious for those who have any natural tendency to impiety or vice,” the
line of reflection traced out above, was fairly chargeable.—Not, however, with
“hedonism” and its supposed consequences. The blood, the heart, of Marius were
still pure. He knew that his carefully considered theory of practice braced
him, with the effect of a moral principle duly recurring to mind every morning,
towards the work of a student, for which he might seem intended. Yet there were
some among his acquaintance who jumped to the conclusion that, with the
“Epicurean stye,” he was making pleasure—pleasure, as they so poorly conceived
it—the sole motive of life; and they precluded any exacter estimate of the
situation by covering it with a high-sounding general term, through the
vagueness of which they were enabled to see the severe and laborious youth in
the vulgar company of Lais. Words like “hedonism”— terms of large and vague
comprehension—above all when used for a purpose avowedly controversial, have
ever been the worst examples of what are called “question-begging terms;” and
in that late age in which Marius lived, amid the dust of so many centuries of
philosophical debate, the air was full of them. Yet those who used that
reproachful Greek term for the philosophy of pleasure, were hardly more likely
than the old Greeks themselves (on whom regarding this very subject of the
theory of pleasure, their masters in the art of thinking had so emphatically to
impress the necessity of “making distinctions”) to come to any very delicately
correct ethical conclusions by a reasoning, which began with a general term,
comprehensive enough to cover pleasures so different in quality, in their
causes and effects, as the pleasures of wine and love, of art and science, of
religious enthusiasm and political enterprise, and of that taste or curiosity
which satisfied itself with long days of serious study. Yet, in truth, each of
those pleasurable modes of activity, may, in its turn, fairly become the ideal
of the “hedonistic” doctrine. Really, to the phase of reflection through which
Marius was then passing, the charge of “hedonism,” whatever its true weight
might be, was not properly applicable at all. Not pleasure, but fulness of
life, and “insight” as conducting to that fulness—energy, variety, and choice
of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the
exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life,
such as Seneca and Epictetus—whatever form of human life, in short, might be
heroic, impassioned, ideal: from these the “new Cyrenaicism” of Mariustook its
criterion of values. It was a theory, indeed, which might properly be regarded
as in great degree coincident with the main principle of the Stoics themselves,
and an older version of the precept “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it
with thy might”—a doctrine so widely acceptable among the nobler spirits of
that time. And, as with that, its mistaken tendency would lie in the direction
of a kind of idolatry of mere life, or natural gift, or strength—l’idôlatrie
des talents. To understand the various forms of ancient art and thought,
the various forms of actual human feeling (the only new thing, in a world
almost too opulent in what was old) to satisfy, with a kind of scrupulous
equity, the claims of these concrete and actual objects on his sympathy, his
intelligence, his senses—to “pluck out the heart of their mystery,” and in turn
become the interpreter of them to others: this had now defined itself for
Marius as a very narrowly practical design: it determined his choice of a
vocation to live by. It was the era of the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they
were sometimes called; of men who came in some instances to great fame and
fortune, by way of a literary cultivation of “science.” That science, it has
been often said, must have been wholly an affair of words. But in a world,
confessedly so opulent in what was old, the work, even of genius, must necessarily
consist very much in criticism; and, in the case of the more excellent
specimens of his class, the rhetorician was, after all, the eloquent and
effective interpreter, for the delighted ears of others, of what understanding
himself had come by, in years of travel and study, of the beautiful house of
art and thought which was the inheritance of the age. The emperor Marcus
Aurelius, to whose service Marius had now been called, was himself, more or
less openly, a “lecturer.” That late world, amid many curiously vivid modern
traits, had this spectacle, so familiar to ourselves, of the public lecturer or
essayist; in some cases adding to his other gifts that of the Christian
preacher, who knows how to touch people’s sensibilities on behalf of the
suffering. To follow in the way of these successes, was the natural instinct of
youthful ambition; and it was with no vulgar egotism that MARIO, determined,
like many another young man of parts, to enter as a student of rhetoric at
Rome. Though the manner of his work was changed formally from poetry to
prose, he remained, and must always be, of the poetic temper: by which, I mean,
among other things, that quite independently of the general habit of that
pensive age he lived much, and as it were by system, in reminiscence. Amid his
eager grasping at the sensation, the consciousness, of the present, he had come
to see that, after all, the main point of economy in the conduct of the
present, was the question:—How will it look to me, at what shall I value it,
this day next year?—that in any given day or month one’s main concern was its
impression for the memory. A strange trick memory sometimes played him; for,
with no natural gradation, what was of last month, or of yesterday, of to-day
even, would seem as far off, as entirely detached from him, as things of ten
years ago. Detached from him, yet very real, there lay certain spaces of his
life, in delicate perspective, under a favourable light; and, somehow, all the
less fortunate detail and circumstance had parted from them. Such hours were
oftenest those in which he had been helped by work of others to the pleasurable
apprehension of art, of nature, or of life. “Not what I do, but what I am,
under the power of this vision”—he would say to himself—“is what were indeed
pleasing to the gods!” And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who
had taken for his philosophic ideal the monochronos hêdonê+ of Aristippus—the
pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now—there would come, together
with that precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire, after all, to
retain “what was so transitive.” Could he but arrest, for others also, certain
clauses of experience, as the imaginative memory presented them to himself! In
those grand, hot summers, he would have imprisoned the very perfume of the
flowers. To create, to live, perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours,
if it were but in a fragment of perfect expression:—it was thus his longing
defined itself for something to hold by amid the “perpetual flux.” With men of
his vocation, people were apt to say, words were things. Well! with him, words
should be indeed things,—the word, the phrase, valuable in exact proportion to
the transparency with which it conveyed to others the apprehension, the
emotion, the mood, so vividly real within himself. Verbaque provisam rem non
invita sequentur:+ Virile apprehension of the true nature of things, of the true
nature of one’s own impression, first of all!—words would follow that
naturally, a true understanding of one’s self being ever the first condition of
genuine style. Language delicate and measured, the delicate Attic phrase, for
instance, in which the eminent Aristeides could speak, was then a power to
which people’s hearts, and sometimes even their purses, readily responded. And
there were many points, as Marius thought, on which the heart of that age
greatly needed to be touched. He hardly knew how strong that old religious
sense of responsibility, the conscience, as we call it, still was within him—a
body of inward impressions, as real as those so highly valued outward ones—to
offend against which, brought with it a strange feeling of disloyalty, as to a person.
And the determination, adhered to with no misgiving, to add nothing, not so
much as a transient sigh, to the great total of men’s unhappiness, in his way
through the world:—that too was something to rest on, in the drift of mere
“appearances.” All this would involve a life of industry, of industrious
study, only possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body
and soul. For the male element, the logical conscience asserted itself now,
with opening manhood—asserted itself, even in his literary style, by a certain
firmness of outline, that touch of the worker in metal, amid its richness.
Already he blamed instinctively alike in his work and in himself, as youth so
seldom does, all that had not passed a long and liberal process of erasure. The
happy phrase or sentence was really modelled upon a cleanly finished structure
of scrupulous thought. The suggestive force of the one master of his
development, who had battled so hard with imaginative prose; the utterance, the
golden utterance, of the other, so content with its living power of persuasion
that he had never written at all,—in the commixture of these two qualities he
set up his literary ideal, and this rare blending of grace with an intellectual
rigour or astringency, was the secret of a singular expressiveness in it.
He acquired at this time a certain bookish air, the somewhat sombre habitude of
the avowed scholar, which though it never interfered with the perfect tone,
“fresh and serenely disposed,” of the Roman gentleman, yet qualified it as by
an interesting oblique trait, and frightened away some of his equals in age and
rank. The sober discretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation,
the sense of those negative conclusions enabling him to concentrate himself,
with an absorption so entire, upon what is immediately here and now, gave him a
peculiar manner of intellectual confidence, as of one who had indeed been
initiated into a great secret.—Though with an air so disengaged, he seemed to
be living so intently in the visible world! And now, in revolt against that
pre-occupation with other persons, which had so often perturbed his spirit, his
wistful speculations as to what the real, the greater, experience might be,
determined in him, not as the longing for love—to be with Cynthia, or
Aspasia—but as a thirst for existence in exquisite places. The veil that was to
be lifted for him lay over the works of the old masters of art, in places where
nature also had used her mastery. And it was just at this moment that a summons
to Rome reached him. 145. +Canto VI. 147. +Transliteration:
paideia. Definition “rearing, education.” +Transliteration: theôria. Definition “a
looking at ... observing ... contemplation.” +Transliteration:
monochronos hêdonê. Pater’s definition “the pleasure of the ideal present, of
the mystic now.” The definition is fitting; the unusual adjective monokhronos
means, literally, “single or unitary time.” 155. +Horace, Ars Poetica
311. +Etext editor’s translation: “The subject once foreknown, the words will
follow easily.” Mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur. Pliny’s
Letters. Many points in
that train of thought, its harder and more energetic practical details
especially, at first surmised but vaguely in the intervals of his visits to the
tomb of Flavian, attained the coherence of formal principle amid the stirring
incidents of the journey, which took him, still in all the buoyancy of his
nineteen years and greatly expectant, to Rome. That summons had come from one
of the former friends of his father in the capital, who had kept himself
acquainted with the lad’s progress, and, assured of his parts, his courtly
ways, above all of his beautiful penmanship, now offered him a place, virtually
that of an amanuensis, near the person of the philosophic emperor. The old
town-house of his family on the Caelian hill, so long neglected, might well
require his personal care; and Marius, relieved a little by his preparations
for travelling from a certain over-tension of spirit in which he had lived of
late, was presently on his way, to await introduction to Aurelius, on his
expected return home, after a first success, illusive enough as it was soon to
appear, against the invaders from beyond the Danube. The opening stage of
his journey, through the firm, golden weather, for which he had lingered three
days beyond the appointed time of starting—days brown with the first rains of
autumn—brought him, by the byways among the lower slopes of the Apennines of
Luna, to the town of Luca, a station on the Cassian Way; travelling so far
mainly on foot, while the baggage followed under the care of his attendants. He
wore a broad felt hat, in fashion not unlike a more modern pilgrim’s, the neat
head projecting from the collar of his gray paenula, or travelling mantle,
sewed closely together over the breast, but with its two sides folded up upon
the shoulders, to leave the arms free in walking, and was altogether so trim
and fresh, that, as he climbed the hill from Pisa, by the long steep lane
through the olive-yards, and turned to gaze where he could just discern the
cypresses of the old school garden, like two black lines down the yellow walls,
a little child took possession of his hand, and, looking up at him with entire
confidence, paced on bravely at his side, for the mere pleasure of his company,
to the spot where the road declined again into the valley beyond. From this
point, leaving the servants behind, he surrendered himself, a willing subject,
as he walked, to the impressions of the road, and was almost surprised, both at
the suddenness with which evening came on, and the distance from his old home at
which it found him. And at the little town of Luca, he felt that
indescribable sense of a welcoming in the mere outward appearance of things,
which seems to mark out certain places for the special purpose of evening rest,
and gives them always a peculiar amiability in retrospect. Under the deepening
twilight, the rough-tiled roofs seem to huddle together side by side, like one
continuous shelter over the whole township, spread low and broad above the snug
sleeping-rooms within; and the place one sees for the first time, and must
tarry in but for a night, breathes the very spirit of home. The cottagers
lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the shadows grew larger, and went
to rest early; though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn
corn-fields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling gray heights of
an old temple. So quiet and air-swept was the place, you could hardly tell
where the country left off in it, and the field-paths became its streets. Next
morning he must needs change the manner of his journey. The light baggage-wagon
returned, and he proceeded now more quickly, travelling a stage or two by post,
along the Cassian Way, where the figures and incidents of the great high-road
seemed already to tell of the capital, the one centre to which all were
hastening, or had lately bidden adieu. That Way lay through the heart of the
old, mysterious and visionary country of Etruria; and what he knew of its
strange religion of the dead, reinforced by the actual sight of the funeral
houses scattered so plentifully among the dwelling-places of the living,
revived in him for a while, in all its strength, his old instinctive yearning
towards those inhabitants of the shadowy land he had known in life. It seemed
to him that he could half divine how time passed in those painted houses on the
hillsides, among the gold and silver ornaments, the wrought armour and
vestments, the drowsy and dead attendants; and the close consciousness of that
vast population gave him no fear, but rather a sense of companionship, as he
climbed the hills on foot behind the horses, through the genial
afternoon. The road, next day, passed below a town not less primitive, it
might seem, than its rocky perch—white rocks, that had long been glistening
before him in the distance. Down the dewy paths the people were descending from
it, to keep a holiday, high and low alike in rough, white-linen smocks. A
homely old play was just begun in an open-air theatre, with seats hollowed out
of the turf-grown slope. Marius caught the terrified expression of a child in
its mother’s arms, as it turned from the yawning mouth of a great mask, for
refuge in her bosom. The way mounted, and descended again, down the steep
street of another place, all resounding with the noise of metal under the
hammer; for every house had its brazier’s workshop, the bright objects of brass
and copper gleaming, like lights in a cave, out of their dark roofs and
corners. Around the anvils the children were watching the work, or ran to fetch
water to the hissing, red-hot metal; and Marius too watched, as he took his
hasty mid-day refreshment, a mess of chestnut-meal and cheese, while the
swelling surface of a great copper water-vessel grew flowered all over with
tiny petals under the skilful strokes. Towards dusk, a frantic woman at the
roadside, stood and cried out the words of some philter, or malison, in verse,
with weird motion of her hands, as the travellers passed, like a wild picture
drawn from Virgil. But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of
these incidents of the way, Marius noted, more and more as he drew nearer to
Rome, marks of the great plague. Under Hadrian and his successors, there had
been many enactments to improve the condition of the slave. The ergastula+ were
abolished. But no system of free labour had as yet succeeded. A whole mendicant
population, artfully exaggerating every symptom and circumstance of misery,
still hung around, or sheltered themselves within, the vast walls of their old,
half-ruined task-houses. And for the most part they had been variously stricken
by the pestilence. For once, the heroic level had been reached in rags,
squints, scars—every caricature of the human type—ravaged beyond what could
have been thought possible if it were to survive at all. Meantime, the farms
were less carefully tended than of old: here and there they were lapsing into
their natural wildness: some villas also were partly fallen into ruin. The
picturesque, romantic Italy of a later time—the Italy of Claude and Salvator
Rosa—was already forming, for the delight of the modern romantic
traveller. And again Marius was aware of a real change in things, on
crossing the Tiber, as if some magic effect lay in that; though here, in truth,
the Tiber was but a modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, under the
richer sky, seemed readier and more affluent, and man fitter to the conditions
around him: even in people hard at work there appeared to be a less burdensome
sense of the mere business of life. How dreamily the women were passing up
through the broad light and shadow of the steep streets with the great
water-pots resting on their heads, like women of Caryae, set free from slavery
in old Greek temples. With what a fresh, primeval poetry was daily existence
here impressed—all the details of the threshing-floor and the vineyard; the
common farm-life even; the great bakers’ fires aglow upon the road in the
evening. In the presence of all this Marius felt for a moment like those old,
early, unconscious poets, who created the famousGreek myths of Dionysus, and
the Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and the ploughshare. And
still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form.
He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither.
The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which
he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the
matter of thought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the
healthfully excited brain.—“It is wonderful,” says Pliny, “how the mind is
stirred to activity by brisk bodily exercise.” The presentable aspects of
inmost thought and feeling became evident to him: the structure of all he
meant, its order and outline, defined itself: his general sense of a fitness
and beauty in words became effective in daintily pliant sentences, with all
sorts of felicitous linking of figure to abstraction. It seemed just then as if
the desire of the artist in him—that old longing to produce—might be satisfied
by the exact and literal transcript of what was then passing around him, in
simple prose, arresting the desirable moment as it passed, and prolonging its
life a little.—To live in the concrete! To be sure, at least, of one’s hold
upon that!—Again, his philosophic scheme was but the reflection of the data of
sense, and chiefly of sight, a reduction to the abstract, of the brilliant road
he travelled on, through the sunshine. But on the seventh evening there
came a reaction in the cheerful flow of our traveller’s thoughts, a reaction
with which mere bodily fatigue, asserting itself at last over his curiosity,
had much to do; and he fell into a mood, known to all passably sentimental
wayfarers, as night deepens again and again over their path, in which all
journeying, from the known to the unknown, comes suddenly to figure as a mere
foolish truancy—like a child’s running away from home—with the feeling that one
had best return at once, even through the darkness. He had chosen to climb on
foot, at his leisure, the long windings by which the road ascended to the place
where that day’s stage was to end, and found himself alone in the twilight, far
behind the rest of his travelling-companions. Would the last zigzag, round and
round those dark masses, half natural rock, half artificial substructure, ever
bring him within the circuit of the walls above? It was now that a startling
incident turned those misgivings almost into actual fear. From the steep slope
a heavy mass of stone was detached, after some whisperings among the trees
above his head, and rushing down through the stillness fell to pieces in a
cloud of dust across the road just behind him, so that he felt the touch upon
his heel. That was sufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his
old vague fear of evil—of one’s “enemies”—a distress, so much a matter of
constitution with him, that at times it would seem that the best pleasures of
life could but be snatched, as it were hastily, in one moment’s forgetfulness
of its dark, besetting influence. A sudden suspicion of hatred against him, of
the nearness of “enemies,” seemed all at once to alter the visible form of
things, as with the child’s hero, when he found the footprint on the sand of
his peaceful, dreamy island. His elaborate philosophy had not put beneath his
feet the terror of mere bodily evil; much less of “inexorable fate, and the
noise of greedy Acheron.” The resting-place to which he presently came,
in the keen, wholesome air of the market-place of the little hill-town, was a pleasant
contrast to that last effort of his journey. The room in which he sat down to
supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The
firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished, three-wicked lucernae burning
cleanly with the best oil, upon the white-washed walls, and the bunches of
scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place put before
him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate
foam as it mounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had found in
no other wine. These things had relieved a little the melancholy of the hour
before; and it was just then that he heard the voice of one, newly arrived at
the inn, making his way to the upper floor—a youthful voice, with a reassuring
clearness of note, which completed his cure. He seemed to hear that voice
again in dreams, uttering his name: then, awake in the full morning light and
gazing from the window, saw the guest of the night before, a very
honourable-looking youth, in the rich habit of a military knight, standing
beside his horse, and already making preparations to depart. It happened that
Marius, too, was to take that day’s journey on horseback. Riding presently from
the inn, he overtook CORNELIO—of the Twelfth Legion—advancing carefully down
the steep street; and before they had issued from the gates of Urbs-vetus, the
two young men had broken into talk together. They were passing along the street
of the goldsmiths; and Cornelius must needs enter one of the workshops for the
repair of some button or link of his knightly trappings. Standing in the
doorway, Marius watched the work, as he had watched the brazier’s business a
few days before, wondering most at the simplicity of its processes, a simplicity,
however, on which only genius in that craft could have lighted.—By what
unguessed-at stroke of hand, for instance, had the grains of precious metal
associated themselves with so daintily regular a roughness, over the surface of
the little casket yonder? And the conversation which followed, hence arising,
left the two travellers with sufficient interest in each other to insure an
easy companionship for the remainder of their journey. In time to come, Marius
was to depend very much on the preferences, the personal judgments, of the
comrade who now laid his hand so brotherly on his shoulder, as they left the
workshop. Itineris matutini gratiam capimus,+—observes one of our
scholarly travellers; and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted,
by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first acquaintance into
intimacy; its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back upon each
other’s entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension of which,
however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the unexpected assertion of
something singularly attractive. The immediate aspect of the land was, indeed,
in spite of abundant olive and ilex, unpleasing enough. A river of clay seemed,
“in some old night of time,” to have burst up over valley and hill, and
hardened there into fantastic shelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock,
up and down among the contorted vegetation; the hoary roots and trunks seeming
to confess some weird kinship with them. But that was long ago; and these
pallid hillsides needed only the declining sun, touching the rock with purple,
and throwing deeper shadow into the immemorial foliage, to put on a peculiar,
because a very grave and austere, kind of beauty; while the graceful outlines
common to volcanic hills asserted themselves in the broader prospect. And, for
sentimental Marius, all this was associated, by some perhaps fantastic
affinity, with a peculiar trait of severity, beyond his guesses as to the
secret of it, which mingled with the blitheness of his new companion.
Concurring, indeed, with the condition of a Roman soldier, it was certainly
something far more than the expression of military hardness, or ascêsis; and
what was earnest, or even austere, in the landscape they had traversed
together, seemed to have been waiting for the passage of this figure to
interpret or inform it. Again, as in his early days with Flavian, a vivid
personal presence broke through the dreamy idealism, which had almost come to
doubt of other men’s reality: reassuringly, indeed, yet not without some sense
of a constraining tyranny over him from without. For Cornelius, returning
from the campaign, to take up his quarters on the Palatine, in the imperial
guard, seemed to carry about with him, in that privileged world of comely usage
to which he belonged, the atmosphere of some still more jealously exclusive
circle. They halted on the morrow at noon, not at an inn, but at the house of
one of the young soldier’s friends, whom they found absent, indeed, in
consequence of the plague in those parts, so that after a mid-day rest only,
they proceeded again on their journey. The great room of the villa, to which
they were admitted, had lain long untouched; and the dust rose, as they
entered, into the slanting bars of sunlight, that fell through the half-closed
shutters. It was here, to while away the time, that Cornelius bethought himself
of displaying to his new friend the various articles and ornaments of his
knightly array—the breastplate, the sandals and cuirass, lacing them on, one by
one, with the assistance of Marius, and finally the great golden bracelet on
the right arm, conferred on him by his general for an act of valour. And as he
gleamed there, amid that odd interchange of light and shade, with the staff of
a silken standard firm in his hand, Marius felt as if he were face to face, for
the first time, with some new knighthood or chivalry, just then coming into the
world. It was soon after they left this place, journeying now by
carriage, that Rome was seen at last, with much excitement on the part of our
travellers; CORNELIO, and some others of whom the party then consisted,
agreeing, chiefly for the sake of MARIO, to hasten forward, that it might be
reached by daylight, with a cheerful noise of rapid wheels as they passed over
the flagstones. But the highest light upon the mausoleum of Hadrian was quite
gone out, and it was dark, before they reached the Flaminian Gate. The abundant
sound of water was the one thing that impressed MARIO as they passed down a
long street, with many open spaces on either hand: Cornelius to his military
quarters, and MARIO to the old dwelling-place of his fathers. . +E-text
editor’s note: ergastula were the Roman agrarian equivalent of
prison-workhouses. 168. +Apuleius, The Golden Ass, I.17.
Marius awoke early and passed curiously from room to room, noting for
more careful inspection by and by the rolls of manuscripts. Even greater than
his curiosity in gazing for the first time on this ancient possession, was his
eagerness to look out upon Rome itself, as he pushed back curtain and shutter,
and stepped forth in the fresh morning upon one of the many balconies, with an
oft-repeated dream realised at last. He was certainly fortunate in the time of
his coming to Rome. That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had
reached its perfection in the things of poetry and art—a perfection which
indicated only too surely the eve of decline. As in some vast intellectual
museum, all its manifold products were intact and in their places, and with
custodians also still extant, duly qualified to appreciate and explain them. And
at no period of history had the material Rome itself been better worth
seeing—lying there not less consummate than that world of pagan intellect which
it represented in every phase of its darkness and light. The various work of
many ages fell here harmoniously together, as yet untouched save by time,
adding the final grace of a rich softness to its complex expression. Much which
spoke of ages earlier than Nero, the great re-builder, lingered on, antique,
quaint, immeasurably venerable, like the relics of the medieval city in the
Paris of Lewis the Fourteenth: the work of Nero’s own time had come to have
that sort of old world and picturesque interest which the work of Lewis has for
ourselves; while without stretching a parallel too far we might perhaps liken
the architectural finesses of the archaic Hadrian to the more excellent
products of our own Gothic revival. The temple of Antoninus and Faustina was
still fresh in all the majesty of its closely arrayed columns of cipollino;
but, on the whole, little had been added under the late and present emperors,
and during fifty years of public quiet, a sober brown and gray had grown apace
on things. The gilding on the roof of many a temple had lost its garishness:
cornice and capital of polished marble shone out with all the crisp freshness
of real flowers, amid the already mouldering travertine and brickwork, though
the birds had built freely among them. What Marius then saw was in many
respects, after all deduction of difference, more like the modern Rome than the
enumeration of particular losses might lead us to suppose; the Renaissance, in
its most ambitious mood and with amplest resources, having resumed the ancient
classical tradition there, with no break or obstruction, as it had happened, in
any very considerable work of the middle age. Immediately before him, on the
square, steep height, where the earliest little old Rome had huddled itself
together, arose the palace of the Caesars. Half-veiling the vast substruction
of rough, brown stone—line upon line of successive ages of builders—the trim,
old-fashioned garden walks, under their closely-woven walls of dark glossy
foliage, test of long and careful cultivation, wound gradually, among choice
trees, statues and fountains, distinct and sparkling in the full morning
sunlight, to the richly tinted mass of pavilions and corridors above, centering
in the lofty, white-marble dwelling-place of Apollo himself. How often
had Marius looked forward to that first, free wandering through Rome, to which
he now went forth with a heat in the town sunshine (like a mist of fine
gold-dust spread through the air) to the height of his desire, making the dun
coolness of the narrow streets welcome enough at intervals. He almost feared,
descending the stair hastily, lest some unforeseen accident should snatch the
little cup of enjoyment from him ere he passed the door. In such morning
rambles in places new to him, life had always seemed to come at its fullest: it
was then he could feel his youth, that youth the days of which he had already
begun to count jealously, in entire possession. So the grave, pensive figure, a
figure, be it said nevertheless, fresher far than often came across it now,
moved through the old city towards the lodgings of Cornelius, certainly not by
the most direct course, however eager to rejoin the friend of yesterday.
Bent as keenly on seeing as if his first day in Rome were to be also his last,
the two friends descended along the _Vicus Tuscus_, with its rows of
incense-stalls, into the _Via Nova_, where the fashionable people were busy
shopping; and Marius saw with much amusement the frizzled heads, then _à la
mode_. A glimpse of the _Marmorata_, the haven at the river-side, where
specimens of all the precious marbles of the world were lying amid great white
blocks from the quarries of Luna, took his thoughts for a moment to his distant
home. They visited the flower-market, lingering where the _coronarii_ pressed
on them the newest species, and purchased zinias, now in blossom (like painted
flowers, thought Marius), to decorate the folds of their togas. Loitering to
the other side of the Forum, past the great Galen’s drug-shop, after a glance
at the announcements of new poems on sale attached to the doorpost of a famous
bookseller, they entered the curious library of the Temple of Peace, then a
favourite resort of literary men, and read, fixed there for all to see, the
_Diurnal_ or Gazette of the day, which announced, together with births and
deaths, prodigies and accidents, and much mere matter of business, the date and
manner of the philosophic emperor’s joyful return to his people; and,
thereafter, with eminent names faintly disguised, what would carry that day’s
news, in many copies, over the provinces—a certain matter concerning the great
lady, known to be dear to him, whom he had left at home. It was a story, with
the development of which “society” had indeed for some time past edified or
amused itself, rallying sufficiently from the panic of a year ago, not only to
welcome back its ruler, but also to relish a _chronique scandaleuse;_ and thus,
when soon after Marius saw the world’s wonder, he was already acquainted with
the suspicions which have ever since hung about her name. Twelve o’clock was
come before they left the Forum, waiting in a little crowd to hear the
_Accensus_, according to old custom, proclaim the hour of noonday, at the
moment when, from the steps of the Senate-house, the sun could be seen standing
between the _Rostra_ and the _Græcostasis_. He exerted for this function a
strength of voice, which confirmed in Marius a judgment the modern visitor may
share with him, that Roman throats and Roman chests, namely, must, in some
peculiar way, be differently constructed from those of other people. Such
judgment indeed he had formed in part the evening before, noting, as a
religious procession passed him, how much noise a man and a boy could make,
though not without a great deal of real music, of which in truth the Romans
were then as ever passionately fond. Hence the two friends took their way
through the Via Flaminia, almost along the line of the modern Corso, already
bordered with handsome villas, turning presently to the left, into the
Field-of-Mars, still the playground of Rome. But the vast public edifices were
grown to be almost continuous over the grassy expanse, represented now only by
occasional open spaces of verdure and wild-flowers. In one of these a crowd was
standing, to watch a party of athletes stripped for exercise. Marius had been
surprised at the luxurious variety of the litters borne through Rome, where no
carriage horses were allowed; and just then one far more sumptuous than the
rest, with dainty appointments of ivory and gold, was carried by, all the town
pressing with eagerness to get a glimpse of its most beautiful woman, as she passed
rapidly. Yes! there, was the wonder of the world—the empress Faustina herself:
Marius could distinguish, could distinguish clearly, the well-known profile,
between the floating purple curtains. For indeed all Rome was ready to
burst into gaiety again, as it awaited with much real affection, hopeful and
animated, the return of its emperor, for whose ovation various adornments were
preparing along the streets through which the imperial procession would pass.
He had left Rome just twelve months before, amid immense gloom. The alarm of a
barbarian insurrection along the whole line of the Danube had happened at the
moment when Rome was panic-stricken by the great pestilence. In fifty
years of peace, broken only by that conflict in the East from which Lucius
Verus, among other curiosities, brought back the plague, war had come to seem a
merely romantic, superannuated incident of bygone history. And now it was
almost upon Italian soil. Terrible were the reports of the numbers and audacity
of the assailants. Aurelius, as yet untried in war, and understood by a few
only in the whole scope of a really great character, was known to the majority
of his subjects as but a careful administrator, though a student of philosophy,
perhaps, as we say, a dilettante. But he was also the visible centre of
government, towards whom the hearts of a whole people turned, grateful for
fifty years of public happiness—its good genius, its “Antonine”—whose fragile
person might be foreseen speedily giving way under the trials of military life,
with a disaster like that of the slaughter of the legions by Arminius.
Prophecies of the world’s impending conflagration were easily credited: “the
secular fire” would descend from heaven: superstitious fear had even demanded
the sacrifice of a human victim. Marcus Aurelius, always philosophically
considerate of the humours of other people, exercising also that devout
appreciation of every religious claim which was one of his characteristic
habits, had invoked, in aid of the commonwealth, not only all native gods, but
all foreign deities as well, however strange.—“Help! Help! in the ocean space!”
A multitude of foreign priests had been welcomed to Rome, with their various
peculiar religious rites. The sacrifices made on this occasion were remembered
for centuries; and the starving poor, at least, found some satisfaction in the
flesh of those herds of “white bulls,” which came into the city, day after day,
to yield the savour of their blood to the gods. In spite of all this, the
legions had but followed their standards despondently. But prestige, personal
prestige, the name of “Emperor,” still had its magic power over the nations.
The mere approach of the Roman army made an impression on the barbarians.
Aurelius and his colleague had scarcely reached Aquileia when a deputation
arrived to ask for peace. And now the two imperial “brothers” were returning
home at leisure; were waiting, indeed, at a villa outside the walls, till the
capital had made ready to receive them. But although Rome was thus in genial
reaction, with much relief, and hopefulness against the winter, facing itself
industriously in damask of red and gold, those two enemies were still
unmistakably extant: the barbarian army of the Danube was but over-awed for a
season; and the plague, as we saw when Marius was on his way to Rome, was not
to depart till it had done a large part in the formation of the melancholy
picturesque of modern Italy—till it had made, or prepared for the making of the
Roman Campagna. The old, unaffected, really pagan, peace or gaiety, of ANTONINO
PIO — that genuine though unconscious humanist—was gone for ever. And again and
again, throughout this day of varied observation, Marius had been reminded,
above all else, that he was not merely in “the most religious city of the
world,” as one had said, but that Rome was become the romantic home of the
wildest superstition. Such superstition presented itself almost as religious
mania in many an incident of his long ramble,—incidents to which he gave his
full attention, though contending in some measure with a reluctance on the part
of his companion, the motive of which he did not understand till long
afterwards. Marius certainly did not allow this reluctance to deter his own
curiosity. Had he not come to Rome partly under poetic vocation, to receive all
those things, the very impress of life itself, upon the visual, the
imaginative, organ, as upon a mirror; to reflect them; to transmute them into
golden words? He must observe that strange medley of superstition, that
centuries’ growth, layer upon layer, of the curiosities of religion (one faith
jostling another out of place) at least for its picturesque interest, and as an
indifferent outsider might, not too deeply concerned in the question which, if
any of them, was to be the survivor. Superficially, at least, the Roman
religion, allying itself with much diplomatic economy to possible rivals, was
in possession, as a vast and complex system of usage, intertwining itself with
every detail of public and private life, attractively enough for those who had
but “the historic temper,” and a taste for the past, however much a Lucian
might depreciate it. Roman religion, as Marius knew, had, indeed, been always
something to be done, rather than something to be thought, or believed, or
loved; something to be done in minutely detailed manner, at a particular time
and place, correctness in which had long been a matter of laborious learning
with a whole school of ritualists—as also, now and again, a matter of heroic
sacrifice with certain exceptionally devout souls, as when Caius Fabius Dorso,
with his life in his hand, succeeded in passing the sentinels of the invading
Gauls to perform a sacrifice on the Quirinal, and, thanks to the divine
protection, had returned in safety. So jealous was the distinction between
sacred and profane, that, in the matter of the “regarding of days,” it had made
more than half the year a holiday. Aurelius had, indeed, ordained that there
should be no more than a hundred and thirty-five festival days in the year; but
in other respects he had followed in the steps of his predecessor, Antoninus
Pius—commended especially for his “religion,” his conspicuous devotion to its
public ceremonies—and whose coins are remarkable for their reference to the
oldest and most hieratic types of Roman mythology. Aurelius had succeeded in
more than healing the old feud between philosophy and religion, displaying
himself, in singular combination, as at once the most zealous of philosophers
and the most devout of polytheists, and lending himself, with an air of
conviction, to all the pageantries of public worship. To his pious recognition
of that one orderly spirit, which, according to the doctrine of the Stoics,
diffuses itself through the world, and animates it—a recognition taking the
form, with him, of a constant effort towards inward likeness thereto, in the
harmonious order of his own soul—he had added a warm personal devotion towards
the whole multitude of the old national gods, and a great many new foreign ones
besides, by him, at least, not ignobly conceived. If the comparison may be
reverently made, there was something here of the method by which the catholic
church has added the cultus of the saints to its worship of the one Divine
Being. And to the view of the majority, though the emperor, as the
personal centre of religion, entertained the hope of converting his people to
philosophic faith, and had even pronounced certain public discourses for their
instruction in it, that polytheistic devotion was his most striking feature.
Philosophers, indeed, had, for the most part, thought with Seneca, “that a man
need not lift his hands to heaven, nor ask the sacristan’s leave to put his
mouth to the ear of an image, that his prayers might be heard the
better.”—Marcus Aurelius, “a master in Israel,” knew all that well enough. Yet
his outward devotion was much more than a concession to popular sentiment, or a
mere result of that sense of fellow-citizenship with others, which had made him
again and again, under most difficult circumstances, an excellent comrade.
Those others, too!—amid all their ignorances, what were they but instruments in
the administration of the Divine Reason, “from end to end sweetly and strongly
disposing all things”? Meantime “Philosophy” itself had assumed much of what we
conceive to be the religious character. It had even cultivated the habit, the
power, of “spiritual direction”; the troubled soul making recourse in its hour
of destitution, or amid the distractions of the world, to this or that
director—philosopho suo—who could really best understand it. And it had
been in vain that the old, grave and discreet religion of Rome had set itself,
according to its proper genius, to prevent or subdue all trouble and
disturbance in men’s souls. In religion, as in other matters, plebeians, as
such, had a taste for movement, for revolution; and it had been ever in the
most populous quarters that religious changes began. To the apparatus of
foreign religion, above all, recourse had been made in times of public
disquietude or sudden terror; and in those great religious celebrations, before
his proceeding against the barbarians, Aurelius had even restored the
solemnities of Isis, prohibited in the capital since the time of Augustus,
making no secret of his worship of that goddess, though her temple had been
actually destroyed by authority in the reign of TIBERIO (si veda). Her singular
and in many ways beautiful ritual was now popular in Rome. And then—what the
enthusiasm of the swarming plebeian quarters had initiated, was sure to be
adopted, sooner or later, by women of fashion. A blending of all the religions
of the ancient world had been accomplished. The new gods had arrived, had been
welcomed, and found their places; though, certainly, with no real security, in
any adequate ideal of the divine nature itself in the background of men’s
minds, that the presence of the new-comer should be edifying, or even refining.
High and low addressed themselves to all deities alike without scruple;
confusing them together when they prayed, and in the old, authorised, threefold
veneration of their visible images, by flowers, incense, and ceremonial
lights—those beautiful usages, which the church, in her way through the world,
ever making spoil of the world’s goods for the better uses of the human spirit,
took up and sanctified in her service. And certainly “the most religious city
in the world” took no care to veil its devotion, however fantastic. The
humblest house had its little chapel or shrine, its image and lamp; while
almost every one seemed to exercise some religious function and responsibility.
Colleges, composed for the most part of slaves and of the poor, provided for
the service of the Compitalian Lares—the gods who presided, respectively, over
the several quarters of the city. In one street, Marius witnessed an incident
of the festival of the patron deity of that neighbourhood, the way being strewn
with box, the houses tricked out gaily in such poor finery as they possessed,
while the ancient idol was borne through it in procession, arrayed in gaudy
attire the worse for wear. Numerous religious clubs had their stated anniversaries,
on which the members issued with much ceremony from their guild-hall, or
schola, and traversed the thoroughfares of Rome, preceded, like the
confraternities of the present day, by their sacred banners, to offer sacrifice
before some famous image. Black with the perpetual smoke of lamps and incense,
oftenest old and ugly, perhaps on that account the more likely to listen to the
desires of the suffering—had not those sacred effigies sometimes given sensible
tokens that they were aware? The image of the Fortune of Women—Fortuna
Muliebris, in the Latin Way, had spoken (not once only) and declared; Bene me,
Matronae! vidistis riteque dedicastis! The Apollo of Cumae had wept during
three whole nights and days. The images in the temple of Juno Sospita had been
seen to sweat. Nay! there was blood—divine blood—in the hearts of some of them:
the images in the Grove of Feronia had sweated blood! From one and all CORNELIO
had turned away: like the “atheist” of whom Apuleius tells he had never once
raised hand to lip in passing image or sanctuary, and had parted from Marius
finally when the latter determined to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on
their return into the Forum, below the Palatine hill, where the mothers were
pressing in, with a multitude of every sort of children, to touch the
lightning-struck image of the wolf-nurse of Romulus—so tender to little
ones!—just discernible in its dark shrine, amid a blaze of lights. Marius gazed
after his companion of the day, as he mounted the steps to his lodging, singing
to himself, as it seemed. Marius failed precisely to catch the words.
And, as the rich, fresh evening came on, there was heard all over Rome,
far above a whisper, the whole town seeming hushed to catch it distinctly, the
lively, reckless call to “play,” from the sons and daughters of foolishness, to
those in whom their life was still green—Donec virenti canities abest!—Donec
virenti canities abest!+ MARIO could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have
taken the call. And as for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral
obligation with which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant
affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him.
NOTES 187. +Horace, Odes I.ix.17. Translation: “So long as youth is
fresh and age is far away.” But ah! Maecenas is yclad in claye, And great
Augustus long ygoe is dead, And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead, That
matter made for poets on to playe.+ Marcus Aurelius who, though he
had little relish for them himself, had ever been willing to humour the taste
of his people for magnificent spectacles, was received back to Rome with the
lesser honours of the Ovation, conceded by the Senate (so great was the public
sense of deliverance) with even more than the laxity which had become its habit
under imperial rule, for there had been no actual bloodshed in the late
achievement. Clad in the civic dress of the chief Roman magistrate, and with a
crown of myrtle upon his head, his colleague similarly attired walking beside
him, he passed up to the Capitol on foot, though in solemn procession along the
Sacred Way, to offer sacrifice to the national gods. The victim, a goodly
sheep, whose image we may still see between the pig and the ox of the
Suovetaurilia, filleted and stoled almost like some ancient canon of the
church, on a sculptured fragment in the Forum, was conducted by the priests,
clad in rich white vestments, and bearing their sacred utensils of massive
gold, immediately behind a company of flute-players, led by the great
choir-master, or conductor, of the day, visibly tetchy or delighted, according
as the instruments he ruled with his tuning-rod, rose, more or less adequately
amid the difficulties of the way, to the dream of perfect music in the soul
within him. The vast crowd, including the soldiers of the triumphant army, now
restored to wives and children, all alike in holiday whiteness, had left their
houses early in the fine, dry morning, in a real affection for “the father of
his country,” to await the procession, the two princes having spent the
preceding night outside the walls, at the old Villa of the Republic. Marius,
full of curiosity, had taken his position with much care; and stood to see the
world’s masters pass by, at an angle from which he could command the view of a
great part of the processional route, sprinkled with fine yellow sand, and
punctiliously guarded from profane footsteps. The coming of the pageant
was announced by the clear sound of the flutes, heard at length above the
acclamations of the people—Salve Imperator!—Dii te servent!—shouted in regular
time, over the hills. It was on the central figure, of course, that the whole
attention of Marius was fixed from the moment when the procession came in
sight, preceded by the lictors with gilded fasces, the imperial image-bearers,
and the pages carrying lighted torches; a band of knights, among whom was
Cornelius in complete military, array, following. Amply swathed about in the
folds of a richly worked toga, after a manner now long since become obsolete
with meaner persons, Marius beheld a man of about five-and-forty years of age,
with prominent eyes—eyes, which although demurely downcast during this
essentially religious ceremony, were by nature broadly and benignantly
observant. He was still, in the main, as we see him in the busts which
represent his gracious and courtly youth, when Hadrian had playfully called
him, not Verus, after the name of his father, but Verissimus, for his candour
of gaze, and the bland capacity of the brow, which, below the brown hair,
clustering thickly as of old, shone out low, broad, and clear, and still
without a trace of the trouble of his lips. You saw the brow of one who, amid
the blindness or perplexity of the people about him, understood all things
clearly; the dilemma, to which his experience so far had brought him, between
Chance with meek resignation, and a Providence with boundless possibilities and
hope, being for him at least distinctly defined. That outward serenity,
which he valued so highly as a point of manner or expression not unworthy the
care of a public minister—outward symbol, it might be thought, of the inward
religious serenity it had been his constant purpose to maintain—was increased
to-day by his sense of the gratitude of his people; that his life had been one
of such gifts and blessings as made his person seem in very deed divine to
them. Yet the cloud of some reserved internal sorrow, passing from time to time
into an expression of fatigue and effort, of loneliness amid the shouting
multitude, might have been detected there by the more observant—as if the
sagacious hint of one of his officers, “The soldiers can’t understand you, they
don’t know Greek,” were applicable always to his relationships with other
people. The nostrils and mouth seemed capable almost of peevishness; and Marius
noted in them, as in the hands, and in the spare body generally, what was new
to his experience—something of asceticism, as we say, of a bodily gymnastic, by
which, although it told pleasantly in the clear blue humours of the eye, the
flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer with the spirit. It was hardly the
expression of “the healthy mind in the healthy body,” but rather of a sacrifice
of the body to the soul, its needs and aspirations, that Marius seemed to
divine in this assiduous student of the Greek sages—a sacrifice, in truth, far
beyond the demands of their very saddest philosophy of life. Dignify
thyself with modesty and simplicity for thine ornaments!—had been ever a maxim
with this dainty and high-bred Stoic, who still thought manners a true part of
morals, according to the old sense of the term, and who regrets now and again
that he cannot control his thoughts equally well with his countenance. That
outward composure was deepened during the solemnities of this day by an air of
pontifical abstraction; which, though very far from being pride—nay, a sort of
humility rather—yet gave, to himself, an air of unapproachableness, and to his
whole proceeding, in which every minutest act was considered, the character of
a ritual. Certainly, there was no haughtiness, social, moral, or even
philosophic, in Aurelius, who had realised, under more trying conditions
perhaps than any one before, that no element of humanity could be alien from
him. Yet, as he walked to-day, the centre of ten thousand observers, with eyes
discreetly fixed on the ground, veiling his head at times and muttering very
rapidly the words of the “supplications,” the rich, fresh evening
came on, there was heard all over Rome, far above a whisper, the whole town
seeming hushed to catch it distinctly, the lively, reckless call to “play,”
from the sons and daughters of foolishness , to those in whom their life
was still green—Donec virenti canities abest!—Donec virenti canities abest!+
Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call. And as for
himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he
had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these,
that his Epicureanism had committed him. . +Horace, Odes I.ix.17.
Translation: “So long as youth is fresh and age is far away.” But ah!
Maecenas is yclad in claye, And great Augustus long ygoe is dead, And all the
worthies liggen wrapt in lead, That matter made for poets on to playe.+
Marcus Aurelius who, though he had little relish for them himself, had
ever been willing to humour the taste of his people for magnificent spectacles,
was received back to Rome with the lesser honours of the Ovation, conceded by
the Senate (so great was the public sense of deliverance) with even more than
the laxity which had become its habit under imperial rule, for there had been
no actual bloodshed in the late achievement. Clad in the civic dress of the
chief Roman magistrate, and with a crown of myrtle upon his head, his colleague
similarly attired walking beside him, he passed up to the Capitol on foot,
though in solemn procession along the Sacred Way, to offer sacrifice to the national
gods. The victim, a goodly sheep, whose image we may still see between the pig
and the ox of the Suovetaurilia, filleted and stoled almost like some ancient
canon of the church, on a sculptured fragment in the Forum, was conducted by
the priests, clad in rich white vestments, and bearing their sacred utensils of
massive gold, immediately behind a company of flute-players, led by the great
choir-master, or conductor, of the day, visibly tetchy or delighted, according
as the instruments he ruled with his tuning-rod, rose, more or less adequately
amid the difficulties of the way, to the dream of perfect music in the soul
within him. The vast crowd, including the soldiers of the triumphant army, now
restored to wives and children, all alike in holiday whiteness, had left their
houses early in the fine, dry morning, in a real affection for “the father of
his country,” to await the procession, the two princes having spent the
preceding night outside the walls, at the old Villa of the REPUBBLICA. MARIO,
full of curiosity, had taken his position with much care; and stood to see the
world’s masters pass by, at an angle from which he could command the view of a
great part of the processional route, sprinkled with fine yellow sand, and
punctiliously guarded from profane footsteps. The coming of the pageant
was announced by the clear sound of the flutes, heard at length above the
acclamations of the people—Salve Imperator!—Dii te servent!—shouted in regular
time, over the hills. It was on the central figure, of course, that the whole
attention of MARIO is fixed from the moment when the procession came in sight,
preceded by the lictors with gilded fasces, the imperial image-bearers, and the
pages carrying lighted torches; a band of knights, among whom was CORNELIO in
complete military, array, following. Amply swathed about in the folds of a
richly worked toga, after a manner now long since become obsolete withmeaner
persons, Marius beheld a man of about five-and-forty years of age, with
prominent eyes—eyes, which although demurely downcast during this essentially
religious ceremony, were by nature broadly and benignantly observant. He was
still, in the main, as we see him in the busts which represent his gracious and
courtly youth, when Hadrian had playfully called him, not Verus, after the
name of his father, but Verissimus, for his candour of gaze, and the bland
capacity of the brow, which, below the brown hair, clustering thickly as of
old, shone out low, broad, and clear, and still without a trace of the trouble
of his lips. You saw the brow of one who, amid the blindness or perplexity of
the people about him, understood all things clearly; the dilemma, to which
his experience so far had brought him, between Chance with meek
resignation, and a Providence with boundless possibilities and hope, being for
him at least distinctly defined. That outward serenity, which he valued
so highly as a point of manner or expression not unworthy the care of a public
minister—outward symbol, it might be thought, of the inward religious serenity
it had been his constant purpose to maintain—was increased to-day by his sense
of the gratitude of his people; that his life had been one of such gifts and
blessings as made his person seem in very deed divine to them. Yet the cloud of
some reserved internal sorrow, passing from time to time into an expression of
fatigue and effort, of loneliness amid the shouting multitude, might have been
detected there by the more observant—as if the sagacious hint of one of his
officers, “The soldiers can’t understand you, they don’t know Greek,” were
applicable always to his relationships with other people. The nostrils and
mouth seemed capable almost of peevishness; and Marius noted in them, as in the
hands, and in the spare body generally, what was new to his
experience—something of asceticism, as we say, of a bodily gymnastic, by
which, although it told pleasantly in the clear blue humours of the eye, the
flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer with the spirit. It was hardly the
expression of “the healthy mind in the healthy body,” but rather of a sacrifice
of the body to the soul, its needs and aspirations, that Marius seemed to
divine in this assiduous student of the Greek sages—a sacrifice, in truth, far
beyond the demands of their very saddest philosophy of life. Dignify
thyself with modesty and simplicity for thine ornaments!—had been ever a maxim
with this dainty and high -bred Stoic, who still thought manners a true
part of morals, according to the old sense of the term, and who regrets now and
again that he cannot control his thoughts equally well with his countenance.
That outward composure was deepened during the solemnities of this day by an
air of pontifical abstraction; which, though very far from being pride—nay, a
sort of humility rather—yet gave, to himself, an air of unapproachableness, and
to his whole proceeding, in which every minutest act was considered, the
character of a ritual. Certainly, there was no haughtiness, social, moral, or
even philosophic, in Aurelius, who had realised, under more trying conditions
perhaps than any one before, that no element of humanity could be alien from
him. Yet, as he walked to-day, the centre of ten thousand observers, with eyes
discreetly fixed on the ground, veiling his head at times and muttering very
rapidly the words of the “supplications,” there was something many spectators
may have noted as a thing new in their experience, for Aurelius, unlike his
predecessors, took all this with absolute seriousness. The doctrine of the
sanctity of kings, that, in the words of Tacitus, Princes are as Gods—Principes
instar deorum esse—seemed to have taken a novel, because a literal, sense. For ANTONINO
(si veda), indeed, the old legend of his descent from NUMA (si veda), from NUMA
(si veda) who had talked with the gods, meant much. Attached in very early
years to the service of the altars, like many another noble youth, he was
“observed to perform all his sacerdotal functions with a constancy and
exactness unusual at that age; was soon a master of the sacred music; and had
all the forms and ceremonies by heart.” And now, as the emperor, who had not
only a vague divinity about his person, but was actually the chief religious
functionary of the state, recited from time to time the forms of invocation, he
needed not the help of the prompter, or ceremoniarius, who then approached, to
assist him by whispering the appointed words in his ear. It was that pontifical
abstraction which then impressed itself on MARIO as the leading outward
characteristic of ANTONINO (si veda); though to him alone, perhaps, in that
vast crowd of observers, it was no strange thing, but a matter he had
understood from of old. Some fanciful writers have assigned the origin of
these triumphal processions to the mythic pomps of Dionysus, after his
conquests in the East; the very word Triumph being, according to this
supposition, only Thriambos-the Dionysiac Hymn. And certainly the younger of
the two imperial “brothers,” who, with the effect of a strong contrast, walked
beside Aurelius, and shared the honours of the day, might well have reminded
people of the delicate Greek god of flowers and wine. This new conqueror of the
East was now about thirty-six years old, but with his scrupulous care for all
the advantages of his person, and a soft curling beard powdered with gold,
looked many years younger. One result of the more genial element in the wisdom
of Aurelius had been that, amid most difficult circumstances, he had known
throughout life how to act in union with persons of character very alien from his
own; to be more than loyal to the colleague, the younger brother in empire, he
had too lightly taken to himself, five years before, then an uncorrupt youth,
“skilled in manly exercises and fitted for war.” When Aurelius thanks the gods
that a brother had fallen to his lot, whose character was a stimulus to the
proper care of his own, one sees that this could only have happened in the way
of an example, putting him on his guard against insidious faults. But it is
with sincere amiability that the imperial writer, who was indeed little used to
be ironical, adds that the lively respect and affection of the junior had often
“gladdened” him. To be able to make his use of the flower, when the fruit
perhaps was useless or poisonous:—that was one of the practical successes of
his philosophy; and his people noted, with a blessing, “the concord of the two
Augusti.” The younger, certainly, possessed in full measure that charm of
a constitutional freshness of aspect which may defy for a long time extravagant
or erring habits of life; a physiognomy, healthy-looking, cleanly, and firm,
which seemed unassociable with any form of self-torment, and made one think of
the muzzle of some young hound or roe, such as human beings invariably like to
stroke—a physiognomy, in effect, with all the goodliness of animalism of the
finer sort, though still wholly animal. The charm was that of the blond head,
the unshrinking gaze, the warm tints: neither more nor less than one may see
every English summer, in youth, manly enough, and with the stuff which makes
brave soldiers, in spite of the natural kinship it seems to have with
playthings and gay flowers. But innate in Lucius Verus there was that more than
womanly fondness for fond things, which had made the atmosphere of the old city
of Antioch, heavy with centuries of voluptuousness, a poison to him: he had
come to love his delicacies best out of season, and would have gilded the very
flowers. But with a wonderful power of self-obliteration, the elder brother at
the capital had directed his procedure successfully, and allowed him, become
now also the husband of his daughter Lucilla, the credit of a “Conquest,”
though Verus had certainly not returned a conqueror over himself. He had
returned, as we know, with the plague in his company, along with many another
strange creature of his folly; and when the people saw him publicly feeding his
favourite horse Fleet with almonds and sweet grapes, wearing the animal’s image
in gold, and finally building it a tomb, they felt, with some un-sentimental
misgiving, that he might revive the manners of Nero.—What if, in the chances of
war, he should survive the protecting genius of that elder brother? He
was all himself to-day: and it was with much wistful curiosity that Marius
regarded him. For Lucius Verus was, indeed, but the highly expressive type of a
class,—the true son of his father, adopted by Hadrian. Lucius Verus the elder,
also, had had the like strange capacity for misusing the adornments of life,
with a masterly grace; as if such misusing were, in truth, the quite adequate
occupation of an intelligence, powerful, but distorted by cynical philosophy or
some disappointment of the heart. It was almost a sort of genius, of which
there had been instances in the imperial purple: it was to ascend the throne, a
few years later, in the person of one, now a hopeful little lad at home in the
palace; and it had its following, of course, among the wealthy youth at Rome,
who concentrated no inconsiderable force of shrewdness and tact upon minute
details of attire and manner, as upon the one thing needful. Certainly, flowers
were pleasant to the eye. Such things had even their sober use, as making the
outside of human life superficially attractive, and thereby promoting the first
steps towards friendship and social amity. But what precise place could there
be for Verus and his peculiar charm, in that Wisdom, that Order of divine
Reason “reaching from end to end, strongly and sweetly disposing all things,”
from the vision of which Aurelius came down, so tolerant of persons like him?
Into such vision Marius too was certainly well-fitted to enter, yet, noting the
actual perfection of Lucius Verus after his kind, his undeniable achievement of
the select, in all minor things, felt, though with some suspicion of himself,
that he entered into, and could understand, this other so dubious sort of
character also. There was a voice in the theory he had brought to Rome with him
which whispered “nothing is either great nor small;” as there were times when
he could have thought that, as the “grammarian’s” or the artist’s ardour of
soul may be satisfied by the perfecting of the theory of a sentence, or the
adjustment of two colours, so his own life also might have been fulfilled by an
enthusiastic quest after perfection—say, in the flowering and folding of a
toga. The emperors had burned incense before the image of Jupiter,
arrayed in its most gorgeous apparel, amid sudden shouts from the people of
Salve Imperator! turned now from the living princes to the deity, as they
discerned his countenance through the great open doors. The imperial brothers
had deposited their crowns of myrtle on the richly embroidered lapcloth of the
god; and, with their chosen guests, sat down to a public feast in the temple
itself. There followed what was, after all, the great event of the day:—an
appropriate discourse, a discourse almost wholly de contemptu mundi, delivered
in the presence of the assembled Senate, by the emperor Aurelius, who had thus,
on certain rare occasions, condescended to instruct his people, with the double
authority of a chief pontiff and a laborious student of philosophy. In those
lesser honours of the ovation, there had been no attendant slave behind the
emperors, to make mock of their effulgence as they went; and it was as if with
the discretion proper to a philosopher, and in fear of a jealous Nemesis, he
had determined himself to protest in time against the vanity of all outward
success. IL SENATO is assembled to hear the emperor’s discourse in the
vast hall of the Curia Julia. A crowd of high-bred youths idled around, or on
the steps before the doors, with the marvellous toilets Marius had noticed in
the Via Nova; in attendance, as usual, to learn by observation the minute
points of senatorial procedure. MARIO had already some acquaintance with them,
and passing on found himself suddenly in the presence of what was still the
most august assembly the world had seen. Under Aurelius, ever full of
veneration for this ancient traditional guardian of public religion, the Senate
had recovered all its old dignity and independence. Among its members many
hundreds in number, visibly the most distinguished of them all, Marius noted
the great sophists or rhetoricians of the day, in all their magnificence. The
antique character of their attire, and the ancient mode of wearing it, still
surviving with them, added to the imposing character of their persons, while
they sat, with their staves of ivory in their hands, on their curule
chairs—almost the exact pattern of the chair still in use in the Roman church
when a Bishop pontificates at the divine offices—“tranquil and unmoved, with a
majesty that seemed divine,” as MARIO thought, like the old Gaul of the
Invasion. The rays of the early November sunset slanted full upon the audience,
and made it necessary for the officers of the Court to draw the purple curtains
over the windows, adding to the solemnity of the scene. In the depth of those
warm shadows, surrounded by her ladies, the empress Faustina was seated to
listen. The beautiful Greek statue of Victory, which since the days of Augustus
had presided over the assemblies of the Senate, had been brought into the hall,
and placed near the chair of the emperor; who, after rising to perform a brief
sacrificial service in its honour, bowing reverently to the assembled fathers
left and right, took his seat and began to speak. There was a certain
melancholy grandeur in the very simplicity or triteness of the theme: as it
were the very quintessence of all the old Roman epitaphs, of all that was
monumental in that city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people.
As if in the very fervour of disillusion, he seemed to be composing—Hôsper
epigraphas chronôn kai holôn ethnôn+—the sepulchral titles of ages and whole
peoples; nay! the very epitaph of the living Rome itself. The grandeur of the
ruins of Rome,—heroism in ruin: it was under the influence of an imaginative
anticipation of this, that he appeared to be speaking. And though the
impression of the actual greatness of Rome on that day was but enhanced by the
strain of contempt, falling with an accent of pathetic conviction from the
emperor himself, and gaining from his pontifical pretensions the authority of a
religious intimation, yet the curious interest of the discourse lay in this,
that Marius, for one, as he listened, seemed to forsee a grass-grown Forum, the
broken ways of the Capitol, and the Palatine hill itself in humble occupation.
That impression connected itself with what he had already noted of an actual
change even then coming over Italian scenery. Throughout, he could trace
something of a humour into which Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the
tendency to cry, Abase yourselves! There was here the almost inhuman
impassibility of one who had thought too closely on the paradoxical aspect of
the love of posthumous fame. With the ascetic pride which lurks under all
Platonism, resultant from its opposition of the seen to the unseen, as
falsehood to truth—the imperial Stoic, like his true descendant, the hermit of
the middle age, was ready, in no friendly humour, to mock, there in its narrow
bed, the corpse which had made so much of itself in life. Marius could but contrast
all that with his own Cyrenaic eagerness, just then, to taste and see and
touch; reflecting on the opposite issues deducible from the same text. “The
world, within me and without, flows away like a river,” he had said; “therefore
let me make the most of what is here and now.”—“The world and the thinker upon
it, are consumed like a flame,” said Aurelius, “therefore will I turn away my
eyes from vanity: renounce: withdraw myself alike from all affections.” He
seemed tacitly to claim as a sort of personal dignity, that he was very
familiarly versed in this view of things, and could discern a death’s-head
everywhere. Now and again MARIO is reminded of the saying that “with the Stoics
all people are the vulgar save themselves;” and at times the orator seemed to
have forgotten his audience, and to be speaking only to himself. “Art
thou in love with men’s praises, get thee into the very soul of them, and
see!—see what judges they be, even in those matters which concern themselves.
Wouldst thou have their praise after death, bethink thee, that they who shall
come hereafter, and with whom thou wouldst survive by thy great name, will be but
as these, whom here thou hast found so hard to live with. For of a truth, the
soul of him who is aflutter upon renown after death, presents not this aright
to itself, that of all whose memory he would have each one will likewise very
quickly depart, until memory herself be put out, as she journeys on by means of
such as are themselves on the wing but for a while, and are extinguished in
their turn.—Making so much of those thou wilt never see! It is as if thou
wouldst have had those who were before thee discourse fair things concerning
thee. “To him, indeed, whose wit hath been whetted by true doctrine, that
well-worn sentence of Homer sufficeth, to guard him against regret and
fear.— Like the race of leaves The race of man is:— The wind in
autumn strows The earth with old leaves: then the spring the
woods with new endows.+ Leaves! little leaves!—thy children, thy
flatterers, thine enemies! Leaves in the wind, those who would devote thee to
darkness, who scorn or miscall thee here, even as they also whose great fame
shall outlast them. For all these, and the like of them, are born indeed in the
spring season—Earos epigignetai hôrê+: and soon a wind hath scattered them, and
thereafter the wood peopleth itself again with another generation of leaves.
And what is common to all of them is but the littleness of their lives: and yet
wouldst thou love and hate, as if these things should continue for ever. In a
little while thine eyes also will be closed, and he on whom thou perchance hast
leaned thyself be himself a burden upon another. “Bethink thee often of
the swiftness with which the things that are, or are even now coming to be, are
swept past thee: that the very substance of them is but the perpetual motion of
water: that there is almost nothing which continueth: of that bottomless depth
of time, so close at thy side. Folly! to be lifted up, or sorrowful, or
anxious, by reason of things like these! Think of infinite matter, and thy
portion—how tiny a particle, of it! of infinite time, and thine own brief point
there; of destiny, and the jot thou art in it; and yield thyself readily to the
wheel of Clotho, to spin of thee what web she will. “As one casting a
ball from his hand, the nature of things hath had its aim with every man, not
as to the ending only, but the first beginning of his course, and passage
thither. And hath the ball any profit of its rising, or loss as it descendeth
again, or in its fall? or the bubble, as it groweth or breaketh on the air? or
the flame of the lamp, from the beginning to the end of its brief story?
“All but at this present that future is, in which nature, who disposeth all
things in order, will transform whatsoever thou now seest, fashioning from its
substance somewhat else, and therefrom somewhat else in its turn, lest the
world grow old. We are such stuff as dreams are made of—disturbing dreams.
Awake, then! and see thy dream as it is, in comparison with that erewhile it
seemed to thee. “And for me, especially, it were well to mind those many
mutations of empire in time past; therein peeping also upon the future, which
must needs be of like species with what hath been, continuing ever within the
rhythm and number of things which really are; so that in forty years one may
note of man and of his ways little less than in a thousand. Ah! from this
higher place, look we down upon the ship-wrecks and the calm! Consider, for
example, how the world went, under the emperor Vespasian. They are married and
given in marriage, they breed children; love hath its way with them; they heap
up riches for others or for themselves; they are murmuring at things as then
they are; they are seeking for great place; crafty, flattering, suspicious,
waiting upon the death of others:—festivals, business, war, sickness,
dissolution: and now their whole life isno longer anywhere at all. Pass on to
the reign of TRAIANO (si veda): all things continue the same: and that life
also is no longer anywhere at all. Ah! but look again, and consider, one after
another, as it were the sepulchral inscriptions of all peoples and times,
according to one pattern.—What multitudes, after their utmost striving—a little
afterwards! were dissolved again into their dust. “Think again of life as
it was far off in the ancient world; as it must be when we shall be gone; as it
is now among the wild heathen. How many have never heard your names and mine, or
will soon forget them! How soon may those who shout my name to-day begin to
revile it, because glory, and the memory of men, and all things beside, are but
vanity—a sand-heap under the senseless wind, the barking of dogs, the
quarrelling of children, weeping incontinently upon their laughter. This
hasteth to be; that other to have been: of that which now cometh to be, even
now somewhat hath been extinguished. And wilt thou make thy treasure of any one
of these things? It were as if one set his love upon the swallow, as it passeth
out of sight through the air! Bethink thee often, in all contentions
public and private, of those whom men have remembered by reason of their anger
and vehement spirit—those famous rages, and the occasions of them—the great
fortunes, and misfortunes, of men’s strife of old. What are they all now, and
the dust of their battles? Dust and ashes indeed; a fable, a mythus, or not so
much as that. Yes! keep those before thine eyes who took this or that, the like
of which happeneth to thee, so hardly; were so querulous, so agitated. And where
again are they? Wouldst thou have it not otherwise with thee? Consider
how quickly all things vanish away—their bodily structure into the general
substance; the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past
thoughts. Ah! ’tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping through life—a
pigmy soul carrying a dead body to its grave. “Let death put thee upon
the consideration both of thy body and thy soul: what an atom of all matter
hath been distributed to thee; what a little particle of the universal mind.
Turn thy body about, and consider what thing it is, and that which old age, and
lust, and the languor of disease can make of it. Or come to its substantial and
causal qualities, its very type: contemplate that in itself, apart from the
accidents of matter, and then measure also the span of time for which the
nature of things, at the longest, will maintain that special type. Nay! in the
very principles and first constituents of things corruption hath its part—so
much dust, humour, stench , and scraps of bone! Consider that thy marbles
are but the earth’s callosities, thy gold and silver its faeces; this silken
robe but a worm’s bedding, and thy purple an unclean fish. Ah! and thy life’s
breath is not otherwise, as it passeth out of matters like these, into the like
of them again. “For the one soul in things, taking matter like wax in the
hands, moulds and remoulds—how hastily!—beast, and plant, and the babe, in
turn: and that which dieth hath not slipped out of the order of nature, but, remaining
therein, hath also its changes there, disparting into those elements of
which nature herself, and thou too, art compacted. She changes without
murmuring. The oaken chest falls to pieces with no more complaining than when
the carpenter fitted it together. If one told thee certainly that on the morrow
thou shouldst die, or at the furthest on the day after, it would be no great
matter to thee to die on the day after to-morrow, rather than to-morrow. Strive
to think it a thing no greater that thou wilt die—not to-morrow, but a year, or
two years, or ten years f rom to-day. “I find that all things are
now as they were in the days of our buried ancestors—all things sordid in their
elements, trite by long usage, and yet ephemeral. How ridiculous, then, how
like a countryman in town, is he, who wonders at aught. Doth the sameness, the
repetition of the public shows, weary thee? Even so doth that likeness of
events in the spectacle of the world. And so must it be with thee to the end.
For the wheel of the world hath ever the same motion, upward and downward, from
generation to generation. When, when, shall time give place to eternity?
“If there be things which trouble thee thou canst put them away, inasmuch as
they have their being but in thine own notion concerning them. Consider what
death is, and how, if one does but detach from it the appearances, the notions,
that hang about it, resting the eye upon it as in itself it really is, it must
be thought of but as an effect of nature, and that man but a child whom an effect
of nature shall affright. Nay! not function and effect of nature, only; but a
thing profitable also to herself. “To cease from action—the ending of
thine effort to think and do: there is no evil in that. Turn thy thought to the
ages of man’s life, boyhood, youth, maturity, old age: the change in every one
of these also is a dying, but evil nowhere. Thou climbedst into the ship, thou
hast made thy voyage and touched the shore. Go forth now! Be it into some other
life: the divine breath is everywhere, even there. Be it into forgetfulness for
ever; at least thou wilt rest from the beating of sensible images upon thee,
from the passions which pluck thee this way and that like an unfeeling toy,
from those long marches of the intellect, from thy toilsome ministry to the
flesh. “Art thou yet more than dust and ashes and bare bone—a name only,
or not so much as that, which, also, is but whispering and a resonance, kept
alive from mouth to mouth of dying abjects who have hardly known themselves;
how much less thee, dead so long ago! “When thou lookest upon a wise man,
a lawyer, a captain of war, think upon another gone. When thou seest thine own
face in the glass, call up there before thee one of thine ancestors—one of
those old Caesars. Lo! everywhere, thy double before thee! Thereon, let the
thought occur to thee: And where are they? anywhere at all, for ever? And thou,
thyself—how long? Art thou blind to that thou art—thy matter, how temporal; and
thy function, the nature of thy business? Yet tarry, at least, till thou hast
assimilated even these things to thine own proper essence, as a quick fire
turneth into heat and light whatsoever be cast upon it. “As words once in
use are antiquated to us, so is it with the names that were once on all men’s
lips: CAMILLO (siveda), Volesus, Leonnatus: then, in a little while, Scipio and
Cato, and then Augustus, and then Hadrian, and then Antoninus Pius. How many
great physicians who lifted wise brows at other men’s sick-beds, have sickened
and died! Those wise Chaldeans, who foretold, as a great matter, another man’s
last hour, have themselves been taken by surprise. Ay! and all those others, in
their pleasant places: those who doated on a Capreae like Tiberius, on their
gardens, on the baths: Pythagoras and Socrates, who reasoned so closely upon
immortality: Alexander, who used the lives of others as though his own should
last for ever—he and his mule-driver alike now!—one upon another. Well-nigh the
whole court of Antoninus is extinct. Panthea and Pergamus sit no longer beside
the sepulchre of their lord. The watchers over Hadrian’s dust have slipped from
his sepulchre.—It were jesting to stay longer. Did they sit there still, would
the dead feel it? or feeling it, be glad? or glad, hold those watchers for
ever? The time must come when they too shall be aged men and aged women, and
decease, and fail from their places; and what shift were there then for
imperial service? This too is but the breath of the tomb, and a skinful of dead
men’s blood. “Think again of those inscriptions, which belong not to one
soul only, but to whole families: Eschatos tou idiou genous:+ He was the last
of his race. Nay! of the burial of whole cities: Helice, Pompeii: of others,
whose very burial place is unknown. “Thou hast been a citizen in this
wide city. Count not for how long, nor repine; since that which sends thee
hence is no unrighteous judge, no tyrant, but Nature, who brought thee hither;
as when a player leaves the stage at the bidding of the conductor who hired
him. Sayest thou, ‘I have not played five acts’? True! but in human life, three
acts only make sometimes an entire play. That is the composer’s business, not
thine. Withdraw thyself with a good will; for that too hath, perchance, a good
will which dismisseth thee from thy part.” The discourse ended almost in
darkness, the evening having set in somewhat suddenly, with a heavy fall of
snow. The torches, made ready to do him a useless honour, were of real service
now, as the emperor was solemnly conducted home; one man rapidly catching light
from another—a long stream of moving lights across the white Forum, up the
great stairs, to the palace. And, in effect, that night winter began, the
hardest that had been known for a lifetime. The wolves came from the mountains;
and, led by the carrion scent, devoured the dead bodies which had been hastily
buried during the plague, and, emboldened by their meal, crept, before the
short day was well past, over the walls of the farmyards of the Campagna. The
eagles were seen driving the flocks of smaller birds across the dusky sky.
Only, in the city itself the winter was all the brighter for the contrast,
among those who could pay for light and warmth. The habit-makers made a great
sale of the spoil of all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles,
for presents at the Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses from
Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red. NOTES 188.
+Spenser, Shepheardes Calendar, October, 61-66. 200.
+Transliteration: Hôsper epigraphas chronôn kai holôn ethnôn. Pater’s
Translation: “the sepulchral titles of ages and whole peoples.”
202. +OMERO, Iliad VI.146-48. 202. +Transliteration: Earos
epigignetai hôrê. Translation: “born in springtime.” Homer, Iliad VI.147.
210. +Transliteration: Eschatos tou idiou genous. Translation: “He was
the last of his race.” After that sharp, brief winter, the sun was
already at work, softening leaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness
in the air; but he did his work behind an evenly white sky, against which the
abode of the Caesars, its cypresses and bronze roofs, seemed like a picture in
beautiful but melancholy colour, as Marius climbed the long flights of steps to
be introduced to the emperor Aurelius. Attired in the newest mode, his legs
wound in dainty fasciae of white leather, with the heavy gold ring of the
ingenuus, and in his toga of ceremony, he still retained all his country
freshness of complexion. The eyes of the “golden youth” of Rome were upon him
as the chosen friend of Cornelius, and the destined servant of the emperor; but
not jealously. In spite of, perhaps partly because of, his habitual reserve of
manner, he had become “the fashion,” even among those who felt instinctively
the irony which lay beneath that remarkable self-possession, as of one taking
all things with a difference from other people, perceptible in voice, in
expression, and even in his dress. It was, in truth, the air of one who,
entering vividly into life, and relishing to the full the delicacies of its
intercourse, yet feels all the while, from the point of view of an ideal
philosophy, that he is but conceding reality to suppositions, choosing of his
own will to walk in a day-dream, of the illusiveness of which he at least is
aware. In the house of the chief chamberlain Marius waited for the due
moment of admission to the emperor’s presence. He was admiring the peculiar
decoration of the walls, coloured like rich old red leather. In the midst of
one of them was depicted, under a trellis of fruit you might have gathered, the
figure of a woman knocking at a door with wonderful reality of perspective.
Then the summons came; and in a few minutes, the etiquette of the imperial
household being still a simple matter, he had passed the curtains which divided
the central hall of the palace into three parts—three degrees of approach to
the sacred person—and was speaking to Aurelius himself; not in Greek, in which
the emperor oftenest conversed with the learned, but, more familiarly, in
Latin, adorned however, or disfigured, by many a Greek phrase, as now and again
French phrases have made the adornment of fashionable English. It was with real
kindliness that ANTONINO (si veda) looks upon MARIO, as a youth of great
attainments in Greek letters and philosophy; and he liked also his serious
expression, being, as we know, a believer in the doctrine of physiognomy—that,
as he puts it, not love only, but every other affection of man’s soul, looks out
very plainly from the window of the eyes. The apartment in which MARIO finds
himself was of ancient aspect, and richly decorated with the favourite toys of
two or three generations of imperial collectors, now finally revised by the
high connoisseurship of the Stoic emperor himself, though destined not much
longer to remain together there. It is the repeated boast of ANTONINO (si veda)
that he had learned from old Antoninus Pius to maintain authority without the
constant use of guards, in a robe woven by the handmaids of his own consort,
with no processional lights or images, and “that a prince may shrink himself
almost into the figure of a private gentleman.” And yet, again as at his first
sight of him, Marius was struck by the profound religiousness of the
surroundings of the imperial presence. The effect might have been due in part
to the very simplicity, the discreet and scrupulous simplicity, of the central
figure in this splendid abode; but Marius could not forget that he saw before
him not only the head of the Roman religion, but one who might actually have
claimed something like divine worship, had he cared to do so. Though the
fantastic pretensions of CALIGOLA (si veda) had brought some contempt on that
claim, which had become almost a jest under the ungainly CLAUDIO (si veda),
yet, from OTTAVIANO (si veda) downwards, a vague divinity had seemed to
surround the Caesars even in this life; and the peculiar character of ANTONINO
(si veda), at once a ceremonious polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical
calling, and a philosopher whose mystic speculation encircled him with a sort
of saintly halo, had restored to his person, without his intending it,
something of that divine prerogative, or prestige. Though he would never allow
the immediate dedication of altars to himself, yet the image of his Genius—his
spirituality or celestial counterpart—was placed among those of the deified
princes of the past; and his family, including Faustina and COMMODO (si veda),
was spoken of as the “holy” or “divine” house. Many a Roman courtier agreed
with the barbarian chief, who, after contemplating a predecessor of Aurelius,
withdrew from his presence with t he exclamation:—“I have seen a god
to-day!” The very roof of his house, rising into a pediment or gable, like that
of the sanctuary of a god, the laurels on either side its doorway, the chaplet
of oak-leaves above, seemed to designate the place for religious veneration.
And notwithstanding all this, the household of ANTONINO (si veda) is singularly
modest, with none of the wasteful expense of palaces after the fashion of Lewis
the Fourteenth; the palatial dignity being felt only in a peculiar sense of
order, the absence of all that was casual, of vulgarity and discomfort. A
merely official residence of his predecessors, the Palatine had become the
favourite dwelling-place of ANTONINO (si veda); its many-coloured memories
suiting, perhaps, his pensive character, and the crude splendours of NERONE (si
veda) and ADRIANO (si veda) being now subdued by time. The window-less Roman
abode must have had much of what toa modern would be gloom. How did the
children, one wonders, endure houses with so little escape for the eye into the
world outside? Aurelius, who had altered little else, choosing to live there,
in a genuine homeliness, had shifted and made the most of the level lights, and
broken out a quite medieval window here and there, and the clear daylight,
fully appreciated by his youthful visitor, made pleasant shadows among the objects
of the imperial collection. Some of these, indeed, by reason of their Greek
simplicity and grace, themselves shone out like spaces of a purer, early light,
amid the splendours of the Roman manufacture. Though he looked, thought
Marius, like a man who did not sleep enough, he was abounding and bright
to-day, after one of those pitiless headaches, which since boyhood had been the
“thorn in his side,” challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify
one in humble endurances. At the first moment, to Marius, remembering the
spectacle of the emperor in ceremony, it was almost bewildering to be in
private conversation with him. There was much in the philosophy of
Aurelius—much consideration of mankind at large, of great bodies, aggregates
and generalities, after the Stoic manner—which, on a nature less rich than his,
might have acted as an inducement to care for people in inverse proportion to
their nearness to him. That has sometimes been the result of the Stoic
cosmopolitanism. Aurelius, however, determined to beautify by all means, great
or little, a doctrine which had in it some potential sourness, had brought all
the quickness of his intelligence, and long years of observation, to bear on
the conditions of social intercourse. He had early determined “not to make
business an excuse to decline the offices of humanity—not to pretend to be too
much occupied with important affairs to concede what life with others may
hourly demand;” and with such success, that, in an age which made much of the
finer points of that intercourse, it was felt that the mere honesty of his
conversation was more pleasing than other men’s flattery. His agreeableness to
his young visitor to-day was, in truth, a blossom of the same wisdom which had
made of Lucius Verus really a brother—the wisdom of not being exigent with men,
any more than with fruit-trees (it is his own favourite figure) beyond their
nature. And there was another person, still nearer to him, regarding whom this
wisdom became a marvel, of equity—of charity. The centre of a group of
princely children, in the same apartment with Aurelius, amid all the refined
intimacies of a modern home, sat the empress Faustina, warming her hands over a
fire. With her long fingers lighted up red by the glowing coals of the brazier
Marius looked close upon the most beautiful woman in the world, who was also
the great paradox of the age, among her boys and girls. As has been truly said
of the numerous representations of her in art, so in life, she had the air of
one curious, restless, to enter into conversation with the first comer. She had
certainly the power of stimulating a very ambiguous sort of curiosity about
herself. And Marius found this enigmatic point in her expression, that even
after seeing her many times he could never precisely recall her features in
absence. The lad of six years, looking older, who stood beside her, impatiently
plucking a rose to pieces over the hearth, was, in outward appearance, his
father—the young Verissimus—over again; but with a certain feminine length of
feature, and with all his mother’s alertness, or license, of gaze. Yet
rumour knocked at every door and window of the imperial house regarding the
adulterers who knocked at them, or quietly left their lovers’ garlands there.
Was not that likeness of the husband, in the boy beside her, really the effect
of a shameful magic, in which the blood of the murdered gladiator, his true
father, had been an ingredient? Were the tricks for deceiving husbands which
the Roman poet describes, really hers, and her household an efficient school of
all the arts of furtive love? Or, was the husband too aware, like every one
beside? Were certain sudden deaths which happened there, really the work of
apoplexy, or the plague? The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumours
were meant to penetrate, was, however, faithful to his sanguine and optimist
philosophy, to his determination that the world should be to him simply what
the higher reason preferred to conceive it; and the life’s journey Aurelius had
made so far, though involving much moral and intellectual loneliness, had been
ever in affectionate and helpful contact with other wayfarers, very unlike
himself. Since his days of earliest childhood in the Lateran gardens, he seemed
to himself, blessing the gods for it after deliberate survey, to have been
always surrounded by kinsmen, friends, servants, of exceptional virtue. From
the great Stoic idea, that we are all fellow-citizens of one city, he had
derived a tenderer, a more equitable estimate than was common among Stoics, of
the eternal shortcomings of men and women. Considerations that might tend to
the sweetening of his temper it was his daily care to store away, with a kind
of philosophic pride in the thought that no one took more good-naturedly than
he the “oversights” of his neighbours. For had not Plato taught (it was not
paradox, but simple truth of experience) that if people sin, it is because they
know no better, and are “under the necessity of their own ignorance”? Hard to
himself, he seemed at times, doubtless, to decline too softly upon unworthy
persons. Actually, he came thereby upon many a useful instrument. The empress
Faustina he would seem at least to have kept, by a constraining affection, from
becoming altogether what most people have believed her, and won in her (we must
take him at his word in the “Thoughts,” abundantly confirmed by letters, on
both sides, in his correspondence with Cornelius Fronto) a consolation, the
more secure, perhaps, because misknown of others. Was the secret of her actual
blamelessness, after all, with him who has at least screened her name? At all
events, the one thing quite certain about her, besides her extraordinary
beauty, is her sweetness to himself. No! The wise, who had made due
observation on the trees of the garden, would not expect to gather grapes of
thorns or fig-trees: and he was the vine, putting forth his genial fruit, by
natural law, again and again, after his kind, whatever use people might make of
it. Certainly, his actual presence never lost its power, and Faustina was glad
in it to-day, the birthday of one of her children, a boy who stood at her knee
holding in his fingers tenderly a tiny silver trumpet, one of his birthday
gifts.—“For my part, unless I conceive my hurt to be such, I have no hurt at
all,”—boasts the would-be apathetic emperor:—“and how I care to conceive of the
thing rests with me.” Yet when his children fall sick or die, this pretence
breaks down, and he is broken-hearted: and one of the charms of certain of his
letters still extant, is his reference to those childish sicknesses.—“On my
return to Lorium,” he writes, “I found my little lady—domnulam meam—in a
fever;” and again, in a letter to one of the most serious of men, “You will be
glad to hear that our little one is better, and running about the room—parvolam
nostram melius valere et intra cubiculum discurrere.” The young Commodus
had departed from the chamber, anxious to witness the exercises of certain
gladiators, having a native taste for such company, inherited, according to popular
rumour, from his true father—anxious also to escape from the too impressive
company of the gravest and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had ever seen,
the tutor of the imperial children, who had arrived to offer his birthday
congratulations, and now, very familiarly and affectionately, made a part of
the group, falling on the shoulders of the emperor, kissing the empress
Faustina on the face, the little ones on the face and hands. Marcus Cornelius
Fronto, the “Orator,” favourite teacher of the emperor’s youth, afterwards his
most trusted counsellor, and now the undisputed occupant of the sophistic
throne, whose equipage, elegantly mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the
streets of Rome, had certainly turned his many personal gifts to account with a
good fortune, remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to professors or
rhetoricians. The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius, always generous to his
teachers, arranging their very quarrels sometimes, for they were not always
fair to one another, had helped him to a really great place in the world. But
his sumptuous appendages, including the villa and gardens of Maecenas, had been
borne with an air perfectly becoming, by the professor of a philosophy which,
even in its most accomplished and elegant phase, presupposed a gentle contempt
for such things. With an intimate practical knowledge of manners,
physiognomies, smiles, disguises, flatteries, and courtly tricks of every
kind—a whole accomplished rhetoric of daily life—he applied them all to the
promotion of humanity, and especially of men’s family affection. Through a long
life of now eighty years, he had been, as it were, surrounded by the gracious
and soothing air of his own eloquence—the fame, the echoes, of it—like warbling
birds, or murmuring bees. Setting forth in that fine medium the best ideas of
matured pagan philosophy, he had become the favourite “director” of noble
youth. Yes! it was the one instance Marius, always eagerly on the
look-out for such, had yet seen of a perfectly tolerable, perfectly beautiful,
old age—an old age in which there seemed, to one who perhaps habitually
over-valued the expression of youth, nothing to be regretted, nothing
really lost, in what years had taken away. The wise old man, whose blue eyes
and fair skin were so delicate, uncontaminate and clear, would seem to have
replaced carefully and consciously each natural trait of youth, as it departed
from him, by an equivalent grace of culture; and had the blitheness, the placid
cheerfulness, as he had also the infirmity, the claim on stronger people, of a
delightful child. And yet he seemed to be but awaiting his exit from life—that
moment with which the Stoics were almost as much preoccupied as the Christians,
however differently—and set Marius pondering on the contrast between a
placidity like this, at eighty years, and the sort of desperateness he was
aware of in his own manner of entertaining that thought. His infirmities
nevertheless had been painful and long-continued, with losses of children, of
pet grandchildren. What with the crowd, and the wretched streets, it was a sign
of affection which had cost him something, for the old man to leave his own
house at all that day; and he was glad of the emperor’s support, as he moved
from place to place among the children he protests so often to have loved as
his own. For a strange piece of literary good fortune, at the beginning
of the present century, has set freethe long-buried fragrance of this famous
friendship of the old world, from below a valueless later manuscript, in a
series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange, for the most part their
evening thoughts, especially at family anniversaries, and with entire intimacy,
on their children, on the art of speech, on all the various subtleties of the
“science of images”—rhetorical images—above all, of course, on sleep and
matters of health. They are full of mutual admiration of each other’s
eloquence, restless in absence till they see one another again, noting,
characteristically, their very dreams of each other, expecting the day which
will terminate the office, the business or duty, which separates them—“as
superstitious people watch for the star, at the rising of which they may break
their fast.” To one of the writers, to Aurelius, the correspondence was
sincerely of value. We see him once reading his letters with genuine delight on
going to rest. Fronto seeks to deter his pupil from writing in Greek.—Why buy,
at great cost, a foreign wine, inferior to that from one’s own vineyard?
Aurelius, on the other hand, with an extraordinary innate susceptibility to
words—la parole pour la parole, as the French say—despairs, in presence of
Fronto’s rhetorical perfection. Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline
and some other museums, Fronto had been struck, pleasantly struck, by the
family likeness among the Antonines; and it was part of his friendship to make
much of it, in the case of the children of Faustina. “Well! I have seen the
little ones,” he writes to Aurelius, then, apparently, absent from them: “I
have seen the little ones—the pleasantest sight of my life; for they are as
like yourself as could possibly be. It has well repaid me for my journey over
that slippery road, and up those steep rocks; for I beheld you, not simply face
to face before me, but, more generously, whichever way I turned, to my right
and my left. For the rest, I found them, Heaven be thanked! with healthy cheeks
and lusty voices. One was holding a slice of white bread, like a king’s son;
the other a crust of brown bread, as becomes the offspring of a philosopher. I
pray the gods to have both the sower and the seed in their keeping; to watch
over this field wherein the ears of corn are so kindly alike. Ah! I heard too
their pretty voices, so sweet that in the childish prattle of one and the other
I seemed somehow to be listening—yes! in that chirping of your pretty
chickens—to the limpid+ and harmonious notes of your own oratory. Take care!
you will find me growing independent, having those I could love in your
place:—love, on the surety of my eyes and ears.” +“Limpid” is misprinted
“Limped.” “Magistro meo salutem!” replies the Emperor, “I too have
seen my little ones in your sight of them; as, also, I saw yourself in reading
your letter. It is that charming letter forces me to write thus:” with reiterations
of affection, that is, which are continual in these letters, on both sides, and
which may strike a modern reader perhaps as fulsome; or, again, as having
something in common with the old Judaic unction of friendship. They were
certainly sincere. To one of those children Fronto had now brought the
birthday gift of the silver trumpet, upon which he ventured to blow softly now
and again, turning away with eyes delighted at the sound, when he thought the
old man was not listening. It was the well-worn, valetudinarian subject of
sleep, on which Fronto and Aurelius were talking together; Aurelius always
feeling it a burden, Fronto a thing of magic capacities, so that he had written
an encomium in its praise, and often by ingenious arguments recommends his imperial
pupil not to be sparing of it. To-day, with his younger listeners in mind, he
had a story to tell about it: They say that our father GIOVE, when he ordered
the world at the beginning, divided time into two parts exactly equal: the one
part he clothed with light, the other with darkness: he called them Day and
Night; and he assigned rest to the night and to day the work of life. At that
time Sleep was not yet born and men passed the whole of their lives awake:
only, the quiet of the night was ordained for them, instead of sleep. But it
came to pass, little by little, being that the minds of men are restless, that
they carried on their business alike by night as by day, and gave no part at
all to repose. And Jupiter, when he perceived that even in the night-time they
ceased not from trouble and disputation, and that even the courts of law
remained open (it was the pride of Aurelius, as Fronto knew, to be assiduous in
those courts till far into the night) resolved to appoint one of his brothers
to be the overseer of the night and have authority over man’s rest. But Neptune
pleaded in excuse the gravity of his constant charge of the seas, and Father
Dis the difficulty of keeping in subjection the spirits below; and Jupiter,
having taken counsel with the other gods, perceived that the practice of
nightly vigils was somewhat in favour. It was then, for the most part, that
Juno gave birth to her children: Minerva, the mistress of all art and craft,
loved the midnight lamp: Mars delighted in the darkness for his plots and
sallies; and the favour of Venus and Bacchus was with those who roused by
night. Then it was that Jupiter formed the design of creating Sleep; and he
added him to the number of the gods, and gave him the charge over night and
rest, putting into his hands the keys of human eyes. With his own hands he
mingled the juices wherewith Sleep should soothe the hearts of mortals—herb of
Enjoyment and herb of Safety, gathered from a grove in Heaven; and, from the
meadows of Acheron, the herb of Death; expressing from it one single drop only,
no bigger than a tear one might hide. ‘With this juice,’ he said, ‘pour slumber
upon the eyelids of mortals. So soon as it hath touched them they will lay
themselves down motionless, under thy power. But be not afraid: they shall
revive, and in a while stand up again upon their feet.’ Thereafter, Jupiter
gave wings to Sleep, attached, not, like Mercury’s, to his heels, but to his
shoulders, like the wings of Love. For he said, ‘It becomes thee not to
approach men’s eyes as with the noise of chariots, and the rushing of a swift
courser, but in placid and merciful flight, as upon the wings of a swallow—nay!
with not so much as the flutter of the dove.’ Besides all this, that he might
be yet pleasanter to men, he committed to him also a multitude of blissful
dreams, according to every man’s desire. One watched his favourite actor;
another listened to the flute, or guided a charioteer in the race: in his
dream, the soldier was victorious, the general was borne in triumph, the
wanderer returned home. Yes!—and sometimes those dreams come true! Just
then Aurelius was summoned to make the birthday offerings to his household
gods. A heavy curtain of tapestry was drawn back; and beyond it MARIO gazed for
a few moments into the Lararium, or imperial chapel. A patrician youth, in
white habit, was in waiting, with a little chest in his hand containing incense
for the use of the altar. On richly carved consoles, or side boards, around
this narrow chamber, were arranged the rich apparatus of worship and the golden
or gilded images, adorned to-day with fresh flowers, among them that image of
Fortune from the apartment of Antoninus Pius, and such of the emperor’s own
teachers as were gone to their rest. A dim fresco on the wall commemorated the
ancient piety of Lucius Albinius, who in flight from Rome on the morrow of a
great disaster, overtaking certain priests on foot with their sacred utensils,
descended from the wagon in which he rode and yielded it to the ministers of
the gods. As he ascended into the chapel the emperor paused, and with a grave
but friendly look at his young visitor, delivered a parting sentence, audible
to him alone: _Imitation is the most acceptable part of worship:—the gods had
much rather mankind should resemble than flatter them. Make sure that those to
whom you come nearest be the happier by your presence!_ It was the very
spirit of the scene and the hour—the hour Marius had spent in the imperial
house. How temperate, how tranquillising! what humanity! Yet, as he left the
eminent company concerning whose ways of life at home he had been so youthfully
curious, and sought, after his manner, to determine the main trait in all this,
he had to confess that it was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity
for once really golden. During the Eastern war there came a moment
when schism in the empire had seemed possible through the defection of LUCIO
VERO (si veda); when to ANTONINO (si veda) it had also seemed possible to
confirm his allegiance by no less a gift than his beautiful daughter Lucilla,
the eldest of his children—the domnula, probably, of those letters. The little
lady, grown now to strong and stately maidenhood, had been ever something of
the good genius, the better soul, to LUCIO VERO (si veda), by the law of
contraries, her somewhat cold and apathetic modesty acting as counterfoil to
the young man’s tigrish fervour. Conducted to Ephesus, she had become his wife
by form of civil marriage, the more solemn wedding rites being deferred till
their return to Rome. The ceremony of the Confarreation, or religious
marriage, in which bride and bridegroom partook together of a certain mystic
bread, was celebrated accordingly, with due pomp, early in the spring; Aurelius
himself assisting, with much domestic feeling. A crowd of fashionable people
filled the space before the entrance to the apartments of Lucius on the
Palatine hill, richly decorated for the occasion, commenting, not always quite
delicately, on the various details of the rite, which only a favoured few
succeeded in actually witnessing. “She comes!” MARIO can hear them say,
“escorted by her young brothers: it is the young Commodus who carries the torch
of white-thornwood, the little basket of work-things, the toys for the
children:”—and then, after a watchful pause, “she is winding the woollen thread
round the doorposts. Ah! I see the marriage-cake: the bridegroom presents the
fire and water.” Then, in a longer pause, was heard the chorus, Thalassie!
Thalassie! and for just a few moments, in the strange light of many wax tapers
at noonday, Marius could see them both, side by side, while the bride was
lifted over the doorstep: LUCIO VERO (si veda) heated and handsome—the pale,
impassive Lucilla looking very long and slender, in her closely folded yellow
veil, and high nuptial crown. As Marius turned away, glad to escape from
the pressure of the crowd, he found himself face to face with Cornelius, an
infrequent spectator on occasions such as this. It was a relief to depart with
him—so fresh and quiet he looked, though in all his splendid equestrian array
in honour of the ceremony—from the garish heat of the marriage scene. The
reserve which had puzzled Marius so much on his first day in Rome, was but an
instance of many, to him wholly unaccountable, avoidances alike of things and
persons, which must certainly mean that an intimate companionship would cost
him something in the way of seemingly indifferent amusements. Some inward
standard Marius seemed to detect there (though wholly unable to estimate its
nature) of distinction, selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the
fervid and corrupt life across which they were moving together:—some secret,
constraining motive, ever on the alert at eye and ear, which carried him
through Rome as under a charm, so that Marius could not but think of that
figure of the white bird in the market-place as undoubtedly made true of him.
And Marius was still full of admiration for this companion, who had known how
to make himself very pleasant to him. Here was the clear, cold corrective,
which the fever of his present life demanded. Without it, he would have felt
alternately suffocated and exhausted by an existence, at once so gaudy and
overdone, and yet so intolerably empty; in which people, even at their best,
seemed only to be brooding, like the wise emperor himself, over a world’s
disillusion. For with all the severity of Cornelius, there was such a breeze of
hopefulness—freshness and hopefulness, as of new morning, about him. For the
most part, as I said, those refusals, that reserve of his, seemed
unaccountable. But there were cases where the unknown monitor acted in a
direction with which the judgment, or instinct, of Marius himself wholly
concurred; the effective decision of Cornelius strengthening him further
therein, as by a kind of outwardly embodied conscience. And the entire drift of
his education determined him, on one point at least, to be wholly of the same
mind with this peculiar friend (they two, it might be, together, against the
world!) when, alone of a whole company of brilliant youth, he had withdrawn
from his appointed place in the amphitheatre, at a grand public show, which
after an interval of many months, was presented there, in honour of the
nuptials of Lucius Verus and Lucilla. And it was still to the eye,
through visible movement and aspect, that the character, or genius of Cornelius
made itself felt by Marius; even as on that afternoon when he had girt on his
armour, among the expressive lights and shades of the dim old villa at the
roadside, and every object of his knightly array had seemed to be but sign or
symbol of some other thing far beyond it. For, consistently with his really
poetic temper, all influence reached Marius, even more exclusively than he was
aware, through th e medium of sense. From Flavian in that brief early
summer of his existence, he had derived a powerful impression of the “perpetual
flux”: he had caught there, as in cipher or symbol, or low whispers more
effective than any definite language, his own Cyrenaic philosophy, presented
thus, for the first time, in an image or person, with much attractiveness,
touched also, consequently, with a pathetic sense of personal sorrow:—a
concrete image, the abstract equivalent of which he could recognise afterwards,
when the agitating personal influence had settled down for him, clearly enough,
into a theory of practice. But of what possible intellectual formula could this
mystic Cornelius be the sensible exponent; seeming, as he did, to live ever in
close relationship with, and recognition of, a mental view, a source of
discernment, a light upon his way, which had certainly not yet sprung up for
Marius? Meantime, the discretion of Cornelius, his energetic clearness and
purity, were a charm, rather physical than moral: his exquisite correctness of
spirit, at all events, accorded so perfectly with the regular beauty of his
person, as to seem to depend upon it. And wholly different as was this later
friendship, with its exigency, its warnings, its restraints, from the feverish
attachment to Flavian, which had made him at times like an uneasy slave, still,
like that, it was a reconciliation to the world of sense, the visible world. From
the hopefulness o f this gracious presence, all visible things around him,
even the commonest objects of everyday life—if they but stood together to warm
their hands at the same fire—took for him a new poetry, a delicate fresh bloom,
and interest. It was as if his bodily eyes had been indeed mystically washed,
renewed, strengthened. And how eagerly, with what a light heart, would
Flavian have taken his placein the amphitheatre, among the youth of his own
age! with what an appetite for every detail of the entertainment, and its
various accessories:—the sunshine, filtered into soft gold by the vela, with
their serpentine patterning, spread over the more select part of the company;
the Vestal virgins, taking their privilege of seats near the empress Faustina,
who sat there in a maze of double-coloured gems, changing, as she moved, like
the waves of the sea; the cool circle of shadow, in which the wonderful toilets
of the fashionable told so effectively around the blazing arena, covered again
and again during the many hours’ show, with clean sand for the absorption of
certain great red patches there, by troops of white-shirted boys, for whom the
good-natured audience provided a scramble of nuts and small coin, flung to them
over a trellis-work of silver-gilt and amber, precious gift of Nero, while a
rain of flowers and perfume fell over themselves, as they paused between the
parts of their long feast upon the spectacle of animal suffering. During
his sojourn at Ephesus, Lucius Verus had readily become a patron, patron or
protégé, of the great goddess of Ephesus, the goddess of hunters; and the show,
celebrated by way of a compliment to him to-day, was to present some incidents
of her story, where she figures almost as the genius of madness, in animals, or
in the humanity which comes in contact with them. The entertainment would have
an element of old Greek revival in it, welcome to the taste of a learned and
Hellenising society; and, as Lucius Verus was in some sense a lover of animals,
was to be a display of animals mainly. There would be real wild and domestic
creatures, all of rare species; and a real slaughter. On so happy an occasion,
it was hoped, the elder emperor might even concede a point, and a living
criminal fall into the jaws of the wild beasts. And the spectacle was,
certainly, to end in the destruction, by one mighty shower of arrows, of a
hundred lions, “nobly” provided by ANTONINO (si veda) himself for the amusement
of his people.—Tam magnanimus fuit! The arena, decked and in order for
the first scene, looked delightfully fresh, re-inforcing on the spirits of the
audience the actual freshness of the morning, which at this season still
brought the dew. Along the subterranean ways that led up to it, the sound of an
advancing chorus was heard at last, chanting the words of a sacred song, or
hymn to Diana; for the spectacle of the amphitheatre was, after all, a
religious occasion. To its grim acts of blood-shedding a kind of sacrificial
character still belonged in the view of certain religious casuists, tending
conveniently to soothe the humane sensibilities of so pious an emperor as
Aurelius, who, in his fraternal complacency, had consented to preside over the
shows. Artemis or Diana, as she may be understood in the actual
development of her worship, was, indeed, the symbolical expression of two
allied yet contrasted elements of human temper and experience—man’s amity, and
also his enmity, towards the wild creatures, when they were still, in a certain
sense, his brothers. She is the complete, and therefore highly complex,
representative of a state, in which man was still much occupied with animals,
not as his flock, or as his servants after the pastoral relationship of our
later, orderly world, but rather as his equals, on friendly terms or the
reverse,—a state full of primeval sympathies and antipathies, of rivalries and
common wants—while he watched, and could enter into, the humours of those “younger
brothers,” with an intimacy, the “survivals” of which in a later age seem often
to have had a kind of madness about them. Diana represents alike the bright and
the dark side of such relationship. But the humanities of that relationship
were all forgotten to-day in the excitement of a show, in which mere cruelty to
animals, their useless suffering and death, formed the main point of interest.
People watched their destruction, batch after batch, in a not particularly
inventive fashion; though it was expected that the animals themselves, as
living creatures are apt to do when hard put to it, would become inventive, and
make up, by the fantastic accidents of their agony, for the deficiencies of an
age fallen behind in this matter of manly amusement. It was as a Deity of
Slaughter—the Taurian goddess who demands the sacrifice of the shipwrecked
sailors thrown on her coasts—the cruel, moonstruck huntress, who brings not
only sudden death, but rabies, among the wild creatures that Diana was to be
presented, in the person of a famous courtesan. The aim at an actual theatrical
illusion, after the first introductory scene, was frankly surrendered to the
display of the animals, artificially stimulated and maddened to attack each
other. And as Diana was also a special protectress of new-born creatures, there
would be a certain curious interest in the dexterously contrived escape of the
young from their mother’s torn bosoms; as many pregnant animals as possible
being carefully selected for the purpose. The time had been, and was to
come again, when the pleasures of the amphitheatre centered in a similar
practical joking upon human beings. What more ingenious diversion had stage
manager ever contrived than that incident, itself a practical epigram never to
be forgottten, when a criminal, who, like slaves and animals, had no rights,
was compelled to present the part of Icarus; and, the wings failing him in due
course, had fallen into a pack of hungry bears? For the long shows of the
amphitheatre were, so to speak, the novel-reading of that age—a current help
provided for sluggish imaginations, in regard, for instance, to grisly
accidents, such as might happen to one’s self; but with every facility for
comfortable inspection. Scaevola might watch his own hand, consuming,
crackling, in the fire, in the person of a culprit, willing to redeem his life
by an act so delightful to the eyes, the very ears, of a curious public. If the
part of MARSIA was called for, there was a criminal condemned to lose his skin.
It might be almost edifying to study minutely the expression of his face, while
the assistants corded and pegged him to the bench, cunningly; the servant of
the law waiting by, who, after one short cut with his knife, would slip the
man’s leg from his skin, as neatly as if it were a stocking—a finesse in
providing the due amount of suffering for wrong-doers only brought to its
height in Nero’s living bonfires. But then, by making his suffering ridiculous,
you enlist against the sufferer, some real, and all would-be manliness, and do
much to stifle any false sentiment of compassion. The philosophic emperor,
having no great taste for sport, and asserting here a personal scruple, had
greatly changed all that; had provided that nets should be spread under the
dancers on the tight-rope, and buttons for the swords of the gladiators. But
the gladiators were still there. Their bloody contests had, under the form of a
popular amusement, the efficacy of a human sacrifice; as, indeed, the whole
system of the public shows was understood to possess a religious import. Just
at this point, certainly, the judgment of Lucretius on pagan religion is
without reproach— Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. And MARIO,
weary and indignant, feeling isolated in the great slaughter-house, could not
but observe that, in his habitual complaisance to Lucius Verus, who, with loud
shouts of applause from time to time, lounged beside him, Aurelius had sat
impassibly through all the hours Marius himself had remained there. For the
most part indeed, the emperor had actually averted his eyes from the show,
reading, or writing on matters of public business, but had seemed, after all,
indifferent. He was revolving, perhaps, that old Stoic paradox of the
Imperceptibility of pain; which might serve as an excuse, should those savage
popular humours ever again turn against men and women. MARIO remembers well his
very attitude and expression on this day, when, a few years later, certain
things came to pass in Gaul, under his full authority; and that attitude and
expression defined already, even thus early in their so friendly intercourse,
and though he was still full of gratitude for his interest, a permanent point
of difference between the emperor and himself—between himself, with all the
convictions of his life taking centre to-day in his merciful, angry heart, and
Aurelius, as representing all the light, all the apprehensive power there might
be in pagan intellect. There was something in a tolerance such as this, in the
bare fact that he could sit patiently through a scene like this, which seemed
to Marius to mark Aurelius as his inferior now and for ever on the question of
righteousness; to set them on opposite sides, in some great conflict, of which
that difference was but a single presentment. Due, in whatever proportions, to
the abstract principles he had formulated for himself, or in spite of them, there
was the loyal conscience within him, deciding, judging himself and every one
else, with a wonderful sort of authority:—You ought, methinks, to be something
quite different from what you are; here! and here! Surely Aurelius must be
lacking in that decisive conscience at first sight, of the intimations of which
Marius could entertain no doubt—which he looked for in others. He at least, the
humble follower of the bodily eye, was aware of a crisis in life, in this
brief, obscure existence, a fierce opposition of real good and real evil around
him, the issues of which he must by no means compromise or confuse; of the
antagonisms of which the “wise” Marcus Aurelius was unaware. That long
chapter of the cruelty of the Roman public shows may, perhaps, leave with the
children of the modern world a feeling of self-complacency. Yet it might seem
well to ask ourselves—it is always well to do so, when we read of the
slave-trade, for instance, or of great religious persecutions on this side or
on that, or of anything else which raises in us the question, “Is thy servant a
dog, that he should do this thing?”—not merely, what germs of feeling we may
entertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to the like; but,
even more practically, what thoughts, what sort of considerations, may be
actually present to our minds such as might have furnished us, living in
another age, and in the midst of those legal crimes, with plausible excuses for
them: each age in turn, perhaps, having its own peculiar point of blindness,
with its consequent peculiar sin—the touch-stone of an unfailing conscience in
the select few. Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of
blindness, of deadness and stupidity, in the age of Marius; and his light had
not failed him regarding it. Yes! what was needed was the heart that would make
it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with the forces that
could beget a heart like that. His chosen philosophy had said,—Trust the eye:
Strive to be right always in regard to the concrete experience: Beware of
falsifying your impressions. And its sanction had at least been effective here,
in protesting—“This, and this, is what you may not look upon!” Surely evil was
a real thing, and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where, not to have
been, by instinctive election, on the right side, was to have failed in
life. The very finest flower of the same company Aurelius with the
gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress
Faustina her- self, and all the elegant blue -stockings of the day,
who maintained, people said, their private " sophists " to
whisper philosophy into their ears winsomely as they performed the duties
of the toilet was assembled again a few months later, in a
different place and for a very different purpose. The temple of Peace, a
" modernis- ing" foundation of Hadrian, enlarged by a
library and lecture-rooms, had grown into an institution like something
between a college and a literary club ; and here Cornelius Pronto was
to pronounce a discourse on the Nature of Morals. There were some,
indeed, who had desired the emperor Aurelius himself to declare his
whole mind on this matter. Rhetoric was become almost a function of
the state : philosophy was upon the throne ; and had from time to time,
by request, delivered an official utterance with well- nigh divine
authority. And it was as the delegate of this authority, under the full
sanction of the philosophic emperor emperor and pontiff, that the
aged Pronto purposed to-day to expound some parts of the Stoic doctrine,
with the view of recommending morals to that refined but perhaps
prejudiced company, as being, in effect, one mode of comeliness in things
as it were music, or a kind of artistic order, in life. And he did
this earnestly, with an outlay of all his science of mind, and that
eloquence of which he was known to be a master. For Stoicism was no
longer a rude a nd unkempt thing. Received at court, it had largely
decorated itself: it was grown persuasive and insinuating, and sought
not only to convince men's intelligence but to allure their souls.
Associated with the beautiful old age of the great rhetorician, and his
winning voice, it was almost Epicurean. And the old man was at his
best on the occasion ; the last on which he ever appeared in this way.
To-day was his own birthday. Early in the morning the imperial
letter of congratulation had reached him ; and all the pleasant animation
it had caused was in his face, when assisted by his daughter Gratia
he took his place on the ivory chair, as president of the Athenaeum of
Rome, wearing with a wonderful grace the philosophic pall, in
reality neither more nor less than the loose woollen cloak of the common
soldier, but fastened on his right shoulder with a magnificent
clasp, the emperor's birthday gift. It was an age, as
abundant evidence shows, whose delight in rhetoric was but one result of
a general susceptibility an age not merely taking pleasure in
words, but experiencing a great moral power in them. Fronto's quaintly
fashionable audience would have wept, and also assisted with their
purses, had his present purpose been, as sometimes happened, the
recommendation of an object of charity. As it was, arranging them-
selves at their ease among the images and flowers, these amateurs of
exquisite language, with their tablets open for careful record of
felicitous word or phrase, were ready to give themselves wholly to
the intellectual treat prepared for them, applauding, blowing loud kisses
through the air sometimes, at the speaker's triumphant exit from
one of his long, skilfully modulated sentences ; while the younger of
them meant to imitate everything about him, down to the inflections
of his voice and the very folds of his mantle. Certainly there was
rhetoric enough : a wealth of imagery ; illustrations from painting,
music, mythology, the experiences of love ; a manage- ment, by
which subtle, unexpected meaning was brought out of familiar terms, like
flies from morsels of amber, to use Fronto's own figure. But with
all its richness, the higher claim of his style was rightly understood to
lie in gravity and self-command, and an especial care for
the purities of a vocabulary which rejected every expression
unsanctioned by the authority of approved ancient models. And
it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes happen, that this general
discourse to a general audience had the effect of an utterance
adroitly designed for him. His conscience still vibrating painfully under
the shock of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full of the
ethical charm of CORNELIO, he was questioning himself with much
impatience as to the possibility of an adjustment between his own
elaborately thought- / out intellectual scheme and the " old
morality." In that intellectual scheme indeed the old morality
had so far been allowed no place, as seeming to demand from him the
admission of certain first principles such as might misdirect or
retard him in his efforts towards a complete, many-sided existence ; or
distort the revelations of the experience of life ; or curtail his natural
liberty of heart and mind. But now (his imagination being occupied for
the moment with the noble and resolute air, the gallantry, so to
call it, which composed the outward mien and presentment of his strange
friend's inflexible ethics) he felt already some nascent suspicion
of his philosophic programme, in regard, precisely, to the question
of good taste. There was the taint of a graceless " antinomianism
" perceptible in it, a dissidence, a revolt against accustomed
modes, the actual impression of which on other men might rebound upon
himself in some loss of that personal pride to which it was part of
his theory of life to allow so much. And it was exactly a moral
situation such as this that Pronto appeared to be contemplating. He
seemed to have before his mind the case of one Cyrenaic or
Epicurean, as the courtier tends to be, by habit and instinct, if not on
principle who yet experiences, actually, a strong tendency to moral
assents, and a desire, with as little logical incon- sistency as may be,
to find a place for duty and righteousness in his house of thought.
And the Stoic professor found the key to this problem in the purely
aesthetic beauty of the old morality, as an element in things, fascinating
to the imagination, to good taste in its most highly developed
form, through association a system or order, as a matter of fact, in
possession, not only of the larger world, but of the rare minority
of elite intelligences ; from which, therefore, least of all would
the sort of Epicurean he had in view endure to become, so to speak, an
outlaw. He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in search
after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he seemed to Marius
to be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of motive to
an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life, determined partly
by natural affection, partly by enlightened self-interest or the
feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere fear of penalties ; no
element of which, however, was distinctively moral in the agent
himself as such, and providing him, therefore, no common ground with a
really moral being like Cornelius, or even like the philosophic
emperor. Performing the same offices ; actually satisfying, even as
they, the external claims of others ; rendering to all their dues one
thus circum- stanced would be wanting, nevertheless, in the secret
of inward adjustment to the moral agents around him. How tenderly more
tenderly than many stricter souls he might yield himself to kindly
instinct ! what fineness of charity in passing judgment on others ! what
an exquisite conscience of other men's susceptibilities ! He knows
for how much the manner, because the heart itself, counts, in doing a
kindness. He goes beyond most people in his care for all weakly
creatures ; judging, instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess
rights. He con- ceives a hundred duties, though he may not call
them by that name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may
have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in
a way of his own. Sometimes, he may think that those men of line
and rule do not really under- stand their own business. How narrow,
inflex- ible, unintelligent ! what poor guardians (he may reason)
of the inward spirit of righteousness, are some supposed careful walkers
according to its letter and form. And yet all the while he admits,
as such, no moral world at all : no theoretic equivalent to so large
a proportion of the facts of life. But, over and above such
practical rectitude, thus determined by natural affection or
self-love or fear, he may notice that there is a rem- nant of right
conduct, what he does, still more what he abstains from doing, not so
much through his own free election, as from a defer- ence, an
" assent," entire, habitual, unconscious, to custom to the
actual habit or fashion of others, from whom he could not endure to
break away, any more than he would care to be out of agreement with them
on questions of mere manner, or, say, even, of dress. Yes ! there
were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a failure in
good taste. An assent, such as this, to the preferences of others,
might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the rectitude it could
determine the least consider- able element in a moral life. Yet here,
according to CORNELIO PRONTONE, is in truth the revealing example, albeit
operating upon com- parative trifles, of the general principle
required. There was one great idea associated with which that
determination to conform to precedent was elevated into the clearest, the
fullest, the weightiest principle of moral action ; a principle
under which one might subsume men's most strenuous efforts after
righteousness. And he proceeded to expound the idea of Humanity of
a universal commonwealth of mind, which becomes explicit, and as if
incarnate, in a select communion of just men made perfect. 'O
Koo-fjios axravel 7ro\t9 <rrw the world is as it were a
commonwealth, a city : and there are observances, customs, usages,
actually current in it, things our friends and companions will
expect of us, as the condition of our living there with them at all, as
really their peers or fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed,
the creation of a visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose
actual manners, whose preferences from of old, become now a weighty
tradition as to the way in which things should or should not be
done, are like a music, to which the intercourse of life proceeds such a
music as no one who had once caught its harmonies would willingly
jar. In this way, the becoming, as in Greek TO irpiirov : or T^ rj#?7,
mores, manners, as both Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a
comprehensive term for duty. Righteous- ness would be, in the words of GIULIO (si veda) CESARE himself, of the
philosophic Aurelius, but a " following of the reasonable will of
the oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities of the royal,
the law-giving element, therein forasmuch as we are citizens also in
that supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but as
single habitations." But as the old man spoke with animation
of this supreme city, this invisible society, whose conscience was become
explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose common
spirit, the trusted leaders of human conscience had been but the
mouthpiece, of whose successive personal preferences in the conduct
of life, the " old morality " was the sum, Marius felt that his
own thoughts were pass- ing beyond the actual intention of the speaker
; not in the direction of any clearer theoretic or abstract
definition of that ideal commonwealth, but rather as if in search of its
visible locality and abiding-place, the walls and towers of which,
so to speak, he might really trace and tell, according to his own old,
natural habit of mind. ^ It would be the fabric, the outward fabric,
of a system reaching, certainly, far beyond the great city around
him, even if conceived in all the machinery of its visible and invisible
influences at their grandest as Augustus or Trajan might have conceived
of them however well the visible Rome might pass for a figure of
that new, unseen, Rome on high. At moments, Marius even asked himself
with surprise, whether it might be some vast secret society the
speaker had in view : that august community, to be an outlaw from which,
to be foreign to the manners of which, was a loss so much greater
than to be excluded, into the ends of the earth, from the sovereign Roman
common- wealth. Humanity, a universal order, the great polity, its
aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their example over their
successors these were the ideas, stimulating enough in their way, by
association with which the Stoic professor had attempted to elevate, to
unite under a single principle, men's moral efforts, himself lifted
up with so genuine an enthusiasm. But where might Marius search for
all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction ? Where were
those elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable,
winning, persuasive whose footsteps through the world were so beautiful
in the actual order he saw whose faces averted from him, would be more
than he could bear ? Where was that comely order, to which as a
great fact of experience he must give its due ; to which, as to all other
beautiful " phenomena " in life, he must, for his own peace,
adjust himself ? Rome did well to be serious. The
discourse ended somewhat abruptly, as the noise of a great crowd in
motion was heard below the walls ; whereupon, the audience, following the
humour of the younger element in it, poured into the colonnade,
from the steps of which the famous procession, or transvectio y of the
military knights was to be seen passing over the Forum, from their
trysting-place at the temple of Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri. The
ceremony took place this year, not on the day accustomed-
anniversary of the victory of Lake Regillus, with its pair of celestial
assistants and amid the heat and roses of a Roman July, but,
by anticipation, some months earlier, the almond- trees along the way
being still in leafless flower. Through that light trellis-work, Marius
watched the riders, arrayed in all their gleaming orna- ments, and
wearing wreaths of olive around their helmets, the faces below which,
what with battle and the plague, were almost all youthful. It was a
flowery scene enough, but had to-day its fulness of war-like meaning ;
the return of the army to the North, where the enemy was again upon
the move, being now imminent. Cornelius had ridden along in his
place, and, on the dismissal of the company, passed below the steps where
Marius stood, with | that new song he had heard once before
floating from his lips. And MARIO, for his part, was grave
enough. The discourse of Cornelius Pronto, with its wide prospect
over the human, the spiritual, horizon, had set him on a review on a
review of the isolating narrowness, in particular, of his own theoretic
scheme. Long after the very latest roses were faded, when " the town
" had departed to country villas, or the baths, or the war, he
remained behind in Rome ; anxious to try the lastingness of his own
Epicurean rose- garden ; setting to work over again, and
deliberately passing from point to point of his old argument with
himself, down to its practical conclusions. That age and our own have
much in common many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon
me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern
representa- tives from Rome, to Paris or London. What really
were its claims as a theory of practice, of the sympathies that
determine practice ? It had been a theory, avowedly, of loss and
gain (so to call it) of an economy. If, therefore, it missed something in
the commerce of life, which some other theory of practice was able
to include, if it made a needless sacrifice, then it must be, in a
manner, inconsistent with itself, and lack theoretic completeness. Did it
make such a sacrifice ? What did it lose, or cause one to lose ?
And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaicism
is ever the char- acteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but
narrow in its survey sincere, but apt to become one- sided, or even
fanatical. It is one of those sub- jective and partial ideals, based on
vivid, because limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of
experience (in this case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of
man's life there) which it may be said to be the special vocation of
the young to express. In the school of Cyrene, in that
comparatively fresh Greek world, we see this philosophy where it is least
blase^ as we say , in its most pleasant, its blithest and yet
perhaps its wisest form, youthfully bright in the youth of European
thought. But it grows young again for a while in almost every youthful
soul. It is spoken of sometimes as the appropriate utterance of
jaded men ; but in them it can hardly be sincere, or, by the nature of
the case, an enthusi- asm. " Walk in the ways of thine heart, and
in the sight of thine eyes," is, indeed, most often, according
to the supposition of the book from which I quote it, the counsel of the
young, who feel that the sunshine is pleasant along their veins,
and wintry weather, though in a general sense foreseen, a long way off.
The youthful enthusi- asm or fanaticism, the self-abandonment to
one favourite mode of thought or taste, which occurs, quite
naturally, at the outset of every really vigorous intellectual career,
finds its special opportunity in a theory such as that so carefully
put together by Marius, just because it seems to call on one to make the
sacrifice, accompanied by a vivid sensation of power and will, of
what others value sacrifice of some conviction, or doctrine, or
supposed first principle for the sake of that clear-eyed intellectual
consistency, which is like spotless bodily cleanliness, or
scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the mind of the
youthful student, when he first comes to appreciate it, the fascination
of an ideal. The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a
motive of strenuousness or enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance
of the u jaded L’ORTO," as of the strong young man in all the
freshness of thought and feeling, fascinated by the notion of
raising his life to the level of a daring theory, while, in the first
genial heat of existence, the beauty of the physical world strikes
potently upon his wide-open, unwearied senses. He discovers a great
new poem every spring, with a hundred delightful things he too has felt,
but which have never been expressed, or at least never so truly,
before. The workshops of the artists, who can select and set before us
what is really most distinguished in visible life, are open to him.
He thinks that the old Platonic, or the new Baconian philosophy, has been
better explained than by the authors themselves, or with some striking
original development, this very month. In the quiet heat of early
summer, on the dusty gold morning, the music comes, louder at
intervals, above the hum of voices from some neighbouring church, among
the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps, only for the poetically
rapt faces among priests or wor- shippers, or the mere skill and
eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and righteousness.
In his scrupulous idealism, indeed, he too feels himself to be something
of a priest, and that devotion of his days to the contemplation of
what is beautiful, a sort of perpetual religious service. Afar off, how
many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts await him ! At that age,
with minds of a certain constitution, no very choice or exceptional
circumstances are needed to provoke an enthusiasm something like
this. Life in modern London even, in the heavy glow of summer, is
stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to build its "
palace of art" of; and the very sense and enjoyment of an
experience in which all is new, are but en- hanced, like that glow of
summer itself, by the thought of its brevity, giving him something
of a gambler's zest, in the apprehension, by dex- terous act or
diligently appreciative thought, of the highly coloured moments which are
to pass away so quickly. At bottom, perhaps, in his elaborately
developed self-consciousness, his sensibilities, his almost fierce grasp
upon the things he values at all, he has, beyond all others, an
inward need of something permanent in its character, to hold by : of
which circumstance, also, he may be partly aware, and that, as with
the brilliant CLAUDIO in Measure for Measure -, it is, in truth, but
darkness he is, " encountering, like a bride." But the
inevitable falling of the curtain is probably distant ; and in the
daylight, at least, it is not often that he really shudders at the
thought of the grave the weight above, the narrow world and its company,
within. When the thought of it does occur to him, he may say to
himself: Well ! and the rude monk, for instance, who has renounced all
this, on the security of some dim world beyond it, really
acquiesces in that " fifth act," amid all the consoling
ministries around him, as little as I should at this moment ; though I
may hope, that, as at the real ending of a play, however well
acted, I may already have had quite enough of it, and find a true
well-being in eternal sleep. And precisely in this circumstance,
that, consistently with the function of youth in general,
Cyrenaicism will always be more or less the special philosophy, or prophecy,
of the young, when the ideal of a rich experience comes to them in
the ripeness of the receptive, if not of the reflective, powers precisely
in this circumstance, if we rightly consider it, lies the duly
prescribed corrective of that FILOSOFIA. For it is by its exclusiveness,
and by negation rather than positively, that such theories fail to
satisfy us permanently ; and what they really need for their correction,
is the complementary influence of some greater system, in which
they may find their due place. That Sturm und Drang of the spirit,
as it has been called, that ardent and special apprehension of
half-truths, in the enthusiastic, and as it were " prophetic
" advocacy of which, devotion to truth, in the case of the
young apprehending but one point at a time in the great circumference
most usually embodies itself, is levelled down, safely enough,
afterwards, as in history so in the individual, by the weakness and mere
weariness, as well as by the maturer wisdom, of our nature. And
though truth indeed, resides, as has been said, " in the whole
" in harmonisings and adjust- ments like this yet those special
apprehen- sions may still owe their full value, in this sense of
" the whole," to that earlier, one-sided but ardent pre-occupation
with them. Cynicism and Cyrenaicism : they are the earlier
Greek forms of Roman Stoicism and Epicureanism, and in that world of old
Greek thought, we may notice with some surprise that, in a little
while, the nobler form of Cyrenaicism -Cyrenaicism cured of its faults
met the nobler form of Cynicism half-way. Starting from opposed
points, they merged, each in its most refined form, in a single ideal of
temperance or moderation. Something of the same kind may be noticed
regarding some later phases of Cyrenaic theory. If it starts with
considerations opposed to the religious temper, which the religious
temper holds it a duty to repress, it is like it, nevertheless, and very
unlike any lower development of temper, in its stress and earnest-
ness, its serious application to the pursuit of a very unworldly type of
perfection. The saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty, it may be
thought, would at least understand each other | better than either would
understand the mere 1 man of the world. Carry their respective
positions a point further, shift the terms a little, and they might
actually touch. Perhaps all theories of practice tend, as
they rise to their best, as understood by their worthiest representatives,
to identification with each other. For the variety of men's possible
reflections on their experience, as of that experience itself, is
not really so great as it seems ; and as the highest and most
disinterested ethical formula, filtering down into men's everyday existence,
reach the same poor level of vulgar egotism, so, we may fairly
suppose that all the highest spirits, from whatever contrasted points they
have started, would yet be found to entertain, in the moral
consciousness realised by themselves, much the same kind of mental
company ; to hold, far more than might be thought probable, at first
sight, the same personal types of character, and even the same
artistic and literary types, in esteem or aversion ; to convey, all of
them alike, the same savour of unworldliness. And Cyrenaicism or
Epicureanism too, new or old, may be noticed, in proportion to the
completeness of its develop- ment, to approach, as to the nobler form
of Cynicism, so also to the more nobly developed phases of the old,
or traditional morality. In the gravity of its conception of life, in its
pursuit after nothing less than a perfection, in its appre- hension
of the value of time the passion and the seriousness which are like a
consecration la passion et le serieux qui consacrent it may be
conceived, as regards its main drift, to be not so much opposed to the
old morality, as an exaggeration of one special motive in it.
Some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own
nature, and of the nature of things, to another, Marius seemed to
have detected in himself, meantime, in himself, as also in those
old masters of the Cyrenaic philo- sophy. If they did realise the
povoxpovo? fiSovij, as it was called the pleasure of the " Ideal Now
" if certain moments of their lives were high- pitched,
passionately coloured, intent with sensation, and a kind of knowledge which, in
its vivid clearness, was like sensation if, now and then, they
apprehended the world in its fulness, and had a vision, almost "
beatific," of ideal person- alities in life and art, yet these
moments were a very costly matter: they paid a great price for
them, in the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies, of things only
to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves,
in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take
nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths.
In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion,
and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty
economists. The Greek religion is then alive : then, still more than
in its later day of dissolution, the higher view of it was possible, even
for the philosopher. Its story made little or no demand for a
reasoned or formal acceptance. A religion, which had grown through and
through man's life, with so much natural strength ; had meant so
much for so many generations ; which expressed so much of their hopes, in forms
so familiar and so winning ; linked by associations so manifold to
man as he had been and was a religion like this, one would think, might
have had its uses, even for a philosophic sceptic. Yet those
beautiful gods, with the whole round of their poetic worship, the school
of Cyrene definitely renounced. The old Greek morality, again, with
all its imperfections, was certainly a comely thing. Yes ! a
harmony, a music, in men's ways, one might well hesitate to jar. The
merely aesthetic sense might have had a legitimate satisfaction in
the spectacle of that fair order of choice manners, in those attractive
conventions, enveloping, so gracefully, the whole of life, insuring
some sweetness, some security at least against offence, in the
intercourse of the world. Beyond an obvious utility, it could claim,
indeed but custom use -and -wont, as we say for its sanction. But
then, one of the advantages of that liberty of spirit among the Cyrenaics
(in which, through theory, they had become dead to theory, so that
all theory, as such, was really indifferent to them, and indeed nothing
valuable but in its tangible ministration to life) was precisely this,
that it gave them free play in using as their ministers or
servants, things which, to the uninitiated, must be masters or nothing.
Yet, how little the followers of Aristippus made of that whole
comely system of manners or morals, then actually in possession of life,
is shown by the bold practical consequence, which one of them main-
tained (with a hard, self-opinionated adherence to his peculiar theory of
values) in the not very amiable paradox that friendship and
patriotism were things one could do without ; while another
Deaths-advocate^ as he was called helped so many to self-destruction, by
his pessimistic eloquence on the evils of life, that his
lecture-room was closed. That this was in the range of their consequences
that this was a possible, if remote, deduction from the premisses
of the discreet Aristippus was surely an incon- sistency in a thinker who
professed above all things an economy of the moments of life. And
yet those old Cyrenaics felt their way, as if in the dark, we may be
sure, like other men in the ordinary transactions of life, beyond the
narrow limits they drew of clear and absolutely legitimate
knowledge, admitting what was not of immediate sensation, and drawing
upon that " fantastic " future which might never come. A little
more of such "walking by faith/' a little more of such not
unreasonable " assent," and they might have profited by a
hundred services to their culture, from Greek religion and Greek
morality, as they actually were. The spectacle of their fierce,
exclusive, tenacious hold on their own narrow apprehension, makes one
think of a picture with no relief, no soft shadows nor breadth of
space, or of a drama without proportionate repose. Yet it was
of perfection that Marius (to return to him again from his masters, his
intellectual heirs) had been really thinking all the time: a narrow
perfection it might be objected, the perfection of but one part of his
nature his capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical im-
pressions, of an imaginative sympathy but still, a true perfection of
those capacities, wrought out to their utmost degree, admirable enough in
its way. He too is an economist : he hopes, by that " insight
" of which the old Cyrenaics made so much, by skilful apprehension
of the condi- tions of spiritual success as they really are, the
special circumstances of the occasion with which he has to deal, the
special felicities of his own nature, to make the most, in no mean or
vulgar sense, of the few years of life ; few, indeed, for the
attainment of anything like general perfection ! With the brevity of that sum
of years his mind is exceptionally impressed ; and this purpose
makes him no frivolous dilettante^ but graver than other men : his scheme
is not that of a trifler, but rather of one who gives a meaning of
his own, yet a very real one, to those old words Let us work while it is
day ! He has a strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the
visible things around him ; their fading, momentary, graces and
attractions. His natural susceptibility in this direction, enlarged
by experience, seems to demand of him an almost exclusive pre-
occupation with the aspects of things ; with their aesthetic character,
as it is called their revelations to the eye and the imagination :
not so much because those aspects of them yield him the largest amount of
enjoy- ment, as because to be occupied, in this way, with the
aesthetic or imaginative side of things, is to be in real contact with
those elements of his own nature, and of theirs, which, for him
at least, are matter of the most real kind of appre- hension. As
other men are concentrated upon truths of number, for instance, or on
business, or it may be on the pleasures of appetite, so he is
wholly bent on living in that full stream of refined sensation. And in
the prosecution of this love of beauty, he claims an entire
personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty, above all,
from what may seem conventional answers to first questions.
But, without him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea,
widely extended in time and place, in a kind of impregnable possession
of human life a system, which, like some other great products of
the conjoint efforts of human mind through many generations, is rich in
the world's experience ; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one
lets in a great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were with a
single step, a great experience of one's own, and with great con-
sequent increase to one's sense of colour, variety, and relief, in the
spectacle of men and things. The mere sense that one belongs to a
system an imperial system or organisation has, in itself, the
expanding power of a great experience ; as some have felt who have been
admitted from narrower sects into the communion of the catholic
church ; or as the old Roman citizen felt. It is, we might fancy, what
the coming into possession of a very widely spoken language might
be, with a great literature, which is also the speech of the people we have to
live among. A wonderful order, actually in possession of
/ human life ! grown inextricably through and { 7 f through it ;
penetrating into its laws, its very language, its mere habits of decorum,
in a thousand half-conscious ways ; yet still felt to be, in part,
an unfulfilled ideal ; and, as such, awaken- ing hope, and an aim,
identical with the one only consistent aspiration of mankind ! In
the apprehension of that, just then, Marius seemed to have joined
company once more with his own old self; to have overtaken on the road
the pilgrim who had come to Rome, with absolute sincerity, on the
search fo r perfection. It defined not so much a change of practice,
as of sympathy a new departure, an expansion, of sympathy. It involves,
certainly, some curtailment of his liberty, in concession to the actual
manner, the distinc- tions, the enactments of that great crowd of
admirable spirits, who have elected so, and not otherwise, in their
conduct of life, and are not here to give one, so to term it, an "
indulgence." But then, under the supposition of their dis-
approval, no roses would ever seem worth plucking again. The authority
they exercised was like that of classic taste an influence so
subtle, yet so real, as defining the loyalty of the scholar ; or of some
beautiful and venerable ritual, in which every observance is become
spontaneous and almost mechanical, yet is found, the more carefully one
considers it, to have a reasonable significance and a natural
history. And MARIO sees that he would be but an inconsistent
Cyrenaic, mistaken in his estimate of values, of loss and gain, and
untrue to the well- considered economy of life which he had brought
with him to Rome that some drops of the great cup would fall to the
ground if he did not make that concession, if he did but remain
just there. " Many prophets and kings have desired to see the
things which ye see." The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but
the vanguard of the mighty invading hosts of the fifth century.
Illusively repressed just now, those confused movements along the
northern boundary of the Empire were destined to unite triumphantly
at last, in the barbarism, which, powerless to destroy the Christian
church, is yet to suppress for a time the achieved culture of the
pagan world. The kingdom of Christ was to grow up in a somewhat false
alienation from the light and beauty of the kingdom of nature, of
the natural man, with a partly mistaken tradition concerning it, and an
incapacity, as it might almost seem at times, for eventual reconciliation
thereto. Meantime Italy had armed itself once more, in haste, and the
imperial brothers set forth for the Alps. Whatever misgiving
the Roman people may have felt as to the leadership of the younger
was unexpectedly set at rest ; though with some temporary regret
for the loss of what had been, after all, a popular figure on the world's
stage. Travelling fraternally in the same litter with ANTONINO (si
veda), LUCIO VERO (si veda) is struck with sudden and mysterious disease,
and died as he hastened back to Rome. His death awoke a swarm of
sinister rumours, to settle on Lucilla, jealous, it was said, of Fabia
her sister, perhaps of Faustina on Faustina herself, who had accompanied
the imperial progress, and was anxious now to hide a crime of her
own even on the elder brother, who, beforehand with the treasonable
designs of his colleague, should have helped him at supper to a
favourite morsel, cut with a knife poisoned ingeniously on one side only.
ANTONINO (si veda), certainly, with sincere distress, his long
irritations, so duti- fully concealed or repressed, turning now into
a single feeling of regret for the human creature, carried the
remains back to Rome, and demanded of IL SENATO a public funeral, with a
decree for the apotheosis^ or canonisation, of the dead. For
three days the body lay in state in IL FORO, enclosed in an open coffin of
cedar-wood, on a bed of ivory and gold, in the centre of a sort of
temporary chapel, representing the temple of his patroness Venus
Genetrix. Armed soldiers kept watch around it, while choirs of select
voices relieved one another in the chanting of hymns or monologues from
the great tragedians. At the head of the couch were displayed the
various personal decorations which had belonged to Verus in life. Like
all the rest of Rome, Marius went to gaze on the face he had seen
last scarcely disguised under the hood of a travelling-dress, as the
wearer hurried, at night- fall, along one of the streets below the
palace, to some amorous appointment. Unfamiliar as he still was
with dead faces, he was taken by surprise, and touched far beyond what he
had reckoned on, by the piteous change there ; even the skill of
Galen having been not wholly successful in the process of embalming. It
was as if a brother of his own were lying low before him, with that
meek and helpless expression it would have been a sacrilege to treat
rudely. Meantime, in the centre of the Campus Martins^ within
the grove of poplars which enclosed the space where the body of
Augustus had been burnt, the great funeral pyre, stuffed with
shavings of various aromatic woods, was built up in many stages,
separated from each other by a light entablature of woodwork, and
adorned abundantly with carved and tapestried images. Upon this pyramidal
or flame-shaped structure lay the corpse, hidden now under a
mountain of flowers and incense brought by the women, who from the first
had had their fondness for the wanton graces of the deceased. The dead
body was surmounted by a waxen effigy of great size, arrayed in the
triumphal ornaments. At last the Centurions to whom that office belonged,
drew near, torch in hand, to ignite the pile at its four corners, while
the soldiers, in wild excitement, flung themselves around it,
casting into the flames the decorations they had received for acts of
valour under the dead emperor's command. It had been a really
heroic order, spoiled a little, at the last moment, through the
some- what tawdry artifice, by which an eagle not a very noble or
youthful specimen of its kind was caused to take flight amid the real
or affected awe of the spectators, above the perishing remains; a
court chamberlain, according to ancient etiquette, subsequently making
official declaration before the Senate, that the imperial " genius
" had been seen in this way, escaping from the fire. And
Marius was present when the Fathers, duly certified of the fact, by
"acclamation," muttering their judgment all together, in
a kind of low, rhythmical chant, decreed Gcelum the privilege of
divine rank to the departed. The actual gathering of the ashes in a
white cere-cloth by the widowed Lucilla, when the last flicker had
been extinguished by drops of wine ; and the conveyance of them to the
little cell, already populous, in the central mass of the sepulchre
of Hadrian, still in all the splendour of its statued colonnades, were a
matter of private or domestic duty ; after the due accomplishment
of which Aurelius was at liberty to retire for a time into the privacy
of his beloved apartments of the Palatine. And hither, not long
afterwards, Marius was sum- moned a second time, to receive from
the imperial hands the great pile of manuscripts it would be his
business to revise and arrange. One year had passed since his first
visit to the palace ; and as he climbed the stairs to-day, the great
cypresses rocked against the sunless sky, like living creatures in pain.
He had to traverse a long subterranean gallery, once a secret
entrance to the imperial apartments, and in our own day, amid the ruin of
all around it, as smooth and fresh as if the carpets were but just
removed from its floor after the return of the emperor from the shows. It
was here, on such an occasion, that the emperor Caligula, at the
age of twenty-nine, had come by his end, the assassins gliding along it
as he lingered a few moments longer to watch the movements of a
party of noble youths at their exercise in the courtyard below. As Marius
waited, a second time, in that little red room in the house of the
chief chamberlain, curious to look once more upon its painted walls the
very place whither the assassins were said to have turned for
refuge after the murder he could all but see the figure, which in its
surrounding light and darkness seemed to him the most melancholy in
the entire history of Rome. He called to mind the greatness of that
popularity and early promise the stupefying height of irresponsible
power, from which, after all, only men's viler side had been clearly
visible the overthrow of reason the seemingly irredeemable memory ;
and still, above all, the beautiful head in which the noble lines of the
race of Augustus were united to, he knew not what expression of
sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and for the like of which one must
pass onward to the Antonines. Popular hatred had been careful to
destroy its semblance wherever it was to be found ; but one bust, in dark
bronze-like basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, preserved
in the museum of IL CAMPIDOGLIO, may have seemed to some visitors there
perhaps the finest extant relic of Roman art. Had the very seal of
empire upon those sombre brows, reflected from his mirror, suggested his
insane attempt upon the liberties, the dignity of men ? " O
humanity ! " he seems to ask, " what hast thou done to me that
I should so despise thee ? " And might not this be indeed the
true meaning of kingship, if the world would have one man to reign
over it ? The like of this : or, some incredible, surely never to be
realised, height of disinterestedness, in a king who should be the
servant of all, quite at the other extreme of the practical dilemma
involved in such a position. Not till some while after his death
had the body been decently interred by the piety of the sisters he had
driven into exile. Fraternity of feeling had been no invariable feature in
the incidents of Roman story. One long Vicus Sceleratus^ from its
first dim foundation in fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common
deliverance so touching had not almost every step in it some gloomy
memory of unnatural violence ? Romans did well to fancy the
traitress Tarpeia still " green in earth," crowned, enthroned,
at the roots of the Capitoline rock. If in truth the religion of Rome was
every- where in it, like that perfume of the funeral incense still
upon the air, so also was the memory of crime prompted by a
hypocritical cruelty, down to the erring, or not erring, Vesta calmly
buried alive there, only eighty years ago, under Domitian. It
was with a sense of relief that MARIO finds himself in the presence of
Aurelius, whose gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered,
raised a smile at the gloomy train of his own thoughts just then,
although since his first visit to the palace a great change had passed
over it. The clear daylight found its way now into empty rooms. To raise
funds for the war, ANTONINO (si veda), his luxurious brother being
no more, had determined to sell by auction the accumulated treasures of
the im- perial household. The works of art, the dainty furniture,
had been removed, and were now " on view " in the Forum, to be
the delight or dismay, for many weeks to come, of the large public
of those who were curious in these things. In such wise had Aurelius
come to the condition of philosophic detachment he had affected as
a boy, hardly persuaded to wear warm clothing, or to sleep in more luxurious
manner than on the bare floor. But, in his empty house, the man of mind,
who had always made so much of the pleasures of philosophic
contemplation, felt freer in thought than ever. He had been reading, with
less self-reproach than usual, in the Republic of Plato, those
passages which describe the life of the philosopher-kings like that of
hired servants in their own house who, possessed of the gold
undefiled of intellectual vision, forgo so cheerfully all other riches.
It was one of his happy days : one of those rare days, when, almost
with none of the effort, otherwise so constant with him, his thoughts
came rich and full, and converged in a mental view, as exhilarating
to him as the prospect of some wide expanse of landscape to another
man's bodily eye. He seemed to lie readier than was his wont to the
imaginative influence of the philosophic reason to its suggestions of
a possible open country, commencing just where all actual
experience leaves off, but which experience, one's own and not another's,
may one day occupy. In fact, he was seeking strength for himself,
in his own way, before he started for that ambiguous earthly
warfare which was to occupy the remainder of his life. " Ever
remember this," he writes, " that a happy life depends, not on
many things & o\iyi(TTot,<i tceiTai." And to-day,
committing himself with a steady effort of volition to the mere
silence of the great empty apartments, he might be said to have escaped,
according to Plato's promise to those who live closely with
philosophy, from the evils of the world. In his "conversations
with himself" Marcus Aurelius speaks often of that City on high^
of which all other cities are but single habitations. From him in
fact Cornelius Pronto, in his late discourse, had borrowed the expression
; and he certainly meant by it more than the whole commonwealth of
Rome, in any idealisation of it, however sublime. Incorporate somehow
with the actual city whose goodly stones were lying beneath his gaze, it
was also implicate in that reasonable constitution of nature, by
devout contemplation of which it is possible for man to associate
himself to the consciousness of God. In that New Rome he had taken up his
rest for awhile on this day, deliberately feeding his thoughts on
the better air of it, as another might have gone for mental renewal to a
favourite villa. " Men seek retirement in
country-houses," he writes, " on the sea-coast, on the
mountains ; and you have yourself as much fondness for such places
as another. But there is little proof of culture therein ; since the
privilege is yours of retiring into yourself whensoever you please,
into that little farm of one's own mind, where a silence so profound may
be enjoyed." That it could make these retreats, was a plain
con- sequence of the kingly prerogative of the mind, its dominion
over circumstance, its inherent liberty. " It is in thy power to
think as thou wilt : The essence of things is in thy thoughts about
them : All is opinion, conception : No man can be hindered by another :
What is out- side thy circle of thought is nothing at all to it ;
hold to this, and you are safe : One thing is needful to live close to
the divine genius with- in thee, and minister thereto worthily."
And the first point in this true ministry, this culture, was to
maintain one's soul in a condition of indifference and calm. How
continually had public claims, the claims of other persons, with
their rough angularities of character, broken in upon him, the
shepherd of the flock. But after all he had at least this privilege he
could not part with, of thinking as he would ; and it was well, now
and then, by a conscious effort of will, to indulge it for a while, under
systematic direc- tion. The duty of thus making discreet,
systematic use of the power of imaginative vision for purposes of
spiritual culture, " since the soul takes colour from its
fantasies," is a point he has frequently insisted on.
The influence of these seasonable meditations a symbol, or
sacrament, because an intensified condition, of the soul's own ordinary
and natural life would remain upon it, perhaps for many days. There
were experiences he could not for- get, intuitions beyond price, he had
come by in this way, which were almost like the breaking of a
physical light upon his mind ; as the great OTTAVIANO (si veda) was said
to have seen a mysterious physical splendour, yonder, upon the summit
of the Capitol, where the altar of the Sibyl now stood. With a
prayer, therefore, for inward quiet, for conformity to the divine reason,
he read some select passages of Plato, which bear upon the harmony
of the reason, in all its forms, with itself. "Could there be
Cosmos, that wonderful, reasonable order, in him, and nothing but
disorder in the world without ? " It was from this question he had
passed on to the vision of a reasonable, a divine, order, not in nature,
but in the condition of human affairs that unseen Celestial City,
Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs Eeata in which, a consciousness of the
divine will being everywhere realised, there would be, among other
felicitous differences from this lower visible world, no more quite
hopeless death, of men, or children, or of their affections. He had
tried to-day, as never before, to make the most of this vision of a New
Rome, to realise it as distinctly as he could, and, as it were, find
his way along its streets, ere he went down into a world so
irksomely different, to make his practical effort towards it, with a soul
full of compassion for men as they were. However distinct the mental
image might have been to him, with the descent of but one flight of
steps into the market-place below, it must have retreated again, as
if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond the utmost verge of
the horizon. But it had been actually, in his clearest vision of
it, a confused place, with but a recognisable entry, a tower or fountain,
here or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose novel expression
he, the great physiognomist, could by no means read. Plato, indeed, had
been able to articulate, to see, at least in thought, his ideal
city. But just because ANTONINO (si veda) had passed beyond L’ACCADEMIA,
in the scope of the gracious charities he pre-supposed there, he had
been unable really to track his way about it. Ah ! after all,
according to Plato himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this,
his heart's desire, no place his soul could ever have visited in
any region of the old world's achievements. He had but divined, by
a kind of generosity of spirit, the void place, which another
experience than his must fill. Yet Marius noted the wonderful
expression of peace, of quiet pleasure, on the countenance of ANTONINO
(si veda0, as he received from him the rolls of fine clear manuscript,
fancying the thoughts of the emperor occupied at the moment with
the famous prospect towards the Alban hills, from those lofty
windows. The ideas of IL PORTICO, so precious to ANTONINO (si veda),
ideas of large generalisation, have sometimes induced, in those over
whose in- tellects they have had real power, a coldness of heart.
It was the distinction of Aurelius that he was able to harmonise them
with the kindness, one might almost say the amenities, of a
humourist, as also with the popular religion and its many gods. Those
vasty conceptions of the later Greek philosophy had in them, in
truth, the germ of a sort of austerely opinion- ative "natural
theology," and how often has that led to religious dryness a hard
contempt of everything in religion, which touches the senses, or
charms the fancy, or really concerns the affections. Aurelius had made
his own the secret of passing, naturally, and with no violence to
his thought, to and fro, between the richly coloured and romantic
religion of those old gods who had still been human beings, and a
very abstract speculation upon the impassive, I universal soul that circle
whose centre everywhere, the circumference nowhere of which a series
of purely logical necessities had evolved the formula. As in many
another instance, those traditional pieties of the place and the
hour had been derived by him from his mother : frapci rrfc Mrpbs TO
Oeoo-eftes. Puri- fied, as all such religion of concrete time and
place needs to be, by frequent confronting with the ideal of godhead as
revealed to that innate religious sense in the possession of which ANTONINO
(si veda) differed from the people around him, it was the ground of many
a sociability with their simpler souls, and for himself, certainly,
a consolation, whenever the wings of his own soul flagged in the trying
atmosphere of purely intellectual vision. A host of companions,
guides, helpers, about him from of old time, " the very court and
company of heaven," objects for him of personal reverence and
affection the supposed presence of the ancient popular gods determined
the character of much of his daily life, and might prove the last
stay of human nature at its weakest. " In every time and
place," he had said, " it rests with thyself to use the event
of the hour religiously : , at all seasons worship the gods." And
when he said " Worship the gods ! " he did it, as
strenuously as everything else. Yet here again, how often must he
have experienced disillusion, or even some revolt of feeling, at
that contact with coarser natures to which his religious conclusions
exposed him. At the beginning of the year one hundred and seventy
-three public anxiety was as great as ever ; and as before it brought
people's supersti- tion into unreserved play. For seven days the
images of the old gods, and some of the graver new ones, lay solemnly
exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their ornaments, each in
his separate resting-place, amid lights and burning incense, while
the crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited them, with
offerings of flowers to this or that particular divinity, according
to the devotion of each. But supplementing these older official
observ- ances, the very wildest gods had their share of worship,
strange creatures with strange secrets startled abroad into open
daylight. The deliri- ous sort of religion of which MARIO is a
spectator in the streets of Rome, during the seven days of the
Lectisternium, reminded him now and again of an observation of Apuleius
: it was " as if the presence of the gods did not do men good,
but disordered or weakened them." Some jaded women of fashion,
especi- ally, found in certain oriental devotions, at once relief
for their religiously tearful souls and an opportunity for personal
display ; preferring this or that "mystery," chiefly because
the attire required in it was suitable to their peculiar manner of
beauty. And one morning Marius encountered an extraordinary crimson
object, borne in a litter through an excited crowd -the famous
courtesan Benedicta, still fresh from the bath of blood, to which she had
submitted herself, sitting below the scaffold where the victims provided
for that purpose were slaughtered by the priests. Even on the last
day of the solemnity, when the emperor himself performed one of the
oldest ceremonies of the Roman religion, this fantastic piety had
asserted itself. There were victims enough certainly, brought from the
choice pastures of the Sabine mountains, and conducted around the
city they were to die for, in almost con- tinuous procession, covered
with flowers and well-nigh worried to death before the time by the
crowds of people superstitiously pressing to touch them. But certain
old-fashioned Romans, in these exceptional circumstances, demanded
something more than this, in the way of a human sacrifice after the
ancient pattern ; as when, not so long since, some Greeks or Gauls
had been buried alive in the Forum. At least, human blood should be
shed ; and it was through a wild multitude of fanatics, cutting their
flesh with knives and whips and licking up ardently the crimson
stream, that the emperor repaired to the temple of Bellona, and in solemn
symbolic act cast the bloodstained spear, or " dart," carefully
pre- served there, towards the enemy's country towards that unknown
world of German homes, still warm, as some believed under the faint
northern twilight, with those innocent affections of which Romans had
lost the sense. And this at least was clear, amid all doubts of
abstract right or wrong on either side, that the ruin of those
homes was involved in what Aurelius was then preparing for, with, Yes !
the gods be thanked for that achievement of an invigorat- ing
philosophy ! almost with a light heart. For, in truth, that
departure, really so difficult to him, for which Marcus Aurelius
had needed to brace himself so strenuously, came to test the power of a
long-studied theory of practice ; and it was the development of
this theory a theoria literally a view, an intuition, of the most
important facts, and still more im- portant possibilities, concerning man
in the world, that Marius now discovered, almost as if by accident,
below the dry surface of the manuscripts entrusted to him. The great
purple rolls contained, first of all, statistics, a general
historical account of the writer's own time, and an exact diary ; all
alike, though in three different degrees of nearness to the writer's
own personal experience, laborious, formal, self- suppressing. This
was for the instruction of the public ; and part of it has, perhaps,
found its way into the Augustan Histories. But it was for the
especial guidance of his son COMMODO (si veda) that he had permitted
himself to break out, here and there, into reflections upon what was
pass- ing, into conversations with the reader. And then, as though
he were put off his guard in this way, there had escaped into the heavy
matter-of-fact, of which the main portion was composed, morsels of his
conversation with him- self. It was the romance of a soul (to be
traced only in hints, wayside notes, quotations from older
masters), as it were in lifelong, and often baffled search after some
vanished or elusive golden fleece, or Hesperidean fruit-trees, or
some mysterious light of doctrine, ever retreat- ing before him. A man,
he had seemed to Marius from the first, of two lives, as we say. Of
what nature, he had sometimes wondered, on the day, for instance, when he
had inter- rupted the emperor's musings in the empty palace, might
be that placid inward guest or inhabitant, who from amid the
pre-occupations of the man of practical affairs looked out, as if
surprised, at the things and faces around. Here, then, under the tame
surface of what was meant for a life of business, Marius dis-
covered, welcoming a brother, the spontaneous self-revelation of a soul
as delicate as his own, a soul for which conversation with itself
was a necessity of existence. MARIO, indeed, had always suspected
that the sense of such necessity was a peculiarity of his. But here,
certainly, was another, in this respect like himself; and again he
seemed to detect the advent of some new or changed spirit into the world,
mystic, inward, hardly to be satisfied with that wholly external
and objective habit of life, which had been sufficient for the old
classic soul. His purely literary curiosity was greatly stimulated
by this example of a book of self-portraiture. It was in fact the
position of the modern essayist, creature of efforts rather than of
achievements, in the matter of apprehending truth, but at least conscious
of lights by the way, which he must needs record, acknowledge. What
seemed to underlie that position was the desire to make the most of every
experience that might come, outwardly or from within : to
perpetuate, to display, what was so fleeting, f in a kind of instinctive,
pathetic protest against the imperial writer's own theory that
theory of the perpetual flux of all things to MARIO himself, so plausible
from of old. There was, besides, a special moral or doctrinal
significance in the making of such conversation with one's self at all.
The Logos, the reasonable spark, in man, is common to him with the
gods KOWO? at 77/309 roi>$ 0eov9 cum diis communis. That might seem
but the truism of a certain school of philosophy ; but in ANTONINO
(si veda) was clearly an original and lively ap- prehension. There could
be no inward conver- sation with one's self such as this, unless
there were indeed some one else, aware of our actual thoughts and
feelings, pleased or displeased at one's disposition of one's self.
Cornelius Front* too could enounce that theory of the reasonable
community between men and God, in many different ways. But then, he was a
cheerful man, and Aurelius a singularly sad one ; and what to
Pronto was but a doctrine, or a motive of mere rhetoric, was to the other
a consolation. He walks and talks, for a spiritual refreshment
lacking which he would faint by the way, with what to the learned
professor is but matter of philosophic eloquence. In performing
his public religious functions Marcus Aurelius had ever seemed like one
who took part in some great process, a great thing really done,
with more than the actually visible assistants about him. Here, in these
manu- scripts, in a hundred marginal flowers of thought or language,
in happy new phrases of his own like the impromptus of an actual
conversation, in quotations from other older masters of the inward
life, taking new significance from the chances of such intercourse, was
the record of his communion with that eternal reason, which was
also his own proper self, with the divine companion, whose tabernacle was
in the intelli- gence of men the journal of his daily commerce with
that. Chance : or Providence ! Chance : or Wis- dom, one with
nature and man, reaching from end to end, through all time and all
exist- ence, orderly disposing all things, according to fixed
periods, as he describes it, in terms very like certain well-known words
of the book of Wisdom: those are the "fenced opposites "
of the speculative dilemma, the tragic embarras^ of which Aurelius
cannot too often remind himself as the summary of man's situation in the
world. If there be, however, a provident soul like this "
behind the veil," truly, even to him, even in the most intimate of
those conversations, it has never yet spoken with any quite
irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet one's choice in that
speculative dilemma, as he has found it, is on the whole a matter of
will. "'Tis in thy power," here too, again, "to think as
thou wilt." For his part he has asserted his will, and has the
courage of his opinion. " To the better of two things, if thou
findest that, turn with thy whole heart : eat and drink ever of the
best before thee." "Wisdom," says that other
disciple of the Sapiential philosophy, " hath mingled Her wine, she
hath also prepared Herself a table." ToO apurTov aTroXaue :
"Partake ever of Her best ! " And what Marius, peeping
now very closely upon the intimacies of that singular mind, found a thing
actually * pathetic and affecting, was the manner of the writer's
bearing as in the presence of this supposed guest ; so elusive, so
jealous of any palpable manifestation of himself, so taxing to
one's faith, never allowing one to lean frankly upon him and feel wholly
at rest. Only, he would do his part, at least, in maintaining the
constant fitness, the sweetness and quiet, of the guest-chamber. Seeming
to vary with the in- tellectual fortune of the hour, from the
plainest account of experience, to a sheer fantasy, only
"believed because it was impossible/' that one hope was, at all
events, sufficient to make men's common pleasures and their common
ambition, above all their commonest vices, seem very petty indeed,
too petty to know of. It bred in him a kind of magnificence of character,
in the old Greek sense of the term ; a temper incompatible with any
merely plausible advocacy of his convic- tions, or merely superficial
thoughts about any- thing whatever, or talk about other people, or
speculation as to what was passing in their so visibly little souls, or
much talking of any kind, however clever or graceful. A soul thus
disposed had " already entered into the better life": was
indeed in some sort "a priest, a minister of the gods." Hence
his constant " re- collection " ; a close watching of his soul,
of a kind almost unique in the ancient world. Before all things
examine into thyself: strive to be at home 'with thyself ! Marius, a
sympathetic witness of all this, might almost seem to have had a
foresight of monasticism itself in the prophetic future. With this mystic
companion he had gone a step onward out of the merely objective
pagan existence. Here was already a master in that craft of
self-direction, which was about to So play so large a part in
the forming of human mind, under the sanction of the Christian
church. Yet it was in truth a somewhat melancholy service, a
service on which one must needs move about, solemn, serious, depressed,
with the hushed footsteps of those who move about the house where a
dead body is lying. Such was the impression which occurred to Marius
again and again as he read, with a growing sense of some profound
dissidence from his author. By certain quite traceable links of
association he was reminded, in spite of the moral beauty of the
philosophic emperor's ideas, how he had sat, essentially unconcerned, at
the public shows. For, actually, his contemplations had made him of
a sad heart, inducing in him that melancholy Tristitia which even the
monastic moralists have held to be of the nature of deadly sin,
akin to the sin of Desidia or Inactivity. Resignation, a sombre
resignation, a sad heart, patient bearing of the burden of a sad heart :
Yes ! this be- longed doubtless to the situation of an honest
thinker upon the world. Only, in this case there seemed to be too much of
a complacent acquiescence in the world as it is. And there could be
no true Theodicee in that ; no real accommodation of the world as it is,
to the divine pattern of the Logos y the eternal reason, over
against it. It amounted to a tolerance of evil. The soul of good,
though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little understand, yet
prospereth on the journey: If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature,
there can be nought of evil with thee therein : If thou hast
done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are communicant
with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with thee nothing
to be afraid of : Whatever is, is right ; as from the hand of one
dispensing to every man according to his desert : If
reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require? Dost thou
take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits ? That which happeneth
to each of us is for the profit of the whole : The profit of
the whole, that was sufficient ! Links, in a train of thought really
generous ! of which, nevertheless, the forced and yet facile
optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, after all, the
secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight upon the
spirits ; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no real
justification of the ways of Heaven to man. " Let thine air be
cheerful," he had said ; and, with an effort, did himself at times
attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely ought to accompany,
as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like those.
Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with
Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable
physiognomy. With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the
joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the
outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon
human faces from " the land which is very far off," we
may trace from Giotto onward to its consumma- tion in the work of Raphael
the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, of those who have been
indeed delivered from death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed
" blitheness " of the Greeks had been but a transitory gleam,
as in careless and wholly superficial youth. And yet, in Cornelius,
it was certainly united with the bold recognition of evil as a fact in
the world ; real as an aching in the head or heart, which one
instinctively desires to have cured ; an enemy with whom no terms could
be made, visible, hatefully visible, in a thousand forms the ap-
parent waste of men's gifts in an early, or even in a late grave ; the
death, as such, of men, and even of animals ; the disease and pain of the
body. And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius
and his reader. The philo- sophic emperor was a despiser of the
body. Since it is " the peculiar privilege of reason to move
within herself, and to be proof against corporeal impressions, suffering
neither sensation nor passion to break in upon her," it follows that
the true interest of the spirit must ever be to treat the body Well ! as
a corpse attached thereto, rather than as a living companion nay,
actually to promote its dissolution. In counter- poise to the inhumanity
of this, presenting itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin
against nature, the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a
sanction of that reverent delight Marius had always had in the
visible body of man. Such delight indeed had been but a natural
consequence of the sensuous or material- istic character of the
philosophy of his choice. } Now to Cornelius the body of man was
unmis- takeably, as a later seer terms it, the one true I
temple in the world ; or rather itself the proper object of worship, of a
sacred service, in which the very finest gold might have its
seemliness and due symbolic use : Ah ! and of what awe- stricken
pity also, in its dejection, in the perish- ing gray bones of a poor
man's grave! Some flaw of vision, thinks MARIO, must be involved in the
philosopher's contempt for it- some diseased point of thought, or moral
dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of
all the emperor's inhumanities, the temper of the suicide ; for which
there was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world. "
'Tis part of the business of life," he read, " to lose it
handsomely." On due occasion, " one might give life the
slip." The moral or mental powers might fail one ; and then it were
a fair question, precisely, whether the time for taking leave was
not come : " Thou canst leave this prison when thou wilt. Go forth
boldly ! " Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain such
question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must always
leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching him
as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with. There,
surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of apprehension.
It was the attitude, the melancholy intellectual attitude, of
one who might be greatly mistaken in things who might make the greatest
of mistakes. A heart that could forget itself in the mis-
fortune, or even in the weakness of others : of this Marius had certainly
found the trace, as a confidant of the emperor's conversations with
himself, in spite of those jarring inhumanities, of that pretension to a
stoical indifference, and the many difficulties of his manner of writing.
He found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger evidence,
in this way. As he read one morning early, there slipped from the rolls
of manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor's superscription,
which might well be of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at
once in person ; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one of his
favourite retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with his
young children, before his departure for the war. A whole day passed
as Marius crossed the Gampagna on horseback, pleased by the random
autumn lights bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture,
the shepherds in their picturesque dress, the golden elms, tower
and villa ; and it was after dark that he mounted the steep street of the
little hill-town to the imperial residence. He was struck by an odd
mixture of stillness and excitement about the place. Lights burned at the
windows. It seemed that numerous visitors were within, for the
courtyard was crowded with litters and horses in waiting. For the moment,
indeed, all larger cares, even the cares of war, of late so heavy a
pressure, had been forgotten in what was passing with the little Annius
Verus ; who for his part had forgotten his toys, lying all day across
the knees of his mother, as a mere child's ear-ache grew rapidly to
alarming sickness with great and manifest agony, only suspended a little,
from time to time, when from very weariness he passed into a few
moments of unconsciousness. The country surgeon called in, had removed
the imposthume with the knife. There had been a great effort to
bear this operation, for the terrified child, hardly persuaded to submit
him- self, when his pain was at its worst, and even more for the
parents. At length, amid a company of pupils pressing in with him, as
the custom was, to watch the proceedings in the sick-room, the
eminent Galen had arrived, only to pronounce the thing done visibly
useless, the patient falling now into longer intervals of delirium.
And thus, thrust on one side by the crowd of departing visitors, Marius
was forced into the privacy of a grief, the desolate face of which
went deep into his memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away
quite conscious at last, but with a touching expression upon it of
weakness and defeat pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just
then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in
its obscure distress. Paratum cor meum deus ! paratum cor meum
! THE emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of
images in memory of the dead prince ; that a golden one should be
carried, together with the other images, in the great procession of
the Circus, and the addition of the child's name to the Hymn of the
Salian Priests : and so, stifling private grief, without further
delay set forth for the war. True kingship, as Plato, the old master
of Aurelius, had understood it, was essentially of the nature of a
service. If so be, you can discover a mode of life more desirable than
the being a king, for those who shall be kings ; then, the true
Ideal of the State will become a possibility; but not otherwise. And if
the life of Beatific Vision be indeed possible, if philosophy
really " concludes in an ecstasy/' affording full fruition to
the entire nature of man ; then, for certain elect souls at least, a mode
of life will have been discovered more desirable than to be a king.
By love or fear you might induce such persons to forgo their
privilege ; to take upon them the distasteful task of governing other
men, or even of leading them to victory in battle. But, by the very
conditions of its tenure, their dominion would be wholly a ministry to
others : they would have taken upon them " the form of a
servant ": they would be reigning for the well- being of others
rather than their own. The true king, the righteous king, would be Saint
Lewis, exiling himself from the better land and its perfected
company so real a thing to him, definite and real as the pictured scenes
of his psalter to take part in or to arbitrate men's quarrels,
about the transitory appearances of things. In a lower degree (lower, in
proportion as the highest Platonic dream is lower than any
Christian vision) the true king would be Marcus Aurelius, drawn from the
meditation of books, to be the ruler of the Roman people in peace,
and still more, in war. To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic
mood, the visions, however dim, which this mood brought with it,
were sufficiently pleasant to him, together with the endearments of his
home, to make public rule nothing less than a sacrifice of himself
according to Plato's requirement, now consummated in his setting forth
for the cam- paign on the Danube. That it was such a sacrifice was
to Marius visible fact, as he saw hirn ceremoniously lifted into the
saddle amid all the pageantry of an imperial departure, yet with
the air less of a sanguine and self-reliant leader than of one in
some way or other already defeated. Through the fortune of the subsequent
years, passing and repassing so inexplicably from side to side, the
rumour of which reached him amid his own quiet studies, Marius seemed
always to see that central figure, with its habitually dejected hue
grown now to an expression of positive suffering, all the stranger from
its contrast with the magnificent armour worn by the emperor on
this occasion, as it had been worn by his pre- decessor Hadrian.
Totus et argento contextus et auro : clothed in its gold and
silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed armour of which OMERO tells,
but without its miraculous lightsomeness he looked out baffled,
labouring, moribund ; a mere comfortless shadow taking part in some
shadowy reproduction of the labours of Hercules, through those northern,
mist-laden confines of the civilised world. It was as if the
familiar soul which had been so friendly disposed towards him were
actually departed to Hades ; and when he read the Conversations
afterwards, though his judgment of them underwent no material
change, it was nevertheless with the allowance we make for the
dead. The memory of that suffering image, while it certainly strengthened
his adhesion to what he could accept at all in the philo- sophy of
Aurelius, added a strange pathos to what must seem the writer's mistakes.
What, after all, had been the meaning of that incident, observed as
so fortunate an omen long since, when the prince, then a little child
much younger than was usual, had stood in ceremony among the
priests of Mars and flung his crown of flowers with the rest at the
sacred image reclin- ing on the Pulvinar ? The other crowns lodged
themselves here or there ; when, Lo ! the crown thrown by ANTONINO (si
veda), alighted upon the very brows of the god, as if placed there by a
careful hand ! He was still young, also, when on the day of his adoption
by Antoninus Pius he saw himself in a dream, with as it were
shoulders of ivory, like the images of the gods, and found them more
capable than shoulders of flesh. Yet he was now well-nigh fifty
years of age, setting out with two-thirds of life behind him, upon a
labour which would fill the remainder of it with anxious cares a
labour for which he had perhaps no capacity, and certainly no
taste. That ancient suit of armour was almost the only object
Aurelius now possessed from all those much cherished articles of vertu
collected by the Caesars, making the imperial residence like a
magnificent museum. Not men alone were needed for the war, so that it
became necessary, to the great disgust alike of timid persons and
of thelovers of sport, to arm the gladiators, but money also was
lacking. Accordingly, at the sole motion of Aurelius himself, unwilling
that the public burden should be further increased, especially on
the part of the poor, the whole of the imperial ornaments and furniture,
a sump- tuous collection of gems formed by Hadrian, with many works
of the most famous painters and sculptors, even the precious ornaments
of the emperor's chapel or Lararium, and the ward- robe of the
empress Faustina, who seems to have borne the loss without a murmur, were
exposed for public auction. u These treasures," says ANTONINO (si
veda), " like all else that I possess, belong by right to the
Senate and People." Was it not a characteristic of the true kings in
Plato that they had in their houses nothing they could call their
own ? Connoisseurs had a keen delight in the mere reading of the
Prtetor's list of the property for sale. For two months the learned
in these matters were daily occupied in the appraising of the embroidered
hangings, the choice articles of personal use selected for pre-
servation by each succeeding age, the great out- landish pearls from
Hadrian's favourite cabinet, the marvellous plate lying safe behind the
pretty iron wicker-work of the shops in the goldsmiths' quarter.
Meantime ordinary persons might have an interest in the inspection of
objects which had been as daily companions to people so far above
and remote from them things so fine also in workmanship and material as to
seem, with their antique and delicate air, a worthy survival of the
grand bygone eras, like select thoughts or utterances embodying the very
spirit of the vanished past. The town became more pensive than ever
over old fashions. The welcome amusement of this last act of
preparation for the great war being now over, all Rome seemed to settle down
into a singular quiet, likely to last long, as though bent only on
watching from afar the languid, somewhat un- eventful course of the
contest itself. MARIO takes advantage of it as an opportunity for still
closer study than of old, only now and then going out to one of his
favourite spots on the Sabine or Alban hills for a quiet even greater
than that of Rome in the country air. On one of these occasions, as
if by favour of an invisible power withdrawing some unknown cause of
dejection from around him, he enjoyed a quite unusual sense of
self-possession the possession of his own best and happiest self. After
some gloomy thoughts over-night, he awoke under the full tide of
the rising sun, himself full, in his entire refreshment, of that almost
religious appreciation of sleep, the graciousness of its influence on
men's spirits, which had made the old Greeks conceive of it as a
god. It was like one of those old joyful wakings of childhood, now
becoming rarer and rarer with him, and looked back upon with much
regret as a measure of advancing age. In fact, the last bequest of this
serene sleep had been a dream, in which, as once before, he
overheard those he loved best pronouncing his name very pleasantly,
as they passed through the rich light and shadow of a summer morning,
along the pavement of a city Ah ! fairer far than Rome ! In a
moment, as he arose, a certain oppression of late setting very heavily
upon him was lifted away, as though by some physical motion in the
air. That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasurable
excitement, yet so easily ruffled by chance collision even with the
things and persons he had come to value as the greatest treasure in
life, was to be wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards Tibur,
under the early sunshine ; the marble of its villas glistening all the
way before him on the hillside. And why could he not hold such
serenity of spirit ever at command ? he asked, expert as he was at last
become in the art of setting the house of his thoughts in order.
" 'Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt : " he repeated to
himself : it was the most serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him
by those imperial conversations. " 'Tis in thy power to think
as thou wilt." And were the cheerful, sociable, restorative beliefs,
of which he had there read so much, that bold adhesion, for
instance, to the hypothesis of an eternal friend to man, just hidden
behind the veil of a mechanical and material order, but only just behind it, ready
perhaps even now to break through : were they, after all, really a matter
of choice, dependent on some deliberate act of volition on his part
? Were they doctrines one might take for granted, generously take for granted,
and led on by them, at first as but well-defined objects of hope,
come at last into the region of a corre- sponding certitude of the
intellect ? " It is the truth I seek," he had read, " the
truth, by which no one," gray and depressing though it might
seem, "was ever really injured." And yet, on the other hand,
the imperial wayfarer, he had been able to go along with so far on his
intel- lectual pilgrimage, let fall many things con- cerning the
practicability of a methodical and self-forced assent to certain
principles or pre- suppositions " one could not do without."
Were there, as the expression " one could not do 'without
" seemed to hint, beliefs, without which life itself must be
almost impossible, principles which had their sufficient ground of
evidence in that very fact? Experience certainly taught that, as
regarding the sensible world he could attend or not, almost at will, to
this or that colour, this or that train of sounds, in the whole
tumultuous concourse of colour and sound, so it was also, for the
well-trained intelligence, in regard to that hum of voices which besiege
the inward no less than the outward ear. Might it be not otherwise
with those various and competing hypotheses, the permissible hypotheses,
which, in that open field for hypothesis one's own actual ignorance
of the origin and tendency of our being present themselves so
importunately, some of them with so emphatic a reiteration, through
all the mental changes of successive ages ? Might the will itself be an
org an of knowledge, of vision ? On this day truly no
mysterious light, no irresistibly leading hand from afar reached him
; only the peculiarly tranquil influence of its first hour
increased steadily upon him, in a manner with which, as he conceived, the
aspects of the place he was then visiting hadsomething to do. The
air there, air supposed to possess the singular property of restoring the
whiteness of ivory, was pure and thin. An even veil of lawn-like
white cloud had now drawn over the sky; and under its broad,
shadowless light every hue and tone of time came out upon the yellow old
temples, the elegant pillared circle of the shrine of the patronal
Sibyl, the houses seemingly of a piece with the ancient fundamental rock.
Some half- conscious motive of poetic grace would appear to have
determined their grouping ; in part resisting, partly going along with
the natural wildness and harshness of the place, its floods and
precipices. An air of immense age possessed, above all, the vegetation
around a world of evergreen trees the olives especially, older than
how many generations of men's lives ! fretted and twisted by the
combining forces of life and death, intoevery conceivable caprice
of form. In the windless weather all seemed to be listening to the
roar of the immemorial waterfall, plunging down so unassociably among
these human habitations, and with a motion so un- changing from age
to age as to count, even in this time-worn place, as an image of
unalterable rest. Yet the clear sky all but broke to let through
the ray which was silently quickening everything in the late February
afternoon, and the unseen violet refined itself through the air. /
It was as if the spirit of life in nature were but withholding any too
precipitate revelation of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work.
Through some accident to the trappings of his horse at the inn
where he rested, Marius had an unexpected delay. He sat down in an
olive- garden, and, all around him and within still turning to
reverie, the course of his own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself
into some other world, disparted from this spectacular point where
he was now placed to survey it, like that distant road below, along which
he had travelled this morning across the Campagna. Through a dreamy
land he could see himself moving, as if in another life, and like another
person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from
point to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various dangers. That
prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude
: it was as if he must look round for some one else to share his joy
with : for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own
relief. Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this
way or that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or
another long span of it, the chief delight of the journey. And was it
only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through
his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there
had not been besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the
solitude which in spite of ardent friendship he had perhaps loved
best of all things some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at
his side throughout ; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the
way, patient of his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with
his grate- ful recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the
fact that he was there at all ? Must not the whole world around have
faded away for him altogether, had he been left for one moment
really alone in it f In his deepest apparent solitude there had been rich
entertainment. It was as if there were not one only, but two way-
farers, side by side, visible there across the plain, as he indulged his
fancy. A bird came and sang among the wattled hedge-roses : an animal
feed- ing crept nearer : the child who kept it was gazing quietly :
and the scene and the hours still conspiring, he passed from that mere
fantasy of a self not himself, beside him in his coming and going,
to those divinations of a living and com- panionable spirit at work in
all things, of which he had become aware from time to time in his
old philosophic readings in Plato and others, last but not least, in ANTONINO
(si veda). Through one reflection upon another, he passed from such
instinctive divinations, to the thoughts which give them logical
consistency, formulating at last, as the necessary exponent of our own
and the world's life, that reasonable Ideal to which the Old
Testament gives the name of Creator, which for the philosophers of Greece
is the Eternal Reason, and in the New Testament the Father of Men
even as one builds up from act and word and expression of the friend
actually visible at one's side, an ideal of the spirit within
him. In this peculiar and privileged hour, his bodily frame,
as he could recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of its
capacities, so entirely possessed by him Nay ! actually his very
self was yet determined by a far-reaching system of material forces
external to it, a thousand combining currents from earth and sky.
Its seemingly active powers of appre- hension were, in fact, but
susceptibilities to , influence. The perfection of its capacity
might be said to depend on its passive surrender, as of a leaf on
the wind, to the motions of the great stream of physical energy without
it. And might not the intellectual frame also, still more intimately
himself as in truth it was, after the analogy of the bodily life, be a
moment only, an impulse or series of impulses, a single process, in
an intellectual or spiritual system external to it, diffused through all
time and place that great stream of spiritual energy, of which his
own imperfect thoughts, yesterday or to-day, would be but the remote, and
therefore im- perfect pulsations ? It was the hypothesis (boldest,
though in reality the most conceivable of all hypotheses) which had
dawned on the contemplations of the two opposed great masters of
the old Greek thought, alike: the "World of Ideas," existent
only because, and in so far as, they are known, as L’ACCADEMIA conceived
; the " creative, incorruptible, informing mind, " sup-
posed by il LIZIO, so sober-minded, yet as regards this matter left
something of a mystic after all. Might not this entire material
world," the very scene around him, the immemorial rocks, the
firm marble, the olive-gardens, the falling water, be themselves but
reflections in, or a creation of, that one indefectible mind,
wherein he too became conscious, for an hour, a day, for so many years?
Upon what other hypothesis could he so well understand the
persistency of all these things for his own intermittent consciousness of
them, for the intermittent consciousness of so many generations,
fleeting away one after another ? It was easier to conceive of the
material fabric of things as but an element in a world of thought as a
thought in a mind, than of mind as an element, or accident, or passing
condition in a world of matter, because mind was really nearer to
him- self : it was an explanation of what was less known by what
was known better. The purely material world, that close, impassable
prison- wall, seemed just then the unreal thing, to be actually
dissolving away all around him : and he felt a quiet hope, a quiet joy
dawning faintly, in the dawning of this doctrine upon him as a
really credible opinion. It was like the break of day over some vast
prospect with the " new city," as it were some celestial New
Rome, in the midst of it. That divine companion figured no longer as
but an occasional wayfarer beside him ; but rather as the unfailing
" assist- ant," without whose inspiration and concurrence
he could not breathe or see, instrumenting his bodily senses, rounding,
supporting his imperfect thoughts. How often had the thought of
their brevity spoiled for him the most natural pleasures of life,
confusing even his present sense of them by the suggestion of disease, of
death, of a coming end, in everything ! How had he longed,
sometimes, that there were indeed one to whose boundless power of memory
he could commit his own most fortunate moments, his admiration, his
love, Ay ! the very sorrows of which he could not bear quite to lose
the sense : one strong to retain them even though he forgot, in
whose more vigorous consciousness they might subsist for ever, beyond
that mere quickening of capacity which was all that remained of
them in himself ! " Oh ! that they might live before Thee To-day at least, in the peculiar
clearness of one privileged hour, he seemed to have apprehended that in
which the experiences he valued most might find, one by one, an
abiding-place. And again, the result- ant sense of companionship, of a
person beside him, evoked the faculty of conscience of conscience,
as of old and when he had been at his best, in the form, not of fear, nor
of ] self-reproach even, but of a certain lively gratitude.
Himself his sensations and ideas never fell again precisely into
focus as on that day, | yet he was the richer by its experience.
But for once only to have come under the power of that peculiar
mood, to have felt the train of reflections which belong to it really
forcible and conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion,
to have apprehended the Great Ideal) so palpably that it defined personal gratitude
and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the shadows of the
world, left this one particular hour a marked point in life never
to be forgotten. It gave him a definitely ascertained measure of his
moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul must make upon
the powers, whatsoever they might be, which had brought him, as he was, into
the world at all. And again, would he be faithful to himself, to
his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions, if he did but remain
just there ? Must not all that remained of life be but a search for
the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual things a gathering
together of every trace or token of it, which his actual experience
might present ? Your men shall dream dreams. A nature like that of
Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of instincts almost
physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual judg- ments, was
perhaps even less susceptible than other men's characters of essential
change. And yet the experience of that fortunate hour, seeming to
gather into one central act of vision ; all the deeper impressions his
mind had ever, received, did not leave him quite as he had been.
For his mental view, at least, it changed measurably the world about him,
of which he was still indeed a curious spectator, but which looked
further off, was weaker in its hold, and, in a sense, less real to him
than ever. It was as if he viewed it through a diminishing glass.
And the permanency of this change he could note, some years later, when
it happened that he was a guest at a feast, in which the various
exciting elements of Roman life, its physical and intellectual
accomplish- ments, its frivolity and far-fetched elegances, its
strange, mystic essays after the unseen, were elaborately combined. The
great Apuleius> the literary ideal of his boyhood, had arrived
in Rome, was now visiting Tusculum, at the house of their common friend,
a certain aristo- cratic poet who loved every sort of superiorities
; and MARIO is favoured with an invitation to a supper given in his
honour. It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to
his own early boyish hero-worship, yet with some sense of superiority in
himself, seeing his old curiosity grown now almost to indifference
when on the point of satisfaction at last, and upon a juster estimate of
its object, that he mounted to the little town on the hillside, the
foot -ways of which were so many flights of easy-going steps gathered
round a single great house under shadow of the "haunted"
ruins of Cicero's villa on the wooded heights. He found a touch of
weirdness in the cir- cumstance that in so romantic a place he had
been bidden to meet the writer who was come to seem almost like one of
the personages in his own fiction. As he turned now and then to
gaze at the evening scene through the tall narrow openings of the street,
up which the cattle were going home slowly from the pastures below,
the Alban mountains, stretched between the great walls of the ancient
houses, seemed close at hand a screen of vaporous dun purple
against the setting sun with those waves of surpassing softness in the
boundary lines which indicate volcanic formation. The cool- ness of
the little brown market-place, for profit of which even the
working-people, in long file through the olive- gardens, were leaving
the plain for the night, was grateful, after the heats of Rome.
Those wild country figures, clad in every kind of fantastic
patchwork, stained by wind and weather fortunately enough for the
eye, under that significant light inclined him to poetry. And it was a
very delicate poetry of its kind that seemed to enfold him, \ as
passing into the poet's house he paused for; a moment to glance back
towards the heights above ; whereupon, the numerous cascades of the
precipitous garden of the villa, framed in the doorway of the hall, fell
into a harmless picture, in its place among the pictures within,
and scarcely more real than they a landscape- piece, in which the power
of water (plunging into what unseen depths !) done to the life, was
pleasant, and without its natural terrors. At the further end of
this bland apartment, fragrant with the rare woods of the old
inlaid panelling, the falling of aromatic oil from the
ready-lighted lamps, the iris-root clinging to the dresses of the guests,
as with odours from the altars of the gods, the supper-table was
spread, in all the daintiness characteristic of the agree- able
petit-maitrC) who entertained. He was already most carefully dressed,
but, like Martial's Stella, perhaps consciously, meant to change
his attire once and again during the banquet ; in the last
instance, for an ancient vesture (object of much rivalry among the young
men of fashion, at that great sale of the imperial wardrobes) a
toga, of altogether lost hue and texture. He wore it with a grace which
became the leader of a thrilling movement then on foot for the
restora- tion of that disused garment, in which, laying aside the
customary evening dress, all the visitors were requested to appear,
setting off the delicate sinuosities and well-disposed " golden
ways" of its folds, with harmoniously tinted flowers. The
opulent sunset, blending pleasan tly with artificial light, fell
across the quiet ancestral effigies of old consular dignitaries, along
the wide floor strewn with sawdust of sandal -wood, and lost itself
in the heap of cool coronals, lying ready for the foreheads of the guests
on a sideboard of old citron. The crystal vessels darkened with old
wine, the hues of the early autumn fruit mulberries, pomegranates, and
grapes that had long been hanging under careful protection upon the
vines, were almost as much a feast for the eye, as the dusky fires of the
rare twelve-petalled roses. A favourite animal, white as snow,
brought by one of the visitors, purred its way gracefully among the
wine-cups, coaxed onward from place to place by those at table, as
they reclined easily on their cushions of German eider-down, spread
over the long-legged, carved couches. A highly refined
modification of the acroama a musical performance during supper for
the diversion of the guests was presently heard hovering round the
place, soothingly, and so unobtrusively that the company could not
guess, and did not like to ask, whether or not it had been designed
by their entertainer. They inclined on the whole to think it some
wonderful peasant- music peculiar to that wild neighbourhood, turn-
ing, as it did now and then, to a solitary reed- note, like a bird's,
while it wandered into the distance. It wandered quite away at last,
as darkness with a bolder lamplight came on, and made way for
another sort of entertainment. An odd, rapid, phantasmal glitter, advancing
from the garden by torchlight, defined itself, as it came nearer, into a
dance of young men in armour. Arrived at length in a portico, open
to the supper-chamber, they contrived that their mechanical
march-movement should fall out into a kind of highly expressive dramatic
action ; and with the utmost possible emphasis of dumb motion,
their long swords weaving a silvery network in the air, they danced the
Death of Paris. COMMODO (si veda), already an adept in these
matters, who had condescended to welcome the eminent Apuleius at the
banquet, had mysteriously dropped from his place to take his share
in the performance ; and at its con- clusion reappeared, still wearing
the dainty accoutrements of Paris, including a breastplate,
composed entirely of overlapping tigers' claws, skilfully gilt. The
youthful prince had lately assumed the dress of manhood, on the return
of the emperor for a brief visit from the North ; putting up his
hair, in imitation of Nero, in a golden box dedicated to Capitoline
Jupiter. His likeness to Aurelius, his father, was become, in
consequence, more striking than ever ; and he had one source of genuine
interest in the great literary guest of the occasion, in that the
latter was the fortunate possessor of a monopoly for the exhibition
of wild beasts and gladiatorial shows in the province of Carthage, where
he resided. Still, after all complaisance to the perhaps
somewhat crude tastes of the emperor's son, it was felt that with a guest
like Apuleius whom they had come prepared to entertain as veritable
connoisseurs, the conversation should be learned and superior, and the
host at last deftly led his company round to literature, by the way of
bind- ings. Elegant rolls of manuscript from his fine library of
ancient Greek books passed from hand to hand about the table. It was a
sign for the visitors themselves to draw their own choicest literary
curiosities from their bags, as their con- tribution to the banquet ; and
one of them, a famous reader, choosing his lucky moment, delivered
in tenor voice the piece which follows, with a preliminary query as to
whether it could indeed be the composition of Lucian of Samosata,
understood to be the great mocker of that day : " What
sound was that, Socrates ? " asked Chaerephon. " It came from
the beach under the cliff yonder, and seemed a long way off. And
how melodious it was ! Was it a bird, I wonder. I thought all sea-birds
were songless. Aye! a sea-bird," answered Socrates, "a bird
called the Halcyon, and has a note full of plaining and tears. There is
an old story people tell of it. It was a mortal woman once,
daughter of ^Eolus, god of the winds. Ceyx, the son of the
morning-star, wedded her in her early maidenhood. The son was not less
fair than the father; and when it came to pass that he died, the
crying of the girl as she lamented his sweet usage, was, Just that ! And
some while after, as Heaven willed, she was changed into a bird.
Floating now on bird's wings over the sea she seeks her lost Ceyx there ;
since she was not able to find him after long wandering over the
land. That then is the Halcyon the kingfisher," say Chaerephon.
" I never heard a bird like it before. It has truly a plaintive
note. What kind of a bird is it, Socrates f " " Not
a large bird, though she has received large honour from the gods on
account of her singular conjugal affection. For whensoever she
makes her nest, a law of nature brings round what is called Halcyon's
weather, days distinguish- able among all others for their serenity,
though they come sometimes amid the storms of winter days like
to-day ! See how transparent is the sky above us, and how motionless the
sea ! like a smooth mirror." " True ! A Halcyon
day, indeed ! and yester- day was the same. But tell me, Socrates,
what is one to think of those stories which have been told from the
beginning, of birds changed into mortals and mortals into birds ? To me
nothing seems more incredible." "Dear
Chaerephon," said Socrates, "methinks we are but half-blind
judges of the impossible and the possible. We try the question by
the standard of our human faculty, which avails neither for true
knowledge, nor for faith, nor vision. Therefore many things seem to
us impossible which are really easy, many things unattainable which
are within our reach ; partly through inexperience, partly through the
child- ishness of our minds. For in truth, every man, even the
oldest of us, is like a little child, so brief and babyish are the years
of our life in comparison of eternity. Then, how can we, who
comprehend not the faculties of gods and of the heavenly host, tell
whether aught of that kind be possible or no f What a tempest you
saw three days ago ! One trembles but to think of the lightning, the
thunderclaps, the violence of the wind ! You might have thought the
whole world was going to ruin. And then, after a little, came this
wonderful serenity of weather, which has continued till to-day. Which do
you think the greater and more difficult thing to do : to exchange
the disorder of that irresistible whirlwind to a clarity like this, and
becalm the whole world again, or to refashion the form of a woman
into that of a bird ? We can teach even little children to do something
of that sort, to take wax or clay, and mould out of the same
material many kinds of form, one after another, without difficulty. And
it may be that to the Deity, whose power is too vast for comparison
with ours, all processes of that kind are manage- able and easy. How much
wider is the whole circle of heaven than thyself? Wider than thou
canst express. "Among ourselves also, how vast the differ-
ence we may observe in men's degrees of power ! To you and me, and many
another like us, many things are impossible which are quite easy to
others. For those who are un- musical, to play on the flute ; to read or
write, for those who have not yet learned ; is no easier than to
make birds of women, or women of birds. From the dumb and lifeless egg
Nature moulds her swarms of winged creatures, aided, as some will
have it, by a divine and secret art in the wide air around us. She takes
from the honeycomb a little memberless live thing ; she brings it
wings and feet, brightens and beautifies it with quaint variety of colour:
and Lo ! the bee in her wisdom, making honey worthy of the gods.
"It follows, that we mortals, being alto- gether of little
account, able wholly to discern no great matter, sometimes not even a
little one, for the most part at a loss regarding what happens even
with ourselves, may hardly speak with security as to what may be the
powers of the immortal gods concerning Kingfisher, or Nightingale.
Yet the glory of thy mythus, as my fathers bequeathed it to me, O
tearful songstress ! that will I too hand on to my children, and
tell it often to my wives, Xanthippe and Myrto : the story of thy
pious love to Ceyx, and of thy melodious hymns ; and, above all, of
the honour thou hast with the gods ! " The reader's
well-turned periods seemed to stimulate, almost uncontrollably, the
eloquent stirrings of the eminent man of letters then present. The
impulse to speak masterfully was visible, before the recital was well
over, in the moving lines about his mouth, by no means designed, as
detractors were wont to say, simply to display the beauty of his teeth.
One of the company, expert in his humours, made ready to transcribe
what he would say, the sort of things of which a collection was then
forming, the " Florida " or Flowers, so to call them, he
was apt to let fall by the way no impromptu ventures at random ; but
rather elaborate, carved ivories of speech, drawn, at length,
out of the rich treasure-house of a memory stored with such, and as
with a fine savour of old musk about them. Certainly in this case, as
MARIO thought, it was worth while to hear a charming writer speak.
Discussing, quite in our modern way, the peculiarities of those
sub- urban views, especially the sea-views, of which he was a
professed lover, he was also every inch a priest of Aesculapius, patronal
god of Carthage. There was a piquancy in his rococo^ very African,
and as it were perfumed person- ality, though he was now well-nigh sixty
years old, a mixture there of that sort of Platonic spiritualism
which can speak of the soul of man as but a sojourner in the prison of
the body a blending of that with such a relish for merely bodily
graces as availed to set the fashion in matters of dress, deportment,
accent, and the like, nay ! with something also which reminded
Marius of the vein of coarseness he had found in the "Golden Book/'
All this made the total impression he conveyed a very uncommon one.
Marius did not wonder, as he watched him speaking, that people freely
attributed to him many of the marvellous adven- tures he had recounted in
that famous romance, over and above the wildest version of his own
actual story his extraordinary marriage, his religious initiations, his
acts of mad generosity, his trial as a sorcerer. But a sign came
from the imperial prince that it was time for the company to
separate. He was entertaining his immediate neighbours at the table
with a trick from the streets ; tossing his olives in rapid succession
into the air, and catching them, as they fell, between his lips.
His dexterity in this performance made the mirth around him noisy,
disturbing the sleep of the furry visitor : the learned party broke up
; and Marius withdrew, glad to escape into the open air. The
courtesans in their large wigs of false blond hair, were lurking for the
guests, with groups of curious idlers. A great con- flagration was
visible in the distance. Was it in Rome ; or in one of the villages of
the country ? Pausing for a few minutes on the terrace to watch it,
Marius was for the first time able to converse intimately with Apuleius ;
and in this moment of confidence the " illuminist,"
himself with locks so carefully arranged, and seemingly so full of
affectations, almost like one of those light women there, dropped a veil
as it were, and appeared, though still permitting the play of a
certain element of theatrical interest in hi s bizarre tenets, to be
ready to explain and defend his position reasonably. For a moment his
fantastic foppishness and his pretensions to ideal vision seemed to fall
into some intelligible con- gruity with each other. In truth, it was
the Platonic Idealism, as he conceived it, which for him literally
animated, and gave him so livelyan interest in, this world of the purely
outward aspects of men and things. Did material things, such things
as they had had around them all that evening, really need apology for
being there, to interest one, at all ? Were not all visible objects
the whole material world indeed, according to the consistent testimony of
philosophy in many forms "full of souls"? embarrassed
perhaps, partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls ? Certainly,
the contemplative philosophy of Plato, with its figurative imagery and
apologue, its mani- fold aesthetic colouring, its measured
eloquence, its music for the outward ear, had been, like Plato's
old master himself, a two-sided or two-coloured thing. Apuleius was a Platonist
: only, for him, the Ideas of Plato were no creatures of logical
abstraction, but in very truth informing souls, in every type and variety
of sensible things. Those noises in the house all supper-time, sounding
through the tables and along the walls : were they only startings in the
old rafters, at the impact of the music and laughter ; or rather
importunities of the secondary selves, the true unseen selves, of the
persons, nay ! of the very things around, essaying to break through
their frivolous, merely transitory surfaces, to remind one of abiding
essentials beyond them, which might have their say, their judgment
to give, by and by, when the shifting of the meats and drinks at
life's table would be over ? And was not this the true significance of
the Platonic doctrine ? a hierarchy of divine beings, associ- ating
themselves with particular things and places, for the purpose of
mediating between God and man man, who does but need due attention
on his part to become aware of his celestial company, filling the air
about him, thick as motes in the sunbeam, for the glance of
sympathetic intelligence he casts through it. Two kinds there are, of
animated beings," he exclaimed : " Gods, entirely differing
from men in the infinite distance of their abode, since one part of
them only is seen by our blunted vision those mysterious stars! in the
eternity of their existence, in the perfection of their nature,
infected by no contact with ourselves : and men, dwelling on the earth,
with frivolous and anxious minds, with infirm and mortal members,
with variable fortunes ; labouring in vain ; taken altogether and in
their whole species perhaps, eternal ; but, severally, quitting the
scene in irresistible succession. " What then ? Has nature
connected itself together by no bond, allowed itself to be thus
crippled, and split into the divine and human elements ? And you will say
to me : If so it be, that man is thus entirely exiled from the
immortal gods, that all communication is denied him, that not one of them
occasionally visits us, as a shepherd his sheep to whom shall I
address my prayers ? Whom, shall I invoke as the helper of the
unfortunate, the protector of the good? Well ! there are certain
divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are
conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. Passing between the inhabitants
of earth and heaven, they carry from one to the other prayers and
bounties, supplication and assistance, being a kind of interpreters. This
interval of the air is full of them! Through them, all revelations,
miracles, magic processes, are effected. For, specially appointed members
of this order have their special provinces, with a ministry
according to the disposition of each. They go to and fro without
fixed habitation : or dwell in men's houses " Just then
a companion's hand laid in the dark- ness on the shoulder of the speaker
carried him away, and the discourse broke off suddenly. Its
singular intimations, however, were sufficient to throw back on this
strange evening, in all its detail the dance, the readings, the
distant fire a kind of allegoric expression : gave it the character
of one of those famous Platonic figures or apologues which had then been
in fact under discussion. When Marius recalled its circum- stances
he seemed to hear once more that voice of genuine conviction, pleading,
from amidst a scene at best of elegant frivolity, for so boldly
mystical a view of man and his position in the world. For a moment, but
only for a moment, as he listened, the trees had seemed, as of old,
to be growing " close against the sky." Yes ! the
reception of theory, of hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a great deal
on temperament. They were, so to speak, mere equivalents of tempera-
ment. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth: that was the
assumption which the experience of Apuleius had suggested to him :
it was what, in different forms, certain persons in every age had
instinctively supposed : they would be glad to find their supposition accredited
by the authority of a grave philosophy. Marius, however, yearning not
less than they, in that hard world of Rome, and below its unpeopled
sky, for the trace of some celestial wing across it, must still object
that they assumed the thing with too much facility, too much of
self-com- placency. And his second thought was, that to indulge but
for an hour fantasies, fantastic visions of that sort, only left the
actual world more lonely than ever. For him certainly, and for his
solace, the little godship for whom the rude countryman, an unconscious
Platonist, trimmed his twinkling lamp, would never slip from the
bark of these immemorial olive-trees. No ! not even in the wildest
moonlight. For himself, it was clear, he must still hold by what his
eyes really saw. Only, he had to concede also, that the very
boldness of such theory bore witness, at least, to a variety of human
disposition and a consequent variety of mental view, which might
who can tell ? be correspondent to, be defined by and define, varieties
of facts, of truths, just " behind the veil," regarding the
world all alike had actually before them as their original premiss
or starting-point ; a world, wider, perhaps, in its possibilities than
all possible fancies concernng it. Your old men shall dream dreams, and
your young men shall see visions." Cornelius had certain
friends in or near Rome, whose household, to MARIO, as he pondered
now and again what might be the determining influ- ences of that
peculiar character, presented itself as possibly its main secret the
hidden source from which the beauty and strength of a nature, so
persistently fresh in the midst of a somewhat jaded world, might be
derived. But Marius had never yet seen these friends; and it was
almost by accident that the veil of reserve was at last lifted,
and, with strange contrast to his visit to the poet's villa at Tusculum,
he entered another curious house. "The house in which
she lives," says that mystical German writer quoted once before,
" is for the orderly soul, which does not live on blindly
before her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences, building and
adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for herself, only an
expansion of the body ; as the body, according to the philosophy of
Swedenborg, is but a process, an expansion, of the soul. For such an
orderly soul, as life proceeds, all sorts of delicate affinities
establish themselves, between herself and the doors and passage-ways, the
lights and shadows, of her outward dwelling-place, until she may
seem incorporate with it until at last, in the entire expressiveness of
what is outward, there is for her, to speak properly, between
outward and inward, no longer any distinction at all ; and the
light which creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture or space
upon the wall, the scent of flowers in the air at a particular
window, become to her, not so much apprehended objects, as
themselves powers of apprehension and door- ways to things beyond the
germ or rudiment of certain new faculties, by which she, dimly yet
surely, apprehends a matter lying beyond her actually attained capacities
of spirit and sense." So it must needs be in a world which is
itself, we may think, together with that bodily tent or "
tabernacle," only one of many vestures for the clothing of the
pilgrim soul, to be left by her, surely, as if on the wayside, worn-out
one by one, as it was from her, indeed, they borrowed what
momentary value or significance they had. The two friends were returning
to Rome from a visit to a country-house, where again a mixed
company of guests had been assembled ; Marius, for his part, a little
weary of gossip, and those sparks of ill-tempered rivalry, which would
seem sometimes to be the only sort of fire the intercourse of people in
general society can strike out of them. A mere reaction upon this, as
they started in the clear morning, made their com- panionship, at
least for one of them, hardly less tranquillising than the solitude he so
much valued. Something in the south-west wind, combining with their
own intention, favoured increasingly, as the hours wore on, a serenity
like that Marius had felt once before in journeying over the great
plain towards Tibur a serenity that was to-day brotherly amity also, and
seemed to draw into its own charmed circle whatever was then
present to eye or ear, while they talked or were silent together, and all
petty irritations, and the like, shrank out of existence, or kept
certainly beyond its limits. The natural fatigue of the long journey
overcame them quite suddenly at last, when they were still about
two miles distant from Rome. The seemingly end- less line of tombs
and cypresses had been visible for hours against the sky towards the west
; and it was just where a cross-road from the Latin Way fell into
the Appian, that Cornelius halted at a doorway in a long, low wall the
outer wall of some villa courtyard, it might be supposed as if at
liberty to enter, and rest there awhile. He held the door open for his
companion to enter also, if he would ; with an expression, as he
lifted the latch, which seemed to ask Marius, apparently shrinking from a
possible intrusion: Would you like to see it ? " Was he willing
to look upon that, the seeing of which might define yes ! define the
critical turning-point in his days ? The little doorway in
this long, low wall admitted them, in fact, into the court or
garden of a villa, disposed in one of those abrupt natural hollows,
which give its character to the country in this place ; the house itself,
with all its dependent buildings, the spaciousness of which surprised
Marius as he entered, being thus wholly concealed from passengers along
the road. All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were the
quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste a taste, indeed, chiefly
evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to
deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older
art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects, both as regards colour
and form, so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer
intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the
ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance being indeed the
way of nature with her roses, the divine way with the body of man,
perhaps with his soul conceiving the new organism by no sudden
and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new I principle
upon elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many
times. The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral
columns, the precious corner-stones of im- memorial building, had put on,
by such juxta- position, a new and singular expressiveness, an air
of grave thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically,
very seductive. Lastly, herb and tree had taken possession,
spreading their seed-bells and light branches, just astir in the
trembling air, above the ancient garden-wall, against the wide realms of
sunset. And from the first they could hear singing, the singing of
children mainly, it would seem, and of a new kind ; so novel indeed in
its effect, as to bring suddenly to the recollection of MARIO, FLAVIANO's
early essays towards a new world of poetic sound. It was the expression
not altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness the
blithe self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some
all-subduing experience had wrought heroically, and who still remembered,
on this bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance. His old
native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies, of places,
above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they might
have, was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by that
peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion all
around him, passed into the house. That intelligent seriousness about
life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those who lacked it
into some strange species wholly alien from himself, ac- cumulating
all the lessons of his experience since those first days at White-nights,
was as it were translated here, as if in designed congruity with
his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision, into an actual
picture. If the true value of souls is in proportion to what they can
admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul. As he passed
through the various chambers, great and small, one dominant thought
increased upon him, the thought of chaste women and their children
of all the various affections of family life under its most natural
conditions, yet developed, as if in devout imitation of some sublime new
type of it, into large controlling passions. There reigned
throughout, an order and purity, an orderly dis- position, as if by way
of making ready for some gracious spousals. The place itself was like
a bride adorned for her husband ; and its singular cheerfulness,
the abundant light everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which
he received a deep impression though without precisely reckoning
wherein it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast
just at first to the place to which he was next conducted by
Cornelius still with a sort of eager, hurried, half- troubled reluctance,
and as if he forbore the explanation which might well be looked for
by his companion. An old flower-garden in the rear of the
house, set here and there with a venerable olive-tree a picture in
pensive shade and fiery blossom, as transparent, under that afternoon
light, as the old miniature-painters' work on the walls of the
chambers within was bounded towards the west by a low, grass-grown hill.
A narrow opening cut in its steep side, like a solid black- ness
there, admitted Marius and his gleaming leader into a hollow cavern or
crypt, neither more nor less in fact than the family burial- place
of the Cecilii, to whom this residence belonged, brought thus, after an
arrangement then becoming not unusual, into immediate connexion
with the abode of the living, in bold assertion of that instinct of
family life, which the sanction of the Holy Family was, hereafter,
more and more to reinforce. Here, in truth, was the centre of the
peculiar religious expressiveness, of the sanctity, of the entire scene.
That "any person may, at his own election, constitute the place
which belongs to him a religious place, by the carrying of his dead
into it": had been a maxim of old Roman law, which it was
reserved for the early Christian societies, like that established here by
the piety of a wealthy Roman matron, to realise in all its
consequences. Yet this was certainly unlike any cemetery Marius had ever before
seen ; most obviously in this, that these people had returned to
the older fashion of disposing of their dead by burial instead of
burning. Originally a family sepulchre, it was growing to a vast
necropolis^ a whole township of the deceased, by means of some free
expansion of the family interest beyond its amplest natural limits.
That air of venerable beauty which characterised the house and its
precincts above, was maintained also here. It was certainly with a great
outlay of labour that these long, apparently endless, yet
elaborately designed galleries, were increasing so rapidly, with their
layers of beds or berths, one above another, cut, on either side the
path- way, in the porous tufa^ through which all the moisture
filters downwards, leaving the parts above dry and wholesome. All alike
were carefully closed, and with all the delicate costliness at command ;
some with simple tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of marble, enriched
by fair inscriptions : marble taken, in some cases, from older
pagan tombs the inscription some- times a palimpsest^ the new epitaph
being woven into the faded letters of an earlier one. As in
an ordinary Roman cemetery, an abundance of utensils for the worship or
com memoration of the departed was disposed around
incense, lights, flowers, their flame or their freshness being relieved
to the utmost by contrast with the coal-like blackness of the soil
itself, a volcanic sandstone, cinder of burnt- out fires. Would they ever
kindle again ? possess, transform, the place ? Turning to an ashen
pallor where, at regular intervals, an air-hole or luminare let in a hard
beam of clear but sunless light, with the heavy sleepers, row upon
row within, leaving a passage so narrow that only one visitor at a time
could move along, cheek to cheek with them, the high walls seemed
to shut one in into the great company of the dead. Only the long
straight pathway lay before him ; opening, however, here and there,
into a small chamber, around a broad, table-like coffin or "
altar-tomb," adorned even more profusely than the rest as if for
some anniversary observance. Clearly, these people, concurring in
this with the special sympathies of Marius himself, had adopted the
practice of burial from some peculiar feeling of hope they
entertained concerning the body ; a feeling which, in no irreverent
curiosity, he would fain have penetrated. The complete and
irreparable disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, so
crushing to the spirits, as he for one had found it, had long since
induced in him a preference for that other mode of settlement to the
last sleep, as having something about it more home- like and
hopeful, at least in outward seeming. But whence the strange confidence
that these "handfuls of white dust" would hereafter re-
compose themselves once more into exulting human creatures ? By what
heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew from above, such as is certainly
never again to reach the dead violets ? Januarius, Agapetus Felicitas ;
Martyrs ! refresh, I pray you, the soul of CECILIO, of CORNELIO !
said an inscription, one of many, scratched, like a passing sigh,
when it was still fresh in the mortar that had closed up the prison-door.
All critical estimate of this bold hope, as sincere apparently as
it was audacious in its claim, being set aside, here at least, carried
further than ever before, was that pious, systematic commemoration
of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal to forget or finally desert
the helpless, had ever counted with Marius as the central exponent
or symbol of all natural duty. The stern soul of the excellent
Jonathan Edwards, applying the faulty theology of John Calvin,
afforded him, we know, the vision of infants not a span long, on the
floor of hell. Every visitor to the Catacombs must have observed,
in a very different theological con- nexion, the numerous children's
graves there beds of infants, but a span long indeed, lowly
"prisoners of hope," on these sacred floors. It was with great
curiosity, certainly, that Marius considered them, decked in some
in- stances with the favourite toys of their tiny occupants
toy-soldiers, little chariot-wheels, the entire paraphernalia of a
baby-house ; and when he saw afterwards the living children, who
sang and were busy above sang their psalm Laudate Pueri Dominumf
their very faces caught for him a sort of quaint unreality from the
memory of those others, the children of the Catacombs, but a little
way below them. Here and there, mingling with the record of merely
natural decease, and sometimes even at these children's graves, were the
signs of violent death or " martyrdom," proofs that some
" had loved not their lives unto the death " in the little red
phial of blood, the palm-branch, the red flowers for their heavenly
" birthday." About one sepulchre in particular, distinguished
in this way, and devoutly arrayed for what, by a bold paradox, was thus
treated as, natalitia a birthday, the peculiar arrangements of the
whole place visibly centered. And it was with a singular novelty of
feeling, like the dawn- ing of a fresh order of experiences upon
him, that, standing beside those mournful relics, snatched in haste
from the common place of execution not many years before, Marius
be- came, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the whole force
of evidence for a certain strange, new hope, defining in its turn some
new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so tragic for
the " Christian superstition." Something of them he had heard
indeed already. They had seemed to him but one savagery the more,
savagery self- provoked, in a cruel and stupid world. And yet
these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards to-day, as if
towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering, in the
remote background. Yes ! the interest, the expression, of the entire
neighbourhood was instinct with it, as with the savour of some
priceless incense. Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching everything
around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all this
visible mortality, death's very self Ah ! lovelier than any fable of old
mythology had ever thought to render it, in the utmost limits i of
fantasy ; and this, in simple candour of feeling about a supposed fact.
Peace! Pax! Pax tecuml the word, the thought was put forth
everywhere, with images of hope, snatched sometimes from that jaded pagan
world which had really afforded men so little of it from first to
last ; the various consoling images it had thrown off, of succour, of
regeneration, of escape from the grave Hercules wrestling with
Death for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts,
the Shepherd with his sheep, the Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon
his shoulders. Yet these imageries after all, it must be confessed,
formed but a slight contribution to the dominant effect of tranquil hope
there a kind of heroic cheerfulness and grateful ex- i pansion of
heart, as with the sense, again, of some real deliverance, which seemed
to deepen the longer one lingered through these strange and awful
passages. A figure, partly pagan in character, yet most frequently
repeated of all these visible parables the figure of one
just escaped from the sea, still clinging as for life to the shore
in surprised joy, together with the inscription beneath it, seemed best
to express the prevailing sentiment of the place. And it was just
as he had puzzled out this inscription / went down to the bottom of
the mountains. The earth with her bars was about me for ever : Yet
hast Thou brought up my life from corruption ! that with no feeling
of suddenness or change Marius found himself emerging again, like a
later mystic traveller through similar dark places " quieted by
hope," into the daylight. They were still within the precincts
of the house, still in possession of that wonderful sing- ing,
although almost in the open country, with a great view of the Campagna
before them, and the hills beyond. The orchard or meadow, through
which their path lay, was already gray with twilight, though the western
sky, where the greater stars were visible, was still afloat in
crimson splendour. The colour of all earthly things seemed repressed by
the contrast, yet with a sense of great richness lingering in their
shadows. At that moment the voice of the singers, a " voice of joy
and health," concen- trated itself with solemn antistrophic
movement, into an evening, or " candle " hymn.
" Hail ! Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured, Who is
the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest : Worthiest art Thou, at all times
to be sung With undefiled tongue." It was like the evening
itself made audible, its hopes and fears, with the stars shining in
the midst of it. Half above, half below the level white mist,
dividing the light from the dark- ness, came now the mistress of this
place, the wealthy Roman matron, left early a widow a,i few years
before, by CECILIO " Confessor and [ Saint." With a certain
antique severity in the I gathering of the long mantle, and with coif
or veil folded decorously below the chin, " gray within
gray," to the mind of Marius her temperate beauty brought
reminiscences of the serious and virile character of the best
female statuary of Greece. Quite foreign, however, to any Greek
statuary was the expression of pathetic care, with which she carried a
little child at rest in her arms. Another, a year or two older,
walked beside, the fingers of one hand within her girdle. She paused for
a moment with a greeting for Cornelius. That visionary scene
was the close, the fit- ting close, of the afternoon's strange
experiences. A few minutes later, passing forward on his way along
the public road, he could have fancied it a dream. The house of Cecilia
grouped itself beside that other curious house he had lately
visited at Tusculum. And what a contrast was presented by the former, in
its suggestions of hopeful industry, of immaculate cleanness, of
responsive affection ! all alike determined by that transporting
discovery of some fact, or series of facts, in which the old puzzle of
life had found its solution. In truth, one of his most
characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing for
escape for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very spaces
of life, it might be, along which he had lingered most pleasantly
for a lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon. It was like
the necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set a
window or open doorway in the back- ground of his picture ; or like a
sick man's longing for northern coolness, and the whisper- ing
willow-trees, amid the breathless evergreen forests of the south. To some
such effect had this visit occurred to him, and through so slight
an accident. Rome and Roman life, just then, were come to seem like some
stifling forest of bronze -work, transformed, as if by malign en-
chantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet with roots in a
deep, down-trodden soil of poignant human susceptibilities. In the
midst of its suffocation, that old longing for escape had been
satisfied by this vision of the church in Cecilia's house, as never
before. It was still, indeed, according to the unchangeable law of
his temperament, to the eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those
experiences appealed the peaceful light and shade, the boys whose
very faces seemed to sing, the virginal beauty of the mother and her children.
But, in his case, what was thus visible constituted a moral or
spiritual influence, of a somewhat exigent and controlling character,
added anew to life, a new element therein, with which, consistently
with his own chosen maxim, he must make terms. The thirst for
every kind of experience, encouraged by a philosophy which taught
that nothing was intrinsically great or small, good or evil, had
ever been at strife in him with a hieratic refinement, in which the boy
-priest survived, prompting always the selection of what was
perfect of its kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of his soul thereto.
This had carried him along in a continuous communion with ideals,
certainly realised in part, either in the conditions of his own being, or
in the actual company about him, above all, in Cornelius. Surely,
in this strange new society he had touched upon for the first time to-day
in this strange family, like "a garden enclosed " was the
fulfilment of all trie preferences, the judgments, of that half-understood
friend, which of late years had been his protection so often amid
the perplexities of life. Here, it might be, was, if not the cure, yet
the solace or anodyne of his great sorrows of that constitutional
sorrowfulness, not peculiar to himself perhaps, but which had made his
life certainly like one long disease of the spirit. Merciful
intention made itself known remedially here, in the mere contact of
the air, like a soft touch upon aching flesh. On the other hand, he was
aware that new responsibilities also might be awakened new and
untried responsibilities a demand for something from him in return. Might
this new vision, like the malignant beauty of pagan Medusa, be
exclusive of any admiring gaze upon anything but itself? At least he
suspected that, after the beholding of it, he could never again be
altogether as he had been before. Faithful to the spirit of his early
Epicurean philosophy and the impulse to surrender himself, in
perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to anything that, as a matter of
fact, attracted or impressed him strongly, Marius informed himself with
much pains concerning the church in Cecilia's house ; inclining at first
to explain the peculi- arities of that place by the establishment there
of the schola or common hall of one of those burial- guilds, which
then covered so much of the unofficial, and, as it might be called,
subterranean enterprise of Roman society. And what he found, thus
looking, literally, for the dead among the living, was the vision
of a natural, a scrupulously natural, love, transform- ing, by some
new gift of insight into the truth of human relationships, and under the
urgency of some new motive by him so far unfathomable, all the
conditions of life. He saw, in all its primitive freshness and amid the lively
facts of its! actual coming into the world, as a reality of experience,
that regenerate type of humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and his
successors, down to the best and purest days of the young Raphael,
working under conditions very friendly to the imagination, were to
conceive as an artistic ideal. He felt there, felt amid the stirring
of some wonderful new hope within himself, the genius, the unique
power of Christianity; in exercise then, as it has been exercised ever
since, in spite of many hindrances, and under the most inopportune
circumstances. Chastity, as he seemed to understand the chastity of men
and women, amid all the conditions, and with the results, proper to
such chastity, is the most beautiful thing in the world and the truest
con- servation of that creative energy by which men and women were
first brought into it. The nature of the family, for which the better
genius of old Rome itself had sincerely cared, of the family and
its appropriate affections all that love of one's kindred by which
obviously one does triumph in some degree over death had never been
so felt before. Here, surely! in its genial warmth, its jealous exclusion
of all that was opposed to it, to its own immaculate naturalness,
in the hedge set around the sacred thing on every side, this development
of the family did but carry forward, and give effect to, the
purposes, the kindness, of nature itself, friendly to man. As if by
way of a due recognition of some im- measurable divine condescension
manifest in a certain historic fact, its influence was felt more
especially at those points which demanded some sacrifice of one's self,
for the weak, for the aged, for little children, and even for the dead.
And % then, for its constant outward token, its significant manner
or index, it issued in a certain debonair grace, and a certain mystic
attractiveness, a courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that
famed Greek " blitheness," or gaiety, or grace, in the handling
of life, had been, after all, an unrivalled success. Contrasting with the
in- curable insipidity even of what was most exquisite in the
higher Roman life, of what was still truest to the primitive soul of
goodness amid its evil, the new creation he now looked on as it
were a picture beyond the craft of any master of old pagan beauty
had indeed all the appropriate freshness of a " bride adorned for
her husband. Things new and old seemed to be coming as if out of some
goodly treasure-house, the brain full of science, the heart rich with
various sentiment, possessing withal this surprising healthfulness,
this reality of heart. You would hardly believe," writes Pliny
to his own wife ! "what a longing for you possesses me. Habit that
we have not been used to be apart adds herein to the primary force
of affection. It is this keeps me awake at night fancying I see you
beside me. That is why my feet take me unconsciously to your
sitting-room at those hours when I was wont to visit you there. That is why I
turn from the door of the empty chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like
an excluded lover." There, is a real idyll from that family
life, the protection of which had been the motive of so large a
part of the religion of the Romans, still surviving among them ; as it
survived also in Aurelius, his disposition and aims, and, spite of
slanderous tongues, in the attained sweetness of his interior life. What
Marius had been per- mitted to see was a realisation of such life
higher still : and with Yes ! with a more effective sanction and
motive than it had ever possessed before, in that fact, or series of
facts, to be ascer- tained by those who would. The central
glory of the reign of the Anto- nines was that society had attained in
it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by cumbrous
effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went straight,
with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and appro- priate
instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touch- ing charity-sermons on
occasions of great public distress ; its charity-children in long file, in
memory of the elder empress Faustina ; its prototype, under patronage of
Aesculapius, of the modern hospital for the sick on the island of
Saint Bartholomew. But what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as if
with the painful cal- culation of old age, the church was doing, almost
without thinking about it, with all the liberal enterprise of youth,
because it was her very being thus to do. " You fail to realise your
own good intentions," she seems to say, to pagan virtue, pagan
kindness. She identified herself with those intentions and advanced them
with an un- paralleled freedom and largeness. The gentle Seneca
would have reverent burial provided even for the dead body of a criminal.
Yet when a certain woman collected for interment the insulted
remains of Nero, the pagan world surmised that she must be a Christian:
only a Christian would have been likely to conceive so chivalrous a
devotion towards mere wretchedness. "We refuse to be witnesses even
of a homicide com- manded by the law," boasts the dainty
consciena of a Christian apologist, " we take no part ii your
cruel sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we hold that
to witness a murder is the same thing as to commit one." And
there was another duty almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau
brought back to the degenerate society of a later age. In an im-
passioned discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle
their own infants ; and there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers,
which gratefully record this proof of natural affection as a thing
then unusual. In this matter too, what a sanction, what a provocative to
natural duty, lay in that image discovered to Augustus by the
Tiburtine Sibyl, amid the aurora of a new age, the image of the Divine
Mother and the Child, just then rising upon the world like the dawn! Christian
belief, again, had presented itself as a great inspirer of chastity.
Chastity, in turn, realised in the whole scope of its conditions,
fortified that rehabilitation of peaceful labour, after the mind, the
pattern, of the workman of Galilee, which was another of the natural
in- stincts of the catholic church, as being indeed the
long-desired initiator of a religion of cheerfulness, as a true lover of
the industry so to term it the labour, the creation, of God. And
this severe yet genial assertion of the ideal of woman, of the family, of
industry, of man's work in life, so close to the truth of nature,
was also, in that charmed hour of the minor " Peace of the
church," realised as an influence tending to beauty, to the
adornment of life and the world. The sword in the world, the right
eye plucked out, the right hand cut off*, the spirit of reproach which
those images express, and of which monasticism is the fulfilment, reflect
one side only of the nature of the divine missionary of the New
Testament. Opposed to, yet blent with, this ascetic or militant
character, is the function of the Good Shepherd, serene, blithe and
debonair, beyond the gentlest shepherd of Greek mythology; of a king
under whom the beatific vision is realised of a reign of peace--
peace of heart among men. Such aspect of the divine character of Christ,
rightly understood, is indeed the final consummation of that bold
and brilliant hopefulness in man's nature, which had sustained him
so far through his immense labours, his immense sorrows, and of which
pagan gaiety in the handling of life, is but a minor achieve- ment.
Sometimes one, sometimes the other, of those two contrasted aspects of
its Founder, have, in different ages and under the urgency of
different human needs, been at work also in the Christian Church.
Certainly, in that brief " Peace of the church " under the
Antonines, the spirit of a pastoral security and happiness seems to
have been largely expanded. There, in the early church of ROMA, was
to be seen, and on sufficiently reasonable grounds, that
satisfaction and serenity on a dispassionate survey of the facts of
life, which all hearts had desired, though for the most part in vain,
contrasting itself for Marius, in particular, very forcibly, with
the imperial philosopher's so heavy burden of un- relieved
melancholy. It was Christianity in its humanity, or even its humanism, in
its generous hopes for man, its common sense and alacrity of
cheerful service, its sympathy with all creatures, its appreciation of
beauty and daylight. The angel of righteousness," says the Shepherd
of Hermas, the most characteristic religious book of that age, its
Pilgrim's Progress [cited by H. P. GRICE] "the angel of
righteousness is modest and delicate and meek and quiet. Take from
thyself grief, for (as Hamlet will one day discover) 'tis the
sister of doubt and ill-temper. Grief is more evil than any other
spirit of evil, and is most dread- ful to the servants of God, and beyond
all spirits destroyeth man. For, as when good news is come to one
in grief, straightway he forgetteth his former grief, and no longer
attendeth to any- thing except the good news which he hath heard,
so do ye, also ! having received a renewal of your soul through the
beholding of these good things. Put on therefore gladness that hath
always favour before God, and is acceptable unto Him, and delight thyself
in it ; for every man that is glad doeth the things that are good,
and thinketh good thoughts, despising grief." Such were the
commonplaces of this new people, among whom so much of what Marius
had valued most in the old world seemed to be under renewal and
further promotion. Some trans- forming spirit was at work to harmonise
con- trasts, to deepen expression a spirit which, in its dealing
with the elements of ancient life, was guided by a wonderful tact of
selection, exclu- sion, juxtaposition, begetting thereby a unique
effect of freshness, a grave yet wholesome beauty, because the world of
sense, the whole outward world was understood to set forth the
veritable unction and royalty of a certain priesthood and kingship
of the soul within, among the preroga- tives of which was a delightful
sense of freedom. The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who,
Epicurean as he was, had his visionary aptitudes, by an inversion of one
of Plato's peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must
have descended, \>j foresight, upon a later age than his own, and
anticipated Chris- tian poetry and art as they came to be under the
influence of Saint Francis of Assisi. But if he dreamed on one of those
nights of the beautiful house of Cecilia, its lights and flowers, of
Cecilia herself moving among the lilies, with an en- hanced grace
as happens sometimes in healthy dreams, it was indeed hardly an
anticipation. He had lighted, by one of the peculiar in- )
tellectual good-fortunes of his life, upon a period when, even more than
in the days of austere ascesis which had preceded and were to
follow it, the church was true for a moment, truer perhaps than she
would ever be again, to that element of profound serenity in the soul of
her Founder, which reflected the eternal goodwill of God to man,
" in whom," according to the oldest version of the angelic
message, " He is well- pleased." For what
Christianity did many centuries afterwards in the way of informing an
art, a poetry, of graver and higher beauty, we may think, than that
of Greek art and poetry at their best, was in truth conformable to the
original tendency of its genius. The genuine capacity of the
catholic church in this direction, discoverable from the first in the New
Testament, was also really at work, in that earlier " Peace,"
under the Antonines the minor "Peace of the church," as we
might call it, in distinction from the final " Peace of the
church," commonly so called, under Constantine. Saint Francis,
with his following in the sphere of poetry and of the arts the
voice of Dante, the hand of Giotto giving visible feature and colour, and
a palpable place among men, to the regenerate race, did but
re-establish a continuity, only suspended in part by those troublous
intervening centuries the "dark ages," properly thus named with
the gracious spirit of the primitive church, as manifested in that
first early springtide of her success. The greater " Peace " of
Constantine, on the other hand, in many ways, does but establish the
ex- clusiveness, the puritanism, the ascetic gloom which, in the
period between Aurelius and the first Christian emperor, characterised a
church under misunderstanding or oppression, driven back, in a
world of tasteless controversy, inwards upon herself. Already, in
the reign of ANTONINO PIO, the time was gone by when men became
Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression, and with
all the disturbing results of such a crisis. At this period the larger
number, perhaps, had been born Christians, had been ever with
peaceful hearts in their " Father's house." That earlier belief
in the speedy coming of judgment and of the end of the world, with the
con- sequences it so naturally involved in the temper of men's minds,
was dying out. Every day the contrast between the church and the world
was becoming less pronounced. And now also, as the church rested
awhile from opposition, that rapid self-development outward from
within, proper to times of peace, was in progress. Antoninus Pius,
it might seem, more truly even than Marcus Aurelius himself, was of that
group of pagan saints for whom Dante, like Augustine, has provided
in his scheme of the house with many mansions. A sincere old Roman
piety had urged his fortunately constituted nature to no mistakes,
no offences against humanity. And of his entire freedom from guile one
reward had been this singular happiness, that under his rule there
was no shedding of Christian blood. To him belonged that half-humorous
placidity of soul, of a kind illustrated later very effectively by
Montaigne, which, starting with an instinct of mere fairness towards
human nature and the world, seems at last actually to qualify its
possessor to be almost the friend of the people of Christ. Amiable, in
its own nature, and full of a reasonable gaiety, Christianity has often
had its advantage of characters such as that. The geni- ality of
Antoninus Pius, like the geniality of the earth itself, had permitted the
church, as being in truth no alien from that old mother earth, to
expand and thrive for a season as by natural process. And that charmed
period under the Antonines, extending to the later years of
the reign of ANTONINO (si veda) (beautiful, brief, chapter of
ecclesiastical history !), contains, as one of its motives of interest,
the earliest development of Christian ritual under the presidence of
the church of Rome. Again as in one of those mystical,
quaint visions of the Shepherd of Hernias, "the aged woman was
become by degrees more and more youthful. And in the third vision she was
quite young, and radiant with beauty : only her hair was that of an
aged woman. And at the last she was joyous, and seated upon a throne
seated upon a throne, because her position is a strong one."
The subterranean worship of the church belonged properly to those years
of her early history in which it was illegal for her to worship at
all. But, hiding herself for awhile as con- flict grew violent, she
resumed, when there was felt to be no more than ordinary risk, her
natural freedom. And the kind of outward prosperity she was
enjoying in those moments of her first " Peace," her modes of
worship now blossoming freely above-ground, was re-inforced by the
deci- sion at this point of a crisis in her internal history.
In the history of the church, as throughout the moral history of
mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either of which it is possible to
maintain two conceptions, under one or the other of which we may
represent to ourselves men's efforts towards a better life
corresponding to those two contrasted aspects, noted above,
as discernible in the picture afforded by the New Testament itself
of the character of Christ. The ideal of asceticism represents moral
effort as essentially a sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of
human nature to another, that it may live the more completely in what
survives of it ; while the ideal of culture represents it as a
harmonious development of all the parts of human nature, in just
proportion to each other. It was to the latter order of ideas that the
church, and' especially the church of Rome in the age of the
Antonines, freely lent herself. In that earlier " Peace " she
had set up for herself the ideal of spiritual development, under the
guidance of an instinct by which, in those serene moments, she was
absolutely true to the peaceful soul of her Founder. " Goodwill to
men," she said, " in whom God Himself is well -pleased ! "
For a little while, at least, there was no forced opposi- tion
between the soul and the body, the world and the spirit, and the grace of
graciousness itself was pre-eminently with the people of Christ. Tact,
good sense, ever the note of a true ortho- doxy, the merciful compromises
of the church, indicative of her imperial vocation in regard to all
the varieties of human kind, with a universal- ity of which the old Roman
pastorship she was superseding is but a prototype, was already
become conspicuous, in spite of a discredited, irritating, vindictive
society, all around her. Against that divine urbanity and
moderation the old error of Montanus we read of dimly, was a
fanatical revolt sour, falsely anti-mun- dane, ever with an air of
ascetic affectation, and a bigoted distaste in particular for all
the peculiar graces of womanhood. By it the desire to please was
understood to come of the author of evil. In this interval of quietness,
it was perhaps inevitable, by the law of reaction, that some such
extravagances of the religious temper should arise. But again the church
of Rome, now becoming every day more and more com- pletely the capital
of the Christian world, checked the nascent Montanism, or puritanism
of the moment, vindicating for all Christian people a cheerful liberty of
heart, against many a narrow group of sectaries, all alike, in
their different ways, accusers of the genial creation of God. With
her full, fresh faith in the Evange/e in a veritable regeneration of the
earth and the body, in the dignity of man's entire personal being
for a season, at least, at that critical period in the development of
Christianity, she was for reason, for common sense, for fairness to
human nature, and generally for what may be called the naturalness of
Christianity. As also for its comely order: she would be "brought
to her king in raiment of needlework." It was by the bishops
of Rome, diligently transforming themselves, in the true catholic sense,
into universal pastors, that the path of what we must call humanism
was thus defined. And then, in this hour of expansion, as if now at
last the catholic church might venture to show her outward lineaments as
they really were, worship "the beauty of holiness," nay!
the elegance of sanctity was developed, with a bold and confident
gladness, the like of which has hardly been the ideal of worship in
any later age. The tables in fact were turned : the prize of a
cheerful temper on a candid survey of life was no longer with the pagan
world. The aesthetic charm of the catholic church, her evoca- tive
power over all that is eloquent and expres- sive in the better mind of
man, her outward comeliness, her dignifying convictions about human
nature : all this, as abundantly realised centuries later by ALIGHIERI (s
veda) and Giotto, by the great medieval church-builders, by the great
ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the masters of sacred music in
the middle age we may see already, in dim anticipation, in those charmed
moments towards the end of the second century. Dissi- pated or
turned aside, partly through the fatal mistake of Marcus Aurelius
himself, for a brief space of time we may discern that influence
clearly predominant there. What might seem harsh as dogma was already
justifying itself as worship ; according to the sound rule : Lex
orandi^ lex credendi Our Creeds are but the brief abstract of our prayer
and song. The wonderful liturgical spirit of the church, her
wholly unparalleled genius for worship, being thus awake, she was rapidly
re-organising both pagan and Jewish elements of ritual, for the
expanding therein of her own new heart of devotion. Like the institutions
of monasticism, like the Gothic style of architecture, the ritual
system of the church, as we see it in historic retrospect, ranks as one
of the great, conjoint, and (so to term them) necessary, products
of human mind. Destined for ages to come, to direct with so deep a
fascination men's religious instincts, it was then already recognisable
as a new and precious fact in the sum of things. What has been on
the whole the method of the church, as " a power of sweetness and
patience, in dealing with matters like pagan art, pagan literature was
even then manifest ; and has the character of the moderation, the divine
moderation of Christ himself. It was only among the ignorant, indeed,
only in the " villages," that Christianity, even in conscious
triumph over paganism, was really betrayed into iconoclasm. In the
final " Peace " of the Church under COSTANTINO, while there was
plenty of destruc- tive fanaticism in the country, the revolution
was accomplished in the larger towns, in a manner more orderly and
discreet in the Roman manner. The faithful were bent less on the
destruction of the old pagan temples than on their conversion to a new
and higher use ; and, with much beautiful furniture ready to hand,
they became Christian sanctuaries. Already, in accordance with such
maturer wisdom, the church of the " Minor Peace " had
adopted many of the graces of pagan feeling and pagan custom ; as being
indeed a living creature, taking up, transforming, accommodating
still more closely to the human heart what of right belonged to it.
In this way an obscure syna- gogue was expanded into the catholic
church. Gathering, from a richer and more varied field of sound
than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies, some notes of which
Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after generations of interrupted
development, formed into the Gregorian music, she was already, as we
have heard, the house of song of a wonderful new music and poesy.
As if in anticipation of the sixteenth century, the church was
becoming! "humanistic," in an earlier, and unimpeachable/
Renaissance. Singing there had been in abund-j ance from the first ;
though often it dared only be of the heart. And it burst forth, when
it might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical music; the
Jewish psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now, gradually,
from Greek into Latin BROKEN LATIN, into ITALIANO, as the ritual
use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the earlier
authorised language of the Church. Through certain surviving
remnants of Greek in the later Latin liturgies, we may still
discern a highly interesting intermediate phase of ritual development,
when the Greek and the Latin were in combination; the poor, surely !
the poor and the children of that liberal Roman church responding already
in their own " vulgar tongue," to an office said in the
original, liturgical Greek. That hymn sung in the early morning, of which
Pliny had heard, was kindling into the service of the Mass.
The Mass, indeed, would appear to have been said continuously from
the Apostolic age. Its details, as one by one they become visible
in later history, have already the character of what is ancient and
venerable. "We are very old, and ye are young ! " they seem to
protest, to those who fail to understand them. Ritual, in fact,
like all other elements of religion, must grow and cannot be made grow by
the same law of development which prevails everywhere else, in the
moral as in the physical world. As regards this special phase of the
religious life, however, such development seems to have been
unusually rapid in the subterranean age which preceded Constantine ; and
in the very first days j of the final triumph of the church the
Mass emerges to general view already substantially complete. "
Wisdom " was dealing, as with the dust of creeds and philosophies,
so also with the dust of outworn religious usage, like the very
spirit of life itself, organising soul and body out of the lime and clay
of the earth. In a generous eclecticism, within the bounds of her
liberty, and as by some providential power within her, she gathers
and serviceably adopts, as in other matters so in ritual, one thing here,
another there, from various sources Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan to adorn
and beautify the greatest act of worship the world has seen. It was thus
the liturgy of the church came to be full of con- solations for the
human soul, and destined, surely ! one day, under the sanction of so many
ages of human experience, to take exclusive possession of the
religious consciousness. TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM VENEREMUR
CERNUI: ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM NOVO CEDAT RITUI. Wisdom
hath builded herselt a house : she hath mingled hex wine : she hath also
prepared for herself a table." The more highly favoured ages
of imaginative art present instances of the summing up of an entire
world of complex associations under some single form, like the Zeus of
Olympia, or the series of frescoes which commemorate The Acts of
Saint Francis, at Assisi, or like the play of Hamlet or Faust. It was not
in an image, or series of images, yet still in a sort of dramatic
action, and with the unity of a single appeal to eye and ear, that Marius
about this time found all his new impressions set forth, regarding
what he had already recognised, intellectually, as for him at least
the most beautiful thing in the world. To understand the
influence upon him of what follows the reader must remember that it
was an experience which came amid a deep sense of vacuity in life. The
fairest products of the earth seemed to be dropping to pieces, as
if in men's very hands, around him. How real was their sorrow, and
his ! " His observation of life " had come to be like the
constant telling of a sorrowful rosary, day after day ; till, as if
taking infection from the cloudy sorrow of the mind, the eye also, the
very senses, were grown faint and sick. And now it happened as with
the actual morning on which he found himself a spectator of this new
thing. The long winter had been a season of unvarying sullenness.
At last, on this day he awoke with a sharp flash of lightning in
the earliest twilight : in a little while the heavy rain had filtered the
air: the clear light was abroad ; and, as though the spring had set
in with a sudden leap in the heart of things, the whole scene around him
lay like some untarnished picture beneath a sky of delicate blue.
Under the spell of his late depression, Marius had suddenly determined to
leave Rome for a while. But desiring first to advertise CORNELIO of his
movements, and failing to find him in his lodgings, he had
ventured, still early in the day, to seek him in the Cecilian
villa. Passing through its silent and empty court-yard he loitered for a
moment, to admire. Under the clear but immature light of winter
morning after a storm, all the details of form and colour in the old
marbles were dis- tinctly visible, and with a kind of severity or
sadness so it struck him amid their beauty : in them, and in all other
details of the scene the cypresses, the bunches of pale daffodils
in the grass, the curves of the purple hills of Tusculum, with the
drifts of virgin snow still lying in their hollows. The
little open door, through which he passed from the court-yard, admitted
him into what was plainly the vast Lararium^ or domestic sanctuary,
of the Cecilian family, transformed in many particulars, but still richly
decorated, and retaining much of its ancient furniture in metal-
work and costly stone. The peculiar half-light of dawn seemed to be
lingering beyond its hour upon the solemn marble walls ; and here,
though at that moment in absolute silence, a great company of people was
assembled. In that brief period of peace, during which the church
emerged for awhile from her jealously- guarded subterranean life, the
rigour of an earlier rule of exclusion had been relaxed. And so it
came to pass that, on this morning Marius saw for the first time the
wonderful spectacle - wonderful, especially, in its evidential
power over himself, over his own thoughts of those who
believe. There were noticeable, among those present, great
varieties of rank, of age, of personal type. The Roman ingenuus^ with the
white toga and gold ring, stood side by side with his slave ; and
the air of the whole company was, above all, a grave one, an air of
recollection. Coming thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so
entirely united, in a silence so profound, for purposes unknown to him, MARIO
feels for a moment as if he had stumbled by chance upon some great
conspiracy. Yet that could scarcely be, for the peoplehere collected
might have figured as the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new
world, from the very face of which dis- content had passed away.
Corresponding to the variety of human type there present, was the
various expression of every form of human sorrow assuaged. What desire,
what fulfilment of desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features
of these ranks of aged men and women of humble condition ? Those
young men, bent down so j discreetly on the details of their sacred
service, had faced life and were glad, by some science, or light of
knowledge they had, to which there had certainly been no parallel in the
older world. Was some credible message from beyond " the
flaming rampart of the world " a message of hope, regarding the
place of men's souls and theirinterest in the sum of things already
moulding anew their very bodies, and looks, and voices, now and here ? At
least, there was a cleansing and kindling flame at work in them,
which seemed to make everything else Marius had ever known look
comparatively vulgar and mean. There were the children, above all
troops of children reminding him of those pathetic children's graves,
like cradles or garden-beds, he had noticed in his first visit to these
places; and they more than satisfied the odd curiosity he had then
conceived about them, wondering in what quaintly expressive forms
they might come forth into the daylight, if awakened from sleep. Children
of the Cata- combs, some but "a span long," with features
not so much beautiful as heroic (that world of new, refining sentiment
having set its seal even on phildhood), they retained certainly no stain
or trace of anything subterranean this morning, in the alacrity of
their worship as ready as if they had been at play stretching forth their
hands, crying, chanting in a resonant voice, and with boldly
upturned faces, Christe Eleison ! For the silence silence, amid
those lights of early morning to which Marius had always been
constitutionally impressible, as having in them a certain reproachful
austerity was broken suddenly by resounding cries of Kyrie Eleison
! Christe Eleison! repeated alternately, again and again, until the
bishop, rising from his chair, made sign that this prayer should cease.
But the voices burst out once more presently, in richer and more
varied melody, though still of an antiphonal character ; the men, the
women and children, the deacons, the people, answering one another,
somewhat after the manner of a Greek chorus. But again with what a
novelty of poetic accent ; what a genuine expansion of heart ; what
profound intimations for the intellect, as the meaning of the words grew
upon him! Cum grandi affectu et compunctione dicatur says an
ancient eucharistic order ; and certainly, the mystic tone of this
praying and singing was one with the expression of deliverance, of
grate- ful assurance and sincerity, upon the faces of those
assembled. As if some searching correc- tion, a regeneration of the body
by the spirit, \ had begun, and was already gone a great way, the
countenances of men, women, and children alike had a brightness on them
which he could fancy reflected upon himself an amenity, a mystic
amiability and unction, which found its way most readily of all to the
hearts of children themselves. The religious poetry of those Hebrew
psalms Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: Dixit Dominus Domino meo^ sede a
dextris meis was certainly in marvellous accord with the lyrical
instinct of his own character. Those august hymns, he thought, must
thereafter ever remain by him as among the well-tested powers in
things to soothe and fortify the soul. One could never grow tired of them
! In the old pagan worship there had been little to call the
understanding into play. Here, on the other hand, the utterance, the
eloquence, the music of worship conveyed, as Marius readily
understood, a fact or series of facts, for intellectual reception. That
became evident, more especially, in those lessons, or sacred
readings, which, like the singing, in broken vernacular Latin, occurred at
certain intervals, amid the silence of the assembly. There were
readings, again with bursts of chanted invocation between for fuller
light on a difficult path, in which many a vagrant voice of human
philo- sophy, haunting men's minds from of old, recurred with
clearer accent than had ever belonged to it before, as if lifted, above
its first intention, into the harmonies of some supreme system of
knowledge or doctrine, at length complete. And last of all came a
narrative which, with a thousand tender memories, every one
appeared to know by heart, displaying, in all the vividness of a picture
for the eye, the mournful figure of him towards whom this whole act
of worship still consistently turned a figure which seemed to have
absorbed, like some rich tincture in his garment, all that was
deep-felt and impassioned in the experiences of the past. It
was the anniversary of his birth as a little child they celebrated
to-day. Astiterunt reges terra : so the Gradual, the " Song of
Degrees," proceeded, the young men on the steps of the altar
responding in deep, clear, antiphon or chorus Astiterunt
reges terrae Adversus sanctum puerum tuum, Jesum :
Nunc, Domine, da servis tuis loqui verbum tuum Et signa
fieri, per nomen sancti pueri Jesu. And the proper action of the
rite itself, like a half-opened book to be read by the duly initi-
ated mind took up those suggestions, and carried them forward into the
present, as having refer- ence to a power still efficacious, still after
some mystic sense even now in action among the people there
assembled. The entire office, in- deed, with its interchange of lessons,
hymns, prayer, silence, was itself like a single piece j of highly
composite, dramatic music ; a " song j of degrees," rising
steadily to a climax. Not- | withstanding the absence of any central image
visible to the eye, the entire ceremonial process, / like the place in
which it was enacted, was weighty with symbolic significance, seemed
to express a single leading motive. The mystery, if such in fact it
was, centered indeed in the actions of one visible person, distinguished
among the assistants, who stood ranged in semicircle around him, by the
extreme fineness of his white vestments, and the pointed cap with
the golden ornaments upon his head. Nor had Marius ever seen the
pontifical character, as he conceived it sicut unguentum in capite^
descendens in oram vestimenti so fully real- ised, as in the expression,
the manner and voice, of this novel pontiff, as he took his seat on
the white chair placed for him by the young men, and received his
long staff into his hand, or moved his hands hands which seemed
endowed in very deed with some mysterious power at the Lavabo, or
at the various benedictions, or to bless certain objects on the table before
him, chanting in cadence of a grave sweetness the leading parts of
the rite. What profound unction and mysticity ! The solemn
character of the singing was at its height when he opened his lips.
Like some new sort of rhapsodos, it was for the moment as if he alone
possessed the words of the office, and they flowed anew from some
permanent source of inspiration within him. The table or altar at which
he presided, below a canopy on delicate spiral columns, was in fact
the tomb of a youthful " witness," of the family of the Cecilii,
who had shed his blood not many years before, and whose relics were
still in this place. It was for his sake the bishop put his lips so
often to the surface before him ; the regretful memory of that death
entwining itself, though not without certain notes of triumph, as a
matter of special inward significance, throughout a service, which was,
before all else, from first to last, a commemoration of the
dead. A sacrifice also, a sacrifice, it might seem, like the
most primitive, the most natural and enduringly significant of old pagan
sacrifices, of the simplest fruits of the earth. And in con- nexion
with this circumstance again, as in the actual stones of the building so
in the rite itself, what Marius observed was not so much new matter
as a new spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many
observances not witnessed for the first time to-day. Men and women
came to the altar successively, in perfect order, and deposited below the
lattice-work 01 pierced white marble, their baskets of wheat and
grapes, incense, oil for the sanctuary lamps ; bread and wine especially
pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan vineyards.
There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the
earth's gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself, now in some way
re- deemed at last, of all that we can touch or see, in the midst
of a jaded world that had lost the true sense of such things, and in
strong contrast to the wise emperor's renunciant and impassive
attitude towards them. Certain portions of that bread and wine were taken
into the bishop's hands ; and thereafter, with an increasing mysti-
city and effusion the rite proceeded. Still in a strain of inspired
supplication, the antiphonal singing developed, from this point, into a
kind of dialogue between the chief minister and the whole assisting
company SURSUM CORDA! HABEMUS AD DOMINUM. GRATIAS AGAMUS DOMINO
DEO NOSTRO! It might have been thought the business, the duty or
service of young men more particularly, as they stood there in long
ranks, and in severe and simple vesture of the purest white a
service in which they would seem to be flying for refuge, as with their
precious, their treacher- ous and critical youth in their hands, to
one- Yes ! one like themselves, who yet claimed their worship, a
worship, above all, in the way of ANTONINO (si veda), in the way of
imitation. Adoramus te Christe^ quia per crucem tuam redemisti mundum
! they cry together. So deep is the emotion that at moments it
seems to Marius as if some there present apprehend that prayer
prevails, that the very object of this pathetic crying him- self
draws near. From the first there had been the sense, an increasing
assurance, of one coming : actually with them now, according to the
oft- repeated affirmation or petition, e Dominus vobis- cum ! Some
at least were quite sure of it ; and the confidence of this remnant fired
the hearts, and gave meaning to the bold, ecstatic worship, of all
the rest about them. Prompted especially by the suggestions
of that mysterious old Jewish psalmody, so new to him lesson and
hymn and catching there- with a portion of the enthusiasm of those
beside him, Marius could discern dimly, behind the solemn
recitation which now followed, at once a narrative and a prayer, the most
touching image truly that had ever come within the scope of his
mental or physical gaze. It was the image of a young man giving up
voluntarily, one by one, for the greatest of ends, the greatest
gifts ; actually parting with himself, above all, with the serenity, the
divine serenity, of his own soul ; yet from the midst of his
desolation crying out upon the greatness of his success, as if
foreseeing this very worship. 1 As centre of the supposed facts which for
these people were become so constraining a motive of hopefulness,
of activity, that image seemed to display itself with an overwhelming
claim on human grati- tude. What Saint Lewis of France discerned,
and found so irresistibly touching, across the dimness of many centuries,
as a painful thing done for love of him by one he had never seen,
was to them almost as a thing of yesterday ; and their hearts were whole
with it. It had the force, among their interests, of an almost
recent event in the career of one whom their fathers' fathers might
have known. From memories so sublime, yet so close at hand, had the
narra- tive descended in which these acts of worship centered ;
though again the names of some more recently dead were mingled in it. And
it seemed as if the very dead were aware; to be stirring beneath the
slabs of the sepulchres which lay so near, that they might
associate themselves to this enthusiasm to this exalted worship of
Jesus. One by one, at last, the faithful approach to receive
from the chief minister morsels of the great, white, wheaten cake, he had
taken into his hands Perducat vos ad vitarn ceternam ! he prays,
half-silently, as they depart again, after 1 Psalm xxii. 22-31. discreet
embraces. The Eucharist of those early days was, even more entirely than
at any later or happier time, an act of thanksgiving ; and while
the remnants of the feast are borne away for the reception of the sick,
the sustained gladness of the rite reaches its highest point in the
sing- ing of a hymn : a hymn like the spontaneous product of two
opposed militant companies, contending accordantly together,
heightening, accumulating, their witness, provoking one an- other's
worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry. Ite ! Missa esf ! cried the
young deacons : and MARIO departs from that strange scene along
with the rest. What was it ? Was it this made the way of Cornelius so
pleasant through the world ? As for Marius himself, the natural
soul of worship in him had at last been satisfied as never before. He
felt, as he left that place, that he must hereafter experience
often a longing memory, a kind of thirst, for all this, over again. And
it seemed moreover to define what he must require of the powers,
whatsoever they might be, that had brought him into the world at all, to
make him not unhappy in it. In cheerfulness is the success of our
studies, says Pliny studia hilaritate proveniunt. It was still the
habit of MARIO, encouraged by his experi- ence that sleep is not only a
sedative but the best of stimulants, to seize the morning hours for
creation, making profit when he might of the wholesome serenity which
followed a dreamless night. The morning for creation," he
would say; "the afternoon for the perfecting labour of the
file ; the evening for reception the reception of matter from without
one, of other men's words and thoughts matter for our own dreams,
or the merely mechanic exercise of the brain, brooding thereon silently,
in its dark chambers." To leave home early in the day was therefore
a rare thing for him. He was induced so to do on the occasion of a
visit to ROMA of the famous writer LUCIANO, whom he had been bidden
to meet. The breakfast over, he walked away with the learned guest,
having offered to be his guide to the lecture-room of a well-known
Greek rhetorician and expositor of the Stoic philosophy, a teacher
then much in fashion among the studious youth of Rome. On reaching
the place, however, they found the doors closed, with a slip of
writing attached, which proclaimed " a holiday " ; and the
morning being a fine one, they walked further, along the Appian
Way. Mortality, with which the Queen of Ways in reality the
favourite cemetery of Rome was so closely crowded, in every imaginable
form of sepulchre, from the tiniest baby-house, to the massive
monument out of which the Middle Age would adapt a fortress-tower, might
seem, on a morning like this, to be " smiling through
tears." The flower-stalls just beyond the city gates pre-
sented to view an array of posies and garlands, fresh enough for a
wedding. At one and another of them groups of persons, gravely clad,
were making their bargains before starting for some perhaps distant
spot on the highway, to keep a dies rosationis, this being the time of
roses, at the grave of a deceased relation. Here and there, a
funeral procession was slowly on its way, in weird contrast to the gaiety
of the hour. The two companions, of course, read the epitaphs
as they strolled along. In one, remind- ing them of the poet's Si lacrima
prosunt, visis te ostende videri ! a woman prayed that her lost
husband might visit her dreams. Their charac- teristic note, indeed, was
an imploring cry, still to be sought after by the living. "While
I live," such was the promise of a lover to his dead mistress,
" you will receive this homage : after my death, who can tell ?
" post mortem nescio. " If ghosts, my sons, do feel anything
after death, my sorrow will be lessened by your frequent coming to
me here ! " " This is a privileged tomb ; to my family and descendants
has been conceded the right of visiting this place as often as they
please." -"This is an eternal habita- tion ; here lie I ; here
I shall lie for ever." " Reader ! if you doubt that the soul
survives, make your oblation and a prayer for me; and you shall
understand ! " The elder of the two readers, certainly,
was little affected by those pathetic suggestions. It was long ago
that after visiting the banks of the Padus, where he had sought in vain
for the poplars (sisters of Phaethon erewhile) whose tears became
amber, he had once for all arranged for himself a view of the world
exclusive of all reference to what might lie beyond its "
flaming barriers." And at the age of sixty he had no
misgivings. His elegant and self-complacent but far fromunamiable
scepticism, long since brought to perfection, never failed him. It
sur- rounded him, as some are surrounded by a magic ring of fine
aristocratic manners, with " a ram- part," through which he
himself never broke, nor permitted any thing or person to break
upon him. Gay, animated, content with his old age as it was, the
aged student still took a lively interest in studious youth. Could Marius
inform him of any such, now known to him in Rome ? What did the
young men learn, just then? and how? In answer, Marius became
fluent concerning the promise of one young student, the son, as it
presently appeared, of parents of whom Lucian himself knew something: and
soon afterwards the lad was seen coming along briskly a lad with
gait and figure well enough expressive of the sane mind in the healthy
body, though a little slim and worn of feature, and with a pair of
eyes expressly designed, it might seem, for fine glancings at the stars.
At the sight of Marius he paused suddenly, and with a modest blush
on recognising his companion, who straightway took with the youth, so
prettily enthusiastic, the freedom of an old friend. In a few
moments the three were seated together, immediately above the fragrant
borders of a rose-farm, on the marble bench of one of the exhedra
for the use of foot-passengers at the roadside, from which they could
overlook the grand, earnest prospect of the Campagna^ and enjoy the
air. Fancying that the lad's plainly written enthusiasm had induced in
the elder speaker somewhat more fervour than was usual with him,
Marius listened to the conversation which follows. Ah ! ERMOTIMO!
Hurrying to lecture ! if I may judge by your pace, and that volume
in your hand. You were thinking hard as you came along, moving your lips
and waving your arms. Some fine speech you were pondering, some
knotty question, some viewy doctrine not to be idle for a moment, to be
making progress in philosophy, even on your way to the schools.
To-day, however, you need go no further. We read a notice at the schools
that there would be no lecture. Stay therefore, and talk awhile
with us. -With pleasure, Lucian. Yes ! I was rumin- ating
yesterday's conference. One must not lose a moment. Life is short and art
is long ! And it was of the art of medicine, that was first said a
thing so much easier than divine philo- sophy, to which one can hardly
attain in a life- time, unless one be ever wakeful, ever on the
watch. And here the hazard is no little one : By the attainment of a true
philosophy to attain happiness ; or, having missed both, to perish,
as one of the vulgar herd. The prize is a great one,
Hermotimus ! and you must needs be near it, after these months of
toil, and with that scholarly pallor of yours. Unless, indeed, you have
already laid hold upon it, and kept us in the dark. How could
that be, LUCIANO? Happiness, as ESIODO says, abides very far hence; and
the way to it is long and steep and rough. I see myself still at
the beginning of my journey ; still but at the mountain's foot. I am
trying with all my might to get forward. What I need is a hand,
stretched out to help me. And is not the master sufficient for that
? Could he not, like GIONE in OMERO, let down to you, from that
high place, a golden cord, to draw you up thither, to himself and to
that Happiness, to which he ascended so long ago ? The very
point, Lucian ! Had it depended on him I should long ago have been caught
up. 'Tis I, am wanting. Well ! keep your eye fixed on the
journey's end, and that happiness there above, with con- fidence in
his goodwill. Ah ! there are many who start cheerfully on the
journey and proceed a certain distance, but lose heart when they light on
the obstacles of the way. Only, those who endure to the end do come
to the mountain's top, and thereafter live in Happiness : live a
wonderful manner of life, seeing all other people from that great
height no bigger than tiny ants. What little fellows you make of us
less than the pygmies down in the dust here. Well ! we, * the
vulgar herd,' as we creep along, will not forget you in our prayers, when
you are seated up there above the clouds, whither you have been so
long hastening. But tell me, Hermotimus ! when do you expect to
arrive there ? Ah ! that I know not. In twenty
years, perhaps, I shall be really on the summit. A great while ! you
think. But then, again, the prize I contend for is a great one.
Perhaps ! But as to those twenty years that you will live so long.
Has the master assured you of that ? Is he a prophet as well as a
philosopher? For I suppose you would not endure all this, upon a mere
chance toiling day and night, though it might happen that just ere
the last step, Destiny seized you by the foot and plucked you thence,
with your hope still unfulfilled. Hence, with these
ill-omened words, Lucian ! Were I to survive but for a day, I
should be happy, having once attained wisdom. Howf Satisfied with a
single day, after all those labours ? Yes ! one blessed
moment were enough ! But again, as you have never been, how
know you that happiness is to be had up there, at all the happiness that
is to make all this worth while ? I believe what the master
tells me. Of a certainty he knows, being now far above all
others. And what was it he told you about it ? Is it riches,
or glory, or some indescribable pleasure ? Hush ! my friend !
All those are nothing in comparison of the life there. What,
then, shall those who come to the end of this discipline what excellent
thing shall they receive, if not these ? Wisdom, the absolute
goodness and the absolute beauty, with the sure and certain
knowledge of all things how they are. Riches and glory and pleasure
whatsoever belongs to the body they have cast from them : stripped
bare of all that, they mount up, even as Hercules, consumed in the fire,
became a god. He too cast aside all that he had of his earthly
mother, and bearing with him the divine element, pure and undefiled,
winged his way to heaven from the discerning flame. Even so do
they, detached from all that others prize, by the burning fire of a true
philosophy, ascend to the highest degree of happiness.
Strange ! And do they never come down again from the heights to
help those whom they left below ? Must they, when they be once come
thither, there remain for ever, laughing, as you say, at what other men
prize ? More than that ! They whose initiation is entire are
subject no longer to anger, fear, desire, regret. Nay ! They scarcely
feel at all. -Well ! as you have leisure to-day, why not tell
an old friend in what way you first started on your philosophic journey ?
For, if I might, I should like to join company with you from this
very day. If you be really willing, Lucian ! you will learn
in no long time your advantage over all other people. They will seem
but as children, so far above them will be your thoughts.
Well ! Be you my guide ! It is but fair. But tell me Do you allow
learners to contra- dict, if anything is said which they don't
think right ? No, indeed ! Still, if you wish, oppose your
questions. In that way you will learn more easily. Let me
know, then Is there one only way which leads to a true philosophy
your own way the way of the Stoics : or is it true, as I have
heard, that there are many ways of approaching it ? -Yes !
Many ways ! There are the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, and those who
call them- selves after Plato : there are the enthusiasts for
Diogenes, and Antisthenes, and the followers of Pythagoras, besides
others. It was true, then. But again, is what they say the
same or different ? Very different. Yet the truth, I conceive, would
be one and the same, from all of them. Answer me then In what, or
in whom, did you confide when you first betook yourself to
philosophy, and seeing so many doors open to you, passed them all by
and went in to the Stoics, as if there alone lay the way of truth ? What
token had you ? Forget, please, all you are to-day- half-way, or
more, on the philosophic journey : answer me as you would have done then,
a mere outsider as I am now. Willingly ! It was there the great
ma- jority went ! 'Twas by that I judged it to be the better
way. A majority how much greater than L’ORTO, the ACCADEMIA, the LIZIO
f You, doubtless, counted them respectively, as with the votes in a
scrutiny. No ! But this was not my only motive. I heard it said by
every one that the L’ORTO are soft and voluptuous, il LIZIO ava- ricious
and quarrelsome, and ACCADEMIA’s followers puffed up with pride. But of IL
PORTICO, not a few pronounced that they are true men, that they
knew everything, that theirs was the royal road, the one road, to wealth,
to wisdom, to all that can be desired. Of course those who said this
were not themselves Stoics : you would not have believed them still
less their opponents. They were the vulgar, therefore. True !
But you must know that I did not trust to others exclusively. I trusted
also to myself to what I saw. I saw the Stoics going through the
world after a seemly manner, neatly clad, never in excess, always
collected, ever faithful to the mean which all pronounce ' golden.
You are trying an experiment on me. You would fain see how far you
can mislead me as to your real ground. The kind of pro- bation you
describe is applicable, indeed, to works of art, which are rightly judged
by their appearance to the eye. There is something in the comely
form, the graceful drapery, which tells surely of the hand of Pheidias or
Alcamenes. But if LA FILOSOFIA is to be judged by outward
appearances, what would become of the blind man, for instance, unable to
observe the attire and gait of your friends the Stoics ? It was not
of the blind I was thinking. Yet there must needs be some common
criterion in a matter so important to all. Put the blind, if you will,
beyond the privileges of philosophy ; though they perhaps need that
inward vision more than all others. But can those who are not blind, be
they as keen-sighted as you will, collect a single fact of mind from
a man's attire, from anything outward ? Understand me ! You attached
yourself to these men did you not ? because of a certain love you
had for the mind in them, the thoughts they possessed desiring the mind
in you to be im- proved thereby ? Assuredly ! How,
then, did you find it possible, by the sort of signs you just now spoke
of, to distinguish the true philosopher from the false ? Matters of
that kind are not wont so to reveal themselves. They are but hidden
mysteries, hardly to be guessed at through the words and acts
which may in some sort be conformable to them. You, however, it
would seem, can look straight into the heart in men's bosoms, and
acquaint yourself with what really passes there. You are
making sport of me, Lucian ! In truth, it was with God's help I made my
choice, and I don't repent it. And still you refuse to tell
me, to save me from perishing in that ' vulgar herd.' Because
nothing I can tell you would satisfy you. You are mistaken, my
friend ! But since you deliberately conceal the thing, grudging me,
as I suppose, that true philosophy which would make me equal to you, I
will try, if it may be, to find out for myself the exact criterion in these
matters how to make a perfectly safe choice. And, do you listen.
I will ; there may be something worth knowing in what you will
say. Well ! only don't laugh if I seem a little fumbling in
my efforts. The fault is yours, in refusing to share your lights with
me. Let Philosophy, then, be like a city --a city whose citizens
within it are a happy people, as your master would tell you, having
lately come thence, as we suppose. All the virtues are theirs, and
they are little less than gods. Those acts of violence which happen among
us are not to be seen in their streets. They live together in one
mind, very seemly ; the things which beyond everything else cause men to
contend against each other, having no place upon them. Gold and
silver, pleasure, vainglory, they have long since banished, as being
unprofitable to the commonwealth ; and their life is an unbroken
calm, in liberty, equality, an equal happiness. And is it not
reasonable that all men should desire to be of a city such as that, and
take no account of the length and difficulty of the way thither, so
only they may one day become its freemen ? It might well be
the business of life: leaving all else, forgetting one's native
country here, unmoved by the tears, the restraining hands, of
parents or children, if one had them only bidding them follow the same
road; and if they would not or could not, shaking them off, leaving
one's very garment in their hands if they took hold on us, to start off
straightway for that happy place ! For there is no fear, I suppose,
of being shut out if one came thither naked. I remember, indeed, long ago
an aged man related to me how things passed there, offering himself
to be my leader, and enrol me on my arrival in the number of the
citizens. I was but fifteen certainly very foolish: and it may be
that I was then actually within the suburbs, or at the very gates, of the
city. Well, this aged man told me, among other things, that all the
citizens were wayfarers from afar. Among them were barbarians and slaves,
poor men aye ! and cripples all indeed who truly desired that
citizenship. For the only legal conditions of enrolment were not wealth,
nor bodily beauty, nor noble ancestry things not named among them
but intelligence, and the desire for moral beauty, and earnest
labour. The last comer, thus qualified, was made equal to the rest
: master and slave, patrician, plebe- ian, were words they had not in
that blissful place. And believe me, if that blissful, that
beautiful place, were set on a hill visible to all the world, I should
long ago have journeyed thither. But, as you say, it is far off: and
one must needs find out for oneself the road to it, and the best
possible guide. And I find a multi- tude of guides, who press on me their
services, and protest, all alike, that they have themselves come
thence. Only, the roads they propose are many, and towards adverse
quarters. And one of them is steep and stony, and through the
beating sun ; and the other is through green meadows, and under grateful
shade, and by many a fountain of water. But howsoever the road may
be, at each one of them stands a credible guide ; he puts out his hand
and would have you come his way. All other ways are wrong, all
other guides false. Hence my diffi- culty ! The number and variety of the
ways ! For you know, There is but one road that leads to
Corinth. Well ! If you go the whole round, you will find no
better guides than those. If you wish to get to Corinth, you will follow
the traces of Zeno and Chrysippus. It is impossible
otherwise. Yes ! The old, familiar language ! Were one of
Plato's fellow-pilgrims here, or a follower of Epicurus or fifty others
each would tell me that I should never get to Corinth except in his
company. One must therefore credit all alike, which would be absurd ; or,
what is far safer, distrust all alike, until one has discovered the
truth. Suppose now, that, being as I am, ignorant which of all
philosophers is really in possession of truth, I choose your sect,
relying on yourself my friend, indeed, yet still acquainted only with the
way of the Stoics ; and that then some divine power brought Plato,
and Aristotle, and Pythagoras, and the others, back to life again. Well !
They would come round about me, and put me on my trial for my
presumption, and say : c In whom was it you confided when you preferred
Zeno and Chrysippus to me? and me? masters of far more venerable
age than those, who are but of yesterday ; and though you have never
held any discussion with us, nor made trial of our doctrine ? It is
not thus that the law would have judges do listen to one party and
refuse to let the other speak for himself. If judges act thus,
there may be an appeal to another tribunal.' What should I answer? Would
it be enough to say : ' I trusted my friend Her- motimus ? ' c We
know not Hermotimus, nor he us/ they would tell me ; adding, with a
smile, 'your friend thinks he may believe all our adversaries say of us
whether in ignorance or in malice. Yet if he were umpire in the
games, and if he happened to see one of our wrestlers, by way of a
preliminary exercise, knock to pieces an antagonist of mere empty
air, he would not thereupon pronounce him a victor. Well ! don't
let your friend Hermotimus sup- pose, in like manner, that his teachers
have really prevailed over us in those battles of theirs, fought
with our mere shadows. That, again, were to be like children, lightly
overthrowing their own card-castles ; or like boy-archers, who cry
out when they hit the target of straw. The Persian and Scythian bowmen,
as they speed along, can pierce a bird on the wing.' Let us
leave Plato and the others at rest. It is not for me to contend against
them. Let us rather search out together if the truth of LA
FILOSOFIA be as I say. Why summon the athletes, and archers from Persia
? Yes ! let them go, if you think them in the way. And now do
you speak ! You really look as if you had something wonderful to
deliver. -Well then, Lucian ! to me it seems quite possible
for one who has learned the doctrines of the Stoics only, to attain from
those a knowledge of the truth, without proceeding to inquire into all
the various tenets of the others. Look at the question in this way. If
one told you that twice two make four, would it be necessary for
you to go the whole round of the arithme- ticians, to see whether any one
of them will say that twice two make five, or seven ? Would you not
see at once that the man tells the truth? At once. Why then do you
find it impossible that one who has fallen in with the Stoics only,
in their enunciation of what is true, should adhere to them, and
seek after no others ; assured that four could never be five, even if
fifty Platos, fifty Aristotles said so ? f-You are beside the
point, Hermotimus ! You are likening open questions to principles
universally received. Have you ever met any one who said that twice two
make five, or seven ? No ! only a madman would say
that. And have you ever met, on the other hand, a Stoic and an
Epicurean who were agreed upon the beginning and the end, the
principle and the final cause, of things ? Never ! Then your
parallel is false. We are inquiring to which of the sects philosophic
truth belongs, and you seize on it by anticipation, and assign it
to IL PORTICO, alleging, what is by no means clear, that itis they for
whom twice two make four. But the Epicureans, or the
Platonists, might say that it is they, in truth, who make two and
two equal four, while you make them five or seven. Is it not so, when you
think virtue the only good, and the Epicureans plea- sure; when you
hold all things to be material^ while the Platonists admit something
immaterial? As I said, you resolve offhand, in favour of the Stoics,
the very point which needs a critical decision. If it is clear beforehand
that the Stoics alone make two and two equal four, then the
others must hold their peace. But so long as that is the very point of
debate, we must listen to all sects alike, or be well- assured that
we shall seem but partial in our judgment. I think, Lucian ! that
you do not alto- gether understand my meaning. To make it clear,
then, let us suppose that two men had entered a temple, of Aesculapius,
say ! or Bacchus : and that afterwards one of the sacred vessels is
found to be missing. And the two men must be searched to see which of
them has hidden it under his garment. For it is certainly in the
possession of one or the other of them. Well ! if it be found on the
first there will be no need to search the second ; if it is not
found on the first, then the other must have it ; and again, there
will be no need to search him. Yes ! So let it be. And
we too, Lucian ! if we have found the holy vessel in possession of the
Stoics, shall no longer have need to search other philosophers,
having attained that we were seeking. Why trouble ourselves further
? No need, if something had indeed been found, and you knew
it to be that lost thing : if, at the least, you could recognise the
sacred object when you saw it. But truly, as the matter now stands,
not two persons only have entered the temple, one or the other of
whom must needs have taken the golden cup, but a whole crowd of
persons. And then, it is not clear what the lost object really is cup,
or flagon, or diadem ; for one of the priests avers this, another
that ; they are not even in agree- ment as to its material : some will
have it to be of brass, others of silver, or gold. It thus becomes
necessary to search the garments of all persons who have entered the
temple, if the lost vessel is to be recovered. And if you find a
golden cup on the first of them, it will still be necessary to proceed in
searching the garments of the others ; for it is not certain that this
cup really belonged to the temple. Might there not be many such
golden vessels ? No ! we must go on to every one of them, placing all
that we find in the midst together, and then make our guess which
of all those things may fairly be supposed to be the property of the god.
For, again, this circumstance adds greatly to our difficulty, that
without exception every one searched is found to have something upon
him cup, or flagon, or diadem, of brass, of silver, of gold : and still,
all the while, it is not ascer- tained which of all these is the sacred
thing. And you must still hesitate to pronounce any one of them
guilty of the sacrilege those objects may be their own lawful property:
one cause of all this obscurity being, as I think, that there was
no inscription on the lost cup, if cup it was. Had the name of the god,
or even that of the donor, been upon it, at least we should have
had less trouble, and having detected the inscription, should have ceased
to trouble any one else by our search. I have nothing to reply
to that. Hardly anything plausible. So that if we wish to
find who it is has the sacred vessel, or who will be our best guide to
Corinth, we must needs proceed to every one and examinehim with the
utmost care, stripping off his garment and considering him closely.
Scarcely, even so, shall we come at the truth. And if we are to
have a credible adviser regarding this question of philosophy which of
all philosophies one ought to follow he alone who is acquainted with
the dicta of every one of them can be such a guide : all others
must be inadequate. I would give no credence to them if they lacked
information as to one only. If somebody introduced a fair person
and told us he was the fairest of all men, we should not believe that,
unless we knew that he had seen all the people in the world. Fair
he might be; but, fairest of all none could know, unless he had seen all.
And we too desire, not a fair one, but the fairest of all. Unless
we find him, we shall think we have failed. It is no casual beauty that
will content us; what we are seeking after is that supreme beauty
which must of necessity be unique. -What then is one to do, if the
matter be really thus ? Perhaps you know better than I. All I see is that
very few of us would have time to examine all the various sects of
philosophy in turn, even if we began in early life. I know not how
it is ; but though you seem to me to speak reasonably, yet (I must
confess it) you have distressed me not a little by this exact ex-
position of yours. I was unlucky in coming out to-day, and in my falling
in with you, who have thrown me into utter perplexity by your proof
that the discovery of truth is impossible, just as I seemed to be on the
point of attaining my hope. Blame your parents, my child, not me
! Or rather, blame mother Nature herself, for giving us but seventy
or eighty years instead of making us as long-lived as Tithonus. For
my part, I have but led you from premise to conclusion. Nay !
you are a mocker ! I know not wherefore, but you have a grudge
against philosophy ; and it is your entertainment to make a jest of
her lovers. Ah ! ERMOTIMO! what the Truth may be, you philosophers
may be able to tell better than I. But so much at least I know of
her, that she is one by no means pleasant to those who hear her
speak : in the matter of pleasant- ness , she is far surpassed by
Falsehood : and Falsehood has the pleasanter countenance. She,
nevertheless, being conscious of no alloy within, discourses with
boldness to all men, who therefore have little love for her. See how
angry you are now because I have stated the truth about certain
things of which we are both alike enamoured that they are hard to come
by. It is as if you had fallen in love with a statue and hoped to
win its favour, thinking it a human creature; and I, understanding it to
be but an image of brass or stone, had shown you, as a friend, that
your love was impossible, and there- upon you had conceived that I bore you
some ill-will. But still, does it not follow from what
you said, that we must renounce philosophy and pass our days in
idleness? When did you hear me say that? I did but assert
that if we are to seek after LA FILOSOFIA, whereas there are many ways
professing to lead thereto, we must with much exactness distinguish
them. Well, LUCIANO! that we must go to all the schools in turn, and
test what they say, if we are to choose the right one, is perhaps
reasonable; but surely ridiculous, unless we are to live as many
years as the Phoenix, to be so lengthy in the trial of each ; as if it
were not possible to learn the whole by the part! They say that
Pheidias, when he was shown one of the talons of a lion, computed the
stature and age of the animal it belonged to, modelling a complete lion
upon the standard of a single part of it. You too would recognise a human
hand were the rest of the body concealed. Even so with the schools
of philosophy : the leading doctrines of each might be learned in an
afternoon. That over-exactness of yours, which required so long a
time, is by no means necessary for making the better choice.
-You are forcible, Hermotimus ! with this theory of The Whole by
the Part. Yet, methinks, I heard you but now propound the contrary.
But tell me; would Pheidias when he saw the lion's talon have known that
it was a lion's, if he had never seen the animal ? Surely, the
cause of his recognising the part was his knowledge of the whole. There
is a way of choosing one's philosophy even less troublesome than
yours. Put the names of all the philo- sophers into an urn. Then call a
little child, and let him draw the name of the philosopher you
shall follow all the rest of your days. Nay! be serious with me. Tell me ;
did you ever buy wine? Surely. And did you first go the
whole round of the wine-merchants, tasting and comparing their wines
? By no means. No ! You were contented to order
the first good wine you found at your price. By tasting a little you
were ascertained of the quality of the whole cask. How if you had
gone to each of the merchants in turn, and said, ' I wish to buy a cotyle
of wine. Let me drink out the whole cask. Then I shall be able to
tell which is best, and where I ought to buy.' Yet this is what you would
do with the philo- sophies. Why drain the cask when you might
taste, and see ? How slippery you are; how you escape from
one's fingers ! Still, you have given me an advantage, and are in your
own trap. How so ? Thus ! You take a common object
known to every one, and make wine the figure of a thing which
presents the greatest variety in itself, and about which all men are at
variance, because it is an unseen and difficult thing. I hardly
know wherein philosophy and wine are alike unless it be in this, that the
philosophers exchange their ware for money, like the wine-
merchants; some of them with a mixture of water or worse, or giving short
measure. However, let us consider your parallel. The wine in the cask,
you say, is of one kind throughout. But have the philosophers has your
own master even but one and the same thing only to tell you, every
day and all days, on a subject so manifold? Otherwise, how can you
know the whole by the tasting of one part? The whole is not the
same Ah ! and it may be that God has hidden the good wine of
philosophy at the bottom of the cask. You must drain it to the end
if you are to find those drops of divine sweetness you seem so much to
thirst for ! Yourself, after drinking so deeply, are still but at
the beginning, as you said. But is not philosophy rather like this? Keep
the figure of the merchant and the cask : but let it be filled, not
with wine, but with every sort of grain. You come to buy. The merchant
hands you a little of the wheat which lies at the top. Could you
tell by looking at that, whether the chick-peas were clean, the lentils
tender, the beans full ? And then, whereas in selecting our wine we
risk only our money ; in selecting our philosophy we risk ourselves, as
you told me might ourselves sink into the dregs of the vulgar
herd.' Moreover, while you may not drain the whole cask of wine by way of
tasting, Wisdom grows no less by the depth of your drinking. Nay !
if you take of her, she is in- creased thereby. And then I have
another similitude to propose, as regards this tasting of philosophy.
Don't think I blaspheme her if I say that it may be with her as with some
deadly poison, hemlock or aconite. These too, though they cause
death, yet kill not if one tastes but a minute portion. You would suppose
that the tiniest particle must be sufficient. Be it as you
will, Lucian! One must live a hundred years : one must sustain all
this labour ; otherwise philosophy is unattainable. Not so !
Though there were nothing strange in that, if it be true, as you said at
first, that Life is short and art is long. But now you take it hard
that we are not to see you this very day, before the sun goes down, a
Chrysippus, a Pythagoras, an ACCADEMIA. You overtake me,
Lucian ! and drive me into a corner; in jealousy of heart, I
believe, because I have made some progress in doctrine whereas you
have neglected yourself. Well ! Don't attend to me ! Treat me as
a Corybant, a fanatic : and do you go forward on this road of yours.
Finish the journey in accordance with the view you had of these
matters at the beginning of it. Only, be assured that my judgment on it
will remain unchanged. Reason still says, that without criticism,
with- out a clear, exact, unbiassed intelligence to try them, all
those theories all things will have been seen but in vain. c To that
end,' she tells us, 'much time is necessary, many delays of
judgment, a cautious gait; repeated inspection.' And we are not to regard
the outward appearance, or the reputation of wisdom, in any of
the speakers; but like the judges of Areopagus, who try their causes
in the darkness of the night, look only to what they say. LA
FILOSOFIA, then, is impossible, or possible only in another life ! ERMOTIMO!
I grieve to tell you that all this even, may be in truth insufficient.
After all, we may deceive ourselves in the belief that we have
found something : like the fishermen ! Again and again they let down the
net. At last they feel something heavy, and with vast labour draw
up, not a load of fish, but only a pot full of sand, or a great
stone. I don't understand what you mean by the net. It is plain that
you have caught me in it. Try to get out ! You can swim as well as
another. We may go to all philosophers in turn and make trial of them.
Still, I, for my part, hold it by no mean certain that any one of
them really possesses what we seek. The truth may be a thing that
not one of them has yet found. You have twenty beans in your hand, and
you bid ten persons guess how many : one says five, another fifteen
; it is possible that one of them may tell the true number ; but it is
not im- possible that all may be wrong. So it is with the
philosophers. All alike are in search of Happiness what kind of thing it
is. One says one thing, one another : it is pleasure ; it is virtue
; what not ? And Happiness may indeed be one of those things. But it is possible also
that it may be still something else, different and distinct from them
all. What is this? There is something, I know not how, very sad and
disheartening in what you say. We seem to have come round in a
circle to the spot whence we started, and to our first incertitude. Ah !
Lucian, what have you done to me ? You have proved my priceless
pearl to be but ashes, and all my past labour to have been in vain. Reflect,
my friend, that you are not the first person who has thus failed of the
good thing he hoped for. All philosophers, so to speak, are but
fighting about the c ass's shadow.' To me you seem like one who should
weep, and reproach fortune because he is not able to climb up into
heaven, or go down into the sea by Sicily and come up at Cyprus, or sail
on wings in one day from Greece to India. And the true cause of his
trouble is that he has based his hope on what he has seen in a dream, or
his own fancy has put together ; without previous thought whether
what he desires is in itself attainable and within the compass of human
nature. Even so, methinks, has it happened with you. As you dreamed, so
largely, of those wonderful things, came Reason, and woke you up
from sleep, a little roughly : and then you are angry with Reason, your
eyes being still but half open, and find it hard to shake off sleep for
the pleasure of what you saw therein. Only, don't be angry with me,
because, as a friend, I would not suffer you to pass your life in a
dream, pleasant perhaps, but still only a dream because I wake you
up and demand that you should busy yourself with the proper business of
life, and send you to it possessed of common sense. What your soul
was full of just now is not very different from those Gorgons and
Chimaeras and the like, which the poets and the painters con-
struct for us, fancy-free: things which never were, and never will be,
though many believe in them, and all like to see and hear of them,
just because they are so strange and odd. And you too,
methinks, having heard from some such maker of marvels of a certain
woman of a fairness beyond nature beyond the Graces, beyond Venus
Urania herself asked not if he spoke truth, and whether this woman be
really alive in the world, but straightway fell in love with her ;
as they say that Medea was en- amoured of Jason in a dream. And what
more than anything else seduced you, and others like you, into that
passion, for a vain idol of the fancy, is, that he who told you about
that fair woman, from the very moment when you first believed that
what he said was true, brought for- ward all the rest in consequent
order. Upon her alone your eyes were fixed ; by her he led you
along, when once you had given him a hold upon you led you along the
straight road, as he said, to the beloved one. All was easy after
that. None of you asked again whether it was the true way ;
following one after another, like sheep led by the green bough in the
hand of the shepherd. He moved you hither and thither with his
finger, as easily as water spilt on a table! My friend ! Be not so lengthy
in preparing the banquet, lest you die of hunger ! I saw one who
poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a
pestle of iron, fancy- ing he did a thing useful and necessary; but
it remained water only, none the less. Just there the conversation broke
off suddenly, and the disputants parted. The horses were come for
Lucian. The boy went on his way, and Marius onward, to visit a friend
whose abode lay further. As he returned to Rome towards evening the
melancholy aspect, natural to a city of the dead, had triumphed over
the superficial gaudiness of the early day. He could almost have
fancied Canidia there, picking her way among the rickety lamps, to rifle
some neglected or ruined tomb ; for these tombs were not all
equally well cared for (Post mortem nescio /) and it had been one of the
pieties of Aurelius to frame a severe law to prevent the defacing
of such monuments. To Marius there seemed to be some new meaning in
that terror of isolation, of being left alone in these places, of which
the sepulchral inscriptions were so full. A blood- red sunset was
dying angrily, and its wild glare upon the shadowy objects around helped
to combine the associations of this famous way, its deeply graven marks
of immemorial travel, together with the earnest questions of the morning
as to the true way of that other sort of travelling, around an
image, almost ghastly in the traces of its great sorrows bearing along
for ever, on bleeding feet, the instrument of its punishment which
was all Marius could recall distinctly of a certain Christian legend he
had heard. The legend told of an encounter at this very spot, of
two wayfarers on the Appian Way, as also upon some very dimly
discerned mental journey, altogether different from himself and his
late companions an encounter between Love, liter- ally fainting by
the road, and Love "travelling in the greatness of his
strength," Love itself, suddenly appearing to sustain that other. A
strange contrast to anything actually presented in that morning's
conversation, it seemed neverthe- less to echo its very words " Do
they never come down again," he heard once more the well-
modulated voice : " Do they never come down again from the heights,
to help those whom they left here below?" "And we too
desire, not a fair one, but the fairest of all. Unless we find him,
we shall think we have failed." It was become a habit with Marius one
of his modernisms developed by his assistance at the Emperor's
"conversations with himself," to keep a register of the
movements of his own private thoughts and humours ; not continuously
indeed, yet sometimes for lengthy intervals, dur- ing which it was no
idle self-indulgence, but a necessity of his intellectual life, to "
confess himself," with an intimacy, seemingly rare among the
ancients ; ancient writers, at all evtiits, having been jealous, for the
most part, of affording us so much as a glimpse of that interior
self, which in many cases would have actually doubled the interest of
their objective informations. " If a particular tutelary
or genius" writes Marius, " according to old belief, walks
through life beside each one of us, mine is very certainly a
capricious creature. He fills one with wayward, unaccountable, yet quite
irresistible humours, and seems always to be in collusion with some
outward circumstance, often trivial enough in itself the condition of the
weather, forsooth ! the people one meets by chance the things one happens
to overhear them say, veritable evofaoi, o-vfjL@o\oi 9 or omens by the
wayside, as the old Greeks fancied to push on the unreason- able
prepossessions of the moment into weighty motives. It was doubtless a
quite explicable, physical fatigue that presented me to myself, on
awaking this morning, so lack-lustre and trite. But I must needs take my
petulance, contrasting it with my accustomed morning hopefulness,
as a sign of the ageing of appetite, of a decay in the very
capacity of enjoyment. We need some imaginative stimulus, some not
impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it
into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust,
through the routine-work which is so large a part of life.
"Then, how if appetite, be it for real or ideal, should itself
fail one after awhile ? /^h, yes ! is it of cold always that men die ;
and on some of us it creeps very gradually. In truth, I can
remember just such a lack-lustre condition of feeling once or twice before.
But I note, that it was accompanied then by an odd indifference, as
the thought of them occurred to me, in regard to the sufferings of others
a kind of callousness, so unusual with me, as at once to mark the
humour it accompanied as a palpably morbid one that could not last. Were those
sufferings, great or little, I asked myself then, of more real
conse- quence to them than mine to me, as I remind myself that
'nothing that will end is really long '--long enough to be thought of
import- ance f But to-day, my own sense of fatigue, the pity I
conceive for myself, disposed me strongly to a tenderness for others. For
a moment the whole world seemed to present itself as a hospital of
sick persons ; many of them sick in mind; all of whom it would be a
brutality not to humour, not to indulge. Why, when I went out to
walk off my wayward fancies, did I confront the very sort of
incident (my unfortunate genius had surely beckoned it from afar to vex
me) likely to irritate them further ? A party of men were coming down
the street. They were leading a fine race-horse; a handsome beast, but
badly hurt somewhere, in the circus, and useless. They were taking
him to slaughter ; and I think the animal knew it : he cast such looks,
as if of mad appeal, to those who passed him, as he went among the
strangers to whom his former owner had committed him, to die, in his
beauty and pride, for just that one mischance or fault ; although
the morning air was still so animating, and pleasant to snuff. I could
have fancied a human soul in the creature, swelling against its
luck. And I had come across the incident just when it would figure to me
as the very symbol of our poor humanity, in its capacities for pain,
its wretched accidents, and those imperfect sym- pathies, which can never
quite identify us with one another ; the very power of utterance
and appeal to others seeming to fail us, in propor- tion as our
sorrows come home to ourselves, are really our own. We are constructed
for suffer- ing ! What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we
care to note them, as we go a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries !
Sunt lacrimtf rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. " Men's
fortunes touch us ! The little chil- dren of one of those institutions
for the support of orphans, now become fashionable among us by way
of memorial of eminent persons deceased, are going, in long file, along
the street, on their way to a holiday in the country. They halt,
and count themselves with an air of triumph, to show that they are all
there. Their gay chatter has disturbed a little group of peasants ; a
young woman and her husband, who have brought the old mother, now
past work and witless, to place her in a house provided for such
afflicted people. They are fairly affectionate, but anxious how the
thing they have to do may go hope only she may permit them to leave her
there behind quietly. And the poor old soul is excited by the noise
made by the children, and partly aware of what is going to happen with
her. She too begins to count one, two, three, five on her trembling
fingers, misshapen by a life of toil. ' Yes ! yes ! and twice five
make ten ' they say, to pacify her. It is her last appeal to be
taken home again ; her proof that all is not yet up with her ; that
she is, at all events, still as capable as those joyous children. At
the baths, a party of labourers are at work upon one of the great brick
furnaces, in a cloud of black dust. A frail young child has brought
food for one of them, and sits apart, waiting till his father comes
watching the labour, but with a sorrowful distaste for the din and
dirt. He is regarding wistfully his own place in the world, there before
him. His mind, as he watches, is grown up for a moment ; and he
foresees, as it were, in that moment, all the long tale of days, of early
awakings, of his own coming life of drudgery at work like this. A
man comes along carrying a boy whose rough work has already begun the
only child whose presence beside him sweetened the father's toil a
little. The boy has been badly injured by a fall of brick-work, yet, with
an effort, he rides boldly on his father's shoulders. It will be
the way of natural affection to keep him alive as long as possible,
though with that miserably shattered body ' Ah ! with us still, and
feeling our care beside him ! ' and yet surely not without a
heartbreaking sigh of relief, alike from him and them, when the end
comes. On the alert for incidents like these, yet of necessity
passing them by on the other side, I find it hard to get rid of a sense
that I, for one, have failed in love. I could yield to the humour
till I seemed to have had my share in those great public cruelties,
the shocking legal crimes which are on record, like that cold-blooded
slaughter, according to law, of the four hundred slaves in the
reign of Nero, because one of their number was thought to have murdered
his master. The reproach of that, together with the kind of facile
apologies those who had no share in the deed may have made for it, as
they went about quietly on their own affairs that day, seems to come
very close to me, as I think upon it. And to how many of those now
actually around me, whose life is a sore one, must I be indifferent, if I
ever become aware of their soreness at all ? To some, perhaps, the
necessary conditions of my own life may cause me to be opposed, in a kind
of natural conflict, regarding those interests which actually
determine the happiness of theirs. I \ would that a stronger love might
arise in my heart ! Yet there is plenty of charity in the world. My
patron, the Stoic emperor, has made it even fashionable. To celebrate one
of his brief returns to Rome lately from the war, over and above a
largess of gold pieces to all who would, the public debts were forgiven.
He made a nice show of it : for once, the Romans enter- tained
themselves with a good-natured spectacle, and the whole town came to see
the great bonfire in the Forum, into which all bonds and evidence of debt
were thrown on delivery, by the emperor himself; many private
creditors following his example. That was done well enough ! But
still the feeling returns to me, that no charity of ours can get at a
certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves. When I
first came to Rome, eager to observe its religion, especially its
antiquities of religious usage, I assisted at the most curious,
perhaps, of them all, the most distinctly marked with that immobility
which is a sort of ideal in the Roman religion. The ceremony took
place at a singular spot some miles distant from the city, among
the low hills on the bank of the Tiber, beyond the Aurelian Gate. There,
in a little wood of venerable trees, piously allowed their own way,
age after age ilex and cypress remaining where they fell at last, one
over the other, and all caught, in that early May-time, under a
riotous tangle of wild clematis was to be found a magnificent sanctuary,
in which the members of the Arval College assembled them- selves on
certain days. The axe never touched those trees Nay ! it was forbidden to
introduce any iron thing whatsoever within the precincts ; not only
because the deities of these quiet places hate to be disturbed by the
harsh noise of metal, but also in memory of that better age the
lost Golden Age the homely age of the potters, of which the central
act of the festival was a com- memoration. The preliminary
ceremonies were long and fe complicated, but of a character familiar
enough. Peculiar to the time and place was the solemn exposition,
after lavation of hands, processions backwards and forwards, and certain
changes of vestments, of the identical earthen vessels veritable
relics of the old religion of NUMA (si veda)! the vessels from which the
holy Numa himself had eaten and drunk, set forth above a kind of
altar, amid a cloud of flowers and incense, and many lights, for the
veneration of the credulous or the faithful. They were, in fact,
cups or vases of burnt clay, rude in form : and the religious
veneration thus offered to them expressed men's desire to give
honour to a simpler age, before iron had found place in human life : the
persuasion that that age was worth remembering : a hope that it
might come again. That a NUMA (si veda), and his age of gold, would
return, has been the hope or the dream of some, in every period. Yet if
he did come back, or any equivalent of his presence, he could but
weaken, and by no means smite through, that root of evil, certainly of
sorrow, of outraged human sense, in things, which one must care-
fully distinguish from all preventible accidents. Death, and the little
perpetual daily dyings, which have something of its sting, he
must necessarily leave untouched. And, methinks, that were all the
rest of man's life framed entirely to his liking, he would
straightway begin to sadden himself, over the fate say, of the
flowers ! For there is, there has come to be since Numa lived perhaps, a
capacity for sorrow in his heart, which grows with all the growth,
alike of the individual and of the race, in intel- lectual delicacy and
power, and which 'will find its aliment. Of that sort of golden age,
indeed, one discerns even now a trace, here and there. Often have I
maintained that, in this generous southern country at least, Epicureanism
is the special philosophy of the poor. How little I myself really
need, when people leave me alone, with the intellectual powers at work
serenely. The drops of falling water, a few wild flowers with their
priceless fragrance, a few tufts even of half-dead leaves, changing
colour in the quiet of a room that has but light and shadow in it;
these, for a susceptible mind, might well do duty for all the glory of
Augustus. I notice some- times what I conceive to be the precise
character of the fondness of the roughest working-people for their
young children, a fine appreciation, not only of their serviceable
affection, but of their visible graces : and indeed, in this country,
the children are almost always worth looking at. I see daily, in
fine weather, a child like a delicate nosegay, running to meet the rudest
of brick-makers as he comes from work. She is not at all afraid to hang
upon his rough hand : and through her, he reaches out to, he makes
his own, something from that strange region, so dis- tant from him
yet so real, of the world's refine- ment. What is of finer soul, or of
finer stuff in things, and demands delicate touching to him the
delicacy of the little child represents that : it initiates him into
that. There, surely, is a touch of the secular gold, of a perpetual
age of gold. But then again, think for a moment, with what a hard
humour at the nature of things, his struggle for bare life will go
on, if the child should happen to die. I observed to-day, under one
of the archways of the baths, two children at play, a little seriously a
fair girl and her crippled younger brother. Two toy chairs and a
little table, and sprigs of fir set upright in the sand for a garden !
They played at housekeeping. Well ! the girl thinks her life a
perfectly good thing in the service of this crippled brother. But she
will have a jealous lover in time: and the boy, though his face is
not altogether unpleasant, is after all a hopeless cripple.
" For there is a certain grief in things as they are, in man
as he has come to be, as he certainly is, over and above those griefs of
circumstance which are in a measure removable some inexplicable
shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself death, and old
age as it must needs be, and that watching for their ap- proach,
which makes every stage of life like a dying over and over again. Almost
all death is painful, and in every thing that comes to an end a
touch of death, and therefore of wretched coldness struck home to one, of
remorse, of loss and parting, of outraged attachments. Given
faultless men and women, given a perfect state of society which should
have no need to practise on men's susceptibilities for its own selfish
ends, adding one turn more to the wheel of the great rack for its
own interest or amusement, there would still be this evil in the world,
of a certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in pro-
portion to the moral, or nervous perfection men have attained to. And
what we need in the world, over against that, is a certain
permanent and general power of compassion humanity's standing force
of self-pity as an elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we
are to live in it at all. I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has
cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how every
step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him,
from age to age, must needs increase his dejection. It is as if the
increase of know- ledge were but an increasing revelation of the
radical hopelessness of his position : and I would that there were one
even as I, behind this vain show of things ! At all events, the
actual conditions of our life being as they are, and the capacity
for suffering so large a principle in things since the only
principle, perhaps, to which we may always safely trust is a ready
sympathy with the pain one actually sees it follows that the '
practical and effective difference between men will lie in their power of
insight into those con- ditions, their power of sympathy. The future
1 will be with those who have most of it ; while for the present,
as I persuade myself, those who have much of it, have something to hold
by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of
self, which is, for every one, no less than the dissolution of the world
it repre- sents for him. Nearly all of us, I suppose, have had our
moments, in which any effective sym- pathy for us on the part of others
has seemed impossible ; in which our pain has seemed a stupid
outrage upon us, like some overwhelming physical violence, from which we
could take refuge, at best, only in some mere general sense of
goodwill somewhere in the world perhaps. And then, to one's surprise, the
discovery of that goodwill, if it were only in a not unfriendly
animal, may seem to have explained, to have actually justified to us, the
fact of our pain. There have been occasions, certainly, when I have
felt that if others cared for me as I cared for them, it would be, not so
much a consola- tion, as an equivalent, for what one has lost or suffered
: a realised profit on the summing up of one's accounts : a touching of
that absolute ground amid all the changes of phenomena, such as our
philosophers have of late confessed them- selves quite unable to
discover. In the mere clinging of human creatures to each other, nay !
in one's own solitary self-pity, amid the effects even of what might
appear irredeemable loss, I seem to touch the eternal. Something in
that pitiful contact, something new and true, fact or apprehension
of fact, is educed, which, on a review of all the perplexities of life,
satisfies our moral sense, and removes that appearance of
unkindness in the soul of things themselves, and assures us that not
everything has been in vain. And I know not how, but in the
thought thus suggested, I seem to take up, and re-knit 'myself to,
a well-remembered hour, when by some gracious accident it was on a
journey- all things about me fell into a more perfect har- mony
than is their wont. Everything seemed to be, for a moment, after all,
almost for the best. Through the train of my thoughts, one against
another, it was as if I became aware of the dominant power of another
person in contro- versy, wrestling with me. I seem to be come round
to the point at which I left off then. The antagonist has closed with me
again. A protest comes, out of the very depths of man's radically
hopeless condition in the world, with the energy of one of those
suffering yet prevailing deities, of which old poetry tells. Dared one
hope that there is a heart, even as ours, in that divine e Assistant of
one's thoughts a heart even as mine, behind this vain show of
things! Ah! voila les ames qu'il falloit a la miennc! Rousseau. The
charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affec- tions, wonderfully fresh in
the midst of a thread- bare world, would have led MARIO, if nothing
else had done so, again and again, to Cecilia's house. He found a range
of intellectual plea- sures, altogether new to him, in the sympathy
of that pure and elevated soul. Elevation of soul, generosity, humanity
little by little it came to seem to him as if these existed nowhere
else. The sentiment of maternity, above all, as it might be understood
there, its claims, with the claims of all natural feeling
everywhere, down to the sheep bleating on the hills, nay ! even to
the mother-wolf, in her hungry cave seemed to have been vindicated, to
have been enforced anew, by the sanction of some divine pattern
thereof. He saw its legitimate place in the world given at last to the
bare capacity for suffering in any creature, however feeble or
apparently useless. In this chivalry, seeming to leave the world's
heroism a mere property of the stage, in this so scrupulous fidelity
to what could not help itself, could scarcely claim not to be
forgotten, what a contrast to the hard contempt of one's own or other's
pain, of death, of glory even, in those discourses of Aurelius
! But if Marius thought at times that some long - cherished
desires were now about to blossom for him, in the sort of home he had
sometimes pictured to himself, the very charm of which would lie in its
contrast to any random affections : that in this woman, to whom
children instinctively clung, he might find such a sister, at least, as
he had always longed for ; there were also circumstances which
reminded him that a certain rule forbidding second marriages, was
among these people still in force ; ominous incidents, moreover, warning
a suscep- tible conscience not to mix together the spirit and the
flesh, nor make the matter of a heavenly banquet serve for earthly meat
and drink. One day he found Cecilia occupied with the burial
of one of the children of her household. It was from the tiny brow of
such a child, as he now heard, that the new light had first shone
forth upon them through the light of mere physical life, glowing there
again, when the child was dead, or supposed to be dead. The aged
servant of Christ had arrived in the midst of their noisy grief; and
mounting to the little chamber where it lay, had returned, not long
afterwards, with the child stirring in his arms as he descended the stair
rapidly ; bursting open the closely-wound folds of the shroud and
scattering the funeral flowers from them, as the soul kindled once more through
its limbs. Old Roman common-sense had taught people to occupy
their thoughts as little as might be with children who died young. Here,
to-day, however, in this curious house, all thoughts were tenderly
bent on the little waxen figure, yet with a kind of exultation and joy,
notwith- standing the loud weeping of the mother. The other
children, its late companions, broke with it, suddenly, into the place
where the deep black bed lay open to receive it. Pushing away the
grim fossores, the grave-diggers, they ranged themselves around it in
order, and chanted that old psalm of theirs LAVDATE PVERI DOMINVM! Dead
children, children's graves Marius had been always half aware of an old
superstitious fancy in his mind concerning them; as if in coming
near them he came near the failure of some lately-born hope or purpose of
his own. And now, perusing intently the expression with which
Cecilia assisted, directed, returned after- wards to her house, he felt
that he too had had to-day his funeral of a little child. But it
had always been his policy, through all his pursuit of "
experience/' to take flight in time from any too disturbing passion, from
any sort of affection likely to quicken his pulses beyond the point
at which the quiet work of life was practicable. Had he, after all,
been taken unawares, so that it was no longer possible for him to fly ?
At least, during the journey he took, by way of test- ing the
existence of any chain about him, he found a certain disappointment at
his heart, greater than he could have anticipated; and as he passed
over the crisp leaves, nipped off in multitudes by the first sudden cold
of winter, he felt that the mental atmosphere within himself was
perceptibly colder. Yet it was, finally, a quite successful resigna- tion
which he achieved, on a review, after his manner, during that absence, of
loss or gain. The image of Cecilia, it would seem, was already become for
him like some matter of poetry, or of another man's story, or a picture
on the wall. And on his return to Rome there had been a rumour in
that singular company, of things which spoke certainly not of any
merely tranquil loving : hinted rather that he had come across a
world, the lightest contact with which might make appropriate to himself
also the precept that " They which have wives be as they that
have none." This was brought home to him, when, in early
spring, he ventured once more to listen to the sweet singing of the
Eucharist. It breathed more than ever the spirit of a wonderful hop*
of hopes more daring than poor, labouring humanity had ever seriously
entertained before, though it was plain that a great calamity was
befallen. Amid stifled sobbing, even as the pathetic words of the psalter
relieved the tension of their hearts, the people around him still
wore upon their faces their habitual gleam of joy, of placid
satisfaction. They were still under the influence of an immense gratitude
in thinking. even amid their present distress, of the hour or a
great deliverance. As he followed again that mystical dialogue, he felt
also again, like a mighty spirit about him, the potency, the half-
realised presence, of a great multitude, as if thronging along those
awful passages, to hear the sentence of its release from prison; a
company which represented nothing less than orbis ter- rarum the
whole company of mankind. And the special note of the day expressed that
relief a sound new to him, drawn deep from some old Hebrew source,
as he conjectured, Alleluia! repeated over and over again, Alleluia!
Alleluia! at every pause and movement of the long Easter ceremonies.
And then, in its place, by way of sacred lection, although in
shocking contrast with the peaceful dignity of all around, came the
Epistle of the churches of Lyons and Vienne to " their
sister,'' the church of Rome. For the "Peace" of the church had
been broken broken, as Marius could not but acknowledge, on the
responsibility of the emperor ANTONINO (si veda) himself, following
tamely, and as a matter of course, the traces of his predecessors,
gratuitously enlisting, against the good as well as the evil of that
great pagan world, the strange new heroism of which this singular
message was full. The greatness of it certainly lifted away all merely
private regret, inclining one, at last, actually to draw sword for
the oppressed, as if in some new order of knighthood. The pains which our
brethren have endured we have no power fully to tell, for the enemy
came upon us with his whole strength. But the grace of God fought for us,
set free the weak, and made ready those who, like pillars, were
able to bear the weight. These, coming now into close strife with the
foe, bore every kind of pang and shame. At the time of the fair
which is held here with a great crowd, the governor led forth the
Martyrs as a show. Holding what was thought great but little, and that
the pains of to-day are not deserving to be measured against the
glory that shall be made known, these worthy wrestlers went joyfully on
their way; their delight and the sweet favour of God mingling in
their faces, so that their bonds seemed but a goodly array, or like the
golden bracelets of a bride. Filled with the fragrance of Christ,
to some they seemed to have been touched with earthly perfumes. VETTIO
EPAGATO, though he is very young, because he would not endure to
see unjust judgment given against us, vented his anger, and sought
to be heard for the brethren, for he was a youth of high place.
Whereupon the governor asked him whether he also were a Christian.
He confessed in a clear voice, and was added to the number of the
Martyrs. But he had the Paraclete within him ; as, in truth, he
showed by the fulness of his love; glorying in the defence of his
brethren, and to give his life for theirs. Then was fulfilled the saying
of the Lord that the day should come, When he that slayeth you
'will think that he doeth God service. Most madly did the mob, the
governor and the soldiers, rage against the handmaiden Blandina, in
whom Christ showed that what seems mean among men is of price with Him.
For whilst we all, and her earthly mistress, who was herself one of
the contending Martyrs, were fearful lest through the weakness of the
flesh she should be unable to profess the faith, Blandina was filled
with such power that her tormentors, following upon each other from
morning until night, owned that they were overcome, and had no more
that they could do to her ; admiring that she still breathed after her
whole body was torn asunder. " But this blessed one, in
the very midst of her c witness,' renewed her strength ; and
to repeat, / am Christ's ! was to her rest, refresh- ment, and
relief from pain. As for Alexander, he neither uttered a groan nor any
sound at all, but in his heart talked with God. Sanctus, the
deacon, also, having borne beyond all measure pains devised by them,
hoping that they would get something from him, did not so much as
tell his name ; but to all questions answered only, / am Chrises !
For this he confessed instead of his name, his race, and everything
beside. Whence also a strife in torturing him arose between the
governor and those tormentors, so that when they had nothing else they
could do they set red-hot plates of brass to the most tender parts
of his body. But he stood firm in his profession, cooled and fortified by
that stream of living water which flows from Christ. His corpse, a
single wound, having wholly lost the form of man, was the measure of his
pain. But Christ, paining in him, set forth an en- sample to the
rest that there is nothing fearful, nothing painful, where the love of
the Father overcomes. And as all those cruelties were made null
through the patience of the Martyrs, they bethought them of other things
; among which was their imprisonment in a dark and most sorrowful
place, where many were privily strangled. But destitute of man's aid,
they were filled with power from the Lord, both in body and mind,
and strengthened their brethren. Also, much joy was in our virgin mother,
the Church ; for, by means of these, such as were fallen away
retraced their steps were again con- ceived, were filled again with
lively heat, and hastened to make the profession of their faith.
"The holy bishop Pothinus, who was now past ninety years old
and weak in body, yet in his heat of soul and longing for
martyrdom, roused what strength he had, and was also cruelly
dragged to judgment, and gave witness. Thereupon he suffered many
stripes, all thinking it would be a wickedness if they fell short
in cruelty towards him, for that thus their own gods would be
avenged. Hardly drawing breath, he was thrown into prison, and after two
days there died. "After these things their martyrdom
was parted into divers manners. Plaiting as it were one crown of
many colours and every sort of flowers, they offered it to God. MATURO, therefore,
Sanctus and Blandina, were led to the wild beasts. And Maturus and
Sanctus passed through all the pains of the amphitheatre, as if they
had suffered nothing before : or rather, as having in many trials
overcome, and now contending for the prize itself, were at last
dismissed. " But Blandina was bound and hung upon a
stake, and set forth as food for the assault of the wild beasts. And as
she thus seemed to be hung upon the Cross, by her fiery prayers she
imparted much alacrity to those contending Witnesses. For as they
looked upon her with the eye of flesh, through her, they saw Him that was
cruci- fied. But as none of the beasts would then touch her, she
was taken down from the Cross, and sent back to prison for another day :
that, though weak and mean, yet clothed with the mighty wrestler,
Christ Jesus, she might by many con- quests give heart to her
brethren. On the last day, therefore, of the shows, she was brought
forth again, together with Ponticus, a lad of about fifteen years old.
They were brought in day by day to behold the pains of the rest.
And when they wavered not, the mob was full of rage ; pitying neither the
youth of the lad, nor the sex of the maiden. Hence, they drave them
through the whole round of pain. And Ponticus, taking heart from
Blandina, hav- ing borne well the whole of those torments, gave up
his life. Last of all, the blessed Blandina herself, as a mother that had
given life to her children, and sent them like conquerors to the
great King, hastened to them, with joy at the end, as to a
marriage-feast; the enemy himself confessing that no woman had ever borne
pain so manifold and great as hers. " Nor even so was
their anger appeased ; some among them seeking for us pains, if it might
be, yet greater; that the saying might be fulfilled, He that is
unjust, let him be unjust still. And their rage against the Martyrs took
a new form, insomuch that we were in great sorrow for lack of
freedom to entrust their bodies to the earth, Neither did the night-time,
nor the offer of money, avail us for this matter; but they set
watch with much carefulness, as though it were a great gain to hinder
their burial. Therefore, after the bodies had been displayed to view
for many days, they were at last burned to ashes, and cast into the
river Rhone, which flows by this place, that not a vestige of them might
be left upon the earth. For they said, Now shall we see whether
they will rise again, and whether their God can save them out of our
hands" Not many months after the date of that epistle, Marius, then
expecting to leave Rome for a long time, and in fact about to leave it
for ever, stood to witness the triumphal entry of Marcus Aurelius,
almost at the exact spot from which he had watched the emperor's solemn
return to the capital on his own first coming thither. His triumph
was now a " full " one Justus Triumphus justified, by far more
than the due amount of bloodshed in those Northern wars, at length,
it might seem, happily at an end. Among the captives, amid the laughter
of the crowds at his blowsy upper garment, his trousered legs and conical
wolf-skin cap, walked our own ancestor, representative of subject
Germany, under a figure very familiar in later Roman sculpture;
and, though certainly with none of the grace of the Dying Gaul, yet with
plenty of uncouth pathos in his misshapen features, and the pale,
servile, yet angry eyes. His children, white-skinned and golden-haired
" as angels," trudged beside him. His brothers, of the
animal world, the ibex, the wild-cat, and the reindeer, stalking
and trumpeting grandly, found their due place in the procession; and
among the spoil, set forth on a portable frame that it might be
distinctly seen (no mere model, but the very house he had lived in), a
wattled cottage, in all the simplicity of its snug contrivances
against the cold, and well-calculated to give a moment's delight to
his new, sophisticated masters. Mantegna, working at the end of the
fifteenth century, for a society full of antiquarian fervour at the sight
of the earthy relics of the old Roman people, day by day returning to
light out of the clay childish still, moreover, and with no more
suspicion of pasteboard than the old Romans themselves, in its unabashed
love of open-air pageantries, has invested this, the greatest, and alas !
the most characteristic, of the splendours of imperial ROMA, with a
reality livelier than any description. The homely senti- ments for
which he has found place in his learned paintings are hardly more
lifelike than the great public incidents of the show, there
depicted. And then, with all that vivid realism, how refined, how
dignified, how select in type, is this reflection of the old Roman world
! now especially, in its time-mellowed red and gold, for the modern
visitor to the old English palace. It was under no such selected
types that the great procession presented itself to MARIO; though,
in effect, he found something there prophetic, so to speak, and evocative of
ghosts, as susceptible minds will do, upon a repetition after long
interval of some notable incident, which may yet perhaps have no direct
concern for themselves. In truth, he had been so closely bent of
late on certain very personal interests that the broad current of the
world's doings seemed to have withdrawn into the distance, but now,
as he witnessed this procession, to return once more into evidence for
him. The world, certainly, had been holding on its old way, and was
all its old self, as it thus passed by dramatically, accentuating, in this
favourite spectacle, its mode of viewing things. And even apart
from the contrast of a very different scene, he would have found
it, just now, a somewhat vulgar spectacle. The temples, wide open, with their
ropes of roses flapping in the wind against the rich, reflecting marble,
their startling draperies and heavy cloud of incense, were but the
centres of a great banquet spread through all the gaudily coloured
streets of ROMA, for which the carnivo- rous appetite of those who
thronged them in the glare of the mid -day sun was frankly enough
asserted. At best, they were but calling their gods to share with them
the cooked, sacrificial, and other meats, reeking to the sky. The
child, who was concerned for the sorrows of one of those Northern
captives as he passed by, and explained to his comrade "There's
feeling in that hand, you know ! " benumbed and lifeless as it
looked in the chain, seemed, in a moment, to transform the entire show
into its own proper tinsel. Yes ! these Romans are a coarse, a
vulgar people; and their vulgarities of soul in full evidence here. And
Aurelius himself seemed to have undergone the world's coinage, and
fallen to the level of his reward, in a mediocrity no longer golden. Yet
if, as he passed by, almost filling the quaint old circular chariot with
his magnificent golden-flowered attire, he presented himself to MARIO,
chiefly as one who had made the great mistake ; to the multitude he came
as a more than magnanimous conqueror. That he had " forgiven
" the innocent wife and children of the dashing and almost
successful rebel AVIDIO CASSIO, now no more, was a recent circumstance
still in memory. As the children went past not among those who, ere the
emperor ascended the steps of the CAMPIDOGLIO, would be detached
from the great progress for execution, happy rather, and radiant,
as adopted members of the imperial family the crowd actually enjoyed an
exhibi- tion of the moral order, such as might become perhaps the fashion.
And it was in considera- tion of some possible touch of a heroism
herein that might really have cost him something, that MARIO resolves
to seek the emperor once more, with an appeal for common-sense, for reason
and justice. He had set out at last to revisit his old home;
and knowing that Aurelius was then in retreat at a favourite villa, which
lay almost on his way thither, determined there to present himself.
Although the great plain was dying steadily, a new race of wild birds
establishing itself there, as he knew enough of their habits to
understand, and the idle contadino^ with his never-ending ditty of
decay and death, replacing the lusty Roman labourer, never had that
poetic region between Rome and the sea more deeply im- pressed him
than on this sunless day of early autumn, under which all that fell
within the immense horizon was presented in one uniform tone of a
clear, penitential blue. Stimulating to the fancy as was that range of
low hills to the northwards, already troubled with the upbreak- ing
of the Apennines, yet a want of quiet in their outline, the record of
wild fracture there, of sudden upheaval and depression, marked them
as but the ruins of nature ; while at every little descent and ascent of
the road might be noted traces of the abandoned work of man. From
time to time, the way was still redolent of the floral relics of summer,
daphne and myrtle-blossom, sheltered in the little hollows and ravines.
At last, amid rocks here and there piercing the soil, as those descents
became steeper, and the main line of the Apennines, now visible,
gave a higher accent to the scene, he espied over the plateau^ almost
like one of those broken hills, cutting the horizon towards the
sea, the old brown villa itself, rich in memories of one after another of
the family of the Antonines. As he approached it, such reminiscences
crowded upon him, above all of the life there of the aged ANTONINO PIO,
in its wonderful mansuetude and calm. Death had overtaken him here
at the precise moment when the tribune of the watch had received from
his lips the word Aequanimitas! as the watchword of the night. To
see their emperor living there like one of his simplest subjects, his
hands red at vintage-time with the juice of the grapes, hunt- ing,
teaching his children, starting betimes, with all who cared to join him,
for long days of anti- quarian research in the country around :
this, and the like of this, had seemed to mean the peace of
mankind. Upon that had come like a stain ! it seemed to MARIO just
then the more intimate life of Faustina, the life of Faustina at home.
Surely, that marvellous but malign beauty must still haunt those
rooms, like an unquiet, dead goddess, who might have perhaps, after all,
something reassuring to tell surviving mortals about her ambiguous
self. When, two years since, the news had reached Rome that those eyes,
always so persistently turned to vanity, had suddenly closed for
ever, a strong desire to pray had come over Marius, as he followed in
fancy on its wild way the soul of one he had spoken with now and
again, and whose presence in it for a time the world of art could so ill
have spared. Certainly, the honours freely accorded to embalm her
memory were poetic enough the rich temple left among those wild villagers
at the spot, now it was hoped sacred for ever, where she had
breathed her last ; the golden image, in her old place at the
amphitheatre ; the altar at which the newly married might make their
sacrifice ; above all, the great foundation for orphan girls, to be
called after her name. The latter, precisely, was the cause
why Marius failed in fact to see Aurelius again, and make the
chivalrous effort at enlightenment he had proposed to himself. Entering the
villa, he learned from an usher, at the door of the long gallery,
famous still for its grand prospect in the memory of many a visitor, and
then lead- ing to the imperial apartments, that the emperor was
already in audience : Marius must wait his turn he knew not how long it
might be. An odd audience it seemed ; for at that moment, through
the closed door, came shouts of laughter, the laughter of a great crowd
of children the Faustinian Children themselves, as he afterwards learned
happy and at their ease, in the imperial presence. Uncertain, then, of
the time for which so pleasant a reception might last, so pleasant
that he would hardly have wished to shorten it, Marius finally determined
to proceed, as it was necessary that he should accomplish the first
stage of his journey on this day. The thing was not to be Vale ! anima
infelicissima! He might at least carry away that sound of the
laughing orphan children, as a not unamiable last impression of kings and
their houses. The place he was now about to visit, especi-
ally as the resting-place of his dead, had never been forgotten. Only,
the first eager period of his life in Rome had slipped on rapidly ;
and, almost on a sudden, that old time had come to seem very long
ago. An almost burdensome solemnity had grown about his memory of
the place, so that to revisit it seemed a thing that needed
preparation : it was what he could not have done hastily. He half feared
to lessen, or disturb, its value for himself. And then, as he
travelled leisurely towards it, and so far with quite tranquil mind,
interested also in many another place by the way, he discovered a
shorter road to the end of his journey, and found himself indeed
approaching the spot that was to him like no other. Dreaming now only of
the dead before him, he journeyed on rapidly through the night ;
the thought of them increasing on him, in the darkness. It was as if they
had been waiting for him there through all those years, and felt
his footsteps approaching now, and understood his devotion, quite
gratefully, in that lowliness of theirs, in spite of its
tardy fulfilment. As morning came, his late tranquillity of mind had given
way to a grief which surprised him by its freshness. He was moved
more than he could have thought possible by so distant a sorrow. "
To-day ! " they seemed to be saying as the hard dawn broke, To-day,
he will come ! " At last, amid all his distractions, they were
become the main purpose of what he was then doing. The world around it,
when he actually reached the place later in the day, was in a mood
very different from his : so work- a-day, it seemed, on that fine
afternoon, and the villages he passed through so silent ; the
inhabitants being, for the most part, at their labour in the country.
Then, at length, above the tiled outbuildings, were the walls of the
old villa itself, with the tower for the pigeons ; and, not among
cypresses, but half-hidden by aged poplar-trees, their leaves like golden
fruit, the birds floating around it, the conical roof of the tomb
itself. In the presence of an old servant who remembered him, the great
seals were broken, the rusty key turned at last in the lock, the
door was forced out among the weeds grown thickly about it, and Marius
was actually in the place which had been so often in his thoughts.
He was struck, not however without a touch of remorse thereupon,
chiefly by an odd air of neglect, the neglect of a place allowed to
remain as when it was last used, and left in a hurry, till long
years had covered all alike with thick dust the faded flowers, the
burnt-out lamps, the tools and hardened mortar of the workmen who
had had something to do there. A heavy fragment of woodwork had fallen
and chipped open one of the oldest of the mortuary urns, many
hundreds in number ranged around the walls. It was not properly an urn,
but a minute coffin of stone, and the fracture had revealed a
piteous spectacle of the mouldering, unburned remains within ; the bones
of a child, as he understood, which might have died, in ripe age,
three times over, since it slipped away from among his
great-grandfathers, so far up in the line. Yet the protruding baby hand
seemed to stir up in him feelings vivid enough, bringing him
intimately within the scope of dead people's grievances. He noticed, side
by side with the urn of his mother, that of a boy of about his own
age one of the serving-boys of the household who had descended hither,
from the lightsome world of childhood, almost at the same time with
her. It seemed as if this boy of his own age had taken filial place
beside her there, in his stead. That hard feeling, again, which had
always lingered in his mind with the thought of the father he had
scarcely known, melted wholly away, as he read the precise number
of his years, and reflected suddenly He was of my own present age ;
no hard old man, but with interests, as he looked round him on the
world for the last time, even as mine to-day! And with that came a
blinding rush of kindness, as if two alienated friends had come to
under- stand each other at last. There was weakness in all this ;
as there is in all care for dead persons, to which nevertheless people
will always yield in proportion as they really care for one
another. With a vain yearning, as he stood there, still to be able
to do something for them, he reflected that such doing must be, after
all, in the nature of things, mainly for himself. His own epitaph
might be that old one "Eo-^aTo? TOV ISlov yevov? He was the last of
his race ! Of those who might come hither after himself probably no
one would ever again come quite as he had done to-day ; and it was under
the influence of this thought that he determined to bury all that,
deep below the surface, to be remembered only by him, and in a way which
would claim no sentiment from the indifferent. That took many days
was like a renewal of lengthy old burial rites as he himself watched the
work, early and late ; coming on the last day very early, and
anticipating, by stealth, the last touches, while the workmen were absent
; one young lad only, finally smoothing down the earthy bed,
greatly surprised at the seriousness with which Marius flung in his
flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould. Those eight days
at his old home, so mournfully occupied, had been for Marius in some sort
a forcible disruption from the world and the roots of his life in
it. He had been carried out of himself as never before ; and when the
time was over, it was as if the claim over him of the earth below
had been vindicated, over against the interests of that living world
around. Dead, yet sentient and caressing hands seemed to reach out
of the ground and to be clinging about him. Looking back sometimes now,
from about the midway of life the age, as he conceived, at which
one begins to re-descend one's life though antedating it a little, in his
sad humour, he would note, almost with surprise, the un- broken
placidity of the contemplation in which it had been passed. His own
temper, his early theoretic scheme of things, would have pushed him
on to movement and adventure. Actually, as circumstances had determined,
all its movement had been inward ; movement of observation only, or even of
pure meditation ; in part, perhaps, because throughout it had been
some- thing of a meditatio mortis^ ever facing towards the act of
final detachment. Death, however, as he reflected, must be for every one
nothing (less than the fifth or last act of a drama, and, as 1 such, was
likely to have something of the stirring ! character of a denouement.
And, in fact, it was in form tragic enough that his end not long after-
' wards came to him. In the midst of the extreme weariness and
depression which had followed those last days, CORNELIO, then, as it
happened, on a journey and travelling near the place, finding traces of
him, had become his guest at Whitenights. It was just then that
Marius felt, as he had never done before, the value to himself, the
overpowering charm, of his friendship. More than brother! he felt "
like a son also ! " contrasting the fatigue of soul which made
himself in effect an older man, with the irrepressible youth of his
companion. For it was still the marvellous hopefulness of CORNELIO, his
seeming prerogative over the future, that determined, and kept
alive, all other sentiment concerning him. A new hope had sprung up
in the world of which he, Cornelius, was a depositary, which he was
to bear onward in it. Identifying himself with Cornelius in so dear
a friendship, through him, MARIO seems to touch, to ally himself to, actually
to become a possessor of the coming world ; even as happy parents reach
out, and take possession of it, in and through the survival of
their children. For in these days their intimacy had grown very close, as
they moved hither and thither, leisurely, among the country-places
thereabout, CORNELIO being on his way back to Rome, till they came one
evening to a little town (Marius remembered that he had been there
on his first journey to Rome) which had even then its church and legend
the legend and holy relics of the martyr Hyacinthus, a young Roman
soldier, whose blood had stained the soil of this place in the reign of
the emperor TRAIANO. The thought of that so recent death,
haunted Marius through the night, as if with audible crying and
sighs above the restless wind, which came and went around their lodging.
But towards dawn he slept heavily ; and awaking in broad daylight,
and finding CORNELIO absent, set forth to seek him. The plague was still
in the place had indeed just broken out afresh ; with an outbreak
also of cruel superstition among its wild and miserable inhabitants.
Surely, the old gods were wroth at the presence of this new enemy
among them ! And it was no ordinary morning into which Marius stepped
forth. There was a menace in the dark masses of hill, and motionless
wood, against the gray, although apparently unclouded sky. Under this
sunless heaven the earth itself seemed to fret and fume with a heat
of its own, in spite of the strong night-wind. And now the wind had
fallen. Marius felt that he breathed some strange heavy fluid,
denser than any common air. He could have fancied that the world had
sunken in the night, far below its proper level, into some close,
thick abysm of its own atmosphere. The Christian people of the town,
hardly less terrified and overwrought by the haunting sick- ness
about them than their pagan neighbours, were at prayer before the tomb of
the martyr ; and even as Marius pressed among them to a place
beside Cornelius, on a sudden the hills seemed to roll like a sea in
motion, around the whole compass of the horizon. For a moment
Marius supposed himself attacked with some sudden sickness of brain, till
the fall of a great mass of building convinced him that not himself
but the earth under his feet was giddy. A few moments later the little
market- place was alive with the rush of the distracted inhabitants
from their tottering houses ; and as they waited anxiously for the second
shock of earthquake, a long -smouldering suspicion leapt
precipitately into well-defined purpose, and the whole body of people was
carried forward towards the band of worshippers below. An hour
later, in the wild tumult which followed, the earth had been stained
afresh with the blood of the martyrs Felix and Faustinus F
lores apparuerunt in terra nostra ! and their brethren, together
with CORNELIO and MARIO, thus, as it had happened, taken among them, were
prisoners, reserved for the action of the law. Marius and his
friend, with certain others, exercising the privilege of their rank, made
claim to be tried in Rome, or at least in the chief town of the
district; where, indeed, in the troublous days that had now begun, a legal
process had been already instituted. Under the care of a military
guard the captives were removed on the same day, one stage of their
journey ; sleeping, for security, during the night, side by side
with their keepers, in the rooms of a shepherd's deserted house by
the wayside. It was surmised that one of the prisoners was not a
Christian : the guards were forward to make the utmost pecuniary profit
of this circumstance, and in the night, MARIO, taking advantage of the loose
charge kept over them, and by means partly of a large bribe, had
contrived that Cornelius, as the really innocent person, should be
dismissed in safety on his way, to procure, as Marius explained, the
proper means of defence for himself, when the time of trial came. And
in the morning Cornelius in fact set forth alone, from their miserable
place of detention. MARIO believed that CORNELIO was to be the husband of
Cecilia; and that, perhaps strangely, had but added to the desire to get
him away safely. We wait for the great crisis which is to try what
is in us : we can hardly bear the pressure of our hearts, as we think of
it : the lonely wrestler, or victim, which imagination foreshadows
to us, can hardly be one's self; it seems an outrage of our destiny that
we should be led along so gently and imperceptibly, to so terrible
a leaping-place in the dark, for more perhaps than life or death. At
last, the great act, the critical moment itself comes, easily,
almost unconsciously. Another motion of the clock, and our fatal line the
" great climacteric point " has been passed, which changes
our- selves or our lives. In one quarter of an hour, under a
sudden, uncontrollable impulse, hardly weighing what he did, almost as a
matter of course and as lightly as one hires a bed for one's ;
night's rest on a journey, Marius had taken upon himself all the heavy
risk of the position in which Cornelius had then been the long and
wearisome delays of judgment, which were possible ; the danger and
wretchedness of a long journey in this manner ; possibly the danger
of death. He had delivered his brother, after the manner he had sometimes
vaguely anticipated as a kind of distinction in his destiny; though
indeed always with wistful calculation as to what it might cost him : and
in the first moment after the thing was actually done, he felt only
satisfaction at his courage, at the discovery of his possession of "
nerve." Yet he was, as we know, no hero, no heroic martyr had
indeed no right to be ; and when he had seen Cornelius depart, on his
blithe and hopeful way, as he believed, to become the husband of
Cecilia; actually, as it had happened, without a word of farewell,
supposing MARIO is almost immediately afterwards to follow (Marius
indeed having avoided the moment of leave-taking with its possible
call for an explanation of the circumstances), the re- action came.
He could only guess, of course, at what might really happen. So far, he
had but taken upon himself, in the stead of CORNELIO, a certain
amount of personal risk; though he hardly supposed himself to be facing
the danger of death. Still, especially for one such as he, with all
the sensibilities of which his whole manner of life had been but a
promotion, the situation of a person under trial on a criminal
charge was actually full of distress. To him, in truth, a death such as
the recent death of those saintly brothers, seemed no glorious end. In
his case, at least, the Martyrdom, as it was called the overpowering
act of testimony that Heaven had come down among men would be but a
common execution: from the drops of his blood there would spring no
miraculous, poetic flowers; no eternal aroma would indicate the place of
his burial ; no plenary grace, overflowing for ever upon those who
might stand around it. Had there been one to listen just then, there
would have come, from the very depth of his desolation, an eloquent
utterance at last, on the irony of men's fates, on the singular accidents
of life and death. The guards, now safely in possession of what- ever
money and other valuables the prisoners had had on them, pressed them
forward, over the rough mountain paths, altogether careless of
their sufferings. The great autumn rains were falling. At night the
soldiers light a fire; but it was impossible to keep warm. From time to
time they stopped to roast portions of the meat they carried with
them, making their captives sit round the fire, and pressing it upon
them. But weariness and depression of spirits had deprived Marius
of appetite, even if the food had been more attractive, and for some days
he partook of nothing but bad bread and water. All through the dark
mornings they dragged over boggy plains, up and down hills, wet through
some- times with the heavy rain. Even in those de- plorable
circumstances, he could but notice the wild, dark beauty of those regions
the stormy sunrise, and placid spaces of evening. One of the
keepers, a very young soldier, won him at times, by his simple kindness,
to talk a little, with wonder at the lad's half-conscious, poetic
delight in the adventures of the journey. At times, the whole company
would lie down for rest at the roadside, hardly sheltered from the
storm ; and in the deep fatigue of his spirit, his old longing for
inopportune sleep overpowered him. Sleep anywhere, and under any
conditions, seemed just then a thing one might well exchange the remnants
of one's life for. It must have been about the fifth night, as he
afterwards conjectured, that the soldiers, believing him likely to die,
had finally left him unable to proceed further, under the care of some
country people, who to the extent of their power certainly treated
him kindly in his sickness. He awoke to consciousness after a severe
attack of fever, lying alone on a rough bed, in a kind of hut. It
seemed a remote, mysterious place, as he looked around in the silence ;
but so fresh lying, in fact, in a high pasture-land among the
mountains that he felt he should recover, if he might but just lie
there in quiet long enough. Even during those nights of delirium he had
felt the scent of the new-mown hay pleasantly, with a dim sense for
a moment that he was lying safe in his old home. The sunlight lay clear
beyond the open door ; and the sounds of the cattle reached him
softly from the green places around. Recalling confusedly the torturing
hurry of his late journeys, he dreaded, as his consciousness of the
whole situation returned, the coming of the guards. But the place
remained in absolute stillness. He was, in fact, at liberty, but for
his own disabled condition. And it was certainly a genuine clinging
to life that he felt just then, at the very bottom of his mind. So it had
been, obscurely, even through all the wild fancies of his delirium,
from the moment which followed his decision against himself, in favour of
Cornelius. The occupants of the place were to be heard presently,
coming and going about him on their business : and it was as if the
approach of death brought out in all their force the merely human
sentiments. There is that in death which certainly makes indifferent
persons anxious to forget the dead : to put them those aliens away
out of their thoughts altogether, as soon as may be. Conversely, in the
deep isolation of spirit which was now creeping upon MARIO, the
faces of these people, casually visible, took a strange hold on his
affections ; the link of general brotherhood, the feeling of human kinship,
asserting itself most strongly when it was about to be severed for ever.
At nights he would find this face or that impressed deeply on his
fancy ; and, in a troubled sort of manner, his mind would follow them
onwards, on the ways of their simple, humdrum, everyday life, with
a peculiar yearning to share it with them, envying the calm, earthy
cheerfulness of all their days to be, still under the sun, though so
indifferent, of course, to him ! as if these rude people had been
suddenly lifted into some height of earthly good-fortune, which must
needs isolate them from himself. Tristem neminem fecit he repeated
to himself; his old prayer shaping itself now almost as his
epitaph. Yes ! so much the very hardest judge must concede to him. And the
sense of satisfaction which that thought left with him disposed him to a
conscious effort of recollection, while he lay there, unable now even to
raise his head, as he discovered on attempting to reach a .pitcher
of water which stood near. Revelation, vision, the discovery of a vision,
the seeing of a perfect humanity, in a perfect world through all
his alternations of mind, by some dominant instinct, determined by the
original necessities of his own nature and character, he had always
set that above the having, or even the doing, of any- thing. For,
such vision, if received with due attitude on his part, was, in reality,
the being something, and as such was surely a pleasant offering or
sacrifice to whatever gods there might be, observant of him. And how
goodly had the vision been ! one long unfolding of beauty and
energy in things, upon the closing of which he might gratefully utter his
"Vixi!' Even then, just ere his eyes were to be shut for ever,
the things they had seen seemed a veritable possession in hand ; the
persons, the places, above all, the touching image of Jesus,
apprehended dimly through the expressive faces, the crying of the
children, in that mysterious drama, with a sudden sense of peace and
satisfaction now, which he could not explain to himself. Surely, he
had prospered in life ! And again, as of old, the sense of gratitude
seemed to bring with it the sense also of a living person at his
side. For still, in a shadowy world, his deeper wisdom had ever
been, with a sense of economy, with a jealous estimate of gain and loss,
to use life, not as the means to some problematic end, but, as far
as might be, from dying hour to dying hour, an end in itself a kind of
music, all- sufficing to the duly trained ear, even as it died out
on the air. Yet now, aware still in that suffering body of such vivid
powers of mind and sense, as he anticipated from time to time how
his sickness, practically without aid as he must be in this rude place,
was likely to end, and that the moment of taking final account was
drawing very near, a consciousness of waste would come, with
half-angry tears of self-pity, in his great weakness a blind, outraged,
angry feeling of wasted power, such as he might have experienced
himself standing by the deathbed of another, in condition like his
own. And yet it was the fact, again, that the vision of men and
things, actually revealed to him on his way through the world, had
developed, with a wonderful largeness, the faculties to which it
addressed itself, his general capacity of vision; and in that too was a
success, in the view of certain, very definite, well-considered, undeniable
possibilities. Throughout that elaborate and lifelong education of his
receptive powers, he had ever kept in view the purpose of pre-
paring himself towards possible further revelation some day towards some
ampler vision, which should take up into itself and explain this
world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but
half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic,
recovered at last. At this moment, his un- clouded receptivity of soul,
grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to ex-
perience, was at its height ; the house ready for the possible guest ;
the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers
might choose to write there. And was not this precisely the condition,
the attitude of mind, to which something higher than he, yet akin
to him, would be likely to reveal itself ; to which that influence
he had felt now and again like a friendly hand upon his shoulder, amid
the actual obscurities of the world, would be likely to make a
further explanation ? Surely, the aim of a true philosophy must lie, not
in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to the
circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance
of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest
achievement; the unclouded and receptive soul quitting the world finally,
with the same fresh wonder with which it had entered the world
still unimpaired, and going on its blind way at last with the
consciousness of some profound enigma in things, as but a pledge of
something further to come. MARIO seems to understand how one might
look back upon life here, and its excellent visions, as but the portion of
a race-course left behind him by a runner still swift of foot : for a
moment he experienced a singular curiosity, almost an ardent desire to
enter upon a future, the possibilities of which seemed so
large. And just then, again amid the memory of certain touching
actual words and images, came the thought of the great hope, that hope
against hope, which, as he conceived, had arisen Lux sedentibus in
tenebris upon the aged world; the hope CORNELIO had seemed to bear away
upon him in his strength, with a buoyancy which had caused MARIO to
feel, not so much that by a caprice of destiny, he had been left to die
in his place, as that CORNELIO was gone on a mission to deliver him
also from death. There had been a permanent protest established in the
world, a plea, a perpetual after-thought, which humanity henceforth
would ever possess in reserve, against any wholly mechanical and
disheartening theory of itself and its conditions. That was a
thought which relieved for him the iron outline of the horizon
about him, touching it as if with soft light from beyond ; filling the
shadowy, hollow places to which he was on his way with the warmth
of definite affections; confirming also certain considerations by which
he seemed to link himself to the generations to come in the world he
was leaving. Yes ! through the survival of their children, happy parents are
able to think calmly, and with a very practical affection, of a
world in which they are to have no direct share; planting with a cheerful
good-humour, the acorns they carry about with them, that their
grand-children may be shaded from the sun by the broad oak-trees of the
future. That is nature's way of easing death to us. It was thus
too, surprised, delighted, that MARIO, under the power of that new hope
among men, could think of the generations to come after him.
Without it, dim in truth as it was, he could hardly have dared to
ponder the world which limited all he really knew, as it would be when he
should have departed from it. A strange lonesomeness, like physical
darkness, seemed to settle upon the thought of it; as if its business
hereafter must be, as far as he was concerned, carried on in some
inhabited, but distant and alien, star. Contrariwise, with the sense of that
hope warm about him, he seemed to anticipate some kindly care for
himself, never to fail even on earth, a care for his very body that dear
sister and companion of his soul, outworn, suffering, and in the
very article of death, as it was now. For the weariness came back
tenfold ; and he had finally to abstain from thoughts like these,
as from what caused physical pain. And then, as before in the
wretched, sleepless nights of those forced marches, he would try to fix
his mind, as it were impassively, and like a child thinking over
the toys it loves, one after another, that it may fall asleep thus, and
forget all about them the sooner, on all the persons he had loved
in life on his love for them, dead or living, grate- ful for his
love or not, rather than on theirs for him letting their images pass away
again, or rest with him, as they would. In the bare sense of having
loved he seemed to find, even amid this foundering of the ship, that on
which his soul might "assuredly rest and depend." One
after another, he suffered those faces and voices to come and go, as in
some mechanical exercise, as he might have repeated all the verses
he knew by heart, or like the telling of beads one by one, with many a
sleepy nod between-whiles. For there remained also, for the old
earthy creature still within him, that great blessedness of
physical slumber. To sleep, to lose one's self in sleep that, as he had
always recognised, was a good thing. And it was after a space of
deep sleep that he awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people
who had kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness, now
kneeling around his bed : and what he heard confirmed, in the then
perfect clearness of his soul, the inevitable suggestion of his own bodily
feelings. He had often dreamt he was condemned to die, that the
hour, with wild thoughts of escape, was arrived; and waking, with the sun
all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been full of
gratitude for his place there, alive still, in the land of the living. He
read surely, now, in the manner, the doings, of these people, some
of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the heavy
sunlight in very deed lay, that his last morning was come, and turned to
think once more of the beloved. Often had he fancied of old that
not to die on a dark or rainy day might itself have a little alleviating
grace or favour about it. The people around his bed were praying
fervently Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana! In the moments of his extreme
helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a
snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had applied
to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses,
through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and
obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the same people who, in the
gray, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them
secretly, with their accustomed prayers ; but with joy also,
holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter,
to have been of the nature of a martyrdom ; and martyrdom, as the church
had always said, a kind of sacrament with plenary grace. P Corrado Curcio. Curcio. Keywords: esistenti -- Lucrezio,
Foscolo, Leopardi, Alighieri, Gentile, Diano, Sicilian philosophy. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, “Grice e Curcio” – The Swimming-Pool Library.
No comments:
Post a Comment