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Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

by Walter Pater · English · Gutenberg #4057 · 346,444 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

Author: Walter Pater


        
Release date: May 1, 2003 [eBook #4057]
                Most recently updated: September 1, 2021

Language: English

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Credits: Alfred J. Drake. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARIUS THE EPICUREAN — VOLUME 1 ***




Marius the Epicurean

HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS

by WALTER PATER

VOLUME ONE

London: 1910.
(The Library Edition.)


Contents

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

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


NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Notes: I have placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater’s
footnotes and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each of my
notes at that chapter’s end.

Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater’s Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it
can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other
nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN,
VOLUME ONE
WALTER PATER


Χειμερινὸς ὄνειρος, ὅτε μήκισται αἱ νύκτες+


+“A winter’s dream, when nights are longest.”
Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.


MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE




PART THE FIRST




CHAPTER I.
“THE RELIGION OF NUMA”


As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in
the country, and died out at last as but paganism—the religion of the
villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so, in an
earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that the older
and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest. While, in
Rome, new religions had arisen with bewildering complexity around the
dying old one, the earlier and simpler patriarchal religion, “the
religion of Numa,” as people loved to fancy, lingered on with little
change amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and sentiment of which
so much of it had grown. Glimpses of such a survival we may catch below
the merely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry; in Tibullus
especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman
religious usage.

At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates,
Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:


—he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical, with
repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of his
elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from
a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the child Romulus
had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar; and the
worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of the
young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of the
hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment
rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things
and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned
by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex,
passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase,
Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the
temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that
simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects
with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods
had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines.

And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his golden
image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (now
about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the world
would at last find itself happy, could it detach some reluctant
philosophic student from the more desirable life of celestial
contemplation, and compel him to rule it), there was a boy living in an
old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for himself, recruited
that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous force of religious
veneration such as had originally called them into being. More than a
century and a half had past since Tibullus had written; but the
restoration of religious usages, and their retention where they still
survived, was meantime come to be the fashion through the influence of
imperial example; and what had been in the main a matter of family
pride with his father, was sustained by a native instinct of devotion
in the young Marius. A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves,
pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every
circumstance of daily life—that conscience, of which the old Roman
religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a
powerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly
puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly
in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the
Roman lad, as he passed the spot, “touched of heaven,” where the
lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an upright
stone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place. He
brought to that system of symbolic usages, and they in turn developed
in him further, a great seriousness—an impressibility to the sacredness
of time, of life and its events, and the circumstances of family
fellowship; of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour
on which they live, really understood by him as gifts—a sense of
religious responsibility in the reception of them. It was a religion
for the most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long
burden of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, for instance)
the thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome channel for the
almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and relieved it as
gratitude to the gods.

The day of the “little” or private Ambarvalia was come, to be
celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belonging to it,
as the great college of the Arval Brothers officiated at Rome in the
interest of the whole state. At the appointed time all work ceases; the
instruments of labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers,
while masters and servants together go in solemn procession along the
dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims whose blood
is presently to be shed for the purification from all natural or
supernatural taint of the lands they have “gone about.” The old Latin
words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved on its way,
though their precise meaning was long since become unintelligible, were
recited from an ancient illuminated roll, kept in the painted chest in
the hall, together with the family records. Early on that day the girls
of the farm had been busy in the great portico, filling large baskets
with flowers plucked short from branches of apple and cherry, then in
spacious bloom, to strew before the quaint images of the gods—Ceres and
Bacchus and the yet more mysterious Dea Dia—as they passed through the
fields, carried in their little houses on the shoulders of white-clad
youths, who were understood to proceed to this office in perfect
temperance, as pure in soul and body as the air they breathed in the
firm weather of that early summer-time. The clean lustral water and the
full incense-box were carried after them. The altars were gay with
garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of blossom and green herbs
to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered this morning
from a particular plot in the old garden, set apart for the purpose.
Just then the young leaves were almost as fragrant as flowers, and the
scent of the bean-fields mingled pleasantly with the cloud of incense.
But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the priests, clad
in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and bearing ears of green
corn upon their heads, secured by flowing bands of white, the
procession moved in absolute stillness, all persons, even the children,
abstaining from speech after the utterance of the pontifical formula,
Favete linguis!—Silence! Propitious Silence!—lest any words save those
proper to the occasion should hinder the religious efficacy of the
rite.

With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a leading part
in the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to complete
this impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of mind,
esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of these
sacred functions. To him the sustained stillness without seemed really
but to be waiting upon that interior, mental condition of preparation
or expectancy, for which he was just then intently striving. The
persons about him, certainly, had never been challenged by those
prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine nature: they
conceived them rather to be the appointed means of setting such
troublesome movements at rest. By them, “the religion of Numa,” so
staid, ideal and comely, the object of so much jealous conservatism,
though of direct service as lending sanction to a sort of high
scrupulosity, especially in the chief points of domestic conduct, was
mainly prized as being, through its hereditary character, something
like a personal distinction—as contributing, among the other
accessories of an ancient house, to the production of that aristocratic
atmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But in the
young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all
definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much
speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of
the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct
enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind,
as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were like
the passing of some mysterious influence over all the elements of his
nature and experience. One thing only distracted him—a certain pity at
the bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the sacrificial
victims and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at the
central act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher’s
work, such as we decorously hide out of sight; though some then present
certainly displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted
them on a religious pretext. The old sculptors of the great procession
on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placid
heads of the victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for
animals in forcible contrast with any indifference as to their
sufferings. It was this contrast that distracted Marius now in the
blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption upon the
scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the
procession approached the altars.

The names of that great populace of “little gods,” dear to the Roman
home, which the pontiffs had placed on the sacred list of the
Indigitamenta, to be invoked, because they can help, on special
occasions, were not forgotten in the long litany—Vatican who causes the
infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his first word,
Cuba who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca especially, for whom
Marius had through life a particular memory and devotion, the goddess
who watches over one’s safe coming home. The urns of the dead in the
family chapel received their due service. They also were now become
something divine, a goodly company of friendly and protecting spirits,
encamped about the place of their former abode—above all others, the
father, dead ten years before, of whom, remembering but a tall, grave
figure above him in early childhood, Marius habitually thought as a
genius a little cold and severe.

Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi,
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera.—


Perhaps!—but certainly needs his altar here below, and garlands to-day
upon his urn. But the dead genii were satisfied with little—a few
violets, a cake dipped in wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, from
the time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had Marius
taken them their portion of the family meal, at the second course,
amidst the silence of the company. They loved those who brought them
their sustenance; but, deprived of these services, would be heard
wandering through the house, crying sorrowfully in the stillness of the
night.

And those simple gifts, like other objects as trivial—bread, oil, wine,
milk—had regained for him, by their use in such religious service, that
poetic and as it were moral significance, which surely belongs to all
the means of daily life, could we but break through the veil of our
familiarity with things by no means vulgar in themselves. A hymn
followed, while the whole assembly stood with veiled faces. The fire
rose up readily from the altars, in clean, bright flame—a favourable
omen, making it a duty to render the mirth of the evening complete. Old
wine was poured out freely for the servants at supper in the great
kitchen, where they had worked in the imperfect light through the long
evenings of winter. The young Marius himself took but a very sober part
in the noisy feasting. A devout, regretful after-taste of what had been
really beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished took him early away,
that he might the better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the
celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the
influences of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be moving
in procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That
feeling was still upon him as he awoke amid the beating of violent rain
on the shutters, in the first storm of the season. The thunder which
startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of his chamber
almost painfully complete, as if the nearness of those angry clouds
shut him up in a close place alone in the world. Then he thought of the
sort of protection which that day’s ceremonies assured. To procure an
agreement with the gods—Pacem deorum exposcere: that was the meaning of
what they had all day been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but
half-suspicious, he would fain have those Powers at least not against
him. His own nearer household gods were all around his bed. The spell
of his religion as a part of the very essence of home, its intimacy,
its dignity and security, was forcible at that moment; only, it seemed
to involve certain heavy demands upon him.




CHAPTER II.
WHITE-NIGHTS


To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the
childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as
you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,—surely nothing could
happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie.
White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.* “The red rose
came first,” says a quaint German mystic, speaking of “the mystery of
so-called white things,” as being “ever an after-thought—the doubles,
or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real,
half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which,
as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by
horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the
priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal.” So,
white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should
be nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but passed in continuous
dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainly the place was, in such
case, true to its fanciful name in this, that you might very well
conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in the daytime might come
to much there.

* _Ad Vigilias Albas_.


The young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had come
down to him much curtailed through the extravagance of a certain
Marcellus two generations before, a favourite in his day of the
fashionable world at Rome, where he had at least spent his substance
with a correctness of taste Marius might seem to have inherited from
him; as he was believed also to resemble him in a singularly pleasant
smile, consistent however, in the younger face, with some degree of
sombre expression when the mind within was but slightly moved.

As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and nearer to
the dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a trace of workday
negligence or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some,
for the young master himself among them. The more observant passer-by
would note, curious as to the inmates, a certain amount of dainty care
amid that neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance to
disturb old associations. It was significant of the national character,
that a sort of elegant gentleman farming, as we say, had been much
affected by some of the most cultivated Romans. But it became something
more than an elegant diversion, something of a serious business, with
the household of Marius; and his actual interest in the cultivation of
the earth and the care of flocks had brought him, at least, intimately
near to those elementary conditions of life, a reverence for which, the
great Roman poet, as he has shown by his own half-mystic pre-occupation
with them, held to be the ground of primitive Roman religion, as of
primitive morals. But then, farm-life in Italy, including the culture
of the olive and the vine, has a grace of its own, and might well
contribute to the production of an ideal dignity of character, like
that of nature itself in this gifted region. Vulgarity seemed
impossible. The place, though impoverished, was still deservedly dear,
full of venerable memories, and with a living sweetness of its own for
to-day.

To hold by such ceremonial traditions had been a part of the struggling
family pride of the lad’s father, to which the example of the head of
the state, old Antoninus Pius—an example to be still further enforced
by his successor—had given a fresh though perhaps somewhat artificial
popularity. It had been consistent with many another homely and
old-fashioned trait in him, not to undervalue the charm of
exclusiveness and immemorial authority, which membership in a local
priestly college, hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To set a
real value on these things was but one element in that pious concern
for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as Marius afterwards
discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. The ancient
hymn—Fana Novella!—was still sung by his people, as the new moon grew
bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leaping through heaps
of blazing straw on a certain night in summer was not discouraged. The
privilege of augury itself, according to tradition, had at one time
belonged to his race; and if you can imagine how, once in a way, an
impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mystic intimation, of
the meaning and consequences of all that, what was implied in it
becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the mind of Marius, in
whose house the auspices were still carefully consulted before every
undertaking of moment.

The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally—and that is all
many not unimportant persons ever find to do—a certain tradition of
life, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling with
which he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that of awe;
though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he
could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so
weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman
religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. On the part of
his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband’s memory, there
was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the recognition, as
Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice to be credited to the
dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowy enough but for the
poignancy of that regret, was like one long service to the departed
soul; its many annual observances centering about the funeral urn—a
tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white and fair, in the
family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowers from the
garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a somewhat
closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought still to
protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself—a closeness
which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our human
sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country,
might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout
interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother’s sorrow. After the
deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so
much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images.
To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding
of him a similar collectedness. The severe and archaic religion of the
villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout circumspection
lest he should fall short at any point of the demand upon him of
anything in which deity was concerned. He must satisfy with a kind of
sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest he be found wanting to,
the claims of others, in their joys and calamities—the happiness which
deity sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself felt. And from
habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world of men and
things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side,
came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept him serious
and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in after years much
engrossed him, and when he had learned to think of all religions as
indifferent, serious amid many fopperies and through many languid days,
and made him anticipate all his life long as a thing towards which he
must carefully train himself, some great occasion of self-devotion,
such as really came, that should consecrate his life, and, it might be,
its memory with others, as the early Christian looked forward to
martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon it.

The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his
first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the
face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the
white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to
the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble,
mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the
exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries
of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay
along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble
plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds had
forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and
farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a
still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. The old Roman
architects seem to have well understood the decorative value of the
floor—the real economy there was, in the production of rich interior
effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface they trod on.
The pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness; but,
though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a piece
of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age.
Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn
chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant
Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to
Marius, just then so full of animation and country colour. A chamber,
curved ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the mansion,
still contained his collection of works of art; above all, that head of
Medusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the old
Greek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the thing, as it
seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands of
which it was drawn up in a fisherman’s net, with the fine golden
laminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellus
also who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the white
pigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazed
windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape—the
pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the
purple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marble
going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark
headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summer
nights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of
the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.

Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral
or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the
whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar
sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the
deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can
give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them—the
“subjective immortality,” to use a modern phrase, for which many a
Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter,
still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any such considerations
regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that secondary
existence, that warm place still left, in thought at least, beside the
living, the desire for which is actually, in various forms, so great a
motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, even thus early, came
to think of women’s tears, of women’s hands to lay one to rest, in
death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural want. The soft
lines of the white hands and face, set among the many folds of the veil
and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music
sometimes, defined themselves for him as the typical expression of
maternity. Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for
her musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such
things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying duly his
country-grown habits—the sense of a certain delicate blandness, which
he relished, above all, on returning to the “chapel” of his mother,
after long days of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For
poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English,
the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its
generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is
beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit afterwards in
his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the
winters especially, when the sufferings of the animal world became so
palpable even to the least observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for
all creatures, for the almost human troubles and sicknesses of the
flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which had in it something of
religious veneration for life as such—for that mysterious essence which
man is powerless to create in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at
the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and
springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she
told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in
his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul was like that!
Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the opposite side,
unruffled and unsoiled? And as his mother became to him the very type
of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and
maternity itself the central type of all love;—so, that beautiful
dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal
of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many
distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.

And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced still
further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security. His
religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the really
light-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom,
its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls of
Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always as the
prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as his
accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it;
and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made
him oddly suspicious of particular places and persons. Though his
liking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer,
as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and
ever afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for there
was something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep
uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almost
passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an
African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile
writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into
the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all
sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to
puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of
a snake’s bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into
the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A
kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have
killed or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the
very circumstance of their life, being what they were. It was something
like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral feeling, for
the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or feathers, so
different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect in
its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and
sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it
awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmity against him.
Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, a second time, a
showman with his serpents, he remembered the night which had then
followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine’s vein, on the real greatness of
those little troubles of children, of which older people make light;
but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected how richly possessed
his life had actually been by beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing
how greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace.

Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to
contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an
earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his
solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of
the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and
became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an
idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from
within, by the exercise of meditative power. A vein of subjective
philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, there
would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct,
with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men’s valuations. And
the generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace up
to the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance to
him. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis
perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might
describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal
function hereditary in his family—the sort of mystic enjoyment he had
in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such
preparation involved. Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of
the play of Euripides, who every morning sweeps the temple floor with
such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in
sacred places, with a susceptibility to their peculiar influences which
he never outgrew; so that often in after-times, quite unexpectedly,
this feeling would revive in him with undiminished freshness. That
first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication,
survived through all the distractions of the world, and when all
thought of such vocation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in
spirit at least, towards a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the
conduct of life.

And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the lad’s
pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble to the
coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and
delightful signs, one after another—the abandoned boat, the ruined
flood-gates, the flock of wild birds—that one was approaching the sea;
the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds. And
it was characteristic of him that he relished especially the grave,
subdued, northern notes in all that—the charm of the French or English
notes, as we might term them—in the luxuriant Italian landscape.




CHAPTER III.
CHANGE OF AIR


Dilexi decorem domus tuae.

That almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of the
country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of a journey,
which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to a certain
temple of Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was then usual in
such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. The religion of
Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been naturalised in Rome
in the old republican times; but had reached under the Antonines the
height of its popularity throughout the Roman world. That was an age of
valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginary ones; but below its
various crazes concerning health and disease, largely multiplied a few
years after the time of which I am speaking by the miseries of a great
pestilence, lay a valuable, because partly practicable, belief that all
the maladies of the soul might be reached through the subtle gateways
of the body.

Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean bodily sanity. The
religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator, as they called him
absolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one religion; that
mild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing, all other
pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral
or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to
have a kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more
serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health,
beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming
truly, in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthood
or “family” of Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be in
possession of certain precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps,
of all the institutions of the pagan world, to the Christian
priesthood; the temples of the god, rich in some instances with the
accumulated thank-offerings of centuries of a tasteful devotion, being
really also a kind of hospitals for the sick, administered in a full
conviction of the religiousness, the refined and sacred happiness, of a
life spent in the relieving of pain.

Elements of a really experimental and progressive knowledge there were
doubtless amid this devout enthusiasm, bent so faithfully on the
reception of health as a direct gift from God; but for the most part
his care was held to take effect through a machinery easily capable of
misuse for purposes of religious fraud. Through dreams, above all,
inspired by Aesculapius himself, information as to the cause and cure
of a malady was supposed to come to the sufferer, in a belief based on
the truth that dreams do sometimes, for those who watch them carefully,
give many hints concerning the conditions of the body—those latent weak
points at which disease or death may most easily break into it. In the
time of Marcus Aurelius these medical dreams had become more than ever
a fashionable caprice. Aristeides, the “Orator,” a man of undoubted
intellectual power, has devoted six discourses to their interpretation;
the really scientific Galen has recorded how beneficently they had
intervened in his own case, at certain turning-points of life; and a
belief in them was one of the frailties of the wise emperor himself.
Partly for the sake of these dreams, living ministers of the god, more
likely to come to one in his actual dwelling-place than elsewhere, it
was almost a necessity that the patient should sleep one or more nights
within the precincts of a temple consecrated to his service, during
which time he must observe certain rules prescribed by the priests.

For this purpose, after devoutly saluting the Lares, as was customary
before starting on a journey, Marius set forth one summer morning on
his way to the famous temple which lay among the hills beyond the
valley of the Arnus. It was his greatest adventure hitherto; and he had
much pleasure in all its details, in spite of his feverishness.
Starting early, under the guidance of an old serving-man who drove the
mules, with his wife who took all that was needful for their
refreshment on the way and for the offering at the shrine, they went,
under the genial heat, halting now and then to pluck certain flowers
seen for the first time on these high places, upwards, through a long
day of sunshine, while cliffs and woods sank gradually below their
path. The evening came as they passed along a steep white road with
many windings among the pines, and it was night when they reached the
temple, the lights of which shone out upon them pausing before the
gates of the sacred enclosure, while Marius became alive to a singular
purity in the air. A rippling of water about the place was the only
thing audible, as they waited till two priestly figures, speaking Greek
to one another, admitted them into a large, white-walled and clearly
lighted guest-chamber, in which, while he partook of a simple but
wholesomely prepared supper, Marius still seemed to feel pleasantly the
height they had attained to among the hills.

The agreeable sense of all this was spoiled by one thing only, his old
fear of serpents; for it was under the form of a serpent that
Aesculapius had come to Rome, and the last definite thought of his
weary head before he fell asleep had been a dread either that the god
might appear, as he was said sometimes to do, under this hideous
aspect, or perhaps one of those great sallow-hued snakes themselves,
kept in the sacred place, as he had also heard was usual.

And after an hour’s feverish dreaming he awoke—with a cry, it would
seem, for some one had entered the room bearing a light. The footsteps
of the youthful figure which approached and sat by his bedside were
certainly real. Ever afterwards, when the thought arose in his mind of
some unhoped-for but entire relief from distress, like blue sky in a
storm at sea, would come back the memory of that gracious countenance
which, amid all the kindness of its gaze, had yet a certain air of
predominance over him, so that he seemed now for the first time to have
found the master of his spirit. It would have been sweet to be the
servant of him who now sat beside him speaking.

He caught a lesson from what was then said, still somewhat beyond his
years, a lesson in the skilled cultivation of life, of experience, of
opportunity, which seemed to be the aim of the young priest’s
recommendations. The sum of them, through various forgotten intervals
of argument, as might really have happened in a dream, was the precept,
repeated many times under slightly varied aspects, of a diligent
promotion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eye would lie
for him the determining influence of life: he was of the number of
those who, in the words of a poet who came long after, must be “made
perfect by the love of visible beauty.” The discourse was conceived
from the point of view of a theory Marius found afterwards in Plato’s
Phaedrus, which supposes men’s spirits susceptible to certain
influences, diffused, after the manner of streams or currents, by fair
things or persons visibly present—green fields, for instance, or
children’s faces—into the air around them, acting, in the case of some
peculiar natures, like potent material essences, and conforming the
seer to themselves as with some cunning physical necessity. This
theory,* in itself so fantastic, had however determined in a range of
methodical suggestions, altogether quaint here and there from their
circumstantial minuteness. And throughout, the possibility of some
vision, as of a new city coming down “like a bride out of heaven,” a
vision still indeed, it might seem, a long way off, but to be granted
perhaps one day to the eyes thus trained, was presented as the motive
of this laboriously practical direction.

* [Transliteration:] Ê aporroê tou kallous. +Translation: “Emanation
from a thing of beauty.”


“If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some fresh
picture, in a clear light,” so the discourse recommenced after a pause,
“be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in all
things, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows.” To keep the eye
clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness,
extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and
more fastidiously, select form and colour in things from what was less
select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more
especially, connected with the period of youth—on children at play in
the morning, the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the
fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by him if it were
but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token
and representative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid
jealously, in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight;
and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse in the
range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circumstance at
any cost of place, money, or opportunity; such were in brief outline
the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula of
life. And it was delivered with conviction; as if the speaker verily
saw into the recesses of the mental and physical being of the listener,
while his own expression of perfect temperance had in it a fascinating
power—the merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom from
taint or flaw, in exercise as a positive influence. Long afterwards,
when Marius read the Charmides—that other dialogue of Plato, into which
he seems to have expressed the very genius of old Greek temperance—the
image of this speaker came back vividly before him, to take the chief
part in the conversation.

It was as a weighty sanction of such temperance, in almost visible
symbolism (an outward imagery identifying itself with unseen
moralities) that the memory of that night’s double experience, the
dream of the great sallow snake and the utterance of the young priest,
always returned to him, and the contrast therein involved made him
revolt with unfaltering instinct from the bare thought of an excess in
sleep, or diet, or even in matters of taste, still more from any excess
of a coarser kind.

When he awoke again, still in the exceeding freshness he had felt on
his arrival, and now in full sunlight, it was as if his sickness had
really departed with the terror of the night: a confusion had passed
from the brain, a painful dryness from his hands. Simply to be alive
and there was a delight; and as he bathed in the fresh water set ready
for his use, the air of the room about him seemed like pure gold, the
very shadows rich with colour. Summoned at length by one of the
white-robed brethren, he went out to walk in the temple garden. At a
distance, on either side, his guide pointed out to him the Houses of
Birth and Death, erected for the reception respectively of women about
to become mothers, and of persons about to die; neither of those
incidents being allowed to defile, as was thought, the actual precincts
of the shrine. His visitor of the previous night he saw nowhere again.
But among the official ministers of the place there was one, already
marked as of great celebrity, whom Marius saw often in later days at
Rome, the physician Galen, now about thirty years old. He was standing,
the hood partly drawn over his face, beside the holy well, as Marius
and his guide approached it.

This famous well or conduit, primary cause of the temple and its
surrounding institutions, was supplied by the water of a spring flowing
directly out of the rocky foundations of the shrine. From the rim of
its basin rose a circle of trim columns to support a cupola of singular
lightness and grace, itself full of reflected light from the rippling
surface, through which might be traced the wavy figure-work of the
marble lining below as the stream of water rushed in. Legend told of a
visit of Aesculapius to this place, earlier and happier than his first
coming to Rome: an inscription around the cupola recorded it in letters
of gold. “Being come unto this place the son of God loved it
exceedingly:”—Huc profectus filius Dei maxime amavit hunc locum;—and it
was then that that most intimately human of the gods had given men the
well, with all its salutary properties. The element itself when
received into the mouth, in consequence of its entire freedom from
adhering organic matter, was more like a draught of wonderfully pure
air than water; and after tasting, Marius was told many mysterious
circumstances concerning it, by one and another of the bystanders:—he
who drank often thereof might well think he had tasted of the Homeric
lotus, so great became his desire to remain always on that spot:
carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative of its
fine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and it
flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume so oddly
rhythmical that the well stood always full to the brim, whatever
quantity might be drawn from it, seeming to answer with strange
alacrity of service to human needs, like a true creature and pupil of
the philanthropic god. Certainly the little crowd around seemed to find
singular refreshment in gazing on it. The whole place appeared sensibly
influenced by the amiable and healthful spirit of the thing. All the
objects of the country were there at their freshest. In the great
park-like enclosure for the maintenance of the sacred animals offered
by the convalescent, grass and trees were allowed to grow with a kind
of graceful wildness; otherwise, all was wonderfully nice. And that
freshness seemed to have something moral in its influence, as if it
acted upon the body and the merely bodily powers of apprehension,
through the intelligence; and to the end of his visit Marius saw no
more serpents.

A lad was just then drawing water for ritual uses, and Marius followed
him as he returned from the well, more and more impressed by the
religiousness of all he saw, on his way through a long cloister or
corridor, the walls well-nigh hidden under votive inscriptions
recording favours from the son of Apollo, and with a distant fragrance
of incense in the air, explained when he turned aside through an open
doorway into the temple itself. His heart bounded as the refined and
dainty magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood
of early sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there,
and withal a singular expression of sacred order, a surprising
cleanliness and simplicity. Certain priests, men whose countenances
bore a deep impression of cultivated mind, each with his little group
of assistants, were gliding round silently to perform their morning
salutation to the god, raising the closed thumb and finger of the right
hand with a kiss in the air, as they came and went on their sacred
business, bearing their frankincense and lustral water. Around the
walls, at such a level that the worshippers might read, as in a book,
the story of the god and his sons, the brotherhood of the Asclepiadae,
ran a series of imageries, in low relief, their delicate light and
shade being heightened, here and there, with gold. Fullest of inspired
and sacred expression, as if in this place the chisel of the artist had
indeed dealt not with marble but with the very breath of feeling and
thought, was the scene in which the earliest generation of the sons of
Aesculapius were transformed into healing dreams; for “grown now too
glorious to abide longer among men, by the aid of their sire they put
away their mortal bodies, and came into another country, yet not indeed
into Elysium nor into the Islands of the Blest. But being made like to
the immortal gods, they began to pass about through the world, changed
thus far from their first form that they appear eternally young, as
many persons have seen them in many places—ministers and heralds of
their father, passing to and fro over the earth, like gliding stars.
Which thing is, indeed, the most wonderful concerning them!” And in
this scene, as throughout the series, with all its crowded personages,
Marius noted on the carved faces the same peculiar union of unction,
almost of hilarity, with a certain self-possession and reserve, which
was conspicuous in the living ministrants around him.

In the central space, upon a pillar or pedestal, hung, ex voto, with
the richest personal ornaments, stood the image of Aesculapius himself,
surrounded by choice flowering plants. It presented the type, still
with something of the severity of the earlier art of Greece about it,
not of an aged and crafty physician, but of a youth, earnest and strong
of aspect, carrying an ampulla or bottle in one hand, and in the other
a traveller’s staff, a pilgrim among his pilgrim worshippers; and one
of the ministers explained to Marius this pilgrim guise.—One chief
source of the master’s knowledge of healing had been observation of the
remedies resorted to by animals labouring under disease or pain—what
leaf or berry the lizard or dormouse lay upon its wounded fellow; to
which purpose for long years he had led the life of a wanderer, in wild
places. The boy took his place as the last comer, a little way behind
the group of worshippers who stood in front of the image. There, with
uplifted face, the palms of his two hands raised and open before him,
and taught by the priest, he said his collect of thanksgiving and
prayer (Aristeides has recorded it at the end of his Asclepiadae) to
the Inspired Dreams:—

“O ye children of Apollo! who in time past have stilled the waves of
sorrow for many people, lighting up a lamp of safety before those who
travel by sea and land, be pleased, in your great condescension, though
ye be equal in glory with your elder brethren the Dioscuri, and your
lot in immortal youth be as theirs, to accept this prayer, which in
sleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it aright, I pray you,
according to your loving-kindness to men. Preserve me from sickness;
and endue my body with such a measure of health as may suffice it for
the obeying of the spirit, that I may pass my days unhindered and in
quietness.”

On the last morning of his visit Marius entered the shrine again, and
just before his departure the priest, who had been his special director
during his stay at the place, lifting a cunningly contrived panel,
which formed the back of one of the carved seats, bade him look
through. What he saw was like the vision of a new world, by the opening
of some unsuspected window in a familiar dwelling-place. He looked out
upon a long-drawn valley of singularly cheerful aspect, hidden, by the
peculiar conformation of the locality, from all points of observation
but this. In a green meadow at the foot of the steep olive-clad rocks
below, the novices were taking their exercise. The softly sloping sides
of the vale lay alike in full sunlight; and its distant opening was
closed by a beautifully formed mountain, from which the last wreaths of
morning mist were rising under the heat. It might have seemed the very
presentment of a land of hope, its hollows brimful of a shadow of blue
flowers; and lo! on the one level space of the horizon, in a long dark
line, were towers and a dome: and that was Pisa.—Or Rome, was it? asked
Marius, ready to believe the utmost, in his excitement.

All this served, as he understood afterwards in retrospect, at once to
strengthen and to purify a certain vein of character in him. Developing
the ideal, pre-existent there, of a religious beauty, associated for
the future with the exquisite splendour of the temple of Aesculapius,
as it dawned upon him on that morning of his first visit—it developed
that ideal in connexion with a vivid sense of the value of mental and
bodily sanity. And this recognition of the beauty, even for the
aesthetic sense, of mere bodily health, now acquired, operated
afterwards as an influence morally salutary, counteracting the less
desirable or hazardous tendencies of some phases of thought, through
which he was to pass.

He came home brown with health to find the health of his mother
failing; and about her death, which occurred not long afterwards, there
was a circumstance which rested with him as the cruellest touch of all,
in an event which for a time seemed to have taken the light out of the
sunshine. She died away from home, but sent for him at the last, with a
painful effort on her part, but to his great gratitude, pondering, as
he always believed, that he might chance otherwise to look back all his
life long upon a single fault with something like remorse, and find the
burden a great one. For it happened that, through some sudden,
incomprehensible petulance there had been an angry childish gesture,
and a slighting word, at the very moment of her departure, actually for
the last time. Remembering this he would ever afterwards pray to be
saved from offences against his own affections; the thought of that
marred parting having peculiar bitterness for one, who set so much
store, both by principle and habit, on the sentiment of home.




CHAPTER IV.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE


O mare! O littus! verum secretumque Mouseion,+
quam multa invenitis, quam multa dictatis!
Pliny’s Letters.


It would hardly have been possible to feel more seriously than did
Marius in those grave years of his early life. But the death of his
mother turned seriousness of feeling into a matter of the intelligence:
it made him a questioner; and, by bringing into full evidence to him
the force of his affections and the probable importance of their place
in his future, developed in him generally the more human and earthly
elements of character. A singularly virile consciousness of the
realities of life pronounced itself in him; still however as in the
main a poetic apprehension, though united already with something of
personal ambition and the instinct of self-assertion. There were days
when he could suspect, though it was a suspicion he was careful at
first to put from him, that that early, much cherished religion of the
villa might come to count with him as but one form of poetic beauty, or
of the ideal, in things; as but one voice, in a world where there were
many voices it would be a moral weakness not to listen to. And yet this
voice, through its forcible pre-occupation of his childish conscience,
still seemed to make a claim of a quite exclusive character, defining
itself as essentially one of but two possible leaders of his spirit,
the other proposing to him unlimited self-expansion in a world of
various sunshine. The contrast was so pronounced as to make the easy,
light-hearted, unsuspecting exercise of himself, among the temptations
of the new phase of life which had now begun, seem nothing less than a
rival religion, a rival religious service. The temptations, the various
sunshine, were those of the old town of Pisa, where Marius was now a
tall schoolboy. Pisa was a place lying just far enough from home to
make his rare visits to it in childhood seem like adventures, such as
had never failed to supply new and refreshing impulses to the
imagination. The partly decayed pensive town, which still had its
commerce by sea, and its fashion at the bathing-season, had lent, at
one time the vivid memory of its fair streets of marble, at another the
solemn outline of the dark hills of Luna on its background, at another
the living glances of its men and women, to the thickly gathering crowd
of impressions, out of which his notion of the world was then forming.
And while he learned that the object, the experience, as it will be
known to memory, is really from first to last the chief point for
consideration in the conduct of life, these things were feeding also
the idealism constitutional with him—his innate and habitual longing
for a world altogether fairer than that he saw. The child could find
his way in thought along those streets of the old town, expecting duly
the shrines at their corners, and their recurrent intervals of
garden-courts, or side-views of distant sea. The great temple of the
place, as he could remember it, on turning back once for a last look
from an angle of his homeward road, counting its tall gray columns
between the blue of the bay and the blue fields of blossoming flax
beyond; the harbour and its lights; the foreign ships lying there; the
sailors’ chapel of Venus, and her gilded image, hung with votive gifts;
the seamen themselves, their women and children, who had a whole
peculiar colour-world of their own—the boy’s superficial delight in the
broad light and shadow of all that was mingled with the sense of power,
of unknown distance, of the danger of storm and possible death.

To this place, then, Marius came down now from White-nights, to live in
the house of his guardian or tutor, that he might attend the school of
a famous rhetorician, and learn, among other things, Greek. The school,
one of many imitations of Plato’s Academy in the old Athenian garden,
lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove of cypresses, its
porticoes, a house for the master, its chapel and images. For the
memory of Marius in after-days, a clear morning sunlight seemed to lie
perpetually on that severe picture in old gray and green. The lad went
to this school daily betimes, in state at first, with a young slave to
carry the books, and certainly with no reluctance, for the sight of his
fellow-scholars, and their petulant activity, coming upon the sadder
sentimental moods of his childhood, awoke at once that instinct of
emulation which is but the other side of sympathy; and he was not
aware, of course, how completely the difference of his previous
training had made him, even in his most enthusiastic participation in
the ways of that little world, still essentially but a spectator. While
all their heart was in their limited boyish race, and its transitory
prizes, he was already entertaining himself, very pleasurably
meditative, with the tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic,
preliminary exercise for a larger contest, and already with an implicit
epicureanism. Watching all the gallant effects of their small
rivalries—a scene in the main of fresh delightful sunshine—he entered
at once into the sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into the passion
of men, and had already recognised a certain appetite for fame, for
distinction among his fellows, as his dominant motive to be.

The fame he conceived for himself at this time was, as the reader will
have anticipated, of the intellectual order, that of a poet perhaps.
And as, in that gray monastic tranquillity of the villa, inward voices
from the reality of unseen things had come abundantly; so here, with
the sounds and aspects of the shore, and amid the urbanities, the
graceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was the reality, the tyrannous
reality, of things visible that was borne in upon him. The real world
around—a present humanity not less comely, it might seem, than that of
the old heroic days—endowing everything it touched upon, however
remotely, down to its little passing tricks of fashion even, with a
kind of fleeting beauty, exercised over him just then a great
fascination.

That sense had come upon him in all its power one exceptionally fine
summer, the summer when, at a somewhat earlier age than was usual, he
had formally assumed the dress of manhood, going into the Forum for
that purpose, accompanied by his friends in festal array. At night,
after the full measure of those cloudless days, he would feel well-nigh
wearied out, as if with a long succession of pictures and music. As he
wandered through the gay streets or on the sea-shore, the real world
seemed indeed boundless, and himself almost absolutely free in it, with
a boundless appetite for experience, for adventure, whether physical or
of the spirit. His entire rearing hitherto had lent itself to an
imaginative exaltation of the past; but now the spectacle actually
afforded to his untired and freely open senses, suggested the
reflection that the present had, it might be, really advanced beyond
the past, and he was ready to boast in the very fact that it was
modern. If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of that day went
back to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of a
fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature, and even,
as we have seen, of religion, at least it improved, by a shade or two
of more scrupulous finish, on the old pattern; and the new era, like
the Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our own
century, might perhaps be discerned, awaiting one just a single step
onward—the perfected new manner, in the consummation of time, alike as
regards the things of the imagination and the actual conduct of life.
Only, while the pursuit of an ideal like this demanded entire liberty
of heart and brain, that old, staid, conservative religion of his
childhood certainly had its being in a world of somewhat narrow
restrictions. But then, the one was absolutely real, with nothing less
than the reality of seeing and hearing—the other, how vague, shadowy,
problematical! Could its so limited probabilities be worth taking into
account in any practical question as to the rejecting or receiving of
what was indeed so real, and, on the face of it, so desirable?

And, dating from the time of his first coming to school, a great
friendship had grown up for him, in that life of so few attachments—the
pure and disinterested friendship of schoolmates. He had seen Flavian
for the first time the day on which he had come to Pisa, at the moment
when his mind was full of wistful thoughts regarding the new life to
begin for him to-morrow, and he gazed curiously at the crowd of
bustling scholars as they came from their classes. There was something
in Flavian a shade disdainful, as he stood isolated from the others for
a moment, explained in part by his stature and the distinction of the
low, broad forehead; though there was pleasantness also for the
newcomer in the roving blue eyes which seemed somehow to take a fuller
hold upon things around than is usual with boys. Marius knew that those
proud glances made kindly note of him for a moment, and felt something
like friendship at first sight. There was a tone of reserve or gravity
there, amid perfectly disciplined health, which, to his fancy, seemed
to carry forward the expression of the austere sky and the clear song
of the blackbird on that gray March evening. Flavian indeed was a
creature who changed much with the changes of the passing light and
shade about him, and was brilliant enough under the early sunshine in
school next morning. Of all that little world of more or less gifted
youth, surely the centre was this lad of servile birth. Prince of the
school, he had gained an easy dominion over the old Greek master by the
fascination of his parts, and over his fellow-scholars by the figure he
bore. He wore already the manly dress; and standing there in class, as
he displayed his wonderful quickness in reckoning, or his taste in
declaiming Homer, he was like a carved figure in motion, thought
Marius, but with that indescribable gleam upon it which the words of
Homer actually suggested, as perceptible on the visible forms of the
gods—hoia theous epenênothen aien eontas.+

A story hung by him, a story which his comrades acutely connected with
his habitual air of somewhat peevish pride. Two points were held to be
clear amid its general vagueness—a rich stranger paid his schooling,
and he was himself very poor, though there was an attractive piquancy
in the poverty of Flavian which in a scholar of another figure might
have been despised. Over Marius too his dominion was entire. Three
years older than he, Flavian was appointed to help the younger boy in
his studies, and Marius thus became virtually his servant in many
things, taking his humours with a sort of grateful pride in being
noticed at all, and, thinking over all this afterwards, found that the
fascination experienced by him had been a sentimental one, dependent on
the concession to himself of an intimacy, a certain tolerance of his
company, granted to none beside.

That was in the earliest days; and then, as their intimacy grew, the
genius, the intellectual power of Flavian began its sway over him. The
brilliant youth who loved dress, and dainty food, and flowers, and
seemed to have a natural alliance with, and claim upon, everything else
which was physically select and bright, cultivated also that foppery of
words, of choice diction which was common among the élite spirits of
that day; and Marius, early an expert and elegant penman, transcribed
his verses (the euphuism of which, amid a genuine original power, was
then so delightful to him) in beautiful ink, receiving in return the
profit of Flavian’s really great intellectual capacities, developed and
accomplished under the ambitious desire to make his way effectively in
life. Among other things he introduced him to the writings of a
sprightly wit, then very busy with the pen, one Lucian—writings seeming
to overflow with that intellectual light turned upon dim places, which,
at least in seasons of mental fair weather, can make people laugh where
they have been wont, perhaps, to pray. And, surely, the sunlight which
filled those well-remembered early mornings in school, had had more
than the usual measure of gold in it! Marius, at least, would lie awake
before the time, thinking with delight of the long coming hours of hard
work in the presence of Flavian, as other boys dream of a holiday.

It was almost by accident at last, so wayward and capricious was he,
that reserve gave way, and Flavian told the story of his father—a
freedman, presented late in life, and almost against his will, with the
liberty so fondly desired in youth, but on condition of the sacrifice
of part of his peculium—the slave’s diminutive hoard—amassed by many a
self-denial, in an existence necessarily hard. The rich man, interested
in the promise of the fair child born on his estate, had sent him to
school. The meanness and dejection, nevertheless, of that unoccupied
old age defined the leading memory of Flavian, revived sometimes, after
this first confidence, with a burst of angry tears amid the sunshine.
But nature had had her economy in nursing the strength of that one
natural affection; for, save his half-selfish care for Marius, it was
the single, really generous part, the one piety, in the lad’s
character. In him Marius saw the spirit of unbelief, achieved as if at
one step. The much-admired freedman’s son, as with the privilege of a
natural aristocracy, believed only in himself, in the brilliant, and
mainly sensuous gifts, he had, or meant to acquire.

And then, he had certainly yielded himself, though still with untouched
health, in a world where manhood comes early, to the seductions of that
luxurious town, and Marius wondered sometimes, in the freer revelation
of himself by conversation, at the extent of his early corruption. How
often, afterwards, did evil things present themselves in malign
association with the memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of
borrowed sanction and charm in its natural grace! To Marius, at a later
time, he counted for as it were an epitome of the whole pagan world,
the depth of its corruption, and its perfection of form. And still, in
his mobility, his animation, in his eager capacity for various life, he
was so real an object, after that visionary idealism of the villa. His
voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the solid world upon
one, amid the flimsy fictions of a dream. A shadow, handling all things
as shadows, had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them.

Meantime, under his guidance, Marius was learning quickly and
abundantly, because with a good will. There was that in the actual
effectiveness of his figure which stimulated the younger lad to make
the most of opportunity; and he had experience already that education
largely increased one’s capacity for enjoyment. He was acquiring what
it is the chief function of all higher education to impart, the art,
namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of
distinction, in our everyday life—of so exclusively living in them—that
the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or débris of our days,
comes to be as though it were not. And the consciousness of this aim
came with the reading of one particular book, then fresh in the world,
with which he fell in about this time—a book which awakened the poetic
or romantic capacity as perhaps some other book might have done, but
was peculiar in giving it a direction emphatically sensuous. It made
him, in that visionary reception of every-day life, the seer, more
especially, of a revelation in colour and form. If our modern
education, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind
of idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as its
professed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of
ancient literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened
also, long ago, with Marius and his friend.

NOTES


43. +Transliteration: Mouseion. The word means “seat of the muses.”
Translation: “O sea! O shore! my own Helicon, / How many things have
you uncovered to me, how many things suggested!” Pliny, Letters, Book
I, ix, to Minicius Fundanus.


50. +Transliteration: hoia theous epenênothen aien eontas. Translation:
“such as the gods are endowed with.” Homer, Odyssey, 8.365.




CHAPTER V.
THE GOLDEN BOOK


The two lads were lounging together over a book, half-buried in a heap
of dry corn, in an old granary—the quiet corner to which they had
climbed out of the way of their noisier companions on one of their
blandest holiday afternoons. They looked round: the western sun smote
through the broad chinks of the shutters. How like a picture! and it
was precisely the scene described in what they were reading, with just
that added poetic touch in the book which made it delightful and
select, and, in the actual place, the ray of sunlight transforming the
rough grain among the cool brown shadows into heaps of gold. What they
were intent on was, indeed, the book of books, the “golden” book of
that day, a gift to Flavian, as was shown by the purple writing on the
handsome yellow wrapper, following the title Flaviane!—it said,

Flaviane! lege Felicitur!
Flaviane! Vivas! Fioreas!
Flaviane! Vivas! Gaudeas!


It was perfumed with oil of sandal-wood, and decorated with carved and
gilt ivory bosses at the ends of the roller.

And the inside was something not less dainty and fine, full of the
archaisms and curious felicities in which that generation delighted,
quaint terms and images picked fresh from the early dramatists, the
lifelike phrases of some lost poet preserved by an old grammarian, racy
morsels of the vernacular and studied prettinesses:—all alike, mere
playthings for the genuine power and natural eloquence of the erudite
artist, unsuppressed by his erudition, which, however, made some people
angry, chiefly less well “got-up” people, and especially those who were
untidy from indolence.

No! it was certainly not that old-fashioned, unconscious ease of the
early literature, which could never come again; which, after all, had
had more in common with the “infinite patience” of Apuleius than with
the hack-work readiness of his detractors, who might so well have been
“self-conscious” of going slip-shod. And at least his success was
unmistakable as to the precise literary effect he had intended,
including a certain tincture of “neology” in expression—nonnihil
interdum elocutione novella parum signatum—in the language of Cornelius
Fronto, the contemporary prince of rhetoricians. What words he had
found for conveying, with a single touch, the sense of textures,
colours, incidents! “Like jewellers’ work! Like a myrrhine
vase!”—admirers said of his writing. “The golden fibre in the hair, the
gold thread-work in the gown marked her as the mistress”—aurum in comis
et in tunicis, ibi inflexum hic intextum, matronam profecto
confitebatur—he writes, with his “curious felicity,” of one of his
heroines. Aurum intextum: gold fibre:—well! there was something of that
kind in his own work. And then, in an age when people, from the emperor
Aurelius downwards, prided themselves unwisely on writing in Greek, he
had written for Latin people in their own tongue; though still, in
truth, with all the care of a learned language. Not less happily
inventive were the incidents recorded—story within story—stories with
the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams. He had his humorous touches
also. And what went to the ordinary boyish taste, in those somewhat
peculiar readers, what would have charmed boys more purely boyish, was
the adventure:—the bear loose in the house at night, the wolves
storming the farms in winter, the exploits of the robbers, their
charming caves, the delightful thrill one had at the question—“Don’t
you know that these roads are infested by robbers?”

The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land of
witchcraft, and took one up and down its mountains, and into its old
weird towns, haunts of magic and incantation, where all the more
genuine appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea when she
fled through that country, were still in use. In the city of Hypata,
indeed, nothing seemed to be its true self—“You might think that
through the murmuring of some cadaverous spell, all things had been
changed into forms not their own; that there was humanity in the
hardness of the stones you stumbled on; that the birds you heard
singing were feathered men; that the trees around the walls drew their
leaves from a like source. The statues seemed about to move, the walls
to speak, the dumb cattle to break out in prophecy; nay! the very sky
and the sunbeams, as if they might suddenly cry out.” Witches are there
who can draw down the moon, or at least the lunar virus—that white
fluid she sheds, to be found, so rarely, “on high, heathy places: which
is a poison. A touch of it will drive men mad.”

And in one very remote village lives the sorceress Pamphile, who turns
her neighbours into various animals. What true humour in the scene
where, after mounting the rickety stairs, Lucius, peeping curiously
through a chink in the door, is a spectator of the transformation of
the old witch herself into a bird, that she may take flight to the
object of her affections—into an owl! “First she stripped off every rag
she had. Then opening a certain chest she took from it many small
boxes, and removing the lid of one of them, rubbed herself over for a
long time, from head to foot, with an ointment it contained, and after
much low muttering to her lamp, began to jerk at last and shake her
limbs. And as her limbs moved to and fro, out burst the soft feathers:
stout wings came forth to view: the nose grew hard and hooked: her
nails were crooked into claws; and Pamphile was an owl. She uttered a
queasy screech; and, leaping little by little from the ground, making
trial of herself, fled presently, on full wing, out of doors.”

By clumsy imitation of this process, Lucius, the hero of the romance,
transforms himself, not as he had intended into a showy winged
creature, but into the animal which has given name to the book; for
throughout it there runs a vein of racy, homely satire on the love of
magic then prevalent, curiosity concerning which had led Lucius to
meddle with the old woman’s appliances. “Be you my Venus,” he says to
the pretty maid-servant who has introduced him to the view of Pamphile,
“and let me stand by you a winged Cupid!” and, freely applying the
magic ointment, sees himself transformed, “not into a bird, but into an
ass!”

Well! the proper remedy for his distress is a supper of roses, could
such be found, and many are his quaintly picturesque attempts to come
by them at that adverse season; as he contrives to do at last, when,
the grotesque procession of Isis passing by with a bear and other
strange animals in its train, the ass following along with the rest
suddenly crunches the chaplet of roses carried in the High-priest’s
hand.

Meantime, however, he must wait for the spring, with more than the
outside of an ass; “though I was not so much a fool, nor so truly an
ass,” he tells us, when he happens to be left alone with a daintily
spread table, “as to neglect this most delicious fare, and feed upon
coarse hay.” For, in truth, all through the book, there is an
unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold touches like Swift’s,
and a genuine animal breadth. Lucius was the original ass, who peeping
slily from the window of his hiding-place forgot all about the big
shade he cast just above him, and gave occasion to the joke or proverb
about “the peeping ass and his shadow.”

But the marvellous, delight in which is one of the really serious
elements in most boys, passed at times, those young readers still
feeling its fascination, into what French writers call the macabre—that
species of almost insane pre-occupation with the materialities of our
mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption, which
was connected, in this writer at least, with not a little obvious
coarseness. It was a strange notion of the gross lust of the actual
world, that Marius took from some of these episodes. “I am told,” they
read, “that when foreigners are interred, the old witches are in the
habit of out-racing the funeral procession, to ravage the corpse”—in
order to obtain certain cuttings and remnants from it, with which to
injure the living—“especially if the witch has happened to cast her eye
upon some goodly young man.” And the scene of the night-watching of a
dead body lest the witches should come to tear off the flesh with their
teeth, is worthy of Théophile Gautier.

But set as one of the episodes in the main narrative, a true gem amid
its mockeries, its coarse though genuine humanity, its burlesque
horrors, came the tale of Cupid and Psyche, full of brilliant,
life-like situations, speciosa locis, and abounding in lovely visible
imagery (one seemed to see and handle the golden hair, the fresh
flowers, the precious works of art in it!) yet full also of a gentle
idealism, so that you might take it, if you chose, for an allegory.
With a concentration of all his finer literary gifts, Apuleius had
gathered into it the floating star-matter of many a delightful old
story.—

The Story of Cupid and Psyche.


In a certain city lived a king and queen who had three daughters
exceeding fair. But the beauty of the elder sisters, though pleasant to
behold, yet passed not the measure of human praise, while such was the
loveliness of the youngest that men’s speech was too poor to commend it
worthily and could express it not at all. Many of the citizens and of
strangers, whom the fame of this excellent vision had gathered thither,
confounded by that matchless beauty, could but kiss the finger-tips of
their right hands at sight of her, as in adoration to the goddess Venus
herself. And soon a rumour passed through the country that she whom the
blue deep had borne, forbearing her divine dignity, was even then
moving among men, or that by some fresh germination from the stars, not
the sea now, but the earth, had put forth a new Venus, endued with the
flower of virginity.

This belief, with the fame of the maiden’s loveliness, went daily
further into distant lands, so that many people were drawn together to
behold that glorious model of the age. Men sailed no longer to Paphos,
to Cnidus or Cythera, to the presence of the goddess Venus: her sacred
rites were neglected, her images stood uncrowned, the cold ashes were
left to disfigure her forsaken altars. It was to a maiden that men’s
prayers were offered, to a human countenance they looked, in
propitiating so great a godhead: when the girl went forth in the
morning they strewed flowers on her way, and the victims proper to that
unseen goddess were presented as she passed along. This conveyance of
divine worship to a mortal kindled meantime the anger of the true
Venus. “Lo! now, the ancient parent of nature,” she cried, “the
fountain of all elements! Behold me, Venus, benign mother of the world,
sharing my honours with a mortal maiden, while my name, built up in
heaven, is profaned by the mean things of earth! Shall a perishable
woman bear my image about with her? In vain did the shepherd of Ida
prefer me! Yet shall she have little joy, whosoever she be, of her
usurped and unlawful loveliness!” Thereupon she called to her that
winged, bold boy, of evil ways, who wanders armed by night through
men’s houses, spoiling their marriages; and stirring yet more by her
speech his inborn wantonness, she led him to the city, and showed him
Psyche as she walked.

“I pray thee,” she said, “give thy mother a full revenge. Let this maid
become the slave of an unworthy love.” Then, embracing him closely, she
departed to the shore and took her throne upon the crest of the wave.
And lo! at her unuttered will, her ocean-servants are in waiting: the
daughters of Nereus are there singing their song, and Portunus, and
Salacia, and the tiny charioteer of the dolphin, with a host of Tritons
leaping through the billows. And one blows softly through his sounding
sea-shell, another spreads a silken web against the sun, a third
presents the mirror to the eyes of his mistress, while the others swim
side by side below, drawing her chariot. Such was the escort of Venus
as she went upon the sea.

Psyche meantime, aware of her loveliness, had no fruit thereof. All
people regarded and admired, but none sought her in marriage. It was
but as on the finished work of the craftsman that they gazed upon that
divine likeness. Her sisters, less fair than she, were happily wedded.
She, even as a widow, sitting at home, wept over her desolation, hating
in her heart the beauty in which all men were pleased.

And the king, supposing the gods were angry, inquired of the oracle of
Apollo, and Apollo answered him thus: “Let the damsel be placed on the
top of a certain mountain, adorned as for the bed of marriage and of
death. Look not for a son-in-law of mortal birth; but for that evil
serpent-thing, by reason of whom even the gods tremble and the shadows
of Styx are afraid.”

So the king returned home and made known the oracle to his wife. For
many days she lamented, but at last the fulfilment of the divine
precept is urgent upon her, and the company make ready to conduct the
maiden to her deadly bridal. And now the nuptial torch gathers dark
smoke and ashes: the pleasant sound of the pipe is changed into a cry:
the marriage hymn concludes in a sorrowful wailing: below her yellow
wedding-veil the bride shook away her tears; insomuch that the whole
city was afflicted together at the ill-luck of the stricken house.

But the mandate of the god impelled the hapless Psyche to her fate,
and, these solemnities being ended, the funeral of the living soul goes
forth, all the people following. Psyche, bitterly weeping, assists not
at her marriage but at her own obsequies, and while the parents
hesitate to accomplish a thing so unholy the daughter cries to them:
“Wherefore torment your luckless age by long weeping? This was the
prize of my extraordinary beauty! When all people celebrated us with
divine honours, and in one voice named the New Venus, it was then ye
should have wept for me as one dead. Now at last I understand that that
one name of Venus has been my ruin. Lead me and set me upon the
appointed place. I am in haste to submit to that well-omened marriage,
to behold that goodly spouse. Why delay the coming of him who was born
for the destruction of the whole world?”

She was silent, and with firm step went on the way. And they proceeded
to the appointed place on a steep mountain, and left there the maiden
alone, and took their way homewards dejectedly. The wretched parents,
in their close-shut house, yielded themselves to perpetual night; while
to Psyche, fearful and trembling and weeping sore upon the
mountain-top, comes the gentle Zephyrus. He lifts her mildly, and, with
vesture afloat on either side, bears her by his own soft breathing over
the windings of the hills, and sets her lightly among the flowers in
the bosom of a valley below.

Psyche, in those delicate grassy places, lying sweetly on her dewy bed,
rested from the agitation of her soul and arose in peace. And lo! a
grove of mighty trees, with a fount of water, clear as glass, in the
midst; and hard by the water, a dwelling-place, built not by human
hands but by some divine cunning. One recognised, even at the entering,
the delightful hostelry of a god. Golden pillars sustained the roof,
arched most curiously in cedar-wood and ivory. The walls were hidden
under wrought silver:—all tame and woodland creatures leaping forward
to the visitor’s gaze. Wonderful indeed was the craftsman, divine or
half-divine, who by the subtlety of his art had breathed so wild a soul
into the silver! The very pavement was distinct with pictures in goodly
stones. In the glow of its precious metal the house is its own
daylight, having no need of the sun. Well might it seem a place
fashioned for the conversation of gods with men!

Psyche, drawn forward by the delight of it, came near, and, her courage
growing, stood within the doorway. One by one, she admired the
beautiful things she saw; and, most wonderful of all! no lock, no
chain, nor living guardian protected that great treasure house. But as
she gazed there came a voice—a voice, as it were unclothed of bodily
vesture—“Mistress!” it said, “all these things are thine. Lie down, and
relieve thy weariness, and rise again for the bath when thou wilt. We
thy servants, whose voice thou hearest, will be beforehand with our
service, and a royal feast shall be ready.”

And Psyche understood that some divine care was providing, and,
refreshed with sleep and the Bath, sat down to the feast. Still she saw
no one: only she heard words falling here and there, and had voices
alone to serve her. And the feast being ended, one entered the chamber
and sang to her unseen, while another struck the chords of a harp,
invisible with him who played on it. Afterwards the sound of a company
singing together came to her, but still so that none were present to
sight; yet it appeared that a great multitude of singers was there.

And the hour of evening inviting her, she climbed into the bed; and as
the night was far advanced, behold a sound of a certain clemency
approaches her. Then, fearing for her maidenhood in so great solitude,
she trembled, and more than any evil she knew dreaded that she knew
not. And now the husband, that unknown husband, drew near, and ascended
the couch, and made her his wife; and lo! before the rise of dawn he
had departed hastily. And the attendant voices ministered to the needs
of the newly married. And so it happened with her for a long season.
And as nature has willed, this new thing, by continual use, became a
delight to her: the sound of the voice grew to be her solace in that
condition of loneliness and uncertainty.

One night the bridegroom spoke thus to his beloved, “O Psyche, most
pleasant bride! Fortune is grown stern with us, and threatens thee with
mortal peril. Thy sisters, troubled at the report of thy death and
seeking some trace of thee, will come to the mountain’s top. But if by
chance their cries reach thee, answer not, neither look forth at all,
lest thou bring sorrow upon me and destruction upon thyself.” Then
Psyche promised that she would do according to his will. But the
bridegroom was fled away again with the night. And all that day she
spent in tears, repeating that she was now dead indeed, shut up in that
golden prison, powerless to console her sisters sorrowing after her, or
to see their faces; and so went to rest weeping.

And after a while came the bridegroom again, and lay down beside her,
and embracing her as she wept, complained, “Was this thy promise, my
Psyche? What have I to hope from thee? Even in the arms of thy husband
thou ceasest not from pain. Do now as thou wilt. Indulge thine own
desire, though it seeks what will ruin thee. Yet wilt thou remember my
warning, repentant too late.” Then, protesting that she is like to die,
she obtains from him that he suffer her to see her sisters, and present
to them moreover what gifts she would of golden ornaments; but
therewith he ofttimes advised her never at any time, yielding to
pernicious counsel, to enquire concerning his bodily form, lest she
fall, through unholy curiosity, from so great a height of fortune, nor
feel ever his embrace again. “I would die a hundred times,” she said,
cheerful at last, “rather than be deprived of thy most sweet usage. I
love thee as my own soul, beyond comparison even with Love himself.
Only bid thy servant Zephyrus bring hither my sisters, as he brought
me. My honeycomb! My husband! Thy Psyche’s breath of life!” So he
promised; and after the embraces of the night, ere the light appeared,
vanished from the hands of his bride.

And the sisters, coming to the place where Psyche was abandoned, wept
loudly among the rocks, and called upon her by name, so that the sound
came down to her, and running out of the palace distraught, she cried,
“Wherefore afflict your souls with lamentation? I whom you mourn am
here.” Then, summoning Zephyrus, she reminded him of her husband’s
bidding; and he bare them down with a gentle blast. “Enter now,” she
said, “into my house, and relieve your sorrow in the company of Psyche
your sister.”

And Psyche displayed to them all the treasures of the golden house, and
its great family of ministering voices, nursing in them the malice
which was already at their hearts. And at last one of them asks
curiously who the lord of that celestial array may be, and what manner
of man her husband? And Psyche answered dissemblingly, “A young man,
handsome and mannerly, with a goodly beard. For the most part he hunts
upon the mountains.” And lest the secret should slip from her in the
way of further speech, loading her sisters with gold and gems, she
commanded Zephyrus to bear them away.

And they returned home, on fire with envy. “See now the injustice of
fortune!” cried one. “We, the elder children, are given like servants
to be the wives of strangers, while the youngest is possessed of so
great riches, who scarcely knows how to use them. You saw, Sister! what
a hoard of wealth lies in the house; what glittering gowns; what
splendour of precious gems, besides all that gold trodden under foot.
If she indeed hath, as she said, a bridegroom so goodly, then no one in
all the world is happier. And it may be that this husband, being of
divine nature, will make her too a goddess. Nay! so in truth it is. It
was even thus she bore herself. Already she looks aloft and breathes
divinity, who, though but a woman, has voices for her handmaidens, and
can command the winds.” “Think,” answered the other, “how arrogantly
she dealt with us, grudging us these trifling gifts out of all that
store, and when our company became a burden, causing us to be hissed
and driven away from her through the air! But I am no woman if she keep
her hold on this great fortune; and if the insult done us has touched
thee too, take we counsel together. Meanwhile let us hold our peace,
and know naught of her, alive or dead. For they are not truly happy of
whose happiness other folk are unaware.”

And the bridegroom, whom still she knows not, warns her thus a second
time, as he talks with her by night: “Seest thou what peril besets
thee? Those cunning wolves have made ready for thee their snares, of
which the sum is that they persuade thee to search into the fashion of
my countenance, the seeing of which, as I have told thee often, will be
the seeing of it no more for ever. But do thou neither listen nor make
answer to aught regarding thy husband. Besides, we have sown also the
seed of our race. Even now this bosom grows with a child to be born to
us, a child, if thou but keep our secret, of divine quality; if thou
profane it, subject to death.” And Psyche was glad at the tidings,
rejoicing in that solace of a divine seed, and in the glory of that
pledge of love to be, and the dignity of the name of mother. Anxiously
she notes the increase of the days, the waning months. And again, as he
tarries briefly beside her, the bridegroom repeats his warning:

“Even now the sword is drawn with which thy sisters seek thy life. Have
pity on thyself, sweet wife, and upon our child, and see not those evil
women again.” But the sisters make their way into the palace once more,
crying to her in wily tones, “O Psyche! and thou too wilt be a mother!
How great will be the joy at home! Happy indeed shall we be to have the
nursing of the golden child. Truly if he be answerable to the beauty of
his parents, it will be a birth of Cupid himself.”

So, little by little, they stole upon the heart of their sister. She,
meanwhile, bids the lyre to sound for their delight, and the playing is
heard: she bids the pipes to move, the quire to sing, and the music and
the singing come invisibly, soothing the mind of the listener with
sweetest modulation. Yet not even thereby was their malice put to
sleep: once more they seek to know what manner of husband she has, and
whence that seed. And Psyche, simple over-much, forgetful of her first
story, answers, “My husband comes from a far country, trading for great
sums. He is already of middle age, with whitening locks.” And therewith
she dismisses them again.

And returning home upon the soft breath of Zephyrus one cried to the
other, “What shall be said of so ugly a lie? He who was a young man
with goodly beard is now in middle life. It must be that she told a
false tale: else is she in very truth ignorant what manner of man he
is. Howsoever it be, let us destroy her quickly. For if she indeed
knows not, be sure that her bridegroom is one of the gods: it is a god
she bears in her womb. And let that be far from us! If she be called
mother of a god, then will life be more than I can bear.”

So, full of rage against her, they returned to Psyche, and said to her
craftily, “Thou livest in an ignorant bliss, all incurious of thy real
danger. It is a deadly serpent, as we certainly know, that comes to
sleep at thy side. Remember the words of the oracle, which declared
thee destined to a cruel beast. There are those who have seen it at
nightfall, coming back from its feeding. In no long time, they say, it
will end its blandishments. It but waits for the babe to be formed in
thee, that it may devour thee by so much the richer. If indeed the
solitude of this musical place, or it may be the loathsome commerce of
a hidden love, delight thee, we at least in sisterly piety have done
our part.” And at last the unhappy Psyche, simple and frail of soul,
carried away by the terror of their words, losing memory of her
husband’s precepts and her own promise, brought upon herself a great
calamity. Trembling and turning pale, she answers them, “And they who
tell those things, it may be, speak the truth. For in very deed never
have I seen the face of my husband, nor know I at all what manner of
man he is. Always he frights me diligently from the sight of him,
threatening some great evil should I too curiously look upon his face.
Do ye, if ye can help your sister in her great peril, stand by her
now.”

Her sisters answered her, “The way of safety we have well considered,
and will teach thee. Take a sharp knife, and hide it in that part of
the couch where thou art wont to lie: take also a lamp filled with oil,
and set it privily behind the curtain. And when he shall have drawn up
his coils into the accustomed place, and thou hearest him breathe in
sleep, slip then from his side and discover the lamp, and, knife in
hand, put forth thy strength, and strike off the serpent’s head.” And
so they departed in haste.

And Psyche left alone (alone but for the furies which beset her) is
tossed up and down in her distress, like a wave of the sea; and though
her will is firm, yet, in the moment of putting hand to the deed, she
falters, and is torn asunder by various apprehension of the great
calamity upon her. She hastens and anon delays, now full of distrust,
and now of angry courage: under one bodily form she loathes the monster
and loves the bridegroom. But twilight ushers in the night; and at
length in haste she makes ready for the terrible deed. Darkness came,
and the bridegroom; and he first, after some faint essay of love, falls
into a deep sleep.

And she, erewhile of no strength, the hard purpose of destiny assisting
her, is confirmed in force. With lamp plucked forth, knife in hand, she
put by her sex; and lo! as the secrets of the bed became manifest, the
sweetest and most gentle of all creatures, Love himself, reclined
there, in his own proper loveliness! At sight of him the very flame of
the lamp kindled more gladly! But Psyche was afraid at the vision, and,
faint of soul, trembled back upon her knees, and would have hidden the
steel in her own bosom. But the knife slipped from her hand; and now,
undone, yet ofttimes looking upon the beauty of that divine
countenance, she lives again. She sees the locks of that golden head,
pleasant with the unction of the gods, shed down in graceful
entanglement behind and before, about the ruddy cheeks and white
throat. The pinions of the winged god, yet fresh with the dew, are
spotless upon his shoulders, the delicate plumage wavering over them as
they lie at rest. Smooth he was, and, touched with light, worthy of
Venus his mother. At the foot of the couch lay his bow and arrows, the
instruments of his power, propitious to men.

And Psyche, gazing hungrily thereon, draws an arrow from the quiver,
and trying the point upon her thumb, tremulous still, drave in the
barb, so that a drop of blood came forth. Thus fell she, by her own
act, and unaware, into the love of Love. Falling upon the bridegroom,
with indrawn breath, in a hurry of kisses from eager and open lips, she
shuddered as she thought how brief that sleep might be. And it chanced
that a drop of burning oil fell from the lamp upon the god’s shoulder.
Ah! maladroit minister of love, thus to wound him from whom all fire
comes; though ’twas a lover, I trow, first devised thee, to have the
fruit of his desire even in the darkness! At the touch of the fire the
god started up, and beholding the overthrow of her faith, quietly took
flight from her embraces.

And Psyche, as he rose upon the wing, laid hold on him with her two
hands, hanging upon him in his passage through the air, till she sinks
to the earth through weariness. And as she lay there, the divine lover,
tarrying still, lighted upon a cypress tree which grew near, and, from
the top of it, spake thus to her, in great emotion. “Foolish one!
unmindful of the command of Venus, my mother, who had devoted thee to
one of base degree, I fled to thee in his stead. Now know I that this
was vainly done. Into mine own flesh pierced mine arrow, and I made
thee my wife, only that I might seem a monster beside thee—that thou
shouldst seek to wound the head wherein lay the eyes so full of love to
thee! Again and again, I thought to put thee on thy guard concerning
these things, and warned thee in loving-kindness. Now I would but
punish thee by my flight hence.” And therewith he winged his way into
the deep sky.

Psyche, prostrate upon the earth, and following far as sight might
reach the flight of the bridegroom, wept and lamented; and when the
breadth of space had parted him wholly from her, cast herself down from
the bank of a river which was nigh. But the stream, turning gentle in
honour of the god, put her forth again unhurt upon its margin. And as
it happened, Pan, the rustic god, was sitting just then by the
waterside, embracing, in the body of a reed, the goddess Canna;
teaching her to respond to him in all varieties of slender sound. Hard
by, his flock of goats browsed at will. And the shaggy god called her,
wounded and outworn, kindly to him and said, “I am but a rustic
herdsman, pretty maiden, yet wise, by favour of my great age and long
experience; and if I guess truly by those faltering steps, by thy
sorrowful eyes and continual sighing, thou labourest with excess of
love. Listen then to me, and seek not death again, in the stream or
otherwise. Put aside thy woe, and turn thy prayers to Cupid. He is in
truth a delicate youth: win him by the delicacy of thy service.”

So the shepherd-god spoke, and Psyche, answering nothing, but with a
reverence to his serviceable deity, went on her way. And while she, in
her search after Cupid, wandered through many lands, he was lying in
the chamber of his mother, heart-sick. And the white bird which floats
over the waves plunged in haste into the sea, and approaching Venus, as
she bathed, made known to her that her son lies afflicted with some
grievous hurt, doubtful of life. And Venus cried, angrily, “My son,
then, has a mistress! And it is Psyche, who witched away my beauty and
was the rival of my godhead, whom he loves!”

Therewith she issued from the sea, and returning to her golden chamber,
found there the lad, sick, as she had heard, and cried from the
doorway, “Well done, truly! to trample thy mother’s precepts under
foot, to spare my enemy that cross of an unworthy love; nay, unite her
to thyself, child as thou art, that I might have a daughter-in-law who
hates me! I will make thee repent of thy sport, and the savour of thy
marriage bitter. There is one who shall chasten this body of thine, put
out thy torch and unstring thy bow. Not till she has plucked forth that
hair, into which so oft these hands have smoothed the golden light, and
sheared away thy wings, shall I feel the injury done me avenged.” And
with this she hastened in anger from the doors.

And Ceres and Juno met her, and sought to know the meaning of her
troubled countenance. “Ye come in season,” she cried; “I pray you, find
for me Psyche. It must needs be that ye have heard the disgrace of my
house.” And they, ignorant of what was done, would have soothed her
anger, saying, “What fault, Mistress, hath thy son committed, that thou
wouldst destroy the girl he loves? Knowest thou not that he is now of
age? Because he wears his years so lightly must he seem to thee ever
but a child? Wilt thou for ever thus pry into the pastimes of thy son,
always accusing his wantonness, and blaming in him those delicate wiles
which are all thine own?” Thus, in secret fear of the boy’s bow, did
they seek to please him with their gracious patronage. But Venus, angry
at their light taking of her wrongs, turned her back upon them, and
with hasty steps made her way once more to the sea.

Meanwhile Psyche, tost in soul, wandering hither and thither, rested
not night or day in the pursuit of her husband, desiring, if she might
not soothe his anger by the endearments of a wife, at the least to
propitiate him with the prayers of a handmaid. And seeing a certain
temple on the top of a high mountain, she said, “Who knows whether
yonder place be not the abode of my lord?” Thither, therefore, she
turned her steps, hastening now the more because desire and hope
pressed her on, weary as she was with the labours of the way, and so,
painfully measuring out the highest ridges of the mountain, drew near
to the sacred couches. She sees ears of wheat, in heaps or twisted into
chaplets; ears of barley also, with sickles and all the instruments of
harvest, lying there in disorder, thrown at random from the hands of
the labourers in the great heat. These she curiously sets apart, one by
one, duly ordering them; for she said within herself, “I may not
neglect the shrines, nor the holy service, of any god there be, but
must rather win by supplication the kindly mercy of them all.”

And Ceres found her bending sadly upon her task, and cried aloud,
“Alas, Psyche! Venus, in the furiousness of her anger, tracks thy
footsteps through the world, seeking for thee to pay her the utmost
penalty; and thou, thinking of anything rather than thine own safety,
hast taken on thee the care of what belongs to me!” Then Psyche fell
down at her feet, and sweeping the floor with her hair, washing the
footsteps of the goddess in her tears, besought her mercy, with many
prayers:—“By the gladdening rites of harvest, by the lighted lamps and
mystic marches of the Marriage and mysterious Invention of thy daughter
Proserpine, and by all beside that the holy place of Attica veils in
silence, minister, I pray thee, to the sorrowful heart of Psyche!
Suffer me to hide myself but for a few days among the heaps of corn,
till time have softened the anger of the goddess, and my strength,
out-worn in my long travail, be recovered by a little rest.”

But Ceres answered her, “Truly thy tears move me, and I would fain help
thee; only I dare not incur the ill-will of my kinswoman. Depart hence
as quickly as may be.” And Psyche, repelled against hope, afflicted now
with twofold sorrow, making her way back again, beheld among the
half-lighted woods of the valley below a sanctuary builded with cunning
art. And that she might lose no way of hope, howsoever doubtful, she
drew near to the sacred doors. She sees there gifts of price, and
garments fixed upon the door-posts and to the branches of the trees,
wrought with letters of gold which told the name of the goddess to whom
they were dedicated, with thanksgiving for that she had done. So, with
bent knee and hands laid about the glowing altar, she prayed saying,
“Sister and spouse of Jupiter! be thou to these my desperate fortune’s
Juno the Auspicious! I know that thou dost willingly help those in
travail with child; deliver me from the peril that is upon me.” And as
she prayed thus, Juno in the majesty of her godhead, was straightway
present, and answered, “Would that I might incline favourably to thee;
but against the will of Venus, whom I have ever loved as a daughter, I
may not, for very shame, grant thy prayer.”

And Psyche, dismayed by this new shipwreck of her hope, communed thus
with herself, “Whither, from the midst of the snares that beset me,
shall I take my way once more? In what dark solitude shall I hide me
from the all-seeing eye of Venus? What if I put on at length a man’s
courage, and yielding myself unto her as my mistress, soften by a
humility not yet too late the fierceness of her purpose? Who knows but
that I may find him also whom my soul seeketh after, in the abode of
his mother?”

And Venus, renouncing all earthly aid in her search, prepared to return
to heaven. She ordered the chariot to be made ready, wrought for her by
Vulcan as a marriage-gift, with a cunning of hand which had left his
work so much the richer by the weight of gold it lost under his tool.
From the multitude which housed about the bed-chamber of their
mistress, white doves came forth, and with joyful motions bent their
painted necks beneath the yoke. Behind it, with playful riot, the
sparrows sped onward, and other birds sweet of song, making known by
their soft notes the approach of the goddess. Eagle and cruel hawk
alarmed not the quireful family of Venus. And the clouds broke away, as
the uttermost ether opened to receive her, daughter and goddess, with
great joy.

And Venus passed straightway to the house of Jupiter to beg from him
the service of Mercury, the god of speech. And Jupiter refused not her
prayer. And Venus and Mercury descended from heaven together; and as
they went, the former said to the latter, “Thou knowest, my brother of
Arcady, that never at any time have I done anything without thy help;
for how long time, moreover, I have sought a certain maiden in vain.
And now naught remains but that, by thy heraldry, I proclaim a reward
for whomsoever shall find her. Do thou my bidding quickly.” And
therewith she conveyed to him a little scrip, in the which was written
the name of Psyche, with other things; and so returned home.

And Mercury failed not in his office; but departing into all lands,
proclaimed that whosoever delivered up to Venus the fugitive girl,
should receive from herself seven kisses—one thereof full of the inmost
honey of her throat. With that the doubt of Psyche was ended. And now,
as she came near to the doors of Venus, one of the household, whose
name was Use-and-Wont, ran out to her, crying, “Hast thou learned,
Wicked Maid! now at last! that thou hast a mistress?” And seizing her
roughly by the hair, drew her into the presence of Venus. And when
Venus saw her, she cried out, saying, “Thou hast deigned then to make
thy salutations to thy mother-in-law. Now will I in turn treat thee as
becometh a dutiful daughter-in-law!”

And she took barley and millet and poppy-seed, every kind of grain and
seed, and mixed them together, and laughed, and said to her: “Methinks
so plain a maiden can earn lovers only by industrious ministry: now
will I also make trial of thy service. Sort me this heap of seed, the
one kind from the others, grain by grain; and get thy task done before
the evening.” And Psyche, stunned by the cruelty of her bidding, was
silent, and moved not her hand to the inextricable heap. And there came
forth a little ant, which had understanding of the difficulty of her
task, and took pity upon the consort of the god of Love; and he ran
deftly hither and thither, and called together the whole army of his
fellows. “Have pity,” he cried, “nimble scholars of the Earth, Mother
of all things!—have pity upon the wife of Love, and hasten to help her
in her perilous effort.” Then, one upon the other, the hosts of the
insect people hurried together; and they sorted asunder the whole heap
of seed, separating every grain after its kind, and so departed quickly
out of sight.

And at nightfall Venus returned, and seeing that task finished with so
wonderful diligence, she cried, “The work is not thine, thou naughty
maid, but his in whose eyes thou hast found favour.” And calling her
again in the morning, “See now the grove,” she said, “beyond yonder
torrent. Certain sheep feed there, whose fleeces shine with gold. Fetch
me straightway a lock of that precious stuff, having gotten it as thou
mayst.”

And Psyche went forth willingly, not to obey the command of Venus, but
even to seek a rest from her labour in the depths of the river. But
from the river, the green reed, lowly mother of music, spake to her: “O
Psyche! pollute not these waters by self-destruction, nor approach that
terrible flock; for, as the heat groweth, they wax fierce. Lie down
under yon plane-tree, till the quiet of the river’s breath have soothed
them. Thereafter thou mayst shake down the fleecy gold from the trees
of the grove, for it holdeth by the leaves.”

And Psyche, instructed thus by the simple reed, in the humanity of its
heart, filled her bosom with the soft golden stuff, and returned to
Venus. But the goddess smiled bitterly, and said to her, “Well know I
who was the author of this thing also. I will make further trial of thy
discretion, and the boldness of thy heart. Seest thou the utmost peak
of yonder steep mountain? The dark stream which flows down thence
waters the Stygian fields, and swells the flood of Cocytus. Bring me
now, in this little urn, a draught from its innermost source.” And
therewith she put into her hands a vessel of wrought crystal.

And Psyche set forth in haste on her way to the mountain, looking there
at last to find the end of her hapless life. But when she came to the
region which borders on the cliff that was showed to her, she
understood the deadly nature of her task. From a great rock, steep and
slippery, a horrible river of water poured forth, falling straightway
by a channel exceeding narrow into the unseen gulf below. And lo!
creeping from the rocks on either hand, angry serpents, with their long
necks and sleepless eyes. The very waters found a voice and bade her
depart, in smothered cries of, Depart hence! and What doest thou here?
Look around thee! and Destruction is upon thee! And then sense left
her, in the immensity of her peril, as one changed to stone.

Yet not even then did the distress of this innocent soul escape the
steady eye of a gentle providence. For the bird of Jupiter spread his
wings and took flight to her, and asked her, “Didst thou think, simple
one, even thou! that thou couldst steal one drop of that relentless
stream, the holy river of Styx, terrible even to the gods? But give me
thine urn.” And the bird took the urn, and filled it at the source, and
returned to her quickly from among the teeth of the serpents, bringing
with him of the waters, all unwilling—nay! warning him to depart away
and not molest them.

And she, receiving the urn with great joy, ran back quickly that she
might deliver it to Venus, and yet again satisfied not the angry
goddess. “My child!” she said, “in this one thing further must thou
serve me. Take now this tiny casket, and get thee down even unto hell,
and deliver it to Proserpine. Tell her that Venus would have of her
beauty so much at least as may suffice for but one day’s use, that
beauty she possessed erewhile being foreworn and spoiled, through her
tendance upon the sick-bed of her son; and be not slow in returning.”

And Psyche perceived there the last ebbing of her fortune—that she was
now thrust openly upon death, who must go down, of her own motion, to
Hades and the Shades. And straightway she climbed to the top of an
exceeding high tower, thinking within herself, “I will cast myself down
thence: so shall I descend most quickly into the kingdom of the dead.”
And the tower again, broke forth into speech: “Wretched Maid! Wretched
Maid! Wilt thou destroy thyself? If the breath quit thy body, then wilt
thou indeed go down into Hades, but by no means return hither. Listen
to me. Among the pathless wilds not far from this place lies a certain
mountain, and therein one of hell’s vent-holes. Through the breach a
rough way lies open, following which thou wilt come, by straight
course, to the castle of Orcus. And thou must not go empty-handed. Take
in each hand a morsel of barley-bread, soaked in hydromel; and in thy
mouth two pieces of money. And when thou shalt be now well onward in
the way of death, then wilt thou overtake a lame ass laden with wood,
and a lame driver, who will pray thee reach him certain cords to fasten
the burden which is falling from the ass: but be thou cautious to pass
on in silence. And soon as thou comest to the river of the dead,
Charon, in that crazy bark he hath, will put thee over upon the further
side. There is greed even among the dead: and thou shalt deliver to
him, for the ferrying, one of those two pieces of money, in such wise
that he take it with his hand from between thy lips. And as thou
passest over the stream, a dead old man, rising on the water, will put
up to thee his mouldering hands, and pray thee draw him into the
ferry-boat. But beware thou yield not to unlawful pity.

“When thou shalt be come over, and art upon the causeway, certain aged
women, spinning, will cry to thee to lend thy hand to their work; and
beware again that thou take no part therein; for this also is the snare
of Venus, whereby she would cause thee to cast away one at least of
those cakes thou bearest in thy hands. And think not that a slight
matter; for the loss of either one of them will be to thee the losing
of the light of day. For a watch-dog exceeding fierce lies ever before
the threshold of that lonely house of Proserpine. Close his mouth with
one of thy cakes; so shalt thou pass by him, and enter straightway into
the presence of Proserpine herself. Then do thou deliver thy message,
and taking what she shall give thee, return back again; offering to the
watch-dog the other cake, and to the ferryman that other piece of money
thou hast in thy mouth. After this manner mayst thou return again
beneath the stars. But withal, I charge thee, think not to look into,
nor open, the casket thou bearest, with that treasure of the beauty of
the divine countenance hidden therein.”

So spake the stones of the tower; and Psyche delayed not, but
proceeding diligently after the manner enjoined, entered into the house
of Proserpine, at whose feet she sat down humbly, and would neither the
delicate couch nor that divine food the goddess offered her, but did
straightway the business of Venus. And Proserpine filled the casket
secretly and shut the lid, and delivered it to Psyche, who fled
therewith from Hades with new strength. But coming back into the light
of day, even as she hasted now to the ending of her service, she was
seized by a rash curiosity. “Lo! now,” she said within herself, “my
simpleness! who bearing in my hands the divine loveliness, heed not to
touch myself with a particle at least therefrom, that I may please the
more, by the favour of it, my fair one, my beloved.” Even as she spoke,
she lifted the lid; and behold! within, neither beauty, nor anything
beside, save sleep only, the sleep of the dead, which took hold upon
her, filling all her members with its drowsy vapour, so that she lay
down in the way and moved not, as in the slumber of death.

And Cupid being healed of his wound, because he would endure no longer
the absence of her he loved, gliding through the narrow window of the
chamber wherein he was holden, his pinions being now repaired by a
little rest, fled forth swiftly upon them, and coming to the place
where Psyche was, shook that sleep away from her, and set him in his
prison again, awaking her with the innocent point of his arrow. “Lo!
thine old error again,” he said, “which had like once more to have
destroyed thee! But do thou now what is lacking of the command of my
mother: the rest shall be my care.” With these words, the lover rose
upon the air; and being consumed inwardly with the greatness of his
love, penetrated with vehement wing into the highest place of heaven,
to lay his cause before the father of the gods. And the father of gods
took his hand in his, and kissed his face and said to him, “At no time,
my son, hast thou regarded me with due honour. Often hast thou vexed my
bosom, wherein lies the disposition of the stars, with those busy darts
of thine. Nevertheless, because thou hast grown up between these mine
hands, I will accomplish thy desire.” And straightway he bade Mercury
call the gods together; and, the council-chamber being filled, sitting
upon a high throne, “Ye gods,” he said, “all ye whose names are in the
white book of the Muses, ye know yonder lad. It seems good to me that
his youthful heats should by some means be restrained. And that all
occasion may be taken from him, I would even confine him in the bonds
of marriage. He has chosen and embraced a mortal maiden. Let him have
fruit of his love, and possess her for ever.”

Thereupon he bade Mercury produce Psyche in heaven; and holding out to
her his ambrosial cup, “Take it,” he said, “and live for ever; nor
shall Cupid ever depart from thee.” And the gods sat down together to
the marriage-feast.

On the first couch lay the bridegroom, and Psyche in his bosom. His
rustic serving-boy bare the wine to Jupiter; and Bacchus to the rest.
The Seasons crimsoned all things with their roses. Apollo sang to the
lyre, while a little Pan prattled on his reeds, and Venus danced very
sweetly to the soft music. Thus, with due rites, did Psyche pass into
the power of Cupid; and from them was born the daughter whom men call
Voluptas.




CHAPTER VI.
EUPHUISM


So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius, with an
expression changed in some ways from the original and on the whole
graver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more like
that “Lord, of terrible aspect,” who stood at Dante’s bedside and wept,
or had at least grown to the manly earnestness of the Erôs of
Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, this
episode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation,
already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative
love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean—an
ideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued it
at various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty, as
the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed to
him just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken celestial fire,
to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, soul or spirit in
things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the pure brilliancy, and as
it were in the happy light, of youth and morning and the springtide,
men’s actual loves, with which at many points the book brings one into
close contact, might appear to him, like the general tenor of their
lives, to be somewhat mean and sordid. The hiddenness of perfect
things: a shrinking mysticism, a sentiment of diffidence like that
expressed in Psyche’s so tremulous hope concerning the child to be born
of the husband she had never yet seen—“in the face of this little
child, at the least, shall I apprehend thine”—in hoc saltem parvulo
cognoscam faciem tuam: the fatality which seems to haunt any signal+
beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something
illicit and isolating: the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in
the vulgar:—these were some of the impressions, forming, as they do, a
constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience, from Medusa
and Helen downwards, which the old story enforced on him. A book, like
a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise
moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident
counts with us for something more than its independent value. The
Metamorphoses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured for him
as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal gratitude to its
writer, and saw in it doubtless far more than was really there for any
other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in his remembrance,
never quite losing its power in frequent return to it for the revival
of that first glowing impression.

Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical one: it stimulated
the literary ambition, already so strong a motive with him, by a signal
example of success, and made him more than ever an ardent,
indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of the
literary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of that
through which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one can
actually take effect upon others, to over-awe or charm them to one’s
side, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connexion
with that desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of which
another might have relied on the acquisition and display of brilliant
military qualities. In him, a fine instinctive sentiment of the exact
value and power of words was connate with the eager longing for sway
over his fellows. He saw himself already a gallant and effective
leader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in the
rehabilitation of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished and
languid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the only
sort of patriotic feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves.
The popular speech was gradually departing from the form and rule of
literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial. While
the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously
pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand
chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at
least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was
coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understand
Cicero; though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius,
who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been a
fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days of
Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.

The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himself
would be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in its
dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and
revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of the
proletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the younger
Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the Latin
tongue, had said,—“I am one of those who admire the ancients, yet I do
not, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius which our
own times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if weary and
effete, no longer produces what is admirable.” And he, Flavian, would
prove himself the true master of the opportunity thus indicated. In his
eagerness for a not too distant fame, he dreamed over all that, as the
young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns. Others might brutalise or
neglect the native speech, that true “open field” for charm and sway
over men. He would make of it a serious study, weighing the precise
power of every phrase and word, as though it were precious metal,
disentangling the later associations and going back to the original and
native sense of each,—restoring to full significance all its wealth of
latent figurative expression, reviving or replacing its outworn or
tarnished images. Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of
routine and languor; and what was necessary, first of all, was to
re-establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and
expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words
their primitive power.

For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force,
were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forcibly
impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of
making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful,
of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but
middling, tame, or only half-true even to him—this scrupulousness of
literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of
chivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience of execution!
what research for the significant tones of ancient idiom—sonantia verba
et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building—gravis et decora
constructio! He felt the whole meaning of the sceptical Pliny’s
somewhat melancholy advice to one of his friends, that he should seek
in literature deliverance from mortality—ut studiis se literarum a
mortalitate vindicet. And there was everything in the nature and the
training of Marius to make him a full participator in the hopes of such
a new literary school, with Flavian for its leader. In the refinements
of that curious spirit, in its horror of profanities, its fastidious
sense of a correctness in external form, there was something which
ministered to the old ritual interest, still surviving in him; as if
here indeed were involved a kind of sacred service to the
mother-tongue.

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in
which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties
towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it does
but modify a little the principles of all effective expression at all
times. ’Tis art’s function to conceal itself: ars est celare artem:—is
a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, has perhaps been
oftenest and most confidently quoted by those who have had little
literary or other art to conceal; and from the very beginning of
professional literature, the “labour of the file”—a labour in the case
of Plato, for instance, or Virgil, like that of the oldest of
goldsmiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the work by far more
than the weight of precious metal it removed—has always had its
function. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples of it, this Roman
Euphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty in writing—es kallos
graphein+—might lapse into its characteristic fopperies or mannerisms,
into the “defects of its qualities,” in truth, not wholly unpleasing
perhaps, or at least excusable, when looked at as but the toys (so
Cicero calls them), the strictly congenial and appropriate toys, of an
assiduously cultivated age, which could not help being polite,
critical, self-conscious. The mere love of novelty also had, of course,
its part there: as with the Euphuism of the Elizabethan age, and of the
modern French romanticists, its neologies were the ground of one of the
favourite charges against it; though indeed, as regards these tricks of
taste also, there is nothing new, but a quaint family likeness rather,
between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here, as elsewhere, the power
of “fashion,” as it is called, is but one minor form, slight enough, it
may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper yearning of human
nature towards ideal perfection, which is a continuous force in it; and
since in this direction too human nature is limited, such fashions must
necessarily reproduce themselves. Among other resemblances to later
growths of Euphuism, its archaisms on the one hand, and its neologies
on the other, the Euphuism of the days of Marcus Aurelius had, in the
composition of verse, its fancy for the refrain. It was a snatch from a
popular chorus, something he had heard sounding all over the town of
Pisa one April night, one of the first bland and summer-like nights of
the year, that Flavian had chosen for the refrain of a poem he was then
pondering—the Pervigilium Veneris—the vigil, or “nocturn,” of Venus.

Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a constant
part in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries are
playing in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation or
unreality in that minute culture of form:—Cannot those who have a thing
to say, say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like the old
writers of Greece? And this challenge had at least the effect of
setting his thoughts at work on the intellectual situation as it lay
between the children of the present and those earliest masters.
Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greek
genius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence of
imitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent, laid
upon every artist, increased since then! It was all around one:—that
smoothly built world of old classical taste, an accomplished fact, with
overwhelming authority on every detail of the conduct of one’s work.
With no fardel on its own back, yet so imperious towards those who came
labouring after it, Hellas, in its early freshness, looked as distant
from him even then as it does from ourselves. There might seem to be no
place left for novelty or originality,—place only for a patient, an
infinite, faultlessness. On this question too Flavian passed through a
world of curious art-casuistries, of self-tormenting, at the threshold
of his work. Was poetic beauty a thing ever one and the same, a type
absolute; or, changing always with the soul of time itself, did it
depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick of apprehension, the fashion,
as we say, of each successive age? Might one recover that old, earlier
sense of it, that earlier manner, in a masterly effort to recall all
the complexities of the life, moral and intellectual, of the earlier
age to which it had belonged? Had there been really bad ages in art or
literature? Were all ages, even those earliest, adventurous, matutinal
days, in themselves equally poetical or unpoetical; and poetry, the
literary beauty, the poetic ideal, always but a borrowed light upon
men’s actual life?

Homer had said—

Hoi d’ hote dê limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d’ en nêi melainê...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phêgmini thalassês.+


And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was
always telling things after this manner. And one might think there had
been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical
transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which
one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, the
sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in “the great
style,” against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of
an age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer’s
poetry? Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer,
the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader and
the actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, in
an age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on his
opportunity for the touch of “golden alchemy,” or at least for the
pleasantly lighted side of things themselves? Might not another, in
one’s own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had been
through the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in like manner,
discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it? Would not a future
generation, looking back upon this, under the power of the
enchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with its
own languor—the languor that for some reason (concerning which
Augustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt men always? Had
Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to some
of the people of his own age, as seemed to happen with every new
literature in turn? In any case, the intellectual conditions of early
Greece had been—how different from these! And a true literary tact
would accept that difference in forming the primary conception of the
literary function at a later time. Perhaps the utmost one could get by
conscious effort, in the way of a reaction or return to the conditions
of an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas, artificial
artlessness, naïveté; and this quality too might have its measure of
euphuistic charm, direct and sensible enough, though it must count, in
comparison with that genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, not
as the freshness of the open fields, but only of a bunch of
field-flowers in a heated room.

There was, meantime, all this:—on one side, the old pagan culture, for
us but a fragment, for him an accomplished yet present fact, still a
living, united, organic whole, in the entirety of its art, its thought,
its religions, its sagacious forms of polity, that so weighty authority
it exercised on every point, being in reality only the measure of its
charm for every one: on the other side, the actual world in all its
eager self-assertion, with Flavian himself, in his boundless animation,
there, at the centre of the situation. From the natural defects, from
the pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, he
was saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to present, very
real, at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante with what
might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose
of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain
strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things
as really being, with important results, thus, rather than
thus,—intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called upon
to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the model
within. Flavian too, with his fine clear mastery of the practically
effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic in
literature: that to know when one’s self is interested, is the first
condition of interesting other people. It was a principle, the forcible
apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in the selection
of his intellectual food; often listless while others read or gazed
diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere complaisance to
people’s emotions: it served to foster in him a very scrupulous
literary sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demand
for a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personal
intuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved his
euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice.

Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddess
Venus, the work of his earlier manhood, and designed originally to open
an argument less persistently sombre than that protest against the
whole pagan heaven which actually follows it? It is certainly the most
typical expression of a mood, still incident to the young poet, as a
thing peculiar to his youth, when he feels the sentimental current
setting forcibly along his veins, and so much as a matter of purely
physical excitement, that he can hardly distinguish it from the
animation of external nature, the upswelling of the seed in the earth,
and of the sap through the trees. Flavian, to whom, again, as to his
later euphuistic kinsmen, old mythology seemed as full of untried,
unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself, had long been
occupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the vernal principle of life in
things; a composition shaping itself, little by little, out of a
thousand dim perceptions, into singularly definite form (definite and
firm as fine-art in metal, thought Marius) for which, as I said, he had
caught his “refrain,” from the lips of the young men, singing because
they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa. And as oftenest happens
also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal
beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunate
incidents, the physical heat and light, of one singularly happy day.

It was one of the first hot days of March—“the sacred day”—on which,
from Pisa, as from many another harbour on the Mediterranean, the Ship
of Isis went to sea, and every one walked down to the shore-side to
witness the freighting of the vessel, its launching and final
abandonment among the waves, as an object really devoted to the Great
Goddess, that new rival, or “double,” of ancient Venus, and like her a
favourite patroness of sailors. On the evening next before, all the
world had been abroad to view the illumination of the river; the
stately lines of building being wreathed with hundreds of many-coloured
lamps. The young men had poured forth their chorus—

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit,
Quique amavit cras amet—


as they bore their torches through the yielding crowd, or rowed their
lanterned boats up and down the stream, till far into the night, when
heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home. Morning broke,
however, smiling and serene; and the long procession started betimes.
The river, curving slightly, with the smoothly paved streets on either
side, between its low marble parapet and the fair dwelling-houses,
formed the main highway of the city; and the pageant, accompanied
throughout by innumerable lanterns and wax tapers, took its course up
one of these streets, crossing the water by a bridge up-stream, and
down the other, to the haven, every possible standing-place, out of
doors and within, being crowded with sight-seers, of whom Marius was
one of the most eager, deeply interested in finding the spectacle much
as Apuleius had described it in his famous book.

At the head of the procession, the master of ceremonies, quietly waving
back the assistants, made way for a number of women, scattering
perfumes. They were succeeded by a company of musicians, piping and
twanging, on instruments the strangest Marius had ever beheld, the
notes of a hymn, narrating the first origin of this votive rite to a
choir of youths, who marched behind them singing it. The tire-women and
other personal attendants of the great goddess came next, bearing the
instruments of their ministry, and various articles from the sacred
wardrobe, wrought of the most precious material; some of them with long
ivory combs, plying their hands in wild yet graceful concert of
movement as they went, in devout mimicry of the toilet. Placed in their
rear were the mirror-bearers of the goddess, carrying large mirrors of
beaten brass or silver, turned in such a way as to reflect to the great
body of worshippers who followed, the face of the mysterious image, as
it moved on its way, and their faces to it, as though they were in fact
advancing to meet the heavenly visitor. They comprehended a multitude
of both sexes and of all ages, already initiated into the divine
secret, clad in fair linen, the females veiled, the males with shining
tonsures, and every one carrying a sistrum—the richer sort of silver, a
few very dainty persons of fine gold—rattling the reeds, with a noise
like the jargon of innumerable birds and insects awakened from torpor
and abroad in the spring sun. Then, borne upon a kind of platform, came
the goddess herself, undulating above the heads of the multitude as the
bearers walked, in mystic robe embroidered with the moon and stars,
bordered gracefully with a fringe of real fruit and flowers, and with a
glittering crown upon the head. The train of the procession consisted
of the priests in long white vestments, close from head to foot,
distributed into various groups, each bearing, exposed aloft, one of
the sacred symbols of Isis—the corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand
of equity, and among them the votive ship itself, carved and gilt, and
adorned bravely with flags flying. Last of all walked the high priest;
the people kneeling as he passed to kiss his hand, in which were those
well-remembered roses.

Marius followed with the rest to the harbour, where the mystic ship,
lowered from the shoulders of the priests, was loaded with as much as
it could carry of the rich spices and other costly gifts, offered in
great profusion by the worshippers, and thus, launched at last upon the
water, left the shore, crossing the harbour-bar in the wake of a much
stouter vessel than itself with a crew of white-robed mariners, whose
function it was, at the appointed moment, finally to desert it on the
open sea.

The remainder of the day was spent by most in parties on the water.
Flavian and Marius sailed further than they had ever done before to a
wild spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony,
which, having had its eager, stirring life at the time when Etruria was
still a power in Italy, had perished in the age of the civil wars. In
the absolute transparency of the air on this gracious day, an
infinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with sparkling
clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves—Flavian at work
suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land at
last. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with a
tumble-down of quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine of
Venus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and napkins and gilded
shells which these people had offered to the image. Flavian and Marius
sat down under the shadow of a mass of gray rock or ruin, where the
sea-gate of the Greek town had been, and talked of life in those old
Greek colonies. Of this place, all that remained, besides those rude
stones, was—a handful of silver coins, each with a head of pure and
archaic beauty, though a little cruel perhaps, supposed to represent
the Siren Ligeia, whose tomb was formerly shown here—only these, and an
ancient song, the very strain which Flavian had recovered in those last
months. They were records which spoke, certainly, of the charm of life
within those walls. How strong must have been the tide of men’s
existence in that little republican town, so small that this circle of
gray stones, of service now only by the moisture they gathered for the
blue-flowering gentians among them, had been the line of its rampart!
An epitome of all that was liveliest, most animated and adventurous, in
the old Greek people of which it was an offshoot, it had enhanced the
effect of these gifts by concentration within narrow limits. The band
of “devoted youth,”—hiera neotês.+—of the younger brothers, devoted to
the gods and whatever luck the gods might afford, because there was no
room for them at home—went forth, bearing the sacred flame from the
mother hearth; itself a flame, of power to consume the whole material
of existence in clear light and heat, with no smouldering residue. The
life of those vanished townsmen, so brilliant and revolutionary,
applying so abundantly the personal qualities which alone just then
Marius seemed to value, associated itself with the actual figure of his
companion, standing there before him, his face enthusiastic with the
sudden thought of all that; and struck him vividly as precisely the
fitting opportunity for a nature like his, so hungry for control, for
ascendency over men.

Marius noticed also, however, as high spirits flagged at last, on the
way home through the heavy dew of the evening, more than physical
fatigue in Flavian, who seemed to find no refreshment in the coolness.
There had been something feverish, perhaps, and like the beginning of
sickness, about his almost forced gaiety, in this sudden spasm of
spring; and by the evening of the next day he was lying with a burning
spot on his forehead, stricken, as was thought from the first, by the
terrible new disease.

NOTES


93. +Corrected from the Macmillan edition misprint “singal.”


98. +Transliteration: es kallos graphein. Translation: “To write
beautifully.”


100. +Iliad 1.432-33, 437. Transliteration:


Hoi d’ hote dê limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d’ en nêi melainê...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phêgmini thalassês.


Etext editor’s translation:


When they had safely made deep harbor
They took in the sail, laid it in their black ship...
And went ashore just past the breakers.


109. +Transliteration: hiera neotês. Pater translates the phrase,
“devoted youth.”




CHAPTER VII.
A PAGAN END


For the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor Marcus
Aurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in his train,
among the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive. People actually
sickened at a sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as they watched in
dense crowds the pathetic or grotesque imagery of failure or success in
the triumphal procession. And, as usual, the plague brought with it a
power to develop all pre-existent germs of superstition. It was by
dishonour done to Apollo himself, said popular rumour—to Apollo, the
old titular divinity of pestilence, that the poisonous thing had come
abroad. Pent up in a golden coffer consecrated to the god, it had
escaped in the sacrilegious plundering of his temple at Seleucia by the
soldiers of Lucius Verus, after a traitorous surprise of that town and
a cruel massacre. Certainly there was something which baffled all
imaginable precautions and all medical science, in the suddenness with
which the disease broke out simultaneously, here and there, among both
soldiers and citizens, even in places far remote from the main line of
its march in the rear of the victorious army. It seemed to have invaded
the whole empire, and some have even thought that, in a mitigated form,
it permanently remained there. In Rome itself many thousands perished;
and old authorities tell of farmsteads, whole towns, and even entire
neighbourhoods, which from that time continued without inhabitants and
lapsed into wildness or ruin.

Flavian lay at the open window of his lodging, with a fiery pang in the
brain, fancying no covering thin or light enough to be applied to his
body. His head being relieved after a while, there was distress at the
chest. It was but the fatal course of the strange new sickness, under
many disguises; travelling from the brain to the feet, like a material
resident, weakening one after another of the organic centres; often,
when it did not kill, depositing various degrees of lifelong infirmity
in this member or that; and after such descent, returning upwards
again, now as a mortal coldness, leaving the entrenchments of the
fortress of life overturned, one by one, behind it.

Flavian lay there, with the enemy at his breast now in a painful cough,
but relieved from that burning fever in the head, amid the rich-scented
flowers—rare Paestum roses, and the like —procured by Marius for his
solace, in a fancied convalescence; and would, at intervals, return to
labour at his verses, with a great eagerness to complete and transcribe
the work, while Marius sat and wrote at his dictation, one of the
latest but not the poorest specimens of genuine Latin poetry.

It was in fact a kind of nuptial hymn, which, taking its start from the
thought of nature as the universal mother, celebrated the preliminary
pairing and mating together of all fresh things, in the hot and genial
spring-time—the immemorial nuptials of the soul of spring itself and
the brown earth; and was full of a delighted, mystic sense of what
passed between them in that fantastic marriage. That mystic burden was
relieved, at intervals, by the familiar playfulness of the Latin
verse-writer in dealing with mythology, which, though coming at so late
a day, had still a wonderful freshness in its old age.—“Amor has put
his weapons by and will keep holiday. He was bidden go without apparel,
that none might be wounded by his bow and arrows. But take care! In
truth he is none the less armed than usual, though he be all unclad.”

In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while making it his chief
aim to retain the opulent, many-syllabled vocabulary of the Latin
genius, at some points even to have advanced beyond it, in anticipation
of wholly new laws of taste as regards sound, a new range of sound
itself. The peculiar resultant note, associating itself with certain
other experiences of his, was to Marius like the foretaste of an
entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come. Flavian had caught,
indeed, something of the rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music of
the medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its unction and
mysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along with the last
splendour of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that
transformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just about
to dawn. The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself with a
feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seems to
say, You have been just here, just thus, before!—a feeling, in his
case, not reminiscent but prescient of the future, which passed over
him afterwards many times, as he came across certain places and people.
It was as if he detected there the process of actual change to a wholly
undreamed-of and renewed condition of human body and soul: as if he saw
the heavy yet decrepit old Roman architecture about him, rebuilding on
an intrinsically better pattern. Could it have been actually on a new
musical instrument that Flavian had first heard the novel accents of
his verse? And still Marius noticed there, amid all its richness of
expression and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always relished
so much in the composition of Flavian. Yes! a firmness like that of
some master of noble metal-work, manipulating tenacious bronze or gold.
Even now that haunting refrain, with its impromptu variations, from the
throats of those strong young men, came floating through the window.

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit,
Quique amavit cras amet!


—repeated Flavian, tremulously, dictating yet one stanza more.

What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and body so fortunately
endowed, the mere liberty of life above-ground, “those sunny mornings
in the cornfields by the sea,” as he recollected them one day, when the
window was thrown open upon the early freshness—his sense of all this,
was from the first singularly near and distinct, yet rather as of
something he was but debarred the use of for a time than finally
bidding farewell to. That was while he was still with no very grave
misgivings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources of
life still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time to
time, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at the poem from his dictation,
was haunted by a feeling of the triviality of such work just then. The
recurrent sense of some obscure danger beyond the mere danger of death,
vaguer than that and by so much the more terrible, like the menace of
some shadowy adversary in the dark with whose mode of attack they had
no acquaintance, disturbed him now and again through those hours of
excited attention to his manuscript, and to the purely physical wants
of Flavian. Still, during these three days there was much hope and
cheerfulness, and even jesting. Half-consciously Marius tried to
prolong one or another relieving circumstance of the day, the
preparations for rest and morning refreshment, for instance; sadly
making the most of the little luxury of this or that, with something of
the feigned cheer of the mother who sets her last morsels before her
famished child as for a feast, but really that he “may eat it and die.”

On the afternoon of the seventh day he allowed Marius finally to put
aside the unfinished manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the chest quiet
at length though much exhausted, had made itself felt with full power
again in a painful vomiting, which seemed to shake his body asunder,
with great consequent prostration. From that time the distress
increased rapidly downwards. Omnia tum vero vitai claustra lababant;+
and soon the cold was mounting with sure pace from the dead feet to the
head.

And now Marius began more than to suspect what the issue must be, and
henceforward could but watch with a sort of agonised fascination the
rapid but systematic work of the destroyer, faintly relieving a little
the mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering. Flavian himself
appeared, in full consciousness at last—in clear-sighted, deliberate
estimate of the actual crisis—to be doing battle with his adversary.
His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the various suggested modes
of relief. He must without fail get better, he would fancy, might he be
removed to a certain place on the hills where as a child he had once
recovered from sickness, but found that he could scarcely raise his
head from the pillow without giddiness. As if now surely foreseeing the
end, he would set himself, with an eager effort, and with that eager
and angry look, which is noted as one of the premonitions of death in
this disease, to fashion out, without formal dictation, still a few
more broken verses of his unfinished work, in hard-set determination,
defiant of pain, to arrest this or that little drop at least from the
river of sensuous imagery rushing so quickly past him.

But at length delirium—symptom that the work of the plague was done,
and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy—broke the coherent
order of words and thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony,
found his best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient’s mind. In
intervals of clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of sorrow
and desolation, were very painful. No longer battling with the disease,
he seemed as it were to place himself at the disposal of the victorious
foe, dying passively, like some dumb creature, in hopeless acquiescence
at last. That old, half-pleading petulance, unamiable, yet, as it might
seem, only needing conditions of life a little happier than they had
actually been, to become refinement of affection, a delicate grace in
its demand on the sympathy of others, had changed in those moments of
full intelligence to a clinging and tremulous gentleness, as he lay—“on
the very threshold of death”—with a sharply contracted hand in the hand
of Marius, to his almost surprised joy, winning him now to an
absolutely self-forgetful devotion. There was a new sort of pleading in
the misty eyes, just because they took such unsteady note of him, which
made Marius feel as if guilty; anticipating thus a form of
self-reproach with which even the tenderest ministrant may be sometimes
surprised, when, at death, affectionate labour suddenly ceasing leaves
room for the suspicion of some failure of love perhaps, at one or
another minute point in it. Marius almost longed to take his share in
the suffering, that he might understand so the better how to relieve
it.

It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the patient, and Marius
extinguished it. The thunder which had sounded all day among the hills,
with a heat not unwelcome to Flavian, had given way at nightfall to
steady rain; and in the darkness Marius lay down beside him, faintly
shivering now in the sudden cold, to lend him his own warmth,
undeterred by the fear of contagion which had kept other people from
passing near the house. At length about day-break he perceived that the
last effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as Marius
understood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of him
there. “Is it a comfort,” he whispered then, “that I shall often come
and weep over you?”—“Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!”

The sun shone out on the people going to work for a long hot day, and
Marius was standing by the dead, watching, with deliberate purpose to
fix in his memory every detail, that he might have this picture in
reserve, should any hour of forgetfulness hereafter come to him with
the temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage, of
resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity, as he
noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility, almost
abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one,
fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a
merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he would not forget
one circumstance in all that; as a man might piously stamp on his
memory the death-scene of a brother wrongfully condemned to die,
against a time that may come.

The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort to watch by
it through the darkness, was a hint of his own failing strength, just
in time. The first night after the washing of the body, he bore stoutly
enough the tax which affection seemed to demand, throwing the incense
from time to time on the little altar placed beside the bier. It was
the recurrence of the thing—that unchanged outline below the coverlet,
amid a silence in which the faintest rustle seemed to speak—that
finally overcame his determination. Surely, here, in this alienation,
this sense of distance between them, which had come over him before
though in minor degree when the mind of Flavian had wandered in his
sickness, was another of the pains of death. Yet he was able to make
all due preparations, and go through the ceremonies, shortened a little
because of the infection, when, on a cloudless evening, the funeral
procession went forth; himself, the flames of the pyre having done
their work, carrying away the urn of the deceased, in the folds of his
toga, to its last resting-place in the cemetery beside the highway, and
so turning home to sleep in his own desolate lodging.

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
    Tam cari capitis?—+


What thought of others’ thoughts about one could there be with the
regret for “so dear a head” fresh at one’s heart?

NOTES


116. +Lucretius, Book VI.1153.


120. +Horace, Odes I.xxiv.1-2.




PART THE SECOND




CHAPTER VIII.
ANIMULA VAGULA


Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Pallidula, rigida, nudula.


The Emperor Hadrian to his Soul


Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and tears
lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actual spectacle
of death brings out into greater reality, at least for the imagination,
whatever confidence they may entertain of the soul’s survival in
another life. To Marius, greatly agitated by that event, the earthly
end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing less than the
soul’s extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as the fire among
those still beloved ashes. Even that wistful suspense of judgment
expressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages of being still
possible for the soul in some dim journey hence, seemed wholly
untenable, and, with it, almost all that remained of the religion of
his childhood. Future extinction seemed just then to be what the
unforced witness of his own nature pointed to. On the other hand, there
came a novel curiosity as to what the various schools of ancient
philosophy had had to say concerning that strange, fluttering creature;
and that curiosity impelled him to certain severe studies, in which his
earlier religious conscience seemed still to survive, as a principle of
hieratic scrupulousness or integrity of thought, regarding this new
service to intellectual light.

At this time, by his poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen a
prey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in many
a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this,
fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, he
was kept by a genuine virility there, effective in him, among other
results, as a hatred of what was theatrical, and the instinctive
recognition that in vigorous intelligence, after all, divinity was most
likely to be found a resident. With this was connected the feeling,
increasing with his advance to manhood, of a poetic beauty in mere
clearness of thought, the actually aesthetic charm of a cold austerity
of mind; as if the kinship of that to the clearness of physical light
were something more than a figure of speech. Of all those various
religious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could well
appreciate the picturesque; that was made easy by his natural
Epicureanism, already prompting him to conceive of himself as but the
passive spectator of the world around him. But it was to the severer
reasoning, of which such matters as Epicurean theory are born, that, in
effect, he now betook himself. Instinctively suspicious of those
mechanical arcana, those pretended “secrets unveiled” of the
professional mystic, which really bring great and little souls to one
level, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old,
ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and the
honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even the
Arcana Celestia of Platonism—what the sons of Plato had had to say
regarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily house
and merely occasional dwelling-place—seemed to him while his heart was
there in the urn with the material ashes of Flavian, or still lingering
in memory over his last agony, wholly inhuman or morose, as tending to
alleviate his resentment at nature’s wrong. It was to the sentiment of
the body, and the affections it defined—the flesh, of whose force and
colour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or
abstract—he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved,
suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him a
materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee.

As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetry
had passed away, to be replaced by the literature of thought. His
much-pondered manuscript verses were laid aside; and what happened now
to one, who was certainly to be something of a poet from first to last,
looked at the moment like a change from poetry to prose. He came of age
about this time, his own master though with beardless face; and at
eighteen, an age at which, then as now, many youths of capacity, who
fancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from others chiefly in
affectation and vague dreaming, he secluded himself indeed from others,
but in a severe intellectual meditation, that salt of poetry, without
which all the more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative world.
Still with something of the old religious earnestness of his childhood,
he set himself—Sich im Denken zu orientiren—to determine his bearings,
as by compass, in the world of thought—to get that precise acquaintance
with the creative intelligence itself, its structure and capacities,
its relation to other parts of himself and to other things, without
which, certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young man rich in
this world’s goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, and
ascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact estimate of
realities, as towards himself, he must have—a delicately measured
gradation of certainty in things—from the distant, haunted horizon of
mere surmise or imagination, to the actual feeling of sorrow in his
heart, as he reclined one morning, alone instead of in pleasant
company, to ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old Greek
manuscript, unrolled beside him. His former gay companions, meeting him
in the streets of the old Italian town, and noting the graver lines
coming into the face of the sombre but enthusiastic student of
intellectual structure, who could hold his own so well in the society
of accomplished older men, were half afraid of him, though proud to
have him of their company. Why this reserve?—they asked, concerning the
orderly, self-possessed youth, whose speech and carriage seemed so
carefully measured, who was surely no poet like the rapt, dishevelled
Lupus. Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was so daintily
folded, and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent on
his own line of ambition: or even on riches?

Marius, meantime, was reading freely, in early morning for the most
part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what
might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence,
which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.
And the old Greek who more than any other was now giving form to his
thoughts was a very hard master. From Epicurus, from the thunder and
lightning of Lucretius—like thunder and lightning some distance off,
one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses—he had gone back to
the writer who was in a certain sense the teacher of both, Heraclitus
of Ionia. His difficult book “Concerning Nature” was even then rare,
for people had long since satisfied themselves by the quotation of
certain brilliant, isolated, oracles only, out of what was at best a
taxing kind of lore. But the difficulty of the early Greek prose did
but spur the curiosity of Marius; the writer, the superior clearness of
whose intellectual view had so sequestered him from other men, who had
had so little joy of that superiority, being avowedly exacting as to
the amount of devout attention he required from the student. “The
many,” he said, always thus emphasising the difference between the many
and the few, are “like people heavy with wine,” “led by children,”
“knowing not whither they go;” and yet, “much learning doth not make
wise;” and again, “the ass, after all, would have his thistles rather
than fine gold.”

Heraclitus, indeed, had not under-rated the difficulty for “the many”
of the paradox with which his doctrine begins, and the due reception of
which must involve a denial of habitual impressions, as the necessary
first step in the way of truth. His philosophy had been developed in
conscious, outspoken opposition to the current mode of thought, as a
matter requiring some exceptional loyalty to pure reason and its “dry
light.” Men are subject to an illusion, he protests, regarding matters
apparent to sense. What the uncorrected sense gives was a false
impression of permanence or fixity in things, which have really changed
their nature in the very moment in which we see and touch them. And the
radical flaw in the current mode of thinking would lie herein: that,
reflecting this false or uncorrected sensation, it attributes to the
phenomena of experience a durability which does not really belong to
them. Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world of firmly
out-lined objects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and dead
what is in reality full of animation, of vigour, of the fire of
life—that eternal process of nature, of which at a later time Goethe
spoke as the “Living Garment,” whereby God is seen of us, ever in
weaving at the “Loom of Time.”

And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made was, in the first
instance, from confused to unconfused sensation; with a sort of
prophetic seriousness, a great claim and assumption, such as we may
understand, if we anticipate in this preliminary scepticism the
ulterior scope of his speculation, according to which the universal
movement of all natural things is but one particular stage, or measure,
of that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason consists. The one
true being—that constant subject of all early thought—it was his merit
to have conceived, not as sterile and stagnant inaction, but as a
perpetual energy, from the restless stream of which, at certain points,
some elements detach themselves, and harden into non-entity and death,
corresponding, as outward objects, to man’s inward condition of
ignorance: that is, to the slowness of his faculties. It is with this
paradox of a subtle, perpetual change in all visible things, that the
high speculation of Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expresses for
anything like a careless, half-conscious, “use-and-wont” reception of
our experience, which took so strong a hold on men’s memories! Hence
those many precepts towards a strenuous self-consciousness in all we
think and do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason, which makes
strict attentiveness of mind a kind of religious duty and service.

The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our ordinary
experience, fixed as they seem, are really in perpetual change, had
been, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a large
positive system of almost religious philosophy. Then as now, the
illuminated philosophic mind might apprehend, in what seemed a mass of
lifeless matter, the movement of that universal life, in which things,
and men’s impressions of them, were ever “coming to be,” alternately
consumed and renewed. That continual change, to be discovered by the
attentive understanding where common opinion found fixed objects, was
but the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading motion—the sleepless,
ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine reason itself,
proceeding always by its own rhythmical logic, and lending to all mind
and matter, in turn, what life they had. In this “perpetual flux” of
things and of souls, there was, as Heraclitus conceived, a continuance,
if not of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderly
intelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wrought
out in and through the series of their mutations—ordinances of the
divine reason, maintained throughout the changes of the phenomenal
world; and this harmony in their mutation and opposition, was, after
all, a principle of sanity, of reality, there. But it happened, that,
of all this, the first, merely sceptical or negative step, that easiest
step on the threshold, had alone remained in general memory; and the
“doctrine of motion” seemed to those who had felt its seduction to make
all fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the still
swifter passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed to
reflect them, might indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but what
was ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring flame, or
like the race of water in the mid-stream—too swiftly for any real
knowledge of them to be attainable. Heracliteanism had grown to be
almost identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras,
that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was the
only standard of what is or is not, and each one the measure of all
things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had become but an
authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge.

And as it had been with his original followers in Greece, so it
happened now with the later Roman disciple. He, too, paused at the
apprehension of that constant motion of things—the drift of flowers, of
little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream around him,
the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out of
sight, must count with him as but a dim problem. The bold mental flight
of the old Greek master from the fleeting, competing objects of
experience to that one universal life, in which the whole sphere of
physical change might be reckoned as but a single pulsation, remained
by him as hypothesis only—the hypothesis he actually preferred, as in
itself most credible, however scantily realisable even by the
imagination—yet still as but one unverified hypothesis, among many
others, concerning the first principle of things. He might reserve it
as a fine, high, visionary consideration, very remote upon the
intellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where that ladder
seemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly no
time left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so close
to him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground. And those
childish days of reverie, when he played at priests, played in many
another day-dream, working his way from the actual present, as far as
he might, with a delightful sense of escape in replacing the outer
world of other people by an inward world as himself really cared to
have it, had made him a kind of “idealist.” He was become aware of the
possibility of a large dissidence between an inward and somewhat
exclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved,
unheightened reality of the life of those about him. As a consequence,
he was ready now to concede, somewhat more easily than others, the
first point of his new lesson, that the individual is to himself the
measure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive certainty to
himself of his own impressions. To move afterwards in that outer world
of other people, as though taking it at their estimate, would be
possible henceforth only as a kind of irony. And as with the Vicaire
Savoyard, after reflecting on the variations of philosophy, “the first
fruit he drew from that reflection was the lesson of a limitation of
his researches to what immediately interested him; to rest peacefully
in a profound ignorance as to all beside; to disquiet himself only
concerning those things which it was of import for him to know.” At
least he would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow its
due weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in the
conditions of man’s life. Just here he joined company, retracing in his
individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of human thought, with
another wayfarer on the journey, another ancient Greek master, the
founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weighty traditional
utterances (for he had left no writing) served in turn to give
effective outline to the contemplations of Marius. There was something
in the doctrine itself congruous with the place wherein it had its
birth; and for a time Marius lived much, mentally, in the brilliant
Greek colony which had given a dubious name to the philosophy of
pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the mountains and the sea,
among richer than Italian gardens, on a certain breezy table-land
projecting from the African coast, some hundreds of miles southward
from Greece. There, in a delightful climate, with something of
transalpine temperance amid its luxury, and withal in an inward
atmosphere of temperance which did but further enhance the brilliancy
of human life, the school of Cyrene had maintained itself as almost one
with the family of its founder; certainly as nothing coarse or unclean,
and under the influence of accomplished women.

Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of judgment as to
what might really lie behind—flammantia moenia mundi: the flaming
ramparts of the world. Those strange, bold, sceptical surmises, which
had haunted the minds of the first Greek enquirers as merely abstract
doubt, which had been present to the mind of Heraclitus as one element
only in a system of abstract philosophy, became with Aristippus a very
subtly practical worldly-wisdom. The difference between him and those
obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that between an ancient thinker
generally, and a modern man of the world: it was the difference between
the mystic in his cell, or the prophet in the desert, and the expert,
cosmopolitan, administrator of his dark sayings, translating the
abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first of all, of sentiment.
It has been sometimes seen, in the history of the human mind, that when
thus translated into terms of sentiment—of sentiment, as lying already
half-way towards practice—the abstract ideas of metaphysics for the
first time reveal their true significance. The metaphysical principle,
in itself, as it were, without hands or feet, becomes impressive,
fascinating, of effect, when translated into a precept as to how it
were best to feel and act; in other words, under its sentimental or
ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the great master of Cyrene, his
theory that things are but shadows, and that we, even as they, never
continue in one stay, might indeed have taken effect as a languid,
enervating, consumptive nihilism, as a precept of “renunciation,” which
would touch and handle and busy itself with nothing. But in the
reception of metaphysical formulae, all depends, as regards their
actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil
of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already
present there, on their admission into the house of thought; there
being at least so much truth as this involves in the theological maxim,
that the reception of this or that speculative conclusion is really a
matter of will. The persuasion that all is vanity, with this happily
constituted Greek, who had been a genuine disciple of Socrates and
reflected, presumably, something of his blitheness in the face of the
world, his happy way of taking all chances, generated neither frivolity
nor sourness, but induced, rather, an impression, just serious enough,
of the call upon men’s attention of the crisis in which they find
themselves. It became the stimulus towards every kind of activity, and
prompted a perpetual, inextinguishable thirst after experience.

With Marius, then, the influence of the philosopher of pleasure
depended on this, that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat
acrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial nature, well fitted to
transform it into a theory of practice, of considerable stimulative
power towards a fair life. What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of
one of the happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to an
understanding with the most depressing of theories; accepting the
results of a metaphysical system which seemed to concentrate into
itself all the weakening trains of thought in earlier Greek
speculation, and making the best of it; turning its hard, bare truths,
with wonderful tact, into precepts of grace, and delicate wisdom, and a
delicate sense of honour. Given the hardest terms, supposing our days
are indeed but a shadow, even so, we may well adorn and beautify, in
scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touch
upon—these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling-places through
which the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment we wear,
our very pastimes and the intercourse of society. The most discerning
judges saw in him something like the graceful “humanities” of the later
Roman, and our modern “culture,” as it is termed; while Horace recalled
his sayings as expressing best his own consummate amenity in the
reception of life.

In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of that old master of
decorous living, those eternal doubts as to the criteria of truth
reduced themselves to a scepticism almost drily practical, a scepticism
which developed the opposition between things as they are and our
impressions and thoughts concerning them—the possibility, if an outward
world does really exist, of some faultiness in our apprehension of
it—the doctrine, in short, of what is termed “the subjectivity of
knowledge.” That is a consideration, indeed, which lies as an element
of weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw, at the very foundation
of every philosophical account of the universe; which confronts all
philosophies at their starting, but with which none have really dealt
conclusively, some perhaps not quite sincerely; which those who are not
philosophers dissipate by “common,” but unphilosophical, sense, or by
religious faith. The peculiar strength of Marius was, to have
apprehended this weakness on the threshold of human knowledge, in the
whole range of its consequences. Our knowledge is limited to what we
feel, he reflected: we need no proof that we feel. But can we be sure
that things are at all like our feelings? Mere peculiarities in the
instruments of our cognition, like the little knots and waves on the
surface of a mirror, may distort the matter they seem but to represent.
Of other people we cannot truly know even the feelings, nor how far
they would indicate the same modifications, each one of a personality
really unique, in using the same terms as ourselves; that “common
experience,” which is sometimes proposed as a satisfactory basis of
certainty, being after all only a fixity of language. But our own
impressions!—The light and heat of that blue veil over our heads, the
heavens spread out, perhaps not like a curtain over anything!—How
reassuring, after so long a debate about the rival criteria of truth,
to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one’s aspirations after
knowledge to that! In an age still materially so brilliant, so expert
in the artistic handling of material things, with sensible capacities
still in undiminished vigour, with the whole world of classic art and
poetry outspread before it, and where there was more than eye or ear
could well take in—how natural the determination to rely exclusively
upon the phenomena of the senses, which certainly never deceive us
about themselves, about which alone we can never deceive ourselves!

And so the abstract apprehension that the little point of this present
moment alone really is, between a past which has just ceased to be and
a future which may never come, became practical with Marius, under the
form of a resolve, as far as possible, to exclude regret and desire,
and yield himself to the improvement of the present with an absolutely
disengaged mind. America is here and now—here, or nowhere: as Wilhelm
Meister finds out one day, just not too late, after so long looking
vaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the development of his
capacities. It was as if, recognising in perpetual motion the law of
nature, Marius identified his own way of life cordially with it,
“throwing himself into the stream,” so to speak. He too must maintain a
harmony with that soul of motion in things, by constantly renewed
mobility of character.

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res.—


Thus Horace had summed up that perfect manner in the reception of life
attained by his old Cyrenaic master; and the first practical
consequence of the metaphysic which lay behind that perfect manner, had
been a strict limitation, almost the renunciation, of metaphysical
enquiry itself. Metaphysic—that art, as it has so often proved, in the
words of Michelet, _de s’égarer avec méthode_, of bewildering oneself
methodically:—one must spend little time upon that! In the school of
Cyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness, logical and physical
speculation, theoretic interests generally, had been valued only so far
as they served to give a groundwork, an intellectual justification, to
that exclusive concern with practical ethics which was a note of the
Cyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic, how true to itself,
under how many varieties of character, had been the effort of the
Greeks after Theory—Theôria—that vision of a wholly reasonable world,
which, according to the greatest of them, literally makes man like God:
how loyally they had still persisted in the quest after that, in spite
of how many disappointments! In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps, some
of them might have found the kind of vision they were seeking for; but
not in “doubtful disputations” concerning “being” and “not being,”
knowledge and appearance. Men’s minds, even young men’s minds, at that
late day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which
had so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind of Marius, as in
that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui, combined with appetites
so youthfully vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort of suicide
(instances of the like have been seen since) by which a great
metaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving metaphysical
speculation impossible, or useless. Abstract theory was to be valued
only just so far as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind from
suppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly visionary, leaving
it in flawless evenness of surface to the impressions of an experience,
concrete and direct.

To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding ourselves
of such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions—to be
rid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often only
misrepresent the experience of which they profess to be the
representation—_idola_, idols, false appearances, as Bacon calls them
later—to neutralise the distorting influence of metaphysical system by
an all-accomplished metaphysic skill: it is this bold, hard, sober
recognition, under a very “dry light,” of its own proper aim, in union
with a habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps open a
wide doorway to human weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic doctrine, to
reproductions of this doctrine in the time of Marius or in our own,
their gravity and importance. It was a school to which the young man
might come, eager for truth, expecting much from philosophy, in no
ignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than an “initiation.” He
would be sent back, sooner or later, to experience, to the world of
concrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt by
him; but with a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from the
tyranny of mere theories.

So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed the
death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself as
if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant school
of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, on
its fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general completeness
of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical
metaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, a
life of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effective
auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, freedom from
all partial and misrepresentative doctrine which does but relieve one
element in our experience at the cost of another, freedom from all
embarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on the
future: this would be but preliminary to the real business of
education—insight, insight through culture, into all that the present
moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.
From that maxim of Life as the end of life, followed, as a practical
consequence, the desirableness of refining all the instruments of
inward and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities, of
testing and exercising one’s self in them, till one’s whole nature
became one complex medium of reception, towards the vision—the
“beatific vision,” if we really cared to make it such—of our actual
experience in the world. Not the conveyance of an abstract body of
truths or principles, would be the aim of the right education of one’s
self, or of another, but the conveyance of an art—an art in some degree
peculiar to each individual character; with the modifications, that is,
due to its special constitution, and the peculiar circumstances of its
growth, inasmuch as no one of us is “like another, all in all.”




CHAPTER IX.
NEW CYRENAICISM


Such were the practical conclusions drawn for himself by Marius, when
somewhat later he had outgrown the mastery of others, from the
principle that “all is vanity.” If he could but count upon the present,
if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to conduct one
anywhere beyond itself, if men’s highest curiosity was indeed so
persistently baffled—then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at
least fill up the measure of that present with vivid sensations, and
such intellectual apprehensions, as, in strength and directness and
their immediately realised values at the bar of an actual experience,
are most like sensations. So some have spoken in every age; for, like
all theories which really express a strong natural tendency of the
human mind or even one of its characteristic modes of weakness, this
vein of reflection is a constant tradition in philosophy. Every age of
European thought has had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans, under many
disguises: even under the hood of the monk.

But—Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!—is a proposal, the real
import of which differs immensely, according to the natural taste, and
the acquired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table. It may
express nothing better than the instinct of Dante’s Ciacco, the
accomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno;+ or, since on no
hypothesis does man “live by bread alone,” may come to be identical
with—“My meat is to do what is just and kind;” while the soul, which
can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil
of immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in
conforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for itself;
and actually, though but with so faint hope, does the “Father’s
business.”

In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely disabused of the
metaphysical ambition to pass beyond “the flaming ramparts of the
world,” but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation of
intellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all varieties
of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works, the thoughts of
Marius did but follow the line taken by the majority of educated
persons, though to a different issue. Pitched to a really high and
serious key, the precept—Be perfect in regard to what is here and now:
the precept of “culture,” as it is called, or of a complete
education—might at least save him from the vulgarity and heaviness of a
generation, certainly of no general fineness of temper, though with a
material well-being abundant enough. Conceded that what is secure in
our existence is but the sharp apex of the present moment between two
hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our experience but a
series of fleeting impressions:—so Marius continued the sceptical
argument he had condensed, as the matter to hold by, from his various
philosophical reading:—given, that we are never to get beyond the walls
of the closely shut cell of one’s own personality; that the ideas we
are somehow impelled to form of an outer world, and of other minds akin
to our own, are, it may be, but a day-dream, and the thought of any
world beyond, a day-dream perhaps idler still: then, he, at least, in
whom those fleeting impressions—faces, voices, material sunshine—were
very real and imperious, might well set himself to the consideration,
how such actual moments as they passed might be made to yield their
utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract
metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that
experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of
human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him
at least make the most of what was “here and now.” In the actual
dimness of ways from means to ends—ends in themselves desirable, yet
for the most part distant and for him, certainly, below the visible
horizon—he would at all events be sure that the means, to use the
well-worn terminology, should have something of finality or perfection
about them, and themselves partake, in a measure, of the more excellent
nature of ends—that the means should justify the end.

With this view he would demand culture, paideia,+ as the Cyrenaics
said, or, in other words, a wide, a complete, education—an education
partly negative, as ascertaining the true limits of man’s capacities,
but for the most part positive, and directed especially to the
expansion and refinement of the power of reception; of those powers,
above all, which are immediately relative to fleeting phenomena, the
powers of emotion and sense. In such an education, an “aesthetic”
education, as it might now be termed, and certainly occupied very
largely with those aspects of things which affect us pleasurably
through sensation, art, of course, including all the finer sorts of
literature, would have a great part to play. The study of music, in
that wider Platonic sense, according to which, music comprehends all
those matters over which the Muses of Greek mythology preside, would
conduct one to an exquisite appreciation of all the finer traits of
nature and of man. Nay! the products of the imagination must themselves
be held to present the most perfect forms of life—spirit and matter
alike under their purest and most perfect conditions—the most strictly
appropriate objects of that impassioned contemplation, which, in the
world of intellectual discipline, as in the highest forms of morality
and religion, must be held to be the essential function of the
“perfect.” Such manner of life might come even to seem a kind of
religion—an inward, visionary, mystic piety, or religion, by virtue of
its effort to live days “lovely and pleasant” in themselves, here and
now, and with an all-sufficiency of well-being in the immediate sense
of the object contemplated, independently of any faith, or hope that
might be entertained as to their ulterior tendency. In this way, the
true aesthetic culture would be realisable as a new form of the
contemplative life, founding its claim on the intrinsic “blessedness”
of “vision”—the vision of perfect men and things. One’s human nature,
indeed, would fain reckon on an assured and endless future, pleasing
itself with the dream of a final home, to be attained at some still
remote date, yet with a conscious, delightful home-coming at last, as
depicted in many an old poetic Elysium. On the other hand, the world of
perfected sensation, intelligence, emotion, is so close to us, and so
attractive, that the most visionary of spirits must needs represent the
world unseen in colours, and under a form really borrowed from it. Let
me be sure then—might he not plausibly say?—that I miss no detail of
this life of realised consciousness in the present! Here at least is a
vision, a theory, theôria,+ which reposes on no basis of unverified
hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future after all somewhat
problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery of an
Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had
really been the origin, and course of development, of man’s actually
attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or
spirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of
course have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment, generally, of
what is near at hand, on the adornment of life, till, in a not
impracticable rule of conduct, one’s existence, from day to day, came
to be like a well-executed piece of music; that “perpetual motion” in
things (so Marius figured the matter to himself, under the old Greek
imageries) according itself to a kind of cadence or harmony.

It was intelligible that this “aesthetic” philosophy might find itself
(theoretically, at least, and by way of a curious question in
casuistry, legitimate from its own point of view) weighing the claims
of that eager, concentrated, impassioned realisation of experience,
against those of the received morality. Conceiving its own function in
a somewhat desperate temper, and becoming, as every high-strung form of
sentiment, as the religious sentiment itself, may become, somewhat
antinomian, when, in its effort towards the order of experiences it
prefers, it is confronted with the traditional and popular morality, at
points where that morality may look very like a convention, or a mere
stage-property of the world, it would be found, from time to time,
breaking beyond the limits of the actual moral order; perhaps not
without some pleasurable excitement in so bold a venture.

With the possibility of some such hazard as this, in thought or even in
practice—that it might be, though refining, or tonic even, in the case
of those strong and in health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly and
temperate wisdom of Montaigne, “pernicious for those who have any
natural tendency to impiety or vice,” the line of reflection traced out
above, was fairly chargeable.—Not, however, with “hedonism” and its
supposed consequences. The blood, the heart, of Marius were still pure.
He knew that his carefully considered theory of practice braced him,
with the effect of a moral principle duly recurring to mind every
morning, towards the work of a student, for which he might seem
intended. Yet there were some among his acquaintance who jumped to the
conclusion that, with the “Epicurean stye,” he was making
pleasure—pleasure, as they so poorly conceived it—the sole motive of
life; and they precluded any exacter estimate of the situation by
covering it with a high-sounding general term,

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