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Title: Marius the Epicurean, Volume One
Author: Walter Horatio Pater
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE
WALTER HORATIO PATER
London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a
style inconvenient in an electronic edition. I have therefore
placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater's footnotes
and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each chapter's
notes at that chapter's end.
Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy,
I have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed
numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately
following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I
have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an
e-text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
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
Cheimerinos oneiros, hote mekistai hai vyktes.+
+"A winter's dream, when nights are longest."
Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.
CONTENTS
PART THE FIRST
1. "The Religion of Numa": 3-12
2. White-Nights: 13-26
3. Change of Air: 27-42
4. The Tree of Knowledge: 43-54
5. The Golden Book: 55-91
6. Euphuism: 92-110
7. A Pagan End: 111-120
PART THE SECOND
8. Animula Vagula: 123-143
9. New Cyrenaicism: 144-157
10. On the Way: 158-171
11. "The Most Religious City in the World": 172-187
12. "The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King": 188-211
13. The "Mistress and Mother" of Palaces: 212-229
14. Manly Amusement: 230-243
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE
PART THE FIRST
CHAPTER I: "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"
[3] 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:
[4] --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 [5] 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 [6] 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 [7] 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 [8] 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 [9] 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.
[10] 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 [11] 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 [12] 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
[13] 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 [14] 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.
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 [15] 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 [16] 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.
[17] 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
[18] 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 [19] 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 [20] 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 [21]
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 [22]
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
[23] 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 [24] 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 [25] 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 ascesis, 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.
[26] 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.
NOTES
13. *Ad Vigilias Albas.
CHAPTER III: CHANGE OF AIR
Dilexi decorem domus tuae.
[27] 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.
[28] 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 [29] 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 [30] 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 [31] 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 [32] 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.
"If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some fresh
picture, in a clear [33] 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 [34] 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 [35]
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 [36] 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 [37]
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 [38] 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 [39] 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 [40] 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 [41] 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 [42] 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.
NOTES
32. *[Transliteration:] E aporroe tou kallous. +Translation:
"Emanation from a thing of beauty."
CHAPTER IV: THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
O mare! O littus! verum secretumque Mouseion,+
quam multa invenitis, quam multa dictatis!
Pliny's Letters.
[43] 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 [44] 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 [45] 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 [46] 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 [47] 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 [48] 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 [49] 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 [50] 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 epenenothen 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 [51] 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 elite 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! [52] 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, [53] 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, [54] the
elements of distinction, in our everyday life--of so exclusively
living in them--that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or
debris 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 epenenothen aien eontas. Translation:
"such as the gods are endowed with." Homer, Odyssey, 8.365.
CHAPTER V: THE GOLDEN BOOK
[55] 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!
[56] 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, [57] 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 [58] 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 [59] 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 [60] 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 [61] 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 Theophile
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 [62] 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 [63] 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.
[64] 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 [65] 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 [66] 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 [67] 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.
[68] 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, [69] 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 [70] 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 [71] 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 [72] 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 [73] 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."
[74] 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 [75] 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 [76] 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 [77] 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
[78] 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 [79] 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 sooth 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 [80] 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 [81] 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?"
[82] 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 [83] 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 [84] 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 [85] 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 [86]
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 [87] 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 [88] 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 [89] 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 [90] 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;
[91] 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
[92] 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 Eros
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, [93] 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 [94] 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 [95] 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 [96] 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 [97] 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 [98] 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 [99] 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 [100] 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 de limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nei melaine...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phegmini thalasses.+
And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was
always telling [101] 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, [l02] 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, naivete;
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, [103] 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 [104] 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 [105] 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 [106] 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 [107]
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 [108] 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 [109] 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 neotes.+--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 [110] 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 de limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nei melaine...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phegmini thalasses.
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 neotes. Pater translates the phrase,
"devoted youth."
CHAPTER VII: A PAGAN END
[111] 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 [112] 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 [113] --
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 [114] 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 [115] 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 [116] 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, [117] 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 [118] 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 [119] 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.
[120] 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
[123] 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
[124] 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 [125] 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, [126] 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 [127] 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 [128] 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. [129] 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, [130] 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 [131] 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 [132] 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, [133] 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. [134] 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 [135] 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 [136] 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 [137] 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, [138]
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
[139] 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.--
[140] 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'egarer avec methode, 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--Theoria--
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
[141] 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 [142] 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 [143] 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
[144] 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.
[145] 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 [146] 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 [147]
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 [148] 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, [149] theoria,+ 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 [150] 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"-- [151] 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 [152] 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'idolatrie 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 [153] 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 [154] 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 hedone+ 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, [155] 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,
[156] 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 [157]
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: theoria. Definition "a looking at . . .
observing . . . contemplation."
154. +Transliteration: monochronos hedone. 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.
[158] 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 [159] 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 [160] 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 [161] 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 [162] 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 [163] 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;
[164] 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 [165] 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 [166] 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 [167] 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 [168] 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 [169] 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 ascesis; 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 [170] 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 [171] 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"
[172] 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 [173]
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 [174] 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, [175] 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 a 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 [176] 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 Graecostasis. 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 [177] 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 [178] 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 [179] 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, [180] 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 [181] 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 [182] 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.
[183] 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 [184] 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, [185] 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 [186]
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, [187] 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.+
[188] 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 [189]
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 [190] 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 [191] 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.
[192] 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 [193]
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 [194] 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, [195] 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 [196] 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, [197] 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 [198] 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 [199] 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 [200] 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--Hosper epigraphas
chronon kai holon ethnon+--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, [201] 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
[202] 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 hore+: and soon a wind hath
scattered them, and thereafter the [203] 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?
[204] "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. [205] 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 [206] 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 [207] 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
[208] 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 [209] 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
[210] 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 [211]
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: Hosper epigraphas chronon kai holon ethnon.
Pater's Translation: "the sepulchral titles of ages and whole
peoples."
202. +Homer, Iliad VI.146-48.
202. +Transliteration: Earos epigignetai hore. 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 [213]
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 [214] 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 [215] 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 [216] 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 [217] 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.
[218] 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 [219] 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 [220] 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 [221] 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,
[222] 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 [223] 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 [224] 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
[225] 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."
"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 [226] 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, [227] 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 [228] 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 [229] 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--
Make sure that those to whom you come nearest be the happier by your*
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.
NOTES
225. +"Limpid" is misprinted "Limped."
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 [231] 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 [232] 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. [233] 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 [234] "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 [235] 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 protege, [236] 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 [237] 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 [238] 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, [239] 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
[240] 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 [241] 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 [242] 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. [243] 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
End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Marius the Epicurean Vol. I, by Walter Pater