MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE

WALTER HORATIO PATER

London: 1910. (The Library Edition. )

NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a style inconvenientin an electronic edition. I have therefore placed an asteriskimmediately after each of Pater's footnotes and a + sign after my ownnotes, and have listed each chapter's notes at that chapter's end. 

Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, Ihave transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed numeralsuch as [22] indicates that the material immediately following thenumber marks the beginning of the relevant page. I have preservedparagraph structure except for first-line indentation. 

Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-textdoes not require line-end or page-end hyphenation. 

Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliteratedPater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it can be viewed at my site, http://www. Ajdrake. Com/etexts, aVictorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Paterand many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions. 

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE WALTER PATER

 Cheimerinos oneiros, hote mêkistai hai vyktes. +

 +"A winter's dream, when nights are longest. " Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3. 

CONTENTS

 PART THE FIRST

 1. "The Religion of Numa": 3-12 2. White-Nights: 13-26 3. Change of Air: 27-42 4. The Tree of Knowledge: 43-54 5. The Golden Book: 55-91 6. Euphuism: 92-110 7. A Pagan End: 111-120

 PART THE SECOND

 8. Animula Vagula: 123-143 9. New Cyrenaicism: 144-157 10. On the Way: 158-171 11. "The Most Religious City in the World": 172-187 12. "The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King": 188-211 13. The "Mistress and Mother" of Palaces: 212-229 14. Manly Amusement: 230-243

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE

PART THE FIRST

CHAPTER I: "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"

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

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

[4] --he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one ofhis elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the childRomulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar; and theworthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of theyoung men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of thehearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentimentrather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite thingsand places--the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashionedby weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!--it was in natural harmony withthe temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, likethat simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expresslyconnects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the oldwooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely littleshrines. 

And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his goldenimage of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (nowabout to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the worldwould at last find itself [5] happy, could it detach some reluctantphilosophic student from the more desirable life of celestialcontemplation, and compel him to rule it), there was a boy living in anold country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for himself, recruitedthat body of antique traditions by a spontaneous force of religiousveneration such as had originally called them into being. More than acentury and a half had past since Tibullus had written; but therestoration of religious usages, and their retention where they stillsurvived, was meantime come to be the fashion through the influence ofimperial example; and what had been in the main a matter of familypride with his father, was sustained by a native instinct of devotionin the young Marius. A sense of conscious powers external toourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of everycircumstance of daily life--that conscience, of which the old Romanreligion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him apowerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partlypuritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highlyin a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of theRoman lad, as he passed the spot, "touched of heaven, " where thelightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an uprightstone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place. Hebrought to that system of symbolic [6] usages, and they in turndeveloped in him further, a great seriousness--an impressibility to thesacredness of time, of life and its events, and the circumstances offamily fellowship; of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, fromlabour on which they live, really understood by him as gifts--a senseof religious responsibility in the reception of them. It was areligion for the most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of ayear-long burden of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, forinstance) the thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcomechannel for the almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, andrelieved it as gratitude to the gods. 

The day of the "little" or private Ambarvalia was come, to becelebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belonging to it, as the great college of the Arval Brothers officiated at Rome in theinterest of the whole state. At the appointed time all work ceases;the instruments of labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers, while masters and servants together go in solemn procession along thedry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims whose bloodis presently to be shed for the purification from all natural orsupernatural taint of the lands they have "gone about. " The old Latinwords of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved on its way, though their precise meaning was long [7] since become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient illuminated roll, kept in the paintedchest in the hall, together with the family records. Early on that daythe girls of the farm had been busy in the great portico, filling largebaskets with flowers plucked short from branches of apple and cherry, then in spacious bloom, to strew before the quaint images of thegods--Ceres and Bacchus and the yet more mysterious Dea Dia--as theypassed through the fields, carried in their little houses on theshoulders of white-clad youths, who were understood to proceed to thisoffice in perfect temperance, as pure in soul and body as the air theybreathed in the firm weather of that early summer-time. The cleanlustral water and the full incense-box were carried after them. Thealtars were gay with garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort ofblossom and green herbs to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered this morning from a particular plot in the old garden, set apart for the purpose. Just then the young leaves were almost asfragrant as flowers, and the scent of the bean-fields mingledpleasantly with the cloud of incense. But for the monotonousintonation of the liturgy by the priests, clad in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and bearing ears of green corn upon their heads, secured by flowing bands of white, the procession moved in absolutestillness, all persons, even the children, abstaining from [8] speechafter the utterance of the pontifical formula, Favetelinguis!--Silence! Propitious Silence!--lest any words save thoseproper to the occasion should hinder the religious efficacy of the rite. 

With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a leading partin the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to completethis impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of mind, esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of thesesacred functions. To him the sustained stillness without seemed reallybut to be waiting upon that interior, mental condition of preparationor expectancy, for which he was just then intently striving. Thepersons about him, certainly, had never been challenged by thoseprayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine nature: theyconceived them rather to be the appointed means of setting suchtroublesome movements at rest. By them, "the religion of Numa, " sostaid, ideal and comely, the object of so much jealous conservatism, though of direct service as lending sanction to a sort of highscrupulosity, especially in the chief points of domestic conduct, wasmainly prized as being, through its hereditary character, somethinglike a personal distinction--as contributing, among the otheraccessories of an ancient house, to the production of that aristocraticatmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But [9] in theyoung Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of alldefinite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened muchspeculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details ofthe divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinctenough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were likethe passing of some mysterious influence over all the elements of hisnature and experience. One thing only distracted him--a certain pityat the bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the sacrificialvictims and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at thecentral act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher'swork, such as we decorously hide out of sight; though some then presentcertainly displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permittedthem on a religious pretext. The old sculptors of the great processionon the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placidheads of the victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling foranimals in forcible contrast with any indifference as to theirsufferings. It was this contrast that distracted Marius now in theblessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption upon thescrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as theprocession approached the altars. 

[10] The names of that great populace of "little gods, " dear to theRoman home, which the pontiffs had placed on the sacred list of theIndigitamenta, to be invoked, because they can help, on specialoccasions, were not forgotten in the long litany--Vatican who causesthe infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his firstword, Cuba who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca especially, forwhom Marius had through life a particular memory and devotion, thegoddess who watches over one's safe coming home. The urns of the deadin the family chapel received their due service. They also were nowbecome something divine, a goodly company of friendly and protectingspirits, encamped about the place of their former abode--above allothers, the father, dead ten years before, of whom, remembering but atall, grave figure above him in early childhood, Marius habituallythought as a genius a little cold and severe. 

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

Perhaps!--but certainly needs his altar here below, and garlands to-dayupon his urn. But the dead genii were satisfied with little--a fewviolets, a cake dipped in wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, fromthe time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had Mariustaken them their portion of the family meal, at the second course, amidst the silence [11] of the company. They loved those who broughtthem their sustenance; but, deprived of these services, would be heardwandering through the house, crying sorrowfully in the stillness of thenight. 

And those simple gifts, like other objects as trivial--bread, oil, wine, milk--had regained for him, by their use in such religiousservice, that poetic and as it were moral significance, which surelybelongs to all the means of daily life, could we but break through theveil of our familiarity with things by no means vulgar in themselves. Ahymn followed, while the whole assembly stood with veiled faces. Thefire rose up readily from the altars, in clean, bright flame--afavourable omen, making it a duty to render the mirth of the eveningcomplete. Old wine was poured out freely for the servants at supper inthe great kitchen, where they had worked in the imperfect light throughthe long evenings of winter. The young Marius himself took but a verysober part in the noisy feasting. A devout, regretful after-taste ofwhat had been really beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished tookhim early away, that he might the better recall in reverie all thecircumstances of the celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the influences of long hours in the open air, heseemed still to be moving in procession through the fields, with a kindof pleasurable awe. That feeling was still upon him as he [12] awokeamid the beating of violent rain on the shutters, in the first storm ofthe season. The thunder which startled him from sleep seemed to makethe solitude of his chamber almost painfully complete, as if thenearness of those angry clouds shut him up in a close place alone inthe world. Then he thought of the sort of protection which that day'sceremonies assured. To procure an agreement with the gods--Pacemdeorum exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day beenbusy upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he would fain havethose Powers at least not against him. His own nearer household godswere all around his bed. The spell of his religion as a part of thevery essence of home, its intimacy, its dignity and security, wasforcible at that moment; only, it seemed to involve certain heavydemands upon him. 

CHAPTER II: WHITE-NIGHTS

[13] To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which thechildhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place, --surely nothingcould happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought orreverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name. *"The red rose came first, " says a quaint German mystic, speaking of"the mystery of so-called white things, " as being "ever anafter-thought--the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselvesbut half-real, half-material--the white queen, the white witch, thewhite mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true massturned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by youngcandidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way ofrehearsal. " So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the sameanalogy, should be [14] nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, butpassed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainlythe place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in this, thatyou might very well conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in thedaytime might come to much there. 

The young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had comedown to him much curtailed through the extravagance of a certainMarcellus two generations before, a favourite in his day of thefashionable world at Rome, where he had at least spent his substancewith a correctness of taste Marius might seem to have inherited fromhim; as he was believed also to resemble him in a singularly pleasantsmile, consistent however, in the younger face, with some degree ofsombre expression when the mind within was but slightly moved. 

As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and nearer tothe dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a trace of workdaynegligence or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some, for the young master himself among them. The more observant passer-bywould note, curious as to the inmates, a certain amount of dainty careamid that neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance todisturb old associations. It was significant of the nationalcharacter, that a sort of elegant gentleman farming, as we say, hadbeen much affected by some of the most cultivated [15] Romans. But itbecame something more than an elegant diversion, something of a seriousbusiness, with the household of Marius; and his actual interest in thecultivation of the earth and the care of flocks had brought him, atleast, intimately near to those elementary conditions of life, areverence for which, the great Roman poet, as he has shown by his ownhalf-mystic pre-occupation with them, held to be the ground ofprimitive Roman religion, as of primitive morals. But then, farm-lifein Italy, including the culture of the olive and the vine, has a graceof its own, and might well contribute to the production of an idealdignity of character, like that of nature itself in this gifted region. Vulgarity seemed impossible. The place, though impoverished, was stilldeservedly dear, full of venerable memories, and with a livingsweetness of its own for to-day. 

To hold by such ceremonial traditions had been a part of the strugglingfamily pride of the lad's father, to which the example of the head ofthe state, old Antoninus Pius--an example to be still further enforcedby his successor--had given a fresh though perhaps somewhat artificialpopularity. It had been consistent with many another homely andold-fashioned trait in him, not to undervalue the charm ofexclusiveness and immemorial authority, which membership in a localpriestly college, hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To seta real value on [16] these things was but one element in that piousconcern for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as Mariusafterwards discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. Theancient hymn--Fana Novella!--was still sung by his people, as the newmoon grew bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leapingthrough heaps of blazing straw on a certain night in summer was notdiscouraged. The privilege of augury itself, according to tradition, had at one time belonged to his race; and if you can imagine how, oncein a way, an impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mysticintimation, of the meaning and consequences of all that, what wasimplied in it becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the mindof Marius, in whose house the auspices were still carefully consultedbefore every undertaking of moment. 

The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally--and that is allmany not unimportant persons ever find to do--a certain tradition oflife, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling withwhich he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that of awe;though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as hecould but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of soweighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Romanreligion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. [17] On thepart of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband'smemory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with therecognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice to becredited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowyenough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long serviceto the departed soul; its many annual observances centering about thefuneral urn--a tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white andfair, in the family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowersfrom the garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places asomewhat closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought stillto protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself--acloseness which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of ourhuman sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in thecountry, might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with adevout interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow. After the deification of the emperors, we are told, it was consideredimpious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence oftheir images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacredpresences, demanding of him a similar collectedness. The severe andarchaic religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sortof devout circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of thedemand upon him of anything [18] in which deity was concerned. He mustsatisfy with a kind of sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest hebe found wanting to, the claims of others, in their joys andcalamities--the happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in whichit made itself felt. And from habit, this feeling of a responsibilitytowards the world of men and things, towards a claim for due sentimentconcerning them on his side, came to be a part of his nature not to beput off. It kept him serious and dignified amid the Epicureanspeculations which in after years much engrossed him, and when he hadlearned to think of all religions as indifferent, serious amid manyfopperies and through many languid days, and made him anticipate allhis life long as a thing towards which he must carefully train himself, some great occasion of self-devotion, such as really came, that shouldconsecrate his life, and, it might be, its memory with others, as theearly Christian looked forward to martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon it. 

The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got hisfirst view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read theface, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from thewhite road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply tothe marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but theexquisite [19] fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Twocenturies of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosseswhich lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there themarble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weedshad forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in gardenand farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. Theold Roman architects seem to have well understood the decorative valueof the floor--the real economy there was, in the production of richinterior effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface theytrod on. The pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness;but, though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like apiece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in oldage. Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its littlecedarn chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegantMarcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features toMarius, just then so full of animation and country colour. A chamber, curved ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the mansion, still contained his collection of works of art; above all, that head ofMedusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the oldGreek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the [20] thing, as itseemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands ofwhich it was drawn up in a fisherman's net, with the fine goldenlaminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellusalso who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the whitepigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazedwindows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape--thepallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above thepurple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marblegoing to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its darkheadland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summernights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent ofthe new-mown hay along all the passages of the house. 

Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistralor monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made thewhole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiarsanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided thedeceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we cangive to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them--the"subjective immortality, " to use a modern phrase, for which many aRoman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any [21] suchconsiderations regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyedthat secondary existence, that warm place still left, in thought atleast, beside the living, the desire for which is actually, in variousforms, so great a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, eventhus early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands to lay oneto rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of naturalwant. The soft lines of the white hands and face, set among the manyfolds of the veil and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon herneedlework, or with music sometimes, defined themselves for him as thetypical expression of maternity. Helping her with her white and purplewools, and caring for her musical instruments, he won, as if from thehandling of such things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifyingduly his country-grown habits--the sense of a certain delicateblandness, which he relished, above all, on returning to the "chapel"of his mother, after long days of open-air exercise, in winter orstormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly lessstrongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, withthe very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles inflower, though the hail is beating hard without. One importantprinciple, of fruit afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for thecountry fixed deeply in him; in the winters especially, when thesufferings of [22] the animal world became so palpable even to theleast observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for thealmost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. Itwas a feeling which had in it something of religious veneration forlife as such--for that mysterious essence which man is powerless tocreate in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of hismother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for thehungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom acrossa crowded public place--his own soul was like that! Would it reach thehands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled?And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the centraltype of all love;--so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the realityof concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout therest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to beever seeking to regain. 

And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced stillfurther this sentiment of home as a place of tried security. Hisreligion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the reallylight-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom, its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls [23]of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always as theprompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as hisaccuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it;and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, madehim oddly suspicious of particular places and persons. Though hisliking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, andever afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for therewas something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleepuneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almostpassed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon anAfrican showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptilewrithed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep intothe lower side of the real world, and again for many days took allsweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, tryingto puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dreadof a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his handinto the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly havekilled or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by thevery circumstance of their life, being what they [24] were. It wassomething like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moralfeeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur orfeathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanityof aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggishcoil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmityagainst him. Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, asecond time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered the night whichhad then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein, on the realgreatness of those little troubles of children, of which older peoplemake light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected howrichly possessed his life had actually been by beautiful aspects andimageries, seeing how greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbedhis peace. 

Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given tocontemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at anearlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating hissolitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions ofthe past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, andbecame betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of anidealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure fromwithin, by the exercise [25] of meditative power. A vein of subjectivephilosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, therewould be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men's valuations. Andthe generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace upto the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance tohim. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful wordumbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for thesacerdotal function hereditary in his family--the sort of mysticenjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control andascêsis, which such preparation involved. Like the young Ion in thebeautiful opening of the play of Euripides, who every morning sweepsthe temple floor with such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, hewas apt to be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to theirpeculiar influences which he never outgrew; so that often inafter-times, quite unexpectedly, this feeling would revive in him withundiminished freshness. That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication, survived through all the distractions of theworld, and when all thought of such vocation had finally passed fromhim, as a ministry, in spirit at least, towards a sort of hieraticbeauty and order in the conduct of life. 

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

NOTES

13. *Ad Vigilias Albas. 

CHAPTER III: CHANGE OF AIR

Dilexi decorem domus tuae. 

[27] THAT almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love ofthe country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of ajourney, which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to acertain temple of Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was thenusual in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. Thereligion of Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had beennaturalised in Rome in the old republican times; but had reached underthe Antonines the height of its popularity throughout the Roman world. That was an age of valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginaryones; but below its various crazes concerning health and disease, largely multiplied a few years after the time of which I am speaking bythe miseries of a great pestilence, lay a valuable, because partlypracticable, belief that all the maladies of the soul might be reachedthrough the subtle gateways of the body. 

[28] Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean bodily sanity. The religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator, as they called himabsolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one religion; thatmild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing, all otherpagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineralor herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came tohave a kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in moreserious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becomingtruly, in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthoodor "family" of Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be inpossession of certain precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps, of all the institutions of the pagan world, to the Christianpriesthood; the temples of the god, rich in some instances with theaccumulated thank-offerings of centuries of a tasteful devotion, beingreally also a kind of hospitals for the sick, administered in a fullconviction of the religiousness, the refined and sacred happiness, of alife spent in the relieving of pain. 

Elements of a really experimental and progressive knowledge there weredoubtless amid this devout enthusiasm, bent so faithfully on thereception of health as a direct gift from God; but for the most parthis care was held to take [29] effect through a machinery easilycapable of misuse for purposes of religious fraud. Through dreams, above all, inspired by Aesculapius himself, information as to the causeand cure of a malady was supposed to come to the sufferer, in a beliefbased on the truth that dreams do sometimes, for those who watch themcarefully, give many hints concerning the conditions of the body--thoselatent weak points at which disease or death may most easily break intoit. In the time of Marcus Aurelius these medical dreams had becomemore than ever a fashionable caprice. Aristeides, the "Orator, " a manof undoubted intellectual power, has devoted six discourses to theirinterpretation; the really scientific Galen has recorded howbeneficently they had intervened in his own case, at certainturning-points of life; and a belief in them was one of the frailtiesof the wise emperor himself. Partly for the sake of these dreams, living ministers of the god, more likely to come to one in his actualdwelling-place than elsewhere, it was almost a necessity that thepatient should sleep one or more nights within the precincts of atemple consecrated to his service, during which time he must observecertain rules prescribed by the priests. 

For this purpose, after devoutly saluting the Lares, as was customarybefore starting on a journey, Marius set forth one summer morning onhis way to the famous temple which lay [30] among the hills beyond thevalley of the Arnus. It was his greatest adventure hitherto; and hehad much pleasure in all its details, in spite of his feverishness. Starting early, under the guidance of an old serving-man who drove themules, with his wife who took all that was needful for theirrefreshment on the way and for the offering at the shrine, they went, under the genial heat, halting now and then to pluck certain flowersseen for the first time on these high places, upwards, through a longday of sunshine, while cliffs and woods sank gradually below theirpath. The evening came as they passed along a steep white road withmany windings among the pines, and it was night when they reached thetemple, the lights of which shone out upon them pausing before thegates of the sacred enclosure, while Marius became alive to a singularpurity in the air. A rippling of water about the place was the onlything audible, as they waited till two priestly figures, speaking Greekto one another, admitted them into a large, white-walled and clearlylighted guest-chamber, in which, while he partook of a simple butwholesomely prepared supper, Marius still seemed to feel pleasantly theheight they had attained to among the hills. 

The agreeable sense of all this was spoiled by one thing only, his oldfear of serpents; for it was under the form of a serpent thatAesculapius [31] had come to Rome, and the last definite thought of hisweary head before he fell asleep had been a dread either that the godmight appear, as he was said sometimes to do, under this hideousaspect, or perhaps one of those great sallow-hued snakes themselves, kept in the sacred place, as he had also heard was usual. 

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

He caught a lesson from what was then said, still somewhat beyond hisyears, a lesson in the skilled cultivation of life, of experience, ofopportunity, which seemed to be the aim of the young priest'srecommendations. The sum of them, through various forgotten intervalsof argument, as might really have happened in a [32] dream, was theprecept, repeated many times under slightly varied aspects, of adiligent promotion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eyewould lie for him the determining influence of life: he was of thenumber of those who, in the words of a poet who came long after, mustbe "made perfect by the love of visible beauty. " The discourse wasconceived from the point of view of a theory Marius found afterwards inPlato's Phaedrus, which supposes men's spirits susceptible to certaininfluences, diffused, after the manner of streams or currents, by fairthings or persons visibly present--green fields, for instance, orchildren's faces--into the air around them, acting, in the case of somepeculiar natures, like potent material essences, and conforming theseer to themselves as with some cunning physical necessity. Thistheory, * in itself so fantastic, had however determined in a range ofmethodical suggestions, altogether quaint here and there from theircircumstantial minuteness. And throughout, the possibility of somevision, as of a new city coming down "like a bride out of heaven, " avision still indeed, it might seem, a long way off, but to be grantedperhaps one day to the eyes thus trained, was presented as the motiveof this laboriously practical direction. 

"If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some freshpicture, in a clear [33] light, " so the discourse recommenced after apause, "be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in allthings, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows. " To keep the eyeclear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more andmore fastidiously, select form and colour in things from what was lessselect; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, moreespecially, connected with the period of youth--on children at play inthe morning, the trees in early spring, on young animals, on thefashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by him if it werebut a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a tokenand representative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoidjealously, in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight;and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse in therange of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circumstance atany cost of place, money, or opportunity; such were in brief outlinethe duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula oflife. And it was delivered with conviction; as if the speaker verilysaw into the recesses of the mental and physical being of the listener, while his own expression of perfect temperance had in it a fascinatingpower--the merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom fromtaint or flaw, in exercise [34] as a positive influence. Longafterwards, when Marius read the Charmides--that other dialogue ofPlato, into which he seems to have expressed the very genius of oldGreek temperance--the image of this speaker came back vividly beforehim, to take the chief part in the conversation. 

It was as a weighty sanction of such temperance, in almost visiblesymbolism (an outward imagery identifying itself with unseenmoralities) that the memory of that night's double experience, thedream of the great sallow snake and the utterance of the young priest, always returned to him, and the contrast therein involved made himrevolt with unfaltering instinct from the bare thought of an excess insleep, or diet, or even in matters of taste, still more from any excessof a coarser kind. 

When he awoke again, still in the exceeding freshness he had felt onhis arrival, and now in full sunlight, it was as if his sickness hadreally departed with the terror of the night: a confusion had passedfrom the brain, a painful dryness from his hands. Simply to be aliveand there was a delight; and as he bathed in the fresh water set readyfor his use, the air of the room about him seemed like pure gold, thevery shadows rich with colour. Summoned at length by one of thewhite-robed brethren, he went out to walk in the temple garden. At adistance, on either side, his guide pointed out to him the Houses ofBirth and Death, erected for the reception [35] respectively of womenabout to become mothers, and of persons about to die; neither of thoseincidents being allowed to defile, as was thought, the actual precinctsof the shrine. His visitor of the previous night he saw nowhere again. But among the official ministers of the place there was one, alreadymarked as of great celebrity, whom Marius saw often in later days atRome, the physician Galen, now about thirty years old. He wasstanding, the hood partly drawn over his face, beside the holy well, asMarius and his guide approached it. 

This famous well or conduit, primary cause of the temple and itssurrounding institutions, was supplied by the water of a spring flowingdirectly out of the rocky foundations of the shrine. From the rim ofits basin rose a circle of trim columns to support a cupola of singularlightness and grace, itself full of reflected light from the ripplingsurface, through which might be traced the wavy figure-work of themarble lining below as the stream of water rushed in. Legend told of avisit of Aesculapius to this place, earlier and happier than his firstcoming to Rome: an inscription around the cupola recorded it in lettersof gold. "Being come unto this place the son of God loved itexceedingly:"--Huc profectus filius Dei maxime amavit hunc locum;--andit was then that that most intimately human of the gods had given menthe well, with all its salutary properties. The [36] element itselfwhen received into the mouth, in consequence of its entire freedom fromadhering organic matter, was more like a draught of wonderfully pureair than water; and after tasting, Marius was told many mysteriouscircumstances concerning it, by one and another of the bystanders:--hewho drank often thereof might well think he had tasted of the Homericlotus, so great became his desire to remain always on that spot:carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative of itsfine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and itflowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume so oddlyrhythmical that the well stood always full to the brim, whateverquantity might be drawn from it, seeming to answer with strangealacrity of service to human needs, like a true creature and pupil ofthe philanthropic god. Certainly the little crowd around seemed tofind singular refreshment in gazing on it. The whole place appearedsensibly influenced by the amiable and healthful spirit of the thing. All the objects of the country were there at their freshest. In thegreat park-like enclosure for the maintenance of the sacred animalsoffered by the convalescent, grass and trees were allowed to grow witha kind of graceful wildness; otherwise, all was wonderfully nice. Andthat freshness seemed to have something moral in its influence, as ifit acted upon the body and the merely bodily [37] powers ofapprehension, through the intelligence; and to the end of his visitMarius saw no more serpents. 

A lad was just then drawing water for ritual uses, and Marius followedhim as he returned from the well, more and more impressed by thereligiousness of all he saw, on his way through a long cloister orcorridor, the walls well-nigh hidden under votive inscriptionsrecording favours from the son of Apollo, and with a distant fragranceof incense in the air, explained when he turned aside through an opendoorway into the temple itself. His heart bounded as the refined anddainty magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly, in the floodof early sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there, and withal a singular expression of sacred order, a surprisingcleanliness and simplicity. Certain priests, men whose countenancesbore a deep impression of cultivated mind, each with his little groupof assistants, were gliding round silently to perform their morningsalutation to the god, raising the closed thumb and finger of the righthand with a kiss in the air, as they came and went on their sacredbusiness, bearing their frankincense and lustral water. Around thewalls, at such a level that the worshippers might read, as in a book, the story of the god and his sons, the brotherhood of the Asclepiadae, ran a series of imageries, in low relief, their delicate light andshade being [38] heightened, here and there, with gold. Fullest ofinspired and sacred expression, as if in this place the chisel of theartist had indeed dealt not with marble but with the very breath offeeling and thought, was the scene in which the earliest generation ofthe sons of Aesculapius were transformed into healing dreams; for"grown now too glorious to abide longer among men, by the aid of theirsire they put away their mortal bodies, and came into another country, yet not indeed into Elysium nor into the Islands of the Blest. Butbeing made like to the immortal gods, they began to pass about throughthe world, changed thus far from their first form that they appeareternally young, as many persons have seen them in manyplaces--ministers and heralds of their father, passing to and fro overthe earth, like gliding stars. Which thing is, indeed, the mostwonderful concerning them!" And in this scene, as throughout theseries, with all its crowded personages, Marius noted on the carvedfaces the same peculiar union of unction, almost of hilarity, with acertain self-possession and reserve, which was conspicuous in theliving ministrants around him. 

In the central space, upon a pillar or pedestal, hung, ex voto, withthe richest personal ornaments, stood the image of Aesculapius himself, surrounded by choice flowering plants. It presented the type, stillwith something of the [39] severity of the earlier art of Greece aboutit, not of an aged and crafty physician, but of a youth, earnest andstrong of aspect, carrying an ampulla or bottle in one hand, and in theother a traveller's staff, a pilgrim among his pilgrim worshippers; andone of the ministers explained to Marius this pilgrim guise. --One chiefsource of the master's knowledge of healing had been observation of theremedies resorted to by animals labouring under disease or pain--whatleaf or berry the lizard or dormouse lay upon its wounded fellow; towhich purpose for long years he had led the life of a wanderer, in wildplaces. The boy took his place as the last comer, a little way behindthe group of worshippers who stood in front of the image. There, withuplifted face, the palms of his two hands raised and open before him, and taught by the priest, he said his collect of thanksgiving andprayer (Aristeides has recorded it at the end of his Asclepiadae) tothe Inspired Dreams:--

"O ye children of Apollo! who in time past have stilled the waves ofsorrow for many people, lighting up a lamp of safety before those whotravel by sea and land, be pleased, in your great condescension, thoughye be equal in glory with your elder brethren the Dioscuri, and yourlot in immortal youth be as theirs, to accept this prayer, which insleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it aright, I pray you, according to your loving-kindness to men. Preserve me [40] fromsickness; and endue my body with such a measure of health as maysuffice it for the obeying of the spirit, that I may pass my daysunhindered and in quietness. "

On the last morning of his visit Marius entered the shrine again, andjust before his departure the priest, who had been his special directorduring his stay at the place, lifting a cunningly contrived panel, which formed the back of one of the carved seats, bade him lookthrough. What he saw was like the vision of a new world, by theopening of some unsuspected window in a familiar dwelling-place. Helooked out upon a long-drawn valley of singularly cheerful aspect, hidden, by the peculiar conformation of the locality, from all pointsof observation but this. In a green meadow at the foot of the steepolive-clad rocks below, the novices were taking their exercise. Thesoftly sloping sides of the vale lay alike in full sunlight; and itsdistant opening was closed by a beautifully formed mountain, from whichthe last wreaths of morning mist were rising under the heat. It mighthave seemed the very presentment of a land of hope, its hollows brimfulof a shadow of blue flowers; and lo! on the one level space of thehorizon, in a long dark line, were towers and a dome: and that wasPisa. --Or Rome, was it? asked Marius, ready to believe the utmost, inhis excitement. 

All this served, as he understood afterwards [41] in retrospect, atonce to strengthen and to purify a certain vein of character in him. Developing the ideal, pre-existent there, of a religious beauty, associated for the future with the exquisite splendour of the temple ofAesculapius, as it dawned upon him on that morning of his firstvisit--it developed that ideal in connexion with a vivid sense of thevalue of mental and bodily sanity. And this recognition of the beauty, even for the aesthetic sense, of mere bodily health, now acquired, operated afterwards as an influence morally salutary, counteracting theless desirable or hazardous tendencies of some phases of thought, through which he was to pass. 

He came home brown with health to find the health of his motherfailing; and about her death, which occurred not long afterwards, therewas a circumstance which rested with him as the cruellest touch of all, in an event which for a time seemed to have taken the light out of thesunshine. She died away from home, but sent for him at the last, witha painful effort on her part, but to his great gratitude, pondering, ashe always believed, that he might chance otherwise to look back all hislife long upon a single fault with something like remorse, and find theburden a great one. For it happened that, through some sudden, incomprehensible petulance there had been an angry childish gesture, and a slighting word, at the very moment of her departure, actually forthe last time. Remembering this [42] he would ever afterwards pray tobe saved from offences against his own affections; the thought of thatmarred parting having peculiar bitterness for one, who set so muchstore, both by principle and habit, on the sentiment of home. 

NOTES

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

CHAPTER IV: THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

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

[43] IT would hardly have been possible to feel more seriously than didMarius in those grave years of his early life. But the death of hismother turned seriousness of feeling into a matter of the intelligence:it made him a questioner; and, by bringing into full evidence to himthe force of his affections and the probable importance of their placein his future, developed in him generally the more human and earthlyelements of character. A singularly virile consciousness of therealities of life pronounced itself in him; still however as in themain a poetic apprehension, though united already with something ofpersonal ambition and the instinct of self-assertion. There were dayswhen he could suspect, though it was a suspicion he was careful atfirst to put from him, that that early, much [44] cherished religion ofthe villa might come to count with him as but one form of poeticbeauty, or of the ideal, in things; as but one voice, in a world wherethere were many voices it would be a moral weakness not to listen to. And yet this voice, through its forcible pre-occupation of his childishconscience, still seemed to make a claim of a quite exclusivecharacter, defining itself as essentially one of but two possibleleaders of his spirit, the other proposing to him unlimitedself-expansion in a world of various sunshine. The contrast was sopronounced as to make the easy, light-hearted, unsuspecting exercise ofhimself, among the temptations of the new phase of life which had nowbegun, seem nothing less than a rival religion, a rival religiousservice. The temptations, the various sunshine, were those of the oldtown of Pisa, where Marius was now a tall schoolboy. Pisa was a placelying just far enough from home to make his rare visits to it inchildhood seem like adventures, such as had never failed to supply newand refreshing impulses to the imagination. The partly decayed pensivetown, which still had its commerce by sea, and its fashion at thebathing-season, had lent, at one time the vivid memory of its fairstreets of marble, at another the solemn outline of the dark hills ofLuna on its background, at another the living glances of its men andwomen, to the thickly gathering crowd [45] of impressions, out of whichhis notion of the world was then forming. And while he learned thatthe object, the experience, as it will be known to memory, is reallyfrom first to last the chief point for consideration in the conduct oflife, these things were feeding also the idealism constitutional withhim--his innate and habitual longing for a world altogether fairer thanthat he saw. The child could find his way in thought along thosestreets of the old town, expecting duly the shrines at their corners, and their recurrent intervals of garden-courts, or side-views ofdistant sea. The great temple of the place, as he could remember it, on turning back once for a last look from an angle of his homewardroad, counting its tall gray columns between the blue of the bay andthe blue fields of blossoming flax beyond; the harbour and its lights;the foreign ships lying there; the sailors' chapel of Venus, and hergilded image, hung with votive gifts; the seamen themselves, theirwomen and children, who had a whole peculiar colour-world of theirown--the boy's superficial delight in the broad light and shadow of allthat was mingled with the sense of power, of unknown distance, of thedanger of storm and possible death. 

To this place, then, Marius came down now from White-nights, to live inthe house of his guardian or tutor, that he might attend the school ofa famous rhetorician, and learn, among [46] other things, Greek. Theschool, one of many imitations of Plato's Academy in the old Atheniangarden, lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove of cypresses, its porticoes, a house for the master, its chapel and images. For thememory of Marius in after-days, a clear morning sunlight seemed to lieperpetually on that severe picture in old gray and green. The lad wentto this school daily betimes, in state at first, with a young slave tocarry the books, and certainly with no reluctance, for the sight of hisfellow-scholars, and their petulant activity, coming upon the saddersentimental moods of his childhood, awoke at once that instinct ofemulation which is but the other side of sympathy; and he was notaware, of course, how completely the difference of his previoustraining had made him, even in his most enthusiastic participation inthe ways of that little world, still essentially but a spectator. Whileall their heart was in their limited boyish race, and its transitoryprizes, he was already entertaining himself, very pleasurablymeditative, with the tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic, preliminary exercise for a larger contest, and already with an implicitepicureanism. Watching all the gallant effects of their smallrivalries--a scene in the main of fresh delightful sunshine--he enteredat once into the sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into the passionof men, and had already recognised a certain [47] appetite for fame, for distinction among his fellows, as his dominant motive to be. 

The fame he conceived for himself at this time was, as the reader willhave anticipated, of the intellectual order, that of a poet perhaps. And as, in that gray monastic tranquillity of the villa, inward voicesfrom the reality of unseen things had come abundantly; so here, withthe sounds and aspects of the shore, and amid the urbanities, thegraceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was the reality, the tyrannousreality, of things visible that was borne in upon him. The real worldaround--a present humanity not less comely, it might seem, than that ofthe old heroic days--endowing everything it touched upon, howeverremotely, down to its little passing tricks of fashion even, with akind of fleeting beauty, exercised over him just then a greatfascination. 

That sense had come upon him in all its power one exceptionally finesummer, the summer when, at a somewhat earlier age than was usual, hehad formally assumed the dress of manhood, going into the Forum forthat purpose, accompanied by his friends in festal array. At night, after the full measure of those cloudless days, he would feel well-nighwearied out, as if with a long succession of pictures and music. As hewandered through the gay streets or on the sea-shore, the real worldseemed indeed boundless, and himself almost absolutely free in it, witha boundless [48] appetite for experience, for adventure, whetherphysical or of the spirit. His entire rearing hitherto had lent itselfto an imaginative exaltation of the past; but now the spectacleactually afforded to his untired and freely open senses, suggested thereflection that the present had, it might be, really advanced beyondthe past, and he was ready to boast in the very fact that it wasmodern. If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of that day wentback to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of afastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature, and even, as we have seen, of religion, at least it improved, by a shade or twoof more scrupulous finish, on the old pattern; and the new era, likethe Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our owncentury, might perhaps be discerned, awaiting one just a single steponward--the perfected new manner, in the consummation of time, alike asregards the things of the imagination and the actual conduct of life. Only, while the pursuit of an ideal like this demanded entire libertyof heart and brain, that old, staid, conservative religion of hischildhood certainly had its being in a world of somewhat narrowrestrictions. But then, the one was absolutely real, with nothing lessthan the reality of seeing and hearing--the other, how vague, shadowy, problematical! Could its so limited probabilities be worth taking intoaccount in any practical question as to the rejecting or receiving [49]of what was indeed so real, and, on the face of it, so desirable?

And, dating from the time of his first coming to school, a greatfriendship had grown up for him, in that life of so fewattachments--the pure and disinterested friendship of schoolmates. Hehad seen Flavian for the first time the day on which he had come toPisa, at the moment when his mind was full of wistful thoughtsregarding the new life to begin for him to-morrow, and he gazedcuriously at the crowd of bustling scholars as they came from theirclasses. There was something in Flavian a shade disdainful, as hestood isolated from the others for a moment, explained in part by hisstature and the distinction of the low, broad forehead; though therewas pleasantness also for the newcomer in the roving blue eyes whichseemed somehow to take a fuller hold upon things around than is usualwith boys. Marius knew that those proud glances made kindly note ofhim for a moment, and felt something like friendship at first sight. There was a tone of reserve or gravity there, amid perfectlydisciplined health, which, to his fancy, seemed to carry forward theexpression of the austere sky and the clear song of the blackbird onthat gray March evening. Flavian indeed was a creature who changedmuch with the changes of the passing light and shade about him, and wasbrilliant enough under the early sunshine in [50] school next morning. Of all that little world of more or less gifted youth, surely thecentre was this lad of servile birth. Prince of the school, he hadgained an easy dominion over the old Greek master by the fascination ofhis parts, and over his fellow-scholars by the figure he bore. He worealready the manly dress; and standing there in class, as he displayedhis wonderful quickness in reckoning, or his taste in declaiming Homer, he was like a carved figure in motion, thought Marius, but with thatindescribable gleam upon it which the words of Homer actuallysuggested, as perceptible on the visible forms of the gods--hoia theousepenênothen aien eontas. +

A story hung by him, a story which his comrades acutely connected withhis habitual air of somewhat peevish pride. Two points were held to beclear amid its general vagueness--a rich stranger paid his schooling, and he was himself very poor, though there was an attractive piquancyin the poverty of Flavian which in a scholar of another figure mighthave been despised. Over Marius too his dominion was entire. Threeyears older than he, Flavian was appointed to help the younger boy inhis studies, and Marius thus became virtually his servant in manythings, taking his humours with a sort of grateful pride in beingnoticed at all, and, thinking over all this afterwards, found that the[51] fascination experienced by him had been a sentimental one, dependent on the concession to himself of an intimacy, a certaintolerance of his company, granted to none beside. 

That was in the earliest days; and then, as their intimacy grew, thegenius, the intellectual power of Flavian began its sway over him. Thebrilliant youth who loved dress, and dainty food, and flowers, andseemed to have a natural alliance with, and claim upon, everything elsewhich was physically select and bright, cultivated also that foppery ofwords, of choice diction which was common among the élite spirits ofthat day; and Marius, early an expert and elegant penman, transcribedhis verses (the euphuism of which, amid a genuine original power, wasthen so delightful to him) in beautiful ink, receiving in return theprofit of Flavian's really great intellectual capacities, developed andaccomplished under the ambitious desire to make his way effectively inlife. Among other things he introduced him to the writings of asprightly wit, then very busy with the pen, one Lucian--writingsseeming to overflow with that intellectual light turned upon dimplaces, which, at least in seasons of mental fair weather, can makepeople laugh where they have been wont, perhaps, to pray. And, surely, the sunlight which filled those well-remembered early mornings inschool, had had more than the usual measure of gold in it! [52] Marius, at least, would lie awake before the time, thinking with delight of thelong coming hours of hard work in the presence of Flavian, as otherboys dream of a holiday. 

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

And then, he had certainly yielded himself, [53] though still withuntouched health, in a world where manhood comes early, to theseductions of that luxurious town, and Marius wondered sometimes, inthe freer revelation of himself by conversation, at the extent of hisearly corruption. How often, afterwards, did evil things presentthemselves in malign association with the memory of that beautifulhead, and with a kind of borrowed sanction and charm in its naturalgrace! To Marius, at a later time, he counted for as it were anepitome of the whole pagan world, the depth of its corruption, and itsperfection of form. And still, in his mobility, his animation, in hiseager capacity for various life, he was so real an object, after thatvisionary idealism of the villa. His voice, his glance, were like thebreaking in of the solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions of adream. A shadow, handling all things as shadows, had felt a suddenreal and poignant heat in them. 

Meantime, under his guidance, Marius was learning quickly andabundantly, because with a good will. There was that in the actualeffectiveness of his figure which stimulated the younger lad to makethe most of opportunity; and he had experience already that educationlargely increased one's capacity for enjoyment. He was acquiring whatit is the chief function of all higher education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, [54] the elementsof distinction, in our everyday life--of so exclusively living inthem--that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or débris ofour days, comes to be as though it were not. And the consciousness ofthis aim came with the reading of one particular book, then fresh inthe world, with which he fell in about this time--a book which awakenedthe poetic or romantic capacity as perhaps some other book might havedone, but was peculiar in giving it a direction emphatically sensuous. It made him, in that visionary reception of every-day life, the seer, more especially, of a revelation in colour and form. If our moderneducation, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kindof idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as itsprofessed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains ofancient literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happenedalso, long ago, with Marius and his friend. 

NOTES

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

50. +Transliteration: hoia theous epenênothen aien eontas. Translation:"such as the gods are endowed with. " Homer, Odyssey, 8. 365. 

CHAPTER V: THE GOLDEN BOOK

[55] THE two lads were lounging together over a book, half-buried in aheap of dry corn, in an old granary--the quiet corner to which they hadclimbed out of the way of their noisier companions on one of theirblandest holiday afternoons. They looked round: the western sun smotethrough the broad chinks of the shutters. How like a picture! and itwas precisely the scene described in what they were reading, with justthat added poetic touch in the book which made it delightful andselect, and, in the actual place, the ray of sunlight transforming therough grain among the cool brown shadows into heaps of gold. What theywere intent on was, indeed, the book of books, the "golden" book ofthat day, a gift to Flavian, as was shown by the purple writing on thehandsome yellow wrapper, following the title Flaviane!--it said, Flaviane! lege Felicitur! Flaviane! Vivas! Fioreas! Flaviane! Vivas! Gaudeas!

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

And the inside was something not less dainty and fine, full of thearchaisms and curious felicities in which that generation delighted, quaint terms and images picked fresh from the early dramatists, thelifelike phrases of some lost poet preserved by an old grammarian, racymorsels of the vernacular and studied prettinesses:--all alike, mereplaythings for the genuine power and natural eloquence of the eruditeartist, unsuppressed by his erudition, which, however, made some peopleangry, chiefly less well "got-up" people, and especially those who wereuntidy from indolence. 

No! it was certainly not that old-fashioned, unconscious ease of theearly literature, which could never come again; which, after all, hadhad more in common with the "infinite patience" of Apuleius than withthe hack-work readiness of his detractors, who might so well have been"self-conscious" of going slip-shod. And at least his success wasunmistakable as to the precise literary effect he had intended, including a certain tincture of "neology" in expression--nonnihilinterdum elocutione novella parum signatum--in the language ofCornelius Fronto, the contemporary prince of rhetoricians. What wordshe had found for conveying, with a single touch, the sense of textures, colours, [57] incidents! "Like jewellers' work! Like a myrrhinevase!"--admirers said of his writing. "The golden fibre in the hair, the gold thread-work in the gown marked her as the mistress"--aurum incomis et in tunicis, ibi inflexum hic intextum, matronam profectoconfitebatur--he writes, with his "curious felicity, " of one of hisheroines. Aurum intextum: gold fibre:--well! there was something ofthat kind in his own work. And then, in an age when people, from theemperor Aurelius downwards, prided themselves unwisely on writing inGreek, he had written for Latin people in their own tongue; thoughstill, in truth, with all the care of a learned language. Not lesshappily inventive were the incidents recorded--story withinstory--stories with the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams. He hadhis humorous touches also. And what went to the ordinary boyish taste, in those somewhat peculiar readers, what would have charmed boys morepurely boyish, was the adventure:--the bear loose in the house atnight, the wolves storming the farms in winter, the exploits of therobbers, their charming caves, the delightful thrill one had at thequestion--"Don't you know that these roads are infested by robbers?"

The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land ofwitchcraft, and took one up and down its mountains, and into its oldweird towns, haunts of magic and [58] incantation, where all the moregenuine appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea when shefled through that country, were still in use. In the city of Hypata, indeed, nothing seemed to be its true self--"You might think thatthrough the murmuring of some cadaverous spell, all things had beenchanged into forms not their own; that there was humanity in thehardness of the stones you stumbled on; that the birds you heardsinging were feathered men; that the trees around the walls drew theirleaves from a like source. The statues seemed about to move, the wallsto speak, the dumb cattle to break out in prophecy; nay! the very skyand the sunbeams, as if they might suddenly cry out. " Witches are therewho can draw down the moon, or at least the lunar virus--that whitefluid she sheds, to be found, so rarely, "on high, heathy places: whichis a poison. A touch of it will drive men mad. "

And in one very remote village lives the sorceress Pamphile, who turnsher neighbours into various animals. What true humour in the scenewhere, after mounting the rickety stairs, Lucius, peeping curiouslythrough a chink in the door, is a spectator of the transformation ofthe old witch herself into a bird, that she may take flight to theobject of her affections--into an owl! "First she stripped off everyrag she had. Then opening a certain chest she took from it many smallboxes, and removing the lid [59] of one of them, rubbed herself overfor a long time, from head to foot, with an ointment it contained, andafter much low muttering to her lamp, began to jerk at last and shakeher limbs. And as her limbs moved to and fro, out burst the softfeathers: stout wings came forth to view: the nose grew hard andhooked: her nails were crooked into claws; and Pamphile was an owl. Sheuttered a queasy screech; and, leaping little by little from theground, making trial of herself, fled presently, on full wing, out ofdoors. "

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

Well! the proper remedy for his distress is a supper of roses, couldsuch be found, and many are his quaintly picturesque attempts to comeby them at that adverse season; as he contrives to do at last, when, the grotesque procession of Isis [60] passing by with a bear and otherstrange animals in its train, the ass following along with the restsuddenly crunches the chaplet of roses carried in the High-priest'shand. 

Meantime, however, he must wait for the spring, with more than theoutside of an ass; "though I was not so much a fool, nor so truly anass, " he tells us, when he happens to be left alone with a daintilyspread table, "as to neglect this most delicious fare, and feed uponcoarse hay. " For, in truth, all through the book, there is anunmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold touches like Swift's, and a genuine animal breadth. Lucius was the original ass, who peepingslily from the window of his hiding-place forgot all about the bigshade he cast just above him, and gave occasion to the joke or proverbabout "the peeping ass and his shadow. "

But the marvellous, delight in which is one of the really seriouselements in most boys, passed at times, those young readers stillfeeling its fascination, into what French writers call themacabre--that species of almost insane pre-occupation with thematerialities of our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazingon corruption, which was connected, in this writer at least, with not alittle obvious coarseness. It was a strange notion of the gross lustof the actual world, that Marius took from some of these episodes. "Iam told, " they read, "that [61] when foreigners are interred, the oldwitches are in the habit of out-racing the funeral procession, toravage the corpse"--in order to obtain certain cuttings and remnantsfrom it, with which to injure the living--"especially if the witch hashappened to cast her eye upon some goodly young man. " And the scene ofthe night-watching of a dead body lest the witches should come to tearoff the flesh with their teeth, is worthy of Théophile Gautier. 

But set as one of the episodes in the main narrative, a true gem amidits mockeries, its coarse though genuine humanity, its burlesquehorrors, came the tale of Cupid and Psyche, full of brilliant, life-like situations, speciosa locis, and abounding in lovely visibleimagery (one seemed to see and handle the golden hair, the freshflowers, the precious works of art in it!) yet full also of a gentleidealism, so that you might take it, if you chose, for an allegory. With a concentration of all his finer literary gifts, Apuleius hadgathered into it the floating star-matter of many a delightful oldstory. --

The Story of Cupid and Psyche. 

In a certain city lived a king and queen who had three daughtersexceeding fair. But the beauty of the elder sisters, though pleasantto behold, yet passed not the measure of human praise, while such wasthe loveliness of the [62] youngest that men's speech was too poor tocommend it worthily and could express it not at all. Many of thecitizens and of strangers, whom the fame of this excellent vision hadgathered thither, confounded by that matchless beauty, could but kissthe finger-tips of their right hands at sight of her, as in adorationto the goddess Venus herself. And soon a rumour passed through thecountry that she whom the blue deep had borne, forbearing her divinedignity, was even then moving among men, or that by some freshgermination from the stars, not the sea now, but the earth, had putforth a new Venus, endued with the flower of virginity. 

This belief, with the fame of the maiden's loveliness, went dailyfurther into distant lands, so that many people were drawn together tobehold that glorious model of the age. Men sailed no longer to Paphos, to Cnidus or Cythera, to the presence of the goddess Venus: her sacredrites were neglected, her images stood uncrowned, the cold ashes wereleft to disfigure her forsaken altars. It was to a maiden that men'sprayers were offered, to a human countenance they looked, inpropitiating so great a godhead: when the girl went forth in themorning they strewed flowers on her way, and the victims proper to thatunseen goddess were presented as she passed along. This conveyance ofdivine worship to a mortal kindled meantime the anger of the trueVenus. "Lo! now, the ancient [63] parent of nature, " she cried, "thefountain of all elements! Behold me, Venus, benign mother of theworld, sharing my honours with a mortal maiden, while my name, built upin heaven, is profaned by the mean things of earth! Shall a perishablewoman bear my image about with her? In vain did the shepherd of Idaprefer me! Yet shall she have little joy, whosoever she be, of herusurped and unlawful loveliness!" Thereupon she called to her thatwinged, bold boy, of evil ways, who wanders armed by night throughmen's houses, spoiling their marriages; and stirring yet more by herspeech his inborn wantonness, she led him to the city, and showed himPsyche as she walked. 

"I pray thee, " she said, "give thy mother a full revenge. Let thismaid become the slave of an unworthy love. " Then, embracing himclosely, she departed to the shore and took her throne upon the crestof the wave. And lo! at her unuttered will, her ocean-servants are inwaiting: the daughters of Nereus are there singing their song, andPortunus, and Salacia, and the tiny charioteer of the dolphin, with ahost of Tritons leaping through the billows. And one blows softlythrough his sounding sea-shell, another spreads a silken web againstthe sun, a third presents the mirror to the eyes of his mistress, whilethe others swim side by side below, drawing her chariot. Such was theescort of Venus as she went upon the sea. 

[64] Psyche meantime, aware of her loveliness, had no fruit thereof. All people regarded and admired, but none sought her in marriage. Itwas but as on the finished work of the craftsman that they gazed uponthat divine likeness. Her sisters, less fair than she, were happilywedded. She, even as a widow, sitting at home, wept over herdesolation, hating in her heart the beauty in which all men werepleased. 

And the king, supposing the gods were angry, inquired of the oracle ofApollo, and Apollo answered him thus: "Let the damsel be placed on thetop of a certain mountain, adorned as for the bed of marriage and ofdeath. Look not for a son-in-law of mortal birth; but for that evilserpent-thing, by reason of whom even the gods tremble and the shadowsof Styx are afraid. "

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

But the mandate of the god impelled the hapless Psyche to her fate, and, these solemnities [65] being ended, the funeral of the living soulgoes forth, all the people following. Psyche, bitterly weeping, assists not at her marriage but at her own obsequies, and while theparents hesitate to accomplish a thing so unholy the daughter cries tothem: "Wherefore torment your luckless age by long weeping? This wasthe prize of my extraordinary beauty! When all people celebrated uswith divine honours, and in one voice named the New Venus, it was thenye should have wept for me as one dead. Now at last I understand thatthat one name of Venus has been my ruin. Lead me and set me upon theappointed place. I am in haste to submit to that well-omened marriage, to behold that goodly spouse. Why delay the coming of him who was bornfor the destruction of the whole world?"

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

Psyche, in those delicate grassy places, lying [66] sweetly on her dewybed, rested from the agitation of her soul and arose in peace. And lo!a grove of mighty trees, with a fount of water, clear as glass, in themidst; and hard by the water, a dwelling-place, built not by humanhands but by some divine cunning. One recognised, even at theentering, the delightful hostelry of a god. Golden pillars sustainedthe roof, arched most curiously in cedar-wood and ivory. The walls werehidden under wrought silver:--all tame and woodland creatures leapingforward to the visitor's gaze. Wonderful indeed was the craftsman, divine or half-divine, who by the subtlety of his art had breathed sowild a soul into the silver! The very pavement was distinct withpictures in goodly stones. In the glow of its precious metal the houseis its own daylight, having no need of the sun. Well might it seem aplace fashioned for the conversation of gods with men!

Psyche, drawn forward by the delight of it, came near, and, her couragegrowing, stood within the doorway. One by one, she admired thebeautiful things she saw; and, most wonderful of all! no lock, nochain, nor living guardian protected that great treasure house. But asshe gazed there came a voice--a voice, as it were unclothed of bodilyvesture--"Mistress!" it said, "all these things are thine. Lie down, and relieve thy weariness, and rise again for the bath when thou wilt. We thy servants, whose [67] voice thou hearest, will be beforehand withour service, and a royal feast shall be ready. "

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

And the hour of evening inviting her, she climbed into the bed; and asthe night was far advanced, behold a sound of a certain clemencyapproaches her. Then, fearing for her maidenhood in so great solitude, she trembled, and more than any evil she knew dreaded that she knewnot. And now the husband, that unknown husband, drew near, andascended the couch, and made her his wife; and lo! before the rise ofdawn he had departed hastily. And the attendant voices ministered tothe needs of the newly married. And so it happened with her for a longseason. And as nature has willed, this new thing, by continual use, became a delight to her: the sound of the voice grew to be her solacein that condition of loneliness and uncertainty. 

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

And after a while came the bridegroom again, and lay down beside her, and embracing her as she wept, complained, "Was this thy promise, myPsyche? What have I to hope from thee? Even in the arms of thyhusband thou ceasest not from pain. Do now as thou wilt. Indulgethine own desire, though it seeks what will ruin thee. Yet wilt thouremember my warning, repentant too late. " Then, protesting that she islike to die, she obtains from him that he suffer her to see hersisters, and present to them moreover what gifts she would of goldenornaments; but therewith he ofttimes advised her never at any time, yielding to pernicious counsel, to enquire concerning his bodily form, lest she fall, [69] through unholy curiosity, from so great a height offortune, nor feel ever his embrace again. "I would die a hundredtimes, " she said, cheerful at last, "rather than be deprived of thymost sweet usage. I love thee as my own soul, beyond comparison evenwith Love himself. Only bid thy servant Zephyrus bring hither mysisters, as he brought me. My honeycomb! My husband! Thy Psyche'sbreath of life!" So he promised; and after the embraces of the night, ere the light appeared, vanished from the hands of his bride. 

And the sisters, coming to the place where Psyche was abandoned, weptloudly among the rocks, and called upon her by name, so that the soundcame down to her, and running out of the palace distraught, she cried, "Wherefore afflict your souls with lamentation? I whom you mourn amhere. " Then, summoning Zephyrus, she reminded him of her husband'sbidding; and he bare them down with a gentle blast. "Enter now, " shesaid, "into my house, and relieve your sorrow in the company of Psycheyour sister. "

And Psyche displayed to them all the treasures of the golden house, andits great family of ministering voices, nursing in them the malicewhich was already at their hearts. And at last one of them askscuriously who the lord of that celestial array may be, and what mannerof man her husband? And Psyche [70] answered dissemblingly, "A youngman, handsome and mannerly, with a goodly beard. For the most part hehunts upon the mountains. " And lest the secret should slip from her inthe way of further speech, loading her sisters with gold and gems, shecommanded Zephyrus to bear them away. 

And they returned home, on fire with envy. "See now the injustice offortune!" cried one. "We, the elder children, are given like servantsto be the wives of strangers, while the youngest is possessed of sogreat riches, who scarcely knows how to use them. You saw, Sister! whata hoard of wealth lies in the house; what glittering gowns; whatsplendour of precious gems, besides all that gold trodden under foot. If she indeed hath, as she said, a bridegroom so goodly, then no one inall the world is happier. And it may be that this husband, being ofdivine nature, will make her too a goddess. Nay! so in truth it is. Itwas even thus she bore herself. Already she looks aloft and breathesdivinity, who, though but a woman, has voices for her handmaidens, andcan command the winds. " "Think, " answered the other, "how arrogantlyshe dealt with us, grudging us these trifling gifts out of all thatstore, and when our company became a burden, causing us to be hissedand driven away from her through the air! But I am no woman if shekeep her hold on this great fortune; and if the insult done us hastouched [71] thee too, take we counsel together. Meanwhile let us holdour peace, and know naught of her, alive or dead. For they are nottruly happy of whose happiness other folk are unaware. "

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

"Even now the sword is drawn with which thy sisters seek thy life. Havepity on thyself, sweet wife, and upon our child, and see not those evilwomen again. " But the sisters make their way into the palace oncemore, crying to her in [72] wily tones, "O Psyche! and thou too wilt bea mother! How great will be the joy at home! Happy indeed shall we beto have the nursing of the golden child. Truly if he be answerable tothe beauty of his parents, it will be a birth of Cupid himself. "

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

And returning home upon the soft breath of Zephyrus one cried to theother, "What shall be said of so ugly a lie? He who was a young manwith goodly beard is now in middle life. It must be that she told afalse tale: else is she in very truth ignorant what manner of man heis. Howsoever it be, let us destroy her quickly. For if she indeedknows not, be sure that her bridegroom is one of the gods: it is a godshe bears in her womb. And let [73] that be far from us! If she becalled mother of a god, then will life be more than I can bear. "

So, full of rage against her, they returned to Psyche, and said to hercraftily, "Thou livest in an ignorant bliss, all incurious of thy realdanger. It is a deadly serpent, as we certainly know, that comes tosleep at thy side. Remember the words of the oracle, which declaredthee destined to a cruel beast. There are those who have seen it atnightfall, coming back from its feeding. In no long time, they say, itwill end its blandishments. It but waits for the babe to be formed inthee, that it may devour thee by so much the richer. If indeed thesolitude of this musical place, or it may be the loathsome commerce ofa hidden love, delight thee, we at least in sisterly piety have doneour part. " And at last the unhappy Psyche, simple and frail of soul, carried away by the terror of their words, losing memory of herhusband's precepts and her own promise, brought upon herself a greatcalamity. Trembling and turning pale, she answers them, "And they whotell those things, it may be, speak the truth. For in very deed neverhave I seen the face of my husband, nor know I at all what manner ofman he is. Always he frights me diligently from the sight of him, threatening some great evil should I too curiously look upon his face. Do ye, if ye can help your sister in her great peril, stand by her now. "

[74] Her sisters answered her, "The way of safety we have wellconsidered, and will teach thee. Take a sharp knife, and hide it inthat part of the couch where thou art wont to lie: take also a lampfilled with oil, and set it Privily behind the curtain. And when heshall have drawn up his coils into the accustomed place, and thouhearest him breathe in sleep, slip then from his side and discover thelamp, and, knife in hand, put forth thy strength, and strike off theserpent's head. " And so they departed in haste. 

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

And she, erewhile of no strength, the hard purpose of destiny assistingher, is confirmed in force. With lamp plucked forth, knife in hand, she put by her sex; and lo! as the secrets of the bed became manifest, the sweetest and most gentle of all creatures, Love himself, reclined[75] there, in his own proper loveliness! At sight of him the veryflame of the lamp kindled more gladly! But Psyche was afraid at thevision, and, faint of soul, trembled back upon her knees, and wouldhave hidden the steel in her own bosom. But the knife slipped from herhand; and now, undone, yet ofttimes looking upon the beauty of thatdivine countenance, she lives again. She sees the locks of that goldenhead, pleasant with the unction of the gods, shed down in gracefulentanglement behind and before, about the ruddy cheeks and whitethroat. The pinions of the winged god, yet fresh with the dew, arespotless upon his shoulders, the delicate plumage wavering over them asthey lie at rest. Smooth he was, and, touched with light, worthy ofVenus his mother. At the foot of the couch lay his bow and arrows, theinstruments of his power, propitious to men. 

And Psyche, gazing hungrily thereon, draws an arrow from the quiver, and trying the point upon her thumb, tremulous still, drave in thebarb, so that a drop of blood came forth. Thus fell she, by her ownact, and unaware, into the love of Love. Falling upon the bridegroom, with indrawn breath, in a hurry of kisses from eager and open lips, sheshuddered as she thought how brief that sleep might be. And it chancedthat a drop of burning oil fell from the lamp upon the god's shoulder. Ah! maladroit minister of love, thus to wound him from whom [76] allfire comes; though 'twas a lover, I trow, first devised thee, to havethe fruit of his desire even in the darkness! At the touch of the firethe god started up, and beholding the overthrow of her faith, quietlytook flight from her embraces. 

And Psyche, as he rose upon the wing, laid hold on him with her twohands, hanging upon him in his passage through the air, till she sinksto the earth through weariness. And as she lay there, the divinelover, tarrying still, lighted upon a cypress tree which grew near, and, from the top of it, spake thus to her, in great emotion. "Foolishone! unmindful of the command of Venus, my mother, who had devoted theeto one of base degree, I fled to thee in his stead. Now know I thatthis was vainly done. Into mine own flesh pierced mine arrow, and Imade thee my wife, only that I might seem a monster beside thee--thatthou shouldst seek to wound the head wherein lay the eyes so full oflove to thee! Again and again, I thought to put thee on thy guardconcerning these things, and warned thee in loving-kindness. Now Iwould but punish thee by my flight hence. " And therewith he winged hisway into the deep sky. 

Psyche, prostrate upon the earth, and following far as sight mightreach the flight of the bridegroom, wept and lamented; and when thebreadth of space had parted him wholly from her, cast herself down fromthe bank of a river [77] which was nigh. But the stream, turninggentle in honour of the god, put her forth again unhurt upon itsmargin. And as it happened, Pan, the rustic god, was sitting just thenby the waterside, embracing, in the body of a reed, the goddess Canna;teaching her to respond to him in all varieties of slender sound. Hardby, his flock of goats browsed at will. And the shaggy god called her, wounded and outworn, kindly to him and said, "I am but a rusticherdsman, pretty maiden, yet wise, by favour of my great age and longexperience; and if I guess truly by those faltering steps, by thysorrowful eyes and continual sighing, thou labourest with excess oflove. Listen then to me, and seek not death again, in the stream orotherwise. Put aside thy woe, and turn thy prayers to Cupid. He is intruth a delicate youth: win him by the delicacy of thy service. "

So the shepherd-god spoke, and Psyche, answering nothing, but with areverence to his serviceable deity, went on her way. And while she, inher search after Cupid, wandered through many lands, he was lying inthe chamber of his mother, heart-sick. And the white bird which floatsover the waves plunged in haste into the sea, and approaching Venus, asshe bathed, made known to her that her son lies afflicted with somegrievous hurt, doubtful of life. And Venus cried, angrily, "My son, then, has a mistress! And it is Psyche, who witched away [78] mybeauty and was the rival of my godhead, whom he loves!"

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

And Ceres and Juno met her, and sought to know the meaning of hertroubled countenance. "Ye come in season, " she cried; "I pray you, find for me Psyche. It must needs be that ye have heard the disgraceof my house. " And they, ignorant of what was done, would have soothedher anger, saying, "What fault, Mistress, hath thy son committed, thatthou wouldst destroy the girl he loves? Knowest thou not that he isnow of age? Because he wears his years so lightly must he seem to theeever but a child? Wilt thou for ever thus pry into the [79] pastimesof thy son, always accusing his wantonness, and blaming in him thosedelicate wiles which are all thine own?" Thus, in secret fear of theboy's bow, did they seek to please him with their gracious patronage. But Venus, angry at their light taking of her wrongs, turned her backupon them, and with hasty steps made her way once more to the sea. 

Meanwhile Psyche, tost in soul, wandering hither and thither, restednot night or day in the pursuit of her husband, desiring, if she mightnot sooth his anger by the endearments of a wife, at the least topropitiate him with the prayers of a handmaid. And seeing a certaintemple on the top of a high mountain, she said, "Who knows whetheryonder place be not the abode of my lord?" Thither, therefore, sheturned her steps, hastening now the more because desire and hopepressed her on, weary as she was with the labours of the way, and so, painfully measuring out the highest ridges of the mountain, drew nearto the sacred couches. She sees ears of wheat, in heaps or twistedinto chaplets; ears of barley also, with sickles and all theinstruments of harvest, lying there in disorder, thrown at random fromthe hands of the labourers in the great heat. These she curiously setsapart, one by one, duly ordering them; for she said within herself, "Imay not neglect the shrines, nor the holy service, of any god there be, but must rather [80] win by supplication the kindly mercy of them all. "

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

But Ceres answered her, "Truly thy tears move me, and I would fain helpthee; only I dare not incur the ill-will of my kinswoman. Depart henceas quickly as may be. " And Psyche, repelled against hope, afflictednow with twofold sorrow, making her way back again, beheld among thehalf-lighted woods of the valley below a sanctuary builded with cunning[81] art. And that she might lose no way of hope, howsoever doubtful, she drew near to the sacred doors. She sees there gifts of price, andgarments fixed upon the door-posts and to the branches of the trees, wrought with letters of gold which told the name of the goddess to whomthey were dedicated, with thanksgiving for that she had done. So, withbent knee and hands laid about the glowing altar, she prayed saying, "Sister and spouse of Jupiter! be thou to these my desperate fortune'sJuno the Auspicious! I know that thou dost willingly help those intravail with child; deliver me from the peril that is upon me. " And asshe prayed thus, Juno in the majesty of her godhead, was straightwaypresent, and answered, "Would that I might incline favourably to thee;but against the will of Venus, whom I have ever loved as a daughter, Imay not, for very shame, grant thy prayer. "

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

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

And Venus passed straightway to the house of Jupiter to beg from himthe service of Mercury, the god of speech. And Jupiter refused not herprayer. And Venus and Mercury descended from heaven together; and asthey went, the former said to the latter, "Thou knowest, my brother ofArcady, that never at any time have I done anything without thy help;for how long time, moreover, I have sought a certain maiden in vain. And now naught remains but that, by thy heraldry, I proclaim a rewardfor whomsoever shall find her. Do thou my bidding quickly. " Andtherewith [83] she conveyed to him a little scrip, in the which waswritten the name of Psyche, with other things; and so returned home. 

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

And she took barley and millet and poppy-seed, every kind of grain andseed, and mixed them together, and laughed, and said to her: "Methinksso plain a maiden can earn lovers only by industrious ministry: nowwill I also make trial of thy service. Sort me this heap of seed, theone kind from the others, grain by grain; and get thy task done beforethe evening. " And Psyche, stunned by the cruelty of her bidding, wassilent, and moved not her hand to the inextricable heap. And therecame [84] forth a little ant, which had understanding of the difficultyof her task, and took pity upon the consort of the god of Love; and heran deftly hither and thither, and called together the whole army ofhis fellows. "Have pity, " he cried, "nimble scholars of the Earth, Mother of all things!--have pity upon the wife of Love, and hasten tohelp her in her perilous effort. " Then, one upon the other, the hostsof the insect people hurried together; and they sorted asunder thewhole heap of seed, separating every grain after its kind, and sodeparted quickly out of sight. 

And at nightfall Venus returned, and seeing that task finished with sowonderful diligence, she cried, "The work is not thine, thou naughtymaid, but his in whose eyes thou hast found favour. " And calling heragain in the morning, "See now the grove, " she said, "beyond yondertorrent. Certain sheep feed there, whose fleeces shine with gold. Fetch me straightway a lock of that precious stuff, having gotten it asthou mayst. "

And Psyche went forth willingly, not to obey the command of Venus, buteven to seek a rest from her labour in the depths of the river. Butfrom the river, the green reed, lowly mother of music, spake to her: "OPsyche! pollute not these waters by self-destruction, nor approach thatterrible flock; for, as the heat groweth, they wax fierce. Lie downunder yon plane-tree, till the [85] quiet of the river's breath havesoothed them. Thereafter thou mayst shake down the fleecy gold fromthe trees of the grove, for it holdeth by the leaves. "

And Psyche, instructed thus by the simple reed, in the humanity of itsheart, filled her bosom with the soft golden stuff, and returned toVenus. But the goddess smiled bitterly, and said to her, "Well know Iwho was the author of this thing also. I will make further trial ofthy discretion, and the boldness of thy heart. Seest thou the utmostpeak of yonder steep mountain? The dark stream which flows down thencewaters the Stygian fields, and swells the flood of Cocytus. Bring menow, in this little urn, a draught from its innermost source. " Andtherewith she put into her hands a vessel of wrought crystal. 

And Psyche set forth in haste on her way to the mountain, looking thereat last to find the end of her hapless life. But when she came to theregion which borders on the cliff that was showed to her, sheunderstood the deadly nature of her task. From a great rock, steep andslippery, a horrible river of water poured forth, falling straightwayby a channel exceeding narrow into the unseen gulf below. And lo!creeping from the rocks on either hand, angry serpents, with their longnecks and sleepless eyes. The very waters found a voice and bade herdepart, in smothered cries of, Depart hence! and [86] What doest thouhere? Look around thee! and Destruction is upon thee! And then senseleft her, in the immensity of her peril, as one changed to stone. 

Yet not even then did the distress of this innocent soul escape thesteady eye of a gentle providence. For the bird of Jupiter spread hiswings and took flight to her, and asked her, "Didst thou think, simpleone, even thou! that thou couldst steal one drop of that relentlessstream, the holy river of Styx, terrible even to the gods? But give methine urn. " And the bird took the urn, and filled it at the source, and returned to her quickly from among the teeth of the serpents, bringing with him of the waters, all unwilling--nay! warning him todepart away and not molest them. 

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

And Psyche perceived there the last ebbing of her fortune--that she wasnow thrust openly [87] upon death, who must go down, of her own motion, to Hades and the Shades. And straightway she climbed to the top of anexceeding high tower, thinking within herself, "I will cast myself downthence: so shall I descend most quickly into the kingdom of the dead. "And the tower again, broke forth into speech: "Wretched Maid! WretchedMaid! Wilt thou destroy thyself? If the breath quit thy body, thenwilt thou indeed go down into Hades, but by no means return hither. Listen to me. Among the pathless wilds not far from this place lies acertain mountain, and therein one of hell's vent-holes. Through thebreach a rough way lies open, following which thou wilt come, bystraight course, to the castle of Orcus. And thou must not goempty-handed. Take in each hand a morsel of barley-bread, soaked inhydromel; and in thy mouth two pieces of money. And when thou shalt benow well onward in the way of death, then wilt thou overtake a lame assladen with wood, and a lame driver, who will pray thee reach himcertain cords to fasten the burden which is falling from the ass: butbe thou cautious to pass on in silence. And soon as thou comest to theriver of the dead, Charon, in that crazy bark he hath, will put theeover upon the further side. There is greed even among the dead: andthou shalt deliver to him, for the ferrying, one of those two pieces ofmoney, in such wise that he take [88] it with his hand from between thylips. And as thou passest over the stream, a dead old man, rising onthe water, will put up to thee his mouldering hands, and pray thee drawhim into the ferry-boat. But beware thou yield not to unlawful pity. 

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

So spake the stones of the tower; and Psyche [89] delayed not, butproceeding diligently after the manner enjoined, entered into the houseof Proserpine, at whose feet she sat down humbly, and would neither thedelicate couch nor that divine food the goddess offered her, but didstraightway the business of Venus. And Proserpine filled the casketsecretly and shut the lid, and delivered it to Psyche, who fledtherewith from Hades with new strength. But coming back into the lightof day, even as she hasted now to the ending of her service, she wasseized by a rash curiosity. "Lo! now, " she said within herself, "mysimpleness! who bearing in my hands the divine loveliness, heed not totouch myself with a particle at least therefrom, that I may please themore, by the favour of it, my fair one, my beloved. " Even as shespoke, she lifted the lid; and behold! within, neither beauty, noranything beside, save sleep only, the sleep of the dead, which tookhold upon her, filling all her members with its drowsy vapour, so thatshe lay down in the way and moved not, as in the slumber of death. 

And Cupid being healed of his wound, because he would endure no longerthe absence of her he loved, gliding through the narrow window of thechamber wherein he was holden, his pinions being now repaired by alittle rest, fled forth swiftly upon them, and coming to the placewhere Psyche was, shook that sleep away from her, and set him in hisprison again, awaking her with the [90] innocent point of his arrow. "Lo! thine old error again, " he said, "which had like once more to havedestroyed thee! But do thou now what is lacking of the command of mymother: the rest shall be my care. " With these words, the lover roseupon the air; and being consumed inwardly with the greatness of hislove, penetrated with vehement wing into the highest place of heaven, to lay his cause before the father of the gods. And the father of godstook his hand in his, and kissed his face and said to him, "At no time, my son, hast thou regarded me with due honour. Often hast thou vexed mybosom, wherein lies the disposition of the stars, with those busy dartsof thine. Nevertheless, because thou hast grown up between these minehands, I will accomplish thy desire. " And straightway he bade Mercurycall the gods together; and, the council-chamber being filled, sittingupon a high throne, "Ye gods, " he said, "all ye whose names are in thewhite book of the Muses, ye know yonder lad. It seems good to me thathis youthful heats should by some means be restrained. And that alloccasion may be taken from him, I would even confine him in the bondsof marriage. He has chosen and embraced a mortal maiden. Let him havefruit of his love, and possess her for ever. "

Thereupon he bade Mercury produce Psyche in heaven; and holding out toher his ambrosial cup, "Take it, " he said, "and live for ever; [91] norshall Cupid ever depart from thee. " And the gods sat down together tothe marriage-feast. 

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

CHAPTER VI: EUPHUISM

[92] So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius, withan expression changed in some ways from the original and on the wholegraver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more likethat "Lord, of terrible aspect, " who stood at Dante's bedside and wept, or had at least grown to the manly earnestness of the Erôs ofPraxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, thisepisode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation, already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginativelove, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean--anideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued itat various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty, as the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed tohim just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken celestial fire, to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, [93] soul orspirit in things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the purebrilliancy, and as it were in the happy light, of youth and morning andthe springtide, men's actual loves, with which at many points the bookbrings one into close contact, might appear to him, like the generaltenor of their lives, to be somewhat mean and sordid. The hiddennessof perfect things: a shrinking mysticism, a sentiment of diffidencelike that expressed in Psyche's so tremulous hope concerning the childto be born of the husband she had never yet seen--"in the face of thislittle child, at the least, shall I apprehend thine"--in hoc saltemparvulo cognoscam faciem tuam: the fatality which seems to haunt anysignal+ beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itselfsomething illicit and isolating: the suspicion and hatred it so oftenexcites in the vulgar:--these were some of the impressions, forming, asthey do, a constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience, from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old story enforced on him. Abook, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky inthe precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happyaccident counts with us for something more than its independent value. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured forhim as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal gratitude toits writer, and saw in it doubtless [94] far more than was really therefor any other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in hisremembrance, never quite losing its power in frequent return to it forthe revival of that first glowing impression. 

Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical one: it stimulatedthe literary ambition, already so strong a motive with him, by a signalexample of success, and made him more than ever an ardent, indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of theliterary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of thatthrough which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one canactually take effect upon others, to over-awe or charm them to one'sside, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connexionwith that desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of whichanother might have relied on the acquisition and display of brilliantmilitary qualities. In him, a fine instinctive sentiment of the exactvalue and power of words was connate with the eager longing for swayover his fellows. He saw himself already a gallant and effectiveleader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in therehabilitation of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished andlanguid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the onlysort of patriotic feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves. The popular speech was gradually departing from the form [95] and ruleof literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial. While the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarouslypedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousandchance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or atleast ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time wascoming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understandCicero; though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius, who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been afashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days ofHadrian, had written in the vernacular. 

The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himselfwould be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in itsdealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular andrevolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of theproletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the youngerPliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the Latintongue, had said, --"I am one of those who admire the ancients, yet I donot, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius which ourown times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if weary andeffete, no longer produces what is admirable. " And he, Flavian, wouldprove himself the true master of the opportunity thus indicated. In[96] his eagerness for a not too distant fame, he dreamed over allthat, as the young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns. Others mightbrutalise or neglect the native speech, that true "open field" forcharm and sway over men. He would make of it a serious study, weighingthe precise power of every phrase and word, as though it were preciousmetal, disentangling the later associations and going back to theoriginal and native sense of each, --restoring to full significance allits wealth of latent figurative expression, reviving or replacing itsoutworn or tarnished images. Latin literature and the Latin tonguewere dying of routine and languor; and what was necessary, first ofall, was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship betweenthought and expression, between the sensation and the term, and restoreto words their primitive power. 

For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forciblyimpressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means ofmaking visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful, of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was butmiddling, tame, or only half-true even to him--this scrupulousness ofliterary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort ofchivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience ofexecution! what research for the significant [97] tones of ancientidiom--sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regularword-building--gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaningof the sceptical Pliny's somewhat melancholy advice to one of hisfriends, that he should seek in literature deliverance frommortality--ut studiis se literarum a mortalitate vindicet. And therewas everything in the nature and the training of Marius to make him afull participator in the hopes of such a new literary school, withFlavian for its leader. In the refinements of that curious spirit, inits horror of profanities, its fastidious sense of a correctness inexternal form, there was something which ministered to the old ritualinterest, still surviving in him; as if here indeed were involved akind of sacred service to the mother-tongue. 

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age inwhich the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten dutiestowards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it doesbut modify a little the principles of all effective expression at alltimes. 'Tis art's function to conceal itself: ars est celareartem:--is a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, hasperhaps been oftenest and most confidently quoted by those who have hadlittle literary or other art to conceal; and from the very beginning ofprofessional literature, the "labour of the file"--a labour in the caseof Plato, for instance, or Virgil, like [98] that of the oldest ofgoldsmiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the work by far morethan the weight of precious metal it removed--has always had itsfunction. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples of it, this RomanEuphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty in writing--es kallosgraphein+--might lapse into its characteristic fopperies or mannerisms, into the "defects of its qualities, " in truth, not wholly unpleasingperhaps, or at least excusable, when looked at as but the toys (soCicero calls them), the strictly congenial and appropriate toys, of anassiduously cultivated age, which could not help being polite, critical, self-conscious. The mere love of novelty also had, ofcourse, its part there: as with the Euphuism of the Elizabethan age, and of the modern French romanticists, its neologies were the ground ofone of the favourite charges against it; though indeed, as regardsthese tricks of taste also, there is nothing new, but a quaint familylikeness rather, between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here, aselsewhere, the power of "fashion, " as it is called, is but one minorform, slight enough, it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of thatdeeper yearning of human nature towards ideal perfection, which is acontinuous force in it; and since in this direction too human nature islimited, such fashions must necessarily reproduce themselves. Amongother resemblances to later growths of Euphuism, its archaisms on theone hand, and [99] its neologies on the other, the Euphuism of thedays of Marcus Aurelius had, in the composition of verse, its fancy forthe refrain. It was a snatch from a popular chorus, something he hadheard sounding all over the town of Pisa one April night, one of thefirst bland and summer-like nights of the year, that Flavian had chosenfor the refrain of a poem he was then pondering--the PervigiliumVeneris--the vigil, or "nocturn, " of Venus. 

Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a constantpart in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries areplaying in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation orunreality in that minute culture of form:--Cannot those who have athing to say, say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like theold writers of Greece? And this challenge had at least the effect ofsetting his thoughts at work on the intellectual situation as it laybetween the children of the present and those earliest masters. Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greekgenius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence ofimitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent, laidupon every artist, increased since then! It was all around one:--thatsmoothly built world of old classical taste, an accomplished fact, withoverwhelming authority on every detail of the conduct of one's [100]work. With no fardel on its own back, yet so imperious towards thosewho came labouring after it, Hellas, in its early freshness, looked asdistant from him even then as it does from ourselves. There might seemto be no place left for novelty or originality, --place only for apatient, an infinite, faultlessness. On this question too Flavianpassed through a world of curious art-casuistries, of self-tormenting, at the threshold of his work. Was poetic beauty a thing ever one andthe same, a type absolute; or, changing always with the soul of timeitself, did it depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick ofapprehension, the fashion, as we say, of each successive age? Mightone recover that old, earlier sense of it, that earlier manner, in amasterly effort to recall all the complexities of the life, moral andintellectual, of the earlier age to which it had belonged? Had therebeen really bad ages in art or literature? Were all ages, even thoseearliest, adventurous, matutinal days, in themselves equally poeticalor unpoetical; and poetry, the literary beauty, the poetic ideal, always but a borrowed light upon men's actual life?

Homer had said--

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

And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer wasalways telling [101] things after this manner. And one might thinkthere had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanicaltranscript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in whichone could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, thesailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in "the greatstyle, " against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose ofan age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer'spoetry? Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer, the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader andthe actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, inan age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on hisopportunity for the touch of "golden alchemy, " or at least for thepleasantly lighted side of things themselves? Might not another, inone's own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had beenthrough the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in like manner, discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it? Would not a futuregeneration, looking back upon this, under the power of theenchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with itsown languor--the languor that for some reason (concerning whichAugustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt men always? HadHomer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to someof the people of his own age, [102] as seemed to happen with every newliterature in turn? In any case, the intellectual conditions of earlyGreece had been--how different from these! And a true literary tactwould accept that difference in forming the primary conception of theliterary function at a later time. Perhaps the utmost one could get byconscious effort, in the way of a reaction or return to the conditionsof an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas, artificialartlessness, naïveté; and this quality too might have its measure ofeuphuistic charm, direct and sensible enough, though it must count, incomparison with that genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, notas the freshness of the open fields, but only of a bunch offield-flowers in a heated room. 

There was, meantime, all this:--on one side, the old pagan culture, forus but a fragment, for him an accomplished yet present fact, still aliving, united, organic whole, in the entirety of its art, its thought, its religions, its sagacious forms of polity, that so weighty authorityit exercised on every point, being in reality only the measure of itscharm for every one: on the other side, the actual world in all itseager self-assertion, with Flavian himself, in his boundless animation, there, at the centre of the situation. From the natural defects, fromthe pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, hewas saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to present, veryreal, [103] at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante withwhat might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve thepurpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension ofthings as really being, with important results, thus, rather thanthus, --intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was calledupon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the modelwithin. Flavian too, with his fine clear mastery of the practicallyeffective, had early laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic inliterature: that to know when one's self is interested, is the firstcondition of interesting other people. It was a principle, theforcible apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in theselection of his intellectual food; often listless while others read orgazed diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere complaisanceto people's emotions: it served to foster in him a very scrupulousliterary sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demandfor a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personalintuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved hiseuphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice. 

Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddessVenus, the work of [104] his earlier manhood, and designed originallyto open an argument less persistently sombre than that protest againstthe whole pagan heaven which actually follows it? It is certainly themost typical expression of a mood, still incident to the young poet, asa thing peculiar to his youth, when he feels the sentimental currentsetting forcibly along his veins, and so much as a matter of purelyphysical excitement, that he can hardly distinguish it from theanimation of external nature, the upswelling of the seed in the earth, and of the sap through the trees. Flavian, to whom, again, as to hislater euphuistic kinsmen, old mythology seemed as full of untried, unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself, had long beenoccupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the vernal principle of life inthings; a composition shaping itself, little by little, out of athousand dim perceptions, into singularly definite form (definite andfirm as fine-art in metal, thought Marius) for which, as I said, he hadcaught his "refrain, " from the lips of the young men, singing becausethey could not help it, in the streets of Pisa. And as oftenesthappens also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemealbeginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunateincidents, the physical heat and light, of one singularly happy day. 

It was one of the first hot days of March--"the sacred day"--on which, from Pisa, as from [105] many another harbour on the Mediterranean, theShip of Isis went to sea, and every one walked down to the shore-sideto witness the freighting of the vessel, its launching and finalabandonment among the waves, as an object really devoted to the GreatGoddess, that new rival, or "double, " of ancient Venus, and like her afavourite patroness of sailors. On the evening next before, all theworld had been abroad to view the illumination of the river; thestately lines of building being wreathed with hundreds of many-colouredlamps. The young men had poured forth their chorus--

 Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit cras amet--

as they bore their torches through the yielding crowd, or rowed theirlanterned boats up and down the stream, till far into the night, whenheavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home. Morning broke, however, smiling and serene; and the long procession started betimes. The river, curving slightly, with the smoothly paved streets on eitherside, between its low marble parapet and the fair dwelling-houses, formed the main highway of the city; and the pageant, accompaniedthroughout by innumerable lanterns and wax tapers, took its course upone of these streets, crossing the water by a bridge up-stream, anddown the other, to the haven, every possible standing-place, out ofdoors [106] and within, being crowded with sight-seers, of whom Mariuswas one of the most eager, deeply interested in finding the spectaclemuch as Apuleius had described it in his famous book. 

At the head of the procession, the master of ceremonies, quietly wavingback the assistants, made way for a number of women, scatteringperfumes. They were succeeded by a company of musicians, piping andtwanging, on instruments the strangest Marius had ever beheld, thenotes of a hymn, narrating the first origin of this votive rite to achoir of youths, who marched behind them singing it. The tire-women andother personal attendants of the great goddess came next, bearing theinstruments of their ministry, and various articles from the sacredwardrobe, wrought of the most precious material; some of them with longivory combs, plying their hands in wild yet graceful concert ofmovement as they went, in devout mimicry of the toilet. Placed intheir rear were the mirror-bearers of the goddess, carrying largemirrors of beaten brass or silver, turned in such a way as to reflectto the great body of worshippers who followed, the face of themysterious image, as it moved on its way, and their faces to it, asthough they were in fact advancing to meet the heavenly visitor. Theycomprehended a multitude of both sexes and of all ages, alreadyinitiated into the divine secret, clad in fair linen, the femalesveiled, the males with shining [107] tonsures, and every one carrying asistrum--the richer sort of silver, a few very dainty persons of finegold--rattling the reeds, with a noise like the jargon of innumerablebirds and insects awakened from torpor and abroad in the spring sun. Then, borne upon a kind of platform, came the goddess herself, undulating above the heads of the multitude as the bearers walked, inmystic robe embroidered with the moon and stars, bordered gracefullywith a fringe of real fruit and flowers, and with a glittering crownupon the head. The train of the procession consisted of the priests inlong white vestments, close from head to foot, distributed into variousgroups, each bearing, exposed aloft, one of the sacred symbols ofIsis--the corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand of equity, and amongthem the votive ship itself, carved and gilt, and adorned bravely withflags flying. Last of all walked the high priest; the people kneelingas he passed to kiss his hand, in which were those well-rememberedroses. 

Marius followed with the rest to the harbour, where the mystic ship, lowered from the shoulders of the priests, was loaded with as much asit could carry of the rich spices and other costly gifts, offered ingreat profusion by the worshippers, and thus, launched at last upon thewater, left the shore, crossing the harbour-bar in the wake of a muchstouter vessel than itself with a crew of white-robed mariners, whose[108] function it was, at the appointed moment, finally to desert it onthe open sea. 

The remainder of the day was spent by most in parties on the water. Flavian and Marius sailed further than they had ever done before to awild spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony, which, having had its eager, stirring life at the time when Etruria wasstill a power in Italy, had perished in the age of the civil wars. Inthe absolute transparency of the air on this gracious day, aninfinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with sparklingclearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves--Flavian at worksuddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land atlast. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with atumble-down of quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine ofVenus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and napkins and gildedshells which these people had offered to the image. Flavian and Mariussat down under the shadow of a mass of gray rock or ruin, where thesea-gate of the Greek town had been, and talked of life in those oldGreek colonies. Of this place, all that remained, besides those rudestones, was--a handful of silver coins, each with a head of pure andarchaic beauty, though a little cruel perhaps, supposed to representthe Siren Ligeia, whose tomb was formerly shown here--only these, andan ancient song, the very strain which Flavian [109] had recovered inthose last months. They were records which spoke, certainly, of thecharm of life within those walls. How strong must have been the tideof men's existence in that little republican town, so small that thiscircle of gray stones, of service now only by the moisture theygathered for the blue-flowering gentians among them, had been the lineof its rampart! An epitome of all that was liveliest, most animatedand adventurous, in the old Greek people of which it was an offshoot, it had enhanced the effect of these gifts by concentration withinnarrow limits. The band of "devoted youth, "--hiera neotês. +--of theyounger brothers, devoted to the gods and whatever luck the gods mightafford, because there was no room for them at home--went forth, bearingthe sacred flame from the mother hearth; itself a flame, of power toconsume the whole material of existence in clear light and heat, withno smouldering residue. The life of those vanished townsmen, sobrilliant and revolutionary, applying so abundantly the personalqualities which alone just then Marius seemed to value, associateditself with the actual figure of his companion, standing there beforehim, his face enthusiastic with the sudden thought of all that; andstruck him vividly as precisely the fitting opportunity for a naturelike his, so hungry for control, for ascendency over men. 

Marius noticed also, however, as high spirits [110] flagged at last, onthe way home through the heavy dew of the evening, more than physicalfatigue in Flavian, who seemed to find no refreshment in the coolness. There had been something feverish, perhaps, and like the beginning ofsickness, about his almost forced gaiety, in this sudden spasm ofspring; and by the evening of the next day he was lying with a burningspot on his forehead, stricken, as was thought from the first, by theterrible new disease. 

NOTES

93. +Corrected from the Macmillan edition misprint "singal. "

98. +Transliteration: es kallos graphein. Translation: "To writebeautifully. "

100. +Iliad 1. 432-33, 437. Transliteration:

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

Etext editor's translation:

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

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

CHAPTER VII: A PAGAN END

[111] FOR the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor MarcusAurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in his train, among the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive. People actuallysickened at a sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as they watched indense crowds the pathetic or grotesque imagery of failure or success inthe triumphal procession. And, as usual, the plague brought with it apower to develop all pre-existent germs of superstition. It was bydishonour done to Apollo himself, said popular rumour--to Apollo, theold titular divinity of pestilence, that the poisonous thing had comeabroad. Pent up in a golden coffer consecrated to the god, it hadescaped in the sacrilegious plundering of his temple at Seleucia by thesoldiers of Lucius Verus, after a traitorous surprise of that town anda cruel massacre. Certainly there was something which baffled allimaginable precautions and all medical science, in the suddenness [112]with which the disease broke out simultaneously, here and there, amongboth soldiers and citizens, even in places far remote from the mainline of its march in the rear of the victorious army. It seemed tohave invaded the whole empire, and some have even thought that, in amitigated form, it permanently remained there. In Rome itself manythousands perished; and old authorities tell of farmsteads, wholetowns, and even entire neighbourhoods, which from that time continuedwithout inhabitants and lapsed into wildness or ruin. 

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

Flavian lay there, with the enemy at his breast now in a painful cough, but relieved from that burning fever in the head, amid the rich-scentedflowers--rare Paestum roses, and the like [113] --procured by Mariusfor his solace, in a fancied convalescence; and would, at intervals, return to labour at his verses, with a great eagerness to complete andtranscribe the work, while Marius sat and wrote at his dictation, oneof the latest but not the poorest specimens of genuine Latin poetry. 

It was in fact a kind of nuptial hymn, which, taking its start from thethought of nature as the universal mother, celebrated the preliminarypairing and mating together of all fresh things, in the hot and genialspring-time--the immemorial nuptials of the soul of spring itself andthe brown earth; and was full of a delighted, mystic sense of whatpassed between them in that fantastic marriage. That mystic burden wasrelieved, at intervals, by the familiar playfulness of the Latinverse-writer in dealing with mythology, which, though coming at so latea day, had still a wonderful freshness in its old age. --"Amor has puthis weapons by and will keep holiday. He was bidden go withoutapparel, that none might be wounded by his bow and arrows. But takecare! In truth he is none the less armed than usual, though he be allunclad. "

In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while making it his chiefaim to retain the opulent, many-syllabled vocabulary of the Latingenius, at some points even to have advanced beyond it, in anticipationof wholly new laws of [114] taste as regards sound, a new range ofsound itself. The peculiar resultant note, associating itself withcertain other experiences of his, was to Marius like the foretaste ofan entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come. Flavian had caught, indeed, something of the rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music ofthe medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its unction andmysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along with the lastsplendour of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of thattransformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just aboutto dawn. The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself witha feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seemsto say, You have been just here, just thus, before!--a feeling, in hiscase, not reminiscent but prescient of the future, which passed overhim afterwards many times, as he came across certain places and people. It was as if he detected there the process of actual change to a whollyundreamed-of and renewed condition of human body and soul: as if he sawthe heavy yet decrepit old Roman architecture about him, rebuilding onan intrinsically better pattern. Could it have been actually on a newmusical instrument that Flavian had first heard the novel accents ofhis verse? And still Marius noticed there, amid all its richness ofexpression and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always relishedso much in the composition of [115] Flavian. Yes! a firmness like thatof some master of noble metal-work, manipulating tenacious bronze orgold. Even now that haunting refrain, with its impromptu variations, from the throats of those strong young men, came floating through thewindow. 

 Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit cras amet!

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

What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and body so fortunatelyendowed, the mere liberty of life above-ground, "those sunny morningsin the cornfields by the sea, " as he recollected them one day, when thewindow was thrown open upon the early freshness--his sense of all this, was from the first singularly near and distinct, yet rather as ofsomething he was but debarred the use of for a time than finallybidding farewell to. That was while he was still with no very gravemisgivings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources oflife still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time totime, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at the poem from his dictation, was haunted by a feeling of the triviality of such work just then. Therecurrent sense of some obscure danger beyond the mere danger of death, vaguer than that and by so much the more terrible, like the menace ofsome shadowy [116] adversary in the dark with whose mode of attack theyhad no acquaintance, disturbed him now and again through those hours ofexcited attention to his manuscript, and to the purely physical wantsof Flavian. Still, during these three days there was much hope andcheerfulness, and even jesting. Half-consciously Marius tried toprolong one or another relieving circumstance of the day, thepreparations for rest and morning refreshment, for instance; sadlymaking the most of the little luxury of this or that, with something ofthe feigned cheer of the mother who sets her last morsels before herfamished child as for a feast, but really that he "may eat it and die. "

On the afternoon of the seventh day he allowed Marius finally to putaside the unfinished manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the chestquiet at length though much exhausted, had made itself felt with fullpower again in a painful vomiting, which seemed to shake his bodyasunder, with great consequent prostration. From that time thedistress increased rapidly downwards. Omnia tum vero vitai claustralababant;+ and soon the cold was mounting with sure pace from the deadfeet to the head. 

And now Marius began more than to suspect what the issue must be, andhenceforward could but watch with a sort of agonised fascination therapid but systematic work of the destroyer, [117] faintly relieving alittle the mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering. Flavianhimself appeared, in full consciousness at last--in clear-sighted, deliberate estimate of the actual crisis--to be doing battle with hisadversary. His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the varioussuggested modes of relief. He must without fail get better, he wouldfancy, might he be removed to a certain place on the hills where as achild he had once recovered from sickness, but found that he couldscarcely raise his head from the pillow without giddiness. As if nowsurely foreseeing the end, he would set himself, with an eager effort, and with that eager and angry look, which is noted as one of thepremonitions of death in this disease, to fashion out, without formaldictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished work, inhard-set determination, defiant of pain, to arrest this or that littledrop at least from the river of sensuous imagery rushing so quicklypast him. 

But at length delirium--symptom that the work of the plague was done, and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy--broke the coherentorder of words and thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony, found his best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient's mind. Inintervals of clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of sorrowand desolation, were very painful. No longer battling with thedisease, he seemed as it were to place himself [118] at the disposal ofthe victorious foe, dying passively, like some dumb creature, inhopeless acquiescence at last. That old, half-pleading petulance, unamiable, yet, as it might seem, only needing conditions of life alittle happier than they had actually been, to become refinement ofaffection, a delicate grace in its demand on the sympathy of others, had changed in those moments of full intelligence to a clinging andtremulous gentleness, as he lay--"on the very threshold of death"--witha sharply contracted hand in the hand of Marius, to his almostsurprised joy, winning him now to an absolutely self-forgetfuldevotion. There was a new sort of pleading in the misty eyes, justbecause they took such unsteady note of him, which made Marius feel asif guilty; anticipating thus a form of self-reproach with which eventhe tenderest ministrant may be sometimes surprised, when, at death, affectionate labour suddenly ceasing leaves room for the suspicion ofsome failure of love perhaps, at one or another minute point in it. Marius almost longed to take his share in the suffering, that he mightunderstand so the better how to relieve it. 

It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the patient, and Mariusextinguished it. The thunder which had sounded all day among thehills, with a heat not unwelcome to Flavian, had given way at nightfallto steady rain; and [119] in the darkness Marius lay down beside him, faintly shivering now in the sudden cold, to lend him his own warmth, undeterred by the fear of contagion which had kept other people frompassing near the house. At length about day-break he perceived thatthe last effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as Mariusunderstood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of himthere. "Is it a comfort, " he whispered then, "that I shall often comeand weep over you?"--"Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!"

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

[120] The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort towatch by it through the darkness, was a hint of his own failingstrength, just in time. The first night after the washing of the body, he bore stoutly enough the tax which affection seemed to demand, throwing the incense from time to time on the little altar placedbeside the bier. It was the recurrence of the thing--that unchangedoutline below the coverlet, amid a silence in which the faintest rustleseemed to speak--that finally overcame his determination. Surely, here, in this alienation, this sense of distance between them, whichhad come over him before though in minor degree when the mind ofFlavian had wandered in his sickness, was another of the pains ofdeath. Yet he was able to make all due preparations, and go throughthe ceremonies, shortened a little because of the infection, when, on acloudless evening, the funeral procession went forth; himself, theflames of the pyre having done their work, carrying away the urn of thedeceased, in the folds of his toga, to its last resting-place in thecemetery beside the highway, and so turning home to sleep in his owndesolate lodging. 

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

What thought of others' thoughts about one could there be with theregret for "so dear a head" fresh at one's heart?

NOTES

116. +Lucretius, Book VI. 1153. 

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

PART THE SECOND

CHAPTER VIII: ANIMULA VAGULA

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

 The Emperor Hadrian to his Soul

[123] FLAVIAN was no more. The little marble chest with its dust andtears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actualspectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for theimagination, whatever confidence they may entertain of the soul'ssurvival in another life. To Marius, greatly agitated by that event, the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing lessthan the soul's extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as thefire among those still beloved ashes. Even that wistful suspense ofjudgment expressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages ofbeing still possible for the soul in some dim journey hence, seemedwholly untenable, and, with it, almost all that remained of thereligion of his childhood. Future extinction seemed just then [124] tobe what the unforced witness of his own nature pointed to. On the otherhand, there came a novel curiosity as to what the various schools ofancient philosophy had had to say concerning that strange, flutteringcreature; and that curiosity impelled him to certain severe studies, inwhich his earlier religious conscience seemed still to survive, as aprinciple of hieratic scrupulousness or integrity of thought, regardingthis new service to intellectual light. 

At this time, by his poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen aprey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in manya melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this, fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, hewas kept by a genuine virility there, effective in him, among otherresults, as a hatred of what was theatrical, and the instinctiverecognition that in vigorous intelligence, after all, divinity was mostlikely to be found a resident. With this was connected the feeling, increasing with his advance to manhood, of a poetic beauty in mereclearness of thought, the actually aesthetic charm of a cold austerityof mind; as if the kinship of that to the clearness of physical lightwere something more than a figure of speech. Of all those variousreligious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could wellappreciate the picturesque; that was made easy by his naturalEpicureanism, already prompting [125] him to conceive of himself as butthe passive spectator of the world around him. But it was to theseverer reasoning, of which such matters as Epicurean theory are born, that, in effect, he now betook himself. Instinctively suspicious ofthose mechanical arcana, those pretended "secrets unveiled" of theprofessional mystic, which really bring great and little souls to onelevel, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old, ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and thehonest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even theArcana Celestia of Platonism--what the sons of Plato had had to sayregarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily houseand merely occasional dwelling-place--seemed to him while his heart wasthere in the urn with the material ashes of Flavian, or still lingeringin memory over his last agony, wholly inhuman or morose, as tending toalleviate his resentment at nature's wrong. It was to the sentiment ofthe body, and the affections it defined--the flesh, of whose force andcolour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue orabstract--he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved, suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him amaterialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee. 

As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetryhad passed away, [126] to be replaced by the literature of thought. Hismuch-pondered manuscript verses were laid aside; and what happened nowto one, who was certainly to be something of a poet from first to last, looked at the moment like a change from poetry to prose. He came ofage about this time, his own master though with beardless face; and ateighteen, an age at which, then as now, many youths of capacity, whofancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from others chiefly inaffectation and vague dreaming, he secluded himself indeed from others, but in a severe intellectual meditation, that salt of poetry, withoutwhich all the more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative world. Still with something of the old religious earnestness of his childhood, he set himself--Sich im Denken zu orientiren--to determine hisbearings, as by compass, in the world of thought--to get that preciseacquaintance with the creative intelligence itself, its structure andcapacities, its relation to other parts of himself and to other things, without which, certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young manrich in this world's goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, andascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact estimateof realities, as towards himself, he must have--a delicately measuredgradation of certainty in things--from the distant, haunted horizon ofmere surmise or imagination, to the actual [127] feeling of sorrow inhis heart, as he reclined one morning, alone instead of in pleasantcompany, to ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old Greekmanuscript, unrolled beside him. His former gay companions, meetinghim in the streets of the old Italian town, and noting the graver linescoming into the face of the sombre but enthusiastic student ofintellectual structure, who could hold his own so well in the societyof accomplished older men, were half afraid of him, though proud tohave him of their company. Why this reserve?--they asked, concerningthe orderly, self-possessed youth, whose speech and carriage seemed socarefully measured, who was surely no poet like the rapt, dishevelledLupus. Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was so daintilyfolded, and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent onhis own line of ambition: or even on riches?

Marius, meantime, was reading freely, in early morning for the mostpart, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know whatmight be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires. And the old Greek who more than any other was now giving form to histhoughts was a very hard master. From Epicurus, from the thunder andlightning of Lucretius--like thunder and lightning some distance off, one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses--he had gone back to[128] the writer who was in a certain sense the teacher of both, Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult book "Concerning Nature" was eventhen rare, for people had long since satisfied themselves by thequotation of certain brilliant, isolated, oracles only, out of what wasat best a taxing kind of lore. But the difficulty of the early Greekprose did but spur the curiosity of Marius; the writer, the superiorclearness of whose intellectual view had so sequestered him from othermen, who had had so little joy of that superiority, being avowedlyexacting as to the amount of devout attention he required from thestudent. "The many, " he said, always thus emphasising the differencebetween the many and the few, are "like people heavy with wine, " "ledby children, " "knowing not whither they go;" and yet, "much learningdoth not make wise;" and again, "the ass, after all, would have histhistles rather than fine gold. "

Heraclitus, indeed, had not under-rated the difficulty for "the many"of the paradox with which his doctrine begins, and the due reception ofwhich must involve a denial of habitual impressions, as the necessaryfirst step in the way of truth. His philosophy had been developed inconscious, outspoken opposition to the current mode of thought, as amatter requiring some exceptional loyalty to pure reason and its "drylight. " Men are subject to an illusion, he protests, regarding mattersapparent to sense. [129] What the uncorrected sense gives was a falseimpression of permanence or fixity in things, which have really changedtheir nature in the very moment in which we see and touch them. Andthe radical flaw in the current mode of thinking would lie herein:that, reflecting this false or uncorrected sensation, it attributes tothe phenomena of experience a durability which does not really belongto them. Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world of firmlyout-lined objects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and deadwhat is in reality full of animation, of vigour, of the fire oflife--that eternal process of nature, of which at a later time Goethespoke as the "Living Garment, " whereby God is seen of us, ever inweaving at the "Loom of Time. "

And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made was, in the firstinstance, from confused to unconfused sensation; with a sort ofprophetic seriousness, a great claim and assumption, such as we mayunderstand, if we anticipate in this preliminary scepticism theulterior scope of his speculation, according to which the universalmovement of all natural things is but one particular stage, or measure, of that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason consists. The onetrue being--that constant subject of all early thought--it was hismerit to have conceived, not as sterile and stagnant inaction, but as aperpetual energy, from the restless stream of which, [130] at certainpoints, some elements detach themselves, and harden into non-entity anddeath, corresponding, as outward objects, to man's inward condition ofignorance: that is, to the slowness of his faculties. It is with thisparadox of a subtle, perpetual change in all visible things, that thehigh speculation of Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expressesfor anything like a careless, half-conscious, "use-and-wont" receptionof our experience, which took so strong a hold on men's memories! Hencethose many precepts towards a strenuous self-consciousness in all wethink and do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason, which makesstrict attentiveness of mind a kind of religious duty and service. 

The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our ordinaryexperience, fixed as they seem, are really in perpetual change, hadbeen, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a largepositive system of almost religious philosophy. Then as now, theilluminated philosophic mind might apprehend, in what seemed a mass oflifeless matter, the movement of that universal life, in which things, and men's impressions of them, were ever "coming to be, " alternatelyconsumed and renewed. That continual change, to be discovered by theattentive understanding where common opinion found fixed objects, wasbut the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading motion--the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine [131] reason itself, proceeding always by its own rhythmical logic, and lending to all mindand matter, in turn, what life they had. In this "perpetual flux" ofthings and of souls, there was, as Heraclitus conceived, a continuance, if not of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderlyintelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wroughtout in and through the series of their mutations--ordinances of thedivine reason, maintained throughout the changes of the phenomenalworld; and this harmony in their mutation and opposition, was, afterall, a principle of sanity, of reality, there. But it happened, that, of all this, the first, merely sceptical or negative step, that easieststep on the threshold, had alone remained in general memory; and the"doctrine of motion" seemed to those who had felt its seduction to makeall fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the stillswifter passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed toreflect them, might indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but whatwas ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring flame, orlike the race of water in the mid-stream--too swiftly for any realknowledge of them to be attainable. Heracliteanism had grown to bealmost identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras, that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was theonly standard of what is or is [132] not, and each one the measure ofall things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had becomebut an authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge. 

And as it had been with his original followers in Greece, so ithappened now with the later Roman disciple. He, too, paused at theapprehension of that constant motion of things--the drift of flowers, of little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream aroundhim, the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out ofsight, must count with him as but a dim problem. The bold mentalflight of the old Greek master from the fleeting, competing objects ofexperience to that one universal life, in which the whole sphere ofphysical change might be reckoned as but a single pulsation, remainedby him as hypothesis only--the hypothesis he actually preferred, as initself most credible, however scantily realisable even by theimagination--yet still as but one unverified hypothesis, among manyothers, concerning the first principle of things. He might reserve itas a fine, high, visionary consideration, very remote upon theintellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where that ladderseemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly notime left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so closeto him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground. And thosechildish days of reverie, [133] when he played at priests, played inmany another day-dream, working his way from the actual present, as faras he might, with a delightful sense of escape in replacing the outerworld of other people by an inward world as himself really cared tohave it, had made him a kind of "idealist. " He was become aware of thepossibility of a large dissidence between an inward and somewhatexclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved, unheightened reality of the life of those about him. As a consequence, he was ready now to concede, somewhat more easily than others, thefirst point of his new lesson, that the individual is to himself themeasure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive certainty tohimself of his own impressions. To move afterwards in that outer worldof other people, as though taking it at their estimate, would bepossible henceforth only as a kind of irony. And as with the VicaireSavoyard, after reflecting on the variations of philosophy, "the firstfruit he drew from that reflection was the lesson of a limitation ofhis researches to what immediately interested him; to rest peacefullyin a profound ignorance as to all beside; to disquiet himself onlyconcerning those things which it was of import for him to know. " Atleast he would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow itsdue weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in theconditions of man's life. [134] Just here he joined company, retracingin his individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of humanthought, with another wayfarer on the journey, another ancient Greekmaster, the founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weightytraditional utterances (for he had left no writing) served in turn togive effective outline to the contemplations of Marius. There wassomething in the doctrine itself congruous with the place wherein ithad its birth; and for a time Marius lived much, mentally, in thebrilliant Greek colony which had given a dubious name to the philosophyof pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the mountains and thesea, among richer than Italian gardens, on a certain breezy table-landprojecting from the African coast, some hundreds of miles southwardfrom Greece. There, in a delightful climate, with something oftransalpine temperance amid its luxury, and withal in an inwardatmosphere of temperance which did but further enhance the brilliancyof human life, the school of Cyrene had maintained itself as almost onewith the family of its founder; certainly as nothing coarse or unclean, and under the influence of accomplished women. 

Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of judgment as towhat might really lie behind--flammantia moenia mundi: the flamingramparts of the world. Those strange, bold, sceptical surmises, whichhad haunted the minds [135] of the first Greek enquirers as merelyabstract doubt, which had been present to the mind of Heraclitus as oneelement only in a system of abstract philosophy, became with Aristippusa very subtly practical worldly-wisdom. The difference between him andthose obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that between an ancientthinker generally, and a modern man of the world: it was the differencebetween the mystic in his cell, or the prophet in the desert, and theexpert, cosmopolitan, administrator of his dark sayings, translatingthe abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first of all, ofsentiment. It has been sometimes seen, in the history of the humanmind, that when thus translated into terms of sentiment--of sentiment, as lying already half-way towards practice--the abstract ideas ofmetaphysics for the first time reveal their true significance. Themetaphysical principle, in itself, as it were, without hands or feet, becomes impressive, fascinating, of effect, when translated into aprecept as to how it were best to feel and act; in other words, underits sentimental or ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the greatmaster of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows, and that we, even as they, never continue in one stay, might indeed have takeneffect as a languid, enervating, consumptive nihilism, as a precept of"renunciation, " which would touch and handle and busy itself withnothing. But in the reception of [136] metaphysical formulae, alldepends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on thepre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which theyfall--the company they find already present there, on their admissioninto the house of thought; there being at least so much truth as thisinvolves in the theological maxim, that the reception of this or thatspeculative conclusion is really a matter of will. The persuasion thatall is vanity, with this happily constituted Greek, who had been agenuine disciple of Socrates and reflected, presumably, something ofhis blitheness in the face of the world, his happy way of taking allchances, generated neither frivolity nor sourness, but induced, rather, an impression, just serious enough, of the call upon men's attention ofthe crisis in which they find themselves. It became the stimulustowards every kind of activity, and prompted a perpetual, inextinguishable thirst after experience. 

With Marius, then, the influence of the philosopher of pleasuredepended on this, that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhatacrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial nature, well fitted totransform it into a theory of practice, of considerable stimulativepower towards a fair life. What Marius saw in him was the spectacle ofone of the happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to anunderstanding with the most depressing of theories; accepting the [137]results of a metaphysical system which seemed to concentrate intoitself all the weakening trains of thought in earlier Greekspeculation, and making the best of it; turning its hard, bare truths, with wonderful tact, into precepts of grace, and delicate wisdom, and adelicate sense of honour. Given the hardest terms, supposing our daysare indeed but a shadow, even so, we may well adorn and beautify, inscrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touchupon--these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling-places throughwhich the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the intercourse of society. The most discerningjudges saw in him something like the graceful "humanities" of the laterRoman, and our modern "culture, " as it is termed; while Horace recalledhis sayings as expressing best his own consummate amenity in thereception of life. 

In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of that old master ofdecorous living, those eternal doubts as to the criteria of truthreduced themselves to a scepticism almost drily practical, a scepticismwhich developed the opposition between things as they are and ourimpressions and thoughts concerning them--the possibility, if anoutward world does really exist, of some faultiness in our apprehensionof it--the doctrine, in short, of what is termed "the subjectivity ofknowledge. " That is a consideration, indeed, [138] which lies as anelement of weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw, at the veryfoundation of every philosophical account of the universe; whichconfronts all philosophies at their starting, but with which none havereally dealt conclusively, some perhaps not quite sincerely; whichthose who are not philosophers dissipate by "common, " butunphilosophical, sense, or by religious faith. The peculiar strengthof Marius was, to have apprehended this weakness on the threshold ofhuman knowledge, in the whole range of its consequences. Our knowledgeis limited to what we feel, he reflected: we need no proof that wefeel. But can we be sure that things are at all like our feelings?Mere peculiarities in the instruments of our cognition, like the littleknots and waves on the surface of a mirror, may distort the matter theyseem but to represent. Of other people we cannot truly know even thefeelings, nor how far they would indicate the same modifications, eachone of a personality really unique, in using the same terms asourselves; that "common experience, " which is sometimes proposed as asatisfactory basis of certainty, being after all only a fixity oflanguage. But our own impressions!--The light and heat of that blueveil over our heads, the heavens spread out, perhaps not like a curtainover anything!--How reassuring, after so long a debate about the rivalcriteria of truth, to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one's[139] aspirations after knowledge to that! In an age still materiallyso brilliant, so expert in the artistic handling of material things, with sensible capacities still in undiminished vigour, with the wholeworld of classic art and poetry outspread before it, and where therewas more than eye or ear could well take in--how natural thedetermination to rely exclusively upon the phenomena of the senses, which certainly never deceive us about themselves, about which alone wecan never deceive ourselves!

And so the abstract apprehension that the little point of this presentmoment alone really is, between a past which has just ceased to be anda future which may never come, became practical with Marius, under theform of a resolve, as far as possible, to exclude regret and desire, and yield himself to the improvement of the present with an absolutelydisengaged mind. America is here and now--here, or nowhere: as WilhelmMeister finds out one day, just not too late, after so long lookingvaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the development of hiscapacities. It was as if, recognising in perpetual motion the law ofnature, Marius identified his own way of life cordially with it, "throwing himself into the stream, " so to speak. He too must maintaina harmony with that soul of motion in things, by constantly renewedmobility of character. 

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res. --

[140] Thus Horace had summed up that perfect manner in the reception oflife attained by his old Cyrenaic master; and the first practicalconsequence of the metaphysic which lay behind that perfect manner, hadbeen a strict limitation, almost the renunciation, of metaphysicalenquiry itself. Metaphysic--that art, as it has so often proved, inthe words of Michelet, de s'égarer avec méthode, of bewildering oneselfmethodically:--one must spend little time upon that! In the school ofCyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness, logical and physicalspeculation, theoretic interests generally, had been valued only so faras they served to give a groundwork, an intellectual justification, tothat exclusive concern with practical ethics which was a note of theCyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic, how true to itself, under how many varieties of character, had been the effort of theGreeks after Theory--Theôria--that vision of a wholly reasonable world, which, according to the greatest of them, literally makes man like God:how loyally they had still persisted in the quest after that, in spiteof how many disappointments! In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps, some of them might have found the kind of vision they were seeking for;but not in "doubtful disputations" concerning "being" and "not being, "knowledge and appearance. Men's minds, even young men's minds, at thatlate day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which[141] had so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind of Marius, as in that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui, combined withappetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort ofsuicide (instances of the like have been seen since) by which a greatmetaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving metaphysicalspeculation impossible, or useless. Abstract theory was to be valuedonly just so far as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind fromsuppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly visionary, leavingit in flawless evenness of surface to the impressions of an experience, concrete and direct. 

To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding ourselvesof such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions--to berid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often onlymisrepresent the experience of which they profess to be therepresentation--idola, idols, false appearances, as Bacon calls themlater--to neutralise the distorting influence of metaphysical system byan all-accomplished metaphysic skill: it is this bold, hard, soberrecognition, under a very "dry light, " of its own proper aim, in unionwith a habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps open awide doorway to human weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic doctrine, toreproductions of this doctrine in the time of Marius or in our own, their gravity and importance. It was a [142] school to which the youngman might come, eager for truth, expecting much from philosophy, in noignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than an "initiation. " Hewould be sent back, sooner or later, to experience, to the world ofconcrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt byhim; but with a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from thetyranny of mere theories. 

So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed thedeath of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself asif returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant schoolof healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, onits fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general completenessof life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysicalmetaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, alife of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effectiveauxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, freedom fromall partial and misrepresentative doctrine which does but relieve oneelement in our experience at the cost of another, freedom from allembarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on thefuture: this would be but preliminary to the real business ofeducation--insight, insight through culture, into all that the presentmoment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence. From that maxim of [143] Life as the end of life, followed, as apractical consequence, the desirableness of refining all theinstruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all theircapacities, of testing and exercising one's self in them, till one'swhole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards thevision--the "beatific vision, " if we really cared to make it such--ofour actual experience in the world. Not the conveyance of an abstractbody of truths or principles, would be the aim of the right educationof one's self, or of another, but the conveyance of an art--an art insome degree peculiar to each individual character; with themodifications, that is, due to its special constitution, and thepeculiar circumstances of its growth, inasmuch as no one of us is "likeanother, all in all. "

CHAPTER IX: NEW CYRENAICISM

[144] SUCH were the practical conclusions drawn for himself by Marius, when somewhat later he had outgrown the mastery of others, from theprinciple that "all is vanity. " If he could but count upon thepresent, if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown toconduct one anywhere beyond itself, if men's highest curiosity wasindeed so persistently baffled--then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that present with vividsensations, and such intellectual apprehensions, as, in strength anddirectness and their immediately realised values at the bar of anactual experience, are most like sensations. So some have spoken inevery age; for, like all theories which really express a strong naturaltendency of the human mind or even one of its characteristic modes ofweakness, this vein of reflection is a constant tradition inphilosophy. Every age of European thought has had its Cyrenaics orEpicureans, under many disguises: even under the hood of the monk. 

[145] But--Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!--is a proposal, the real import of which differs immensely, according to the naturaltaste, and the acquired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table. It may express nothing better than the instinct of Dante's Ciacco, theaccomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno;+ or, since on nohypothesis does man "live by bread alone, " may come to be identicalwith--"My meat is to do what is just and kind;" while the soul, whichcan make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veilof immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness inconforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for itself;and actually, though but with so faint hope, does the "Father'sbusiness. "

In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely disabused of themetaphysical ambition to pass beyond "the flaming ramparts of theworld, " but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation ofintellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all varietiesof what is powerful or attractive in man and his works, the thoughts ofMarius did but follow the line taken by the majority of educatedpersons, though to a different issue. Pitched to a really high andserious key, the precept--Be perfect in regard to what is here and now:the precept of "culture, " as it is called, or of a completeeducation--might at least save him from the vulgarity and heaviness[146] of a generation, certainly of no general fineness of temper, though with a material well-being abundant enough. Conceded that whatis secure in our existence is but the sharp apex of the present momentbetween two hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in ourexperience but a series of fleeting impressions:--so Marius continuedthe sceptical argument he had condensed, as the matter to hold by, fromhis various philosophical reading:--given, that we are never to getbeyond the walls of the closely shut cell of one's own personality;that the ideas we are somehow impelled to form of an outer world, andof other minds akin to our own, are, it may be, but a day-dream, andthe thought of any world beyond, a day-dream perhaps idler still: then, he, at least, in whom those fleeting impressions--faces, voices, material sunshine--were very real and imperious, might well set himselfto the consideration, how such actual moments as they passed might bemade to yield their utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step onlybeyond that experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism orearthliness of human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuousworld, let him at least make the most of what was "here and now. " Inthe actual dimness of ways from means to ends--ends in themselvesdesirable, yet for the most part distant and for him, certainly, belowthe [147] visible horizon--he would at all events be sure that themeans, to use the well-worn terminology, should have something offinality or perfection about them, and themselves partake, in ameasure, of the more excellent nature of ends--that the means shouldjustify the end. 

With this view he would demand culture, paideia, + as the Cyrenaicssaid, or, in other words, a wide, a complete, education--an educationpartly negative, as ascertaining the true limits of man's capacities, but for the most part positive, and directed especially to theexpansion and refinement of the power of reception; of those powers, above all, which are immediately relative to fleeting phenomena, thepowers of emotion and sense. In such an education, an "aesthetic"education, as it might now be termed, and certainly occupied verylargely with those aspects of things which affect us pleasurablythrough sensation, art, of course, including all the finer sorts ofliterature, would have a great part to play. The study of music, inthat wider Platonic sense, according to which, music comprehends allthose matters over which the Muses of Greek mythology preside, wouldconduct one to an exquisite appreciation of all the finer traits ofnature and of man. Nay! the products of the imagination mustthemselves be held to present the most perfect forms of life--spiritand matter alike under their purest and most perfect conditions--themost strictly appropriate [148] objects of that impassionedcontemplation, which, in the world of intellectual discipline, as inthe highest forms of morality and religion, must be held to be theessential function of the "perfect. " Such manner of life might comeeven to seem a kind of religion--an inward, visionary, mystic piety, orreligion, by virtue of its effort to live days "lovely and pleasant" inthemselves, here and now, and with an all-sufficiency of well-being inthe immediate sense of the object contemplated, independently of anyfaith, or hope that might be entertained as to their ulterior tendency. In this way, the true aesthetic culture would be realisable as a newform of the contemplative life, founding its claim on the intrinsic"blessedness" of "vision"--the vision of perfect men and things. One'shuman nature, indeed, would fain reckon on an assured and endlessfuture, pleasing itself with the dream of a final home, to be attainedat some still remote date, yet with a conscious, delightful home-comingat last, as depicted in many an old poetic Elysium. On the other hand, the world of perfected sensation, intelligence, emotion, is so close tous, and so attractive, that the most visionary of spirits must needsrepresent the world unseen in colours, and under a form really borrowedfrom it. Let me be sure then--might he not plausibly say?--that I missno detail of this life of realised consciousness in the present! Hereat least is a vision, a theory, [149] theôria, + which reposes on nobasis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future afterall somewhat problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery ofan Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what hadreally been the origin, and course of development, of man's actuallyattained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason orspirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would ofcourse have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment, generally, ofwhat is near at hand, on the adornment of life, till, in a notimpracticable rule of conduct, one's existence, from day to day, cameto be like a well-executed piece of music; that "perpetual motion" inthings (so Marius figured the matter to himself, under the old Greekimageries) according itself to a kind of cadence or harmony. 

It was intelligible that this "aesthetic" philosophy might find itself(theoretically, at least, and by way of a curious question incasuistry, legitimate from its own point of view) weighing the claimsof that eager, concentrated, impassioned realisation of experience, against those of the received morality. Conceiving its own function ina somewhat desperate temper, and becoming, as every high-strung form ofsentiment, as the religious sentiment itself, may become, somewhatantinomian, when, in its effort towards the order of experiences itprefers, it is confronted with the traditional and popular [150]morality, at points where that morality may look very like aconvention, or a mere stage-property of the world, it would be found, from time to time, breaking beyond the limits of the actual moralorder; perhaps not without some pleasurable excitement in so bold aventure. 

With the possibility of some such hazard as this, in thought or even inpractice--that it might be, though refining, or tonic even, in the caseof those strong and in health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly andtemperate wisdom of Montaigne, "pernicious for those who have anynatural tendency to impiety or vice, " the line of reflection traced outabove, was fairly chargeable. --Not, however, with "hedonism" and itssupposed consequences. The blood, the heart, of Marius were stillpure. He knew that his carefully considered theory of practice bracedhim, with the effect of a moral principle duly recurring to mind everymorning, towards the work of a student, for which he might seemintended. Yet there were some among his acquaintance who jumped to theconclusion that, with the "Epicurean stye, " he was makingpleasure--pleasure, as they so poorly conceived it--the sole motive oflife; and they precluded any exacter estimate of the situation bycovering it with a high-sounding general term, through the vagueness ofwhich they were enabled to see the severe and laborious youth in thevulgar company of Lais. Words like "hedonism"-- [151] terms of largeand vague comprehension--above all when used for a purpose avowedlycontroversial, have ever been the worst examples of what are called"question-begging terms;" and in that late age in which Marius lived, amid the dust of so many centuries of philosophical debate, the air wasfull of them. Yet those who used that reproachful Greek term for thephilosophy of pleasure, were hardly more likely than the old Greeksthemselves (on whom regarding this very subject of the theory ofpleasure, their masters in the art of thinking had so emphatically toimpress the necessity of "making distinctions") to come to any verydelicately correct ethical conclusions by a reasoning, which began witha general term, comprehensive enough to cover pleasures so different inquality, in their causes and effects, as the pleasures of wine andlove, of art and science, of religious enthusiasm and politicalenterprise, and of that taste or curiosity which satisfied itself withlong days of serious study. Yet, in truth, each of those pleasurablemodes of activity, may, in its turn, fairly become the ideal of the"hedonistic" doctrine. Really, to the phase of reflection throughwhich Marius was then passing, the charge of "hedonism, " whatever itstrue weight might be, was not properly applicable at all. Notpleasure, but fulness of life, and "insight" as conducting to thatfulness--energy, variety, and choice of experience, including [152]noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite oldstory of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, suchas Seneca and Epictetus--whatever form of human life, in short, mightbe heroic, impassioned, ideal: from these the "new Cyrenaicism" ofMarius took its criterion of values. It was a theory, indeed, whichmight properly be regarded as in great degree coincident with the mainprinciple of the Stoics themselves, and an older version of the precept"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might"--a doctrineso widely acceptable among the nobler spirits of that time. And, aswith that, its mistaken tendency would lie in the direction of a kindof idolatry of mere life, or natural gift, or strength--l'idôlatrie destalents. 

To understand the various forms of ancient art and thought, the variousforms of actual human feeling (the only new thing, in a world almosttoo opulent in what was old) to satisfy, with a kind of scrupulousequity, the claims of these concrete and actual objects on hissympathy, his intelligence, his senses--to "pluck out the heart oftheir mystery, " and in turn become the interpreter of them to others:this had now defined itself for Marius as a very narrowly practicaldesign: it determined his choice of a vocation to live by. It was theera of the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they were sometimes called; ofmen who came in some instances to [153] great fame and fortune, by wayof a literary cultivation of "science. " That science, it has been oftensaid, must have been wholly an affair of words. But in a world, confessedly so opulent in what was old, the work, even of genius, mustnecessarily consist very much in criticism; and, in the case of themore excellent specimens of his class, the rhetorician was, after all, the eloquent and effective interpreter, for the delighted ears ofothers, of what understanding himself had come by, in years of traveland study, of the beautiful house of art and thought which was theinheritance of the age. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, to whose serviceMarius had now been called, was himself, more or less openly, a"lecturer. " That late world, amid many curiously vivid modern traits, had this spectacle, so familiar to ourselves, of the public lecturer oressayist; in some cases adding to his other gifts that of the Christianpreacher, who knows how to touch people's sensibilities on behalf ofthe suffering. To follow in the way of these successes, was the naturalinstinct of youthful ambition; and it was with no vulgar egotism thatMarius, at the age of nineteen, determined, like many another young manof parts, to enter as a student of rhetoric at Rome. 

Though the manner of his work was changed formally from poetry toprose, he remained, and must always be, of the poetic temper: by which, I mean, among other things, that quite [154] independently of thegeneral habit of that pensive age he lived much, and as it were bysystem, in reminiscence. Amid his eager grasping at the sensation, theconsciousness, of the present, he had come to see that, after all, themain point of economy in the conduct of the present, was thequestion:--How will it look to me, at what shall I value it, this daynext year?--that in any given day or month one's main concern was itsimpression for the memory. A strange trick memory sometimes playedhim; for, with no natural gradation, what was of last month, or ofyesterday, of to-day even, would seem as far off, as entirely detachedfrom him, as things of ten years ago. Detached from him, yet very real, there lay certain spaces of his life, in delicate perspective, under afavourable light; and, somehow, all the less fortunate detail andcircumstance had parted from them. Such hours were oftenest those inwhich he had been helped by work of others to the pleasurableapprehension of art, of nature, or of life. "Not what I do, but what Iam, under the power of this vision"--he would say to himself--"is whatwere indeed pleasing to the gods!"

And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who had taken for hisphilosophic ideal the monochronos hêdonê+ of Aristippus--the pleasureof the ideal present, of the mystic now--there would come, togetherwith that precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire, afterall, [155] to retain "what was so transitive. " Could he but arrest, for others also, certain clauses of experience, as the imaginativememory presented them to himself! In those grand, hot summers, hewould have imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers. To create, tolive, perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it were butin a fragment of perfect expression:--it was thus his longing defineditself for something to hold by amid the "perpetual flux. " With men ofhis vocation, people were apt to say, words were things. Well! withhim, words should be indeed things, --the word, the phrase, valuable inexact proportion to the transparency with which it conveyed to othersthe apprehension, the emotion, the mood, so vividly real withinhimself. Verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur:+ Virileapprehension of the true nature of things, of the true nature of one'sown impression, first of all!--words would follow that naturally, atrue understanding of one's self being ever the first condition ofgenuine style. Language delicate and measured, the delicate Atticphrase, for instance, in which the eminent Aristeides could speak, wasthen a power to which people's hearts, and sometimes even their purses, readily responded. And there were many points, as Marius thought, onwhich the heart of that age greatly needed to be touched. He hardlyknew how strong that old religious sense of responsibility, theconscience, as we call it, [156] still was within him--a body of inwardimpressions, as real as those so highly valued outward ones--to offendagainst which, brought with it a strange feeling of disloyalty, as to aperson. And the determination, adhered to with no misgiving, to addnothing, not so much as a transient sigh, to the great total of men'sunhappiness, in his way through the world:--that too was something torest on, in the drift of mere "appearances. "

All this would involve a life of industry, of industrious study, onlypossible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body andsoul. For the male element, the logical conscience asserted itselfnow, with opening manhood--asserted itself, even in his literary style, by a certain firmness of outline, that touch of the worker in metal, amid its richness. Already he blamed instinctively alike in his workand in himself, as youth so seldom does, all that had not passed a longand liberal process of erasure. The happy phrase or sentence wasreally modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupulousthought. The suggestive force of the one master of his development, who had battled so hard with imaginative prose; the utterance, thegolden utterance, of the other, so content with its living power ofpersuasion that he had never written at all, --in the commixture ofthese two qualities he set up his literary ideal, and this rareblending of grace with an intellectual [157] rigour or astringency, wasthe secret of a singular expressiveness in it. 

He acquired at this time a certain bookish air, the somewhat sombrehabitude of the avowed scholar, which though it never interfered withthe perfect tone, "fresh and serenely disposed, " of the Romangentleman, yet qualified it as by an interesting oblique trait, andfrightened away some of his equals in age and rank. The soberdiscretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation, thesense of those negative conclusions enabling him to concentratehimself, with an absorption so entire, upon what is immediately hereand now, gave him a peculiar manner of intellectual confidence, as ofone who had indeed been initiated into a great secret. --Though with anair so disengaged, he seemed to be living so intently in the visibleworld! And now, in revolt against that pre-occupation with otherpersons, which had so often perturbed his spirit, his wistfulspeculations as to what the real, the greater, experience might be, determined in him, not as the longing for love--to be with Cynthia, orAspasia--but as a thirst for existence in exquisite places. The veilthat was to be lifted for him lay over the works of the old masters ofart, in places where nature also had used her mastery. And it was justat this moment that a summons to Rome reached him. 

NOTES

145. +Canto VI. 

147. +Transliteration: paideia. Definition "rearing, education. "

149. +Transliteration: theôria. Definition "a looking at . .. Observing . .. Contemplation. "

154. +Transliteration: monochronos hêdonê. Pater's definition "thepleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now. " The definition isfitting; the unusual adjective monokhronos means, literally, "single orunitary time. "

155. +Horace, Ars Poetica 311. +Etext editor's translation: "Thesubject once foreknown, the words will follow easily. "

CHAPTER X: ON THE WAY

 Mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur. Pliny's Letters. 

[158] MANY points in that train of thought, its harder and moreenergetic practical details especially, at first surmised but vaguelyin the intervals of his visits to the tomb of Flavian, attained thecoherence of formal principle amid the stirring incidents of thejourney, which took him, still in all the buoyancy of his nineteenyears and greatly expectant, to Rome. That summons had come from oneof the former friends of his father in the capital, who had kepthimself acquainted with the lad's progress, and, assured of his parts, his courtly ways, above all of his beautiful penmanship, now offeredhim a place, virtually that of an amanuensis, near the person of thephilosophic emperor. The old town-house of his family on the Caelianhill, so long neglected, might well require his personal care; andMarius, relieved a little by his preparations for travelling from acertain over-tension [159] of spirit in which he had lived of late, waspresently on his way, to await introduction to Aurelius, on hisexpected return home, after a first success, illusive enough as it wassoon to appear, against the invaders from beyond the Danube. 

The opening stage of his journey, through the firm, golden weather, forwhich he had lingered three days beyond the appointed time ofstarting--days brown with the first rains of autumn--brought him, bythe byways among the lower slopes of the Apennines of Luna, to the townof Luca, a station on the Cassian Way; travelling so far mainly onfoot, while the baggage followed under the care of his attendants. Hewore a broad felt hat, in fashion not unlike a more modern pilgrim's, the neat head projecting from the collar of his gray paenula, ortravelling mantle, sewed closely together over the breast, but with itstwo sides folded up upon the shoulders, to leave the arms free inwalking, and was altogether so trim and fresh, that, as he climbed thehill from Pisa, by the long steep lane through the olive-yards, andturned to gaze where he could just discern the cypresses of the oldschool garden, like two black lines down the yellow walls, a littlechild took possession of his hand, and, looking up at him with entireconfidence, paced on bravely at his side, for the mere pleasure of hiscompany, to the spot where the road declined again [160] into thevalley beyond. From this point, leaving the servants behind, hesurrendered himself, a willing subject, as he walked, to theimpressions of the road, and was almost surprised, both at thesuddenness with which evening came on, and the distance from his oldhome at which it found him. 

And at the little town of Luca, he felt that indescribable sense of awelcoming in the mere outward appearance of things, which seems to markout certain places for the special purpose of evening rest, and givesthem always a peculiar amiability in retrospect. Under the deepeningtwilight, the rough-tiled roofs seem to huddle together side by side, like one continuous shelter over the whole township, spread low andbroad above the snug sleeping-rooms within; and the place one sees forthe first time, and must tarry in but for a night, breathes the veryspirit of home. The cottagers lingered at their doors for a fewminutes as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; thoughthere was still a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling gray heights of anold temple. So quiet and air-swept was the place, you could hardlytell where the country left off in it, and the field-paths became itsstreets. Next morning he must needs change the manner of his journey. The light baggage-wagon returned, and he proceeded now more quickly, travelling [161] a stage or two by post, along the Cassian Way, wherethe figures and incidents of the great high-road seemed already to tellof the capital, the one centre to which all were hastening, or hadlately bidden adieu. That Way lay through the heart of the old, mysterious and visionary country of Etruria; and what he knew of itsstrange religion of the dead, reinforced by the actual sight of thefuneral houses scattered so plentifully among the dwelling-places ofthe living, revived in him for a while, in all its strength, his oldinstinctive yearning towards those inhabitants of the shadowy land hehad known in life. It seemed to him that he could half divine how timepassed in those painted houses on the hillsides, among the gold andsilver ornaments, the wrought armour and vestments, the drowsy and deadattendants; and the close consciousness of that vast population gavehim no fear, but rather a sense of companionship, as he climbed thehills on foot behind the horses, through the genial afternoon. 

The road, next day, passed below a town not less primitive, it mightseem, than its rocky perch--white rocks, that had long been glisteningbefore him in the distance. Down the dewy paths the people weredescending from it, to keep a holiday, high and low alike in rough, white-linen smocks. A homely old play was just begun in an open-airtheatre, with seats hollowed out of the turf-grown slope. Marius [162]caught the terrified expression of a child in its mother's arms, as itturned from the yawning mouth of a great mask, for refuge in her bosom. The way mounted, and descended again, down the steep street of anotherplace, all resounding with the noise of metal under the hammer; forevery house had its brazier's workshop, the bright objects of brass andcopper gleaming, like lights in a cave, out of their dark roofs andcorners. Around the anvils the children were watching the work, or ranto fetch water to the hissing, red-hot metal; and Marius too watched, as he took his hasty mid-day refreshment, a mess of chestnut-meal andcheese, while the swelling surface of a great copper water-vessel grewflowered all over with tiny petals under the skilful strokes. Towardsdusk, a frantic woman at the roadside, stood and cried out the words ofsome philter, or malison, in verse, with weird motion of her hands, asthe travellers passed, like a wild picture drawn from Virgil. 

But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of these incidents ofthe way, Marius noted, more and more as he drew nearer to Rome, marksof the great plague. Under Hadrian and his successors, there had beenmany enactments to improve the condition of the slave. The ergastula+were abolished. But no system of free labour had as yet succeeded. Awhole mendicant population, artfully exaggerating every symptom andcircumstance of misery, still hung [163] around, or shelteredthemselves within, the vast walls of their old, half-ruinedtask-houses. And for the most part they had been variously stricken bythe pestilence. For once, the heroic level had been reached in rags, squints, scars--every caricature of the human type--ravaged beyond whatcould have been thought possible if it were to survive at all. Meantime, the farms were less carefully tended than of old: here andthere they were lapsing into their natural wildness: some villas alsowere partly fallen into ruin. The picturesque, romantic Italy of alater time--the Italy of Claude and Salvator Rosa--was already forming, for the delight of the modern romantic traveller. 

And again Marius was aware of a real change in things, on crossing theTiber, as if some magic effect lay in that; though here, in truth, theTiber was but a modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, under thericher sky, seemed readier and more affluent, and man fitter to theconditions around him: even in people hard at work there appeared to bea less burdensome sense of the mere business of life. How dreamily thewomen were passing up through the broad light and shadow of the steepstreets with the great water-pots resting on their heads, like women ofCaryae, set free from slavery in old Greek temples. With what a fresh, primeval poetry was daily existence here impressed--all the details ofthe threshing-floor and the vineyard; [164] the common farm-life even;the great bakers' fires aglow upon the road in the evening. In thepresence of all this Marius felt for a moment like those old, early, unconscious poets, who created the famous Greek myths of Dionysus, andthe Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and theploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing histhoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness ofintellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literarystimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had alwaysobserved in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter ofthought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from thehealthfully excited brain. --"It is wonderful, " says Pliny, "how themind is stirred to activity by brisk bodily exercise. " The presentableaspects of inmost thought and feeling became evident to him: thestructure of all he meant, its order and outline, defined itself: hisgeneral sense of a fitness and beauty in words became effective indaintily pliant sentences, with all sorts of felicitous linking offigure to abstraction. It seemed just then as if the desire of theartist in him--that old longing to produce--might be satisfied by theexact and literal transcript of what was then passing around him, insimple prose, arresting the desirable moment as it passed, andprolonging its life a little. --To live in the concrete! To be sure, atleast, of [165] one's hold upon that!--Again, his philosophic schemewas but the reflection of the data of sense, and chiefly of sight, areduction to the abstract, of the brilliant road he travelled on, through the sunshine. 

But on the seventh evening there came a reaction in the cheerful flowof our traveller's thoughts, a reaction with which mere bodily fatigue, asserting itself at last over his curiosity, had much to do; and hefell into a mood, known to all passably sentimental wayfarers, as nightdeepens again and again over their path, in which all journeying, fromthe known to the unknown, comes suddenly to figure as a mere foolishtruancy--like a child's running away from home--with the feeling thatone had best return at once, even through the darkness. He had chosento climb on foot, at his leisure, the long windings by which the roadascended to the place where that day's stage was to end, and foundhimself alone in the twilight, far behind the rest of histravelling-companions. Would the last zigzag, round and round thosedark masses, half natural rock, half artificial substructure, everbring him within the circuit of the walls above? It was now that astartling incident turned those misgivings almost into actual fear. From the steep slope a heavy mass of stone was detached, after somewhisperings among the trees above his head, and rushing down throughthe stillness fell to pieces in a [166] cloud of dust across the roadjust behind him, so that he felt the touch upon his heel. That wassufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his old vaguefear of evil--of one's "enemies"--a distress, so much a matter ofconstitution with him, that at times it would seem that the bestpleasures of life could but be snatched, as it were hastily, in onemoment's forgetfulness of its dark, besetting influence. A suddensuspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of "enemies, " seemedall at once to alter the visible form of things, as with the child'shero, when he found the footprint on the sand of his peaceful, dreamyisland. His elaborate philosophy had not put beneath his feet theterror of mere bodily evil; much less of "inexorable fate, and thenoise of greedy Acheron. "

The resting-place to which he presently came, in the keen, wholesomeair of the market-place of the little hill-town, was a pleasantcontrast to that last effort of his journey. The room in which he satdown to supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trimand sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished, three-wicked lucernae burning cleanly with the best oil, upon thewhite-washed walls, and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in glassgoblets. The white wine of the place put before him, of the truecolour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate foam as itmounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had [167] foundin no other wine. These things had relieved a little the melancholy ofthe hour before; and it was just then that he heard the voice of one, newly arrived at the inn, making his way to the upper floor--a youthfulvoice, with a reassuring clearness of note, which completed his cure. 

He seemed to hear that voice again in dreams, uttering his name: then, awake in the full morning light and gazing from the window, saw theguest of the night before, a very honourable-looking youth, in the richhabit of a military knight, standing beside his horse, and alreadymaking preparations to depart. It happened that Marius, too, was totake that day's journey on horseback. Riding presently from the inn, he overtook Cornelius--of the Twelfth Legion--advancing carefully downthe steep street; and before they had issued from the gates ofUrbs-vetus, the two young men had broken into talk together. They werepassing along the street of the goldsmiths; and Cornelius must needsenter one of the workshops for the repair of some button or link of hisknightly trappings. Standing in the doorway, Marius watched the work, as he had watched the brazier's business a few days before, wonderingmost at the simplicity of its processes, a simplicity, however, onwhich only genius in that craft could have lighted. --By whatunguessed-at stroke of hand, for instance, had the grains of preciousmetal associated themselves [168] with so daintily regular a roughness, over the surface of the little casket yonder? And the conversationwhich followed, hence arising, left the two travellers with sufficientinterest in each other to insure an easy companionship for theremainder of their journey. In time to come, Marius was to depend verymuch on the preferences, the personal judgments, of the comrade who nowlaid his hand so brotherly on his shoulder, as they left the workshop. 

Itineris matutini gratiam capimus, +--observes one of our scholarlytravellers; and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted, by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first acquaintance intointimacy; its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back uponeach other's entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension ofwhich, however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the unexpectedassertion of something singularly attractive. The immediate aspect ofthe land was, indeed, in spite of abundant olive and ilex, unpleasingenough. A river of clay seemed, "in some old night of time, " to haveburst up over valley and hill, and hardened there into fantasticshelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock, up and down among thecontorted vegetation; the hoary roots and trunks seeming to confesssome weird kinship with them. But that was long ago; and these pallidhillsides needed only the declining sun, touching the rock with purple, and throwing deeper shadow into [169] the immemorial foliage, to put ona peculiar, because a very grave and austere, kind of beauty; while thegraceful outlines common to volcanic hills asserted themselves in thebroader prospect. And, for sentimental Marius, all this wasassociated, by some perhaps fantastic affinity, with a peculiar traitof severity, beyond his guesses as to the secret of it, which mingledwith the blitheness of his new companion. Concurring, indeed, with thecondition of a Roman soldier, it was certainly something far more thanthe expression of military hardness, or ascêsis; and what was earnest, or even austere, in the landscape they had traversed together, seemedto have been waiting for the passage of this figure to interpret orinform it. Again, as in his early days with Flavian, a vivid personalpresence broke through the dreamy idealism, which had almost come todoubt of other men's reality: reassuringly, indeed, yet not withoutsome sense of a constraining tyranny over him from without. 

For Cornelius, returning from the campaign, to take up his quarters onthe Palatine, in the imperial guard, seemed to carry about with him, inthat privileged world of comely usage to which he belonged, theatmosphere of some still more jealously exclusive circle. They haltedon the morrow at noon, not at an inn, but at the house of one of theyoung soldier's friends, whom they found absent, indeed, in consequenceof the [170] plague in those parts, so that after a mid-day rest only, they proceeded again on their journey. The great room of the villa, towhich they were admitted, had lain long untouched; and the dust rose, as they entered, into the slanting bars of sunlight, that fell throughthe half-closed shutters. It was here, to while away the time, thatCornelius bethought himself of displaying to his new friend the variousarticles and ornaments of his knightly array--the breastplate, thesandals and cuirass, lacing them on, one by one, with the assistance ofMarius, and finally the great golden bracelet on the right arm, conferred on him by his general for an act of valour. And as hegleamed there, amid that odd interchange of light and shade, with thestaff of a silken standard firm in his hand, Marius felt as if he wereface to face, for the first time, with some new knighthood or chivalry, just then coming into the world. 

It was soon after they left this place, journeying now by carriage, that Rome was seen at last, with much excitement on the part of ourtravellers; Cornelius, and some others of whom the party thenconsisted, agreeing, chiefly for the sake of Marius, to hasten forward, that it might be reached by daylight, with a cheerful noise of rapidwheels as they passed over the flagstones. But the highest light uponthe mausoleum of Hadrian was quite gone out, and it was dark, beforethey reached the Flaminian Gate. The [171] abundant sound of water wasthe one thing that impressed Marius, as they passed down a long street, with many open spaces on either hand: Cornelius to his militaryquarters, and Marius to the old dwelling-place of his fathers. 

NOTES

162. +E-text editor's note: ergastula were the Roman agrarianequivalent of prison-workhouses. 

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

CHAPTER XI: "THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD"

[172] MARIUS awoke early and passed curiously from room to room, notingfor more careful inspection by and by the rolls of manuscripts. Evengreater than his curiosity in gazing for the first time on this ancientpossession, was his eagerness to look out upon Rome itself, as hepushed back curtain and shutter, and stepped forth in the fresh morningupon one of the many balconies, with an oft-repeated dream realised atlast. He was certainly fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome. That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached itsperfection in the things of poetry and art--a perfection whichindicated only too surely the eve of decline. As in some vastintellectual museum, all its manifold products were intact and in theirplaces, and with custodians also still extant, duly qualified toappreciate and explain them. And at no period of history had thematerial Rome itself been better worth seeing--lying there not lessconsummate than that world of [173] pagan intellect which itrepresented in every phase of its darkness and light. The various workof many ages fell here harmoniously together, as yet untouched save bytime, adding the final grace of a rich softness to its complexexpression. Much which spoke of ages earlier than Nero, the greatre-builder, lingered on, antique, quaint, immeasurably venerable, likethe relics of the medieval city in the Paris of Lewis the Fourteenth:the work of Nero's own time had come to have that sort of old world andpicturesque interest which the work of Lewis has for ourselves; whilewithout stretching a parallel too far we might perhaps liken thearchitectural finesses of the archaic Hadrian to the more excellentproducts of our own Gothic revival. The temple of Antoninus andFaustina was still fresh in all the majesty of its closely arrayedcolumns of cipollino; but, on the whole, little had been added underthe late and present emperors, and during fifty years of public quiet, a sober brown and gray had grown apace on things. The gilding on theroof of many a temple had lost its garishness: cornice and capital ofpolished marble shone out with all the crisp freshness of real flowers, amid the already mouldering travertine and brickwork, though the birdshad built freely among them. What Marius then saw was in manyrespects, after all deduction of difference, more like the modern Romethan the enumeration of particular losses [174] might lead us tosuppose; the Renaissance, in its most ambitious mood and with amplestresources, having resumed the ancient classical tradition there, withno break or obstruction, as it had happened, in any very considerablework of the middle age. Immediately before him, on the square, steepheight, where the earliest little old Rome had huddled itself together, arose the palace of the Caesars. Half-veiling the vast substruction ofrough, brown stone--line upon line of successive ages of builders--thetrim, old-fashioned garden walks, under their closely-woven walls ofdark glossy foliage, test of long and careful cultivation, woundgradually, among choice trees, statues and fountains, distinct andsparkling in the full morning sunlight, to the richly tinted mass ofpavilions and corridors above, centering in the lofty, white-marbledwelling-place of Apollo himself. 

How often had Marius looked forward to that first, free wanderingthrough Rome, to which he now went forth with a heat in the townsunshine (like a mist of fine gold-dust spread through the air) to theheight of his desire, making the dun coolness of the narrow streetswelcome enough at intervals. He almost feared, descending the stairhastily, lest some unforeseen accident should snatch the little cup ofenjoyment from him ere he passed the door. In such morning rambles inplaces new to him, [175] life had always seemed to come at its fullest:it was then he could feel his youth, that youth the days of which hehad already begun to count jealously, in entire possession. So thegrave, pensive figure, a figure, be it said nevertheless, fresher farthan often came across it now, moved through the old city towards thelodgings of Cornelius, certainly not by the most direct course, howevereager to rejoin the friend of yesterday. 

Bent as keenly on seeing as if his first day in Rome were to be alsohis last, the two friends descended along the Vicus Tuscus, with itsrows of incense-stalls, into the Via Nova, where the fashionable peoplewere busy shopping; and Marius saw with much amusement the frizzledheads, then à la mode. A glimpse of the Marmorata, the haven at theriver-side, where specimens of all the precious marbles of the worldwere lying amid great white blocks from the quarries of Luna, took histhoughts for a moment to his distant home. They visited theflower-market, lingering where the coronarii pressed on them the newestspecies, and purchased zinias, now in blossom (like painted flowers, thought Marius), to decorate the folds of their togas. Loitering tothe other side of the Forum, past the great Galen's drug-shop, after aglance at the announcements of new poems on sale attached to thedoorpost of a famous bookseller, they entered the curious [176] libraryof the Temple of Peace, then a favourite resort of literary men, andread, fixed there for all to see, the Diurnal or Gazette of the day, which announced, together with births and deaths, prodigies andaccidents, and much mere matter of business, the date and manner of thephilosophic emperor's joyful return to his people; and, thereafter, with eminent names faintly disguised, what would carry that day's news, in many copies, over the provinces--a certain matter concerning thegreat lady, known to be dear to him, whom he had left at home. It wasa story, with the development of which "society" had indeed for sometime past edified or amused itself, rallying sufficiently from thepanic of a year ago, not only to welcome back its ruler, but also torelish a chronique scandaleuse; and thus, when soon after Marius sawthe world's wonder, he was already acquainted with the suspicions whichhave ever since hung about her name. Twelve o'clock was come beforethey left the Forum, waiting in a little crowd to hear the Accensus, according to old custom, proclaim the hour of noonday, at the momentwhen, from the steps of the Senate-house, the sun could be seenstanding between the Rostra and the Graecostasis. He exerted for thisfunction a strength of voice, which confirmed in Marius a judgment themodern visitor may share with him, that Roman throats and Roman chests, namely, must, in some peculiar way, be differently [177] constructedfrom those of other people. Such judgment indeed he had formed in partthe evening before, noting, as a religious procession passed him, howmuch noise a man and a boy could make, though not without a great dealof real music, of which in truth the Romans were then as everpassionately fond. 

Hence the two friends took their way through the Via Flaminia, almostalong the line of the modern Corso, already bordered with handsomevillas, turning presently to the left, into the Field-of-Mars, stillthe playground of Rome. But the vast public edifices were grown to bealmost continuous over the grassy expanse, represented now only byoccasional open spaces of verdure and wild-flowers. In one of these acrowd was standing, to watch a party of athletes stripped for exercise. Marius had been surprised at the luxurious variety of the litters bornethrough Rome, where no carriage horses were allowed; and just then onefar more sumptuous than the rest, with dainty appointments of ivory andgold, was carried by, all the town pressing with eagerness to get aglimpse of its most beautiful woman, as she passed rapidly. Yes!there, was the wonder of the world--the empress Faustina herself:Marius could distinguish, could distinguish clearly, the well-knownprofile, between the floating purple curtains. 

For indeed all Rome was ready to burst into gaiety again, as it awaitedwith much real [178] affection, hopeful and animated, the return of itsemperor, for whose ovation various adornments were preparing along thestreets through which the imperial procession would pass. He had leftRome just twelve months before, amid immense gloom. The alarm of abarbarian insurrection along the whole line of the Danube had happenedat the moment when Rome was panic-stricken by the great pestilence. 

In fifty years of peace, broken only by that conflict in the East fromwhich Lucius Verus, among other curiosities, brought back the plague, war had come to seem a merely romantic, superannuated incident ofbygone history. And now it was almost upon Italian soil. Terrible werethe reports of the numbers and audacity of the assailants. Aurelius, as yet untried in war, and understood by a few only in the whole scopeof a really great character, was known to the majority of his subjectsas but a careful administrator, though a student of philosophy, perhaps, as we say, a dilettante. But he was also the visible centreof government, towards whom the hearts of a whole people turned, grateful for fifty years of public happiness--its good genius, its"Antonine"--whose fragile person might be foreseen speedily giving wayunder the trials of military life, with a disaster like that of theslaughter of the legions by Arminius. Prophecies of the world'simpending conflagration were easily credited: "the secular fire" woulddescend from [179] heaven: superstitious fear had even demanded thesacrifice of a human victim. 

Marcus Aurelius, always philosophically considerate of the humours ofother people, exercising also that devout appreciation of everyreligious claim which was one of his characteristic habits, hadinvoked, in aid of the commonwealth, not only all native gods, but allforeign deities as well, however strange. --"Help! Help! in the oceanspace!" A multitude of foreign priests had been welcomed to Rome, withtheir various peculiar religious rites. The sacrifices made on thisoccasion were remembered for centuries; and the starving poor, atleast, found some satisfaction in the flesh of those herds of "whitebulls, " which came into the city, day after day, to yield the savour oftheir blood to the gods. 

In spite of all this, the legions had but followed their standardsdespondently. But prestige, personal prestige, the name of "Emperor, "still had its magic power over the nations. The mere approach of theRoman army made an impression on the barbarians. Aurelius and hiscolleague had scarcely reached Aquileia when a deputation arrived toask for peace. And now the two imperial "brothers" were returning homeat leisure; were waiting, indeed, at a villa outside the walls, tillthe capital had made ready to receive them. But although Rome was thusin genial reaction, with much relief, [180] and hopefulness against thewinter, facing itself industriously in damask of red and gold, thosetwo enemies were still unmistakably extant: the barbarian army of theDanube was but over-awed for a season; and the plague, as we saw whenMarius was on his way to Rome, was not to depart till it had done alarge part in the formation of the melancholy picturesque of modernItaly--till it had made, or prepared for the making of the RomanCampagna. The old, unaffected, really pagan, peace or gaiety, ofAntoninus Pius--that genuine though unconscious humanist--was gone forever. And again and again, throughout this day of varied observation, Marius had been reminded, above all else, that he was not merely in"the most religious city of the world, " as one had said, but that Romewas become the romantic home of the wildest superstition. Suchsuperstition presented itself almost as religious mania in many anincident of his long ramble, --incidents to which he gave his fullattention, though contending in some measure with a reluctance on thepart of his companion, the motive of which he did not understand tilllong afterwards. Marius certainly did not allow this reluctance todeter his own curiosity. Had he not come to Rome partly under poeticvocation, to receive all those things, the very impress of life itself, upon the visual, the imaginative, organ, as upon a mirror; to reflectthem; to transmute them [181] into golden words? He must observe thatstrange medley of superstition, that centuries' growth, layer uponlayer, of the curiosities of religion (one faith jostling another outof place) at least for its picturesque interest, and as an indifferentoutsider might, not too deeply concerned in the question which, if anyof them, was to be the survivor. 

Superficially, at least, the Roman religion, allying itself with muchdiplomatic economy to possible rivals, was in possession, as a vast andcomplex system of usage, intertwining itself with every detail ofpublic and private life, attractively enough for those who had but "thehistoric temper, " and a taste for the past, however much a Lucian mightdepreciate it. Roman religion, as Marius knew, had, indeed, beenalways something to be done, rather than something to be thought, orbelieved, or loved; something to be done in minutely detailed manner, at a particular time and place, correctness in which had long been amatter of laborious learning with a whole school of ritualists--asalso, now and again, a matter of heroic sacrifice with certainexceptionally devout souls, as when Caius Fabius Dorso, with his lifein his hand, succeeded in passing the sentinels of the invading Gaulsto perform a sacrifice on the Quirinal, and, thanks to the divineprotection, had returned in safety. So jealous was the distinctionbetween sacred and profane, that, in the matter [182] of the "regardingof days, " it had made more than half the year a holiday. Aurelius had, indeed, ordained that there should be no more than a hundred andthirty-five festival days in the year; but in other respects he hadfollowed in the steps of his predecessor, Antoninus Pius--commendedespecially for his "religion, " his conspicuous devotion to its publicceremonies--and whose coins are remarkable for their reference to theoldest and most hieratic types of Roman mythology. Aurelius hadsucceeded in more than healing the old feud between philosophy andreligion, displaying himself, in singular combination, as at once themost zealous of philosophers and the most devout of polytheists, andlending himself, with an air of conviction, to all the pageantries ofpublic worship. To his pious recognition of that one orderly spirit, which, according to the doctrine of the Stoics, diffuses itself throughthe world, and animates it--a recognition taking the form, with him, ofa constant effort towards inward likeness thereto, in the harmoniousorder of his own soul--he had added a warm personal devotion towardsthe whole multitude of the old national gods, and a great many newforeign ones besides, by him, at least, not ignobly conceived. If thecomparison may be reverently made, there was something here of themethod by which the catholic church has added the cultus of the saintsto its worship of the one Divine Being. 

[183] And to the view of the majority, though the emperor, as thepersonal centre of religion, entertained the hope of converting hispeople to philosophic faith, and had even pronounced certain publicdiscourses for their instruction in it, that polytheistic devotion washis most striking feature. Philosophers, indeed, had, for the mostpart, thought with Seneca, "that a man need not lift his hands toheaven, nor ask the sacristan's leave to put his mouth to the ear of animage, that his prayers might be heard the better. "--Marcus Aurelius, "a master in Israel, " knew all that well enough. Yet his outwarddevotion was much more than a concession to popular sentiment, or amere result of that sense of fellow-citizenship with others, which hadmade him again and again, under most difficult circumstances, anexcellent comrade. Those others, too!--amid all their ignorances, whatwere they but instruments in the administration of the Divine Reason, "from end to end sweetly and strongly disposing all things"? Meantime"Philosophy" itself had assumed much of what we conceive to be thereligious character. It had even cultivated the habit, the power, of"spiritual direction"; the troubled soul making recourse in its hour ofdestitution, or amid the distractions of the world, to this or thatdirector--philosopho suo--who could really best understand it. 

And it had been in vain that the old, grave [184] and discreet religionof Rome had set itself, according to its proper genius, to prevent orsubdue all trouble and disturbance in men's souls. In religion, as inother matters, plebeians, as such, had a taste for movement, forrevolution; and it had been ever in the most populous quarters thatreligious changes began. To the apparatus of foreign religion, aboveall, recourse had been made in times of public disquietude or suddenterror; and in those great religious celebrations, before hisproceeding against the barbarians, Aurelius had even restored thesolemnities of Isis, prohibited in the capital since the time ofAugustus, making no secret of his worship of that goddess, though hertemple had been actually destroyed by authority in the reign ofTiberius. Her singular and in many ways beautiful ritual was nowpopular in Rome. And then--what the enthusiasm of the swarmingplebeian quarters had initiated, was sure to be adopted, sooner orlater, by women of fashion. A blending of all the religions of theancient world had been accomplished. The new gods had arrived, hadbeen welcomed, and found their places; though, certainly, with no realsecurity, in any adequate ideal of the divine nature itself in thebackground of men's minds, that the presence of the new-comer should beedifying, or even refining. High and low addressed themselves to alldeities alike without scruple; confusing them together when theyprayed, and in the old, [185] authorised, threefold veneration of theirvisible images, by flowers, incense, and ceremonial lights--thosebeautiful usages, which the church, in her way through the world, evermaking spoil of the world's goods for the better uses of the humanspirit, took up and sanctified in her service. 

And certainly "the most religious city in the world" took no care toveil its devotion, however fantastic. The humblest house had itslittle chapel or shrine, its image and lamp; while almost every oneseemed to exercise some religious function and responsibility. Colleges, composed for the most part of slaves and of the poor, provided for the service of the Compitalian Lares--the gods whopresided, respectively, over the several quarters of the city. In onestreet, Marius witnessed an incident of the festival of the patrondeity of that neighbourhood, the way being strewn with box, the housestricked out gaily in such poor finery as they possessed, while theancient idol was borne through it in procession, arrayed in gaudyattire the worse for wear. Numerous religious clubs had their statedanniversaries, on which the members issued with much ceremony fromtheir guild-hall, or schola, and traversed the thoroughfares of Rome, preceded, like the confraternities of the present day, by their sacredbanners, to offer sacrifice before some famous image. Black with theperpetual smoke of lamps and incense, oftenest old and [186] ugly, perhaps on that account the more likely to listen to the desires of thesuffering--had not those sacred effigies sometimes given sensibletokens that they were aware? The image of the Fortune ofWomen--Fortuna Muliebris, in the Latin Way, had spoken (not once only)and declared; Bene me, Matronae! vidistis riteque dedicastis! TheApollo of Cumae had wept during three whole nights and days. Theimages in the temple of Juno Sospita had been seen to sweat. Nay!there was blood--divine blood--in the hearts of some of them: theimages in the Grove of Feronia had sweated blood!

From one and all Cornelius had turned away: like the "atheist" of whomApuleius tells he had never once raised hand to lip in passing image orsanctuary, and had parted from Marius finally when the latterdetermined to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on their returninto the Forum, below the Palatine hill, where the mothers werepressing in, with a multitude of every sort of children, to touch thelightning-struck image of the wolf-nurse of Romulus--so tender tolittle ones!--just discernible in its dark shrine, amid a blaze oflights. Marius gazed after his companion of the day, as he mounted thesteps to his lodging, singing to himself, as it seemed. Marius failedprecisely to catch the words. 

And, as the rich, fresh evening came on, there was heard all over Rome, far above a whisper, [187] the whole town seeming hushed to catch itdistinctly, the lively, reckless call to "play, " from the sons anddaughters of foolishness, to those in whom their life was stillgreen--Donec virenti canities abest!--Donec virenti canities abest!+Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call. Andas for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral obligationwith which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrantaffections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him. 

NOTES

187. +Horace, Odes I. Ix. 17. Translation: "So long as youth is freshand age is far away. "

CHAPTER XII: THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH HEDGE A KING

 But ah! Maecenas is yclad in claye, And great Augustus long ygoe is dead, And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead, That matter made for poets on to playe. +

[188] MARCUS AURELIUS who, though he had little relish for themhimself, had ever been willing to humour the taste of his people formagnificent spectacles, was received back to Rome with the lesserhonours of the Ovation, conceded by the Senate (so great was the publicsense of deliverance) with even more than the laxity which had becomeits habit under imperial rule, for there had been no actual bloodshedin the late achievement. Clad in the civic dress of the chief Romanmagistrate, and with a crown of myrtle upon his head, his colleaguesimilarly attired walking beside him, he passed up to the Capitol onfoot, though in solemn procession along the Sacred Way, to offersacrifice to the national gods. The victim, a goodly sheep, whoseimage we may still see between the pig and the ox of the [189]Suovetaurilia, filleted and stoled almost like some ancient canon ofthe church, on a sculptured fragment in the Forum, was conducted by thepriests, clad in rich white vestments, and bearing their sacredutensils of massive gold, immediately behind a company offlute-players, led by the great choir-master, or conductor, of the day, visibly tetchy or delighted, according as the instruments he ruled withhis tuning-rod, rose, more or less adequately amid the difficulties ofthe way, to the dream of perfect music in the soul within him. Thevast crowd, including the soldiers of the triumphant army, now restoredto wives and children, all alike in holiday whiteness, had left theirhouses early in the fine, dry morning, in a real affection for "thefather of his country, " to await the procession, the two princes havingspent the preceding night outside the walls, at the old Villa of theRepublic. Marius, full of curiosity, had taken his position with muchcare; and stood to see the world's masters pass by, at an angle fromwhich he could command the view of a great part of the processionalroute, sprinkled with fine yellow sand, and punctiliously guarded fromprofane footsteps. 

The coming of the pageant was announced by the clear sound of theflutes, heard at length above the acclamations of the people--SalveImperator!--Dii te servent!--shouted in regular time, over the hills. It was on the central [190] figure, of course, that the whole attentionof Marius was fixed from the moment when the procession came in sight, preceded by the lictors with gilded fasces, the imperial image-bearers, and the pages carrying lighted torches; a band of knights, among whomwas Cornelius in complete military, array, following. Amply swathedabout in the folds of a richly worked toga, after a manner now longsince become obsolete with meaner persons, Marius beheld a man of aboutfive-and-forty years of age, with prominent eyes--eyes, which althoughdemurely downcast during this essentially religious ceremony, were bynature broadly and benignantly observant. He was still, in the main, as we see him in the busts which represent his gracious and courtlyyouth, when Hadrian had playfully called him, not Verus, after the nameof his father, but Verissimus, for his candour of gaze, and the blandcapacity of the brow, which, below the brown hair, clustering thicklyas of old, shone out low, broad, and clear, and still without a traceof the trouble of his lips. You saw the brow of one who, amid theblindness or perplexity of the people about him, understood all thingsclearly; the dilemma, to which his experience so far had brought him, between Chance with meek resignation, and a Providence with boundlesspossibilities and hope, being for him at least distinctly defined. 

That outward serenity, which he valued so [191] highly as a point ofmanner or expression not unworthy the care of a publicminister--outward symbol, it might be thought, of the inward religiousserenity it had been his constant purpose to maintain--was increasedto-day by his sense of the gratitude of his people; that his life hadbeen one of such gifts and blessings as made his person seem in verydeed divine to them. Yet the cloud of some reserved internal sorrow, passing from time to time into an expression of fatigue and effort, ofloneliness amid the shouting multitude, might have been detected thereby the more observant--as if the sagacious hint of one of his officers, "The soldiers can't understand you, they don't know Greek, " wereapplicable always to his relationships with other people. The nostrilsand mouth seemed capable almost of peevishness; and Marius noted inthem, as in the hands, and in the spare body generally, what was new tohis experience--something of asceticism, as we say, of a bodilygymnastic, by which, although it told pleasantly in the clear bluehumours of the eye, the flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer withthe spirit. It was hardly the expression of "the healthy mind in thehealthy body, " but rather of a sacrifice of the body to the soul, itsneeds and aspirations, that Marius seemed to divine in this assiduousstudent of the Greek sages--a sacrifice, in truth, far beyond thedemands of their very saddest philosophy of life. 

[192] Dignify thyself with modesty and simplicity for thineornaments!--had been ever a maxim with this dainty and high-bred Stoic, who still thought manners a true part of morals, according to the oldsense of the term, and who regrets now and again that he cannot controlhis thoughts equally well with his countenance. That outward composurewas deepened during the solemnities of this day by an air of pontificalabstraction; which, though very far from being pride--nay, a sort ofhumility rather--yet gave, to himself, an air of unapproachableness, and to his whole proceeding, in which every minutest act wasconsidered, the character of a ritual. Certainly, there was nohaughtiness, social, moral, or even philosophic, in Aurelius, who hadrealised, under more trying conditions perhaps than any one before, that no element of humanity could be alien from him. Yet, as he walkedto-day, the centre of ten thousand observers, with eyes discreetlyfixed on the ground, veiling his head at times and muttering veryrapidly the words of the "supplications, " there was something manyspectators may have noted as a thing new in their experience, forAurelius, unlike his predecessors, took all this with absoluteseriousness. The doctrine of the sanctity of kings, that, in the wordsof Tacitus, Princes are as Gods--Principes instar deorum esse--seemedto have taken a novel, because a literal, sense. For Aurelius, indeed, the old legend of his descent from Numa, from [193] Numa who had talkedwith the gods, meant much. Attached in very early years to the serviceof the altars, like many another noble youth, he was "observed toperform all his sacerdotal functions with a constancy and exactnessunusual at that age; was soon a master of the sacred music; and had allthe forms and ceremonies by heart. " And now, as the emperor, who hadnot only a vague divinity about his person, but was actually the chiefreligious functionary of the state, recited from time to time the formsof invocation, he needed not the help of the prompter, orceremoniarius, who then approached, to assist him by whispering theappointed words in his ear. It was that pontifical abstraction whichthen impressed itself on Marius as the leading outward characteristicof Aurelius; though to him alone, perhaps, in that vast crowd ofobservers, it was no strange thing, but a matter he had understood fromof old. 

Some fanciful writers have assigned the origin of these triumphalprocessions to the mythic pomps of Dionysus, after his conquests in theEast; the very word Triumph being, according to this supposition, onlyThriambos-the Dionysiac Hymn. And certainly the younger of the twoimperial "brothers, " who, with the effect of a strong contrast, walkedbeside Aurelius, and shared the honours of the day, might well havereminded people of the delicate Greek god of flowers and wine. This[194] new conqueror of the East was now about thirty-six years old, butwith his scrupulous care for all the advantages of his person, and asoft curling beard powdered with gold, looked many years younger. Oneresult of the more genial element in the wisdom of Aurelius had beenthat, amid most difficult circumstances, he had known throughout lifehow to act in union with persons of character very alien from his own;to be more than loyal to the colleague, the younger brother in empire, he had too lightly taken to himself, five years before, then anuncorrupt youth, "skilled in manly exercises and fitted for war. " WhenAurelius thanks the gods that a brother had fallen to his lot, whosecharacter was a stimulus to the proper care of his own, one sees thatthis could only have happened in the way of an example, putting him onhis guard against insidious faults. But it is with sincere amiabilitythat the imperial writer, who was indeed little used to be ironical, adds that the lively respect and affection of the junior had often"gladdened" him. To be able to make his use of the flower, when thefruit perhaps was useless or poisonous:--that was one of the practicalsuccesses of his philosophy; and his people noted, with a blessing, "the concord of the two Augusti. "

The younger, certainly, possessed in full measure that charm of aconstitutional freshness of aspect which may defy for a long timeextravagant or erring habits of life; a physiognomy, [195]healthy-looking, cleanly, and firm, which seemed unassociable with anyform of self-torment, and made one think of the muzzle of some younghound or roe, such as human beings invariably like to stroke--aphysiognomy, in effect, with all the goodliness of animalism of thefiner sort, though still wholly animal. The charm was that of theblond head, the unshrinking gaze, the warm tints: neither more nor lessthan one may see every English summer, in youth, manly enough, and withthe stuff which makes brave soldiers, in spite of the natural kinshipit seems to have with playthings and gay flowers. But innate in LuciusVerus there was that more than womanly fondness for fond things, whichhad made the atmosphere of the old city of Antioch, heavy withcenturies of voluptuousness, a poison to him: he had come to love hisdelicacies best out of season, and would have gilded the very flowers. But with a wonderful power of self-obliteration, the elder brother atthe capital had directed his procedure successfully, and allowed him, become now also the husband of his daughter Lucilla, the credit of a"Conquest, " though Verus had certainly not returned a conqueror overhimself. He had returned, as we know, with the plague in his company, along with many another strange creature of his folly; and when thepeople saw him publicly feeding his favourite horse Fleet with almondsand sweet grapes, wearing the animal's image in gold, and [196] finallybuilding it a tomb, they felt, with some un-sentimental misgiving, thathe might revive the manners of Nero. --What if, in the chances of war, he should survive the protecting genius of that elder brother?

He was all himself to-day: and it was with much wistful curiosity thatMarius regarded him. For Lucius Verus was, indeed, but the highlyexpressive type of a class, --the true son of his father, adopted byHadrian. Lucius Verus the elder, also, had had the like strangecapacity for misusing the adornments of life, with a masterly grace; asif such misusing were, in truth, the quite adequate occupation of anintelligence, powerful, but distorted by cynical philosophy or somedisappointment of the heart. It was almost a sort of genius, of whichthere had been instances in the imperial purple: it was to ascend thethrone, a few years later, in the person of one, now a hopeful littlelad at home in the palace; and it had its following, of course, amongthe wealthy youth at Rome, who concentrated no inconsiderable force ofshrewdness and tact upon minute details of attire and manner, as uponthe one thing needful. Certainly, flowers were pleasant to the eye. Such things had even their sober use, as making the outside of humanlife superficially attractive, and thereby promoting the first stepstowards friendship and social amity. But what precise place couldthere be for Verus and his peculiar charm, [197] in that Wisdom, thatOrder of divine Reason "reaching from end to end, strongly and sweetlydisposing all things, " from the vision of which Aurelius came down, sotolerant of persons like him? Into such vision Marius too wascertainly well-fitted to enter, yet, noting the actual perfection ofLucius Verus after his kind, his undeniable achievement of the select, in all minor things, felt, though with some suspicion of himself, thathe entered into, and could understand, this other so dubious sort ofcharacter also. There was a voice in the theory he had brought to Romewith him which whispered "nothing is either great nor small;" as therewere times when he could have thought that, as the "grammarian's" orthe artist's ardour of soul may be satisfied by the perfecting of thetheory of a sentence, or the adjustment of two colours, so his own lifealso might have been fulfilled by an enthusiastic quest afterperfection--say, in the flowering and folding of a toga. 

The emperors had burned incense before the image of Jupiter, arrayed inits most gorgeous apparel, amid sudden shouts from the people of SalveImperator! turned now from the living princes to the deity, as theydiscerned his countenance through the great open doors. The imperialbrothers had deposited their crowns of myrtle on the richly embroideredlapcloth of the god; and, with their chosen guests, sat down to apublic feast in the temple [198] itself. There followed what was, after all, the great event of the day:--an appropriate discourse, adiscourse almost wholly de contemptu mundi, delivered in the presenceof the assembled Senate, by the emperor Aurelius, who had thus, oncertain rare occasions, condescended to instruct his people, with thedouble authority of a chief pontiff and a laborious student ofphilosophy. In those lesser honours of the ovation, there had been noattendant slave behind the emperors, to make mock of their effulgenceas they went; and it was as if with the discretion proper to aphilosopher, and in fear of a jealous Nemesis, he had determinedhimself to protest in time against the vanity of all outward success. 

The Senate was assembled to hear the emperor's discourse in the vasthall of the Curia Julia. A crowd of high-bred youths idled around, oron the steps before the doors, with the marvellous toilets Marius hadnoticed in the Via Nova; in attendance, as usual, to learn byobservation the minute points of senatorial procedure. Marius hadalready some acquaintance with them, and passing on found himselfsuddenly in the presence of what was still the most august assembly theworld had seen. Under Aurelius, ever full of veneration for thisancient traditional guardian of public religion, the Senate hadrecovered all its old dignity and independence. Among its members many[199] hundreds in number, visibly the most distinguished of them all, Marius noted the great sophists or rhetoricians of the day, in alltheir magnificence. The antique character of their attire, and theancient mode of wearing it, still surviving with them, added to theimposing character of their persons, while they sat, with their stavesof ivory in their hands, on their curule chairs--almost the exactpattern of the chair still in use in the Roman church when a Bishoppontificates at the divine offices--"tranquil and unmoved, with amajesty that seemed divine, " as Marius thought, like the old Gaul ofthe Invasion. The rays of the early November sunset slanted full uponthe audience, and made it necessary for the officers of the Court todraw the purple curtains over the windows, adding to the solemnity ofthe scene. In the depth of those warm shadows, surrounded by herladies, the empress Faustina was seated to listen. The beautiful Greekstatue of Victory, which since the days of Augustus had presided overthe assemblies of the Senate, had been brought into the hall, andplaced near the chair of the emperor; who, after rising to perform abrief sacrificial service in its honour, bowing reverently to theassembled fathers left and right, took his seat and began to speak. 

There was a certain melancholy grandeur in the very simplicity ortriteness of the theme: as it were the very quintessence of all the old[200] Roman epitaphs, of all that was monumental in that city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people. As if in the very fervourof disillusion, he seemed to be composing--Hôsper epigraphas chronônkai holôn ethnôn+--the sepulchral titles of ages and whole peoples;nay! the very epitaph of the living Rome itself. The grandeur of theruins of Rome, --heroism in ruin: it was under the influence of animaginative anticipation of this, that he appeared to be speaking. Andthough the impression of the actual greatness of Rome on that day wasbut enhanced by the strain of contempt, falling with an accent ofpathetic conviction from the emperor himself, and gaining from hispontifical pretensions the authority of a religious intimation, yet thecurious interest of the discourse lay in this, that Marius, for one, ashe listened, seemed to forsee a grass-grown Forum, the broken ways ofthe Capitol, and the Palatine hill itself in humble occupation. Thatimpression connected itself with what he had already noted of an actualchange even then coming over Italian scenery. Throughout, he couldtrace something of a humour into which Stoicism at all times tends tofall, the tendency to cry, Abase yourselves! There was here the almostinhuman impassibility of one who had thought too closely on theparadoxical aspect of the love of posthumous fame. With the asceticpride which lurks under all Platonism, [201] resultant from itsopposition of the seen to the unseen, as falsehood to truth--theimperial Stoic, like his true descendant, the hermit of the middle age, was ready, in no friendly humour, to mock, there in its narrow bed, thecorpse which had made so much of itself in life. Marius could butcontrast all that with his own Cyrenaic eagerness, just then, to tasteand see and touch; reflecting on the opposite issues deducible from thesame text. "The world, within me and without, flows away like ariver, " he had said; "therefore let me make the most of what is hereand now. "--"The world and the thinker upon it, are consumed like aflame, " said Aurelius, "therefore will I turn away my eyes from vanity:renounce: withdraw myself alike from all affections. " He seemedtacitly to claim as a sort of personal dignity, that he was veryfamiliarly versed in this view of things, and could discern adeath's-head everywhere. Now and again Marius was reminded of thesaying that "with the Stoics all people are the vulgar savethemselves;" and at times the orator seemed to have forgotten hisaudience, and to be speaking only to himself. 

"Art thou in love with men's praises, get thee into the very soul ofthem, and see!--see what judges they be, even in those matters whichconcern themselves. Wouldst thou have their praise after death, bethink thee, that they who shall come hereafter, and with whom thou[202] wouldst survive by thy great name, will be but as these, whomhere thou hast found so hard to live with. For of a truth, the soul ofhim who is aflutter upon renown after death, presents not this arightto itself, that of all whose memory he would have each one willlikewise very quickly depart, until memory herself be put out, as shejourneys on by means of such as are themselves on the wing but for awhile, and are extinguished in their turn. --Making so much of thosethou wilt never see! It is as if thou wouldst have had those who werebefore thee discourse fair things concerning thee. 

"To him, indeed, whose wit hath been whetted by true doctrine, thatwell-worn sentence of Homer sufficeth, to guard him against regret andfear. --

 Like the race of leaves The race of man is:--

 The wind in autumn strows The earth with old leaves: then the spring the woods with new endows. +

Leaves! little leaves!--thy children, thy flatterers, thine enemies!Leaves in the wind, those who would devote thee to darkness, who scornor miscall thee here, even as they also whose great fame shall outlastthem. For all these, and the like of them, are born indeed in thespring season--Earos epigignetai hôrê+: and soon a wind hath scatteredthem, and thereafter the [203] wood peopleth itself again with anothergeneration of leaves. And what is common to all of them is but thelittleness of their lives: and yet wouldst thou love and hate, as ifthese things should continue for ever. In a little while thine eyesalso will be closed, and he on whom thou perchance hast leaned thyselfbe himself a burden upon another. 

"Bethink thee often of the swiftness with which the things that are, orare even now coming to be, are swept past thee: that the very substanceof them is but the perpetual motion of water: that there is almostnothing which continueth: of that bottomless depth of time, so close atthy side. Folly! to be lifted up, or sorrowful, or anxious, by reasonof things like these! Think of infinite matter, and thy portion--howtiny a particle, of it! of infinite time, and thine own brief pointthere; of destiny, and the jot thou art in it; and yield thyselfreadily to the wheel of Clotho, to spin of thee what web she will. 

"As one casting a ball from his hand, the nature of things hath had itsaim with every man, not as to the ending only, but the first beginningof his course, and passage thither. And hath the ball any profit ofits rising, or loss as it descendeth again, or in its fall? or thebubble, as it groweth or breaketh on the air? or the flame of the lamp, from the beginning to the end of its brief story?

[204] "All but at this present that future is, in which nature, whodisposeth all things in order, will transform whatsoever thou nowseest, fashioning from its substance somewhat else, and therefromsomewhat else in its turn, lest the world grow old. We are such stuffas dreams are made of--disturbing dreams. Awake, then! and see thydream as it is, in comparison with that erewhile it seemed to thee. 

"And for me, especially, it were well to mind those many mutations ofempire in time past; therein peeping also upon the future, which mustneeds be of like species with what hath been, continuing ever withinthe rhythm and number of things which really are; so that in fortyyears one may note of man and of his ways little less than in athousand. Ah! from this higher place, look we down upon theship-wrecks and the calm! Consider, for example, how the world went, under the emperor Vespasian. They are married and given in marriage, they breed children; love hath its way with them; they heap up richesfor others or for themselves; they are murmuring at things as then theyare; they are seeking for great place; crafty, flattering, suspicious, waiting upon the death of others:--festivals, business, war, sickness, dissolution: and now their whole life is no longer anywhere at all. Pass on to the reign of Trajan: all things continue the same: and thatlife also is no longer anywhere at all. [205] Ah! but look again, andconsider, one after another, as it were the sepulchral inscriptions ofall peoples and times, according to one pattern. --What multitudes, after their utmost striving--a little afterwards! were dissolved againinto their dust. 

"Think again of life as it was far off in the ancient world; as it mustbe when we shall be gone; as it is now among the wild heathen. How manyhave never heard your names and mine, or will soon forget them! Howsoon may those who shout my name to-day begin to revile it, becauseglory, and the memory of men, and all things beside, are but vanity--asand-heap under the senseless wind, the barking of dogs, thequarrelling of children, weeping incontinently upon their laughter. 

"This hasteth to be; that other to have been: of that which now comethto be, even now somewhat hath been extinguished. And wilt thou makethy treasure of any one of these things? It were as if one set hislove upon the swallow, as it passeth out of sight through the air!

"Bethink thee often, in all contentions public and private, of thosewhom men have remembered by reason of their anger and vehementspirit--those famous rages, and the occasions of them--the greatfortunes, and misfortunes, of men's strife of old. What are they allnow, and the dust of their battles? Dust [206] and ashes indeed; afable, a mythus, or not so much as that. Yes! keep those before thineeyes who took this or that, the like of which happeneth to thee, sohardly; were so querulous, so agitated. And where again are they?Wouldst thou have it not otherwise with thee?

Consider how quickly all things vanish away--their bodily structureinto the general substance; the very memory of them into that greatgulf and abysm of past thoughts. Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earththou art creeping through life--a pigmy soul carrying a dead body toits grave. 

"Let death put thee upon the consideration both of thy body and thysoul: what an atom of all matter hath been distributed to thee; what alittle particle of the universal mind. Turn thy body about, andconsider what thing it is, and that which old age, and lust, and thelanguor of disease can make of it. Or come to its substantial andcausal qualities, its very type: contemplate that in itself, apart fromthe accidents of matter, and then measure also the span of time forwhich the nature of things, at the longest, will maintain that specialtype. Nay! in the very principles and first constituents of thingscorruption hath its part--so much dust, humour, stench, and scraps ofbone! Consider that thy marbles are but the earth's callosities, thygold and silver its faeces; this silken robe but a worm's bedding, andthy [207] purple an unclean fish. Ah! and thy life's breath is nototherwise, as it passeth out of matters like these, into the like ofthem again. 

"For the one soul in things, taking matter like wax in the hands, moulds and remoulds--how hastily!--beast, and plant, and the babe, inturn: and that which dieth hath not slipped out of the order of nature, but, remaining therein, hath also its changes there, disparting intothose elements of which nature herself, and thou too, art compacted. She changes without murmuring. The oaken chest falls to pieces with nomore complaining than when the carpenter fitted it together. If onetold thee certainly that on the morrow thou shouldst die, or at thefurthest on the day after, it would be no great matter to thee to dieon the day after to-morrow, rather than to-morrow. Strive to think ita thing no greater that thou wilt die--not to-morrow, but a year, ortwo years, or ten years from to-day. 

"I find that all things are now as they were in the days of our buriedancestors--all things sordid in their elements, trite by long usage, and yet ephemeral. How ridiculous, then, how like a countryman intown, is he, who wonders at aught. Doth the sameness, the repetitionof the public shows, weary thee? Even so doth that likeness of eventsin the spectacle of the world. And so must it be with thee to the end. For the wheel of the world hath ever the same [208] motion, upward anddownward, from generation to generation. When, when, shall time giveplace to eternity?

"If there be things which trouble thee thou canst put them away, inasmuch as they have their being but in thine own notion concerningthem. Consider what death is, and how, if one does but detach from itthe appearances, the notions, that hang about it, resting the eye uponit as in itself it really is, it must be thought of but as an effect ofnature, and that man but a child whom an effect of nature shallaffright. Nay! not function and effect of nature, only; but a thingprofitable also to herself. 

"To cease from action--the ending of thine effort to think and do:there is no evil in that. Turn thy thought to the ages of man's life, boyhood, youth, maturity, old age: the change in every one of thesealso is a dying, but evil nowhere. Thou climbedst into the ship, thouhast made thy voyage and touched the shore. Go forth now! Be it intosome other life: the divine breath is everywhere, even there. Be itinto forgetfulness for ever; at least thou wilt rest from the beatingof sensible images upon thee, from the passions which pluck thee thisway and that like an unfeeling toy, from those long marches of theintellect, from thy toilsome ministry to the flesh. 

"Art thou yet more than dust and ashes and bare bone--a name only, ornot so much as [209] that, which, also, is but whispering and aresonance, kept alive from mouth to mouth of dying abjects who havehardly known themselves; how much less thee, dead so long ago!

"When thou lookest upon a wise man, a lawyer, a captain of war, thinkupon another gone. When thou seest thine own face in the glass, callup there before thee one of thine ancestors--one of those old Caesars. Lo! everywhere, thy double before thee! Thereon, let the thought occurto thee: And where are they? anywhere at all, for ever? And thou, thyself--how long? Art thou blind to that thou art--thy matter, howtemporal; and thy function, the nature of thy business? Yet tarry, atleast, till thou hast assimilated even these things to thine own properessence, as a quick fire turneth into heat and light whatsoever be castupon it. 

"As words once in use are antiquated to us, so is it with the namesthat were once on all men's lips: Camillus, Volesus, Leonnatus: then, in a little while, Scipio and Cato, and then Augustus, and thenHadrian, and then Antoninus Pius. How many great physicians who liftedwise brows at other men's sick-beds, have sickened and died! Those wiseChaldeans, who foretold, as a great matter, another man's last hour, have themselves been taken by surprise. Ay! and all those others, intheir pleasant places: those who doated on a Capreae like [210]Tiberius, on their gardens, on the baths: Pythagoras and Socrates, whoreasoned so closely upon immortality: Alexander, who used the lives ofothers as though his own should last for ever--he and his mule-driveralike now!--one upon another. Well-nigh the whole court of Antoninusis extinct. Panthea and Pergamus sit no longer beside the sepulchre oftheir lord. The watchers over Hadrian's dust have slipped from hissepulchre. --It were jesting to stay longer. Did they sit there still, would the dead feel it? or feeling it, be glad? or glad, hold thosewatchers for ever? The time must come when they too shall be aged menand aged women, and decease, and fail from their places; and what shiftwere there then for imperial service? This too is but the breath ofthe tomb, and a skinful of dead men's blood. 

"Think again of those inscriptions, which belong not to one soul only, but to whole families: Eschatos tou idiou genous:+ He was the last ofhis race. Nay! of the burial of whole cities: Helice, Pompeii: ofothers, whose very burial place is unknown. 

"Thou hast been a citizen in this wide city. Count not for how long, nor repine; since that which sends thee hence is no unrighteous judge, no tyrant, but Nature, who brought thee hither; as when a player leavesthe stage at the bidding of the conductor who hired him. Sayest thou, 'I have not played five acts'? True! but in [211] human life, threeacts only make sometimes an entire play. That is the composer'sbusiness, not thine. Withdraw thyself with a good will; for that toohath, perchance, a good will which dismisseth thee from thy part. "

The discourse ended almost in darkness, the evening having set insomewhat suddenly, with a heavy fall of snow. The torches, made readyto do him a useless honour, were of real service now, as the emperorwas solemnly conducted home; one man rapidly catching light fromanother--a long stream of moving lights across the white Forum, up thegreat stairs, to the palace. And, in effect, that night winter began, the hardest that had been known for a lifetime. The wolves came fromthe mountains; and, led by the carrion scent, devoured the dead bodieswhich had been hastily buried during the plague, and, emboldened bytheir meal, crept, before the short day was well past, over the wallsof the farmyards of the Campagna. The eagles were seen driving theflocks of smaller birds across the dusky sky. Only, in the city itselfthe winter was all the brighter for the contrast, among those who couldpay for light and warmth. The habit-makers made a great sale of thespoil of all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles, forpresents at the Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses fromCarthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red. 

NOTES

188. +Spenser, Shepheardes Calendar, October, 61-66. 

200. +Transliteration: Hôsper epigraphas chronôn kai holôn ethnôn. Pater's Translation: "the sepulchral titles of ages and whole peoples. "

202. +Homer, Iliad VI. 146-48. 

202. +Transliteration: Earos epigignetai hôrê. Translation: "born inspringtime. " Homer, Iliad VI. 147. 

210. +Transliteration: Eschatos tou idiou genous. Translation: "He wasthe last of his race. "

CHAPTER XIII: THE "MISTRESS AND MOTHER" OF PALACES

AFTER that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at work, softeningleaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness in the air; but hedid his work behind an evenly white sky, against which the abode of theCaesars, its cypresses and bronze roofs, seemed like a picture inbeautiful but melancholy colour, as Marius climbed the long flights ofsteps to be introduced to the emperor Aurelius. Attired in the newestmode, his legs wound in dainty fasciae of white leather, with the heavygold ring of the ingenuus, and in his toga of ceremony, he stillretained all his country freshness of complexion. The eyes of the"golden youth" of Rome were upon him as the chosen friend of Cornelius, and the destined servant of the emperor; but not jealously. In spiteof, perhaps partly because of, his habitual reserve of manner, he hadbecome "the fashion, " even among those who felt instinctively the ironywhich lay beneath that remarkable self-possession, as of one taking allthings with a [213] difference from other people, perceptible in voice, in expression, and even in his dress. It was, in truth, the air of onewho, entering vividly into life, and relishing to the full thedelicacies of its intercourse, yet feels all the while, from the pointof view of an ideal philosophy, that he is but conceding reality tosuppositions, choosing of his own will to walk in a day-dream, of theillusiveness of which he at least is aware. 

In the house of the chief chamberlain Marius waited for the due momentof admission to the emperor's presence. He was admiring the peculiardecoration of the walls, coloured like rich old red leather. In themidst of one of them was depicted, under a trellis of fruit you mighthave gathered, the figure of a woman knocking at a door with wonderfulreality of perspective. Then the summons came; and in a few minutes, the etiquette of the imperial household being still a simple matter, hehad passed the curtains which divided the central hall of the palaceinto three parts--three degrees of approach to the sacred person--andwas speaking to Aurelius himself; not in Greek, in which the emperoroftenest conversed with the learned, but, more familiarly, in Latin, adorned however, or disfigured, by many a Greek phrase, as now andagain French phrases have made the adornment of fashionable English. Itwas with real kindliness that Marcus Aurelius looked upon Marius, as[214] a youth of great attainments in Greek letters and philosophy; andhe liked also his serious expression, being, as we know, a believer inthe doctrine of physiognomy--that, as he puts it, not love only, butevery other affection of man's soul, looks out very plainly from thewindow of the eyes. 

The apartment in which Marius found himself was of ancient aspect, andrichly decorated with the favourite toys of two or three generations ofimperial collectors, now finally revised by the high connoisseurship ofthe Stoic emperor himself, though destined not much longer to remaintogether there. It is the repeated boast of Aurelius that he hadlearned from old Antoninus Pius to maintain authority without theconstant use of guards, in a robe woven by the handmaids of his ownconsort, with no processional lights or images, and "that a prince mayshrink himself almost into the figure of a private gentleman. " Andyet, again as at his first sight of him, Marius was struck by theprofound religiousness of the surroundings of the imperial presence. The effect might have been due in part to the very simplicity, thediscreet and scrupulous simplicity, of the central figure in thissplendid abode; but Marius could not forget that he saw before him notonly the head of the Roman religion, but one who might actually haveclaimed something like divine worship, had he cared to do so. Thoughthe fantastic pretensions of Caligula had brought some contempt [215]on that claim, which had become almost a jest under the ungainlyClaudius, yet, from Augustus downwards, a vague divinity had seemed tosurround the Caesars even in this life; and the peculiar character ofAurelius, at once a ceremonious polytheist never forgetful of hispontifical calling, and a philosopher whose mystic speculationencircled him with a sort of saintly halo, had restored to his person, without his intending it, something of that divine prerogative, orprestige. Though he would never allow the immediate dedication ofaltars to himself, yet the image of his Genius--his spirituality orcelestial counterpart--was placed among those of the deified princes ofthe past; and his family, including Faustina and the young Commodus, was spoken of as the "holy" or "divine" house. Many a Roman courtieragreed with the barbarian chief, who, after contemplating a predecessorof Aurelius, withdrew from his presence with the exclamation:--"I haveseen a god to-day!" The very roof of his house, rising into a pedimentor gable, like that of the sanctuary of a god, the laurels on eitherside its doorway, the chaplet of oak-leaves above, seemed to designatethe place for religious veneration. And notwithstanding all this, thehousehold of Aurelius was singularly modest, with none of the wastefulexpense of palaces after the fashion of Lewis the Fourteenth; thepalatial dignity being felt only in a peculiar sense of order, theabsence [216] of all that was casual, of vulgarity and discomfort. Amerely official residence of his predecessors, the Palatine had becomethe favourite dwelling-place of Aurelius; its many-coloured memoriessuiting, perhaps, his pensive character, and the crude splendours ofNero and Hadrian being now subdued by time. The window-less Roman abodemust have had much of what to a modern would be gloom. How did thechildren, one wonders, endure houses with so little escape for the eyeinto the world outside? Aurelius, who had altered little else, choosing to live there, in a genuine homeliness, had shifted and madethe most of the level lights, and broken out a quite medieval windowhere and there, and the clear daylight, fully appreciated by hisyouthful visitor, made pleasant shadows among the objects of theimperial collection. Some of these, indeed, by reason of their Greeksimplicity and grace, themselves shone out like spaces of a purer, early light, amid the splendours of the Roman manufacture. 

Though he looked, thought Marius, like a man who did not sleep enough, he was abounding and bright to-day, after one of those pitilessheadaches, which since boyhood had been the "thorn in his side, "challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one in humbleendurances. At the first moment, to Marius, remembering the spectacleof the emperor in ceremony, it was almost bewildering to be in [217]private conversation with him. There was much in the philosophy ofAurelius--much consideration of mankind at large, of great bodies, aggregates and generalities, after the Stoic manner--which, on a natureless rich than his, might have acted as an inducement to care forpeople in inverse proportion to their nearness to him. That hassometimes been the result of the Stoic cosmopolitanism. Aurelius, however, determined to beautify by all means, great or little, adoctrine which had in it some potential sourness, had brought all thequickness of his intelligence, and long years of observation, to bearon the conditions of social intercourse. He had early determined "notto make business an excuse to decline the offices of humanity--not topretend to be too much occupied with important affairs to concede whatlife with others may hourly demand;" and with such success, that, in anage which made much of the finer points of that intercourse, it wasfelt that the mere honesty of his conversation was more pleasing thanother men's flattery. His agreeableness to his young visitor to-daywas, in truth, a blossom of the same wisdom which had made of LuciusVerus really a brother--the wisdom of not being exigent with men, anymore than with fruit-trees (it is his own favourite figure) beyondtheir nature. And there was another person, still nearer to him, regarding whom this wisdom became a marvel, of equity--of charity. 

[218] The centre of a group of princely children, in the same apartmentwith Aurelius, amid all the refined intimacies of a modern home, satthe empress Faustina, warming her hands over a fire. With her longfingers lighted up red by the glowing coals of the brazier Mariuslooked close upon the most beautiful woman in the world, who was alsothe great paradox of the age, among her boys and girls. As has beentruly said of the numerous representations of her in art, so in life, she had the air of one curious, restless, to enter into conversationwith the first comer. She had certainly the power of stimulating avery ambiguous sort of curiosity about herself. And Marius found thisenigmatic point in her expression, that even after seeing her manytimes he could never precisely recall her features in absence. The ladof six years, looking older, who stood beside her, impatiently pluckinga rose to pieces over the hearth, was, in outward appearance, hisfather--the young Verissimus--over again; but with a certain femininelength of feature, and with all his mother's alertness, or license, ofgaze. 

Yet rumour knocked at every door and window of the imperial houseregarding the adulterers who knocked at them, or quietly left theirlovers' garlands there. Was not that likeness of the husband, in theboy beside her, really the effect of a shameful magic, in which theblood of the murdered gladiator, his true father, had been aningredient? Were the tricks for [219] deceiving husbands which theRoman poet describes, really hers, and her household an efficientschool of all the arts of furtive love? Or, was the husband too aware, like every one beside? Were certain sudden deaths which happenedthere, really the work of apoplexy, or the plague?

The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumours were meant to penetrate, was, however, faithful to his sanguine and optimist philosophy, to hisdetermination that the world should be to him simply what the higherreason preferred to conceive it; and the life's journey Aurelius hadmade so far, though involving much moral and intellectual loneliness, had been ever in affectionate and helpful contact with other wayfarers, very unlike himself. Since his days of earliest childhood in theLateran gardens, he seemed to himself, blessing the gods for it afterdeliberate survey, to have been always surrounded by kinsmen, friends, servants, of exceptional virtue. From the great Stoic idea, that weare all fellow-citizens of one city, he had derived a tenderer, a moreequitable estimate than was common among Stoics, of the eternalshortcomings of men and women. Considerations that might tend to thesweetening of his temper it was his daily care to store away, with akind of philosophic pride in the thought that no one took moregood-naturedly than he the "oversights" of his neighbours. For had notPlato taught (it was not [220] paradox, but simple truth of experience)that if people sin, it is because they know no better, and are "underthe necessity of their own ignorance"? Hard to himself, he seemed attimes, doubtless, to decline too softly upon unworthy persons. Actually, he came thereby upon many a useful instrument. The empressFaustina he would seem at least to have kept, by a constrainingaffection, from becoming altogether what most people have believed her, and won in her (we must take him at his word in the "Thoughts, "abundantly confirmed by letters, on both sides, in his correspondencewith Cornelius Fronto) a consolation, the more secure, perhaps, becausemisknown of others. Was the secret of her actual blamelessness, afterall, with him who has at least screened her name? At all events, theone thing quite certain about her, besides her extraordinary beauty, isher sweetness to himself. 

No! The wise, who had made due observation on the trees of the garden, would not expect to gather grapes of thorns or fig-trees: and he wasthe vine, putting forth his genial fruit, by natural law, again andagain, after his kind, whatever use people might make of it. Certainly, his actual presence never lost its power, and Faustina was glad in itto-day, the birthday of one of her children, a boy who stood at herknee holding in his fingers tenderly a tiny silver trumpet, one of hisbirthday gifts. --"For my [221] part, unless I conceive my hurt to besuch, I have no hurt at all, "--boasts the would-be apatheticemperor:--"and how I care to conceive of the thing rests with me. " Yetwhen his children fall sick or die, this pretence breaks down, and heis broken-hearted: and one of the charms of certain of his lettersstill extant, is his reference to those childish sicknesses. --"On myreturn to Lorium, " he writes, "I found my little lady--domnulammeam--in a fever;" and again, in a letter to one of the most serious ofmen, "You will be glad to hear that our little one is better, andrunning about the room--parvolam nostram melius valere et intracubiculum discurrere. "

The young Commodus had departed from the chamber, anxious to witnessthe exercises of certain gladiators, having a native taste for suchcompany, inherited, according to popular rumour, from his truefather--anxious also to escape from the too impressive company of thegravest and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had ever seen, thetutor of the imperial children, who had arrived to offer his birthdaycongratulations, and now, very familiarly and affectionately, made apart of the group, falling on the shoulders of the emperor, kissing theempress Faustina on the face, the little ones on the face and hands. Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the "Orator, " favourite teacher of theemperor's youth, afterwards his most trusted counsellor, and now theundisputed occupant of the sophistic throne, whose equipage, [222]elegantly mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the streets of Rome, had certainly turned his many personal gifts to account with a goodfortune, remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to professors orrhetoricians. The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius, always generousto his teachers, arranging their very quarrels sometimes, for they werenot always fair to one another, had helped him to a really great placein the world. But his sumptuous appendages, including the villa andgardens of Maecenas, had been borne with an air perfectly becoming, bythe professor of a philosophy which, even in its most accomplished andelegant phase, presupposed a gentle contempt for such things. With anintimate practical knowledge of manners, physiognomies, smiles, disguises, flatteries, and courtly tricks of every kind--a wholeaccomplished rhetoric of daily life--he applied them all to thepromotion of humanity, and especially of men's family affection. Through a long life of now eighty years, he had been, as it were, surrounded by the gracious and soothing air of his own eloquence--thefame, the echoes, of it--like warbling birds, or murmuring bees. Setting forth in that fine medium the best ideas of matured paganphilosophy, he had become the favourite "director" of noble youth

Yes! it was the one instance Marius, always eagerly on the look-out forsuch, had yet seen of [223] a perfectly tolerable, perfectly beautiful, old age--an old age in which there seemed, to one who perhapshabitually over-valued the expression of youth, nothing to beregretted, nothing really lost, in what years had taken away. The wiseold man, whose blue eyes and fair skin were so delicate, uncontaminateand clear, would seem to have replaced carefully and consciously eachnatural trait of youth, as it departed from him, by an equivalent graceof culture; and had the blitheness, the placid cheerfulness, as he hadalso the infirmity, the claim on stronger people, of a delightfulchild. And yet he seemed to be but awaiting his exit from life--thatmoment with which the Stoics were almost as much preoccupied as theChristians, however differently--and set Marius pondering on thecontrast between a placidity like this, at eighty years, and the sortof desperateness he was aware of in his own manner of entertaining thatthought. His infirmities nevertheless had been painful andlong-continued, with losses of children, of pet grandchildren. Whatwith the crowd, and the wretched streets, it was a sign of affectionwhich had cost him something, for the old man to leave his own house atall that day; and he was glad of the emperor's support, as he movedfrom place to place among the children he protests so often to haveloved as his own. 

For a strange piece of literary good fortune, at the beginning of thepresent century, has set [224] free the long-buried fragrance of thisfamous friendship of the old world, from below a valueless latermanuscript, in a series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange, for the most part their evening thoughts, especially at familyanniversaries, and with entire intimacy, on their children, on the artof speech, on all the various subtleties of the "science ofimages"--rhetorical images--above all, of course, on sleep and mattersof health. They are full of mutual admiration of each other'seloquence, restless in absence till they see one another again, noting, characteristically, their very dreams of each other, expecting the daywhich will terminate the office, the business or duty, which separatesthem--"as superstitious people watch for the star, at the rising ofwhich they may break their fast. " To one of the writers, to Aurelius, the correspondence was sincerely of value. We see him once reading hisletters with genuine delight on going to rest. Fronto seeks to deterhis pupil from writing in Greek. --Why buy, at great cost, a foreignwine, inferior to that from one's own vineyard? Aurelius, on the otherhand, with an extraordinary innate susceptibility to words--la parolepour la parole, as the French say--despairs, in presence of Fronto'srhetorical perfection. 

Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline and some other museums, Fronto had been struck, pleasantly struck, by the family likeness [225]among the Antonines; and it was part of his friendship to make much ofit, in the case of the children of Faustina. "Well! I have seen thelittle ones, " he writes to Aurelius, then, apparently, absent fromthem: "I have seen the little ones--the pleasantest sight of my life;for they are as like yourself as could possibly be. It has well repaidme for my journey over that slippery road, and up those steep rocks;for I beheld you, not simply face to face before me, but, moregenerously, whichever way I turned, to my right and my left. For therest, I found them, Heaven be thanked! with healthy cheeks and lustyvoices. One was holding a slice of white bread, like a king's son; theother a crust of brown bread, as becomes the offspring of aphilosopher. I pray the gods to have both the sower and the seed intheir keeping; to watch over this field wherein the ears of corn are sokindly alike. Ah! I heard too their pretty voices, so sweet that inthe childish prattle of one and the other I seemed somehow to belistening--yes! in that chirping of your pretty chickens--to thelimpid+ and harmonious notes of your own oratory. Take care! you willfind me growing independent, having those I could love in yourplace:--love, on the surety of my eyes and ears. "

"Magistro meo salutem!" replies the Emperor, "I too have seen my littleones in your sight of them; as, also, I saw yourself in reading your[226] letter. It is that charming letter forces me to write thus:"with reiterations of affection, that is, which are continual in theseletters, on both sides, and which may strike a modern reader perhaps asfulsome; or, again, as having something in common with the old Judaicunction of friendship. They were certainly sincere. 

To one of those children Fronto had now brought the birthday gift ofthe silver trumpet, upon which he ventured to blow softly now andagain, turning away with eyes delighted at the sound, when he thoughtthe old man was not listening. It was the well-worn, valetudinariansubject of sleep, on which Fronto and Aurelius were talking together;Aurelius always feeling it a burden, Fronto a thing of magiccapacities, so that he had written an encomium in its praise, and oftenby ingenious arguments recommends his imperial pupil not to be sparingof it. To-day, with his younger listeners in mind, he had a story totell about it:--

"They say that our father Jupiter, when he ordered the world at thebeginning, divided time into two parts exactly equal: the one part heclothed with light, the other with darkness: he called them Day andNight; and he assigned rest to the night and to day the work of life. At that time Sleep was not yet born and men passed the whole of theirlives awake: only, the quiet of the night was ordained for them, instead of sleep. But it came to pass, little by little, [227] beingthat the minds of men are restless, that they carried on their businessalike by night as by day, and gave no part at all to repose. AndJupiter, when he perceived that even in the night-time they ceased notfrom trouble and disputation, and that even the courts of law remainedopen (it was the pride of Aurelius, as Fronto knew, to be assiduous inthose courts till far into the night) resolved to appoint one of hisbrothers to be the overseer of the night and have authority over man'srest. But Neptune pleaded in excuse the gravity of his constant chargeof the seas, and Father Dis the difficulty of keeping in subjection thespirits below; and Jupiter, having taken counsel with the other gods, perceived that the practice of nightly vigils was somewhat in favour. It was then, for the most part, that Juno gave birth to her children:Minerva, the mistress of all art and craft, loved the midnight lamp:Mars delighted in the darkness for his plots and sallies; and thefavour of Venus and Bacchus was with those who roused by night. Thenit was that Jupiter formed the design of creating Sleep; and he addedhim to the number of the gods, and gave him the charge over night andrest, putting into his hands the keys of human eyes. With his ownhands he mingled the juices wherewith Sleep should soothe the hearts ofmortals--herb of Enjoyment and herb of Safety, gathered from a grove inHeaven; and, from the meadows of [228] Acheron, the herb of Death;expressing from it one single drop only, no bigger than a tear onemight hide. 'With this juice, ' he said, 'pour slumber upon the eyelidsof mortals. So soon as it hath touched them they will lay themselvesdown motionless, under thy power. But be not afraid: they shallrevive, and in a while stand up again upon their feet. ' Thereafter, Jupiter gave wings to Sleep, attached, not, like Mercury's, to hisheels, but to his shoulders, like the wings of Love. For he said, 'Itbecomes thee not to approach men's eyes as with the noise of chariots, and the rushing of a swift courser, but in placid and merciful flight, as upon the wings of a swallow--nay! with not so much as the flutter ofthe dove. ' Besides all this, that he might be yet pleasanter to men, he committed to him also a multitude of blissful dreams, according toevery man's desire. One watched his favourite actor; another listenedto the flute, or guided a charioteer in the race: in his dream, thesoldier was victorious, the general was borne in triumph, the wandererreturned home. Yes!--and sometimes those dreams come true!

Just then Aurelius was summoned to make the birthday offerings to hishousehold gods. A heavy curtain of tapestry was drawn back; and beyondit Marius gazed for a few moments into the Lararium, or imperialchapel. A patrician youth, in white habit, was in waiting, with alittle chest in his hand containing incense for the [229] use of thealtar. On richly carved consoles, or side boards, around this narrowchamber, were arranged the rich apparatus of worship and the golden orgilded images, adorned to-day with fresh flowers, among them that imageof Fortune from the apartment of Antoninus Pius, and such of theemperor's own teachers as were gone to their rest. A dim fresco on thewall commemorated the ancient piety of Lucius Albinius, who in flightfrom Rome on the morrow of a great disaster, overtaking certain priestson foot with their sacred utensils, descended from the wagon in whichhe rode and yielded it to the ministers of the gods. As he ascendedinto the chapel the emperor paused, and with a grave but friendly lookat his young visitor, delivered a parting sentence, audible to himalone: Imitation is the most acceptable-- Make sure that those to whomyou come nearest be the happier by your*

It was the very spirit of the scene and the hour--the hour Marius hadspent in the imperial house. How temperate, how tranquillising! whathumanity! Yet, as he left the eminent company concerning whose ways oflife at home he had been so youthfully curious, and sought, after hismanner, to determine the main trait in all this, he had to confess thatit was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for oncereally golden. 

NOTES

225. +"Limpid" is misprinted "Limped. "

CHAPTER XIV: MANLY AMUSEMENT

DURING the Eastern war there came a moment when schism in the empirehad seemed possible through the defection of Lucius Verus; when toAurelius it had also seemed possible to confirm his allegiance by noless a gift than his beautiful daughter Lucilla, the eldest of hischildren--the domnula, probably, of those letters. The little lady, grown now to strong and stately maidenhood, had been ever something ofthe good genius, the better soul, to Lucius Verus, by the law ofcontraries, her somewhat cold and apathetic modesty acting ascounterfoil to the young man's tigrish fervour. Conducted to Ephesus, she had become his wife by form of civil marriage, the more solemnwedding rites being deferred till their return to Rome. 

The ceremony of the Confarreation, or religious marriage, in whichbride and bridegroom partook together of a certain mystic bread, wascelebrated accordingly, with due pomp, early in the spring; Aureliushimself [231] assisting, with much domestic feeling. A crowd offashionable people filled the space before the entrance to theapartments of Lucius on the Palatine hill, richly decorated for theoccasion, commenting, not always quite delicately, on the variousdetails of the rite, which only a favoured few succeeded in actuallywitnessing. "She comes!" Marius could hear them say, "escorted by heryoung brothers: it is the young Commodus who carries the torch ofwhite-thornwood, the little basket of work-things, the toys for thechildren:"--and then, after a watchful pause, "she is winding thewoollen thread round the doorposts. Ah! I see the marriage-cake: thebridegroom presents the fire and water. " Then, in a longer pause, washeard the chorus, Thalassie! Thalassie! and for just a few moments, inthe strange light of many wax tapers at noonday, Marius could see themboth, side by side, while the bride was lifted over the doorstep:Lucius Verus heated and handsome--the pale, impassive Lucilla lookingvery long and slender, in her closely folded yellow veil, and highnuptial crown. 

As Marius turned away, glad to escape from the pressure of the crowd, he found himself face to face with Cornelius, an infrequent spectatoron occasions such as this. It was a relief to depart with him--sofresh and quiet he looked, though in all his splendid equestrian arrayin honour of the ceremony--from the garish heat [232] of the marriagescene. The reserve which had puzzled Marius so much on his first dayin Rome, was but an instance of many, to him wholly unaccountable, avoidances alike of things and persons, which must certainly mean thatan intimate companionship would cost him something in the way ofseemingly indifferent amusements. Some inward standard Marius seemedto detect there (though wholly unable to estimate its nature) ofdistinction, selection, refusal, amid the various elements of thefervid and corrupt life across which they were moving together:--somesecret, constraining motive, ever on the alert at eye and ear, whichcarried him through Rome as under a charm, so that Marius could not butthink of that figure of the white bird in the market-place asundoubtedly made true of him. And Marius was still full of admirationfor this companion, who had known how to make himself very pleasant tohim. Here was the clear, cold corrective, which the fever of hispresent life demanded. Without it, he would have felt alternatelysuffocated and exhausted by an existence, at once so gaudy andoverdone, and yet so intolerably empty; in which people, even at theirbest, seemed only to be brooding, like the wise emperor himself, over aworld's disillusion. For with all the severity of Cornelius, there wassuch a breeze of hopefulness--freshness and hopefulness, as of newmorning, about him. [233] For the most part, as I said, those refusals, that reserve of his, seemed unaccountable. But there were cases wherethe unknown monitor acted in a direction with which the judgment, orinstinct, of Marius himself wholly concurred; the effective decision ofCornelius strengthening him further therein, as by a kind of outwardlyembodied conscience. And the entire drift of his education determinedhim, on one point at least, to be wholly of the same mind with thispeculiar friend (they two, it might be, together, against the world!)when, alone of a whole company of brilliant youth, he had withdrawnfrom his appointed place in the amphitheatre, at a grand public show, which after an interval of many months, was presented there, in honourof the nuptials of Lucius Verus and Lucilla. 

And it was still to the eye, through visible movement and aspect, thatthe character, or genius of Cornelius made itself felt by Marius; evenas on that afternoon when he had girt on his armour, among theexpressive lights and shades of the dim old villa at the roadside, andevery object of his knightly array had seemed to be but sign or symbolof some other thing far beyond it. For, consistently with his reallypoetic temper, all influence reached Marius, even more exclusively thanhe was aware, through the medium of sense. From Flavian in that briefearly summer of his existence, he had derived a powerful impression ofthe [234] "perpetual flux": he had caught there, as in cipher orsymbol, or low whispers more effective than any definite language, hisown Cyrenaic philosophy, presented thus, for the first time, in animage or person, with much attractiveness, touched also, consequently, with a pathetic sense of personal sorrow:--a concrete image, theabstract equivalent of which he could recognise afterwards, when theagitating personal influence had settled down for him, clearly enough, into a theory of practice. But of what possible intellectual formulacould this mystic Cornelius be the sensible exponent; seeming, as hedid, to live ever in close relationship with, and recognition of, amental view, a source of discernment, a light upon his way, which hadcertainly not yet sprung up for Marius? Meantime, the discretion ofCornelius, his energetic clearness and purity, were a charm, ratherphysical than moral: his exquisite correctness of spirit, at allevents, accorded so perfectly with the regular beauty of his person, asto seem to depend upon it. And wholly different as was this laterfriendship, with its exigency, its warnings, its restraints, from thefeverish attachment to Flavian, which had made him at times like anuneasy slave, still, like that, it was a reconciliation to the world ofsense, the visible world. From the hopefulness of this graciouspresence, all visible things around him, even the commonest objects ofeveryday life--if they but [235] stood together to warm their hands atthe same fire--took for him a new poetry, a delicate fresh bloom, andinterest. It was as if his bodily eyes had been indeed mysticallywashed, renewed, strengthened. 

And how eagerly, with what a light heart, would Flavian have taken hisplace in the amphitheatre, among the youth of his own age! with what anappetite for every detail of the entertainment, and its variousaccessories:--the sunshine, filtered into soft gold by the vela, withtheir serpentine patterning, spread over the more select part of thecompany; the Vestal virgins, taking their privilege of seats near theempress Faustina, who sat there in a maze of double-coloured gems, changing, as she moved, like the waves of the sea; the cool circle ofshadow, in which the wonderful toilets of the fashionable told soeffectively around the blazing arena, covered again and again duringthe many hours' show, with clean sand for the absorption of certaingreat red patches there, by troops of white-shirted boys, for whom thegood-natured audience provided a scramble of nuts and small coin, flungto them over a trellis-work of silver-gilt and amber, precious gift ofNero, while a rain of flowers and perfume fell over themselves, as theypaused between the parts of their long feast upon the spectacle ofanimal suffering. 

During his sojourn at Ephesus, Lucius Verus had readily become apatron, patron or protégé, [236] of the great goddess of Ephesus, thegoddess of hunters; and the show, celebrated by way of a compliment tohim to-day, was to present some incidents of her story, where shefigures almost as the genius of madness, in animals, or in the humanitywhich comes in contact with them. The entertainment would have anelement of old Greek revival in it, welcome to the taste of a learnedand Hellenising society; and, as Lucius Verus was in some sense a loverof animals, was to be a display of animals mainly. There would be realwild and domestic creatures, all of rare species; and a real slaughter. On so happy an occasion, it was hoped, the elder emperor might evenconcede a point, and a living criminal fall into the jaws of the wildbeasts. And the spectacle was, certainly, to end in the destruction, by one mighty shower of arrows, of a hundred lions, "nobly" provided byAurelius himself for the amusement of his people. --Tam magnanimus fuit!

The arena, decked and in order for the first scene, looked delightfullyfresh, re-inforcing on the spirits of the audience the actual freshnessof the morning, which at this season still brought the dew. Along thesubterranean ways that led up to it, the sound of an advancing choruswas heard at last, chanting the words of a sacred song, or hymn toDiana; for the spectacle of the amphitheatre was, after all, a [237]religious occasion. To its grim acts of blood-shedding a kind ofsacrificial character still belonged in the view of certain religiouscasuists, tending conveniently to soothe the humane sensibilities of sopious an emperor as Aurelius, who, in his fraternal complacency, hadconsented to preside over the shows. 

Artemis or Diana, as she may be understood in the actual development ofher worship, was, indeed, the symbolical expression of two allied yetcontrasted elements of human temper and experience--man's amity, andalso his enmity, towards the wild creatures, when they were still, in acertain sense, his brothers. She is the complete, and therefore highlycomplex, representative of a state, in which man was still muchoccupied with animals, not as his flock, or as his servants after thepastoral relationship of our later, orderly world, but rather as hisequals, on friendly terms or the reverse, --a state full of primevalsympathies and antipathies, of rivalries and common wants--while hewatched, and could enter into, the humours of those "younger brothers, "with an intimacy, the "survivals" of which in a later age seem often tohave had a kind of madness about them. Diana represents alike thebright and the dark side of such relationship. But the humanities ofthat relationship were all forgotten to-day in the excitement of ashow, in which mere cruelty to animals, their useless suffering anddeath, formed [238] the main point of interest. People watched theirdestruction, batch after batch, in a not particularly inventivefashion; though it was expected that the animals themselves, as livingcreatures are apt to do when hard put to it, would become inventive, and make up, by the fantastic accidents of their agony, for thedeficiencies of an age fallen behind in this matter of manly amusement. It was as a Deity of Slaughter--the Taurian goddess who demands thesacrifice of the shipwrecked sailors thrown on her coasts--the cruel, moonstruck huntress, who brings not only sudden death, but rabies, among the wild creatures that Diana was to be presented, in the personof a famous courtesan. The aim at an actual theatrical illusion, afterthe first introductory scene, was frankly surrendered to the display ofthe animals, artificially stimulated and maddened to attack each other. And as Diana was also a special protectress of new-born creatures, there would be a certain curious interest in the dexterously contrivedescape of the young from their mother's torn bosoms; as many pregnantanimals as possible being carefully selected for the purpose. 

The time had been, and was to come again, when the pleasures of theamphitheatre centered in a similar practical joking upon human beings. What more ingenious diversion had stage manager ever contrived thanthat incident, itself a practical epigram never to be forgottten, [239]when a criminal, who, like slaves and animals, had no rights, wascompelled to present the part of Icarus; and, the wings failing him indue course, had fallen into a pack of hungry bears? For the long showsof the amphitheatre were, so to speak, the novel-reading of that age--acurrent help provided for sluggish imaginations, in regard, forinstance, to grisly accidents, such as might happen to one's self; butwith every facility for comfortable inspection. Scaevola might watchhis own hand, consuming, crackling, in the fire, in the person of aculprit, willing to redeem his life by an act so delightful to theeyes, the very ears, of a curious public. If the part of Marsyas wascalled for, there was a criminal condemned to lose his skin. It mightbe almost edifying to study minutely the expression of his face, whilethe assistants corded and pegged him to the bench, cunningly; theservant of the law waiting by, who, after one short cut with his knife, would slip the man's leg from his skin, as neatly as if it were astocking--a finesse in providing the due amount of suffering forwrong-doers only brought to its height in Nero's living bonfires. Butthen, by making his suffering ridiculous, you enlist against thesufferer, some real, and all would-be manliness, and do much to stifleany false sentiment of compassion. The philosophic emperor, having nogreat taste for sport, and asserting here a personal scruple, hadgreatly changed all [240] that; had provided that nets should be spreadunder the dancers on the tight-rope, and buttons for the swords of thegladiators. But the gladiators were still there. Their bloodycontests had, under the form of a popular amusement, the efficacy of ahuman sacrifice; as, indeed, the whole system of the public shows wasunderstood to possess a religious import. Just at this point, certainly, the judgment of Lucretius on pagan religion is withoutreproach--

 Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. 

And Marius, weary and indignant, feeling isolated in the greatslaughter-house, could not but observe that, in his habitualcomplaisance to Lucius Verus, who, with loud shouts of applause fromtime to time, lounged beside him, Aurelius had sat impassibly throughall the hours Marius himself had remained there. For the most partindeed, the emperor had actually averted his eyes from the show, reading, or writing on matters of public business, but had seemed, after all, indifferent. He was revolving, perhaps, that old Stoicparadox of the Imperceptibility of pain; which might serve as anexcuse, should those savage popular humours ever again turn against menand women. Marius remembered well his very attitude and expression onthis day, when, a few years later, certain things came to pass in Gaul, under his full authority; and that attitude and expression [241]defined already, even thus early in their so friendly intercourse, andthough he was still full of gratitude for his interest, a permanentpoint of difference between the emperor and himself--between himself, with all the convictions of his life taking centre to-day in hismerciful, angry heart, and Aurelius, as representing all the light, allthe apprehensive power there might be in pagan intellect. There wassomething in a tolerance such as this, in the bare fact that he couldsit patiently through a scene like this, which seemed to Marius to markAurelius as his inferior now and for ever on the question ofrighteousness; to set them on opposite sides, in some great conflict, of which that difference was but a single presentment. Due, inwhatever proportions, to the abstract principles he had formulated forhimself, or in spite of them, there was the loyal conscience withinhim, deciding, judging himself and every one else, with a wonderfulsort of authority:--You ought, methinks, to be something quitedifferent from what you are; here! and here! Surely Aurelius must belacking in that decisive conscience at first sight, of the intimationsof which Marius could entertain no doubt--which he looked for inothers. He at least, the humble follower of the bodily eye, was awareof a crisis in life, in this brief, obscure existence, a fierceopposition of real good and real evil around him, the issues of whichhe must by no [242] means compromise or confuse; of the antagonisms ofwhich the "wise" Marcus Aurelius was unaware. 

That long chapter of the cruelty of the Roman public shows may, perhaps, leave with the children of the modern world a feeling ofself-complacency. Yet it might seem well to ask ourselves--it isalways well to do so, when we read of the slave-trade, for instance, orof great religious persecutions on this side or on that, or of anythingelse which raises in us the question, "Is thy servant a dog, that heshould do this thing?"--not merely, what germs of feeling we mayentertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to thelike; but, even more practically, what thoughts, what sort ofconsiderations, may be actually present to our minds such as might havefurnished us, living in another age, and in the midst of those legalcrimes, with plausible excuses for them: each age in turn, perhaps, having its own peculiar point of blindness, with its consequentpeculiar sin--the touch-stone of an unfailing conscience in the selectfew. 

Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of blindness, ofdeadness and stupidity, in the age of Marius; and his light had notfailed him regarding it. Yes! what was needed was the heart that wouldmake it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be withthe forces that could beget a heart like that. [243] His chosenphilosophy had said, --Trust the eye: Strive to be right always inregard to the concrete experience: Beware of falsifying yourimpressions. And its sanction had at least been effective here, inprotesting--"This, and this, is what you may not look upon!" Surelyevil was a real thing, and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where, not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side, was to have failed in life. 

END OF VOL. I