Marius the Epicurean

HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS

by WALTER PATER

VOLUME ONE

London: 1910.
(The Library Edition.)


Contents

 PART THE FIRST
 1. “The Religion of Numa”
 2. White-Nights
 3. Change of Air
 4. The Tree of Knowledge
 5. The Golden Book
 6. Euphuism
 7. A Pagan End

 PART THE SECOND
 8. Animula Vagula
 9. New Cyrenaicism
 10. On the Way
 11. “The Most Religious City in the World”
 12. “The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King”
 13. The “Mistress and Mother” of Palaces
 14. Manly Amusement


NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Notes: 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, Vol. 3.


MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE




PART THE FIRST




CHAPTER I.
“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 life and 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
religious 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 instance)
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 officiated 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 of 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
Bacchus 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.




CHAPTER II.
WHITE-NIGHTS


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 Marius 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
the earth 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
Marius fancied, 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.




CHAPTER III.
CHANGE OF AIR


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 Marius became 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, Marius still seemed 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.

* [Transliteration:] Ê aporroê tou kallous. +Translation: “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 gazing 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 that
freshness 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 they 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 knowledge of 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 stilled the 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 aright, 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 may pass 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-drawn 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.




CHAPTER IV.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE


O mare! O littus! verum secretumque Mouseion,+
quam multa invenitis, quam multa dictatis!
Pliny’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 Venus, 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 Plato’s Academy 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 Flavian, as other boys 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.

NOTES


43. +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.




CHAPTER V.
THE GOLDEN BOOK


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 vernacular 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 Cornelius
Fronto, 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, Lucius, 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 Zephyrus 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 Zephyrus, 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 an unworthy 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 Venus? 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 Mercury produce Psyche in heaven; and holding out to
her his ambrosial cup, “Take it,” he said, “and live for ever; nor
shall Cupid 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 Venus 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.




CHAPTER VI.
EUPHUISM


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 Apuleius 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 Apuleius, 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
Cicero; 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 programme 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 to the
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: in fact 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 Plato, for instance, or Virgil, 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
Cicero 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
necessarily reproduce 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 first bland 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 masterly 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 counted 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 Venus, 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 Marius 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.

Marius followed 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. Flavian and Marius
sat 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 younger 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.”


100. +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.”




CHAPTER VII.
A PAGAN END


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 bow and 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 architecture about 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 Marius, 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 Flavian, had given way at nightfall to
steady rain; and in the darkness Marius lay 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.




PART THE SECOND




CHAPTER VIII.
ANIMULA VAGULA


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 his childhood,
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 certain 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 lending to all mind
and matter, in turn, what life they had. In this “perpetual flux” of
things and of souls, there was, as Heraclitus 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 Protagoras,
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 Horace 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.”




CHAPTER IX.
NEW CYRENAICISM


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 Dante’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 Marius took 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
Marius, at the age of nineteen, 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.

NOTES


145. +Canto VI.


147. +Transliteration: paideia. Definition “rearing, education.”


149. +Transliteration: theôria. Definition “a looking at ... observing
... contemplation.”


154. +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.”




CHAPTER X.
ON THE WAY


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 famous Greek 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 Cornelius—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; Cornelius, and some others of whom the party then
consisted, agreeing, chiefly for the sake of Marius, 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 Marius, as they passed down a long street,
with many open spaces on either hand: Cornelius to his military
quarters, and Marius to the old dwelling-place of his fathers.

NOTES


162. +E-text editor’s note: ergastula were the Roman agrarian
equivalent of prison-workhouses.


168. +Apuleius, The Golden Ass, I.17.




CHAPTER XI.
“THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD”


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
Antoninus Pius—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
Tiberius. 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 Cornelius 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!+
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.

NOTES


187. +Horace, Odes I.ix.17. Translation: “So long as youth is fresh and
age is far away.”




CHAPTER XII.
THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH HEDGE A KING


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,” 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 Aurelius, indeed, the old legend of his descent from Numa,
from Numa 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 Marius as the leading
outward characteristic of Aurelius; 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.

The Senate was 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. Marius 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 Marius 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
Marius was 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 is no longer anywhere at all.
Pass on to the reign of Trajan: 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 from 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: Camillus, 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. +Homer, 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.”




CHAPTER XIII.
THE “MISTRESS AND MOTHER” OF PALACES


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 Marcus Aurelius looked upon Marius, 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 Marius found 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 Aurelius 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 Caligula had brought some contempt on that claim, which
had become almost a jest under the ungainly Claudius, yet, from
Augustus downwards, a vague divinity had seemed to surround the Caesars
even in this life; and the peculiar character of Aurelius, 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 the young Commodus, 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 the 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
Aurelius was 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 Aurelius; its many-coloured memories suiting, perhaps, his pensive
character, and the crude splendours of Nero and Hadrian being now
subdued by time. The window-less Roman abode must have had much of what
to a 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 free the 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 Jupiter, 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 Marius 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.




CHAPTER XIV.
MANLY AMUSEMENT


During the Eastern war there came a moment when schism in the empire
had seemed possible through the defection of Lucius Verus; when to
Aurelius 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 Lucius Verus, 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!”
Marius could 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: Lucius Verus 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 the 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 of 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
place in 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
Aurelius 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 Marsyas 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 Marius, 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. Marius remembered 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.

END OF VOL. I