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Marius the Epicurean — Volume 2

by Walter Pater · English · Gutenberg #4058 · 318,309 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Marius the Epicurean — Volume 2

Author: Walter Pater


        
Release date: May 1, 2003 [eBook #4058]
                Most recently updated: September 3, 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 2 ***




Marius the Epicurean

HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS

by WALTER PATER

VOLUME TWO

London: 1910.
(The Library Edition.)


Contents

 PART THE THIRD
 15. Stoicism at Court
 16. Second Thoughts
 17. Beata Urbs
 18. “The Ceremony of the Dart”
 19. The Will as Vision

 PART THE FOURTH
 20. Two Curious Houses—1. Guests
 21. Two Curious Houses—2. The Church in Cecilia’s House
 22. “The Minor Peace of the Church”
 23. Divine Service
 24. A Conversation Not Imaginary
 25. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
 26. The Martyrs
 27. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius
 28. Anima Naturaliter Christiana




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.

Χειμερινὸς ὄνειρος, ὅτε μήκισται αἱ νύκτες+


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




PART THE THIRD




CHAPTER XV.
STOICISM AT COURT


The very finest flower of the same company—Aurelius with the gilded
fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina
herself, and all the elegant blue-stockings of the day, who maintained,
people said, their private “sophists” to whisper philosophy into their
ears winsomely as they performed the duties of the toilet—was assembled
again a few months later, in a different place and for a very different
purpose. The temple of Peace, a “modernising” foundation of Hadrian,
enlarged by a library and lecture-rooms, had grown into an institution
like something between a college and a literary club; and here
Cornelius Fronto was to pronounce a discourse on the Nature of Morals.
There were some, indeed, who had desired the emperor Aurelius himself
to declare his whole mind on this matter. Rhetoric was become almost a
function of the state: philosophy was upon the throne; and had from
time to time, by request, delivered an official utterance with
well-nigh divine authority. And it was as the delegate of this
authority, under the full sanction of the philosophic emperor—emperor
and pontiff, that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to expound some parts
of the Stoic doctrine, with the view of recommending morals to that
refined but perhaps prejudiced company, as being, in effect, one mode
of comeliness in things—as it were music, or a kind of artistic order,
in life. And he did this earnestly, with an outlay of all his science
of mind, and that eloquence of which he was known to be a master. For
Stoicism was no longer a rude and unkempt thing. Received at court, it
had largely decorated itself: it was grown persuasive and insinuating,
and sought not only to convince men’s intelligence but to allure their
souls. Associated with the beautiful old age of the great rhetorician,
and his winning voice, it was almost Epicurean. And the old man was at
his best on the occasion; the last on which he ever appeared in this
way. To-day was his own birthday. Early in the morning the imperial
letter of congratulation had reached him; and all the pleasant
animation it had caused was in his face, when assisted by his daughter
Gratia he took his place on the ivory chair, as president of the
Athenaeum of Rome, wearing with a wonderful grace the philosophic
pall,—in reality neither more nor less than the loose woollen cloak of
the common soldier, but fastened on his right shoulder with a
magnificent clasp, the emperor’s birthday gift.

It was an age, as abundant evidence shows, whose delight in rhetoric
was but one result of a general susceptibility—an age not merely taking
pleasure in words, but experiencing a great moral power in them.
Fronto’s quaintly fashionable audience would have wept, and also
assisted with their purses, had his present purpose been, as sometimes
happened, the recommendation of an object of charity. As it was,
arranging themselves at their ease among the images and flowers, these
amateurs of exquisite language, with their tablets open for careful
record of felicitous word or phrase, were ready to give themselves
wholly to the intellectual treat prepared for them, applauding, blowing
loud kisses through the air sometimes, at the speaker’s triumphant exit
from one of his long, skilfully modulated sentences; while the younger
of them meant to imitate everything about him, down to the inflections
of his voice and the very folds of his mantle. Certainly there was
rhetoric enough:—a wealth of imagery; illustrations from painting,
music, mythology, the experiences of love; a management, by which
subtle, unexpected meaning was brought out of familiar terms, like
flies from morsels of amber, to use Fronto’s own figure. But with all
its richness, the higher claim of his style was rightly understood to
lie in gravity and self-command, and an especial care for the purities
of a vocabulary which rejected every expression unsanctioned by the
authority of approved ancient models.

And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes happen, that this
general discourse to a general audience had the effect of an utterance
adroitly designed for him. His conscience still vibrating painfully
under the shock of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full of the
ethical charm of Cornelius, he was questioning himself with much
impatience as to the possibility of an adjustment between his own
elaborately thought-out intellectual scheme and the “old morality.” In
that intellectual scheme indeed the old morality had so far been
allowed no place, as seeming to demand from him the admission of
certain first principles such as might misdirect or retard him in his
efforts towards a complete, many-sided existence; or distort the
revelations of the experience of life; or curtail his natural liberty
of heart and mind. But now (his imagination being occupied for the
moment with the noble and resolute air, the gallantry, so to call it,
which composed the outward mien and presentment of his strange friend’s
inflexible ethics) he felt already some nascent suspicion of his
philosophic programme, in regard, precisely, to the question of good
taste. There was the taint of a graceless “antinomianism” perceptible
in it, a dissidence, a revolt against accustomed modes, the actual
impression of which on other men might rebound upon himself in some
loss of that personal pride to which it was part of his theory of life
to allow so much. And it was exactly a moral situation such as this
that Fronto appeared to be contemplating. He seemed to have before his
mind the case of one—Cyrenaic or Epicurean, as the courtier tends to
be, by habit and instinct, if not on principle—who yet experiences,
actually, a strong tendency to moral assents, and a desire, with as
little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place for duty and
righteousness in his house of thought.

And the Stoic professor found the key to this problem in the purely
æsthetic beauty of the old morality, as an element in things,
fascinating to the imagination, to good taste in its most highly
developed form, through association—a system or order, as a matter of
fact, in possession, not only of the larger world, but of the rare
minority of _élite_ intelligences; from which, therefore, least of all
would the sort of Epicurean he had in view endure to become, so to
speak, an outlaw. He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in
search after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he seemed
to Marius to be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of
motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life,
determined partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened
self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere
fear of penalties; no element of which, however, was distinctively
moral in the agent himself as such, and providing him, therefore, no
common ground with a really moral being like Cornelius, or even like
the philosophic emperor. Performing the same offices; actually
satisfying, even as they, the external claims of others; rendering to
all their dues—one thus circumstanced would be wanting, nevertheless,
in the secret of inward adjustment to the moral agents around him. How
tenderly—more tenderly than many stricter souls—he might yield himself
to kindly instinct! what fineness of charity in passing judgment on
others! what an exquisite conscience of other men’s susceptibilities!
He knows for how much the manner, because the heart itself, counts, in
doing a kindness. He goes beyond most people in his care for all weakly
creatures; judging, instinctively, that to be but sentient is to
possess rights. He conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call
them by that name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may
have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in a
way of his own. Sometimes, he may think that those men of line and rule
do not really understand their own business. How narrow, inflexible,
unintelligent! what poor guardians (he may reason) of the inward spirit
of righteousness, are some supposed careful walkers according to its
letter and form. And yet all the while he admits, as such, no moral
world at all: no theoretic equivalent to so large a proportion of the
facts of life.

But, over and above such practical rectitude, thus determined by
natural affection or self-love or fear, he may notice that there is a
remnant of right conduct, what he does, still more what he abstains
from doing, not so much through his own free election, as from a
deference, an “assent,” entire, habitual, unconscious, to custom—to the
actual habit or fashion of others, from whom he could not endure to
break away, any more than he would care to be out of agreement with
them on questions of mere manner, or, say, even, of dress. Yes! there
were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a failure
in good taste. An assent, such as this, to the preferences of others,
might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the rectitude it could
determine the least considerable element in a moral life. Yet here,
according to Cornelius Fronto, was in truth the revealing example,
albeit operating upon comparative trifles, of the general principle
required. There was one great idea associated with which that
determination to conform to precedent was elevated into the clearest,
the fullest, the weightiest principle of moral action; a principle
under which one might subsume men’s most strenuous efforts after
righteousness. And he proceeded to expound the idea of Humanity—of a
universal commonwealth of mind, which becomes explicit, and as if
incarnate, in a select communion of just men made perfect.

Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin+—the world is as it were a commonwealth,
a city: and there are observances, customs, usages, actually current in
it, things our friends and companions will expect of us, as the
condition of our living there with them at all, as really their peers
or fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed, the creation of a
visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose actual manners, whose
preferences from of old, become now a weighty tradition as to the way
in which things should or should not be done, are like a music, to
which the intercourse of life proceeds—such a music as no one who had
once caught its harmonies would willingly jar. In this way, the
becoming, as in Greek—to prepon: or ta êthê+ mores, manners, as both
Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a comprehensive term for duty.
Righteousness would be, in the words of “Caesar” himself, of the
philosophic Aurelius, but a “following of the reasonable will of the
oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities—of the royal, the
law-giving element, therein—forasmuch as we are citizens also in that
supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but as
single habitations.” But as the old man spoke with animation of this
supreme city, this invisible society, whose conscience was become
explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose common spirit,
the trusted leaders of human conscience had been but the mouthpiece, of
whose successive personal preferences in the conduct of life, the “old
morality” was the sum,—Marius felt that his own thoughts were passing
beyond the actual intention of the speaker; not in the direction of any
clearer theoretic or abstract definition of that ideal commonwealth,
but rather as if in search of its visible locality and abiding-place,
the walls and towers of which, so to speak, he might really trace and
tell, according to his own old, natural habit of mind. It would be the
fabric, the outward fabric, of a system reaching, certainly, far beyond
the great city around him, even if conceived in all the machinery of
its visible and invisible influences at their grandest—as Augustus or
Trajan might have conceived of them—however well the visible Rome might
pass for a figure of that new, unseen, Rome on high. At moments, Marius
even asked himself with surprise, whether it might be some vast secret
society the speaker had in view:—that august community, to be an outlaw
from which, to be foreign to the manners of which, was a loss so much
greater than to be excluded, into the ends of the earth, from the
sovereign Roman commonwealth. Humanity, a universal order, the great
polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their example
over their successors—these were the ideas, stimulating enough in their
way, by association with which the Stoic professor had attempted to
elevate, to unite under a single principle, men’s moral efforts,
himself lifted up with so genuine an enthusiasm. But where might Marius
search for all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction? Where
were those elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable,
winning, persuasive—whose footsteps through the world were so beautiful
in the actual order he saw—whose faces averted from him, would be more
than he could bear? Where was that comely order, to which as a great
fact of experience he must give its due; to which, as to all other
beautiful “phenomena” in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust
himself?

Rome did well to be serious. The discourse ended somewhat abruptly, as
the noise of a great crowd in motion was heard below the walls;
whereupon, the audience, following the humour of the younger element in
it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which the famous
procession, or transvectio, of the military knights was to be seen
passing over the Forum, from their trysting-place at the temple of
Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri. The ceremony took place this year,
not on the day accustomed—anniversary of the victory of Lake Regillus,
with its pair of celestial assistants—and amid the heat and roses of a
Roman July, but, by anticipation, some months earlier, the almond-trees
along the way being still in leafless flower. Through that light
trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, arrayed in all their gleaming
ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive around their helmets, the faces
below which, what with battle and the plague, were almost all youthful.
It was a flowery scene enough, but had to-day its fulness of war-like
meaning; the return of the army to the North, where the enemy was again
upon the move, being now imminent. Cornelius had ridden along in his
place, and, on the dismissal of the company, passed below the steps
where Marius stood, with that new song he had heard once before
floating from his lips.

NOTES


10. +Transliteration: Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin. Translation: “The
world is like a city.”


10. +Transliteration: to prepon ... ta êthê. Translation: “That which
is seemly ... mores.”




CHAPTER XVI.
SECOND THOUGHTS


And Marius, for his part, was grave enough. The discourse of Cornelius
Fronto, with its wide prospect over the human, the spiritual, horizon,
had set him on a review—on a review of the isolating narrowness, in
particular, of his own theoretic scheme. Long after the very latest
roses were faded, when “the town” had departed to country villas, or
the baths, or the war, he remained behind in Rome; anxious to try the
lastingness of his own Epicurean rose-garden; setting to work over
again, and deliberately passing from point to point of his old argument
with himself, down to its practical conclusions. That age and our own
have much in common—many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon
me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern
representatives—from Rome, to Paris or London.

What really were its claims as a theory of practice, of the sympathies
that determine practice? It had been a theory, avowedly, of loss and
gain (so to call it) of an economy. If, therefore, it missed something
in the commerce of life, which some other theory of practice was able
to include, if it made a needless sacrifice, then it must be, in a
manner, inconsistent with itself, and lack theoretic completeness. Did
it make such a sacrifice? What did it lose, or cause one to lose?

And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaicism is
ever the characteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in its
survey—sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical. It is
one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because
limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this
case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man’s life there)
which it may be said to be the special vocation of the young to
express. In the school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh Greek
world, we see this philosophy where it is least blasé, as we say; in
its most pleasant, its blithest and yet perhaps its wisest form,
youthfully bright in the youth of European thought. But it grows young
again for a while in almost every youthful soul. It is spoken of
sometimes as the appropriate utterance of jaded men; but in them it can
hardly be sincere, or, by the nature of the case, an enthusiasm. “Walk
in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes,” is,
indeed, most often, according to the supposition of the book from which
I quote it, the counsel of the young, who feel that the sunshine is
pleasant along their veins, and wintry weather, though in a general
sense foreseen, a long way off. The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism,
the self-abandonment to one favourite mode of thought or taste, which
occurs, quite naturally, at the outset of every really vigorous
intellectual career, finds its special opportunity in a theory such as
that so carefully put together by Marius, just because it seems to call
on one to make the sacrifice, accompanied by a vivid sensation of power
and will, of what others value—sacrifice of some conviction, or
doctrine, or supposed first principle—for the sake of that clear-eyed
intellectual consistency, which is like spotless bodily cleanliness, or
scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the mind of the youthful
student, when he first comes to appreciate it, the fascination of an
ideal.

The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of strenuousness or
enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance of the “jaded Epicurean,”
as of the strong young man in all the freshness of thought and feeling,
fascinated by the notion of raising his life to the level of a daring
theory, while, in the first genial heat of existence, the beauty of the
physical world strikes potently upon his wide-open, unwearied senses.
He discovers a great new poem every spring, with a hundred delightful
things he too has felt, but which have never been expressed, or at
least never so truly, before. The workshops of the artists, who can
select and set before us what is really most distinguished in visible
life, are open to him. He thinks that the old Platonic, or the new
Baconian philosophy, has been better explained than by the authors
themselves, or with some striking original development, this very
month. In the quiet heat of early summer, on the dusty gold morning,
the music comes, louder at intervals, above the hum of voices from some
neighbouring church, among the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps,
only for the poetically rapt faces among priests or worshippers, or the
mere skill and eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and
righteousness. In his scrupulous idealism, indeed, he too feels himself
to be something of a priest, and that devotion of his days to the
contemplation of what is beautiful, a sort of perpetual religious
service. Afar off, how many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts await
him! At that age, with minds of a certain constitution, no very choice
or exceptional circumstances are needed to provoke an enthusiasm
something like this. Life in modern London even, in the heavy glow of
summer, is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to
build its “palace of art” of; and the very sense and enjoyment of an
experience in which all is new, are but enhanced, like that glow of
summer itself, by the thought of its brevity, giving him something of a
gambler’s zest, in the apprehension, by dexterous act or diligently
appreciative thought, of the highly coloured moments which are to pass
away so quickly. At bottom, perhaps, in his elaborately developed
self-consciousness, his sensibilities, his almost fierce grasp upon the
things he values at all, he has, beyond all others, an inward need of
something permanent in its character, to hold by: of which
circumstance, also, he may be partly aware, and that, as with the
brilliant Claudio in Measure for Measure, it is, in truth, but darkness
he is, “encountering, like a bride.” But the inevitable falling of the
curtain is probably distant; and in the daylight, at least, it is not
often that he really shudders at the thought of the grave—the weight
above, the narrow world and its company, within. When the thought of it
does occur to him, he may say to himself:—Well! and the rude monk, for
instance, who has renounced all this, on the security of some dim world
beyond it, really acquiesces in that “fifth act,” amid all the
consoling ministries around him, as little as I should at this moment;
though I may hope, that, as at the real ending of a play, however well
acted, I may already have had quite enough of it, and find a true
well-being in eternal sleep.

And precisely in this circumstance, that, consistently with the
function of youth in general, Cyrenaicism will always be more or less
the special philosophy, or “prophecy,” of the young, when the ideal of
a rich experience comes to them in the ripeness of the receptive, if
not of the reflective, powers—precisely in this circumstance, if we
rightly consider it, lies the duly prescribed corrective of that
philosophy. For it is by its exclusiveness, and by negation rather than
positively, that such theories fail to satisfy us permanently; and what
they really need for their correction, is the complementary influence
of some greater system, in which they may find their due place. That
Sturm und Drang of the spirit, as it has been called, that ardent and
special apprehension of half-truths, in the enthusiastic, and as it
were “prophetic” advocacy of which, devotion to truth, in the case of
the young—apprehending but one point at a time in the great
circumference—most usually embodies itself, is levelled down, safely
enough, afterwards, as in history so in the individual, by the weakness
and mere weariness, as well as by the maturer wisdom, of our nature.
And though truth indeed, resides, as has been said, “in the whole”—in
harmonisings and adjustments like this—yet those special apprehensions
may still owe their full value, in this sense of “the whole,” to that
earlier, one-sided but ardent pre-occupation with them.

Cynicism and Cyrenaicism:—they are the earlier Greek forms of Roman
Stoicism and Epicureanism, and in that world of old Greek thought, we
may notice with some surprise that, in a little while, the nobler form
of Cyrenaicism—Cyrenaicism cured of its faults—met the nobler form of
Cynicism half-way. Starting from opposed points, they merged, each in
its most refined form, in a single ideal of temperance or moderation.
Something of the same kind may be noticed regarding some later phases
of Cyrenaic theory. If it starts with considerations opposed to the
religious temper, which the religious temper holds it a duty to
repress, it is like it, nevertheless, and very unlike any lower
development of temper, in its stress and earnestness, its serious
application to the pursuit of a very unworldly type of perfection. The
saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty, it may be thought, would at
least understand each other better than either would understand the
mere man of the world. Carry their respective positions a point
further, shift the terms a little, and they might actually touch.

Perhaps all theories of practice tend, as they rise to their best, as
understood by their worthiest representatives, to identification with
each other. For the variety of men’s possible reflections on their
experience, as of that experience itself, is not really so great as it
seems; and as the highest and most disinterested ethical formulae,
filtering down into men’s everyday existence, reach the same poor level
of vulgar egotism, so, we may fairly suppose that all the highest
spirits, from whatever contrasted points they have started, would yet
be found to entertain, in the moral consciousness realised by
themselves, much the same kind of mental company; to hold, far more
than might be thought probable, at first sight, the same personal types
of character, and even the same artistic and literary types, in esteem
or aversion; to convey, all of them alike, the same savour of
unworldliness. And Cyrenaicism or Epicureanism too, new or old, may be
noticed, in proportion to the completeness of its development, to
approach, as to the nobler form of Cynicism, so also to the more nobly
developed phases of the old, or traditional morality. In the gravity of
its conception of life, in its pursuit after nothing less than a
perfection, in its apprehension of the value of time—the passion and
the seriousness which are like a consecration—la passion et le sérieux
qui consacrent—it may be conceived, as regards its main drift, to be
not so much opposed to the old morality, as an exaggeration of one
special motive in it.

Some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own
nature, and of the nature of things, to another, Marius seemed to have
detected in himself, meantime,—in himself, as also in those old masters
of the Cyrenaic philosophy. If they did realise the monochronos hêdonê+
as it was called—the pleasure of the “Ideal Now”—if certain moments of
their lives were high-pitched, passionately coloured, intent with
sensation, and a kind of knowledge which, in its vivid clearness, was
like sensation—if, now and then, they apprehended the world in its
fulness, and had a vision, almost “beatific,” of ideal personalities in
life and art, yet these moments were a very costly matter: they paid a
great price for them, in the sacrifice of a thousand possible
sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which
they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere
theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no
approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly, repellent
attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality,
surely, they had been but faulty economists. The Greek religion was
then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, the
higher view of it was possible, even for the philosopher. Its story
made little or no demand for a reasoned or formal acceptance. A
religion, which had grown through and through man’s life, with so much
natural strength; had meant so much for so many generations; which
expressed so much of their hopes, in forms so familiar and so winning;
linked by associations so manifold to man as he had been and was—a
religion like this, one would think, might have had its uses, even for
a philosophic sceptic. Yet those beautiful gods, with the whole round
of their poetic worship, the school of Cyrene definitely renounced.

The old Greek morality, again, with all its imperfections, was
certainly a comely thing.—Yes! a harmony, a music, in men’s ways, one
might well hesitate to jar. The merely æsthetic sense might have had a
legitimate satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair order of choice
manners, in those attractive conventions, enveloping, so gracefully,
the whole of life, insuring some sweetness, some security at least
against offence, in the intercourse of the world. Beyond an obvious
utility, it could claim, indeed but custom—use-and-wont, as we say—for
its sanction. But then, one of the advantages of that liberty of spirit
among the Cyrenaics (in which, through theory, they had become dead to
theory, so that all theory, as such, was really indifferent to them,
and indeed nothing valuable but in its tangible ministration to life)
was precisely this, that it gave them free play in using as their
ministers or servants, things which, to the uninitiated, must be
masters or nothing. Yet, how little the followers of Aristippus made of
that whole comely system of manners or morals, then actually in
possession of life, is shown by the bold practical consequence, which
one of them maintained (with a hard, self-opinionated adherence to his
peculiar theory of values) in the not very amiable paradox that
friendship and patriotism were things one could do without; while
another—Death’s-advocate, as he was called—helped so many to
self-destruction, by his pessimistic eloquence on the evils of life,
that his lecture-room was closed. That this was in the range of their
consequences—that this was a possible, if remote, deduction from the
premisses of the discreet Aristippus—was surely an inconsistency in a
thinker who professed above all things an economy of the moments of
life. And yet those old Cyrenaics felt their way, as if in the dark, we
may be sure, like other men in the ordinary transactions of life,
beyond the narrow limits they drew of clear and absolutely legitimate
knowledge, admitting what was not of immediate sensation, and drawing
upon that “fantastic” future which might never come. A little more of
such “walking by faith,” a little more of such not unreasonable
“assent,” and they might have profited by a hundred services to their
culture, from Greek religion and Greek morality, as they actually were.
The spectacle of their fierce, exclusive, tenacious hold on their own
narrow apprehension, makes one think of a picture with no relief, no
soft shadows nor breadth of space, or of a drama without proportionate
repose.

Yet it was of perfection that Marius (to return to him again from his
masters, his intellectual heirs) had been really thinking all the time:
a narrow perfection it might be objected, the perfection of but one
part of his nature—his capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical
impressions, of an imaginative sympathy—but still, a true perfection of
those capacities, wrought out to their utmost degree, admirable enough
in its way. He too is an economist: he hopes, by that “insight” of
which the old Cyrenaics made so much, by skilful apprehension of the
conditions of spiritual success as they really are, the special
circumstances of the occasion with which he has to deal, the special
felicities of his own nature, to make the most, in no mean or vulgar
sense, of the few years of life; few, indeed, for the attainment of
anything like general perfection! With the brevity of that sum of years
his mind is exceptionally impressed; and this purpose makes him no
frivolous dilettante, but graver than other men: his scheme is not that
of a trifler, but rather of one who gives a meaning of his own, yet a
very real one, to those old words—Let us work while it is day! He has a
strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the visible things around
him; their fading, momentary, graces and attractions. His natural
susceptibility in this direction, enlarged by experience, seems to
demand of him an almost exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of
things; with their æsthetic character, as it is called—their
revelations to the eye and the imagination: not so much because those
aspects of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as because
to be occupied, in this way, with the æsthetic or imaginative side of
things, is to be in real contact with those elements of his own nature,
and of theirs, which, for him at least, are matter of the most real
kind of apprehension. As other men are concentrated upon truths of
number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of
appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of refined
sensation. And in the prosecution of this love of beauty, he claims an
entire personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty, above all,
from what may seem conventional answers to first questions.

But, without him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea,
widely extended in time and place, in a kind of impregnable possession
of human life—a system, which, like some other great products of the
conjoint efforts of human mind through many generations, is rich in the
world’s experience; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one lets in a
great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were with a single
step, a great experience of one’s own, and with great consequent
increase to one’s sense of colour, variety, and relief, in the
spectacle of men and things. The mere sense that one belongs to a
system—an imperial system or organisation—has, in itself, the expanding
power of a great experience; as some have felt who have been admitted
from narrower sects into the communion of the catholic church; or as
the old Roman citizen felt. It is, we might fancy, what the coming into
possession of a very widely spoken language might be, with a great
literature, which is also the speech of the people we have to live
among.

A wonderful order, actually in possession of human life!—grown
inextricably through and through it; penetrating into its laws, its
very language, its mere habits of decorum, in a thousand half-conscious
ways; yet still felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal; and, as
such, awakening hope, and an aim, identical with the one only
consistent aspiration of mankind! In the apprehension of that, just
then, Marius seemed to have joined company once more with his own old
self; to have overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to Rome,
with absolute sincerity, on the search for perfection. It defined not
so much a change of practice, as of sympathy—a new departure, an
expansion, of sympathy. It involved, certainly, some curtailment of his
liberty, in concession to the actual manner, the distinctions, the
enactments of that great crowd of admirable spirits, who have elected
so, and not otherwise, in their conduct of life, and are not here to
give one, so to term it, an “indulgence.” But then, under the
supposition of their disapproval, no roses would ever seem worth
plucking again. The authority they exercised was like that of classic
taste—an influence so subtle, yet so real, as defining the loyalty of
the scholar; or of some beautiful and venerable ritual, in which every
observance is become spontaneous and almost mechanical, yet is found,
the more carefully one considers it, to have a reasonable significance
and a natural history.

And Marius saw that he would be but an inconsistent Cyrenaic, mistaken
in his estimate of values, of loss and gain, and untrue to the
well-considered economy of life which he had brought with him to
Rome—that some drops of the great cup would fall to the ground—if he
did not make that concession, if he did but remain just there.

NOTES


21. +Transliteration: monochronos hêdonê. Pater’s definition “the
pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now.” The definition is
fitting; the unusual adjective monochronos means, literally, “single or
unitary time.”




CHAPTER XVII.
BEATA URBS


“Many prophets and kings have desired to see the things which ye see.”


The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the vanguard of the mighty
invading hosts of the fifth century. Illusively repressed just now,
those confused movements along the northern boundary of the Empire were
destined to unite triumphantly at last, in the barbarism, which,
powerless to destroy the Christian church, was yet to suppress for a
time the achieved culture of the pagan world. The kingdom of Christ was
to grow up in a somewhat false alienation from the light and beauty of
the kingdom of nature, of the natural man, with a partly mistaken
tradition concerning it, and an incapacity, as it might almost seem at
times, for eventual reconciliation thereto. Meantime Italy had armed
itself once more, in haste, and the imperial brothers set forth for the
Alps.

Whatever misgiving the Roman people may have felt as to the leadership
of the younger was unexpectedly set at rest; though with some temporary
regret for the loss of what had been, after all, a popular figure on
the world’s stage. Travelling fraternally in the same litter with
Aurelius, Lucius Verus was struck with sudden and mysterious disease,
and died as he hastened back to Rome. His death awoke a swarm of
sinister rumours, to settle on Lucilla, jealous, it was said, of Fabia
her sister, perhaps of Faustina—on Faustina herself, who had
accompanied the imperial progress, and was anxious now to hide a crime
of her own—even on the elder brother, who, beforehand with the
treasonable designs of his colleague, should have helped him at supper
to a favourite morsel, cut with a knife poisoned ingeniously on one
side only. Aurelius, certainly, with sincere distress, his long
irritations, so dutifully concealed or repressed, turning now into a
single feeling of regret for the human creature, carried the remains
back to Rome, and demanded of the Senate a public funeral, with a
decree for the apotheôsis, or canonisation, of the dead.

For three days the body lay in state in the Forum, enclosed in an open
coffin of cedar-wood, on a bed of ivory and gold, in the centre of a
sort of temporary chapel, representing the temple of his patroness
Venus Genetrix. Armed soldiers kept watch around it, while choirs of
select voices relieved one another in the chanting of hymns or
monologues from the great tragedians.

At the head of the couch were displayed the various personal
decorations which had belonged to Verus in life. Like all the rest of
Rome, Marius went to gaze on the face he had seen last scarcely
disguised under the hood of a travelling-dress, as the wearer hurried,
at night-fall, along one of the streets below the palace, to some
amorous appointment. Unfamiliar as he still was with dead faces, he was
taken by surprise, and touched far beyond what he had reckoned on, by
the piteous change there; even the skill of Galen having been not
wholly successful in the process of embalming. It was as if a brother
of his own were lying low before him, with that meek and helpless
expression it would have been a sacrilege to treat rudely.

Meantime, in the centre of the Campus Martius, within the grove of
poplars which enclosed the space where the body of Augustus had been
burnt, the great funeral pyre, stuffed with shavings of various
aromatic woods, was built up in many stages, separated from each other
by a light entablature of woodwork, and adorned abundantly with carved
and tapestried images. Upon this pyramidal or flame-shaped structure
lay the corpse, hidden now under a mountain of flowers and incense
brought by the women, who from the first had had their fondness for the
wanton graces of the deceased. The dead body was surmounted by a waxen
effigy of great size, arrayed in the triumphal ornaments. At last the
Centurions to whom that office belonged, drew near, torch in hand, to
ignite the pile at its four corners, while the soldiers, in wild
excitement, flung themselves around it, casting into the flames the
decorations they had received for acts of valour under the dead
emperor’s command.

It had been a really heroic order, spoiled a little, at the last
moment, through the somewhat tawdry artifice, by which an eagle—not a
very noble or youthful specimen of its kind—was caused to take flight
amid the real or affected awe of the spectators, above the perishing
remains; a court chamberlain, according to ancient etiquette,
subsequently making official declaration before the Senate, that the
imperial “genius” had been seen in this way, escaping from the fire.
And Marius was present when the Fathers, duly certified of the fact, by
“acclamation,” muttering their judgment all together, in a kind of low,
rhythmical chant, decreed Caelum—the privilege of divine rank to the
departed.

The actual gathering of the ashes in a white cere-cloth by the widowed
Lucilla, when the last flicker had been extinguished by drops of wine;
and the conveyance of them to the little cell, already populous, in the
central mass of the sepulchre of Hadrian, still in all the splendour of
its statued colonnades, were a matter of private or domestic duty;
after the due accomplishment of which Aurelius was at liberty to retire
for a time into the privacy of his beloved apartments of the Palatine.
And hither, not long afterwards, Marius was summoned a second time, to
receive from the imperial hands the great pile of Manuscripts it would
be his business to revise and arrange.

One year had passed since his first visit to the palace; and as he
climbed the stairs to-day, the great cypresses rocked against the
sunless sky, like living creatures in pain. He had to traverse a long
subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the imperial
apartments, and in our own day, amid the ruin of all around it, as
smooth and fresh as if the carpets were but just removed from its floor
after the return of the emperor from the shows. It was here, on such an
occasion, that the emperor Caligula, at the age of twenty-nine, had
come by his end, the assassins gliding along it as he lingered a few
moments longer to watch the movements of a party of noble youths at
their exercise in the courtyard below. As Marius waited, a second time,
in that little red room in the house of the chief chamberlain, curious
to look once more upon its painted walls—the very place whither the
assassins were said to have turned for refuge after the murder—he could
all but see the figure, which in its surrounding light and darkness
seemed to him the most melancholy in the entire history of Rome. He
called to mind the greatness of that popularity and early promise—the
stupefying height of irresponsible power, from which, after all, only
men’s viler side had been clearly visible—the overthrow of reason—the
seemingly irredeemable memory; and still, above all, the beautiful head
in which the noble lines of the race of Augustus were united to, he
knew not what expression of sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and
for the like of which one must pass onward to the Antonines. Popular
hatred had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it was to be
found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a wonderful
perfection of finish, preserved in the museum of the Capitol, may have
seemed to some visitors there perhaps the finest extant relic of Roman
art. Had the very seal of empire upon those sombre brows, reflected
from his mirror, suggested his insane attempt upon the liberties, the
dignity of men?—“O humanity!” he seems to ask, “what hast thou done to
me that I should so despise thee?”—And might not this be indeed the
true meaning of kingship, if the world would have one man to reign over
it? The like of this: or, some incredible, surely never to be realised,
height of disinterestedness, in a king who should be the servant of
all, quite at the other extreme of the practical dilemma involved in
such a position. Not till some while after his death had the body been
decently interred by the piety of the sisters he had driven into exile.
Fraternity of feeling had been no invariable feature in the incidents
of Roman story. One long Vicus Sceleratus, from its first dim
foundation in fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common deliverance
so touching—had not almost every step in it some gloomy memory of
unnatural violence? Romans did well to fancy the traitress Tarpeia
still “green in earth,” crowned, enthroned, at the roots of the
Capitoline rock. If in truth the religion of Rome was everywhere in it,
like that perfume of the funeral incense still upon the air, so also
was the memory of crime prompted by a hypocritical cruelty, down to the
erring, or not erring, Vesta calmly buried alive there, only eighty
years ago, under Domitian.

It was with a sense of relief that Marius found himself in the presence
of Aurelius, whose gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered,
raised a smile at the gloomy train of his own thoughts just then,
although since his first visit to the palace a great change had passed
over it. The clear daylight found its way now into empty rooms. To
raise funds for the war, Aurelius, his luxurious brother being no more,
had determined to sell by auction the accumulated treasures of the
imperial household. The works of art, the dainty furniture, had been
removed, and were now “on view” in the Forum, to be the delight or
dismay, for many weeks to come, of the large public of those who were
curious in these things. In such wise had Aurelius come to the
condition of philosophic detachment he had affected as a boy, hardly
persuaded to wear warm clothing, or to sleep in more luxurious manner
than on the bare floor. But, in his empty house, the man of mind, who
had always made so much of the pleasures of philosophic contemplation,
felt freer in thought than ever. He had been reading, with less
self-reproach than usual, in the Republic of Plato, those passages
which describe the life of the philosopher-kings—like that of hired
servants in their own house—who, possessed of the “gold undefiled” of
intellectual vision, forgo so cheerfully all other riches. It was one
of his happy days: one of those rare days, when, almost with none of
the effort, otherwise so constant with him, his thoughts came rich and
full, and converged in a mental view, as exhilarating to him as the
prospect of some wide expanse of landscape to another man’s bodily eye.
He seemed to lie readier than was his wont to the imaginative influence
of the philosophic reason—to its suggestions of a possible open
country, commencing just where all actual experience leaves off, but
which experience, one’s own and not another’s, may one day occupy. In
fact, he was seeking strength for himself, in his own way, before he
started for that ambiguous earthly warfare which was to occupy the
remainder of his life. “Ever remember this,” he writes, “that a happy
life depends, not on many things—en oligistois keitai.”+ And to-day,
committing himself with a steady effort of volition to the mere silence
of the great empty apartments, he might be said to have escaped,
according to Plato’s promise to those who live closely with philosophy,
from the evils of the world.

In his “conversations with himself” Marcus Aurelius speaks often of
that City on high, of which all other cities are but single
habitations. From him in fact Cornelius Fronto, in his late discourse,
had borrowed the expression; and he certainly meant by it more than the
whole commonwealth of Rome, in any idealisation of it, however sublime.
Incorporate somehow with the actual city whose goodly stones were lying
beneath his gaze, it was also implicate in that reasonable constitution
of nature, by devout contemplation of which it is possible for man to
associate himself to the consciousness of God. In that New Rome he had
taken up his rest for awhile on this day, deliberately feeding his
thoughts on the better air of it, as another might have gone for mental
renewal to a favourite villa.

“Men seek retirement in country-houses,” he writes, “on the sea-coast,
on the mountains; and you have yourself as much fondness for such
places as another. But there is little proof of culture therein; since
the privilege is yours of retiring into yourself whensoever you
please,—into that little farm of one’s own mind, where a silence so
profound may be enjoyed.” That it could make these retreats, was a
plain consequence of the kingly prerogative of the mind, its dominion
over circumstance, its inherent liberty.—“It is in thy power to think
as thou wilt: The essence of things is in thy thoughts about them: All
is opinion, conception: No man can be hindered by another: What is
outside thy circle of thought is nothing at all to it; hold to this,
and you are safe: One thing is needful—to live close to the divine
genius within thee, and minister thereto worthily.” And the first point
in this true ministry, this culture, was to maintain one’s soul in a
condition of indifference and calm. How continually had public claims,
the claims of other persons, with their rough angularities of
character, broken in upon him, the shepherd of the flock. But after all
he had at least this privilege he could not part with, of thinking as
he would; and it was well, now and then, by a conscious effort of will,
to indulge it for a while, under systematic direction. The duty of thus
making discreet, systematic use of the power of imaginative vision for
purposes of spiritual culture, “since the soul takes colour from its
fantasies,” is a point he has frequently insisted on.

The influence of these seasonable meditations—a symbol, or sacrament,
because an intensified condition, of the soul’s own ordinary and
natural life—would remain upon it, perhaps for many days. There were
experiences he could not forget, intuitions beyond price, he had come
by in this way, which were almost like the breaking of a physical light
upon his mind; as the great Augustus was said to have seen a mysterious
physical splendour, yonder, upon the summit of the Capitol, where the
altar of the Sibyl now stood. With a prayer, therefore, for inward
quiet, for conformity to the divine reason, he read some select
passages of Plato, which bear upon the harmony of the reason, in all
its forms, with itself—“Could there be Cosmos, that wonderful,
reasonable order, in him, and nothing but disorder in the world
without?” It was from this question he had passed on to the vision of a
reasonable, a divine, order, not in nature, but in the condition of
human affairs—that unseen Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs
Beata—in which, a consciousness of the divine will being everywhere
realised, there would be, among other felicitous differences from this
lower visible world, no more quite hopeless death, of men, or children,
or of their affections. He had tried to-day, as never before, to make
the most of this vision of a New Rome, to realise it as distinctly as
he could,—and, as it were, find his way along its streets, ere he went
down into a world so irksomely different, to make his practical effort
towards it, with a soul full of compassion for men as they were.
However distinct the mental image might have been to him, with the
descent of but one flight of steps into the market-place below, it must
have retreated again, as if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond
the utmost verge of the horizon. But it had been actually, in his
clearest vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable entry,
a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose
novel expression he, the great physiognomist, could by no means read.
Plato, indeed, had been able to articulate, to see, at least in
thought, his ideal city. But just because Aurelius had passed beyond
Plato, in the scope of the gracious charities he pre-supposed there, he
had been unable really to track his way about it. Ah! after all,
according to Plato himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this,
his heart’s desire, no place his soul could ever have visited in any
region of the old world’s achievements. He had but divined, by a kind
of generosity of spirit, the void place, which another experience than
his must fill.

Yet Marius noted the wonderful expression of peace, of quiet pleasure,
on the countenance of Aurelius, as he received from him the rolls of
fine clear manuscript, fancying the thoughts of the emperor occupied at
the moment with the famous prospect towards the Alban hills, from those
lofty windows.

NOTES


37. +Transliteration: en oligistois keitai. Definition “it lies in the
fewest [things].”




CHAPTER XVIII.
“THE CEREMONY OF THE DART”


The ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aurelius, ideas of large
generalisation, have sometimes induced, in those over whose intellects
they have had real power, a coldness of heart. It was the distinction
of Aurelius that he was able to harmonise them with the kindness, one
might almost say the amenities, of a humourist, as also with the
popular religion and its many gods. Those vasty conceptions of the
later Greek philosophy had in them, in truth, the germ of a sort of
austerely opinionative “natural theology,” and how often has that led
to religious dryness—a hard contempt of everything in religion, which
touches the senses, or charms the fancy, or really concerns the
affections. Aurelius had made his own the secret of passing, naturally,
and with no violence to his thought, to and fro, between the richly
coloured and romantic religion of those old gods who had still been
human beings, and a very abstract speculation upon the impassive,
universal soul—that circle whose centre is everywhere, the
circumference nowhere—of which a series of purely logical necessities
had evolved the formula. As in many another instance, those traditional
pieties of the place and the hour had been derived by him from his
mother:—para tês mêtros to theosebes.+ Purified, as all such religion
of concrete time and place needs to be, by frequent confronting with
the ideal of godhead as revealed to that innate religious sense in the
possession of which Aurelius differed from the people around him, it
was the ground of many a sociability with their simpler souls, and for
himself, certainly, a consolation, whenever the wings of his own soul
flagged in the trying atmosphere of purely intellectual vision. A host
of companions, guides, helpers, about him from of old time, “the very
court and company of heaven,” objects for him of personal reverence and
affection—the supposed presence of the ancient popular gods determined
the character of much of his daily life, and might prove the last stay
of human nature at its weakest. “In every time and place,” he had said,
“it rests with thyself to use the event of the hour religiously: at all
seasons worship the gods.” And when he said “Worship the gods!” he did
it, as strenuously as everything else.

Yet here again, how often must he have experienced disillusion, or even
some revolt of feeling, at that contact with coarser natures to which
his religious conclusions exposed him. At the beginning of the year one
hundred and seventy-three public anxiety was as great as ever; and as
before it brought people’s superstition into unreserved play. For seven
days the images of the old gods, and some of the graver new ones, lay
solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their ornaments, each
in his separate resting-place, amid lights and burning incense, while
the crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited them, with
offerings of flowers to this or that particular divinity, according to
the devotion of each.

But supplementing these older official observances, the very wildest
gods had their share of worship,—strange creatures with strange secrets
startled abroad into open daylight. The delirious sort of religion of
which Marius was a spectator in the streets of Rome, during the seven
days of the Lectisternium, reminded him now and again of an observation
of Apuleius: it was “as if the presence of the gods did not do men
good, but disordered or weakened them.” Some jaded women of fashion,
especially, found in certain oriental devotions, at once relief for
their religiously tearful souls and an opportunity for personal
display; preferring this or that “mystery,” chiefly because the attire
required in it was suitable to their peculiar manner of beauty. And one
morning Marius encountered an extraordinary crimson object, borne in a
litter through an excited crowd—the famous courtesan Benedicta, still
fresh from the bath of blood, to which she had submitted herself,
sitting below the scaffold where the victims provided for that purpose
were slaughtered by the priests. Even on the last day of the solemnity,
when the emperor himself performed one of the oldest ceremonies of the
Roman religion, this fantastic piety had asserted itself. There were
victims enough certainly, brought from the choice pastures of the
Sabine mountains, and conducted around the city they were to die for,
in almost continuous procession, covered with flowers and well-nigh
worried to death before the time by the crowds of people
superstitiously pressing to touch them. But certain old-fashioned
Romans, in these exceptional circumstances, demanded something more
than this, in the way of a human sacrifice after the ancient pattern;
as when, not so long since, some Greeks or Gauls had been buried alive
in the Forum. At least, human blood should be shed; and it was through
a wild multitude of fanatics, cutting their flesh with knives and whips
and licking up ardently the crimson stream, that the emperor repaired
to the temple of Bellona, and in solemn symbolic act cast the
bloodstained spear, or “dart,” carefully preserved there, towards the
enemy’s country— towards that unknown world of German homes, still
warm, as some believed under the faint northern twilight, with those
innocent affections of which Romans had lost the sense. And this at
least was clear, amid all doubts of abstract right or wrong on either
side, that the ruin of those homes was involved in what Aurelius was
then preparing for, with,—Yes! the gods be thanked for that achievement
of an invigorating philosophy!—almost with a light heart.

For, in truth, that departure, really so difficult to him, for which
Marcus Aurelius had needed to brace himself so strenuously, came to
test the power of a long-studied theory of practice; and it was the
development of this theory—a theôria, literally—a view, an intuition,
of the most important facts, and still more important possibilities,
concerning man in the world, that Marius now discovered, almost as if
by accident, below the dry surface of the manuscripts entrusted to him.
The great purple rolls contained, first of all, statistics, a general
historical account of the writer’s own time, and an exact diary; all
alike, though in three different degrees of nearness to the writer’s
own personal experience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing. This was
for the instruction of the public; and part of it has, perhaps, found
its way into the Augustan Histories. But it was for the especial
guidance of his son Commodus that he had permitted himself to break
out, here and there, into reflections upon what was passing, into
conversations with the reader. And then, as though he were put off his
guard in this way, there had escaped into the heavy matter-of-fact, of
which the main portion was composed, morsels of his conversation with
himself. It was the romance of a soul (to be traced only in hints,
wayside notes, quotations from older masters), as it were in lifelong,
and often baffled search after some vanished or elusive golden fleece,
or Hesperidean fruit-trees, or some mysterious light of doctrine, ever
retreating before him. A man, he had seemed to Marius from the first,
of two lives, as we say. Of what nature, he had sometimes wondered, on
the day, for instance, when he had interrupted the emperor’s musings in
the empty palace, might be that placid inward guest or inhabitant, who
from amid the pre-occupations of the man of practical affairs looked
out, as if surprised, at the things and faces around. Here, then, under
the tame surface of what was meant for a life of business, Marius
discovered, welcoming a brother, the spontaneous self-revelation of a
soul as delicate as his own,—a soul for which conversation with itself
was a necessity of existence. Marius, indeed, had always suspected that
the sense of such necessity was a peculiarity of his. But here,
certainly, was another, in this respect like himself; and again he
seemed to detect the advent of some new or changed spirit into the
world, mystic, inward, hardly to be satisfied with that wholly external
and objective habit of life, which had been sufficient for the old
classic soul. His purely literary curiosity was greatly stimulated by
this example of a book of self-portraiture. It was in fact the position
of the modern essayist,—creature of efforts rather than of
achievements, in the matter of apprehending truth, but at least
conscious of lights by the way, which he must needs record,
acknowledge. What seemed to underlie that position was the desire to
make the most of every experience that might come, outwardly or from
within: to perpetuate, to display, what was so fleeting, in a kind of
instinctive, pathetic protest against the imperial writer’s own
theory—that theory of the “perpetual flux” of all things—to Marius
himself, so plausible from of old.

There was, besides, a special moral or doctrinal significance in the
making of such conversation with one’s self at all. The Logos, the
reasonable spark, in man, is common to him with the gods—koinos autô
pros tous theous+—cum diis communis. That might seem but the truism of
a certain school of philosophy; but in Aurelius was clearly an original
and lively apprehension. There could be no inward conversation with
one’s self such as this, unless there were indeed some one else, aware
of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or displeased at one’s
disposition of one’s self. Cornelius Fronto too could enounce that
theory of the reasonable community between men and God, in many
different ways. But then, he was a cheerful man, and Aurelius a
singularly sad one; and what to Fronto was but a doctrine, or a motive
of mere rhetoric, was to the other a consolation. He walks and talks,
for a spiritual refreshment lacking which he would faint by the way,
with what to the learned professor is but matter of philosophic
eloquence.

In performing his public religious functions Marcus Aurelius had ever
seemed like one who took part in some great process, a great thing
really done, with more than the actually visible assistants about him.
Here, in these manuscripts, in a hundred marginal flowers of thought or
language, in happy new phrases of his own like the impromptus of an
actual conversation, in quotations from other older masters of the
inward life, taking new significance from the chances of such
intercourse, was the record of his communion with that eternal reason,
which was also his own proper self, with the divine companion, whose
tabernacle was in the intelligence of men—the journal of his daily
commerce with that.

Chance: or Providence! Chance: or Wisdom, one with nature and man,
reaching from end to end, through all time and all existence, orderly
disposing all things, according to fixed periods, as he describes it,
in terms very like certain well-known words of the book of
Wisdom:—those are the “fenced opposites” of the speculative dilemma,
the tragic embarras, of which Aurelius cannot too often remind himself
as the summary of man’s situation in the world. If there be, however, a
provident soul like this “behind the veil,” truly, even to him, even in
the most intimate of those conversations, it has never yet spoken with
any quite irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet one’s choice in
that speculative dilemma, as he has found it, is on the whole a matter
of will.—“’Tis in thy power,” here too, again, “to think as thou wilt.”
For his part he has asserted his will, and has the courage of his
opinion. “To the better of two things, if thou findest that, turn with
thy whole heart: eat and drink ever of the best before thee.” “Wisdom,”
says that other disciple of the Sapiential philosophy, “hath mingled
Her wine, she hath also prepared Herself a table.” Tou aristou
apolaue:+ “Partake ever of Her best!” And what Marius, peeping now very
closely upon the intimacies of that singular mind, found a thing
actually pathetic and affecting, was the manner of the writer’s bearing
as in the presence of this supposed guest; so elusive, so jealous of
any palpable manifestation of himself, so taxing to one’s faith, never
allowing one to lean frankly upon him and feel wholly at rest. Only, he
would do his part, at least, in maintaining the constant fitness, the
sweetness and quiet, of the guest-chamber. Seeming to vary with the
intellectual fortune of the hour, from the plainest account of
experience, to a sheer fantasy, only “believed because it was
impossible,” that one hope was, at all events, sufficient to make men’s
common pleasures and their common ambition, above all their commonest
vices, seem very petty indeed, too petty to know of. It bred in him a
kind of magnificence of character, in the old Greek sense of the term;
a temper incompatible with any merely plausible advocacy of his
convictions, or merely superficial thoughts about anything whatever, or
talk about other people, or speculation as to what was passing in their
so visibly little souls, or much talking of any kind, however clever or
graceful. A soul thus disposed had “already entered into the better
life”:—was indeed in some sort “a priest, a minister of the gods.”
Hence his constant “recollection”; a close watching of his soul, of a
kind almost unique in the ancient world.—Before all things examine into
thyself: strive to be at home with thyself!—Marius, a sympathetic
witness of all this, might almost seem to have had a foresight of
monasticism itself in the prophetic future. With this mystic companion
he had gone a step onward out of the merely objective pagan existence.
Here was already a master in that craft of self-direction, which was
about to play so large a part in the forming of human mind, under the
sanction of the Christian church.

Yet it was in truth a somewhat melancholy service, a service on which
one must needs move about, solemn, serious, depressed, with the hushed
footsteps of those who move about the house where a dead body is lying.
Such was the impression which occurred to Marius again and again as he
read, with a growing sense of some profound dissidence from his author.
By certain quite traceable links of association he was reminded, in
spite of the moral beauty of the philosophic emperor’s ideas, how he
had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the public shows. For, actually,
his contemplations had made him of a sad heart, inducing in him that
melancholy—Tristitia—which even the monastic moralists have held to be
of the nature of deadly sin, akin to the sin of Desidia or Inactivity.
Resignation, a sombre resignation, a sad heart, patient bearing of the
burden of a sad heart:—Yes! this belonged doubtless to the situation of
an honest thinker upon the world. Only, in this case there seemed to be
too much of a complacent acquiescence in the world as it is. And there
could be no true Théodicé in that; no real accommodation of the world
as it is, to the divine pattern of the Logos, the eternal reason, over
against it. It amounted to a tolerance of evil.

The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little
understand, yet prospereth on the journey:
If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be nought of
evil with thee therein.
If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are
communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with
thee—nothing to be afraid of:
Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every man
according to his desert:
If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require?
Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits?
That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the whole.
The profit of the whole,—that was sufficient!+


—Links, in a train of thought really generous! of which, nevertheless,
the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere,
might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in
truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there
could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man. “Let thine
air be cheerful,” he had said; and, with an effort, did himself at
times attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely ought to
accompany, as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like
those. Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with
Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable
physiognomy. With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy
which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the
outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human
faces from “the land which is very far off,” we may trace from Giotto
onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael—the serenity, the
durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from
death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed “blitheness” of the
Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly
superficial youth. And yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with
the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching
in the head or heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an
enemy with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in
a thousand forms—the apparent waste of men’s gifts in an early, or even
in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of animals; the
disease and pain of the body.

And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius and his
reader.—The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body. Since it is
“the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be
proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither sensation nor
passion to break in upon her,” it follows that the true interest of the
spirit must ever be to treat the body—Well! as a corpse attached
thereto, rather than as a living companion—nay, actually to promote its
dissolution. In counterpoise to the inhumanity of this, presenting
itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin against nature,
the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that
reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man. Such
delight indeed had been but a natural consequence of the sensuous or
materialistic character of the philosophy of his choice. Now to
Cornelius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer terms it,
the one true temple in the world; or rather itself the proper object of
worship, of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold might have
its seemliness and due symbolic use:—Ah! and of what awe-stricken pity
also, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones of a poor man’s
grave!

Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the
philosopher’s contempt for it—some diseased point of thought, or moral
dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all
the emperor’s inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for which there
was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world. “’Tis part of the
business of life,” he read, “to lose it handsomely.” On due occasion,
“one might give life the slip.” The moral or mental powers might fail
one; and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the time for
taking leave was not come:—“Thou canst leave this prison when thou
wilt. Go forth boldly!” Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain
such question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must
always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching
him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with. There,
surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of
apprehension. It was the attitude, the melancholy intellectual
attitude, of one who might be greatly mistaken in things—who might make
the greatest of mistakes.

A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, or even in the
weakness of others:—of this Marius had certainly found the trace, as a
confidant of the emperor’s conversations with himself, in spite of
those jarring inhumanities, of that pretension to a stoical
indifference, and the many difficulties of his manner of writing. He
found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger evidence, in this
way. As he read one morning early, there slipped from the rolls of
manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor’s superscription, which
might well be of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at once in
person; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one of his favourite
retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with his young
children, before his departure for the war. A whole day passed as
Marius crossed the Campagna on horseback, pleased by the random autumn
lights bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture, the shepherds
in their picturesque dress, the golden elms, tower and villa; and it
was after dark that he mounted the steep street of the little hill-town
to the imperial residence. He was struck by an odd mixture of stillness
and excitement about the place. Lights burned at the windows. It seemed
that numerous visitors were within, for the courtyard was crowded with
litters and horses in waiting. For the moment, indeed, all larger
cares, even the cares of war, of late so heavy a pressure, had been
forgotten in what was passing with the little Annius Verus; who for his
part had forgotten his toys, lying all day across the knees of his
mother, as a mere child’s ear-ache grew rapidly to alarming sickness
with great and manifest agony, only suspended a little, from time to
time, when from very weariness he passed into a few moments of
unconsciousness. The country surgeon called in, had removed the
imposthume with the knife. There had been a great effort to bear this
operation, for the terrified child, hardly persuaded to submit himself,
when his pain was at its worst, and even more for the parents. At
length, amid a company of pupils pressing in with him, as the custom
was, to watch the proceedings in the sick-room, the eminent Galen had
arrived, only to pronounce the thing done visibly useless, the patient
falling now into longer intervals of delirium. And thus, thrust on one
side by the crowd of departing visitors, Marius was forced into the
privacy of a grief, the desolate face of which went deep into his
memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away—quite conscious at
last, but with a touching expression upon it of weakness and
defeat—pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one
thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure
distress.

NOTES


42. +Transliteration: para tês mêtros to theosebes. Translation: “rites
deriving from [his] mother.”


47. +Transliteration: koinos autô pros tous theous. Translation:
“common to him together with the gods.”


49. +Transliteration: Tou aristou apolaue. Translation: “[Always] take
the best.”


52. +Not indented in the original.




CHAPTER XIX.
THE WILL AS VISION


Paratum cor meum deus! paratum cor meum!


The emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of images in
memory of the dead prince; that a golden one should be carried,
together with the other images, in the great procession of the Circus,
and the addition of the child’s name to the Hymn of the Salian Priests:
and so, stifling private grief, without further delay set forth for the
war.

True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius, had understood it,
was essentially of the nature of a service. If so be, you can discover
a mode of life more desirable than the being a king, for those who
shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a
possibility; but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific Vision be
indeed possible, if philosophy really “concludes in an ecstasy,”
affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain
elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been discovered more
desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you might induce such
persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon them the distasteful
task of governing other men, or even of leading them to victory in
battle. But, by the very conditions of its tenure, their dominion would
be wholly a ministry to others: they would have taken upon them “the
form of a servant”: they would be reigning for the well-being of others
rather than their own. The true king, the righteous king, would be
Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the better land and its perfected
company—so real a thing to him, definite and real as the pictured
scenes of his psalter—to take part in or to arbitrate men’s quarrels,
about the transitory appearances of things. In a lower degree (lower,
in proportion as the highest Platonic dream is lower than any Christian
vision) the true king would be Marcus Aurelius, drawn from the
meditation of books, to be the ruler of the Roman people in peace, and
still more, in war.

To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the visions, however dim,
which this mood brought with it, were sufficiently pleasant to him,
together with the endearments of his home, to make public rule nothing
less than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato’s requirement, now
consummated in his setting forth for the campaign on the Danube. That
it was such a sacrifice was to Marius visible fact, as he saw him
ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all the pageantry of an
imperial departure, yet with the air less of a sanguine and
self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other already defeated.
Through the fortune of the subsequent years, passing and repassing so
inexplicably from side to side, the rumour of which reached him amid
his own quiet studies, Marius seemed always to see that central figure,
with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive
suffering, all the stranger from its contrast with the magnificent
armour worn by the emperor on this occasion, as it had been worn by his
predecessor Hadrian.

Totus et argento contextus et auro:


clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed
armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous
lightsomeness—he looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere
comfortless shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction of the
labours of Hercules, through those northern, mist-laden confines of the
civilised world. It was as if the familiar soul which had been so
friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to Hades; and when
he read the Conversations afterwards, though his judgment of them
underwent no material change, it was nevertheless with the allowance we
make for the dead. The memory of that suffering image, while it
certainly strengthened his adhesion to what he could accept at all in
the philosophy of Aurelius, added a strange pathos to what must seem
the writer’s mistakes. What, after all, had been the meaning of that
incident, observed as so fortunate an omen long since, when the prince,
then a little child much younger than was usual, had stood in ceremony
among the priests of Mars and flung his crown of flowers with the rest
at the sacred image reclining on the Pulvinar? The other crowns lodged
themselves here or there; when, Lo! the crown thrown by Aurelius, the
youngest of them all, alighted upon the very brows of the god, as if
placed there by a careful hand! He was still young, also, when on the
day of his adoption by Antoninus Pius he saw himself in a dream, with
as it were shoulders of ivory, like the images of the gods, and found
them more capable than shoulders of flesh. Yet he was now well-nigh
fifty years of age, setting out with two-thirds of life behind him,
upon a labour which would fill the remainder of it with anxious cares—a
labour for which he had perhaps no capacity, and certainly no taste.

That ancient suit of armour was almost the only object Aurelius now
possessed from all those much cherished articles of vertu collected by
the Caesars, making the imperial residence like a magnificent museum.
Not men alone were needed for the war, so that it became necessary, to
the great disgust alike of timid persons and of the lovers of sport, to
arm the gladiators, but money also was lacking. Accordingly, at the
sole motion of Aurelius himself, unwilling that the public burden
should be further increased, especially on the part of the poor, the
whole of the imperial ornaments and furniture, a sumptuous collection
of gems formed by Hadrian, with many works of the most famous painters
and sculptors, even the precious ornaments of the emperor’s chapel or
Lararium, and the wardrobe of the empress Faustina, who seems to have
borne the loss without a murmur, were exposed for public auction.
“These treasures,” said Aurelius, “like all else that I possess, belong
by right to the Senate and People.” Was it not a characteristic of the
true kings in Plato that they had in their houses nothing they could
call their own? Connoisseurs had a keen delight in the mere reading of
the Praetor’s list of the property for sale. For two months the learned
in these matters were daily occupied in the appraising of the
embroidered hangings, the choice articles of personal use selected for
preservation by each succeeding age, the great outlandish pearls from
Hadrian’s favourite cabinet, the marvellous plate lying safe behind the
pretty iron wicker-work of the shops in the goldsmiths’ quarter.
Meantime ordinary persons might have an interest in the inspection of
objects which had been as daily companions to people so far above and
remote from them—things so fine also in workmanship and material as to
seem, with their antique and delicate air, a worthy survival of the
grand bygone eras, like select thoughts or utterances embodying the
very spirit of the vanished past. The town became more pensive than
ever over old fashions.

The welcome amusement of this last act of preparation for the great war
being now over, all Rome seemed to settle down into a singular quiet,
likely to last long, as though bent only on watching from afar the
languid, somewhat uneventful course of the contest itself. Marius took
advantage of it as an opportunity for still closer study than of old,
only now and then going out to one of his favourite spots on the Sabine
or Alban hills for a quiet even greater than that of Rome in the
country air. On one of these occasions, as if by favour of an invisible
power withdrawing some unknown cause of dejection from around him, he
enjoyed a quite unusual sense of self-possession—the possession of his
own best and happiest self. After some gloomy thoughts over-night, he
awoke under the full tide of the rising sun, himself full, in his
entire refreshment, of that almost religious appreciation of sleep, the
graciousness of its influence on men’s spirits, which had made the old
Greeks conceive of it as a god. It was like one of those old joyful
wakings of childhood, now becoming rarer and rarer with him, and looked
back upon with much regret as a measure of advancing age. In fact, the
last bequest of this serene sleep had been a dream, in which, as once
before, he overheard those he loved best pronouncing his name very
pleasantly, as they passed through the rich light and shadow of a
summer morning, along the pavement of a city—Ah! fairer far than Rome!
In a moment, as he arose, a certain oppression of late setting very
heavily upon him was lifted away, as though by some physical motion in
the air.

That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasurable excitement,
yet so easily ruffled by chance collision even with the things and
persons he had come to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to
be wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards Tibur, under the
early sunshine; the marble of its villas glistening all the way before
him on the hillside. And why could he not hold such serenity of spirit
ever at command? he asked, expert as he was at last become in the art
of setting the house of his thoughts in order. “’Tis in thy power to
think as thou wilt:” he repeated to himself: it was the most
serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him by those imperial
conversations.—“’Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt.” And were the
cheerful, sociable, restorative beliefs, of which he had there read so
much, that bold adhesion, for instance, to the hypothesis of an eternal
friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and material
order, but only just behind it, ready perhaps even now to break
through:—were they, after all, really a matter of choice, dependent on
some deliberate act of volition on his part? Were they doctrines one
might take for granted, generously take for granted, and led on by
them, at first as but well-defined objects of hope, come at last into
the region of a corresponding certitude of the intellect? “It is the
truth I seek,” he had read, “the truth, by which no one,” gray and
depressing though it might seem, “was ever really injured.” And yet, on
the other hand, the imperial wayfarer, he had been able to go along
with so far on his intellectual pilgrimage, let fall many things
concerning the practicability of a methodical and self-forced assent to
certain principles or presuppositions “one could not do without.” Were
there, as the expression “one could not do without” seemed to hint,
beliefs, without which life itself must be almost impossible,
principles which had their sufficient ground of evidence in that very
fact? Experience certainly taught that, as regarding the sensible world
he could attend or not, almost at will, to this or that colour, this or
that train of sounds, in the whole tumultuous concourse of colour and
sound, so it was also, for the well-trained intelligence, in regard to
that hum of voices which besiege the inward no less than the outward
ear. Might it be not otherwise with those various and competing
hypotheses, the permissible hypotheses, which, in that open field for
hypothesis—one’s own actual ignorance of the origin and tendency of our
being—present themselves so importunately, some of them with so
emphatic a reiteration, through all the mental changes of successive
ages? Might the will itself be an organ of knowledge, of vision?

On this day truly no mysterious light, no irresistibly leading hand
from afar reached him; only the peculiarly tranquil influence of its
first hour increased steadily upon him, in a manner with which, as he
conceived, the aspects of the place he was then visiting had something
to do. The air there, air supposed to possess the singular property of
restoring the whiteness of ivory, was pure and thin. An even veil of
lawn-like white cloud had now drawn over the sky; and under its broad,
shadowless light every hue and tone of time came out upon the yellow
old temples, the elegant pillared circle of the shrine of the patronal
Sibyl, the houses seemingly of a piece with the ancient fundamental
rock. Some half-conscious motive of poetic grace would appear to have
determined their grouping; in part resisting, partly going along with
the natural wildness and harshness of the place, its floods and
precipices. An air of immense age possessed, above all, the vegetation
around—a world of evergreen trees—the olives especially, older than how
many generations of men’s lives! fretted and twisted by the combining
forces of life and death, into every conceivable caprice of form. In
the windless weather all seemed to be listening to the roar of the
immemorial waterfall, plunging down so unassociably among these human
habitations, and with a motion so unchanging from age to age as to
count, even in this time-worn place, as an image of unalterable rest.
Yet the clear sky all but broke to let through the ray which was
silently quickening everything in the late February afternoon, and the
unseen violet refined itself through the air. It was as if the spirit
of life in nature were but withholding any too precipitate revelation
of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work.

Through some accident to the trappings of his horse at the inn where he
rested, Marius had an unexpected delay. He sat down in an olive-garden,
and, all around him and within still turning to reverie, the course of
his own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself into some other world,
disparted from this spectacular point where he was now placed to survey
it, like that distant road below, along which he had travelled this
morning across the Campagna. Through a dreamy land he could see himself
moving, as if in another life, and like another person, through all his
fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point, weeping,
delighted, escaping from various dangers. That prospect brought him,
first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude: it was as if he must look
round for some one else to share his joy with: for some one to whom he
might tell the thing, for his own relief. Companionship, indeed,
familiarity with others, gifted in this way or that, or at least
pleasant to him, had been, through one or another long span of it, the
chief delight of the journey. And was it only the resultant general
sense of such familiarity, diffused through his memory, that in a while
suggested the question whether there had not been—besides Flavian,
besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude he had which in spite of
ardent friendship perhaps loved best of all things—some other
companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side throughout;
doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of his
peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful
recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was
there at all? Must not the whole world around have faded away for him
altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it? In his
deepest apparent solitude there had been rich entertainment. It was as
if there were not one only, but two wayfarers, side by side, visible
there across the plain, as he indulged his fancy. A bird came and sang
among the wattled hedge-roses: an animal feeding crept nearer: the
child who kept it was gazing quietly: and the scene and the hours still
conspiring, he passed from that mere fantasy of a self not himself,
beside him in his coming and going, to those divinations of a living
and companionable spirit at work in all things, of which he had become
aware from time to time in his old philosophic readings—in Plato and
others, last but not least, in Aurelius. Through one reflection upon
another, he passed from such instinctive divinations, to the thoughts
which give them logical consistency, formulating at last, as the
necessary exponent of our own and the world’s life, that reasonable
Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator, which for
the philosophers of Greece is the Eternal Reason, and in the New
Testament the Father of Men—even as one builds up from act and word and
expression of the friend actually visible at one’s side, an ideal of
the spirit within him.

In this peculiar and privileged hour, his bodily frame, as he could
recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of its capacities, so
entirely possessed by him—Nay! actually his very self—was yet
determined by a far-reaching system of material forces external to it,
a thousand combining currents from earth and sky. Its seemingly active
powers of apprehension were, in fact, but susceptibilities to
influence. The perfection of its capacity might be said to depend on
its passive surrender, as of a leaf on the wind, to the motions of the
great stream of physical energy without it. And might not the
intellectual frame also, still more intimately himself as in truth it
was, after the analogy of the bodily life, be a moment only, an impulse
or series of impulses, a single process, in an intellectual or
spiritual system external to it, diffused through all time and
place—that great stream of spiritual energy, of which his own imperfect
thoughts, yesterday or to-day, would be but the remote, and therefore
imperfect pulsations? It was the hypothesis (boldest, though in reality
the most conceivable of all hypotheses) which had dawned on the
contemplations of the two opposed great masters of the old Greek
thought, alike:—the “World of Ideas,” existent only because, and in so
far as, they are known, as Plato conceived; the “creative,
incorruptible, informing mind,” supposed by Aristotle, so sober-minded,
yet as regards this matter left something of a mystic after all. Might
not this entire material world, the very scene around him, the
immemorial rocks, the firm marble, the olive-gardens, the falling
water, be themselves but reflections in, or a creation of, that one
indefectible mind, wherein he too became conscious, for an hour, a day,
for so many years? Upon what other hypothesis could he so well
understand the persistency of all these things for his own intermittent
consciousness of them, for the intermittent consciousness of so many
generations, fleeting away one after another? It was easier to conceive
of the material fabric of things as but an element in a world of
thought—as a thought in a mind, than of mind as an element, or
accident, or passing condition in a world of matter, because mind was
really nearer to himself: it was an explanation of what was less known
by what was known better. The purely material world, that close,
impassable prison-wall, seemed just then the unreal thing, to be
actually dissolving away all around him: and he felt a quiet hope, a
quiet joy dawning faintly, in the dawning of this doctrine upon him as
a really credible opinion. It was like the break of day over some vast
prospect with the “new city,” as it were some celestial New Rome, in
the midst of it. That divine companion figured no longer as but an
occasional wayfarer beside him; but rather as the unfailing
“assistant,” without whose inspiration and concurrence he could not
breathe or see, instrumenting his bodily senses, rounding, supporting
his imperfect thoughts. How often had the thought of their brevity
spoiled for him the most natural pleasures of life, confusing even his
present sense of them by the suggestion of disease, of death, of a
coming end, in everything! How had he longed, sometimes, that there
were indeed one to whose boundless power of memory he could commit his
own most fortunate moments, his admiration, his love, Ay! the very
sorrows of which he could not bear quite to lose the sense:—one strong
to retain them even though he forgot, in whose more vigorous
consciousness they might subsist for ever, beyond that mere quickening
of capacity which was all that remained of them in himself! “Oh! that
they might live before Thee”—To-day at least, in the peculiar clearness
of one privileged hour, he seemed to have apprehended that in which the
experiences he valued most might find, one by one, an abiding-place.
And again, the resultant sense of companionship, of a person beside
him, evoked the faculty of conscience—of conscience, as of old and when
he had been at his best, in the form, not of fear, nor of self-reproach
even, but of a certain lively gratitude.

Himself—his sensations and ideas—never fell again precisely into focus
as on that day, yet he was the richer by its experience. But for once
only to have come under the power of that peculiar mood, to have felt
the train of reflections which belong to it really forcible and
conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion, to have
apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal
gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the
shadows of the world, left this one particular hour a marked point in
life never to be forgotten. It gave him a definitely ascertained
measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul must
make upon the powers, whatsoever they might be, which had brought him,
as he was, into the world at all. And again, would he be faithful to
himself, to his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions, if he did
but remain just there? Must not all that remained of life be but a
search for the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual
things—a gathering together of every trace or token of it, which his
actual experience might present?




PART THE FOURTH




CHAPTER XX.
TWO CURIOUS HOUSES

I. GUESTS

“Your old men shall dream dreams.”+


A nature like that of Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of
instincts almost physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual
judgments, was perhaps even less susceptible than other men’s
characters of essential change. And yet the experience of that
fortunate hour, seeming to gather into one central act of vision all
the deeper impressions his mind had ever received, did not leave him
quite as he had been. For his mental view, at least, it changed
measurably the world about him, of which he was still indeed a curious
spectator, but which looked further off, was weaker in its hold, and,
in a sense, less real to him than ever. It was as if he viewed it
through a diminishing glass. And the permanency of this change he could
note, some years later, when it happened that he was a guest at a
feast, in which the various exciting elements of Roman life, its
physical and intellectual accomplishments, its frivolity and
far-fetched elegances, its strange, mystic essays after the unseen,
were elaborately combined. The great Apuleius, the literary ideal of
his boyhood, had arrived in Rome,—was now visiting Tusculum, at the
house of their common friend, a certain aristocratic poet who loved
every sort of superiorities; and Marius was favoured with an invitation
to a supper given in his honour.

It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to his own early
boyish hero-worship, yet with some sense of superiority in himself,
seeing his old curiosity grown now almost to indifference when on the
point of satisfaction at last, and upon a juster estimate of its
object, that he mounted to the little town on the hillside, the
foot-ways of which were so many flights of easy-going steps gathered
round a single great house under shadow of the “haunted” ruins of
Cicero’s villa on the wooded heights. He found a touch of weirdness in
the circumstance that in so romantic a place he had been bidden to meet
the writer who was come to seem almost like one of the personages in
his own fiction. As he turned now and then to gaze at the evening scene
through the tall narrow openings of the street, up which the cattle
were going home slowly from the pastures below, the Alban mountains,
stretched between the great walls of the ancient houses, seemed close
at hand—a screen of vaporous dun purple against the setting sun—with
those waves of surpassing softness in the boundary lines which indicate
volcanic formation. The coolness of the little brown market-place, for
profit of which even the working-people, in long file through the
olive-gardens, were leaving the plain for the night, was grateful,
after the heats of Rome. Those wild country figures, clad in every kind
of fantastic patchwork, stained by wind and weather fortunately enough
for the eye, under that significant light inclined him to poetry. And
it was a very delicate poetry of its kind that seemed to enfold him, as
passing into the poet’s house he paused for a moment to glance back
towards the heights above; whereupon, the numerous cascades of the
precipitous garden of the villa, framed in the doorway of the hall,
fell into a harmless picture, in its place among the pictures within,
and scarcely more real than they—a landscape-piece, in which the power
of water (plunging into what unseen depths!) done to the life, was
pleasant, and without its natural terrors.

At the further end of this bland apartment, fragrant with the rare
woods of the old inlaid panelling, the falling of aromatic oil from the
ready-lighted lamps, the iris-root clinging to the dresses of the
guests, as with odours from the altars of the gods, the supper-table
was spread, in all the daintiness characteristic of the agreeable
petit-maître, who entertained. He was already most carefully dressed,
but, like Martial’s Stella, perhaps consciously, meant to change his
attire once and again during the banquet; in the last instance, for an
ancient vesture (object of much rivalry among the young men of fashion,
at that great sale of the imperial wardrobes) a toga, of altogether
lost hue and texture. He wore it with a grace which became the leader
of a thrilling movement then on foot for the restoration of that
disused garment, in which, laying aside the customary evening dress,
all the visitors were requested to appear, setting off the delicate
sinuosities and well-disposed “golden ways” of its folds, with
harmoniously tinted flowers. The opulent sunset, blending pleasantly
with artificial light, fell across the quiet ancestral effigies of old
consular dignitaries, along the wide floor strewn with sawdust of
sandal-wood, and lost itself in the heap of cool coronals, lying ready
for the foreheads of the guests on a sideboard of old citron. The
crystal vessels darkened with old wine, the hues of the early autumn
fruit—mulberries, pomegranates, and grapes that had long been hanging
under careful protection upon the vines, were almost as much a feast
for the eye, as the dusky fires of the rare twelve-petalled roses. A
favourite animal, white as snow, brought by one of the visitors, purred
its way gracefully among the wine-cups, coaxed onward from place to
place by those at table, as they reclined easily on their cushions of
German eider-down, spread over the long-legged, carved couches.

A highly refined modification of the acroama—a musical performance
during supper for the diversion of the guests—was presently heard
hovering round the place, soothingly, and so unobtrusively that the
company could not guess, and did not like to ask, whether or not it had
been designed by their entertainer. They inclined on the whole to think
it some wonderful peasant-music peculiar to that wild neighbourhood,
turning, as it did now and then, to a solitary reed-note, like a
bird’s, while it wandered into the distance. It wandered quite away at
last, as darkness with a bolder lamplight came on, and made way for
another sort of entertainment. An odd, rapid, phantasmal glitter,
advancing from the garden by torchlight, defined itself, as it came
nearer, into a dance of young men in armour. Arrived at length in a
portico, open to the supper-chamber, they contrived that their
mechanical march-movement should fall out into a kind of highly
expressive dramatic action; and with the utmost possible emphasis of
dumb motion, their long swords weaving a silvery network in the air,
they danced the Death of Paris. The young Commodus, already an adept in
these matters, who had condescended to welcome the eminent Apuleius at
the banquet, had mysteriously dropped from his place to take his share
in the performance; and at its conclusion reappeared, still wearing the
dainty accoutrements of Paris, including a breastplate, composed
entirely of overlapping tigers’ claws, skilfully gilt. The youthful
prince had lately assumed the dress of manhood, on the return of the
emperor for a brief visit from the North; putting up his hair, in
imitation of Nero, in a golden box dedicated to Capitoline Jupiter. His
likeness to Aurelius, his father, was become, in consequence, more
striking than ever; and he had one source of genuine interest in the
great literary guest of the occasion, in that the latter was the
fortunate possessor of a monopoly for the exhibition of wild beasts and
gladiatorial shows in the province of Carthage, where he resided.

Still, after all complaisance to the perhaps somewhat crude tastes of
the emperor’s son, it was felt that with a guest like Apuleius whom
they had come prepared to entertain as veritable connoisseurs, the
conversation should be learned and superior, and the host at last
deftly led his company round to literature, by the way of bindings.
Elegant rolls of manuscript from his fine library of ancient Greek
books passed from hand to hand about the table. It was a sign for the
visitors themselves to draw their own choicest literary curiosities
from their bags, as their contribution to the banquet; and one of them,
a famous reader, choosing his lucky moment, delivered in tenor voice
the piece which follows, with a preliminary query as to whether it
could indeed be the composition of Lucian of Samosata,+ understood to
be the great mocker of that day:—

“What sound was that, Socrates?” asked Chaerephon. “It came from the
beach under the cliff yonder, and seemed a long way off.—And how
melodious it was! Was it a bird, I wonder. I thought all sea-birds were
songless.”

“Aye! a sea-bird,” answered Socrates, “a bird called the Halcyon, and
has a note full of plaining and tears. There is an old story people
tell of it. It was a mortal woman once, daughter of Aeolus, god of the
winds. Ceyx, the son of the morning-star, wedded her in her early
maidenhood. The son was not less fair than the father; and when it came
to pass that he died, the crying of the girl as she lamented his sweet
usage, was, Just that! And some while after, as Heaven willed, she was
changed into a bird. Floating now on bird’s wings over the sea she
seeks her lost Ceyx there; since she was not able to find him after
long wandering over the land.”

“That then is the Halcyon—the kingfisher,” said Chaerephon. “I never
heard a bird like it before. It has truly a plaintive note. What kind
of a bird is it, Socrates?”

“Not a large bird, though she has received large honour from the gods
on account of her singular conjugal affection. For whensoever she makes
her nest, a law of nature brings round what is called Halcyon’s
weather,—days distinguishable among all others for their serenity,
though they come sometimes amid the storms of winter—days like to-day!
See how transparent is the sky above us, and how motionless the
sea!—like a smooth mirror.”

True! A Halcyon day, indeed! and yesterday was the same. But tell me,
Socrates, what is one to think of those stories which have been told
from the beginning, of birds changed into mortals and mortals into
birds? To me nothing seems more incredible.”

“Dear Chaerephon,” said Socrates, “methinks we are but half-blind
judges of the impossible and the possible. We try the question by the
standard of our human faculty, which avails neither for true knowledge,
nor for faith, nor vision. Therefore many things seem to us impossible
which are really easy, many things unattainable which are within our
reach; partly through inexperience, partly through the childishness of
our minds. For in truth, every man, even the oldest of us, is like a
little child, so brief and babyish are the years of our life in
comparison of eternity. Then, how can we, who comprehend not the
faculties of gods and of the heavenly host, tell whether aught of that
kind be possible or no?—What a tempest you saw three days ago! One
trembles but to think of the lightning, the thunderclaps, the violence
of the wind! You might have thought the whole world was going to ruin.
And then, after a little, came this wonderful serenity of weather,
which has continued till to-day. Which do you think the greater and
more difficult thing to do: to exchange the disorder of that
irresistible whirlwind to a clarity like this, and becalm the whole
world again, or to refashion the form of a woman into that of a bird?
We can teach even little children to do something of that sort,—to take
wax or clay, and mould out of the same material many kinds of form, one
after another, without difficulty. And it may be that to the Deity,
whose power is too vast for comparison with ours, all processes of that
kind are manageable and easy. How much wider is the whole circle of
heaven than thyself?—Wider than thou canst express.

“Among ourselves also, how vast the difference we may observe in men’s
degrees of power! To you and me, and many another like us, many things
are impossible which are quite easy to others. For those who are
unmusical, to play on the flute; to read or write, for those who have
not yet learned; is no easier than to make birds of women, or women of
birds. From the dumb and lifeless egg Nature moulds her swarms of
winged creatures, aided, as some will have it, by a divine and secret
art in the wide air around us. She takes from the honeycomb a little
memberless live thing; she brings it wings and feet, brightens and
beautifies it with quaint variety of colour:—and Lo! the bee in her
wisdom, making honey worthy of the gods.

“It follows, that we mortals, being altogether of little account, able
wholly to discern no great matter, sometimes not even a little one, for
the most part at a loss regarding what happens even with ourselves, may
hardly speak with security as to what may be the powers of the immortal
gods concerning Kingfisher, or Nightingale. Yet the glory of thy
mythus, as my fathers bequeathed it to me, O tearful songstress! that
will I too hand on to my children, and tell it often to my wives,
Xanthippe and Myrto:—the story of thy pious love to Ceyx, and of thy
melodious hymns; and, above all, of the honour thou hast with the
gods!”

The reader’s well-turned periods seemed to stimulate, almost
uncontrollably, the eloquent stirrings of the eminent man of letters
then present. The impulse to speak masterfully was visible, before the
recital was well over, in the moving lines about his mouth, by no means
designed, as detractors were wont to say, simply to display the beauty
of his teeth. One of the company, expert in his humours, made ready to
transcribe what he would say, the sort of things of which a collection
was then forming, the “Florida” or Flowers, so to call them, he was apt
to let fall by the way—no impromptu ventures at random; but rather
elaborate, carved ivories of speech, drawn, at length, out of the rich
treasure-house of a memory stored with such, and as with a fine savour
of old musk about them. Certainly in this case, as Marius thought, it
was worth while to hear a charming writer speak. Discussing, quite in
our modern way, the peculiarities of those suburban views, especially
the sea-views, of which he was a professed lover, he was also every
inch a priest of Aesculapius, patronal god of Carthage. There was a
piquancy in his rococo, very African, and as it were perfumed
personality, though he was now well-nigh sixty years old, a mixture
there of that sort of Platonic spiritualism which can speak of the soul
of man as but a sojourner in the prison of the body—a blending of that
with such a relish for merely bodily graces as availed to set the
fashion in matters of dress, deportment, accent, and the like, nay!
with something also which reminded Marius of the vein of coarseness he
had found in the “Golden Book.” All this made the total impression he
conveyed a very uncommon one. Marius did not wonder, as he watched him
speaking, that people freely attributed to him many of the marvellous
adventures he had recounted in that famous romance, over and above the
wildest version of his own actual story—his extraordinary marriage, his
religious initiations, his acts of mad generosity, his trial as a
sorcerer.

But a sign came from the imperial prince that it was time for the
company to separate. He was entertaining his immediate neighbours at
the table with a trick from the streets; tossing his olives in rapid
succession into the air, and catching them, as they fell, between his
lips. His dexterity in this performance made the mirth around him
noisy, disturbing the sleep of the furry visitor: the learned party
broke up; and Marius withdrew, glad to escape into the open air. The
courtesans in their large wigs of false blond hair, were lurking for
the guests, with groups of curious idlers. A great conflagration was
visible in the distance. Was it in Rome; or in one of the villages of
the country? Pausing for a few minutes on the terrace to watch it,
Marius was for the first time able to converse intimately with
Apuleius; and in this moment of confidence the “illuminist,” himself
with locks so carefully arranged, and seemingly so full of
affectations, almost like one of those light women there, dropped a
veil as it were, and appeared, though still permitting the play of a
certain element of theatrical interest in his bizarre tenets, to be
ready to explain and defend his position reasonably. For a moment his
fantastic foppishness and his pretensions to ideal vision seemed to
fall into some intelligible congruity with each other. In truth, it was
the Platonic Idealism, as he conceived it, which for him literally
animated, and gave him so lively an interest in, this world of the
purely outward aspects of men and things.—Did material things, such
things as they had had around them all that evening, really need
apology for being there, to interest one, at all? Were not all visible
objects—the whole material world indeed, according to the consistent
testimony of philosophy in many forms—“full of souls”? embarrassed
perhaps, partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls? Certainly, the
contemplative philosophy of Plato, with its figurative imagery and
apologue, its manifold æsthetic colouring, its measured eloquence, its
music for the outward ear, had been, like Plato’s old master himself, a
two-sided or two-coloured thing. Apuleius was a Platonist: only, for
him, the Ideas of Plato were no creatures of logical abstraction, but
in very truth informing souls, in every type and variety of sensible
things. Those noises in the house all supper-time, sounding through the
tables and along the walls:—were they only startings in the old
rafters, at the impact of the music and laughter; or rather
importunities of the secondary selves, the true unseen selves, of the
persons, nay! of the very things around, essaying to break through
their frivolous, merely transitory surfaces, to remind one of abiding
essentials beyond them, which might have their say, their judgment to
give, by and by, when the shifting of the meats and drinks at life’s
table would be over? And was not this the true significance of the
Platonic doctrine?—a hierarchy of divine beings, associating themselves
with particular things and places, for the purpose of mediating between
God and man—man, who does but need due attention on his part to become
aware of his celestial company, filling the air about him, thick as
motes in the sunbeam, for the glance of sympathetic intelligence he
casts through it.

“Two kinds there are, of animated beings,” he exclaimed: “Gods,
entirely differing from men in the infinite distance of their abode,
since one part of them only is seen by our blunted vision—those
mysterious stars!—in the eternity of their existence, in the perfection
of their nature, infected by no contact with ourselves: and men,
dwelling on the earth, with frivolous and anxious minds, with infirm
and mortal members, with variable fortunes; labouring in vain; taken
altogether and in their whole species perhaps, eternal; but, severally,
quitting the scene in irresistible succession.

“What then? Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed
itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human
elements? And you will say to me: If so it be, that man is thus
entirely exiled from the immortal gods, that all communication is
denied him, that not one of them occasionally visits us, as a shepherd
his sheep—to whom shall I address my prayers? Whom, shall I invoke as
the helper of the unfortunate, the protector of the good?

“Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom
our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. Passing
between the inhabitants of earth and heaven, they carry from one to the
other prayers and bounties, supplication and assistance, being a kind
of interpreters. This interval of the air is full of them! Through
them, all revelations, miracles, magic processes, are effected. For,
specially appointed members of this order have their special provinces,
with a ministry according to the disposition of each. They go to and
fro without fixed habitation: or dwell in men’s houses”—

Just then a companion’s hand laid in the darkness on the shoulder of
the speaker carried him away, and the discourse broke off suddenly. Its
singular intimations, however, were sufficient to throw back on this
strange evening, in all its detail—the dance, the readings, the distant
fire—a kind of allegoric expression: gave it the character of one of
those famous Platonic figures or apologues which had then been in fact
under discussion. When Marius recalled its circumstances he seemed to
hear once more that voice of genuine conviction, pleading, from amidst
a scene at best of elegant frivolity, for so boldly mystical a view of
man and his position in the world. For a moment, but only for a moment,
as he listened, the trees had seemed, as of old, to be growing “close
against the sky.” Yes! the reception of theory, of hypothesis, of
beliefs, did depend a great deal on temperament. They were, so to
speak, mere equivalents of temperament. A celestial ladder, a ladder
from heaven to earth: that was the assumption which the experience of
Apuleius had suggested to him: it was what, in different forms, certain
persons in every age had instinctively supposed: they would be glad to
find their supposition accredited by the authority of a grave
philosophy. Marius, however, yearning not less than they, in that hard
world of Rome, and below its unpeopled sky, for the trace of some
celestial wing across it, must still object that they assumed the thing
with too much facility, too much of self-complacency. And his second
thought was, that to indulge but for an hour fantasies, fantastic
visions of that sort, only left the actual world more lonely than ever.
For him certainly, and for his solace, the little godship for whom the
rude countryman, an unconscious Platonist, trimmed his twinkling lamp,
would never slip from the bark of these immemorial olive-trees.—No! not
even in the wildest moonlight. For himself, it was clear, he must still
hold by what his eyes really saw. Only, he had to concede also, that
the very boldness of such theory bore witness, at least, to a variety
of human disposition and a consequent variety of mental view, which
might—who can tell?—be correspondent to, be defined by and define,
varieties of facts, of truths, just “behind the veil,” regarding the
world all alike had actually before them as their original premiss or
starting-point; a world, wider, perhaps, in its possibilities than all
possible fancies concerning it.

NOTES


75. Joel 2.28.


81. +Halcyone.




CHAPTER XXI.
TWO CURIOUS HOUSES

II. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA’S HOUSE

“Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see
visions.”


Cornelius had certain friends in or near Rome, whose household, to
Marius, as he pondered now and again what might be the determining
influences of that peculiar character, presented itself as possibly its
main secret—the hidden source from which the beauty and strength of a
nature, so persistently fresh in the midst of a somewhat jaded world,
might be derived. But Marius had never yet seen these friends; and it
was almost by accident that the veil of reserve was at last lifted,
and, with strange contrast to his visit to the poet’s villa at
Tusculum, he entered another curious house.

“The house in which she lives,” says that mystical German writer quoted
once before, “is for the orderly soul, which does not live on blindly
before her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences, building and
adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for herself, only an
expansion of the body; as the body, according to the philosophy of
Swedenborg,+ is but a process, an expansion, of the soul. For such an
orderly soul, as life proceeds, all sorts of delicate affinities
establish themselves, between herself and the doors and passage-ways,
the lights and shadows, of her outward dwelling-place, until she may
seem incorporate with it—until at last, in the entire expressiveness of
what is outward, there is for her, to speak properly, between outward
and inward, no longer any distinction at all; and the light which
creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture or space upon the
wall, the scent of flowers in the air at a particular window, become to
her, not so much apprehended objects, as themselves powers of
apprehension and door-ways to things beyond—the germ or rudiment of
certain new faculties, by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a
matter lying beyond her actually attained capacities of spirit and
sense.”

So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we may think, together
with that bodily “tent” or “tabernacle,” only one of many vestures for
the clothing of the pilgrim soul, to be left by her, surely, as if on
the wayside, worn-out one by one, as it was from her, indeed, they
borrowed what momentary value or significance they had.

The two friends were returning to Rome from a visit to a country-house,
where again a mixed company of guests had been assembled; Marius, for
his part, a little weary of gossip, and those sparks of ill-tempered
rivalry, which would seem sometimes to be the only sort of fire the
intercourse of people in general society can strike out of them. A mere
reaction upon this, as they started in the clear morning, made their
companionship, at least for one of them, hardly less tranquillising
than the solitude he so much valued. Something in the south-west wind,
combining with their own intention, favoured increasingly, as the hours
wore on, a serenity like that Marius had felt once before in journeying
over the great plain towards Tibur—a serenity that was to-day brotherly
amity also, and seemed to draw into its own charmed circle whatever was
then present to eye or ear, while they talked or were silent together,
and all petty irritations, and the like, shrank out of existence, or
kept certainly beyond its limits. The natural fatigue of the long
journey overcame them quite suddenly at last, when they were still
about two miles distant from Rome. The seemingly endless line of tombs
and cypresses had been visible for hours against the sky towards the
west; and it was just where a cross-road from the Latin Way fell into
the Appian, that Cornelius halted at a doorway in a long, low wall—the
outer wall of some villa courtyard, it might be supposed— as if at
liberty to enter, and rest there awhile. He held the door open for his
companion to enter also, if he would; with an expression, as he lifted
the latch, which seemed to ask Marius, apparently shrinking from a
possible intrusion: “Would you like to see it?” Was he willing to look
upon that, the seeing of which might define—yes! define the critical
turning-point in his days?

The little doorway in this long, low wall admitted them, in fact, into
the court or garden of a villa, disposed in one of those abrupt natural
hollows, which give its character to the country in this place; the
house itself, with all its dependent buildings, the spaciousness of
which surprised Marius as he entered, being thus wholly concealed from
passengers along the road. All around, in those well-ordered precincts,
were the quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste—a taste, indeed,
chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it
had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older
art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects, both as regards colour
and form, so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer
intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the
ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance—being indeed the
way of nature with her roses, the divine way with the body of man,
perhaps with his soul—conceiving the new organism by no sudden and
abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon
elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many times.
The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns,
the precious corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such
juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave
thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, æsthetically, very
seductive. Lastly, herb and tree had taken possession, spreading their
seed-bells and light branches, just astir in the trembling air, above
the ancient garden-wall, against the wide realms of sunset. And from
the first they could hear singing, the singing of children mainly, it
would seem, and of a new kind; so novel indeed in its effect, as to
bring suddenly to the recollection of Marius, Flavian’s early essays
towards a new world of poetic sound. It was the expression not
altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness—the blithe
self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some all-subduing
experience had wrought heroically, and who still remembered, on this
bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance.

His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies, of
places,—above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they might
have,—was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by that
peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion
all around him, passed into the house. That intelligent seriousness
about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those who
lacked it into some strange species wholly alien from himself,
accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days
at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed
congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision,
into an actual picture. If the true value of souls is in proportion to
what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul. As he
passed through the various chambers, great and small, one dominant
thought increased upon him, the thought of chaste women and their
children—of all the various affections of family life under its most
natural conditions, yet developed, as if in devout imitation of some
sublime new type of it, into large controlling passions. There reigned
throughout, an order and purity, an orderly disposition, as if by way
of making ready for some gracious spousals. The place itself was like a
bride adorned for her husband; and its singular cheerfulness, the
abundant light everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which he
received a deep impression though without precisely reckoning wherein
it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast just at
first to the place to which he was next conducted by Cornelius still
with a sort of eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he
forbore the explanation which might well be looked for by his
companion.

An old flower-garden in the rear of the house, set here and there with
a venerable olive-tree—a picture in pensive shade and fiery blossom, as
transparent, under that afternoon light, as the old miniature-painters’
work on the walls of the chambers within—was bounded towards the west
by a low, grass-grown hill. A narrow opening cut in its steep side,
like a solid blackness there, admitted Marius and his gleaming leader
into a hollow cavern or crypt, neither more nor less in fact than the
family burial-place of the Cecilii, to whom this residence belonged,
brought thus, after an arrangement then becoming not unusual, into
immediate connexion with the abode of the living, in bold assertion of
that instinct of family life, which the sanction of the Holy Family
was, hereafter, more and more to reinforce. Here, in truth, was the
centre of the peculiar religious expressiveness, of the sanctity, of
the entire scene. That “any person may, at his own election, constitute
the place which belongs to him a religious place, by the carrying of
his dead into it”:—had been a maxim of old Roman law, which it was
reserved for the early Christian societies, like that established here
by the piety of a wealthy Roman matron, to realise in all its
consequences. Yet this was certainly unlike any cemetery Marius had
ever before seen; most obviously in this, that these people had
returned to the older fashion of disposing of their dead by burial
instead of burning. Originally a family sepulchre, it was growing to a
vast necropolis, a whole township of the deceased, by means of some
free expansion of the family interest beyond its amplest natural
limits. That air of venerable beauty which characterised the house and
its precincts above, was maintained also here. It was certainly with a
great outlay of labour that these long, apparently endless, yet
elaborately designed galleries, were increasing so rapidly, with their
layers of beds or berths, one above another, cut, on either side the
path-way, in the porous tufa, through which all the moisture filters
downwards, leaving the parts above dry and wholesome. All alike were
carefully closed, and with all the delicate costliness at command; some
with simple tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of marble, enriched by
fair inscriptions: marble taken, in some cases, from older pagan
tombs—the inscription sometimes a palimpsest, the new epitaph being
woven into the faded letters of an earlier one.

As in an ordinary Roman cemetery, an abundance of utensils for the
worship or commemoration of the departed was disposed around—incense,
lights, flowers, their flame or their freshness being relieved to the
utmost by contrast with the coal-like blackness of the soil itself, a
volcanic sandstone, cinder of burnt-out fires. Would they ever kindle
again?—possess, transform, the place?—Turning to an ashen pallor where,
at regular intervals, an air-hole or luminare let in a hard beam of
clear but sunless light, with the heavy sleepers, row upon row within,
leaving a passage so narrow that only one visitor at a time could move
along, cheek to cheek with them, the high walls seemed to shut one in
into the great company of the dead. Only the long straight pathway lay
before him; opening, however, here and there, into a small chamber,
around a broad, table-like coffin or “altar-tomb,” adorned even more
profusely than the rest as if for some anniversary observance. Clearly,
these people, concurring in this with the special sympathies of Marius
himself, had adopted the practice of burial from some peculiar feeling
of hope they entertained concerning the body; a feeling which, in no
irreverent curiosity, he would fain have penetrated. The complete and
irreparable disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, so crushing
to the spirits, as he for one had found it, had long since induced in
him a preference for that other mode of settlement to the last sleep,
as having something about it more home-like and hopeful, at least in
outward seeming. But whence the strange confidence that these “handfuls
of white dust” would hereafter recompose themselves once more into
exulting human creatures? By what heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew
from above, such as was certainly never again to reach the dead
violets?— Januarius, Agapetus, Felicitas; Martyrs! refresh, I pray you,
the soul of Cecil, of Cornelius! said an inscription, one of many,
scratched, like a passing sigh, when it was still fresh in the mortar
that had closed up the prison-door. All critical estimate of this bold
hope, as sincere apparently as it was audacious in its claim, being set
aside, here at least, carried further than ever before, was that pious,
systematic commemoration of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal
to forget or finally desert the helpless, had ever counted with Marius
as the central exponent or symbol of all natural duty.

The stern soul of the excellent Jonathan Edwards, applying the faulty
theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we know, the vision of infants
not a span long, on the floor of hell. Every visitor to the Catacombs
must have observed, in a very different theological connexion, the
numerous children’s graves there—beds of infants, but a span long
indeed, lowly “prisoners of hope,” on these sacred floors. It was with
great curiosity, certainly, that Marius considered them, decked in some
instances with the favourite toys of their tiny occupants—toy-soldiers,
little chariot-wheels, the entire paraphernalia of a baby-house; and
when he saw afterwards the living children, who sang and were busy
above—sang their psalm Laudate Pueri Dominum!—their very faces caught
for him a sort of quaint unreality from the memory of those others, the
children of the Catacombs, but a little way below them.

Here and there, mingling with the record of merely natural decease, and
sometimes even at these children’s graves, were the signs of violent
death or “martyrdom,”—proofs that some “had loved not their lives unto
the death”—in the little red phial of blood, the palm-branch, the red
flowers for their heavenly “birthday.” About one sepulchre in
particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly arrayed for what,
by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia—a birthday, the
peculiar arrangements of the whole place visibly centered. And it was
with a singular novelty of feeling, like the dawning of a fresh order
of experiences upon him, that, standing beside those mournful relics,
snatched in haste from the common place of execution not many years
before, Marius became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the
whole force of evidence for a certain strange, new hope, defining in
its turn some new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so
tragic for the “Christian superstition.” Something of them he had heard
indeed already. They had seemed to him but one savagery the more,
savagery self-provoked, in a cruel and stupid world.

And yet these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards
to-day, as if towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering,
in the remote background. Yes! the interest, the expression, of the
entire neighbourhood was instinct with it, as with the savour of some
priceless incense. Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching
everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all
this visible mortality, death’s very self—Ah! lovelier than any fable
of old mythology had ever thought to render it, in the utmost limits of
fantasy; and this, in simple candour of feeling about a supposed fact.
Peace! Pax tecum!—the word, the thought—was put forth everywhere, with
images of hope, snatched sometimes from that jaded pagan world which
had really afforded men so little of it from first to last; the various
consoling images it had thrown off, of succour, of regeneration, of
escape from the grave—Hercules wrestling with Death for possession of
Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the Shepherd with his sheep,
the Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his shoulders. Yet these
imageries after all, it must be confessed, formed but a slight
contribution to the dominant effect of tranquil hope there—a kind of
heroic cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart, as with the sense,
again, of some real deliverance, which seemed to deepen the longer one
lingered through these strange and awful passages. A figure, partly
pagan in character, yet most frequently repeated of all these visible
parables—the figure of one just escaped from the sea, still clinging as
for life to the shore in surprised joy, together with the inscription
beneath it, seemed best to express the prevailing sentiment of the
place. And it was just as he had puzzled out this inscription—

I went down to the bottom of the mountains.
The earth with her bars was about me for ever:
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption!


—that with no feeling of suddenness or change Marius found himself
emerging again, like a later mystic traveller through similar dark
places “quieted by hope,” into the daylight.

They were still within the precincts of the house, still in possession
of that wonderful singing, although almost in the open country, with a
great view of the Campagna before them, and the hills beyond. The
orchard or meadow, through which their path lay, was already gray with
twilight, though the western sky, where the greater stars were visible,
was still afloat in crimson splendour. The colour of all earthly things
seemed repressed by the contrast, yet with a sense of great richness
lingering in their shadows. At that moment the voice of the singers, a
“voice of joy and health,” concentrated itself with solemn antistrophic
movement, into an evening, or “candle” hymn.

“Hail! Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured,
Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest:—
Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung
With undefiled tongue.”—


It was like the evening itself made audible, its hopes and fears, with
the stars shining in the midst of it. Half above, half below the level
white mist, dividing the light from the darkness, came now the mistress
of this place, the wealthy Roman matron, left early a widow a few years
before, by Cecilius “Confessor and Saint.” With a certain antique
severity in the gathering of the long mantle, and with coif or veil
folded decorously below the chin, “gray within gray,” to the mind of
Marius her temperate beauty brought reminiscences of the serious and
virile character of the best female statuary of Greece. Quite foreign,
however, to any Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care,
with which she carried a little child at rest in her arms. Another, a
year or two older, walked beside, the fingers of one hand within her
girdle. She paused for a moment with a greeting for Cornelius.

That visionary scene was the close, the fitting close, of the
afternoon’s strange experiences. A few minutes later, passing forward
on his way along the public road, he could have fancied it a dream. The
house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious house he had
lately visited at Tusculum. And what a contrast was presented by the
former, in its suggestions of hopeful industry, of immaculate
cleanness, of responsive affection!—all alike determined by that
transporting discovery of some fact, or series of facts, in which the
old puzzle of life had found its solution. In truth, one of his most
characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing for
escape—for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very spaces
of life, it might be, along which he had lingered most pleasantly—for a
lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon. It was like the
necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set a window or
open doorway in the background of his picture; or like a sick man’s
longing for northern coolness, and the whispering willow-trees, amid
the breathless evergreen forests of the south. To some such effect had
this visit occurred to him, and through so slight an accident. Rome and
Roman life, just then, were come to seem like some stifling forest of
bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the
generations of living trees, yet with roots in a deep, down-trodden
soil of poignant human susceptibilities. In the midst of its
suffocation, that old longing for escape had been satisfied by this
vision of the church in Cecilia’s house, as never before. It was still,
indeed, according to the unchangeable law of his temperament, to the
eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those experiences appealed—the
peaceful light and shade, the boys whose very faces seemed to sing, the
virginal beauty of the mother and her children. But, in his case, what
was thus visible constituted a moral or spiritual influence, of a
somewhat exigent and controlling character, added anew to life, a new
element therein, with which, consistently with his own chosen maxim, he
must make terms.

The thirst for every kind of experience, encouraged by a philosophy
which taught that nothing was intrinsically great or small, good or
evil, had ever been at strife in him with a hieratic refinement, in
which the boy-priest survived, prompting always the selection of what
was perfect of its kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of his soul
thereto. This had carried him along in a continuous communion with
ideals, certainly realised in part, either in the conditions of his own
being, or in the actual company about him, above all, in Cornelius.
Surely, in this strange new society he had touched upon for the first
time to-day—in this strange family, like “a garden enclosed”—was the
fulfilment of all the preferences, the judgments, of that
half-understood friend, which of late years had been his protection so
often amid the perplexities of life. Here, it might be, was, if not the
cure, yet the solace or anodyne of his great sorrows—of that
constitutional sorrowfulness, not peculiar to himself perhaps, but
which had made his life certainly like one long “disease of the
spirit.” Merciful intention made itself known remedially here, in the
mere contact of the air, like a soft touch upon aching flesh. On the
other hand, he was aware that new responsibilities also might be
awakened—new and untried responsibilities—a demand for something from
him in return. Might this new vision, like the malignant beauty of
pagan Medusa, be exclusive of any admiring gaze upon anything but
itself? At least he suspected that, after the beholding of it, he could
never again be altogether as he had been before.

NOTES


93. +Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish mystic writer, 1688-1772. Return.




CHAPTER XXII.
“THE MINOR PEACE OF THE CHURCH”


Faithful to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy and the
impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to
anything that, as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him
strongly, Marius informed himself with much pains concerning the church
in Cecilia’s house; inclining at first to explain the peculiarities of
that place by the establishment there of the schola or common hall of
one of those burial-guilds, which then covered so much of the
unofficial, and, as it might be called, subterranean enterprise of
Roman society.

And what he found, thus looking, literally, for the dead among the
living, was the vision of a natural, a scrupulously natural, love,
transforming, by some new gift of insight into the truth of human
relationships, and under the urgency of some new motive by him so far
unfathomable, all the conditions of life. He saw, in all its primitive
freshness and amid the lively facts of its actual coming into the
world, as a reality of experience, that regenerate type of humanity,
which, centuries later, Giotto and his successors, down to the best and
purest days of the young Raphael, working under conditions very
friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an artistic ideal. He
felt there, felt amid the stirring of some wonderful new hope within
himself, the genius, the unique power of Christianity; in exercise
then, as it has been exercised ever since, in spite of many hindrances,
and under the most inopportune circumstances. Chastity,—as he seemed to
understand—the chastity of men and women, amid all the conditions, and
with the results, proper to such chastity, is the most beautiful thing
in the world and the truest conservation of that creative energy by
which men and women were first brought into it. The nature of the
family, for which the better genius of old Rome itself had sincerely
cared, of the family and its appropriate affections—all that love of
one’s kindred by which obviously one does triumph in some degree over
death—had never been so felt before. Here, surely! in its genial
warmth, its jealous exclusion of all that was opposed to it, to its own
immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set around the sacred thing on
every side, this development of the family did but carry forward, and
give effect to, the purposes, the kindness, of nature itself, friendly
to man. As if by way of a due recognition of some immeasurable divine
condescension manifest in a certain historic fact, its influence was
felt more especially at those points which demanded some sacrifice of
one’s self, for the weak, for the aged, for little children, and even
for the dead. And then, for its constant outward token, its significant
manner or index, it issued in a certain debonair grace, and a certain
mystic attractiveness, a courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that
famed Greek “blitheness,” or gaiety, or grace, in the handling of life,
had been, after all, an unrivalled success. Contrasting with the
incurable insipidity even of what was most exquisite in the higher
Roman life, of what was still truest to the primitive soul of goodness
amid its evil, the new creation he now looked on—as it were a picture
beyond the craft of any master of old pagan beauty—had indeed all the
appropriate freshness of a “bride adorned for her husband.” Things new
and old seemed to be coming as if out of some goodly treasure-house,
the brain full of science, the heart rich with various sentiment,
possessing withal this surprising healthfulness, this reality of heart.

“You would hardly believe,” writes Pliny,—to his own wife!—“what a
longing for you possesses me. Habit—that we have not been used to be
apart—adds herein to the primary force of affection. It is this keeps
me awake at night fancying I see you beside me. That is why my feet
take me unconsciously to your sitting-room at those hours when I was
wont to visit you there. That is why I turn from the door of the empty
chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like an excluded lover.”—

There, is a real idyll from that family life, the protection of which
had been the motive of so large a part of the religion of the Romans,
still surviving among them; as it survived also in Aurelius, his
disposition and aims, and, spite of slanderous tongues, in the attained
sweetness of his interior life. What Marius had been permitted to see
was a realisation of such life higher still: and with—Yes! with a more
effective sanction and motive than it had ever possessed before, in
that fact, or series of facts, to be ascertained by those who would.

The central glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had
attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by
cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went
straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and
appropriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching charity-sermons
on occasions of great public distress; its charity-children in long
file, in memory of the elder empress Faustina; its prototype, under
patronage of Aesculapius, of the modern hospital for the sick on the
island of Saint Bartholomew. But what pagan charity was doing tardily,
and as if with the painful calculation of old age, the church was
doing, almost without thinking about it, with all the liberal
enterprise of youth, because it was her very being thus to do. “You
fail to realise your own good intentions,” she seems to say, to pagan
virtue, pagan kindness. She identified herself with those intentions
and advanced them with an unparalleled freedom and largeness. The
gentle Seneca would have reverent burial provided even for the dead
body of a criminal. Yet when a certain woman collected for interment
the insulted remains of Nero, the pagan world surmised that she must be
a Christian: only a Christian would have been likely to conceive so
chivalrous a devotion towards mere wretchedness. “We refuse to be
witnesses even of a homicide commanded by the law,” boasts the dainty
conscience of a Christian apologist, “we take no part in your cruel
sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we hold that to
witness a murder is the same thing as to commit one.” And there was
another duty almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau brought back
to the degenerate society of a later age. In an impassioned discourse
the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle their own infants; and
there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers, which gratefully record
this proof of natural affection as a thing then unusual. In this matter
too, what a sanction, what a provocative to natural duty, lay in that
image discovered to Augustus by the Tiburtine Sibyl, amid the aurora of
a new age, the image of the Divine Mother and the Child, just then
rising upon the world like the dawn!

Christian belief, again, had presented itself as a great inspirer of
chastity. Chastity, in turn, realised in the whole scope of its
conditions, fortified that rehabilitation of peaceful labour, after the
mind, the pattern, of the workman of Galilee, which was another of the
natural instincts of the catholic church, as being indeed the
long-desired initiator of a religion of cheerfulness, as a true lover
of the industry—so to term it—the labour, the creation, of God.

And this severe yet genial assertion of the ideal of woman, of the
family, of industry, of man’s work in life, so close to the truth of
nature, was also, in that charmed hour of the minor “Peace of the
church,” realised as an influence tending to beauty, to the adornment
of life and the world. The sword in the world, the right eye plucked
out, the right hand cut off, the spirit of reproach which those images
express, and of which monasticism is the fulfilment, reflect one side
only of the nature of the divine missionary of the New Testament.
Opposed to, yet blent with, this ascetic or militant character, is the
function of the Good Shepherd, serene, blithe and debonair, beyond the
gentlest shepherd of Greek mythology; of a king under whom the beatific
vision is realised of a reign of peace—peace of heart—among men. Such
aspect of the divine character of Christ, rightly understood, is indeed
the final consummation of that bold and brilliant hopefulness in man’s
nature, which had sustained him so far through his immense labours, his
immense sorrows, and of which pagan gaiety in the handling of life, is
but a minor achievement. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, of those
two contrasted aspects of its Founder, have, in different ages and
under the urgency of different human needs, been at work also in the
Christian Church. Certainly, in that brief “Peace of the church” under
the Antonines, the spirit of a pastoral security and happiness seems to
have been largely expanded. There, in the early church of Rome, was to
be seen, and on sufficiently reasonable grounds, that satisfaction and
serenity on a dispassionate survey of the facts of life, which all
hearts had desired, though for the most part in vain, contrasting
itself for Marius, in particular, very forcibly, with the imperial
philosopher’s so heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy. It was
Christianity in its humanity, or even its humanism, in its generous
hopes for man, its common sense and alacrity of cheerful service, its
sympathy with all creatures, its appreciation of beauty and daylight.

“The angel of righteousness,” says the Shepherd of Hermas, the most
characteristic religious book of that age, its Pilgrim’s Progress—“the
angel of righteousness is modest and delicate and meek and quiet. Take
from thyself grief, for (as Hamlet will one day discover) ’tis the
sister of doubt and ill-temper. Grief is more evil than any other
spirit of evil, and is most dreadful to the servants of God, and beyond
all spirits destroyeth man. For, as when good news is come to one in
grief, straightway he forgetteth his former grief, and no longer
attendeth to anything except the good news which he hath heard, so do
ye, also! having received a renewal of your soul through the beholding
of these good things. Put on therefore gladness that hath always favour
before God, and is acceptable unto Him, and delight thyself in it; for
every man that is glad doeth the things that are good, and thinketh
good thoughts, despising grief.”—Such were the commonplaces of this new
people, among whom so much of what Marius had valued most in the old
world seemed to be under renewal and further promotion. Some
transforming spirit was at work to harmonise contrasts, to deepen
expression—a spirit which, in its dealing with the elements of ancient
life, was guided by a wonderful tact of selection, exclusion,
juxtaposition, begetting thereby a unique effect of freshness, a grave
yet wholesome beauty, because the world of sense, the whole outward
world was understood to set forth the veritable unction and royalty of
a certain priesthood and kingship of the soul within, among the
prerogatives of which was a delightful sense of freedom.

The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was,
had his visionary aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato’s
peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have
descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated
Christian poetry and art as they came to be under the influence of
Saint Francis of Assisi. But if he dreamed on one of those nights of
the beautiful house of Cecilia, its lights and flowers, of Cecilia
herself moving among the lilies, with an enhanced grace as happens
sometimes in healthy dreams, it was indeed hardly an anticipation. He
had lighted, by one of the peculiar intellectual good-fortunes of his
life, upon a period when, even more than in the days of austere ascêsis
which had preceded and were to follow it, the church was true for a
moment, truer perhaps than she would ever be again, to that element of
profound serenity in the soul of her Founder, which reflected the
eternal goodwill of God to man, “in whom,” according to the oldest
version of the angelic message, “He is well-pleased.”

For what Christianity did many centuries afterwards in the way of
informing an art, a poetry, of graver and higher beauty, we may think,
than that of Greek art and poetry at their best, was in truth
conformable to the original tendency of its genius. The genuine
capacity of the catholic church in this direction, discoverable from
the first in the New Testament, was also really at work, in that
earlier “Peace,” under the Antonines—the minor “Peace of the church,”
as we might call it, in distinction from the final “Peace of the
church,” commonly so called, under Constantine. Saint Francis, with his
following in the sphere of poetry and of the arts—the voice of Dante,
the hand of Giotto—giving visible feature and colour, and a palpable
place among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-establish a
continuity, only suspended in part by those troublous intervening
centuries—the “dark ages,” properly thus named—with the gracious spirit
of the primitive church, as manifested in that first early springtide
of her success. The greater “Peace” of Constantine, on the other hand,
in many ways, does but establish the exclusiveness, the puritanism, the
ascetic gloom which, in the period between Aurelius and the first
Christian emperor, characterised a church under misunderstanding or
oppression, driven back, in a world of tasteless controversy, inwards
upon herself.

Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time was gone by when men
became Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression, and
with all the disturbing results of such a crisis. At this period the
larger number, perhaps, had been born Christians, had been ever with
peaceful hearts in their “Father’s house.” That earlier belief in the
speedy coming of judgment and of the end of the world, with the
consequences it so naturally involved in the temper of men’s minds, was
dying out. Every day the contrast between the church and the world was
becoming less pronounced. And now also, as the church rested awhile
from opposition, that rapid self-development outward from within,
proper to times of peace, was in progress. Antoninus Pius, it might
seem, more truly even than Marcus Aurelius himself, was of that group
of pagan saints for whom Dante, like Augustine, has provided in his
scheme of the house with many mansions. A sincere old Roman piety had
urged his fortunately constituted nature to no mistakes, no offences
against humanity. And of his entire freedom from guile one reward had
been this singular happiness, that under his rule there was no shedding
of Christian blood. To him belonged that half-humorous placidity of
soul, of a kind illustrated later very effectively by Montaigne, which,
starting with an instinct of mere fairness towards human nature and the
world, seems at last actually to qualify its possessor to be almost the
friend of the people of Christ. Amiable, in its own nature, and full of
a reasonable gaiety, Christianity has often had its advantage of
characters such as that. The geniality of Antoninus Pius, like the
geniality of the earth itself, had permitted the church, as being in
truth no alien from that old mother earth, to expand and thrive for a
season as by natural process. And that charmed period under the
Antonines, extending to the later years of the reign of Aurelius
(beautiful, brief, chapter of ecclesiastical history!), contains, as
one of its motives of interest, the earliest development of Christian
ritual under the presidence of the church of Rome.

Again as in one of those mystical, quaint visions of the Shepherd of
Hermas, “the aged woman was become by degrees more and more youthful.
And in the third vision she was quite young, and radiant with beauty:
only her hair was that of an aged woman. And at the last she was
joyous, and seated upon a throne—seated upon a throne, because her
position is a strong one.” The subterranean worship of the church
belonged properly to those years of her early history in which it was
illegal for her to worship at all. But, hiding herself for awhile as
conflict grew violent, she resumed, when there was felt to be no more
than ordinary risk, her natural freedom. And the kind of outward
prosperity she was enjoying in those moments of her first “Peace,” her
modes of worship now blossoming freely above-ground, was re-inforced by
the decision at this point of a crisis in her internal history.

In the history of the church, as throughout the moral history of
mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either of which it is possible
to maintain—two conceptions, under one or the other of which we may
represent to ourselves men’s efforts towards a better
life—corresponding to those two contrasted aspects, noted above, as
discernible in the picture afforded by the New Testament itself of the
character of Christ. The ideal of asceticism represents moral effort as
essentially a sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of human nature to
another, that it may live the more completely in what survives of it;
while the ideal of culture represents it as a harmonious development of
all the parts of human nature, in just proportion to each other. It was
to the latter order of ideas that the church, and especially the church
of Rome in the age of the Antonines, freely lent herself. In that
earlier “Peace” she had set up for herself the ideal of spiritual
development, under the guidance of an instinct by which, in those
serene moments, she was absolutely true to the peaceful soul of her
Founder. “Goodwill to men,” she said, “in whom God Himself is
well-pleased!” For a little while, at least, there was no forced
opposition between the soul and the body, the world and the spirit, and
the grace of graciousness itself was pre-eminently with the people of
Christ. Tact, good sense, ever the note of a true orthodoxy, the
merciful compromises of the church, indicative of her imperial vocation
in regard to all the varieties of human kind, with a universality of
which the old Roman pastorship she was superseding is but a prototype,
was already become conspicuous, in spite of a discredited, irritating,
vindictive society, all around her.

Against that divine urbanity and moderation the old error of Montanus
we read of dimly, was a fanatical revolt—sour, falsely anti-mundane,
ever with an air of ascetic affectation, and a bigoted distaste in
particular for all the peculiar graces of womanhood. By it the desire
to please was understood to come of the author of evil. In this
interval of quietness, it was perhaps inevitable, by the law of
reaction, that some such extravagances of the religious temper should
arise. But again the church of Rome, now becoming every day more and
more completely the capital of the Christian world, checked the nascent
Montanism, or puritanism of the moment, vindicating for all Christian
people a cheerful liberty of heart, against many a narrow group of
sectaries, all alike, in their different ways, accusers of the genial
creation of God. With her full, fresh faith in the Evangele—in a
veritable regeneration of the earth and the body, in the dignity of
man’s entire personal being—for a season, at least, at that critical
period in the development of Christianity, she was for reason, for
common sense, for fairness to human nature, and generally for what may
be called the naturalness of Christianity.—As also for its comely
order: she would be “brought to her king in raiment of needlework.” It
was by the bishops of Rome, diligently transforming themselves, in the
true catholic sense, into universal pastors, that the path of what we
must call humanism was thus defined.

And then, in this hour of expansion, as if now at last the catholic
church might venture to show her outward lineaments as they really
were, worship—“the beauty of holiness,” nay! the elegance of
sanctity—was developed, with a bold and confident gladness, the like of
which has hardly been the ideal of worship in any later age. The tables
in fact were turned: the prize of a cheerful temper on a candid survey
of life was no longer with the pagan world. The æsthetic charm of the
catholic church, her evocative power over all that is eloquent and
expressive in the better mind of man, her outward comeliness, her
dignifying convictions about human nature:—all this, as abundantly
realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by the great medieval
church-builders, by the great ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the
masters of sacred music in the middle age—we may see already, in dim
anticipation, in those charmed moments towards the end of the second
century. Dissipated or turned aside, partly through the fatal mistake
of Marcus Aurelius himself, for a brief space of time we may discern
that influence clearly predominant there. What might seem harsh as
dogma was already justifying itself as worship; according to the sound
rule: Lex orandi, lex credendi—Our Creeds are but the brief abstract of
our prayer and song.

The wonderful liturgical spirit of the church, her wholly unparalleled
genius for worship, being thus awake, she was rapidly re-organising
both pagan and Jewish elements of ritual, for the expanding therein of
her own new heart of devotion. Like the institutions of monasticism,
like the Gothic style of architecture, the ritual system of the church,
as we see it in historic retrospect, ranks as one of the great,
conjoint, and (so to term them) necessary, products of human mind.
Destined for ages to come, to direct with so deep a fascination men’s
religious instincts, it was then already recognisable as a new and
precious fact in the sum of things. What has been on the whole the
method of the church, as “a power of sweetness and patience,” in
dealing with matters like pagan art, pagan literature was even then
manifest; and has the character of the moderation, the divine
moderation of Christ himself. It was only among the ignorant, indeed,
only in the “villages,” that Christianity, even in conscious triumph
over paganism, was really betrayed into iconoclasm. In the final
“Peace” of the Church under Constantine, while there was plenty of
destructive fanaticism in the country, the revolution was accomplished
in the larger towns, in a manner more orderly and discreet—in the Roman
manner. The faithful were bent less on the destruction of the old pagan
temples than on their conversion to a new and higher use; and, with
much beautiful furniture ready to hand, they became Christian
sanctuaries.

Already, in accordance with such maturer wisdom, the church of the
“Minor Peace” had adopted many of the graces of pagan feeling and pagan
custom; as being indeed a living creature, taking up, transforming,
accommodating still more closely to the human heart what of right
belonged to it. In this way an obscure synagogue was expanded into the
catholic church. Gathering, from a richer and more varied field of
sound than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies, some notes
of which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after generations of
interrupted development, formed into the Gregorian music, she was
already, as we have heard, the house of song—of a wonderful new music
and poesy. As if in anticipation of the sixteenth century, the church
was becoming “humanistic,” in an earlier, and unimpeachable
Renaissance. Singing there had been in abundance from the first; though
often it dared only be “of the heart.” And it burst forth, when it
might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical music; the Jewish
psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now, gradually, from
Greek into Latin—broken Latin, into Italian, as the ritual use of the
rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the earlier authorised
language of the Church. Through certain surviving remnants of Greek in
the later Latin liturgies, we may still discern a highly interesting
intermediate phase of ritual development, when the Greek and the Latin
were in combination; the poor, surely!—the poor and the children of
that liberal Roman church—responding already in their own “vulgar
tongue,” to an office said in the original, liturgical Greek. That hymn
sung in the early morning, of which Pliny had heard, was kindling into
the service of the Mass.

The Mass, indeed, would appear to have been said continuously from the
Apostolic age. Its details, as one by one they become visible in later
history, have already the character of what is ancient and venerable.
“We are very old, and ye are young!” they seem to protest, to those who
fail to understand them. Ritual, in fact, like all other elements of
religion, must grow and cannot be made—grow by the same law of
development which prevails everywhere else, in the moral as in the
physical world. As regards this special phase of the religious life,
however, such development seems to have been unusually rapid in the
subterranean age which preceded Constantine; and in the very first days
of the final triumph of the church the Mass emerges to general view
already substantially complete. “Wisdom” was dealing, as with the dust
of creeds and philosophies, so also with the dust of outworn religious
usage, like the very spirit of life itself, organising soul and body
out of the lime and clay of the earth. In a generous eclecticism,
within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power
within her, she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other matters so
in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various sources—Gnostic,
Jewish, Pagan—to adorn and beautify the greatest act of worship the
world has seen. It was thus the liturgy of the church came to be—full
of consolations for the human soul, and destined, surely! one day,
under the sanction of so many ages of human experience, to take
exclusive possession of the religious consciousness.

TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM VENEREMUR CERNUI:
ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
NOVO CEDAT RITUI.




CHAPTER XXIII.
DIVINE SERVICE.


“Wisdom hath builded herself a house: she hath mingled her wine: she
hath also prepared for herself a table.”


The more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present instances of
the summing up of an entire world of complex associations under some
single form, like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of frescoes which
commemorate The Acts of Saint Francis, at Assisi, or like the play of
Hamlet or Faust. It was not in an image, or series of images, yet still
in a sort of dramatic action, and with the unity of a single appeal to
eye and ear, that Marius about this time found all his new impressions
set forth, regarding what he had already recognised, intellectually, as
for him at least the most beautiful thing in the world.

To understand the influence upon him of what follows the reader must
remember that it was an experience which came amid a deep sense of
vacuity in life. The fairest products of the earth seemed to be
dropping to pieces, as if in men’s very hands, around him. How real was
their sorrow, and his! “His observation of life” had come to be like
the constant telling of a sorrowful rosary, day after day; till, as if
taking infection from the cloudy sorrow of the mind, the eye also, the
very senses, were grown faint and sick. And now it happened as with the
actual morning on which he found himself a spectator of this new thing.
The long winter had been a season of unvarying sullenness. At last, on
this day he awoke with a sharp flash of lightning in the earliest
twilight: in a little while the heavy rain had filtered the air: the
clear light was abroad; and, as though the spring had set in with a
sudden leap in the heart of things, the whole scene around him lay like
some untarnished picture beneath a sky of delicate blue. Under the
spell of his late depression, Marius had suddenly determined to leave
Rome for a while. But desiring first to advertise Cornelius of his
movements, and failing to find him in his lodgings, he had ventured,
still early in the day, to seek him in the Cecilian villa. Passing
through its silent and empty court-yard he loitered for a moment, to
admire. Under the clear but immature light of winter morning after a
storm, all the details of form and colour in the old marbles were
distinctly visible, and with a kind of severity or sadness—so it struck
him—amid their beauty: in them, and in all other details of the
scene—the cypresses, the bunches of pale daffodils in the grass, the
curves of the purple hills of Tusculum, with the drifts of virgin snow
still lying in their hollows.

The little open door, through which he passed from the court-yard,
admitted him into what was plainly the vast Lararium, or domestic
sanctuary, of the Cecilian family, transformed in many particulars, but
still richly decorated, and retaining much of its ancient furniture in
metal-work and costly stone. The peculiar half-light of dawn seemed to
be lingering beyond its hour upon the solemn marble walls; and here,
though at that moment in absolute silence, a great company of people
was assembled. In that brief period of peace, during which the church
emerged for awhile from her jealously-guarded subterranean life, the
rigour of an earlier rule of exclusion had been relaxed. And so it came
to pass that, on this morning Marius saw for the first time the
wonderful spectacle—wonderful, especially, in its evidential power over
himself, over his own thoughts—of those who believe.

There were noticeable, among those present, great varieties of rank, of
age, of personal type. The Roman ingenuus, with the white toga and gold
ring, stood side by side with his slave; and the air of the whole
company was, above all, a grave one, an air of recollection. Coming
thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so entirely united, in a
silence so profound, for purposes unknown to him, Marius felt for a
moment as if he had stumbled by chance upon some great conspiracy. Yet
that could scarcely be, for the people here collected might have
figured as the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new world, from the
very face of which discontent had passed away. Corresponding to the
variety of human type there present, was the various expression of
every form of human sorrow assuaged. What desire, what fulfilment of
desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features of these ranks of
aged men and women of humble condition? Those young men, bent down so
discreetly on the details of their sacred service, had faced life and
were glad, by some science, or light of knowledge they had, to which
there had certainly been no parallel in the older world. Was some
credible message from beyond “the flaming rampart of the world”—a
message of hope, regarding the place of men’s souls and their interest
in the sum of things—already moulding anew their very bodies, and
looks, and voices, now and here? At least, there was a cleansing and
kindling flame at work in them, which seemed to make everything else
Marius had ever known look comparatively vulgar and mean. There were
the children, above all—troops of children—reminding him of those
pathetic children’s graves, like cradles or garden- beds, he had
noticed in his first visit to these places; and they more than
satisfied the odd curiosity he had then conceived about them, wondering
in what quaintly expressive forms they might come forth into the
daylight, if awakened from sleep. Children of the Catacombs, some but
“a span long,” with features not so much beautiful as heroic (that
world of new, refining sentiment having set its seal even on
childhood), they retained certainly no stain or trace of anything
subterranean this morning, in the alacrity of their worship—as ready as
if they had been at play—stretching forth their hands, crying, chanting
in a resonant voice, and with boldly upturned faces, Christe Eleison!

For the silence—silence, amid those lights of early morning to which
Marius had always been constitutionally impressible, as having in them
a certain reproachful austerity—was broken suddenly by resounding cries
of Kyrie Eleison! Christe Eleison! repeated alternately, again and
again, until the bishop, rising from his chair, made sign that this
prayer should cease. But the voices burst out once more presently, in
richer and more varied melody, though still of an antiphonal character;
the men, the women and children, the deacons, the people, answering one
another, somewhat after the manner of a Greek chorus. But again with
what a novelty of poetic accent; what a genuine expansion of heart;
what profound intimations for the intellect, as the meaning of the
words grew upon him! Cum grandi affectu et compunctione dicatur—says an
ancient eucharistic order; and certainly, the mystic tone of this
praying and singing was one with the expression of deliverance, of
grateful assurance and sincerity, upon the faces of those assembled. As
if some searching correction, a regeneration of the body by the spirit,
had begun, and was already gone a great way, the countenances of men,
women, and children alike had a brightness on them which he could fancy
reflected upon himself—an amenity, a mystic amiability and unction,
which found its way most readily of all to the hearts of children
themselves. The religious poetry of those Hebrew psalms—Benedixisti
Domine terram tuam: Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede a dextris meis—was
certainly in marvellous accord with the lyrical instinct of his own
character. Those august hymns, he thought, must thereafter ever remain
by him as among the well-tested powers in things to soothe and fortify
the soul. One could never grow tired of them!

In the old pagan worship there had been little to call the
understanding into play. Here, on the other hand, the utterance, the
eloquence, the music of worship conveyed, as Marius readily understood,
a fact or series of facts, for intellectual reception. That became
evident, more especially, in those lessons, or sacred readings, which,
like the singing, in broken vernacular Latin, occurred at certain
intervals, amid the silence of the assembly. There were readings, again
with bursts of chanted invocation between for fuller light on a
difficult path, in which many a vagrant voice of human philosophy,
haunting men’s minds from of old, recurred with clearer accent than had
ever belonged to it before, as if lifted, above its first intention,
into the harmonies of some supreme system of knowledge or doctrine, at
length complete. And last of all came a narrative which, with a
thousand tender memories, every one appeared to know by heart,
displaying, in all the vividness of a picture for the eye, the mournful
figure of him towards whom this whole act of worship still consistently
turned—a figure which seemed to have absorbed, like some rich tincture
in his garment, all that was deep-felt and impassioned in the
experiences of the past.

It was the anniversary of his birth as a little child they celebrated
to-day. Astiterunt reges terrae: so the Gradual, the “Song of Degrees,”
proceeded, the young men on the steps of the altar responding in deep,
clear, antiphon or chorus—

Astiterunt reges terrae—
Adversus sanctum puerum tuum, Jesum:
Nunc, Domine, da servis tuis loqui verbum tuum—
Et signa fieri, per nomen sancti pueri Jesu.


And the proper action of the rite itself, like a half-opened book to be
read by the duly initiated mind took up those suggestions, and carried
them forward into the present, as having reference to a power still
efficacious, still after some mystic sense even now in action among the
people there assembled. The entire office, indeed, with its interchange
of lessons, hymns, prayer, silence, was itself like a single piece of
highly composite, dramatic music; a “song of degrees,” rising steadily
to a climax. Notwithstanding the absence of any central image visible
to the eye, the entire ceremonial process, like the place in which it
was enacted, was weighty with symbolic significance, seemed to express
a single leading motive. The mystery, if such in fact it was, centered
indeed in the actions of one visible person, distinguished among the
assistants, who stood ranged in semicircle around him, by the extreme
fineness of his white vestments, and the pointed cap with the golden
ornaments upon his head.

Nor had Marius ever seen the pontifical character, as he conceived
it—sicut unguentum in capite, descendens in oram vestimenti—so fully
realised, as in the expression, the manner and voice, of this novel
pontiff, as he took his seat on the white chair placed for him by the
young men, and received his long staff into his hand, or moved his
hands—hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious
power—at the Lavabo, or at the various benedictions, or to bless
certain objects on the table before him, chanting in cadence of a grave
sweetness the leading parts of the rite. What profound unction and
mysticity! The solemn character of the singing was at its height when
he opened his lips. Like some new sort of rhapsôdos, it was for the
moment as if he alone possessed the words of the office, and they
flowed anew from some permanent source of inspiration within him. The
table or altar at which he presided, below a canopy on delicate spiral
columns, was in fact the tomb of a youthful “witness,” of the family of
the Cecilii, who had shed his blood not many years before, and whose
relics were still in this place. It was for his sake the bishop put his
lips so often to the surface before him; the regretful memory of that
death entwining itself, though not without certain notes of triumph, as
a matter of special inward significance, throughout a service, which
was, before all else, from first to last, a commemoration of the dead.

A sacrifice also,—a sacrifice, it might seem, like the most primitive,
the most natural and enduringly significant of old pagan sacrifices, of
the simplest fruits of the earth. And in connexion with this
circumstance again, as in the actual stones of the building so in the
rite itself, what Marius observed was not so much new matter as a new
spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many observances not
witnessed for the first time to-day. Men and women came to the altar
successively, in perfect order, and deposited below the lattice-work of
pierced white marble, their baskets of wheat and grapes, incense, oil
for the sanctuary lamps; bread and wine especially—pure wheaten bread,
the pure white wine of the Tusculan vineyards. There was here a
veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the earth’s gifts, of
old dead and dark matter itself, now in some way redeemed at last, of
all that we can touch or see, in the midst of a jaded world that had
lost the true sense of such things, and in strong contrast to the wise
emperor’s renunciant and impassive attitude towards them. Certain
portions of that bread and wine were taken into the bishop’s hands; and
thereafter, with an increasing mysticity and effusion the rite
proceeded. Still in a strain of inspired supplication, the antiphonal
singing developed, from this point, into a kind of dialogue between the
chief minister and the whole assisting company—

SURSUM CORDA!
HABEMUS AD DOMINUM.
GRATIAS AGAMUS DOMINO DEO NOSTRO!—


It might have been thought the business, the duty or service of young
men more particularly, as they stood there in long ranks, and in severe
and simple vesture of the purest white—a service in which they would
seem to be flying for refuge, as with their precious, their treacherous
and critical youth in their hands, to one—Yes! one like themselves, who
yet claimed their worship, a worship, above all, in the way of
Aurelius, in the way of imitation. Adoramus te Christe, quia per crucem
tuam redemisti mundum!—they cry together. So deep is the emotion that
at moments it seems to Marius as if some there present apprehend that
prayer prevails, that the very object of this pathetic crying himself
draws near. From the first there had been the sense, an increasing
assurance, of one coming:—actually with them now, according to the
oft-repeated affirmation or petition, Dominus vobiscum! Some at least
were quite sure of it; and the confidence of this remnant fired the
hearts, and gave meaning to the bold, ecstatic worship, of all the rest
about them.

Prompted especially by the suggestions of that mysterious old Jewish
psalmody, so new to him—lesson and hymn—and catching therewith a
portion of the enthusiasm of those beside him, Marius could discern
dimly, behind the solemn recitation which now followed, at once a
narrative and a prayer, the most touching image truly that had ever
come within the scope of his mental or physical gaze. It was the image
of a young man giving up voluntarily, one by one, for the greatest of
ends, the greatest gifts; actually parting with himself, above all,
with the serenity, the divine serenity, of his own soul; yet from the
midst of his desolation crying out upon the greatness of his success,
as if foreseeing this very worship.* As centre of the supposed facts
which for these people were become so constraining a motive of
hopefulness, of activity, that image seemed to display itself with an
overwhelming claim on human gratitude. What Saint Lewis of France
discerned, and found so irresistibly touching, across the dimness of
many centuries, as a painful thing done for love of him by one he had
never seen, was to them almost as a thing of yesterday; and their
hearts were whole with it. It had the force, among their interests, of
an almost recent event in the career of one whom their fathers’ fathers
might have known. From memories so sublime, yet so close at hand, had
the narrative descended in which these acts of worship centered; though
again the names of some more recently dead were mingled in it. And it
seemed as if the very dead were aware; to be stirring beneath the slabs
of the sepulchres which lay so near, that they might associate
themselves to this enthusiasm—to this exalted worship of Jesus.

* Psalm xxii. 22-31.


One by one, at last, the faithful approach to receive from the chief
minister morsels of the great, white, wheaten cake, he had taken into
his hands—Perducat vos ad vitam aeternam! he prays, half-silently, as
they depart again, after discreet embraces. The Eucharist of those
early days was, even more entirely than at any later or happier time,
an act of thanksgiving; and while the remnants of the feast are borne
away for the reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the rite
reaches its highest point in the singing of a hymn: a hymn like the
spontaneous product of two opposed militant companies, contending
accordantly together, heightening, accumulating, their witness,
provoking one another’s worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry.

Ite! Missa est!—cried the young deacons: and Marius departed from that
strange scene along with the rest. What was it?—Was it this made the
way of Cornelius so pleasant through the world? As for Marius
himself,—the natural soul of worship in him had at last been satisfied
as never before. He felt, as he left that place, that he must hereafter
experience often a longing memory, a kind of thirst, for all this, over
again. And it seemed moreover to define what he must require of the
powers, whatsoever they might be, that had brought him into the world
at all, to make him not unhappy in it.




CHAPTER XXIV.
A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINARY


In cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says Pliny—studia
hilaritate proveniunt. It was still the habit of Marius, encouraged by
his experience that sleep is not only a sedative but the best of
stimulants, to seize the morning hours for creation, making profit when
he might of the wholesome serenity which followed a dreamless night.
“The morning for creation,” he would say; “the afternoon for the
perfecting labour of the file; the evening for reception—the reception
of matter from without one, of other men’s words and thoughts—matter
for our own dreams, or the merely mechanic exercise of the brain,
brooding thereon silently, in its dark chambers.” To leave home early
in the day was therefore a rare thing for him. He was induced so to do
on the occasion of a visit to Rome of the famous writer Lucian, whom he
had been bidden to meet. The breakfast over, he walked away with the
learned guest, having offered to be his guide to the lecture-room of a
well-known Greek rhetorician and expositor of the Stoic philosophy, a
teacher then much in fashion among the studious youth of Rome. On
reaching the place, however, they found the doors closed, with a slip
of writing attached, which proclaimed “a holiday”; and the morning
being a fine one, they walked further, along the Appian Way. Mortality,
with which the Queen of Ways—in reality the favourite cemetery of
Rome—was so closely crowded, in every imaginable form of sepulchre,
from the tiniest baby-house, to the massive monument out of which the
Middle Age would adapt a fortress-tower, might seem, on a morning like
this, to be “smiling through tears.” The flower-stalls just beyond the
city gates presented to view an array of posies and garlands, fresh
enough for a wedding. At one and another of them groups of persons,
gravely clad, were making their bargains before starting for some
perhaps distant spot on the highway, to keep a dies rosationis, this
being the time of roses, at the grave of a deceased relation. Here and
there, a funeral procession was slowly on its way, in weird contrast to
the gaiety of the hour.

The two companions, of course, read the epitaphs as they strolled
along. In one, reminding them of the poet’s—Si lacrimae prosunt, visis
te ostende videri!—a woman prayed that her lost husband might visit her
dreams. Their characteristic note, indeed, was an imploring cry, still
to be sought after by the living. “While I live,” such was the promise
of a lover to his dead mistress, “you will receive this homage: after
my death,—who can tell?”—post mortem nescio. “If ghosts, my sons, do
feel anything after death, my sorrow will be lessened by your frequent
coming to me here!” “This is a privileged tomb; to my family and
descendants has been conceded the right of visiting this place as often
as they please.” “This is an eternal habitation; here lie I; here I
shall lie for ever.” “Reader! if you doubt that the soul survives, make
your oblation and a prayer for me; and you shall understand!”

The elder of the two readers, certainly, was little affected by those
pathetic suggestions. It was long ago that after visiting the banks of
the Padus, where he had sought in vain for the poplars (sisters of
Phaethon erewhile) whose tears became amber, he had once for all
arranged for himself a view of the world exclusive of all reference to
what might lie beyond its “flaming barriers.” And at the age of sixty
he had no misgivings. His elegant and self-complacent but far from
unamiable scepticism, long since brought to perfection, never failed
him. It surrounded him, as some are surrounded by a magic ring of fine
aristocratic manners, with “a rampart,” through which he himself never
broke, nor permitted any thing or person to break upon him. Gay,
animated, content with his old age as it was, the aged student still
took a lively interest in studious youth.—Could Marius inform him of
any such, now known to him in Rome? What did the young men learn, just
then? and how?

In answer, Marius became fluent concerning the promise of one young
student, the son, as it presently appeared, of parents of whom Lucian
himself knew something: and soon afterwards the lad was seen coming
along briskly—a lad with gait and figure well enough expressive of the
sane mind in the healthy body, though a little slim and worn of
feature, and with a pair of eyes expressly designed, it might seem, for
fine glancings at the stars. At the sight of Marius he paused suddenly,
and with a modest blush on recognising his companion, who straightway
took with the youth, so prettily enthusiastic, the freedom of an old
friend.

In a few moments the three were seated together, immediately above the
fragrant borders of a rose-farm, on the marble bench of one of the
exhedrae for the use of foot-passengers at the roadside, from which
they could overlook the grand, earnest prospect of the Campagna, and
enjoy the air. Fancying that the lad’s plainly written enthusiasm had
induced in the elder speaker somewhat more fervour than was usual with
him, Marius listened to the conversation which follows.—

“Ah! Hermotimus! Hurrying to lecture! —if I may judge by your pace, and
that volume in your hand. You were thinking hard as you came along,
moving your lips and waving your arms. Some fine speech you were
pondering, some knotty question, some viewy doctrine—not to be idle for
a moment, to be making progress in philosophy, even on your way to the
schools. To-day, however, you need go no further. We read a notice at
the schools that there would be no lecture. Stay therefore, and talk
awhile with us.

—With pleasure, Lucian.—Yes! I was ruminating yesterday’s conference.
One must not lose a moment. Life is short and art is long! And it was
of the art of medicine, that was first said—a thing so much easier than
divine philosophy, to which one can hardly attain in a lifetime, unless
one be ever wakeful, ever on the watch. And here the hazard is no
little one:—By the attainment of a true philosophy to attain happiness;
or, having missed both, to perish, as one of the vulgar herd.

—The prize is a great one, Hermotimus! and you must needs be near it,
after these months of toil, and with that scholarly pallor of yours.
Unless, indeed, you have already laid hold upon it, and kept us in the
dark.

—How could that be, Lucian? Happiness, as Hesiod says, abides very far
hence; and the way to it is long and steep and rough. I see myself
still at the beginning of my journey; still but at the mountain’s foot.
I am trying with all my might to get forward. What I need is a hand,
stretched out to help me.

—And is not the master sufficient for that? Could he not, like Zeus in
Homer, let down to you, from that high place, a golden cord, to draw
you up thither, to himself and to that Happiness, to which he ascended
so long ago?

—The very point, Lucian! Had it depended on him I should long ago have
been caught up. ’Tis I, am wanting.

—Well! keep your eye fixed on the journey’s end, and that happiness
there above, with confidence in his goodwill.

—Ah! there are many who start cheerfully on the journey and proceed a
certain distance, but lose heart when they light on the obstacles of
the way. Only, those who endure to the end do come to the mountain’s
top, and thereafter live in Happiness:—live a wonderful manner of life,
seeing all other people from that great height no bigger than tiny
ants.

—What little fellows you make of us—less than the pygmies—down in the
dust here. Well! we, ‘the vulgar herd,’ as we creep along, will not
forget you in our prayers, when you are seated up there above the
clouds, whither you have been so long hastening. But tell me,
Hermotimus!—when do you expect to arrive there?

—Ah! that I know not. In twenty years, perhaps, I shall be really on
the summit.—A great while! you think. But then, again, the prize I
contend for is a great one.

—Perhaps! But as to those twenty years—that you will live so long. Has
the master assured you of that? Is he a prophet as well as a
philosopher? For I suppose you would not endure all this, upon a mere
chance—toiling day and night, though it might happen that just ere the
last step, Destiny seized you by the foot and plucked you thence, with
your hope still unfulfilled.

—Hence, with these ill-omened words, Lucian! Were I to survive but for
a day, I should be happy, having once attained wisdom.

—How?—Satisfied with a single day, after all those labours?

—Yes! one blessed moment were enough!

—But again, as you have never been, how know you that happiness is to
be had up there, at all—the happiness that is to make all this worth
while?

—I believe what the master tells me. Of a certainty he knows, being now
far above all others.

—And what was it he told you about it? Is it riches, or glory, or some
indescribable pleasure?

—Hush! my friend! All those are nothing in comparison of the life
there.

—What, then, shall those who come to the end of this discipline—what
excellent thing shall they receive, if not these?

—Wisdom, the absolute goodness and the absolute beauty, with the sure
and certain knowledge of all things—how they are. Riches and glory and
pleasure—whatsoever belongs to the body—they have cast from them:
stripped bare of all that, they mount up, even as Hercules, consumed in
the fire, became a god. He too cast aside all that he had of his
earthly mother, and bearing with him the divine element, pure and
undefiled, winged his way to heaven from the discerning flame. Even so
do they, detached from all that others prize, by the burning fire of a
true philosophy, ascend to the highest degree of happiness.

—Strange! And do they never come down again from the heights to help
those whom they left below? Must they, when they be once come thither,
there remain for ever, laughing, as you say, at what other men prize?

—More than that! They whose initiation is entire are subject no longer
to anger, fear, desire, regret. Nay! They scarcely feel at all.

—Well! as you have leisure to-day, why not tell an old friend in what
way you first started on your philosophic journey? For, if I might, I
should like to join company with you from this very day.

—If you be really willing, Lucian! you will learn in no long time your
advantage over all other people. They will seem but as children, so far
above them will be your thoughts.

—Well! Be you my guide! It is but fair. But tell me—Do you allow
learners to contradict, if anything is said which they don’t think
right?

—No, indeed! Still, if you wish, oppose your questions. In that way you
will learn more easily.

—Let me know, then—Is there one only way which leads to a true
philosophy—your own way—the way of the Stoics: or is it true, as I have
heard, that there are many ways of approaching it?

—Yes! Many ways! There are the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, and those
who call themselves after Plato: there are the enthusiasts for
Diogenes, and Antisthenes, and the followers of Pythagoras, besides
others.

—It was true, then. But again, is what they say the same or different?

—Very different.

—Yet the truth, I conceive, would be one and the same, from all of
them. Answer me then—In what, or in whom, did you confide when you
first betook yourself to philosophy, and seeing so many doors open to
you, passed them all by and went in to the Stoics, as if there alone
lay the way of truth? What token had you? Forget, please, all you are
to-day—half-way, or more, on the philosophic journey: answer me as you
would have done then, a mere outsider as I am now.

—Willingly! It was there the great majority went! ’Twas by that I
judged it to be the better way.

—A majority how much greater than the Epicureans, the Platonists, the
Peripatetics? You, doubtless, counted them respectively, as with the
votes in a scrutiny.

—No! But this was not my only motive. I heard it said by every one that
the Epicureans were soft and voluptuous, the Peripatetics avaricious
and quarrelsome, and Plato’s followers puffed up with pride. But of the
Stoics, not a few pronounced that they were true men, that they knew
everything, that theirs was the royal road, the one road, to wealth, to
wisdom, to all that can be desired.

—Of course those who said this were not themselves Stoics: you would
not have believed them—still less their opponents. They were the
vulgar, therefore.

—True! But you must know that I did not trust to others exclusively. I
trusted also to myself—to what I saw. I saw the Stoics going through
the world after a seemly manner, neatly clad, never in excess, always
collected, ever faithful to the mean which all pronounce ‘golden.’

—You are trying an experiment on me. You would fain see how far you can
mislead me as to your real ground. The kind of probation you describe
is applicable, indeed, to works of art, which are rightly judged by
their appearance to the eye. There is something in the comely form, the
graceful drapery, which tells surely of the hand of Pheidias or
Alcamenes. But if philosophy is to be judged by outward appearances,
what would become of the blind man, for instance, unable to observe the
attire and gait of your friends the 

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