As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion
lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as
but paganismthe religion of the villagers, before the
advance of the Christian Church; so, in an earlier
century, it was in places remote from town-life that the
older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived
the longest. While, in Rome, new religions had arisen
with bewildering complexity around the dying old one,
the earlier and simpler patriarchal religion, "the religion
of Numa," as people loved to fancy, lingered on with
little change amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and
sentiment of which so much of it had grown. Glimpses
of such a survival we may catch below the merely arti-
ficial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry; in Tibullus
especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details
of old Roman religious usage.
At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates,
Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari :
-he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something
liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words,
is traceable in one of his elegies, as part of the order of
B
75
## p. 2 (#18) ###############################################
2
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which,
as one form of old legend related, the child Romulus
had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar;
and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect
physical sanity of the young men and women, which the
scrupulous ways of that religion of the hearth had tended
to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment rather
than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite
things and placesthe oak of immemorial age, the rock
on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim
human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which
one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity
is in this Place! Numen Inest !it was in natural har-
mony with the temper of a quiet people amid the
spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between
man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with
the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old
wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their
homely little shrines.
And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius
ordered his golden image of Fortune to be carried into
the chamber of his successor (now about to test the
truth of the old Platonic contention, that the world
would at last find itself happy, could it detach some
reluctant philosophic student from the more desirable
life of celestial contemplation, and compel him to rule
it) there was a boy living in an old country-house, half
farm, half villa, who, for himself, recruited that body of
antique traditions by a spontaneous force of religious
veneration such as had originally called them into being.
It was more than a century and a half since Tibullus
had written ; but the restoration of religious usages, and
their retention where they still survived, had meantime
become fashionable through the influence of imperial
example ; and what had been in the main a matter of
family pride with his father, was sustained by a native
## p. 3 (#19) ###############################################
I
3
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A sense of
conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or dis-
pleased by the right or wrong conduct of every circum-
stance of daily lifethat conscience, of which the old
Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, had
become in him a powerful current of feeling and observ-
ance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the
power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly
in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the
feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot,
"touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck
dead an aged labourer in the field : an upright stone,
still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place.
He brought to that system of symbolic usages, and they
in turn developed in him further, a great seriousness-
an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life and
its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship; of
such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour
on which they live, really understood by him as giftsa
sense of religious responsibility in the reception of them.
It was a religion for the most part of fear, of multi-
tudinous scruples, of a year-long burden of forms; yet
rarely (on clear. summer mornings, for instance) the
thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome
channel for the almost stifling sense of health and delight
in him, and relieved it as gratitude to the gods.
It was the day of the "little" or private Ambarvalia,
celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belong-
ing to it, as the great college of the Arval Brothers
officiated at Rome in the interest of the whole state. At
the appointed time all work ceases; the instruments of
labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers,
while masters and servants together go in solemn pro-
cession along the dry paths of vineyard and cornfield,
conducting the victims whose blood is presently to be
shed for the purification from all natural or supernatural
## p. 4 (#20) ###############################################
4
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
taint of the lands they have "gone about." The old
Latin words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession
moved along, though their precise meaning had long
since become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient
illuminated roll, kept in the painted chest in the hall,
together with the family records. Early on that day the
girls of the farm had been busy in the great portico,
filling large baskets with flowers plucked short from
branches of apple and cherry, then in spacious bloom,
to strew before the quaint images of the godsCeres
and Bacchus and the yet more mysterious Dea Diaas
they passed through the fields, carried in their little
houses on the shoulders of white-clad youths, who were
understood to proceed to this office in perfect temper-
ance, as pure in soul and body as the air they breathed
in the firm weather of that early summer-time. The
clean lustral water and the full incense-box were carried
after them. The altars were gay with garlands of wool
and the more sumptuous sort of blossom and green
herbs to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered
this morning from a particular plot in the old garden,
set apart for the purpose. Just then the young leaves
were almost as fragrant as flowers, and the scent of the
bean-fields mingled pleasantly with the cloud of incense.
But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the
priests, clad in their strange, stiff, antique vestments,
and bearing ears of green corn upon their heads, secured
by flowing bands of white, the procession moved in
absolute stillness, all persons, even the children, abstain-
ing from speech after the utterance of the pontifical
formula, Favete linguis /Silence ! Propitious Silence !
-lest any words save those proper to the occasion should
hinder the religious efficacy of the rite.
With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house,
took a leading part in the ceremonies of the day, there
was a devout effort to complete this impressive outward
## p. 5 (#21) ###############################################
I
ur
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
silence by that inward tacitness of mind, esteemed so
important by religious Romans in the performance of
these sacred functions. To him the sustained stillness
without seemed really but to be waiting upon that interior,
mental condition of preparation or expectancy, for which
he was just then intently striving. The persons about
him, certainly, had never been challenged by those
prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine
nature: they conceived them rather to be the appointed
means of setting such troublesome movements at rest.
By them, "the religion of Numa," so staid, ideal and
comely, the object of so much jealous conservatism,
though of direct service as lending sanction to a sort of
high scrupulosity, especially in the chief points of
domestic conduct, was mainly prized as being, through
its hereditary character, something like a personal dis-
tinctionas contributing, among the other accessories
of an ancient house, to the production of that aristocratic
atmosphere which separated them from newly - made
people. But in the young Marius, the very absence of
all definite history and dogmatic interpretation from
those venerable usages, had already awakened much
speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual
details of the divine service, some very lively surmises,
though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were
moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the
stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were
like the passing of some mysterious influence over all
the elements of his nature and experience. One thing
only distracted hima certain pity at the bottom of his
heart, and almost on his lips, for the sacrificial victims
and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at the
central act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday
butcher's work, such as we decorously hide out of sight;
though some then present certainly displayed a frank
curiosity in the details of the spectacle, thus permitted
## p. 6 (#22) ###############################################
6
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
them on a religious pretext. The old sculptors of the
great procession on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens,
have delineated the placid heads of the victims led in it
to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for animals in forcible
contrast with any indifference as to their sufferings. It
was this contrast that distracted Marius now in the
blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption
upon the scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the
ceremonial, as the procession approached the altars.
The names of that great populace of "little gods,"
dear to the Roman home, which the pontiffs had placed
on the sacred list of the Indigitamenta, to be invoked,
because they can help, on special occasions, were not
forgotten in the long litany-Vatican who causes the
infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his
first word, Cuba who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domi-
duca, especially, for whom Marius had through life a
particular memory and devotion, the goddess who watches
over one's safe coming home. The urns of the dead in
the family chapel received their due service. They also
were now become something divine, a goodly company
of friendly and protecting spirits, encamped about the
place of their former abodeabove all others, the father,
dead ten years before, of whom, remembering but a tall,
grave figure above him in early childhood, Marius habitu-
ally thought as a genius a little cold and severe.
Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi,
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera.-
Perhaps !but certainly needs his altar here below, and
garlands to-day upon his urn. But the dead genii were
satisfied with littlea few violets, a cake dipped in
wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, from the time
when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had
Marius taken them their portion of the family meal, at
the second course, amidst the silence of the company.
## p. 7 (#23) ###############################################
I
7
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
They loved those who brought them their sustenance ;
but, deprived of these services, would be heard wandering
through the house, crying sorrowfully in the stillness of
the night
And those simple gifts, like other objects as trivial 
bread, oil, wine, milk-had regained for him, by their
use in such religious service, that poetic, and as it were
moral significance, which surely belongs to all the means
of daily life, could we but break through the veil of our
familiarity with things by no means vulgar in themselves.
A hymn followed, while the whole assembly stood with
veiled faces. The fire rose up readily from the altars, in
a clean, bright flame-a favourable omen, making it a
duty to render the mirth of the evening complete. Old
wine was poured out freely for the servants at supper in
the great kitchen, where they had worked in the im-
perfect light through the long evenings of winter. The
young Marius himself took but a very sober part in the
noisy feasting. A devout, regretful after-taste of what
had been really beautiful in the ritual he had accom-
plished took him early away, that he might the
better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the
celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep,
pleasant with all the influences of long hours in the
open air, he seemed still to be moving in procession
through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe.
That feeling was still upon him as he awoke amid
the beating of violent rain on the shutters, in the
first storm of the season. The thunder which startled
him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of his
chamber almost painfully complete, as if the nearness
of those angry clouds shut him up in a close place
alone in the world. Then he thought of the sort of
protection which that day's ceremonies assured. To
procure an agreement with the gods  Pacem deorum
exposcere : that was the meaning of what they had
## p. 8 (#24) ###############################################
8
CHAP. I
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
His own
all day been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but half-
suspicious, he would fain have those Powers at least
not against him.
nearer household gods
were all around his bed. The spell of his religion as
a part of the very essence of home, its intimacy, its
dignity and security, was forcible at that moment; only,
it seemed to involve certain heavy demands upon him.
## p. 9 (#25) ###############################################
CHAPTER II
WHITE-NIGHTS
To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in
which the childhood of Marius was passed had largely
added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of
that coy, retired place,surely nothing could happen
there, without its full accompaniment of thought or
reverie. White-nights ! so you might interpret its old
Latin name. "The red rose came first," says a quaint
German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called
white things," as being "ever an after-thought  the
doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but
half-real or materialthe white queen, the white witch,
the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty
of the true mass turned to evil by horrible old witches,
is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with
an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal." So, white
nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy,
should be nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but
passed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by sleep.
Certainly the place was, in such case, true to its fanciful
name in this, that you might very well conceive, in face
of it, that dreaming even in the daytime might come to
much there.
The young Marius represented an ancient family
whose estate had come down to him much curtailed
## p. 10 (#26) ##############################################
IO
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
through the extravagance of a certain Marcellus two
generations before, a favourite in his day of the fashion-
able world at Rome, where he had at least spent his
substance with a correctness of taste Marius might seem
to have inherited from him ; as he was believed also to
resemble him in a singularly pleasant smile, consistent
however, in the younger face, with some degree of sombre
expression when the mind within was but slightly moved.
As the means of life decreased the farm had crept
nearer and nearer to the dwelling-house, about which
there was therefore a trace of workday negligence or
homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some,
for the young master himself among them. The more
observant passer - by would note, curious as to the
inmates, a certain amount of dainty care amid that
neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance
to disturb old associations. It was significant of the
national character, that a sort of elegant gentleman
farming, as we say, was much affected by some of the
most cultivated Romans. But it was something more
than an elegant diversion, something more of a serious
business, with the household of Marius; and his actual
interest in the cultivation of the earth and the care of
flocks had brought him, at least, intimately near to those
elementary conditions of life, a reverence for which, the
great Roman poet, as he has shown by his own half-
mystic preoccupation with them, held to be the ground
of primitive Roman religion, as of primitive morals.
But then, farm-life in Italy, including the culture of the
olive and the vine, has a grace of its own, and might
well contribute to the production of an ideal dignity
of character, like that of nature itself in this gifted
region. Vulgarity seemed impossible. The place,
though impoverished, was still deservedly dear, full of
venerable memories, and with a living sweetness of its
own for to-day.
## p. 11 (#27) ##############################################
II
II
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
It had been a part of the struggling family pride of
the lad's father to hold by those ceremonial traditions,
to which the example of the head of the state, old
Antoninus Piusan example to be still further enforced
by his successorhad given a fresh though perhaps
somewhat artificial popularity. It was consistent with
many another homely and old-fashioned trait in him, not
to undervalue the charm of exclusiveness and immemorial
authority, which membership in a local priestly college,
hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To set a
real value on these things was but one element in that
pious concern for his home and all that belonged to it,
which, as Marius afterwards discovered, had been a
strong motive with his father. The ancient hymn-Jana
Novella !was still sung by his people, as the new moon
grew bright in the west, and even their wild custom of
leaping through heaps of blazing straw on a certain night
in summer was not discouraged. The privilege of augury
itself, according to tradition, had at one time belonged to
his race; and if you can imagine how, once in a way, an
impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mystic
intimation, of the meaning and consequences of all that,
what was implied in it becoming explicit for him, you
conceive aright the mind of Marius, in whose house the
auspices were still carefully consulted before every under-
taking of moment.
The devotion of the father had handed on loyally
and that is all many not unimportant persons ever find
to do-a certain tradition of life, which came to mean
much for the young Marius. It was with a feeling
almost exclusively of awe that he thought of his dead
father; though at times indeed, with a not unpleasant
sense of liberty, as he could but confess to himself,
pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty and
continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which
Roman religion and Roman law gave to the parent
## p. 12 (#28) ##############################################
I2
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
was
over his son. On the part of his mother, on the
other hand, entertaining the husband's memory, there
a sustained freshness of regret, together with
the recognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly
self-sacrifice, to be credited to the dead. The life
of the widow, languid and shadowy enough but for the
poignancy of that regret, was like one long service to
the departed soul; its many annual observances center-
ing about the funeral urna tiny, delicately carved
marble house, still white and fair, in the family-chapel,
wreathed always with the richest flowers from the garden.
To the dead in truth, in such places, was conceded a
somewhat closer neighbourhood to the old homes they
were thought still to protect, than is usual with us, or
was usual in Rome itselfa closeness which the living
welcomed, so diverse are the ways of human sentiment,
and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country,
might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed
with a devout interest, sincerely touched and awed by
his mother's sorrow. After the deification of the
emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so
much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of
their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full
of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar collected-
The severe and archaic religion of the villa, as
he conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout circum-
spection lest he should fall short, at any point, of the
demand upon him of anything in which deity was con-
cerned. He must satisfy, with a kind of sacred equity,
he must be very cautious not to be found wanting to,
the claims of others, in their joys and calamitiesthe
happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in which
it made itself felt. And from habit, this feeling of a
responsibility towards the world of men and things,
towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on
his side, came to be a part of his nature not to be put
ness.
## p. 13 (#29) ##############################################
II
13
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
off. It kept him serious and dignified amid the Epi-
curean speculations, which in after years much engrossed
him and when he had learned to think of all religions as
indifferent, serious amid many fopperies and through
many languid days, and made him anticipate all his life
long as a thing towards which he must carefully train
himself, some great occasion of self-devotion, such as
really came, that should consecrate his life, and, it might
be, its memory with others, as the early Christian looked
forward to martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal
of worth upon it.
The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna,
even as he got his first view of the Port-of-Venus, would
pause by the way, to read the face, as it were, of so
beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the white road,
at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply
to the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and
yellow marble, mellowed by age, which he saw beyond
the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once
large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play
of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which
lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and
there the marble plates had slipped from their places,
where the delicate weeds had forced their way. The
graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm
gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habita-
tion, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order
reigned within. The old Roman architects seem to have
well understood the decorative value of the floor-the
real economy there was, in the production of rich interior
effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface
they trod on. The pavement of the hall had lost some-
thing of its evenness; but, though a little rough to the
foot, polished and cared for like a piece of silver, looked,
as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age. Most
noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little
## p. 14 (#30) ##############################################
14
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
cedar chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful
but elegant Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in
its yellow waxen features to Marius, just then so full of
animation and country colour. A chamber, curved
ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the
mansion, still contained his collection of works of art;
above all, that head of Medusa, for which the villa was
famous. The spoilers of one of the old Greek towns
on the coast had flung away or lost the thing, as it seemed,
in some rapid flight across the river below, from the
sands of which it was drawn up in a fisherman's net,
with the fine golden lamin still clinging here and there
to the bronze. It was Marcellus also who had contrived
the prospect-tower of two storeys with the white pigeon-
house above, so characteristic of the place. The little
glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each
its dainty landscapethe pallid crags of Carrara, like
wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath; the
distant harbour with its freight of white marble going to
sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark
headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers.
Even on
summer nights the air there had always a
motion in it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay
along all the passages of the house.
Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real,
something cloistral or monastic, as we should say, united
to this exquisite order, made the whole place seem to
Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar sanctuary, of his
mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the
deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of
life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely
realised memory of themthe "subjective immortality,"
to use a modern phrase, for which many a Roman epitaph
cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still
in the land of the living. Certainly, if any such con-
siderations regarding them do reach the shadowy people,
## p. 15 (#31) ##############################################
II
15
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
he enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place
still left, in thought at least, beside the living, the desire
for which is actually, in various forms, so great a motive
with most of us. And Marius the younger, even thus
early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands
to lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood,
as a sort of natural want. The soft lines of the white
hands and face, set among the many folds of the veil
and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her needle-
work, or with music sometimes, defined themselves for
him as the typical expression of maternity. Helping
her with her white and purple wools, and caring for her
musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of
such things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualify-
ing duly his country-grown habitsthe sense of a certain
delicate blandness, which he relished, above all, on
returning to the "chapel" of his mother, after long days
of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For
poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than
the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with
the very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the
young myrtles in flower, though the hail is beating hard
without: One important principle, of fruit afterwards in
his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply
in him ; in the winters especially, when the sufferings of
the animal world become so palpable even to the least
observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures,
for the almost human sicknesses and troubles of the
flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which had in it
something of religious veneration for life, as suchfor
that mysterious essence which man is powerless to create
in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire
of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps
and springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh.
A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely,
a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a
## p. 16 (#32) ##############################################
16
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
crowded public placehis own soul was like that!
Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the
opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled ? And as his
mother became to him the very type of maternity in
things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and mater-
nity itself, the central type of all love ;-so, that
beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete out-
line to a peculiar ideal of home, which, throughout the
rest of his life, he seemed, amid many distractions of
spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.
And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in
him, enhanced still further this sentiment of home, as
a place of tried security. His religion, that old Italian
religion, in contrast with the really light-hearted religion
of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom, its sad,
haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls
of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not
always as the prompter of gratitude for benefits received;
but oftenest as his accuser before those angry heavenly
masters, had a large part in it; and the sense of some
unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made him
oddly suspicious of particular places and persons.
Though his liking for animals was so strong, yet one
fierce day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow
road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and ever after-
wards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for
there was something in the incident which made food
distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards.
The memory of it however had almost passed away,
when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an
African showman exhibiting a great serpent : once more,
as the reptile writhed, the former painful impression
revived : it was like a peep into the lower side of the
real world, and again for many days took all sweetness
from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed,
trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having
## p. 17 (#33) ##############################################
II
17
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one of his
companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of
an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A
kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could
hardly have killed or injured the animals, which seemed
already to suffer by the very circumstance of their life.
It was something like a fear of the supernatural, or per-
haps rather a moral feeling, for the face of a great
serpent, with no grace of fur or feathers, so different from
quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect
in its spotted and clouded nakedness.
There was a
humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in cor-
ruption, in the sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into
one metallic spring of pure enmity against him. Long
afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, a
second time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered
the night which had then followed, thinking, in Saint
Augustine's vein, on the real greatness of those little
troubles of children, of which older people make
light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he
reflected how richly possessed his life had actually
been of beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing how
greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbed his
peace.
Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole,
more given to contemplation than to action, Less
prosperous in fortune than at an earlier day there had
been reason to expect, and animating his solitude, as he
read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of the
past, already he lived much in the realm of the
imagination, and became betimes, as he was to continue
all through life, something of an idealist, constructing
the world for himself in great measure from within, by
the exercise of meditative power. A vein of subjective
philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all
things, there was to be always in his intellectual scheme
## p. 18 (#34) ##############################################
18
CHAP. II
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity
wholly to accept other men's valuations. And the
generation of this peculiar element in his temper he
could trace up to the days when his life had been so
like the reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans
a word for unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis
comes nearest to it, perhaps; and, with that precise
sense, might describe the spirit in which he prepared
himself for the sacerdotal function, hereditary in his
familythe sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the
abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascsis, which
such preparation involved. Like the young Ion in the
beautiful opening of the play of Euripides, who every
morning sweeps the temple floor with such a fund of
cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in
sacred places, with a susceptibility to their peculiar
influences which he never outgrew; so that often in
after-times, quite unexpectedly, this feeling would
revive in him with undiminished freshness. That first,
early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication,
survived through all the distractions of the world, and
when all thought of such vocation had finally passed
from him, as a ministry, in spirit at least, towards a sort
of hieratic beauty and orderliness in the conduct of life.
And now what relieved in part this over-tension of
soul was the lad's pleasure in the country and the open
air ; above all, the ramble to the coast, over the marsh
with the dwarf roses and wild lavender, and the delightful
signs, one after anotherthe abandoned boat, the ruined
flood-gates, the flock of wild birdsthat one
approaching the sea; the long summer-day of idleness
among its vague scents and sounds. And it was char-
acteristic of him that he relished especially the grave,
subdued, northern notes in all thatthe charm of the
French or English notes, as we might term themin
the luxuriant Italian landscape.
was
## p. 19 (#35) ##############################################
CHAPTER III
DILEXI DECOREM DOMUS TUAE
THAT almost morbid religious idealism, and his health-
ful love of the country, were both alike developed by
the circumstances of a journey, which happened about
this time, when Marius was taken to a certain temple of
Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was then usual
in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness.
The religion of Aesculapius, though borrowed from
Greece, had been naturalised in Rome in the old re-
publican times; but it was under the Antonines that it
reached the height of its popularity throughout the
Roman world. It was an age of valetudinarians, in
many instances of imaginary ones; but below its various
crazes concerning health and disease, largely multiplied
a few years after the time of which I am speaking by
the miseries of a great pestilence, lay a valuable, because
partly practicable, belief that all the maladies of the
soul might be reached through the subtle gateways of the
body.
Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean
bodily sanity. The religion of the god of bodily health,
Salvator, as they called him, absolutely, had a chance
just then of becoming the one religion; that mild and
philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing, all
other pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical
-
## p. 20 (#36) ##############################################
20
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
art, the salutary mineral or herb, diet or abstinence, and
all the varieties of the bath, came to have a kind of
sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more
serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical
health, beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of
it; the body becoming truly, in that case, but a quiet
handmaid of the soul. The priesthood or "family"
of Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be in possession
of certain precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps,
of all the institutions of the pagan world, to the
Christian priesthood; the temples of the god, rich, in
some instances, with the accumulated thank-offerings of
centuries of a tasteful devotion, being really also a
kind of hospitals for the sick, administered in a full
conviction of the religiousness, the refined and sacred
happiness, of a life spent in the relieving of pain.
Elements of a really experimental and progressive
knowledge there were doubtless amid this devout
enthusiasm, bent so faithfully on the reception of health
as a direct gift from God; but for the most part his care
was held to take effect through a machinery easily cap-
able of misuse for purposes of religious fraud.
above all through dreams, inspired by Aesculapius him-
self, that information as to the cause and cure of a
malady was held to come to the sufferer, in a belief
based on the truth that dreams do sometimes, for
those who watch them carefully, give many hints con-
cerning the conditions of the bodythose latent weak
points at which disease or death may most easily
break into it. In the time of Marcus Aurelius these
medical dreams had become more than ever a fashion-
able caprice. Aristeides, "the Orator," a
man of
undoubted intellectual power, has devoted six discourses
to their interpretation; the really scientific Galen has
recorded how beneficently they had intervened in his
own case, at certain turning-points of life; and a belief
It was
;
## p. 21 (#37) ##############################################
III
21
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
in them was one of the frailties of the wise emperor
himself. Partly for the sake of these dreams, living
ministers of the god, more likely to come to one in his
actual dwelling-place than elsewhere, it was almost a
necessity that the patient should sleep one or more nights
within the precincts of a temple consecrated to his
service, during which time he must observe certain rules
prescribed by the priests.
It was for this purpose that after devoutly saluting
the Lares, as was customary before starting on a journey,
Marius set forth one summer morning for the famous
temple which lay among the hills beyond the valley of
the Arnus. It was his greatest adventure hitherto; and
he had much pleasure in all its details, in spite of
his feverishness. Setting forth early, under the guidance
of an old serving-man who drove the mules, with his wife
who took all that was needful for their refreshment on
the way and for the offering at the shrine, they went,
under the genial heat, halting now and then to pluck
certain flowers seen for the first time on these high
places, upwards, through a long day of sunshine, while
cliffs and woods sank gradually below their path. The
evening came as they passed along a steep white road
with many windings among the pines, and it was night
when they reached the temple, the lights of which shone
out upon them pausing before the gates of the sacred
enclosure, while Marius became alive to a singular
purity in the air. A rippling of water about the place
was the only thing audible, as they waited till two priestly
figures, speaking Greek to each other, admitted them
into a large, white-walled and clearly lighted guest-
chamber, in which, while he partook of a simple but
wholesomely prepared supper, Marius still seemed to
feel pleasantly the height they had attained to among
the hills.
The agreeable sense of all this was spoiled by one
## p. 22 (#38) ##############################################
22
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
thing only, his old fear of serpents; for it was under the
form of a serpent that Aesculapius had come to Rome,
and the last definite thought of his weary head before
he fell asleep had been a dread either that the god
might appear, as he was said sometimes to do, under
this hideous aspect, or perhaps one of those great sallow-
hued snakes themselves, kept in the sacred place, as he
had also heard was usual.
And after an hour's feverish dreaming he awokewith
a cry, it would seem, for some one had entered the room
bearing a light. The footsteps of the youthful figure
which approached and sat by his bedside were certainly
real. Ever afterwards, when the thought arose in his
mind of some unhoped-for but entire relief from distress,
like blue sky in a storm at sea, would come back the
memory of that gracious countenance which, amid all
the kindness of its gaze, had yet a certain air of domin-
ance over him, so that he seemed now for the first time
to have found the master of his spirit. It would have
been sweet to be the servant of him who now sat beside
him speaking
He caught a lesson from what was then said, still
somewhat beyond his years, a lesson in the skilled
cultivation of life, -of experience, of opportunity, which
seemed to be the aim of the young priest's recommenda-
tions. The sum of them, through various forgotten
intervals of argument, as might really have happened
in a dream, was the precept, repeated many times under
slightly varied aspects, of a diligent promotion of the
capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eye would lie for
him the determining influence of life: he was of the
number of those who, in the words of a poet who came
long after, must be "made perfect by the love of visible
beauty." It was a discourse conceived from the point
of view of a theory Marius found afterwards in Plato's
Phdrus, which supposes men's spirits susceptible to
## p. 23 (#39) ##############################################
III
23
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ness.
certain influences, diffused, after the manner of streams
or currents, by fair things or persons visibly present-
green fields, for instance, or children's faces-into the
air around them acting, on some peculiar natures, like
potent material essences, and conforming the seer to
themselves as with some cunning physical necessity.
This theory,* in itself so fantastic, had however deter-
mined in a range of methodical suggestions, altogether
quaint here and there from their circumstantial minute-
And throughout, the possibility of some vision,
as of a new city coming down "like a bride out of
heaven," a vision still indeed, it might seem, a long way
off, but to be granted perhaps one day to the eyes thus
trained, was presented as the motive of this laboriously
practical direction.
"If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours
of some fresh picture, in a clear light," so the discourse
recommenced after a pause, "be temperate in thy
religious motions, in love, in wine, in all things, and of
a peaceful heart with thy fellows." To keep the eye clear
by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness,
extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate,
ever more and more fastidiously, select form and colour
in things from what was less select ; to meditate much
on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially,
connected with the period of youth-on children at play
in the morning, the trees in early spring, on young
animals, on the fashions and amusements of young men ;
to keep ever by him if it were but a single choice flower,
a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token and repre-
sentative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid
jealously, in his way through the world, everything
repugnant to sight; and, should any circumstance tempt
him to a general converse in the range of such objects,
to disentangle himself from that circumstance at any
*    .
## p. 24 (#40) ##############################################
24
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
cost of place, money, or opportunity; such were, in
brief outline, the duties recognised, the rights demanded,
in this new formula of life. It was delivered with con-
viction, as if the speaker verily saw into the recesses of
the mental and physical being of the listener, while his
own expression of perfect temperance had in it a
fascinating powerthe merely negative element of purity,
the mere freedom from taint or flaw, in exercise as a
positive influence. Long afterwards, when Marius read
the Charmidesthat other dialogue of Plato, into which
he seems to have expressed the very genius of old Greek
temperancethe image of this speaker came back
vividly before him, to take the chief part in the conver-
sation.
It was as a weighty sanction of such temperance, in
almost visible symbolism (an outward imagery identifying
itself with unseen moralities) that the memory of that
night's double experience, the dream of the great sallow
snake and the utterance of the young priest, always
returned to him, and the contrast therein involved made
him revolt with unfaltering instinct from the bare thought
of any excess in sleep, or diet, or even in matters of
taste, still more from any excess of a coarser kind.
When he awoke again still in the exceeding freshness
he had felt on his arrival, and now in full sunlight, it was
as if his sickness had really departed with the terror of
the night : a confusion had passed from the brain, a
painful dryness from his hands. It was a delight merely
to be alive and there; and as he bathed in the fresh
water, set ready for his use, the air of the room about
him seemed like pure gold, the very shadows rich with
colour. Summoned at length by one of the white-robed
brethren, he went out to walk in the temple garden.
a distance, on either side, his guide pointed out to him
the Houses of Birth and Death, erected for the reception
respectively of women about to become mothers, and
## p. 25 (#41) ##############################################
III
25
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
of persons about to die; neither of those incidents being
allowed to defile, as was thought, the actual precincts of
the shrine. His visitor of the previous night he saw
nowhere again. But among the official ministers of the
place there was one, already marked as of great celebrity,
whom Marius saw often in later days at Rome, the
physician Galen, now about thirty years old. He was
standing, the hood partly drawn over his face, beside
the holy well, as Marius and his guide approached it.
This famous well or conduit, primary cause of the temple
and its surrounding institutions, was supplied by the water
of a spring flowing directly out of the rocky foundations
of the shrine. From the rim of its basin rose a circle of
trim columns to support a cupola of singular lightness
and grace, itself full of reflected light from the rippling
surface, through which might be traced the wavy figure-
work of the marble lining below as the stream of water
rushed in. Legend told of a visit of Aesculapius to this
place, earlier and happier than his first coming to Rome :
an inscription around the cupola recorded it in letters of
gold. "Being come unto this place the son of God loved
it exceedingly: "Huc profectus filius Dei maxime amavit
hunc locum :and it was then that that most intimately
human of the gods had given men the well, with all its
salutary properties. The element itself, when received
into the mouth, in consequence of its entire freedom
from adhering organic matter, was more like a draught
of wonderfully pure air than water; and after tasting,
Marius was told many mysterious circumstances con-
cerning it, by one and another of the bystanders :-he
who drank often thereof might well think he had tasted
of the Homeric lotus, so great became his desire to
remain always on that spot : carried to other places, it
was almost indefinitely conservative of its fine qualities :
nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and
it flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a
## p. 26 (#42) ##############################################
26
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
volume so oddly rhythmical that the well stood always
full to the brim, whatever quantity might be drawn from
it, seeming to answer with strange alacrity of service to
human needs, like a true creature and pupil of the phil-
anthropic god. Certainly the little crowd around seemed
to find singular refreshment in gazing on it. The whole
place appeared sensibly influenced by the amiable and
healthful spirit of the thing. All the objects of the
country were there at their freshest.
In the great park-
like enclosure for the maintenance of the sacred animals
offered by the convalescent, grass and trees were allowed
to grow with a kind of graceful wildness; otherwise, all
was wonderfully nice. And that freshness seemed to
have something moral in its influence, as if it acted upon
the body and the merely bodily powers of apprehension,
through the intelligence; and to the end of his visit
Marius saw no more serpents.
A lad was just then drawing water for ritual uses, and
Marius followed him as he returned from the well, more
and more impressed by the religiousness of all he saw,
on his way through a long cloister or corridor, the
walls well-nigh hidden under votive inscriptions recording
favours from the son of Apollo, and with a distant
fragrance of incense in the air, explained when he turned
aside through an open doorway into the temple
itself. His heart bounded as the refined and dainty
magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly,
in the flood of early sunshine, with the ceremonial
lights burning here and there, and withal a singular
expression of sacred order, a surprising cleanliness and
simplicity. Certain priests, men whose countenances
bore a deep impression of cultivated mind, each with his
little group of assistants, were gliding round silently, to
perform their morning salutation to the god, raising the
closed thumb and finger of the right hand with a kiss in
the air, as they came and went on their sacred business,
## p. 27 (#43) ##############################################
III
27
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
bearing their frankincense and lustral water. Around
the walls, at such a level that the worshippers might
read, as in a book, the story of the god and his sons,
the brotherhood of the Asclepiade, ran a series of
imageries, in low relief, their delicate light and shade
being heightened, here and there, with gold. Fullest of
inspired and sacred expression, as if in this place the
chisel of the artist had indeed dealt not with marble
but with the very breath of feeling and thought, was the
scene in which the earliest generation of the sons of
Aesculapius were transformed into healing dreams ; for
grown now too glorious to abide longer among
men, by the aid of their sire they put away their mortal
bodies, and came into another country, yet not indeed
into Elysium nor into the Islands of the Blest. But
being made like to the immortal gods, they began to
pass about through the world, changed thus far from
their first form that they appear eternally young, as many
persons have seen them in many placesministers and
heralds of their father, passing to and fro over the earth,
like gliding stars. Which thing is, indeed, the most
wonderful concerning them !" And in this scene, as
throughout the series, with all its crowded personages,
Marius noted on the carved faces the same peculiar
union of unction, almost of hilarity, with a certain
self-possession and reserve, which was conspicuous in
the living ministrants around him.
In the central space, upon a pillar or pedestal, hung,
ex voto, with the richest personal ornaments, stood the
image of Aesculapius himself, surrounded by choice
flowering plants. It presented the type, still with some-
thing of the severity of the earlier art of Greece about
it, not of an aged and crafty physician, but of a youth,
earnest and strong of aspect, carrying an ampulla or
bottle in one hand, and in the other a traveller's staff, a
pilgrim among his pilgrim worshippers; and one of the
## p. 28 (#44) ##############################################
28
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.
ministers explained to Marius this pilgrim guise.One
chief source of the master's knowledge of healing had
been observation of the remedies resorted to by animals
labouring under disease or painwhat leaf or berry the
lizard or dormouse lay upon its wounded fellow; to
which purpose for long years he had led the life of a
wanderer, in wild places. The boy took his place as
the last comer, a little way behind the group of wor-
shippers who stood in front of the image. There, with
uplifted face, the palms of his two hands raised and
open before him, and taught by the priest, he said
his collect of thanksgiving and prayer (Aristeides has
recorded it at the end of his Asclepiada) to the Inspired
Dreams :
"Oye children of Apollo! who in time past have stilled
the waves of sorrow for many people, lighting up a lamp
of safety before those who travel by sea and land, be
pleased, in your great condescension, though ye be equal in
glory with your elder brethren the Dioscuri, and your
lot in immortal youth be as theirs, to accept this prayer,
which in sleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it
aright, I pray you, according to your loving-kindness to
men. Preserve me from sickness; and endue my body
with such a measure of health as may suffice it for the
obeying of the spirit, that I may pass my days unhindered
and in quietness."
On the last morning of his visit Marius entered the
shrine again, and just before his departure the priest,
who had been his special director during his stay at the
place, lifting a cunningly contrived panel, which formed
the back of one of the carved seats, bade him look
through. It was like the vision of a new world, by the
opening of some unsuspected window in a familiar
dwelling-place. He looked out upon a long-drawn
valley, of singularly cheerful aspect, hidden, by the
peculiar conformation of the locality, from all points of
## p. 29 (#45) ##############################################
III
29
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
observation but this. In a green meadow at the foot of
the steep olive-clad rocks below, the novices were taking
their exercise. The softly sloping sides of the vale lay
alike in full sunlight; and its distant opening was closed
by a beautifully formed mountain, from which the last
wreaths of morning mist were rising under the heat. It
was the very presentment of a land of hope ; its hollows
brimful of a shadow of blue flowers; and lo! on the
one level space of the horizon, in a long dark line, were
towers and a dome : and that was Pisa.Or Rome,
was it? asked Marius, ready to believe the utmost, in
his excitement.
All this served, as he understood afterwards in retro-
spect, at once to strengthen and to purify a certain vein
of character in him. Developing the ideal, pre-existent
there, of a religious beauty, associated for the future
with the exquisite splendour of the temple of Aesculapius,
as it dawned upon him on that morning of his first visit
it developed that ideal in connexion with a vivid
sense of the value of mental and bodily sanity. And
this recognition of the beauty, even for the aesthetic
sense, of mere bodily health, now acquired, operated
afterwards as an influence morally salutary, counter-
acting the less desirable or hazardous tendencies of
some phases of thought, through which he was to
pass.
He came home, brown with health, to find the health
of his mother failing; and about her death, which
occurred not long afterwards, there was a circumstance
which rested with him as the cruellest touch of all, in an
event which for a time seemed to have taken the light
out of the sunshine. She died away from home, but
sent for him at the last, with a painful effort on her part,
but to his great gratitude, pondering, as he always
believed, that he might chance otherwise to look back
all his life long upon a single fault with something like
## p. 30 (#46) ##############################################
30
CHAP. III
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
remorse, and find the burden a great one. For it
happened that, through some sudden, incomprehensible
petulance there had been an angry childish gesture, and
a slighting word, at the very moment of her departure,
actually for the last time. Remembering this he would
ever afterwards pray to be saved from offences against
his own affections; the thought of that marred parting
having peculiar bitterness for one, who set so much
store, both by principle and habit, on the sentiment of
home.
## p. 31 (#47) ##############################################
CHAPTER IV
O MARE, O LITTUS, VERUM SECRETUMQUE MOYEEION
QUAM MULTA INVENITIS QUAM MULTA DICTATIS!
Pliny's Letters.
;
It would hardly have been possible to feel more seriously
than did Marius in those grave years of his early life.
But the death of his mother turned seriousness of feeling
into a matter of the intelligence: it made him a
questioner; and, by bringing into full evidence to him
the force of his affections and the probable importance
of their place in his future, developed in him generally
the more human and earthly elements of character. A
singularly virile consciousness of the realities of life pro-
nounced itself in him ; still however as, in the main, a
poetic apprehension, though united already with some-
thing of personal ambition and the instinct of self-
assertion. There were days when he could suspect,
though it was a suspicion he was careful at first to put
from him, that that early, much cherished religion of the
villa might come to count with him as but one form of
poetic beauty, or of the ideal, in thingsas but one voice,
in a world where there were many voices it would be a
moral weakness not to listen to. And yet this voice,
through its forcible preoccupation of his childish con-
science, still seemed to make a claim of a quite exclusive
character, defining itself as essentially one of but two
possible leaders of his spirit, the other proposing to him
## p. 32 (#48) ##############################################
32
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
unlimited self-expansion in a world of various sunshine.
It was a contrast so pronounced as to make the easy,
light-hearted, unsuspecting exercise of himself, among
the temptations of the new phase of life which had now
begun, seem nothing less than a rival religion, a rival
religious service. The temptations, the various sunshine,
were those of the old town of Pisa, where Marius was
now a tall schoolboy. It was a place lying just far
enough from home to make his rare visits to it in childhood
seem like adventures, such as had never failed to supply
new and refreshing impulses to the imagination. The
partly decayed pensive town, which still had its commerce
by sea, and its fashion at the bathing-season, had lent,
at one time the vivid memory of its fair streets of marble,
at another the solemn outline of the dark hills of Luna
on its background, at another the living glances of its
men and women, to the thickly gathering crowd of
impressions, out of which his notion of the world was
then forming. And while he learned that the object,
the experience, as it will be known to memory, is really
from first to last, the chief point for consideration in the
conduct of life, these things were feeding also the
idealism constitutional with himhis innate and habitual
longing for a world altogether fairer than that he saw.
The child could find his way in thought along those
streets of the old town, expecting duly the shrines at
their corners, and their recurrent intervals of garden-
courts, or side-views of distant sea. The great temple
of the place, as he could remember it, on turning back
once for a last look from an angle of his homeward road,
counting its tall gray columns between the blue of the
bay and the blue fields of blossoming flax beyond; the
harbour and its lights; the foreign ships lying there; the
sailors' chapel of Venus and her gilded image, hung with
votive gifts; the seamen themselves, their women and
children, who had a whole peculiar colour-world of their
## p. 33 (#49) ##############################################
IV
33
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ownthe boy's superficial delight in the broad light and
shadow of all that was mingled with the sense of power,
of unknown distance, of the danger of storm and possible
death.
It was to this place that Marius came down now
from White-nights, to live in the house of his guardian
or tutor, that he might attend the school of a famous
rhetorician, and learn, among other things, Greek. The
school, one of many imitations of Plato's Academy in
the old Athenian garden, lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa,
and had its grove of cypresses, its porticoes, a house for
the master, its chapel and images. For the memory
of Marius in after-days, a clear morning sunlight seemed
to lie perpetually on that severe picture in old grey and
green. The lad went to this school daily betimes, in
state at first, with a young slave to carry the books, and
certainly with no reluctance, for the sight of his fellow-
scholars, and their petulant activity, coming upon the
sadder, sentimental moods of his childhood, awoke at
once that instinct of emulation which is but the other
side of social sympathy; and he was not aware, of course,
how completely the difference of his previous training
had made him, even in his most enthusiastic participation
in the ways of that little world, still essentially but a
spectator. While all their heart was in their limited
boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was already
entertaining himself, very pleasurably meditative, with
the tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic,
preliminary exercise for a larger contest, and already with
an implicit epicureanism. Watching all the gallant
effects of their small rivalriesa scene in the main of
fresh delightful sunshine-he entered at once into the
sensations of a rivalry beyond them, into the passion of
men, and had already recognised a certain appetite for
fame, for distinction among his fellows, as his dominant
motive to be.
D
## p. 34 (#50) ##############################################
34
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
The fame he conceived for himself at this time was,
as the reader will have anticipated, of the intellectual
order, that of a poet perhaps. And as in that grey
monastic tranquillity of the villa, inward voices from the
reality of unseen things had come abundantly; so here,
with the sounds and aspects of the shore, and amid the
urbanities, the graceful follies, of a bathing-place, it was
the reality, the tyrannous reality, of things visible that
was borne in upon him. The real world arounda
present humanity not less comely, it might seem, than
that of the old heroic daysendowing everything it
touched upon, however remotely, down to its little
passing tricks of fashion even, with a kind of fleeting
beauty, exercised over him just then a great fascination.
That sense had come upon him in all its power one
exceptionally fine summer, the summer when, at a some-
what earlier age than was usual, he had formally assumed
the dress of manhood, going into the Forum for that
purpose, accompanied by his friends in festal array. At
night, after the full measure of those cloudless days, he
would feel wellnigh wearied out, as if with a long
succession of pictures and music. As he wandered
through the gay streets or on the sea-shore, the real world
seemed indeed boundless, and himself almost absolutely
free in it, with a boundless appetite for experience, for
adventure, whether physical or of the spirit. His entire
rearing hitherto had lent itself to an imaginative exalta-
tion of the past; but now the spectacle actually afforded
to his untired and freely open senses, suggested the
reflection that the present had, it might be, really
advanced beyond the past, and he was ready to boast in
the very fact that it was modern. If, in a voluntary
archaism, the polite world of that day went back to a
choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of a
fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature,
and even, as
we have seen, of religion, at least it
## p. 35 (#51) ##############################################
IV
35
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
improved, by a shade or two of more scrupulous finish,
on the old pattern; and the new era, like the Neu-zeit
of the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our own
century, might perhaps be discerned, awaiting one just a
single step onwardthe perfected new manner, in the
consummation of time, alike as regards the things of the
imagination and the actual conduct of life. Only, while
the pursuit of an ideal like this demanded entire liberty
of heart and brain, that old, staid, conservative religion
of his childhood certainly had its being in a world of
somewhat narrow restrictions. But then, the one was
absolutely real, with nothing less than the reality of seeing
and hearing--the other, how vague, shadowy, prob-
lematical ! Could its so limited probabilities be worth
taking into account in any practical question as to the
rejecting or receiving of what was indeed so real, and, on
the face of it, so desirable ?
And, dating from the time of his first coming to
school, a great friendship had grown up for him, in that
life of so few attachmentsthe pure and disinterested
friendship of schoolmates. He had seen Flavian for the
first time the day on which he had come to Pisa, at the
moment when his mind was full of wistful thoughts
regarding the new life to begin for him to-morrow, and he
gazed curiously at the crowd of bustling scholars as they
came from their classes. There was something in
Flavian a shade disdainful, as he stood isolated from
the others for a moment, explained in part by his stature
and the distinction of the low, broad forehead; though
there was pleasantness also for the newcomer in the
roving blue eyes which seemed somehow to take a fuller
hold upon things around than is usual with boys.
Marius knew that those proud glances made kindly note
of him for a moment, and felt something like friendship
at first sight. There was a tone of reserve, or gravity
there, amid perfectly disciplined health, which, to his
## p. 36 (#52) ##############################################
36
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
fancy, seemed to carry forward the expression of the
austere sky, with the clear song of the blackbird, on that
grey March evening. Flavian indeed was a creature who
changed much with the changes of the passing light and
shade about him, and was brilliant enough under the
early sunshine in school next morning. Of all that little
world of more or less gifted youth, surely the centre was
this lad of servile birth. Prince of the school, he had
gained an easy dominion over the old Greek master by
the fascination of his parts, and over his fellow-scholars
by the figure he bore. He wore already the manly
dress; and standing there in class, as he displayed his
wonderful quickness in reckoning, or his taste in
declaiming Homer, he was like a carved figure in motion,
thought Marius, but with that indescribable gleam upon
it which the words of Homer actually suggested, as per-
ceptible on the visible forms of the gods-
.
A story hung by him, a story which his comrades acutely
connected with his habitual air of somewhat peevish
pride. Two points were held to be clear amid its
general vaguenessa rich stranger paid his schooling,
and he was himself very poor; though there was an
attractive piquancy in the poverty of Flavian which in
a scholar of another figure might have been despised.
Over Marius too his dominion was entire.
older than he, Flavian was appointed to help the younger
boy in his studies, and Marius thus became virtually his
servant in many things, taking his humours with a sort
of grateful pride in being noticed at all, and, thinking
over all this afterwards, found that the fascination ex-
perienced by him had been a sentimental one, dependent
on the concession to himself of an intimacy, a certain
tolerance of his company, granted to none beside.
That was in the earliest days; and then, as their
Three years
## p. 37 (#53) ##############################################
IV
37
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
intimacy grew, the genius, the intellectual
power
of
Flavian, began its sway over him. The brilliant youth
who loved dress, and dainty food, and flowers, and
seemed to have a natural alliance with, and claim
upon, everything else which was physically select and
bright, cultivated also that foppery of words, of choice
diction, which was common among the lite spirits of
that day; and Marius, early an expert and elegant pen-
man, transcribed his verses (the euphuism of which, amid
a genuine original power, was then so delightful to him)
in beautiful ink, receiving in return the profit of Flavian's
really great intellectual capacities, developed and accom-
plished under the ambitious desire to make his way
effectively in life. Among other things he introduced
him to the writings of a sprightly wit, then very busy
with the pen, one Lucianwritings seeming to overflow
with that intellectual light turned upon dim places, which,
at least in seasons of mental fair weather, can make
people laugh where they have been wont, perhaps, to
pray. And, surely, the sunlight which filled those well-
remembered early mornings in school, had had more
than the usual measure of gold in it! Marius, at least,
would lie awake before the time, thinking with delight
of the long coming hours of hard work in the presence
of Flavian, as other boys dream of a holiday.
It was almost by accident at last, so wayward and
capricious was he, that reserve gave way, and Flavian
told the story of his fathera freedman, presented late
in life, and almost against his will, with the liberty so
fondly desired in youth, but on condition of the sacrifice
of part of his peculiumthe slave's diminutive hoard-
amassed by many a self-denial, in an existence necessarily
hard. The rich man, interested in the promise of the
fair child born on his estate, had sent him to school.
The meanness and dejection, nevertheless, of that un-
occupied old age defined the leading memory of Flavian,
## p. 38 (#54) ##############################################
38
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
revived sometimes, after this first confidence, with a burst
of angry tears amid the sunshine. But nature had had
her economy in nursing the strength of that one natural
affection ; for, save his half-selfish care for Marius, it was
the single, really generous part, the one piety, in the
lad's character. In him Marius saw the spirit of
unbelief, achieved, as it were, at one step. The much-
admired freedman's son, as with the privilege of a natural
aristocracy, believed only in himself, in the brilliant, and
mainly sensuous gifts, he had, or meant to acquire.
And then, he had certainly yielded himself, though
still with untouched health, in a world where manhood
comes early, to the seductions of that luxurious town,
and Marius wondered sometimes, in the freer revelation
of himself by conversation, at the extent of his early
corruption. How often, afterwards, did evil things
present themselves in malign association with the
memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of
borrowed sanction and charm in its natural grace! To
Marius, at a later time, he counted for as it were an
epitome of the whole pagan world itself, the depth of its
corruption, and its perfection of form. And still, in his
mobility, his animation, in his eager capacity for various
life, he was so real an object, after that visionary idealism
of the villa. His voice, his glance, were like the breaking
in of the solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions
of a dream. A shadow, handling all things as shadows,
had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them.
Meantime, under his guidance, Marius was learning
quickly and abundantly, because with a good will.
There was that in the actual effectiveness of his figure
which stimulated the younger lad to make the most of
opportunity; and he had experience already that
education largely increased one's capacity for enjoyment.
He was acquiring what it is the chief function of all higher
education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the
## p. 39 (#55) ##############################################
IV
39
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our
everyday lifeof so exclusively living in themthat the
unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or dbris of
our days, comes to be as though it were not. And the
consciousness of this aim came with the reading of one
particular book, then fresh in the world, with which he
fell in about this timea book which awakened the
poetic or romantic capacity as perhaps some other book
might have done, but was peculiar in giving it a direction
emphatically sensuous. It made him, in that visionary
reception of every-day life, the seer, more especially, of
a revelation in colour and form. If our modern educa-
tion, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that
kind of idealising power, it does so (though dealing
mainly, as its instruments, with the most select and ideal
remains of ancient literature) oftenest by truant reading ;
and thus it happened also, long ago, with Marius and
his friend.
## p. 40 (#56) ##############################################
CHAPTER V
THE GOLDEN BOOK
The two lads were lounging together over a book, half-
buried in a heap of dry corn, in an old granarythe
quiet corner to which they had climbed out of the
way
of
their noisier companions on one of their blandest holiday
afternoons. They looked round: the western sun smote
through the broad chinks of the shutters. How like a
picture! and it was precisely the scene described in
what they were reading, with just that added poetic
touch in the book which made it delightful and select,
and, in the actual place, the ray of sunlight, transforming
the rough grain among the cool brown shadows into
heaps of gold. What they were intent on was, indeed,
the book of books, the "golden" book of that day, a
gift to Flavian, as was shown by the purple writing on
the handsome yellow wrapper, following the title.
Flaviane !-it said,
Flaviane !
lege
Feliciter !
Flaviane !
Vivas !
Floreas !
Flaviane !
Vivas !
Gaudeas !
It was perfumed with oil of sandal-wood, and decorated
rith ved and gilt ivory bosses at the ends of the
roller.
And the inside was something not less dainty and
## p. 41 (#57) ##############################################
CHAP. V
41
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
fine, full of the archaisms and curious felicities in which
that generation delighted, quaint terms and images
picked fresh from the early dramatists, the lifelike phrases
of some lost poet preserved by an old grammarian, racy
morsels of the vernacular and studied prettinesses :-all
alike, mere playthings for the genuine power and natural
eloquence of the erudite artist, unsuppressed by his
erudition, which, however, made some people angry,
chiefly less well "got-up" people, and especially those
who were untidy from indolence.
No! it was certainly not that old-fashioned, uncon-
scious ease of the early literature, which could never
come again ; which, after all, had had more in common
with the "infinite patience" of Apuleius, than with the
hack-work readiness of his detractors, who might so well
have been " self-conscious of going slip-shod. And at
least his success was unmistakable as to the precise
literary effect he had intended, including a certain
tincture of "neology" in expressionnonnihil interdum
elocutione novella parum signatumin the language of
Cornelius Fronto, the contemporary prince of rhetoricians.
What words he had found for conveying, with a single
touch, the sense of textures, colours, incidents !
" Like
jewellers' work! Like a myrrhine vase !"-admirers
said of his writing. "The golden fibre in the hair, the
gold threadwork in the gown marked her as the mistress
-aurum in comis et in tunicis, ibi inflexum hic intextum,
matronam profecto confitebatur  he writes, with his
"curious felicity," of one of his heroines. Aurum
intextum : gold fibre :-well! there was something of
that kind in his own work. And then, in an age when
people, from the emperor Aurelius downwards, prided
themselves, unwisely, on writing in Greek, he had written
for Latin people in their own tongue; though still, in
truth, with all the care of a learned language. Not less
happily inventive were the incidents recorded-story
## p. 42 (#58) ##############################################
42
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
within story  stories with the sudden, unlooked-for
changes of dreams. He had his humorous touches also.
And what went to the ordinary boyish taste, in those
somewhat peculiar readers, what would have charmed
boys more purely boyish, was the adventure :the bear
loose in the house at night, the wolves storming the
farms in winter, the exploits of the robbers, their charm-
ing caves, the delightful thrill one had at the question-
"Don't you know that these roads are infested by
robbers ?"
The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, the
original land of witchcraft, and took one up and down
its mountains, and into its old weird towns, haunts of
magic and incantation, where all the more genuine
appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea
when she fled through that country, were still in use. In
the city of Hypata, indeed, nothing seemed to be its
true self."You might think that through the murmur-
ing of some cadaverous spell, all things had been
changed into forms not their own, and there was
humanity in the hardness of the stones you stumbled on,
that the birds you heard singing were feathered men, that
the trees around the walls drew their leaves from a like
The statues seemed about to move, the walls
to speak, the dumb cattle to break out in prophecy;
nay! the very sky and the sunbeams, as if they might
suddenly cry out." There are witches there who can
draw down the moon, or at least the lunar virusthat
white fluid she sheds, to be found, so rarely, "on high,
heathy places, which is a poison : a touch of it will
drive men mad."
And in one very remote village lives the sorceress
Pamphile, who turns her neighbours into various animals.
What true humour in the scene where, after mounting
the rickety stairs, Lucius, peeping curiously through a
chink in the door, is a spectator of the transformation of
source.
## p. 43 (#59) ##############################################
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
43
:
the old witch herself into a bird, that she may take
flight to the object of her affections  into an owl !
"First she stripped off every rag she had. Then opening
a certain chest she took from it many small boxes, and
removing the lid of one of them, rubbed herself over for
a long time, from head to foot, with an ointment it con-
tained, and after much low muttering to her lamp, began
to jerk at last and shake her limbs. And as her limbs
moved to and fro, out burst the soft feathers : stout
wings came forth to view : the nose grew hard and
hooked: her nails were crooked into claws; and
Pamphile was an owl. She uttered a queasy screech ;
and, leaping little by little from the ground, making trial
of herself, fled presently, on full wing, out of doors."
By clumsy imitation of this process, Lucius, the hero
of the romance, transforms himself, not as he had
intended into a showy winged creature, but into the
animal which has given name to the book; for, through-
out it, there runs a vein of racy, homely satire on the
love of magic then prevalent, curiosity concerning which
had led Lucius to meddle with the old woman's appli-
"Be you my Venus," he says to the pretty maid.
servant who has introduced him to the view of Pamphile,
"and let me stand by you a winged Cupid !" and,
freely applying the magic ointment, sees himself trans-
formed, "not into a bird, but into an ass !"
Well! the proper remedy for his distress is a supper
of roses, could such be found, and many are his quaintly
picturesque attempts to come by them at that adverse
season; as he contrives to do at last, when, the grotesque
procession of Isis passing by with a bear and other
strange animals in its train, the ass following along with
the rest suddenly crunches the chaplet of roses carried
in the High-priest's hand.
Meantime, however, he must wait for the spring, with
more than the outside of an ass ; "though I was not so
ances.
## p. 44 (#60) ##############################################
44
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
much a fool, nor so truly an ass," he tells us, when
he happens to be left alone with a daintily spread table,
"as to neglect this most delicious fare, and feed upon
coarse hay." For, in truth, all through the book, there
is an unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold
touches like Swift's, and a genuine animal breadth.
Lucius was the original ass, who peeping slily from the
window of his hiding-place forgot all about the big
shadow he cast just above him, and gave occasion to
the joke or proverb about "the peeping ass and his
shadow."
But the marvellous, delight in which is one of the
really serious elements in most boys, passed at times,
those young readers still feeling its fascination, into
what French writers call the macabrethat species of
almost insane preoccupation with the materialities of our
mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on
corruption, which was connected, in this writer at least,
with not a little obvious coarseness. It was a strange
notion of the gross lust of the actual world, that Marius
took from some of these episodes. "I am told," they
read, "that when foreigners are interred, the old witches
are in the habit of out-racing the funeral procession, to
ravage the corpse"in order to obtain certain cuttings
and remnants from it, with which to injure the living-
"especially if the witch has happened to cast her eye
upon some goodly young man." And the scene of the
night-watching of a dead body lest the witches should
come to tear off the flesh with their teeth, is worthy of
Thophile Gautier.
But set as one of the episodes in the main narrative,
a true gem amid its mockeries, its coarse though
genuine humanity, its burlesque horrors, came the tale of
Cupid and Psyche, full of brilliant, life-like situations,
speciosa locis, and abounding in lovely visible imagery
(one seemed to see and handle the golden hair, the
## p. 45 (#61) ##############################################
V
45
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
fresh flowers, the precious works of art, in it !) yet full
also of a gentle idealism, so that you might take it, if
you chose, for an allegory. With a concentration of all
his finer literary gifts, Apuleius had gathered into it the
floating star-matter of many a delightful old story.
The story of Cupid and Psyche.
In a certain city lived a king and queen who had
three daughters exceeding fair. But the beauty of the
elder sisters, though pleasant to behold, yet passed not
the measure of human praise, while such was the loveli-
ness of the youngest that men's speech was too poor to
commend it worthily and could express it not at all.
Many of the citizens and of strangers, whom the fame
of this excellent vision had gathered thither, confounded
by that matchless beauty, could but kiss the finger-tips
of their right hands at sight of her, as in adoration to
the goddess Venus herself. And soon a rumour passed
through the country that she whom the blue deep had
borne, forbearing her divine dignity, was even then
moving among men, or that, by some fresh germina-
tion from the stars, not the sea now, but the earth,
had put forth a new Venus, endued with the flower of
virginity.
This belief, with the fame of the maiden's loveliness,
went daily further into distant lands, so that many
people were drawn together to behold that glorious
model of the age.
Men sailed no longer to Paphos, to
Cnidus or Cythera, to the presence of the goddess
Venus : her sacred rites were neglected, her images
stood uncrowned, the cold ashes were left to disfigure
her forsaken altars. It was to a maiden that men's
prayers were offered, to a human countenance they
looked, in propitiating so great a godhead: when the
girl went forth in the morning they strewed flowers on
## p. 46 (#62) ##############################################
46
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
her way, and the victims proper to that unseen goddess
were presented as she passed along. This conveyance
of divine worship to a mortal kindled meantime the
anger of the true Venus. "Lo! now, the ancient
parent of nature," she cried, "the fountain of all
elements! Behold me, Venus, benign mother of the
world, sharing my honours with a mortal maiden, while
my name, built up in heaven, is profaned by the mean
things of earth! Shall a perishable woman bear my
image about with her? In vain did the shepherd of
Ida prefer me! Yet shall she have little joy, whosoever
she be, of her usurped and unlawful loveliness !"
Thereupon she called to her that winged, bold boy, of
evil ways, who wanders armed by night through men's
houses, spoiling their marriages; and stirring yet more
by her speech his inborn wantonness, she led him to the
city, and showed him Psyche as she walked.
"I pray thee," she said, "give thy mother a full
revenge. Let this maid become the slave of an
unworthy love." Then, embracing him closely, she
departed to the shore and took her throne upon the
crest of the wave. And lo! at her unuttered will, her
ocean-servants are in waiting : the daughters of Nereus
are there singing their song, and Portunus, and Salacia,
and the tiny charioteer of the dolphin, with a host of
Tritons leaping through the billows. And one blows
softly through his sounding sea-shell, another spreads a
silken web against the sun, a third presents the mirror
to the eyes of his mistress, while the others swim side
by side below, drawing her chariot. Such was the
escort of Venus as she went upon the sea.
Psyche meantime, aware of her loveliness, had no
fruit thereof. All people regarded and admired, but
none sought her in marriage. It was but as on the
finished work of the craftsman that they gazed upon
that divine likeness. Her sisters, less fair than she,
## p. 47 (#63) ##############################################
V
47
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
were happily wedded. She, even as a widow, sitting at
home, wept over her desolation, hating in her heart the
beauty in which all men were pleased.
And the king, supposing the gods were angry, inquired
of the oracle of Apollo, and Apollo answered him thus :
"Let the damsel be placed on the top of a certain
mountain, adorned as for the bed of marriage and of
death. Look not for a son-in-law of mortal birth; but
for that evil serpent-thing, by reason of whom even the
gods tremble and the shadows of Styx are afraid."
So the king returned home and made known the
oracle to his wife. For many days she lamented, but at
last the fulfilment of the divine precept is urgent upon
her, and the company made ready to conduct the maiden
to her deadly bridal. And now the nuptial torch
gathers dark smoke and ashes: the pleasant sound of
the pipe is changed into a cry: the marriage hymn
concludes in a sorrowful wailing: below her yellow
wedding-veil the bride shook away her tears; insomuch
that the whole city was afflicted together at the ill-luck of
the stricken house.
But the mandate of the god impelled the hapless
Psyche to her fate, and, these solemnities being ended,
the funeral of the living soul goes forth, all the people
following. Psyche, bitterly weeping, assists not at her
marriage but at her own obsequies, and while the
parents hesitate to accomplish a thing so unholy the
daughter cries to them : "Wherefore torment your luck-
less age by long weeping ? This was the prize of my
extraordinary beauty! When all people celebrated us
with divine honours, and in one voice named the New
Venus, it was then ye should have wept for me as one dead.
Now at last I understand that that one name of Venus
has been my ruin. Lead me and set me upon the
appointed place. I am in haste to submit to that well-
omened marriage, to behold that goodly spouse. Why
## p. 48 (#64) ##############################################
48
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
delay the coming of him who was born for the destruc-
tion of the whole world ?"
She was silent, and with firm step went on the way.
And they proceeded to the appointed place on a steep
mountain, and left there the maiden alone, and took
their way homewards dejectedly. The wretched parents,
in their close - shut house, yielded themselves to
perpetual night; while to Psyche, fearful and trembling
and weeping sore upon the mountain-top, comes the
gentle Zephyrus. He lifts her mildly, and, with vesture
afloat on either side, bears her by his own soft breathing
over the windings of the hills, and sets her lightly among
the flowers in the bosom of a valley below.
Psyche, in those delicate grassy places, lying sweetly
on her dewy bed, rested from the agitation of her soul
and arose in peace. And lo! a grove of mighty trees,
with a fount of water, clear as glass, in the midst; and
hard by the water, a dwelling-place, built not by human
hands but by some divine cunning. One recognised,
even at the entering, the delightful hostelry of a god.
Golden pillars sustained the roof, arched most curiously
in cedar-wood and ivory. The walls were hidden under
wrought silver :-all tame and woodland creatures leap-
ing forward to the visitor's gaze. Wonderful indeed was
the craftsman, divine or half-divine, who by the subtlety
of his art had breathed so wild a soul into the silver !
The very pavement was distinct with pictures in goodly
stones. In the glow of its precious metal the house is
its own daylight, having no need of the sun. Well
might it seem a place fashioned for the conversation of
gods with men !
Psyche, drawn forward by the delight of it, came
near, and, her courage growing, stood within the door-
way. One by one, she admired the beautiful things she
saw; and, most wonderful of all ! no lock, no chain, nor
living guardian protected that great treasure-house. But
## p. 49 (#65) ##############################################
V
49
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
as she gazed there came a voice-a voice, as it were
unclothed of bodily vesture"Mistress !" it said, "all
these things are thine. Lie down, and relieve thy weari-
ness, and rise again for the bath when thou wilt. We
thy servants, whose voice thou hearest, will be beforehand
with our service, and a royal feast shall be ready."
And Psyche understood that some divine care was
providing, and, refreshed with sleep and the bath, sat
down to the feast. Still she saw no one: only she
heard words falling here and there, and had voices alone
to serve her. And the feast being ended, one entered
the chamber and sang to her unseen, while another
struck the chords of a harp, invisible with him who
played on it. Afterwards, the sound of a company
singing together came to her, but still so that none was
present to sight; yet it appeared that a great multitude
of singers was there.
And the hour of evening inviting her, she climbed
into the bed ; and as the night was far advanced, behold
a sound of a certain clemency approaches her. Then,
fearing for her maidenhood, in so great solitude, she
trembled, and more than any evil she knew dreaded
that she knew not. And now the husband, that un-
known husband, drew near, and ascended the couch,
and made her his wife; and lo! before the rise of dawn
he had departed hastily. And the attendant voices
ministered to the needs of the newly married.
it happened with her for a long season. And as nature
has willed, this new thing, by continual use, became a
delight to her : the sound of the voice grew to be her
solace in that condition of loneliness and uncertainty.
One night the bridegroom spoke thus to his beloved,
"O Psyche, most pleasant bride!
Fortune is grown
stern with us, and threatens thee with mortal peril.
Thy sisters, troubled at the report of thy death and
seeking some trace of thee, will come to the mountain-
And so
..
E
## p. 50 (#66) ##############################################
50
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
top But if by chance their cries reach thee, answer
not, neither look forth at all, lest thou bring sorrow upon
me and destruction upon thyself." Then Psyche
promised that she would do according to his will. But
the bridegroom was fled away again with the night.
And all that day she spent in tears, repeating that she
was now dead indeed, shut up in that golden prison,
powerless to console her sisters, sorrowing after her, or
to see their faces; and so went to rest weeping.
And after a while came the bridegroom again, and
lay down beside her, and embracing her as she wept,
complained, "Was this thy promise, my Psyche? What
have I to hope from thee? Even in the arms of
thy husband thou ceasest not from pain. Do now as
thou wilt. Indulge thine own desire, though it seeks
what will ruin thee. Yet wilt thou remember my warning,
repentant too late." Then, protesting that she is like
to die, she obtains from him that he suffer her to see
her sisters, and present to them moreover what gifts she
would of golden ornaments ; but therewith he ofttimes
advised her never at any time, yielding to pernicious
counsel, to enquire concerning his bodily form, lest she
fall, through unholy curiosity, from so great a height of
fortune, nor feel ever his embrace again. "I would die
a hundred times," she said, cheerful at last, "rather than
be deprived of thy most sweet usage.
I love thee as my
own soul, beyond comparison even with Love himself.
Only bid thy servant Zephyrus bring hither my sisters,
as he brought me. My honeycomb! My husband !
Thy Psyche's breath of life !" So he promised; and
after the embraces of the night, ere the light appeared,
vanished from the hands of his bride.
And the sisters, coming to the place where Psyche
was abandoned, wept loudly among the rocks, and called
upon her by name, so that the sound came down to her,
and running out of the palace distraught, she cried,
## p. 51 (#67) ##############################################
V
51
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
I
am
"Wherefore afflict your souls with lamentation ?
whom you mourn
here." Then, summoning
Zephyrus, she reminded him of her husband's bidding;
and he bare them down with a gentle blast.
" Enter
now," she said, "into my house, and relieve your sorrow
in the company of Psyche your sister."
And Psyche displayed to them all the treasures of
the golden house, and its great family of ministering
voices, nursing in them the malice which was already
at their hearts. And at last one of them asks curiously
who the lord of that celestial array may be, and what
manner of man her husband ? And Psyche answered
dissemblingly, "A young man, handsome and mannerly,
with a goodly beard. For the most part he hunts upon
the mountains." And lest the secret should slip from
her in the way of further speech, loading her sisters with
gold and gems, she commanded Zephyrus to bear them
away.
And they returned home, on fire with envy. " See
now the injustice of fortune !" cried one. "We, the
elder children, are given like servants to be the wives of
strangers, while the youngest is possessed of so great
riches, who scarcely knows how to use them. You saw,
ster! what a hoard of wealth lies in the house; what
glittering gowns; what splendour of precious gems,
besides all that gold trodden under foot. If she indeed
hath, as she said, a bridegroom so goodly, then no one
in all the world is happier. And it may be that this
husband, being of divine nature, will make her too a
goddess. Nay! so in truth it is. It was even thus she
bore herself. Already she looks aloft and breathes
divinity, who, but a woman, has voices for her hand-
maidens, and can command the winds." "Think,"
answered the other, "how arrogantly she dealt with us,
grudging us these trilling gifts out of all that store, and
when our company became a burden, causing us to be
## p. 52 (#68) ##############################################
52
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ever.
hissed and driven away from her through the air ! But
I am no woman if she keep her hold on this great
fortune; and if the insult done us has touched thee too,
take we counsel together. Meanwhile let us hold our
peace, and know nought of her, alive or dead. For
they are not truly happy of whose happiness other folk
are unaware."
And the bridegroom, whom still she knows not, warns
her thus a second time, as he talks with her by night:
"Seest thou what peril besets thee? Those cunning
wolves have made ready for thee their snares, of which
the sum is that they persuade thee to search into the
fashion of my countenance, the seeing of which, as I
have told thee often, will be the seeing of it no more for
But do thou neither listen nor make answer to
aught regarding thy husband. Besides, we have sown
also the seed of our race. Even now this bosom grows
with a child to be born to us, a child, if thou but keep
our secret, of divine quality ; if thou profane it, subject
to death." And Psyche was glad at the tidings,
rejoicing in that solace of a divine seed, and in the
glory of that pledge of love to be, and the dignity of the
name of mother. Anxiously she notes the increase of
the days, the waning months. And again, as he tarries
briefly beside her, the bridegroom repeats his warning:
"Even now the sword is drawn with which thy sisters
seek thy life. Have pity on thyself, sweet wife, and
upon our child, and see not those evil women again."
But the sisters make their way into the palace once
more, crying to her in wily tones, "O Psyche ! and thou
too wilt be a mother ! How great will be the joy at
home! Happy indeed shall we be to have the nursing
of the golden child. Truly if he be answerable to the
beauty of his parents, it will be a birth of Cupid
himself."
So, little by little, they stole upon the heart of their
## p. 53 (#69) ##############################################
V
53
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a lie?
sister. She, meanwhile, bids the lyre to sound for their
delight and the playing is heard : she bids the pipes to
move and the quire to sing, and the music and the
singing come invisibly, soothing the mind of the listener
with sweetest modulation. Yet not even thereby was
their malice put to sleep : once more they seek to know
what manner of husband she has, and whence that seed.
And Psyche, simple over-much, forgetful of her first
story, answers, "My husband comes from a far country,
trading for great sums. He is already of middle age,
with whitening locks." And therewith she dismisses
them again.
And returning home upon the soft breath of Zephyrus
one cried to the other, "What shall be said of so ugly
He who was a young man with goodly beard is
now in middle life. It must be that she told a false
tale : else is she in very truth ignorant what manner of
man he is.
Howsoever it be, let us destroy her quickly.
For if she indeed knows not, be sure that her bridegroom
is one of the gods : it is a god she bears in her womb.
And let that be far from us ! If she be called mother
of a god, then will life be more than I can bear."
So, full of rage against her, they returned to Psyche,
and said to her craftily, "Thou livest in an ignorant
bliss, all incurious of thy real danger. It is a deadly
serpent, as we certainly know, that comes to sleep at
thy side.
Remember the words of the oracle, which
declared thee destined to a cruel beast. There are
those who have seen it at nightfall, coming back from
its feeding. In no long time, they say, it will end its
blandishments. It but waits for the babe to be formed
in thee, that it may devour thee by so much the richer.
If indeed the solitude of this musical place, or it may
be the loathsome commerce of a hidden love, delight
thee, we at least in sisterly piety have done our part."
And at last the unhappy Psyche, simple and frail of soul,
## p. 54 (#70) ##############################################
54
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
carried away by the terror of their words, losing memory
of her husband's precepts and her own promise, brought
upon herself a great calamity. Trembling and turning
pale, she answers them, "And they who tell those things,
it may be, speak the truth. For in very deed never
have I seen the face of my husband, nor know I at all what
manner of man he is. Always he frights me diligently
from the sight of him, threatening some great evil should
I too curiously look upon his face. Do ye, if ye can
help your sister in her great peril, stand by her now."
Her sisters answered her, "The way of safety we
have well considered, and will teach thee. Take a sharp
knife, and hide it in that part of the couch where thou
art wont to lie: take also a lamp filled with oil, and set
it privily behind the curtain. And when he shall have
drawn up his coils into the accustomed place, and thou
hearest him breathe in sleep, slip then from his side and
discover the lamp, and, knife in hand, put forth thy
strength, and strike off the serpent's head." And so
they departed in haste.
And Psyche left alone (alone but for the furies which
beset her) is tossed up and down in her distress, like a
wave of the sea; and though her will is firm, yet, in the
moment of putting hand to the deed, she falters, and is
torn asunder by various apprehension of the great
calamity upon her. She hastens and anon delays, now
full of distrust, and now of angry courage : under one
bodily form she loathes the monster and loves the bride-
groom. But twilight ushers in the night ; and at length
in haste she makes ready for the terrible deed. Darkness
came, and the bridegroom ; and he first, after some faint
essay of love, fell into a deep sleep.
And she, erewhile of no strength, the hard purpose
of destiny assisting her, is confirmed in force. With
lamp plucked forth, and knife in hand, she put by her
sex; and lo! as the secrets of the bed became manifest,
## p. 55 (#71) ##############################################
V
55
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
lives again.
the sweetest and most gentle of all creatures, Love him-
self, reclined there, in his own proper loveliness ! At
sight of him, the very flame of the lamp kindled more
gladly! But Psyche was afraid at the vision, and, faint
of soul, trembled back upon her knees, and would have
hidden the steel in her own bosom. But the knife
slipped from her hand ; and now, undone, yet ofttimes
looking upon the beauty of that divine countenance, she
She sees the locks of that golden head,
pleasant with the unction of the gods, shed down in
graceful entanglement behind and before, about the
ruddy cheeks and white throat. The pinions of the
winged god, yet fresh with the dew, are spotless upon
his shoulders, the delicate plumage wavering over them
as they lie at rest. Smooth he was, and, touched with
light, worthy of Venus his mother. At the foot of the
couch lay his bow and arrows, the instruments of his
power, propitious to men.
And Psyche, gazing hungrily thereon, draws an arrow
from the quiver, and trying the point upon her thumb,
tremulous still, drave in the barb, so that a drop of
blood came forth. Thus fell she, by her own act, and
unaware, into the love of Love. Falling upon the
bridegroom, with indrawn breath, in a hurry of kisses
from eager and open lips, she shuddered as she thought
how brief that sleep might be. And it chanced that a
drop of burning oil fell from the lamp upon the god's
shoulder. Ah! maladroit minister of love, thus to
wound him from whom all fire comes ; though 'twas a
lover, I trow, first devised thee, to have the fruit of his
desire even in the darkness ! At the touch of the fire
the god started up, and beholding the overthrow of her
faith, quietly took flight from her embraces.
And Psyche, as he rose upon the wing, laid hold on
him with her two hands, hanging upon him in his passage
through the air, till she sinks to the earth through
## p. 56 (#72) ##############################################
56
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
weariness. And as she lay there, the divine lover,
tarrying still, lighted upon a cypress tree which grew
near, and, from the top of it, spake thus to her, in great
emotion. "Foolish one ! unmindful of the command
of Venus, my mother, who had devoted thee to one of
base degree, I fled to thee in his stead. Now know I
that this was vainly done. Into mine own flesh pierced
mine arrow, and I made thee my wife, only that I
might seem a monster beside theethat thou shouldst
seek to wound the head wherein lay the eyes so full of
love to thee! Again and again, I thought to put thee
on thy guard concerning these things, and warned thee
in loving-kindness. Now I would but punish thee by
my flight hence."
And therewith he winged his way
into the deep sky.
Psyche, prostrate upon the earth, and following far as
sight might reach the flight of the bridegroom, wept and
lamented; and when the breadth of space had parted
him wholly from her, cast herself down from the bank
of a river which was near. But the stream, turning
gentle in honour of the god, put her forth again unhurt
upon its margin. And as it happened, Pan, the rustic
god, was sitting just then by the waterside, embracing, in
the body of a reed, the goddess Canna; teaching her to
respond to him in all varieties of slender sound. Hard
by, his flock of goats browsed at will. And the shaggy
god called her, wounded and outworn, kindly to him and
said, "I am but a rustic herdsman, pretty maiden, yet
wise, by favour of my great age and long experience;
and, if I guess truly by those faltering steps, by thy
sorrowful eyes and continual sighing, thou labourest with
excess of love. Listen then to me, and seek not death
again, in the stream or otherwise. Put aside thy woe,
and turn thy prayers to Cupid. He is in truth a delicate
youth : win him by the delicacy of thy service."
So the shepherd-god spoke, and Psyche, answering
## p. 57 (#73) ##############################################
V
57
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
nothing, but with a reverence to his serviceable deity,
went on her way. And while she, in her search after
Cupid, wandered through many lands, he was lying in
the chamber of his mother, heart-sick. And the white
bird which floats over the waves plunged in haste into
the sea, and approaching Venus, as she bathed, made
known to her that her son lies afflicted with some
grievous hurt, doubtful of life. And Venus cried, angrily,
My son, then, has a mistress ! And it is Psyche, who
witched away my beauty and was the rival of my
godhead, whom he loves !"
Therewith she issued from the sea, and returning to
her golden chamber, found there the lad, sick, as she had
heard, and cried from the doorway, "Well done, truly !
to trample thy mother's precepts under foot, to spare my
enemy that cross of an unworthy love; nay, unite her to
thyself, child as thou art, that I might have a daughter-
in-law who hates me ! I will make thee repent of thy
sport, and the savour of thy marriage bitter. There is
one who shall chasten this body of thine, put out thy
torch and unstring thy bow. Not till she has plucked
forth that hair, into which so oft these hands have
smoothed the golden light, and sheared away thy wings,
shall I feel the injury done me avenged." And with
this she hastened in anger from the doors.
And Ceres and Juno met her, and sought to know
the meaning of her troubled countenance.
" Ye come
in season," she cried; "I pray you, find for me Psyche.
It must needs be that ye have heard the disgrace of my
house." And they, ignorant of what was done, would
have soothed her anger, saying, "What fault, Mistress,
hath thy son committed, that thou wouldst destroy the
girl he loves ? Knowest thou not that he is now of age ?
Because he wears his years so lightly must he seem to
thee ever but a child? Wilt thou for ever thus pry into
the pastimes of thy son, always accusing his wantonness,
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58
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
and blaming in him those delicate wiles which are all
thine own?" Thus, in secret fear of the boy's bow, did
they seek to please him with their gracious patronage.
But Venus, angry at their light taking of her wrongs,
turned her back upon them, and with hasty steps made
her way once more to the sea.
Meanwhile, Psyche, tost in soul, wandering hither and
thither, rested not night or day, in the pursuit of her
husband, desiring, if she might not soothe his anger by
the endearments of a wife, at the least to propitiate him
with the prayers of a handmaid. And seeing a certain
temple on the top of a high mountain, she said, "Who
knows whether yonder place be not the abode of my
lord ?" Thither, therefore, she turned her steps,
hastening now the more because desire and hope pressed
her' on, weary as she was with the labours of the way,
and so, painfully measuring out the highest ridges of the
mountain, drew near to the sacred couches. She sees ears
of wheat, in heaps or twisted into chaplets ; ears of
barley also, with sickles and all the instruments of
harvest, lying there in disorder, thrown at random from
the hands of the labourers in the great heat. These she
curiously sets apart, one by one, duly ordering them ;
for she said within herself, "I may not neglect the
shrines, nor the holy service, of any god there be, but
must rather win by supplication the kindly mercy of
them all."
And Ceres found her bending sadly upon her task,
and cried aloud, "Alas, Psyche ! Venus, in the
furiousness of her anger, tracks thy footsteps through the
world, seeking for thee to pay her the utmost penalty; and
thou, thinking of anything rather than thine own safety,
hast taken on thee the care of what belongs to me!"
Then Psyche fell down at her feet, and sweeping the
floor with her hair, washing the footsteps of the goddess
in her tears, besought her mercy, with many prayers ::
## p. 59 (#75) ##############################################
V
59
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
may be."
"By the gladdening rites of harvest, by the lighted lamps
and mystic marches of the Marriage and mysterious
Invention of thy daughter Proserpine, and by all beside
that the holy place of Attica veils in silence, minister, I
pray thee, to the sorrowful heart of Psyche ! Suffer me
to hide myself but for a few days among the heaps of
corn, till time have softened the anger of the goddess,
and my strength, out-worn in my long travail, be
recovered by a little rest."
But Ceres answered her, "Truly thy tears move me,
and I would fain help thee; only I dare not incur the
ill-will of my kinswoman. Depart hence as quickly as
And Psyche, repelled against hope, afflicted
now with twofold sorrow, making her way back again,
beheld among the half-lighted woods of the valley below
a sanctuary builded with cunning art. And that she
might lose no way of hope, howsoever doubtful, she drew
near to the sacred doors. She sees there gifts of price,
and garments fixed upon the door-posts and to the
branches of the trees, wrought with letters of gold which
told the name of the goddess to whom they were dedi-
cated, with thanksgiving for that she had done. So, with
bent knee and hands laid about the glowing altar, she
prayed saying, "Sister and spouse of Jupiter ! be thou
to these my desperate fortunes, Juno the Auspicious! I
know that thou dost willingly help those in travail with
child; deliver me from the peril that is upon me." And
as she prayed thus, Juno in the majesty of her godhead,
was straightway present, and answered, "Would that I
might incline favourably to thee; but against the will of
Venus, whom I have ever loved as a daughter, I may
not, for very shame, grant thy prayer."
And Psyche, dismayed by this new shipwreck of her
hope communed thus with herself, "Whither, from the
midst of the snares that beset me, shall I take my way once
more? In what dark solitude shall I hide me from the all-
3
## p. 60 (#76) ##############################################
60
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
seeing eye of Venus ? What if I put on at length a
man's courage, and yielding myself unto her as my
mistress, soften by a humility not yet too late the fierce-
ness of her purpose ? Who knows but that I may find
him also whom my soul seeketh after, in the abode of
his mother ? "
And Venus, renouncing all earthly aid in her search,
prepared to return to heaven. She ordered the chariot
to be made ready, wrought for her by Vulcan as a
marriage-gift, with a cunning of hand which had left his
work so much the richer by the weight of gold it lost
under his tool. From the multitude which housed about
the bed-chamber of their mistress, white doves came
forth, and with joyful motions bent their painted necks
beneath the yoke. Behind it, with playful riot, the
sparrows sped onward, and other birds sweet of song,
making known by their soft notes the approach of the
goddess. Eagle and cruel hawk alarmed not the quire-
ful family of Venus. And the clouds broke away, as
the uttermost ether opened to receive her, daughter and
goddess, with great joy.
And Venus passed straightway to the house of
Jupiter to beg from him the service of Mercury, the god
of speech. And Jupiter refused not her prayer. And
Venus and Mercury descended from heaven together ;
and as they went, the former said to the latter, "Thou
knowest, my brother of Arcady, that never at any time
have I done anything without thy help; for how long
time, moreover, I have sought a certain maiden in vain.
And now nought remains but that, by thy heraldry, I
proclaim a reward for whomsoever shall find her. Do
thou my bidding quickly." And therewith she conveyed
to him a little scrip, in the which was written the name
of Psyche, with other things, and so returned home.
And Mercury failed not in his office; but departing
into all lands, proclaimed that whosoever delivered up to
## p. 61 (#77) ##############################################
V
61
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
:
Venus the fugitive girl, should receive from herself seven
kissesone thereof full of the inmost honey of her
throat. With that the doubt of Psyche was ended.
And now, as she came near to the doors of Venus, one
of the household, whose name was Use-and-Wont, ran
out to her, crying, "Hast thou learned, Wicked Maid !
now at last ! that thou hast a mistress ? " and seizing her
roughly by the hair, drew her into the presence of
Venus. And when Venus saw her, she cried out,
saying, "Thou hast deigned then to make thy saluta-
tions to thy mother-in-law. Now will I in turn treat
thee as becometh a dutiful daughter-in-law !'
And she took barley and millet and poppy-seed,
every kind of grain and seed, and mixed them together,
and laughed, and said to her : Methinks so plain a
maiden can earn lovers only by industrious ministry :
now will I also make trial of thy service. Sort me this
heap of seed, the one kind from the others, grain by
grain ; and get thy task done before the evening." And
Psyche, stunned by the cruelty of her bidding, was
silent, and moved not her hand to the inextricable heap.
And there came forth a little ant, which had understand-
ing of the difficulty of her task, and took pity upon the
consort of the god of Love; and he ran deftly hither
and thither, and called together the whole army of his
fellows. "Have pity," he cried, "nimble scholars of
the Earth, Mother of all things !have pity upon the
wife of Love, and hasten to help her in her perilous
effort." Then, one upon the other, the hosts of the insect
people hurried together; and they sorted asunder the
whole heap of seed, separating every grain after its kind,
and so departed quickly out of sight.
And at nightfall Venus returned, and seeing that
task finished with so wonderful diligence, she cried,
"The work is not thine, thou naughty maid, but his in
whose eyes thou hast found favour." And calling her
## p. 62 (#78) ##############################################
62
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
again in the morning, "See now the grove," she said,
"beyond yonder torrent. Certain sheep feed there,
whose fleeces shine with gold. Fetch me straightway a
lock of that precious stuff, having gotten it as thou
mayst."
And Psyche went forth willingly, not to obey the
command of Venus, but even to seek a rest from her
labour in the depths of the river. But from the river,
the green reed, lowly mother of music, spake to her :
"O Psyche ! pollute not these waters by self-destruction,
nor approach that terrible flock; for, as the heat groweth,
they wax fierce.
Lie down under yon plane-tree, till
the quiet of the river's breath have soothed them.
Thereafter thou mayst shake down the fleecy gold
from the trees of the grove, for it holdeth by the
leaves."
And Psyche, instructed thus by the simple reed, in
the humanity of its heart, filled her bosom with the soft
golden stuff, and returned to Venus. But the goddess
smiled bitterly, and said to her, "Well know I who was
the author of this thing also. I will make further trial
of thy discretion, and the boldness of thy heart. Seest
thou the utmost peak of yonder steep mountain ? The
dark stream which flows down thence waters the Stygian
fields, and swells the flood of Cocytus. Bring me now,
in this little urn, a draught from its innermost source."
And therewith she put into her hands a vessel of wrought
crystal.
And Psyche set forth in haste on her way to the
mountain, looking there at last to find the end of her
hapless life.
But when she came to the region which
borders on the cliff pointed out to her, she understood
the deadly nature of her task.
From a great rock,
steep and slippery, a horrible river of water poured
forth, falling straightway by a channel exceeding narrow
into the unseen gulf below. And lo! creeping from the
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63
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
rocks on either hand, angry serpents, with their long
necks and sleepless eyes. The very waters found a
voice and bade her depart, in smothered cries of, Depart
hence ! and What doest thou here? Look around thee !
and Destruction is upon thee! And then sense left her,
in the immensity of her peril, as one changed to
stone.
Yet not even then did the distress of this innocent
soul escape the steady eye of a gentle providence. For
the bird of Jupiter spread his wings and took flight to
her, and asked her, " Didst thou think, simple one,
even thou! that thou couldst steal one drop of that
relentless stream, the holy river of Styx, terrible even to
the gods? But give me thine urn." And the bird
took the urn, and filled it at the source, and returned to
her quickly from among the teeth of the serpents, bring-
ing with him of the waters, all unwillingnay! warning
him to depart away and not molest them.
And she, receiving the urn with great joy, ran back
quickly that she might deliver it to Venus, and yet
again satisfied not the angry goddess. "My child !"
she said, " in this one thing further must thou serve
Take now this tiny casket, and get thee down
even unto hell, and deliver it to Proserpine. Tell her
that Venus would have of her beauty so much at least
as may suffice for but one day's use, that beauty she
possessed erewhile being foreworn and spoiled, through
her tendance upon the sick-bed of her son ; and be not
slow in returning."
And Psyche perceived there the last ebbing of her
fortunethat she was now thrust openly upon death,
who must go down, of her own motion, to Hades and
the Shades. And straightway she climbed to the top of
an exceeding high tower, thinking within herself, "I will
cast myself down thence: so shall I descend most
quickly into the kingdom of the dead." And the tower,
me,
## p. 64 (#80) ##############################################
64
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
again, broke forth into speech: Wretched Maid !
Wretched Maid! Wilt thou destroy thyself? If the
breath quit thy body, then wilt thou indeed go down into
Hades, but by no means return hither. Listen to me.
Among the pathless wilds not far from this place, lies
a certain mountain, and therein one of hell's vent-holes.
Through the breach a rough way lies open, following
which thou wilt come, by straight course, to the castle
of Orcus. And thou must not go empty-handed. Take
in each hand a morsel of barley-bread, soaked in
hydromel ; and in thy mouth two pieces of money.
And when thou shalt be now well onward in the
way
of
death, thou wilt overtake a lame ass laden with wood, and
a lame driver, who will pray thee reach him certain cords
to fasten the burden which is falling from the ass : but
be thou cautious to pass on in silence. And soon as
thou comest to the river of the dead, Charon, in that
crazy bark he hath, will put thee over upon the further
side. There is greed even among the dead : and thou
shalt deliver to him, for the ferrying, one of those two
pieces of money, in such wise that he take it with his
hand from between thy lips. And as thou passest over
the stream, a dead old man, rising on the water, will put
up to thee his mouldering hands, and pray thee draw
him into the ferry-boat. But beware thou yield not to
unlawful pity.
"When thou hast crossed, and art upon the cause-
way, certain aged women, spinning, will cry to thee to
lend thy hand to their work; and beware again that
thou take no part therein ; for this also is the snare of
Venus, whereby she would cause thee to cast away one
at least of those cakes thou bearest in thy hands.
And think not that a slight matter; for the loss of either
one of them will be to thee the losing of the light of
day. For a watch-dog exceeding fierce lies ever before
the threshold of that lonely house of Proserpine. Close
## p. 65 (#81) ##############################################
V
65
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
his mouth with one of thy cakes ; so shalt thou pass by
him, and enter straightway into the presence of Proser-
pine herself. Then, do thou deliver thy message, and
taking what she shall give thee, return back again ;
offering to the watch-dog the other cake, and to the
ferryman that other piece of money thou hast in thy
mouth. After this manner mayst thou return again
beneath the stars. But withal, I charge thee, think not
to look into, nor open, the casket thou bearest, with that
treasure of the beauty of the divine countenance hidden
therein."
So spake the stones of the tower; and Psyche
delayed not, but proceeding diligently after the manner
enjoined, entered into the house of Proserpine, at whose
feet she sat down humbly, and would neither the
delicate couch, nor that divine food the goddess offered
her, but did straightway the business of Venus. And
Proserpine filled the casket secretly, and shut the lid,
and delivered it to Psyche, who fled therewith from Hades
with new strength. But coming back into the light of
day, even as she hasted now to the ending of her
service, she was seized by a rash curiosity. "Lo! now,"
she said within herself, "my simpleness ! who bearing
in my hands the divine loveliness, heed not to touch
myself with a particle at least therefrom, that I may
please the more, by the favour of it, my fair one, my
beloved." Even as she spoke, she lifted the lid; and
behold! within, neither beauty, nor anything beside,
save sleep only, the sleep of the dead, which took hold
upon her, filling all her members with its drowsy
vapour, so that she lay down in the way and moved not,
as in the slumber of death.
And Cupid, his wound being healed, because he
would endure no longer the absence of her he loved,
gliding through the narrow window of the chamber
wherein he was holden, his pinions being now repaired
F
## p. 66 (#82) ##############################################
66
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
with a little rest, fled forth swiftly upon them, and
coming to the place where Psyche was, shook that sleep
away from her, and set him in his prison again, awaking
her with the innocent point of his arrow. "Lo! thine
old error again," he said to her, "which had like once
more to have destroyed thee ! But do thou now what
is lacking of the command of my mother : the rest shall
be my care." With these words, the lover rose upon
the air; and being consumed inwardly with the
greatness of his love, penetrated with vehement wing
into the highest place of heaven, to lay his cause before
the father of the gods. And the father of gods took
his hand in his, and kissed his face, and said to him,
"At no time, my son, hast thou regarded me with due
honour. Often hast thou vexed my bosom, wherein
lies the disposition of the stars, with those busy darts of
thine. Nevertheless, because thou hast grown up be-
tween these mire hands, I will accomplish thy desire."
And straightway he bade Mercury call the gods together;
and, the council-chamber being filled, sitting upon a high
throne, "Ye gods," he said, "all ye whose names are in
the white book of the Muses, ye know yonder lad. It
seems good to me that his youthful heats should by some
means be restrained. And that all occasion may be
taken from him, I would even confine him in the bonds
of marriage. He has chosen and embraced a mortal
maiden. Let him have fruit of his love, and possess her
for ever.
Thereupon he bade Mercury produce Psyche in
heaven; and holding out to her his ambrosial cup,
"Take it," he said, "and live for ever;
nor shall
Cupid ever depart from thee." And the gods sat
down together to the marriage - feast. On the first
couch lay the bridegroom, and Psyche in his bosom.
His rustic serving-boy bare the wine to Jupiter ; and
Bacchus to the rest. The Seasons crimsoned all things
## p. 67 (#83) ##############################################
V
67
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
with their roses. Apollo sang to the lyre, while a little
Pan prattled on his reeds, and Venus danced very sweetly
to the soft music. Thus, with due rites, did Psyche
pass into the power of Cupid ; and from them was born
the daughter whom men call Voluptas.
## p. 68 (#84) ##############################################
CHAPTER VI
EUPHUISM
So the famous story composed itself in the memory of
Marius, with an expression changed in some ways from
the original and on the whole graver. The petulant,
boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more like that
" Lord, of terrible aspect," who stood at Dante's bedside
and wept, or had grown at least to the manly earnestness
of the Ers of Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser
matter of the book, this episode of Cupid and Psyche
served to combine many lines of meditation, already
familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative
love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless
and cleanan ideal which never wholly faded from his
thoughts, though he valued it at various times in different
degrees. The human body in its beauty, as the highest
potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed to
him just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken
celestial fire, to assert itself as indeed the true, though
visible, soul or spirit in things. In contrast with that
ideal, in all the pure brilliancy, and, as it were, in the
happy light, of youth and morning and the springtide,
men's actual loves, with which at many points the book
brings one into close contact, might appear to him, like
the general tenor of their lives, to be somewhat mean
and sordid. The hiddenness of perfect things : a shrinking
## p. 69 (#85) ##############################################
CHAP. VI
69
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
mysticism, a sentiment of diffidence like that expressed in
Psyche's so tremulous hope concerning the child to be
born of the husband she has never yet seen-
" in the
face of this little child, at the least, shall I apprehend
thine"-in hoc saltem parvulo cognoscam faciem tuam :
the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty,
whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself
something illicit and isolating : the suspicion and
hatred it so often excites in the vulgar :these were
some of the impressions, forming, as they do, a con-
stant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience,
from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old
story enforced on him. A book, like a person, has
its fortunes with one ; is lucky or unlucky in the
precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by
some happy accident counts with us for something more
than its independent value. The Metamorphoses of
Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured for him
as indeed The golden book : he felt a sort of personal
gratitude to its writer, and saw in it doubtless far more
than was really there for any other reader. It occupied
always a peculiar place in his remembrance, never quite
losing its power in frequent return to it for the revival
of that first glowing impression.
Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical
one: it stimulated the literary ambition, already so strong
a motive with him, by a signal example of success, and
made him more than ever
ever an ardent, indefatigable
student of words, of the means or instrument of the
literary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression
itself, of that through which alone any intellectual or
spiritual power within one can actually take effect upon
others, to over-awe or charm them to one's side, pre-
sented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate
connexion with that desire for predominance, for the
satisfaction of which another might have relied on the
## p. 70 (#86) ##############################################
70
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
acquisition and display of brilliant military qualities. In
him, a fine instinctive sentiment of the exact value
and power of words was connate with the eager
longing for sway over his fellows. He saw himself
already a gallant and effective leader, innovating or
conservative as occasion might require, in the rehabilita-
tion of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished and
languid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself,
of the only sort of patriotic feeling proper, or possible,
for one born of slaves. The popular speech was
gradually departing from the form and rule of literary
language, a language always and increasingly artificial.
While the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and
more barbarously pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the
other hand, offered a thousand chance-tost gems of racy
or picturesque expression, rejected or at least ungathered
by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was
coming when neither the pedants nor the people would
really understand Cicero; though there were
indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius, who, departing
from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been a
fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since
the days of Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.
The literary programme which Flavian had already
designed for himself would be a work, then, partly con-
servative or reactionary, in its dealing with the instru-
ment of the literary art; partly popular and revolutionary,
asserting, so to term them, the rights of the proletariate
of speech. More than fifty years before, the younger
Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power
of the Latin tongue, had said, "I am one of those who
admire the ancients, yet I do not like some others,
underrate certain instances of genius which our own
times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if weary
and effete, no longer produces what is admirable." And
he, Flavian, would prove himself the true master of the
some
## p. 71 (#87) ##############################################
VI
71
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
opportunity thus indicated. In his eagerness for a not
too distant fame, he dreamed over all that, as the young
Csar may have dreamed of campaigns. Others might
brutalise or neglect the native speech, that true "open
field" for charm and sway over men. He would make
of it a serious study, weighing the precise power of every
phrase and word, as though it were precious metal,
disentangling the later associations and going back to
the original and native sense of each,restoring to full
significance all its wealth of latent figurative expression,
reviving or replacing its outworn or tarnished images.
Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of
routine and languor; and what was necessary, first of all,
was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship
between thought and expression, between the sensation
and the term, and restore to words their primitive
power.
For words, after all, words manipulated with all his
delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war for him-
self. To be forcibly impressed, in the first place; and
in the next, to find the means of making visible to others
that which was vividly apparent, delightful, of lively
interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but
middling, tame, or only half-true even to himthis
scrupulousness of literary art actually awoke in Flavian,
for the first time, a sort of chivalrous conscience. What
care for style! what patience of execution ! what research
for the significant tones of ancient idiomsonantia verba
et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building-
gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaning
of the sceptical Pliny's somewhat melancholy advice to
one of his friends, that he should seek in literature
deliverance from mortality ut studiis se literarum a
mortalitate vindicet. And there was everything in the
nature and the training of Marius to make him a full
participator in the hopes of such a new literary school,
## p. 72 (#88) ##############################################
72
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
with Flavian for its leader. In the refinements of that
curious spirit, in its horror of profanities, its fastidious
sense of a correctness in external form, there was some-
thing which ministered to the old ritual interest, still
surviving in him ; as if here indeed were involved a kind
of sacred service to the mother-tongue.
It was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every
age in which the literary conscience has been awakened
to forgotten duties towards language, towards the instru-
ment of expression, and in reality does but modify a
little the principles of all effective expression at all times.
'Tis art's function to conceal itself: ars est celare artem :
-is a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation,
has perhaps been oftenest and most confidently quoted by
those who have had little literary other art to conceal;
and from the very beginning of professional literature,
the "labour of the file"-a labour in the case of Plato,
for instance, or Virgil, like that of the oldest of gold-
smiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the work by
far more than the weight of precious metal it removed
has always had its function. Sometimes, doubtless, as in
later examples of it, this Roman Euphuism, determined at
any cost to attain beauty in writing-  -
might lapse into its characteristic fopperies or mannerisms,
into the "defects of its qualities," in truth, not wholly
unpleasing perhaps, or at least excusable, when looked at
as but the toys (so Cicero calls them) the strictly con-
genial and appropriate toys, of an assiduously cultivated
age, which could not help being polite, critical, self-
conscious. The mere love of novelty also had, of
course, its part there : as with the Euphuism of the
Elizabethan age, and of the modern French romanticists,
its neologies were the ground of one of the favourite
charges against it; though indeed, as regards these
tricks of taste also, there is nothing new, but a quaint
family likeness rather, between the Euphuists of successive
## p. 73 (#89) ##############################################
VI
73
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ages. Here, as elsewhere, the power of "fashion," as it
is called, is but one minor form, slight enough, it may be,
yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper yearning of
human nature towards ideal perfection, which is a con-
tinuous force in it; and since in this direction too
human nature is limited, such fashions must necessarily
reproduce themselves. Among other resemblances to
later growths of Euphuism, its archaisms on the one hand,
and its neologies on the other, the Euphuism of the days
of Marcus Aurelius had, in the composition of verse, its
fancy for the refrain. It was a snatch from a popular
chorus, something he had heard sounding all over the
town of Pisa on April night, one of the first bland and
summer-like nights of the year, that Flavian had chosen
for the refrain of a poem he was then ponderingthe
Pervigilium Veneristhe vigil, or "nocturn,"
nocturn," of Venus.
Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be
thought a constant part in the little tragi-comedy which
literature and its votaries are playing in all ages, would
ask, suspecting some affectation or unreality in that minute
culture of form :-Cannot those who have a thing to say,
say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like the
old writers of Greece ? And this challenge had at least
the effect of setting his thoughts at work on the in-
tellectual situation as it lay between the children of the
present and those earliest masters. Certainly, the most
wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greek genius, in
literature as in everything else, was the entire absence
of imitation in its productions. How had the burden of
precedent, laid upon every artist, increased since then !
It was all around one that smoothly built world of old
classical taste, an accomplished fact, with overwhelming
authority on every detail of the conduct of one's work.
With no fardel on its own back, yet so imperious towards
those who came labouring after it, Hellas, in its early
freshness, looked as distant from him even then, as it
## p. 74 (#90) ##############################################
74
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
does from ourselves. There might seem to be no place
left for novelty or originality,place only for a patient,
an infinite, faultlessness. On this question too Flavian
passed through a world of curious art-casuistries, of self-
tormenting, at the threshold of his work.
Was poetic
beauty a thing ever one and the same, a type absolute;
or, changing always with the soul of time itself, did it
depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick of apprehension,
the fashion, as we say, of each successive age? Might
one recover that earlier sense of it, that earlier manner,
in a masterly effort to recall all the complexities of the
life, moral and intellectual, of the earlier age to which it
had belonged? Had there been really bad ages in art
or literature ? Were all ages, even those earliest,
adventurous, matutinal days, in themselves equally
poetical or unpoetical; and poetry, the literary beauty,
the poetic ideal, always but a borrowed light upon men's
actual life?
Homer had said,
'      , ,
,  '   .
'       .
And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just
thus ! Homer was always telling things after this
manner. And one might think there had been no
effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical
transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a
time in which one could hardly have spoken at all with-
out ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat
without making a picture in "the great style," against a
sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of
an age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than
half of Homer's poetry ? Or might the closer student
discover even here, even in Homer, the really mediatorial
function of the poet, as between the reader and the
## p. 75 (#91) ##############################################
VI
75
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to
speak, in an age which had felt itself trite and common-
place enough, on his opportunity for the touch of
"golden alchemy," or at least for the lighted side of
things themselves ? Might not another, in one's own
prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had been
through the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in
like manner, discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon
it? Would not a future generation, looking back upon
this, under the power of the enchanted-distance fallacy,
find it ideal to view, in contrast with its own languor-
the languor that for some reason (concerning which
Augustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt
men always ? Had Homer, even, appeared unreal and
affected in his poetic flight, to some of the people of his
own age, as seemed to happen with every new literature
in turn ? In any case, the intellectual conditions of
early Greece had been-how different from these !and
a true literary tact would accept that difference in
forming the primary conception of the literary function
at a later time. Perhaps the utmost one could get by con-
scious effort, in the way of a reaction or return to the con-
ditions of an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas,
artificial artlessness, navet ; and this quality too might
have its measure of euphuistic charm, direct and sensible
enough, though it must count, in comparison with that
genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, not as
the freshness of the open fields, but only of a bunch
of field-flowers in a heated room.
Meantime, there was all this : on one side, the old
pagan culture, for us but a fragment, for him an accom-
plished yet present fact, still a living, united, organic
whole, in the entirety of its art, its thought, its religions,
its sagacious forms of polity, that so weighty authority it
exercised on every point, being, really, only the measure
of its charm for every one: on the other side, the actual
## p. 76 (#92) ##############################################
76
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
world in all its eager self-assertion, with Flavian himself,
in his boundless animation, there, at the centre of the
situation. From the natural defects, from the pettiness,
of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, he
was saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to
present, very real, at least to him. That preoccupation
of the dilettante with what might seem mere details of
form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing to
the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong
personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of
things as really being, with important results, thus, rather
than thus,-intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty
was called upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or
clay, clothing the model within. Flavian too, with his
fine clear mastery of the practically effective, had early
laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic in literature :
that to know when one's self is interested, is the first
condition of interesting other people. It was a principle,
the forcible apprehension of which made him jealous and
fastidious in the selection of his intellectual food; often
listless while others read or gazed diligently; never pre-
tending to be moved out of mere complaisance to other
people's emotions: it served to foster in him a very
scrupulous literary sincerity with himself.
And it was
this uncompromising demand for a matter, in all art,
derived immediately from lively personal intuition, this
constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved his
euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere
artifice.
:
Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed
to the goddess Venus, the work of his earlier manhood,
and designed originally to open an argument less per-
sistently sombre than that protest against the whole
pagan heaven which actually follows it? It is certainly
the most typical expression of a mood, still incident
## p. 77 (#93) ##############################################
VI
77
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
to the young poet, as a thing peculiar to his youth,
when he feels the sentimental current setting forcibly
along his veins, and so much as a matter of purely
physical excitement, that he can hardly distinguish it
from the animation of external nature, the upswelling of
the seed in the earth, and of the sap through the trees.
Flavian, to whom, again, as to his later euphuistic kins-
men, old mythology seemed as full of untried, unexpressed
motives and interest as human life itself, had long been
occupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the vernal
principle of life in things; a composition shaping itself,
little by little, out of a thousand dim perceptions, into
singularly definite form (definite and firm as fine-art in
metal, thought Marius) for which, as I said, he had
caught his "refrain," from the lips of the young men,
singing because they could not help it, in the streets of
Pisa. And as oftenest happens also, with natures of
genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal beginnings
came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the
fortunate incidents, the physical heat and light, of one
singularly happy day.
It was one of the first hot days of March"the
sacred day"-on which, from Pisa, as from many another
harbour on the Mediterranean, the Ship of Isis went to
sea, and every one walked down to the shore-side to
witness the freighting of the vessel, its launching and
final abandonment among the waves, as an object really
devoted to the Great Goddess, that new rival, or "double,"
of ancient Venus, and like her a favourite patroness of
sailors. On the evening next before, all the world had
been abroad to view the illumination of the river ; the
stately lines of building being wreathed with hundreds of
many-coloured lamps. The young men had been pour-
ing forth their chorus-
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit,
Quique amavit cras amet-
## p. 78 (#94) ##############################################
78
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
as they bore their torches through the yielding crowd,
or rowed their lanterned boats up and down the stream,
till far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven
the last lingerers home. Morning broke, however,
smiling and serene; and the long procession started
betimes. The river, slightly curving, with the smoothly
paved streets on either side, between its low marble
parapet and the fair dwelling houses, formed together
the main highway of the city; and the pageant, accom-
panied throughout by innumerable lanterns and wax
tapers, took its course up one of these streets, crossing
the water by a bridge up-stream, and down the other, to
the haven, every possible standing-place, out of doors
and within, being crowded with sight-seers, of whom
Marius was one of the most eager, deeply interested in
finding the spectacle much as Apuleius had described
it in his famous book.
At the head of the procession, the master of cere-
monies, quietly waving back the assistants, made way
for a number of women, scattering perfumes. They were
succeeded by a company of musicians, piping and twang-
ing, on instruments the strangest Marius had ever be-
held, the notes of a hymn, narrating the first origin of
this votive rite to a choir of youths, who marched behind
them singing it. The tire-women and other personal
attendants of the great goddess came next, bearing the
instruments of their ministry, and various articles from
the sacred wardrobe, wrought of the most precious
material ; some of them with long ivory combs, plying
their hands in wild yet graceful concert of movement
as they went, in devout mimicry of the toilet. Placed
in their rear were the mirror-bearers of the goddess,
carrying large mirrors of beaten brass or silver, turned in
such a way as to reflect to the great body of worshippers
who followed, the face of the mysterious image, as it
moved on its way, and their faces to it, as though they
## p. 79 (#95) ##############################################
VI
79
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
were in fact advancing to meet the heavenly visitor.
They comprehended a multitude of both sexes and of
all ages, already initiated into the divine secret, clad in
fair linen, the females veiled, the males with shining
tonsures, and every one carrying a sistrumthe richer
sort of silver, a few very dainty persons of fine gold-
rattling the reeds, with a noise like the jargon of innumer-
able birds and insects, awakened from torpor and abroad
in the spring sun. Then, borne upon a kind of platform,
came the goddess herself, undulating above the heads of
the multitude as the bearers walked, in mystic robe
embroidered with the moon and stars, bordered grace-
fully with a fringe of real fruit and flowers, and with a
glittering crown upon the head.
The train of the pro-
cession consisted of the priests in long white vestments,
close from head to foot, distributed into various groups,
each bearing, exposed aloft, one of the sacred symbols
of Isisthe corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand of
equity, and among them the votive ship itself, carved
and gilt, and adorned bravely with flags flying. Last
of all walked the high priest; the people kneeling as he
passed to kiss his hand, in which were those well-
remembered roses.
Marius followed with the rest to the harbour, where
the mystic ship, lowered from the shoulders of the
priests, was loaded with as much as it could carry of the
rich spices and other costly gifts, offered in great pro-
fusion by the worshippers, and thus, launched at last
upon the water, left the shore, crossing the harbour-bar
in the wake of a much stouter vessel than itself with a
crew of white-robed mariners, whose function it was, at
the appointed moment, finally to desert it on the open
sea.
The remainder of the day was spent by most in
parties on the water. Flavian and Marius sailed further
than they had ever done before to a wild spot on the
## p. 80 (#96) ##############################################
80
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony, which,
having had its eager, stirring life at the time when
Etruria was still a power in Italy, had perished in the
age of the civil wars. In the absolute transparency of
the air on this gracious day, an infinitude of detail from
sea and shore reached the eye with sparkling clearness,
as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves -Flavian at
work suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets.
They reached land at last. The coral-fishers had spread
their nets on the sands, with a tumble-down of quaint,
many-hued treasures, below a little shrine of Venus,
fluttering and gay with the scarves and napkins and
gilded shells, which these people had offered to the
image. Flavian and Marius st down under the shade
of a mass of grey rock or ruin, where the sea-gate of the
Greek town had been, and talked of life in those old
Greek colonies. Of this place, all that remained, besides
those rude stones, wasa handful of silver coins, each
with a head of pure and archaic beauty, though a little
cruel perhaps, supposed to represent the Siren Ligeia,
whose tomb was formerly shown here-only these, and
ancient
song,
the
very
strain which Flavian had
recovered in those last months. They were records
which spoke, certainly, of the charm of life within those
walls. How strong must have been the tide of men's
existence in that little republican town, so small that
this circle of grey stones, of service now only by the
moisture they gathered for the blue-flowering gentians
among them, had been the line of its rampart! An
epitome of all that was liveliest, most animated and
adventurous, in the old Greek people of which it was an
offshoot, it had enhanced the effect of these gifts by con-
centration within narrow limits. The band of " devoted
youth," iep verns of the younger brothers, devoted to
the gods and whatever luck the gods might afford,
because there was no room for them at home-went
an
## p. 81 (#97) ##############################################
VI
81
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
forth, bearing the sacred flame from the mother-hearth;
itself a flame, of power to consume the whole material
of existence in clear light and heat, with no smouldering
residue. The life of those vanished townsmen, so
brilliant and revolutionary, applying so abundantly the
personal qualities which alone just then Marius seemed
to value, associated itself with the actual figure of his
companion, standing there before him, his face enthusi-
astic with the sudden thought of all that; and struck
him vividly as precisely the fitting opportunity for a
nature like his, so hungry for control, for ascendency
over men.
Marius noticed also, however, as high spirits flagged
at last, on the way home through the heavy dew of the
evening, more than physical fatigue in Flavian, who
seemed to find no refreshment in the coolness. There
had been something feverish, perhaps, and like the
beginning of sickness, about his almost forced gaiety, in
this sudden heat of spring; and by the evening of the
next day he was lying with a burning spot on his forehead,
stricken, as was thought from the first, by the terrible
new disease.
G
## p. 82 (#98) ##############################################
CHAPTER VII
PAGAN DEATH
For the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor
Marcus Aurelius, returning in triumph from the East,
had brought in his train, among the enemies of Rome,
one by no means a captive. People actually sickened
at a sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as they watched
in dense crowds the pathetic or grotesque imagery of
failure or success, in the triumphal procession. And, as
usual, the plague brought with it a power to develop all
pre-existent germs of superstition. It was by dishonour
done to Apollo himself, said popular rumourto Apollo,
the old titular divinity of pestilence, that the poisonous
thing had come abroad. Pent up in a golden coffer
consecrated to the god, it had escaped in the sacrilegious
plundering of his temple at Seleucia by the soldiers of
Lucius Verus, after a traitorous surprise of that town and
a cruel massacre. Certainly there was something which
baffled all imaginable precautions and all medical science,
in the suddenness with which the disease broke out
simultaneously, here and there, among both soldiers and
citizens, even in places far remote from the main line of
its grand march in the rear of the victorious army. It
seemed to have invaded the whole empire, and some
have even thought that, in a mitigated form, it per-
manently remained there. In Rome itself many thou-
## p. 83 (#99) ##############################################
CHAP. VII
83
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
sands perished ; and old authorities tell of farmsteads,
whole towns, and even entire neighbourhoods, which
from that time continued without inhabitants and lapsed
into wildness or ruin.
Flavian lay at the open window of his lodging, with
a fiery pang in the brain, fancying no covering thin or
light enough to be applied to his body. His head being
relieved after a while, there was distress at the chest.
It was but the fatal course of the strange new sickness,
under many disguises ; travelling from the brain to the
feet, like a material resident, weakening one after another
of the organic centres; often, when it did not kill,
depositing various degrees of lifelong infirmity in this
member or that; and after that descent, returning
upwards again, now as a mortal coldness, leaving the
entrenchments of the fortress of life overturned, one by
one, behind it.
Flavian lay there, with the enemy at his breast now
in a painful cough, but relieved from that burning fever
in the head, amid the rich-scented flowers,
-rare Pstum
roses, and the like-procured by Marius for his solace,
in a fancied convalescence; and would, at intervals,
return to labour at his verses, with a great eagerness to
complete and transcribe the work, while Marius sat and
wrote at his dictation, one of the latest but not the
poorest specimens of genuine Latin poetry.
It was in fact a kind of nuptial hymn, which, taking
its start from the thought of nature as the universal
mother, celebrated the preliminary pairing, and mating
together, of all fresh things, in the hot and genial spring-
timethe immemorial nuptials of the soul of spring itself
and the brown earth; and was full of a delighted, mystic
sense of what passed between them in that fantastic
marriage. That mystic burden was relieved, at intervals,
by the familiar playfulness of the Latin verse-writer in
dealing with mythology, which, coming at so late a day,
## p. 84 (#100) #############################################
84
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
had still a wonderful freshness in its old age."Amor
has put his weapons by and will keep holiday. He was
bidden go without apparel, that none might be wounded
by his bow and arrows.
But take care ! In truth he
is none the less armed than usual, though he be all
unclad."
In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while
making it his chief aim to retain the opulent, many-
syllabled vocabulary of the Latin genius, at some points
even to have advanced beyond it, in anticipation of
wholly new laws of taste as regards sound, a new range
of sound itself; the note of which, associating itself with
certain other experiences of his, was to Marius like the
foretaste of an entirely novel world of poetic beauty to
come. Flavian had caught, indeed, something of the
rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music of the
medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its unction
and mysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along
with the last splendour of the classical language, a touch,
almost prophetic, of that transformed life it was to have
in the rhyming middle age, just about to dawn. The
impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself
with a feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every
one, which seems to say You have been just here, just
thus, before ! a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent but
prescient, which passed over him afterwards many times,
as he came across certain places and people. It
as if he detected there the process of actual
change to a wholly undreamed-of and renewed condition
of human body and soul : as if he saw the heavy, yet
decrepit old Roman architecture about him, rebuilding
on an intrinsically better pattern.Could it have been
actually on a new musical instrument that Flavian had
first heard the novel accents of his verse ? And still
Marius noticed there, amid all its richness of expression
and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always
was
## p. 85 (#101) #############################################
VII
85
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
relished so much, in the composition of Flavian. Yes!
a firmness like that of some master of noble metal-work,
manipulating tenacious bronze or gold. Even now, that
haunting refrain, with its impromptu variations, from the
throats of those strong young men, came floating through
the window.
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit !
Quique amavit cras amet !
-repeated Flavian, tremulously, dictating yet one stanza
more.
That was
What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and body
so fortunately endowed, the mere liberty of life above-
ground, "those sunny mornings in the cornfields, by the
sea," as he recollected them one day, when the window
was thrown open upon the early freshnesshis sense of
all this, was from the first singularly near and distinct,
yet rather as of something he was but debarred the use
of for a time than finally bidding farewell to.
while he was still with no very grave misgivings as to
the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources of life still
springing essentially unadulterate within him. From
time to time, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at the
poem from his dictation, was haunted by a feeling of the
triviality of such work just then. The recurrent sense
of some obscure danger beyond the mere danger of
death, vaguer than that and by so much the more terrible,
like the menace of some shadowy adversary in the dark
with whose mode of attack they had no acquaintance,
disturbed him now and again, through those hours of
excited attention to his manuscript, and to the purely
physical wants of Flavian. Still, during these three days
there was much hope and cheerfulness, and even jesting.
Half-consciously Marius tried to prolong one or another
relieving circumstance of the day, the preparations for
rest and morning refreshment, for instance; sadly making
## p. 86 (#102) #############################################
86
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
vero
the most of the little luxury of this or that, with some-
thing of the feigned cheer of the mother who sets her
last morsels before her famished child as for a feast, but
really that he "may eat it and die."
It was on the afternoon of the seventh day that he
allowed Marius finally to put aside the unfinished
manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the chest quiet
at length, though much exhausted, had made itself felt
with full power again in a painful vomiting, which seemed
to shake his body asunder, with great consequent
prostration. From that time the distress increased
rapidly downwardsOmnia tum vitai claustra
lababantand soon the cold was mounting, with sure
pace, from the dead feet to the head.
And now Marius began more than to suspect what
the issue must be, and henceforward could but watch
with a sort of agonised fascination the rapid but system-
atic work of the destroyer, faintly relieving a little the
mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering.
Flavian himself appeared, in full consciousness at last-
in clear-sighted, deliberate estimate of the actual crisis-
to be doing battle with his adversary. His mind
surveyed, with great distinctness, the various suggested
modes of relief. He must without fail get better, he
would fancy, might he be removed to a certain place on
the hills where as a child he had once recovered from
sickness, but found that he could scarcely raise his head
from the pillow without giddiness. As if now surely
foreseeing the end, he would set himself, with an eager
effort, and with that eager and angry look, which is noted
as one of the premonitions of death in this disease, to
fashion out, without formal dictation, still a few more
broken verses of his unfinished work, in hard-set de-
termination, defiant of pain, to arrest this or that little
drop at least, from the river of sensuous imagery rushing
so quickly past him.
.
## p. 87 (#103) #############################################
VII
87
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the enemy
But at length delirium-symptom that the work of the
plague was done, and the last resort of life yielding to
- broke the coherent order of words and
thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony, found
his best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient's
mind. In intervals of clearer consciousness the visible
signs of cold, of sorrow and desolation, were very painful.
No longer battling with the disease, he seemed as it
were to place himself at the disposal of the victorious
foe, dying passively, like some dumb creature, in hopeless
acquiescence at last. That old, half-pleading petulance,
unamiable, yet, as it might seem, only needing conditions
of life a little happier than they had actually been, to
become refinement of affection, a delicate grace in its
demand on the sympathy of others, had changed in
those moments of full intelligence to a clinging and
tremulous gentleness, as he lay"on the very threshold
of death"with a sharply contracted hand in that of
Marius, to his almost surprised joy, winning him now
to an absolutely self-forgetful devotion.
There was a
new sort of pleading in the misty eyes, just because they
took such unsteady note of him, which made Marius feel
as if guilty, anticipating a form of self-reproach with
which even the tenderest ministrant may be sometimes
surprised, when, at death, affectionate labour suddenly
ceasing leaves room for the suspicion of some failure of
love perhaps, at one or another minute point in it.
Marius almost longed to take his share in the suffering,
that he might understand so the better how to relieve it.
It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the
patient, and Marius extinguished it. The thunder which
had sounded all day among the hills, with a heat not un-
welcome to Flavian, had given way at nightfall to steady
rain; and in the darkness Marius lay down beside him,
faintly shivering now in the sudden cold, to lend him
his own warmth, undeterred by the fear of contagion
## p. 88 (#104) #############################################
88
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
which had kept other people from passing near the house.
At length about daybreak he perceived that the last
effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as
Marius understood by the contact, light as it was, in
recognition of him there. "Is it a comfort," he
whispered then, that I shall often come and weep
over you?""Not unless I be aware, and hear you
weeping !"
The sun shone out on the people going to work for
a long hot day, and Marius was standing by the dead,
watching, with deliberate purpose to fix in his memory
every detail, that he might have the picture in reserve,
should any hour of forgetfulness hereafter come to him
with the temptation to feel completely happy once more.
A feeling of outrage, of resentment against nature itself,
mingled with an agony of pity, as he noted on the now
placid features a certain look of humility, almost abject,
like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of
one, fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly
under the power of a merciless adversary. From mere
tenderness of soul he would not forget one circumstance
in all that; as a man might piously stamp on his memory
the death-scene of a brother wrongfully condemned to
die, against a time that may come.
The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his
effort to watch by it through the darkness, was a hint of
his own failing strength, just in time. The first night
after the washing of the body, he bore stoutly enough
the tax which affection seemed to demand, throwing the
incense from time to time on the little altar placed
beside the bier. It was the recurrence of the thing-
that unchanged outline below the coverlet, amid a silence
in which the faintest rustle seemed to speakthat finally
overcar his determination. Surely, here, in this aliena-
tion, this sense of distance between them, which had come
over him before though in minor degree when the mind of
## p. 89 (#105) #############################################
VII
89
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Flavian had wandered in his sickness, was another of the
pains of death. Yet he was able to make all due pre-
parations, and go through the ceremonies, shortened a
little because of the infection, when, on a cloudless
evening, the funeral procession went forth; himself,
the flames of the pyre having done their work, carrying
away the urn of the deceased, in the folds of his toga,
to its last resting-place in the cemetery beside the high-
way, and so turning home to sleep in his own desolate
lodging
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis ?
What thought of others' thoughts about one could
there be with the regret for "so dear a head" fresh at
one's heart?
## p. 90 (#106) #############################################
## p. 91 (#107) #############################################
PART THE SECOND
## p. 92 (#108) #############################################
## p. 93 (#109) #############################################
CHAPTER VIII
ANIMULA, VAGULA, BLANDULA !
HOSPES COMESQUE CORPORIS,
QUAE NUNC ABIBIS IN LOCA ?
PALLIDULA, RIGIDA, NUDULA.
The Emperor Hadrian to his Soul.
FLAVIAN was no more. The little marble chest with its
dust and tears lay cold among the faded flowers. For
most people the actual spectacle of death brings out into
greater reality, at least for the imagination, whatever
confidence they may entertain of the soul's survival in
another life. To Marius, greatly agitated by that event,
the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of
nothing less than the soul's extinction. Flavian had
gone out as utterly as the fire among those still beloved
ashes. Even that wistful suspense of judgment ex-
pressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages
of being still possible for the soul in some dim journey
hence, seemed wholly untenable, and, with it, almost all
that remained of the religion of his childhood. Future
extinction seemed just then to be what the unforced
witness of his own nature pointed to. On the other
hand, there came a novel curiosity as to what the various
schools of ancient philosophy had had to say concerning
that strange, fluttering creature; and that curiosity
impelled him to certain severe studies, in which his
## p. 94 (#110) #############################################
94
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
earlier religious conscience seemed still to survive,
as a principle of hieratic scrupulousness or integrity
of thought, regarding this new service to intellectual
light.
At this time, through his poetic and inward temper, he
might have fallen a prey to the enervating mysticism,
then in wait for ardent souls in many a melodramatic
revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this,
fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his
character, he was kept by a genuine virility there, effective
in him, among other results, as a hatred of what was
theatrical, and the instinctive recognition that in vigorous
intelligence, after all, divinity was most likely to be
found a resident. With this was connected the feeling,
increasing with his advance to manhood, of a poetic
beauty in mere clearness of thought, the actually
sthetic charm of a cold austerity of mind; as if the
kinship of that to the clearness of physical light were
something more than a figure of speech. Of all those
various religious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm,
he could well appreciate the picturesque : that was
made easy by his natural Epicureanism, already prompt-
ing him to conceive of himself as but the passive
spectator of the world around him. But it was to the
severer reasoning, of which such matters as Epicurean
theory are born, that, in effect, he now betook himself.
Instinctively suspicious of those mechanical arcana, those
pretended secrets unveiled of the professional mystic,
which really bring great and little souls to one level, for
Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old,
ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to
him, and the honest action of his own untroubled,
unassisted intelligence. Even the "heavenly secrets" of
Platonismwhat the sons of Plato had to say regarding
the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily house
and merely occasional dwelling-placeseemed to him,
## p. 95 (#111) #############################################
VIII
95
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
while his heart was there in the urn with the material
ashes of Flavian, or still lingering in memory over his
last agony, wholly inhuman or morose, as tending to
alleviate his resentment at nature's wrong. It was to the
sentiment of the body, and the affections it defined-
the flesh, of whose force and colour that wandering
Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or abstract-
he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved,
suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered,
had made him a materialist, and with something of the
humour of a devotee.
It seemed at first as if his care for poetry had passed
away consequently, to be replaced by the literature of
thought. His much-pondered manuscript verses were
laid aside ; and what happened now to one, who was
certainly to be something of a poet from first to last,
looked, at the moment, like a change from poetry to
prose.
He came of age about this time, though with
beardless face, his own master; and at eighteen, an age
at which, then as now, many youths of capacity, who
fancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from
others chiefly in affectation and vague dreaming, he
secluded himself indeed from others, but in a severe
intellectual meditation, the salt of poetry, without which
all the more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative
world. Still with something of the old religious earnest-
ness of his childhood, he set himself-Sich im Denken
zu orientirento determine his bearings, as by compass,
in the world of thoughtto get that precise acquaintance
with the creative intelligence itself, its structure and
capacities, its relation to other parts of himself and to
other things, without which, certainly, no poetry can be
masterly. Likea
young man rich in this world's goods com-
ing of age, he must go into affairs, and ascertain his outlook.
There must be no disguises. An exact estimate of
realities, as towards himself, he must have-a delicately
## p. 96 (#112) #############################################
96
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
measured gradation of certainty in thingsfrom the
distant, haunted horizon of mere surmise or imagination,
to the actual feeling of sorrow in his heart, as he reclined
one morning, alone instead of in pleasant company, to
ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old Greek
manuscript, unrolled beside him.
His former gay
companions, meeting him in the streets of the old
Italian town, and noting the graver lines coming into
the face of the sombre but enthusiastic student of
intellectual structure, who could hold his own so well in
the society of accomplished older men, were half afraid
of him, though proud to have him of their company.
Why this reserve ?they asked, concerning the orderly,
self-possessed youth, whose speech and carriage seemed
so carefully measured, who was surely no poet like the
rapt, dishevelled Lupus. Was he secretly in love,
perhaps, whose toga was so daintily folded, and who
was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent on
his own line of ambition; or even on riches ?
Marius, meantime, was reading freely, in early
morning for the most part, those writers chiefly who
had made it their business to know what might be
thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal
essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, along
with the funeral fires. And the old Greek who more
than
any other was now giving form to his thoughts was
a very hard master. From Epicurus, from the thunder
and lightning of Lucretiuslike thunder and lightning
some distance off, one might recline to enjoy, in a
garden of roseshe had gone back to the writer who
had been in a certain sense the teacher of both,
Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult book "Concerning
Nature" was even then rare, for people had long since
satisfied themselves by the quotation of certain brilliant,
isolated, oracles only, out of what was at best a taxing
kind of lore. But the difficulty of the early Greek prose
## p. 97 (#113) #############################################
VIII
97
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
did but spur the curiosity of Marius; the writer, the
superior clearness of whose intellectual view had so
sequestered him from other men, who had had so little
joy of that superiority, being avowedly exacting as to the
amount of devout attention he required from the student.
"The many," he said, always thus emphasising the
difference between the many and the few, are "like
people heavy with wine," "led by children," "knowing
not whither they go ;" and yet, "much learning doth not
make wise;" and again, "the ass, after all, would have
his thistles rather than fine gold."
Heraclitus, indeed, had not under-rated the difficulty
for "the many" of the paradox with which his doctrine
begins, and the due reception of which must involve a
denial of habitual impressions, as the necessary first step
in the way of truth. His philosophy had been developed
in conscious, outspoken opposition to the current mode
of thought, as a matter requiring some exceptional
loyalty to pure reason and its "dry light." Men are
subject to an illusion, he protests, regarding matters
apparent to sense. What the uncorrected sense gives
was a false impression of permanence or fixity in things,
which have really changed their nature in the very
moment in which we see and touch them. And the
radical flaw in the current mode of thinking would
lie herein: that, reflecting this false or uncorrected
sensation, it attributes to the phenomena of experience
a durability which does not really belong to them.
Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world
of firmly outlined objects, it leads one to regard as a
thing stark and dead what is, in reality, full of animation,
of vigour, of the fire of lifethat eternal process of
nature, of which at a later time Goethe spoke, as the
"Living Garment," whereby God is seen of us, ever in
weaving at the " Loom of Time."
And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made
:
H
## p. 98 (#114) #############################################
98
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
:
was, in the first instance, from confused to unconfused
sensation ; with a sort of prophetic seriousness, a great
claim and assumption we may understand, if we
anticipate in this preliminary scepticism the ulterior
scope of his speculation, according to which the uni-
versal movement of all natural things is but one particular
stage, or measure, of that ceaseless activity wherein the
divine reason consists. The one true being that
constant subject of all early thought-it was his merit
to have conceived, not as sterile and stagnant inaction,
but as a perpetual energy, from the restless stream of
which, at certain points, some elements detach them-
selves, and harden into non-entity and death, corre-
sponding, as outward objects, to man's inward con-
dition of ignorance : that is, to the slowness of his
faculties. It is with this paradox of a subtle, perpetual
change in all visible things, that the high speculation of
Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expresses for
anything like a careless, half-conscious, "use-and-wont
reception of our experience, which took so strong a
hold on men's memories ! Hence those many precepts
towards a strenuous self-consciousness in all we think and
do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason, which makes
strict attentiveness of mind a kind of religious duty and
service.
The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our
ordinary experience, fixed as they seem, are really in
perpetual change, had been, as originally conceived, but
the preliminary step towards a large positive system of
almost religious philosophy. Then as now, the illumin-
ated philosophic mind might apprehend, in what seemed
a mass of lifeless matter, the movement of that universal
life, in which things, and men's impressions of them,
were ever "coming to be," alternately consumed and
renewed. That continual change, to be discovered by
the attentive understanding where common opinion
>>
## p. 99 (#115) #############################################
VIII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
found fixed objects, was but the indicator of a subtler
but all - pervading motion  the sleepless, sustained,
inexhaustible energy of the divine reason itself
, ever
proceeding by its own rhythmical logic, and lending to all
mind and matter, in turn, what life they had. In this
"perpetual flux" of things and souls, there was, as
Heraclitus conceived, a continuance, if not of their
material or spiritual elements, yet of orderly intelligible
relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wrought
out in and through the series of their mutations-
ordinances of the divine reason, maintained throughout
the changes of the phenomenal world; and this
harmony in their mutation and opposition, was, after all,
a principle of sanity, of reality, there. But it happened,
that, of all this, the first, merely sceptical or negative
step, that easiest step on the threshold, had alone
remained in general memory; and the "doctrine of
motion" seemed to those who had felt its seduction to
make all fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage
of things, the still swifter passage of those modes of our
conscious being which seemed to reflect them, might
indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but what was
ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring
flame, or like the race of water in the mid-streamtoo
swiftly for any real knowledge of them to be attainable.
Heracliteanism had grown to be almost identical with
the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras, that the
momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was
the only standard of what is or is not, and each one the
measure of all things to himself. The impressive name
of Heraclitus had become but an authority for
philosophy of the despair of knowledge.
And as it had been with his original followers in
Greece, so it happened now with the later Roman
disciple. He, too, paused at the apprehension of that
constant motion of thingsthe drift of flowers, of great
a
## p. 100 (#116) ############################################
100
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
or little souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream around
him, the distant, higher reaches of which, in possible
regions out of sight, must count with him as but a dim
problem. The bold mental flight of the old Greek
master from the fleeting, competing objects of experience
to that one universal life, in which the whole sphere
of physical change might be reckoned as but a single
pulsation, remained by him as hypothesis onlythe
hypothesis he actually preferred, as in itself most
credible, however scantily realisable even by the imagina-
tionyet still as but one unverified hypothesis, among
many others, concerning the first principle of things.
He might reserve it as a fine, high, visionary considera-
tion, very remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at
the point, indeed, where that ladder seemed to pass into
the clouds, but for which there was certainly no time
left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so
close to him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground.
And those childish days of reverie, when he played at
priests, played in many another day-dream, working his
way from the actual present, as far as he might, with a
delightful sense of escape in replacing the outer world
of other people by an inward world as himself really
cared to have it, had made him a kind of "idealist."
He was become aware of the possibility of a large
dissidence between an inward and somewhat exclusive
world of vivid personal apprehension, and the un-
improved, unheightened reality of the life of those about
him.
As a consequence, he was ready now to concede,
somewhat more easily than others, the first point of his
new lesson, that the individual is to himself the
measure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive
certainty to himself of his own impressions. To move
afterwards in that outer world of other people, as though
taking it at their estimate, would be possible henceforth
only as a kind of irony. And as with the Vicaire
## p. 101 (#117) ############################################
VIII
IOI
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Savoyard, after reflecting on the variations of philosophy,
"the first fruit he drew from that reflection was the
lesson of a limitation of his researches to what
immediately interested him ; to rest peacefully in a
profound ignorance as to all beside ; to disquiet himself
only concerning those things which it was of import for
him to know." At least he would entertain no
theory of conduct which did not allow its due weight to
this primary element of incertitude or negation, in the
conditions of man's life.
Just here he joined company, retracing in his
individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of human
thought, with another wayfarer on the journey, another
ancient Greek master, the founder of the Cyrenaic
philosophy, whose weighty traditional utterances (for he
had left no writing) served in turn, to give effective out-
line to the contemplations of Marius.
There was
something in the doctrine itself congruous with the
place wherein it had its birth; and for a time Marius
lived much, mentally, in the brilliant Greek colony
which had given a dubious name to the philosophy of
pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the mountains
and the sea, among richer than Italian gardens, on a
certain breezy table-land projecting from the African
coast, some hundreds of miles from Greece southwards.
There, in a delightful climate, with something of trans-
alpine temperance amid its luxury, and withal in an
inward atmosphere of temperance which did but further
enhance the brilliancy of life, the school of Cyrene had
maintained itself as almost one with the family of its
founder; certainly as nothing coarse or unclean, and
under the influence of accomplished women.
Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of
judgment as to what might really lie behind-flam-
mantia mnia mundi : the flaming rampart of the world.
Those strange, bold, sceptical surmises which had
## p. 102 (#118) ############################################
102
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
haunted the minds of the first Greek enquirers as merely
abstract doubt, which had been present to the mind of
Heraclitus as one element only in a system of abstract
philosophy, became with Aristippus a
very subtly
practical worldly-wisdom. The difference between him
and those obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that
between an ancient thinker generally, and a modern man
of the world : it was the difference between the mystic
in his cell, or the prophet in the desert, and the expert,
cosmopolitan, administrator of his dark sayings, translat-
ing the abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first
of all, of sentiment. It has been sometimes seen, in the
history of the human mind, that when thus translated
into terms of sentimentof sentiment, as lying already
half-way towards practicethe abstract ideas of meta-
physics for the first time reveal their true significance.
The metaphysical principle, in itself, as it were, without
hands or feet, becomes impressive, fascinating, effective
when translated into a precept as to how it were best to
feel and act; in other words, under its sentimental or
ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the great master
of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows and
that we, even as they, never continue in one stay, might
indeed have taken its effect as a languid, enervating,
consumptive nihilism, as a precept of "renunciation,"
which would touch and handle and busy itself with
nothing. But in the reception of metaphysical for-
mula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior
result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human
nature into which they fallthe company they find
already present there, on their admission into the
house of thought; there being at least so much truth
as this involves in the theological maxim, that the
reception of this or that speculative conclusion is
really a matter of will. The persuasion that all is
vanity, with this happily constituted Greek, who had
## p. 103 (#119) ############################################
VIII
103
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
been a genuine disciple of Socrates and reflected,
presumably, something of his blitheness in the face of
the world, his happy way of taking all chances,
generated neither frivolity nor sourness, but induced,
rather, an impression, just serious enough, of the call
upon men's attention of the crisis in which they find
themselves. It became the stimulus towards every kind
of activity, and prompted a perpetual, inextinguishable
thirst after experience.
With Marius, then, the influence of the philosopher
of pleasure depended on this, that in him an abstract
doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had fallen upon a
rich and genial nature, well fitted to transform it into a
theory of practice, of considerable stimulative power
towards a fair life. What Marius saw in him was the
spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming,
so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing
of theories ; accepting the results of a metaphysical
system which seemed to concentrate into itself all the
weakening trains of thought in earlier Greek speculation,
and making the best of it; turning its hard, bare truths,
with wonderful tact, into precepts of grace, and delicate
wisdom, and a delicate sense of honour. Given the
hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a
shadow, even so, we may well adorn and beautify, in
scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls
touch uponthese wonderful bodies, these material
dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together
for awhile, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and
the intercourse of society. The most discerning judges
saw in him something like the graceful "humanities" of
the later Roman, and our modern "culture," as it is termed;
while Horace recalled his sayings as expressing best his
own consummate amenity in the reception of life.
In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of that
old master of decorous living, those eternal doubts as to
## p. 104 (#120) ############################################
104
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the criteria of truth reduced themselves to a scepticism
almost drily practical, a scepticism which developed the
opposition between things as they are and our impressions
and thoughts concerning themthe possibility, if an
outward world does really exist, of some faultiness in
our apprehension of itthe doctrine, in short, of what
is termed "the subjectivity of knowledge." That is a
consideration, indeed, which lies as an element of
weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw, at the very
foundation of every philosophical account of the universe;
which confronts all philosophies at their starting, but
with which none have really dealt conclusively, some
perhaps not quite sincerely; which those who are not
philosophers dissipate by"common," but unphilosophical,
sense, or by religious faith. It was the peculiar strength
of Marius to have apprehended this weakness on the
threshold of human knowledge, in the whole range of its
consequences. Our knowledge is limited to what we
feel, he reflected : we need no proof that we feel. But
can we be sure that things are at all like our feelings?
Mere peculiarities in the instruments of our cognition,
like the little knots and waves on the surface of a mirror,
may distort the matter they seem but to represent. Of
other people we cannot truly know even the feelings, nor
how far they would indicate the same modifications,
each one of a personality really unique, in using the
same terms as ourselves; that " common experience,"
which is sometimes proposed as a satisfactory basis of
certainty, being after all only a fixity of language. But
our own impressions !The light and heat of that blue
veil over our heads, the heavens spread out, not like a
curtain " over anything !-How reassuring, after so long
a debate about the rival criteria of truth, to fall back upon
direct sensation, to limit one's aspirations after knowledge
to that! In an age, still, materially, so brilliant, so
expert in the artistic handling of material things, with
66
## p. 105 (#121) ############################################
VIII
105
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
sensible capacities still in undiminished vigour, with the
whole world of classic art and poetry outspread before
it, and where there was more than eye or ear could well
take in-how natural the determination to rely exclusively
upon the phenomena of the senses, which certainly never
deceive us about themselves, about which alone we can
never deceive ourselves !
And so the abstract apprehension that the little point
of this present moment alone really is, between a past
which has just ceased to be and a future which may
never come, became practical with Marius, under the
form of a resolve, as far as possible, to exclude regret
and desire, and yield himself to the improvement of the
present with an absolutely disengaged mind. America
is here and nowhere, or nowhere : as Wilhelm Meister
finds out one day, just not too late, after so long looking
vaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the
development of his capacities. It was as if, recognising
in perpetual motion the law of nature, Marius identified
his own way of life cordially with it, "throwing himself
into the stream," so to speak. He too must maintain a
harmony with that soul of motion in things, by constantly
renewed mobility of character.
Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res. 
It was thus Horace had summed up that perfect manner
in the reception of life, attained by his old Cyrenaic
master; and the first practical consequence of the
metaphysic which lay behind that perfect manner, had
been a strict limitation, almost the renunciation, of
metaphysical enquiry itself. Metaphysicthat art, as it
has so often proved, in the words of Michelet, de
s'garer avec mthode, of bewildering oneself methodically:
-one must spend little time upon that! In the school
of Cyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness, logical
and physical speculation, theoretic interests generally,
## p. 106 (#122) ############################################
106
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
had been valued only so far as they served to give a
groundwork, an intellectual justification, to that exclusive
concern with practical ethics which was a note of the
Cyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic,
how true to itself, under how many varieties of character,
had been the effort of the Greeks after Theory,
Theriathat vision of a wholly reasonable world, which,
according to the greatest of them, literally makes man
like God : how loyally they had still persisted in the
quest after that, in spite of how many disappointments !
In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps, some of them
might have found the kind of vision they were seeking
for ; but not in "doubtful disputations" concerning
"being" and "not-being," knowledge and appearance.
Men's minds (even young men's minds), at that late day,
might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems
which had so far outrun positive knowledge ; and in the
mind of Marius, as in that old school of Cyrene, this
sense of ennui, combined with appetites so youthfully
vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort of suicide,
(instances of the like have been seen since) by which a
great metaphysical acumen was devoted to the function
of proving metaphysical speculation impossible, or useless.
Abstract theory was to be valued only just so far as it
might serve to clear the tablet of the mind from
suppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly
visionary, leaving it, in flawless evenness of surface, to
the impressions of an experience, concrete and direct.
To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by
ridding ourselves of such abstractions as are but the
ghosts of bygone impressionsto be rid of the notions
we have made for ourselves, and that so often only mis-
represent the experience of which they profess to be the
representation-idola, idols, false appearances, as Bacon
calls them laterto neutralise the distorting influence of
metaphysical system by an all-accomplished metaphysic
## p. 107 (#123) ############################################
VIII
107
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
skill : it is this bold, hard, sober recognition, under a
very "dry light," of its own proper aim, in union with a
habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps
open a wide doorway to human weakness, that gives to
the Cyrenaic doctrine, to reproductions of this doctrine
in the time of Marius or in our own, their gravity and
importance. It was a school to which the young man
would come, eager for truth, expecting much from
philosophy, in no ignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing
less than an "initiation." He would be sent back,
sooner or later, to experience, to the world of concrete
impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt by
him ; but with a wonderful machinery of observation,
and free from the tyranny of mere theories.
So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which
followed the death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius
ran, while he felt himself as if returned to the fine, clear,
peaceful light of that pleasant school of healthfully
sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, on
its fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general
completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this
anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed. And to-
wards such a full or complete life, a life of various yet
select sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary
must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, freedom
from all the partial and misrepresentative doctrine which
does but relieve one element in our experience at the
cost of another, freedom from all embarrassment alike
of regret for the past and of calculation on the future:
this would be but preliminary to the real business of
education-insight, insight through culture, into all that
the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so
briefly in its presence. From that maxim of Life as the
end of life, followed, as a practical consequence, the
desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward
and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities,
## p. 108 (#124) ############################################
108
CHAP. VIII
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
of testing and exercising oneself in them, till one's whole
nature became one complex medium of reception, to-
wards the visionthe "beatific vision," if we really cared
to make it suchof our actual experience in the world.
Not the conveyance of an abstract body of truths or
principles, would be the aim of the right education of
oneself, or of another, but the conveyance of an art-
an art in some degree peculiar to each individual
character; with the modifications, that is, due to its
special constitution, and the peculiar circumstances of its
growth, inasmuch as no one of us is "like another, all in
all."
## p. 109 (#125) ############################################
CHAPTER IX
NEW CYRENAICISM
SUCH were the practical conclusions drawn for himself
by Marius, when somewhat later he had outgrown the
mastery of others, from the principle that "all is vanity."
If he could but count upon the present, if a life brief at
best could not certainly be shown to conduct one any-
where beyond itself, if men's highest curiosity was indeed
so persistently baffledthen, with the Cyrenaics of all
ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that present
with vivid sensations, and such intellectual apprehensions,
as, in strength and directness and their immediately
realised values at the bar of an actual experience, are
most like sensations. So some have spoken in every age ;
for, like all theories which really express a strong natural
tendency of the human mind or even
one of its
characteristic modes of weakness, this vein of reflection
is a constant tradition in philosophy. Every age of
European thought has had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans,
under many disguises : even under the hood of the monk.
ButLet us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die !is a
proposal, the real import of which differs immensely,
according to the natural taste, and the acquired judg-
ment, of the guests who sit at the table.
It may express
nothing better than the instinct of Dante's Ciacco, the
accomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno; or,
## p. 110 (#126) ############################################
IIO
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
since on no hypothesis does man "live by bread alone,"
may come to be identical with"My meat is to do
what is just and kind ;" while the soul, which can make
no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the
veil of immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of
happiness in conforming to the highest moral ideal it
can clearly define for itself; and actually, though but
with so faint hope, does the " Father's business."
In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely dis-
abused of the metaphysical ambition to pass beyond
"the flaming rampart of the world," but, on the other
hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation of intellectual
treasure, with so wide a view before it over all varieties
of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works,
the thoughts of Marius did but follow the line taken by
the majority of educated persons, though to a different
issue. Pitched to a really high and serious key, the
precept-Be perfect in regard to what is here and now:
the precept of "culture," as it is called, or of a complete
educationmight at least save him from the vulgarity
and heaviness of a generation, certainly of no general
fineness of temper, though with a material well-being per-
haps excessive. Conceded that what is secure in our exist-
ence is but the sharp apex of the present moment be-
tween two hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in
our experience but a series of fleeting impressionsso
he continued the sceptical argument he had condensed,
as the matter to hold by, from his various philosophical
reading; given, that we are never to get beyond the walls
of this closely shut cell of one's own personality ; if the
ideas we are somehow impelled to form of an outer
world, and of other minds akin to our own, are, it may
be, but a day-dream, and the thought of any world be-
yond, 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
## p. 111 (#127) ############################################
IX
III
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
well set himself to the consideration, how such actual
moments as they passed might be made to yield their
utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity.
Amid abstract metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie
one step only beyond that experience, reinforcing the
deep original materialism or earthliness of human nature
itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him
at least make the most of what was "here and now."
In the actual dimness of ways from means to ends-
ends in themselves desirable, yet for the most part distant,
and for him, certainly, below the visible horizon-he
would at all events be sure that the means, to use the
well-worn terminology, should have something of finality
or perfection about them, and themselves partake, in a
measure, of that more excellent nature of endsthat the
means should justify the end.
With this view he would demand culture, taidela, as
the Cyrenaics said, or, in other words, a wide, a complete,
education-an education partly negative, as ascertaining
the true limits of man's capacities, but, for the most
part positive, and directed especially to the expansion
and refinement of the power of reception; of those
powers, above all, which are relative directly to fleeting
phenomena, the powers of emotion and sense. In such
an education, an "sthetic" education, as it might now
be termed, and certainly occupied very largely with those
aspects of things which affectus pleasurably through
sensation, art, of course, including all the finer sorts of
literature, would have a great part to play. The study of
music, in that wider Platonic sense, according to which,
music comprehends all those matters over which the
Muses of Greek mythology preside, would conduct one to
an exquisite appreciation of all the finer traits of nature
and of man. Nay! the products of the imagination
must themselves be held to present the most perfect
forms of life-spirit and matter, alike, under their purest
## p. 112 (#128) ############################################
II2
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
and most perfect conditionsthe most strictly appro-
priate objects of that impassioned contemplation, which,
in the world of intellectual discipline, as in the highest
forms of morality and religion, must be held to be the
essential function of the "perfect." Such manner of
life might come even to seem a kind of religion-an
inward, visionary, mystic piety, or religion, by virtue of
its effort to live days "lovely and pleasant" in themselves,
here and now, and with an all-sufficiency of well-being
in the immediate sense of the object contemplated, in-
dependently of any faith, or hope that might be enter-
tained, as to their ulterior tendency. In this way, the
true sthetic culture would be realisable as a new form
of the contemplative life, founding its claim on the in-
trinsic " blessedness" of "vision "the vision of perfect
men and things. One's human nature, indeed, would
fain reckon on an assured and endless future, pleasing
itself with the dream of a final home, to be attained at
some still remote date, yet with a conscious, delightful
home-coming at last, as depicted in many an old poetic
Elysium. But then, on the other hand, the world of
perfected sensation, emotion, intelligence, is so close to
us, and so attractive, that even the most visionary of
spirits must needs represent that other world in colours
really borrowed from it. Let me be sure then-might
he not plausibly say ?that I miss no circumstance of
this life of realised consciousness in the present! Here,
at least, is a vision, a seeing, a theory, Dewpa, which
reposes on no basis of unverified hypothesis, which
makes no call upon a future really problematic; as it
would be unaffected by any discovery of an Empedocles
(improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had
really been the origin, and course of development, of
man's actually attained faculties and that seemingly
divine particle of reason or spirit in him.
Such a
doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would, of course,
## p. 113 (#129) ############################################
IX
113
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment,
generally, of what is near at hand, on the adornment of
life, till, in a not impracticable rule of conduct, one's
existence, from day to day, came to be like a well-
executed piece of music; that "perpetual motion" in
things (so Marius figured the matter to himself, under the
old Greek imageries) according itself to a kind of cadence
or harmony.
It was intelligible that this "sthetic" philosophy
might find itself (theoretically, at least, and by way of a
curious question in casuistry, legitimate from its own
point of view) weighing the claims of that eager, con-
centrated, impassioned realisation of experience, against
those of the received morality. Conceiving its own
function in a somewhat desperate temper, and becoming,
as every high-strung form of sentiment, as the religious
sentiment itself, may become, somewhat antinomian,
when, in its effort towards the order of experiences it
prefers, it is confronted with the traditional and popular
morality, at points where that morality may look very like
a convention, or mere stage-property of the world, it would
be found, from time to time, breaking beyond the limits
of the actual moral order; perhaps, not without some
pleasurable excitement in so bold a venture.
With the possibility of some such hazard as this, in
thought or even in practicethat it might be, though
refining, or tonic even, in the case of those strong and in
health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly and temperate
wisdom of Montaigne," pernicious for those who have
any natural tendency to impiety or vice," the line of
reflection traced out above, was fairly chargeable.Not,
however, with "hedonism" and its supposed conse-
quences. The blood, the heart, of Marius were still
pure. He knew that his carefully considered theory of
practice braced him, with the effect of a moral principle
duly recurring to mind every morning, towards the work
I
## p. 114 (#130) ############################################
114
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
of a student, for which he might seem intended. Yet
there were some among his acquaintance who jumped to
the conclusion that, with the "Epicurean stye," he was
making pleasure-pleasure, as they so poorly conceived
itthe sole motive of life ; and they precluded any
exacter estimate of the situation by covering it with a
high-sounding general term, through the vagueness of
which they were enabled to see the severe and laborious
youth in the vulgar company of Lais. Words like
"hedonism"-terms of large and vague comprehension
-above all when used for a purpose avowedly contro-
versial, have ever been the worst examples of what are
called "question-begging terms ;" and in the late age in
which Marius lived, amid the dust of so many centuries
of philosophical debate, the air was full of them.
those who used that reproachful Greek term for the
philosophy of pleasure, were hardly more likely than the
old Greeks themselves (on whom regarding this very
subject of the theory of pleasure, their masters in the
art of thinking had so emphatically to impress the
necessity of "making distinctions") to come to any very
delicately correct ethical conclusions by a reasoning,
which began with a general term, comprehensive
enough to cover pleasures so different in quality, in their
causes and effects, as the pleasures of wine and love, of
art and science, of religious enthusiasm and political
enterprise, and of that taste or curiosity which satisfied
itself with long days of serious study. Yet, in truth,
each of those pleasurable modes of activity, may, in its
turn, fairly become the ideal of the "hedonistic" doctrine.
Really, to the phase of reflection through which Marius
was then passing, the charge of "hedonism," whatever
its right weight might be, was not properly applicable at
all. Not pleasure, but fulness of life, and "insight" as
conducting to that fulness-energy, choice, and variety
of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even,
## p. 115 (#131) ############################################
IX
115
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
..
loves such as those in the exquiste old story of
Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life,
such as Seneca and Epictetuswhatever form of human
life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal : from
these the "new Cyrenaicism" of Marius took its
criterion of values. It was a theory, indeed, which might
properly be regarded as in great degree coincident with
the main principle of the Stoics themselves, and an older
version of the precept "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to
do, do it with all thy might"-a doctrine so widely
acceptable among the nobler spirits of that time. And,
as with that, its mistaken tendency would lie in the
direction of a kind of idolatry of mere life, or natural
gift, or strength--l'idolatrie des talents.
To understand the various forms of ancient art and
thought, the various forms of actual human feeling (the
only new thing, in a world almost too opulent in what
was old) to satisfy, with a kind of scrupulous equity, the
claims of these concrete and actual objects on his
sympathy, his intelligence, his sensesto "pluck out
the heart of their mystery," and in turn become the
interpreter of them to others : this had now defined itself
for Marius as a very narrowly practical design: it
determined his choice of a vocation to live by.
It was
the era of the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they were some-
times called ; of men who came in some instances to
great fame and fortune, by way of a literary cultivation of
"science." That science, it has been often said, must
have been wholly an affair of words. But in a world,
confessedly so rich in what was ancient, the work, even
of genius, must necessarily consist very much in criticism ;
and, in the case of the more excellent specimens of his
class, the rhetorician was, after all, the eloquent and effect-
ive interpreter, for the delighted ears of others, of what
understanding himself had come by, in years of travel
and study, of the beautiful house of art and thought
## p. 116 (#132) ############################################
116
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
79
which was the inheritance of the age.
The emperor
Marcus Aurelius, to whose service Marius had now been
called, was himself, more or less openly, a " lecturer."
That late world, amid many curiously vivid modern
traits, had this spectacle, so familiar to ourselves, of the
public lecturer or essayist; in some cases adding to his
other gifts that of the Christian preacher, who knows
how to touch people's sensibilities on behalf of the
suffering. To follow in the way of these successes, was
the natural instinct of youthful ambition; and it was
with no vulgar egotism, that Marius, at the age of twenty
years, determined, like many another young man of parts,
to enter as a student of rhetoric at Rome.
Though the manner of his work was changed, formally,
from poetry to prose, he remained, and must always be,
of the poetic temper: by which, I mean, among other
things, that, quite independently of the general habit of
that pensive age, he lived much, and as it were by
system, in reminiscence. Amid his eager grasping at
the sensation, the consciousness, of the present, he had
come to see how, after all, the main point of economy
in the conduct of that present, was the question :-How
will it look to me, at what shall I value it, this day next
year?that, in any given day or month, one's main
concern was its impression for the memory. A strange
trick that memory sometimes played him ; for, with no
natural gradation, what was of last month, or of
yesterday, of to-day even, would seem as far off, as entirely
detached from him, as things of ten years ago. Detached
from him, yet very real, there lay certain spaces of his life,
in delicate perspective, under a favourable light; and,
somehow, all the less choice detail and circumstance
had parted from them. Such hours were oftenest those
in which he had been helped by work of others to
the pleasurable apprehension of art, of nature, or of life.
"Not what I do, but what I am, under the power of this
## p. 117 (#133) ############################################
IX
117
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
vision"he would say to himself  "is what were
indeed pleasing to the gods !"
And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who
had taken for his philosophic ideal the  
of Aristippusthe pleasure of the ideal present, of the
mystic nowthere would come, together with that
precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire, after
all, to retain what was so transitive." Could he but
arrest, for others also, certain clauses of experience, as
the imaginative memory presented them to himself!
In those grand, hot summers, he would have imprisoned
the very perfume of the flowers. To create, to live,
perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it
were but in a fragment of perfect expression it was
thus his longing defined itself for something to hold by
amid the "perpetual flux." With men of his vocation,
people were apt to say, words were things. Well! with
him, words should be indeed things,the word, the
phrase, valuable in exact proportion to the transparency
with which it conveyed to others the apprehension, the
emotion, the mood, so vividly real within himself. Verba
provisam rem non invita sequentur: Virile apprehension
of the true nature of things, of the true nature of one's
own impression, first of all !words would follow that,
naturally, a true understanding of oneself being ever the
first condition of genuine style. Language, delicate and
measured, the delicate Attic phrase, for instance, in
which the eminent Aristeides could speak, was then a
power to which people's hearts, and sometimes even
their purses, readily responded. And there were many
points, as Marius thought, on which the heart of that
age greatly needed to be touched. He hardly knew
how strong that old religious sense of responsibility, the
conscience, as we call it, still was within hima body
of inward impressions, as real as those so highly valued
outward onesto offend against which, brought with it
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118
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a strange feeling of disloyalty, as to a person. And the
determination, adhered to with no misgiving, to add
nothing, not so much as a transient sigh, to the great
total of men's unhappiness, in his way through the
world :that too was something to rest on, in the drift
of mere "appearances.
All this would involve a life of industry, of industrious
study, only possible through healthy rule, keeping clear
the eye alike of body and soul. For the male element,
the logical conscience asserted itself now, with opening
manhood-asserted itself, even in his literary style, by
a certain firmness of outline, that touch of the worker in
metal, amid its richness. Already he blamed instinctively
alike in his work and in himself, as youth so seldom does,
all that had not passed a long and liberal process of
erasure. The happy phrase or sentence was really
modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupu-
lous thought. The suggestive force of the one master
of his development, who had battled so hard with
imaginative prose; the utterance, the golden utterance,
of the other, so content with its living power of persua-
sion that he had never written at all,in the commixture
of these two qualities, he set up his literary ideal, and
this rare blending of grace with an intellectual rigour or
astringency, was the secret of a singular expressiveness
in it.
He acquired at this time a certain bookish air, the
somewhat sombre habitude of the avowed scholar, which,
though it never interfered with the perfect tone, " fresh
and serenely disposed," of the Roman gentleman, yet
qualified it as by an interesting oblique trait, and fright-
ened away some of his equals in age and rank. The
sober discretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of
meditation, the sense of those negative conclusions
enabling him to concentrate himself, with an absorption
so entire, upon what is immediately here and now, gave
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119
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
him a peculiar manner of intellectual confidence, as of
one who had indeed been initiated into a great secret.--
With an air so disengaged, he seemed to be living so
intently in the visible world. And now, in revolt against
that pre-occupation with other persons, which had so
often perturbed his spirit, his wistful speculations as to
what the real, the greater, experience might be, deter-
mined in him, not as the longing for loveto be with
Cynthia, or Aspasiabut as a thirst for existence in
exquisite places. The veil that was to be lifted for him
lay over the works of the old masters of art, in places
where nature also had used her mastery. And it was
just then that a summons to Rome reached him.
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CHAPTER X
MIRUM EST UT ANIMUS AGITATIONE MOTUQUE
CORPORIS EXCITETUR
Pliny's Letters.
Many points in that train of thought, its harder and
more energetic practical details especially, at first
surmised but vaguely in the intervals of his visits to the
tomb of Flavian, attained the coherence of formal
principle amid the stirring incidents of the journey, which
took him, still in all the buoyancy of his nineteen years
and greatly expectant, to Rome. That summons had
come from one of the former friends of his father in the
capital, who had kept himself acquainted with the lad's
progress, and, assured of his parts, his courtly ways,
above all, of his beautiful penmanship, now offered him
a place, virtually that of an amanuensis, near the person
of the philosophic emperor.
The old town-house of his
family on the Clian hill, so long neglected, might well
require his personal care; and Marius, relieved a little
by his preparations for travelling from a certain over-
tension of spirit in which he had lived of late, was
presently on his way, to await introduction to Aurelius,
on his expected return home, after a first success,
illusive enough as it was soon to appear, against the
invaders from beyond the Danube.
The opening stage of his journey, through the firm,
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CHAP. X
121
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
golden weather, for which he had lingered three days
beyond the appointed time of starting-days brown with
the first rains of autumn-brought him, by the byways
among the lower slopes of the Apennines of Luna, to
the town of Luca, a station on the Cassian Way;
travelling so far mainly on foot, while the baggage
followed under the care of his attendants. He wore a
broad felt hat, in fashion not unlike a more modern
pilgrim's, the neat head projecting from the collar of his
grey pnula, or travelling mantle, sewed closely together
over the breast, but with its two sides folded up upon
the shoulders, to leave the arms free in walking, and was
altogether so trim and fresh, that, as he climbed the hill
from Pisa, by the long steep lane through the olive-yards,
and turned to gaze where he could just discern the
cypresses of the old school garden, like two black lines
down the yellow walls, a little child took possession of
his hand, and, looking up at him with entire confidence,
paced on bravely at his side, for the mere pleasure of
his company, to the spot where the road declined again
into the valley beyond. From this point, leaving the
servants behind, he surrendered himself, a willing
subject, as he walked, to the impressions of the road,
and was almost surprised, both at the suddenness with
which evening came on, and the distance from his old
home at which it found him.
And at the little town of Luca, he felt that inde-
scribable sense of a welcoming in the mere outward
appearance of things, which seems to mark out certain
places for the special purpose of evening rest, and
gives them always a peculiar amiability in retrospect.
Under the deepening twilight, the rough-tiled roofs seem
to huddle together side by side, like one continuous
shelter over the whole township, spread low and broad
above the snug sleeping-rooms within ; and the place
one sees for the first time, and must tarry in but for a
## p. 122 (#138) ############################################
I 22
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
night, breathes the very spirit of home. The cottagers
lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the shadows
grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was
still a glow along the road through the shorn cornfields,
and the birds were still awake about the crumbling grey
heights of an old temple. So quiet and air-swept was
the place, you could hardly tell where the country left off
in it, and the field-paths became its streets. Next
morning he must needs change the manner of his journey.
The light baggage-wagon returned, and he proceeded
now more quickly, travelling a stage or two by post,
along the Cassian Way, where the figures and incidents
of the great high-road seemed already to tell of the
capital, the one centre to which all were hastening, or
had lately bidden adieu. That Way lay through the
heart of the old, mysterious and visionary country of
Etruria ; and what he knew of its strange religion of the
dead, reinforced by the actual sight of the funeral houses
scattered so plentifully among the dwellings of the living,
revived in him for a while, in all its strength, his old
instinctive yearning towards those inhabitants of the
shadowy land he had known in life. It seemed to him
that he could half divine how time passed in those
painted houses on the hillsides, among the gold and
silver ornaments, the wrought armour and vestments, the
drowsy and dead attendants; and the close consciousness
of that vast population gave him no fear, but rather a
sense of companionship, as he climbed the hills on foot
behind the horses, through the genial afternoon.
The road, next day, passed below a town not less
primitive, it might seem, than its rocky perch-white
rocks, that had long been glistening before him in the
distance. Down the dewy paths the people were
descending from it, to keep a holiday, high and low
alike in rough, white linen smocks. A homely old play
was just begun in an open-air theatre, with seats
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X
123
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
hollowed out in the turf-grown slope. Marius caught
the terrified expression of a child in its mother's arms,
as it turned from the yawning mouth of a great mask,
for refuge in her bosom. The way mounted, and
descended again, down the steep street of another place,
all resounding with the noise of metal under the hammer;
for every house had its brazier's workshop, the bright
objects of brass and copper gleaming, like lights in a
cave, out of their dark roofs and corners. Around the
anvils the children were watching the work, or ran to
fetch water to the hissing, red-hot metal; and Marius
too watched, as he took his hasty mid-day refreshment,
a mess of chestnut-meal and cheese, while the swelling
surface of a great copper water-vessel grew flowered all
over with tiny petals under the skilful strokes. Towards
dusk, a frantic woman at the roadside, stood and cried
out the words of some philter, or malison, in verse, with
weird motion of her hands, as the travellers passed, like
a wild picture drawn from Virgil.
But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of
these incidents of the way, Marius noted, more and more
as he drew nearer to Rome, the records of the great
plague. Under Hadrian and his successors, there had
been many enactments to improve the condition of the
slaves. The ergastula had been abolished.
But no
system of free labour had as yet succeeded. A whole
mendicant population, artfully exaggerating every symptom
and circumstance of misery, still hung around, or
sheltered themselves within, the vast walls of their old,
half-ruined task-houses. And for the most part they had
been variously stricken by the pestilence. For once, the
heroic level had been reached in rags, squints, scars-
every caricature of the human type-ravaged beyond
what could have been thought possible if it were to
survive at all. Meantime, the farms were less carefully
tended than of old : here and there they were lapsing
## p. 124 (#140) ############################################
124
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
into their natural wildness : some villas also were partly
fallen into ruin. The picturesque, romantic Italy of a
later timethe Italy of Claude and Salvator Rosawas
already forming, for the delight of the modern romantic
traveller.
And again Marius was aware of a real change in
things, on crossing the Tiber, as if some magic effect lay
in that; though here, in truth, the Tiber was but a
modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, under
the richer sky, seemed readier and more affluent, and
man fitter to the conditions around him : even in people
hard at work there seemed to be a less burdensome
sense of the mere business of life. How dreamily the
women were passing up through the broad light and
shadow of the eep streets, the great water-pots resting
on their heads, like women of Cary, set free from
slavery in old Greek temples. With what a fresh and
primitive poetry was daily existence here impressed-all
the details of the threshing-floor and the vineyard-the
common farm-life eventhe great bakers' fires aglow
upon the road in the evening. In the presence of all
that, Marius was for a moment like those old, early, un-
conscious poets, who created the famous Greek myths of
Dionysus, and the Great Mother, out of the imagery of
the wine-press and the ploughshare. And still the
motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to
systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the
fulness of intellectual manhood, on his way hither. The
formative, and literary stimulus (so to call it) of peaceful
exercise, he had always observed in himself, doing its
utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike
detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the
healthfully excited brain."It is wonderful," says Pliny,
"how the mind is stirred to activity by brisk bodily
exercise." The presentable aspects of inmost thought
and feeling became evident to him : the structure of all
## p. 125 (#141) ############################################
X
125
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
he meant, its order and outline, defined itself: his
general sense of a fitness and beauty in words became
effective in daintily pliant sentences, with all sorts of
felicitous linking of figure to abstraction. It seemed
just then as if the desire of the artist in himthat old
longing to producemight be satisfied by the exact and
literal expression of what was then passing around him,
in simple prose, arresting the desirable moment as it
passed, and-prolonging its life a little. To live in the
concrete ! To be sure, at least, of one's hold upon that!
-Again, his philosophic scheme was but the reflection
of the data of sense, and chiefly of sight, a reduction to
the abstract, of the brilliant road he travelled on, through
the sunshine.
But on the seventh evening there came a reaction
in the cheerful flow of our traveller's thoughts, a
reaction with which mere bodily fatigue, asserting
itself at last over his curiosity, had much to do; and he
fell into a mood, known to all passably sentimental way-
farers, as night deepens again and again over their path,
in which all journeying from home, from the known to
the unknown, comes suddenly to figure as a mere foolish
truancy-like a child's running awaywith the feeling
that one had best return at once, even through the
darkness. He had chosen to climb on foot, at his
leisure, the long windings, by which the road ascended
to the place where that day's stage was to end, and
found himself alone in the twilight, far behind the rest
of his travelling-companions. Would the last zigzag,
round and round those dark masses, half natural rock,
half artificial substructure, ever bring him within the
circuit of the walls above ? It was now that a startling
incident turned those misgivings almost into actual fear.
From the steep slope, a heavy mass of stone was
detached, after some whisperings among the trees above
his head, and rushing down through the stillness fell to
## p. 126 (#142) ############################################
126
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
pieces in a cloud of dust across the road just behind
him, so that he felt the touch upon his heel.
That was
sufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his
old vague fear of evilof one's "enemies" -a distress,
so much a matter of constitution with him, that at times
it would seem that the best pleasures of life could but
be snatched, as it were hastily, in just one moment's
forgetfulness of its dark, besetting influence. A sudden
suspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of
enemies," seemed all at once to alter the visible form
of things, as with the child's hero, when he found the
footprint on the sand of his peaceful, dreamy island.
His elaborate philosophy had not put beneath his feet
the terror of mere bodily evil; much less of "inexor-
able fate and the noise of greedy Acheron."
The resting-place to which he presently came, in the
keen, wholesome air of the market-place of the little
hill-town, was a pleasant contrast to that last effort of his
journey. The room in which he sat down to sup,
unlike the majority of Roman inns at that day, was
trim and sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon
the polished, three-wicked lucerna burning cleanly with
the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the
bunches of scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The
white wine of the place put before him, of the true
colour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of
delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a reviving
edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.
These things had relieved a little the melancholy of the
hour before, and it was just then that he heard the
voice of one, newly arrived at the inn, making his way
to the upper floor-a youthful voice, with a reassuring
clearness of note, which completed his cure.
He seemed to hear that voice again in dreams,
uttering his name : then, awake in the full morning
light and gazing from the window, saw the guest of the
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x
127
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
night before, a very honourable-looking youth, in the
rich habit of a military knight, standing beside his horse,
and already making preparations to depart. It happened
that Marius, too, was to take that day's journey on
horseback. Riding presently from the inn, he overtook
Corneliusof the Twelfth Legionadvancing carefully
down the steep street; and before they had issued from
the gates of Urbs-Vetus, the two young men had broken
into talk together. They were passing along the street
of the goldsmiths; and Cornelius must needs enter one
of the workshops for the repair of some button or link
of his knightly trappings. Standing in the doorway,
Marius watched the work, as he had watched the brazier's
business a few days before, wondering most at the
simplicity of its processes, a simplicity, however, on
which only genius in that craft could have lighted.-By
what unguessed-at stroke of hand, for instance, had the
grains of precious metal associated themselves with so
daintily regular a roughness, over the surface of the
little casket yonder? And the conversation which
followed, hence arising, left the two travellers with
sufficient interest in each other to insure an easy com-
panionship for the remainder of their journey. In time
to come, Marius was to depend very much on the
preferences, the personal judgments, of the comrade
who now laid his hand so brotherly on his shoulder,
as they left the workshop.
Itineris matutini gratiam capimus :
-quoted one;
and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted,
by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first
acquaintance into intimacy; its superficial ugliness
throwing the wayfarers back upon each other's enter-
tainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension of
which, however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the
unexpected assertion of a singular attractiveness. The
immediate aspect of the land was, indeed, in spite of
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128
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
abundant olive and ilex, unpleasing enough. A river of
clay seemed, "in some old night of time," to have burst
up over valley and hill, and hardened there, into fantastic
shelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock, up and
down among the contorted vegetation; the hoary roots
and trunks seeming to confess some weird kinship with
them. But that was long ago ; and these pallid hillsides
needed only the declining sun, touching the rock with
purple, and throwing deeper shadow into the immemorial
foliage, to put on a peculiar, because a very grave and
austere, kind of beauty ; while the graceful outlines
common to volcanic hills asserted themselves in the
broader prospect. And, for sentimental Marius, all this
was associated, by some perhaps fantastic affinity, with a
peculiar trait of severity, beyond his guesses as to the
secret of it, which mingled with the blitheness of his
new companion. Concurring, indeed, with the condi-
tion of a Roman soldier, it was certainly something far
more than the expression of military hardness, or ascsis ;
and what was earnest, or austere even, in the landscape
they had traversed together, seemed to have been wait-
ing for the passage of this figure to interpret or inform
it. Again, as in his early days with Flavian, a vivid
personal presence broke through the dreamy idealism,
which had almost come to doubt of other men's reality :
re-assuringly, indeed, and yet not without some sense of
a constraining tyranny over him from without.
For Cornelius, returning from the campaign, to take
up his quarters on the Palatine, in the imperial guard,
seemed to carry about with him, in that privileged world
of comely usage to which he belonged, the atmosphere
of some still more jealously exclusive circle. They
halted at noon next day, not at an inn, but at the house
of one of the young soldier's friends, whom found
absent, indeed, in consequence of the plague in those
parts, so that after a mid-day rest only, they proceeded
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X
129
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
again on their journey. The great room of the villa, to
which they were admitted, had lain long untouched;
and the dust rose, as they entered, into the slanting bars
of sunlight, that fell through the half-closed shutters. It
was here, to while away the time, that Cornelius be-
thought himself of displaying to his new friend the
various articles and ornaments of his knightly array
the breastplate, the sandals and cuirass, lacing them
on, one by one, with the assistance of Marius, and
finally the great golden bracelet on the right arm, con-
ferred on him by his general for an act of valour. And
as he gleamed there, amid that odd interchange of light
and shade, with the staff of his silken standard firm in
his hand, Marius felt as if he were face to face, for the
first time, with some new knighthood or chivalry, just
then coming into the world.
It was soon after they left this place, journeying now
by carriage, that Rome was seen at last, with much
excitement on the part of our travellers ; Cornelius, and
some others of whom the party then consisted, agreeing,
chiefly for the sake of Marius, to hasten forward, that it
might be reached by daylight, with a cheerful noise of
rapid wheels as they passed over the flagstones. But
the highest light upon the mausoleum of Hadrian had
quite gone out, and it was dark, before they reached the
Flaminian Gate. The abundant sound of water was
the one thing that impressed Marius, as they passed
down a long street, with many open spaces on either
hand : Cornelius to his military quarters, and Marius
to the old dwelling-place of his fathers.
K
## p. 130 (#146) ############################################
CHAPTER XI
THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD
MARIUS awoke early and passed curiously from room to
room, noting for more careful inspection by and by the
rolls of manuscripts. Even greater than his curiosity in
gazing for the first time on this ancient possession, was
his eagerness to look out upon Rome itself, as he
pushed back curtain and shutter, and stepped forth in the
fresh morning upon one of the many balconies, with an
oft-repeated dream realised at last. He was certainly
fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome. That old
pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached
its perfection in the things of poetry and arta per-
fection which indicated only too surely the eve of decline.
As in some vast intellectual museum, all its manifold
products were intact and in their places, and with
custodians, also, still extant, duly qualified to appreciate
and explain them. And at no period of history had the
material Rome itself been better worth seeing - lying
there, as consummated, as complete, as that world of
pagan intellect which it represented in every phase of its
darkness and light.
The various work of many ages fell
here harmoniously together, as yet untouched save by
time, adding the final grace of a rich softness to its
complex expression. Much which spoke of ages earlier
than Nero, the great re-builder, lingered on, antique,
## p. 131 (#147) ############################################
CHAP. XI
131
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
quaint, immeasurably venerable, like the relics of the
medieval city in the Paris of Lewis the Fourteenth : the
work of Nero's own time had come to have that sort of
old world and picturesque interest which the work of
Lewis has for ourselves; while without stretching a
parallel too far we might perhaps liken the architectural
finesses of the archaic Hadrian to the more excellent
products of our own Gothic revival. The temple of
Antoninus and Faustina was still fresh in all the majesty
of its closely arrayed columns of cipollino ; but, on the
whole, little had been added under the late and present
emperors, and during fifty years of public quiet, a sober
brown and grey had grown apace on things. The gilding
on the roof of many a temple had lost its garishness :
cornice and capital of polished marble shone out with all
the crisp freshness of real flowers, amid the already
mouldering travertine and brickwork, though the birds
had built freely among them. What Marius then saw
was in many respects, after all deduction of differences,
more like the modern Rome than the enumeration of
particular losses might lead us to suppose; the Renais-
sance, in its most ambitious mood and with amplest
resources, having resumed the ancient classical tradition
there, with no break or obstruction, as it had happened,
in any very considerable work of the middle age. Im-
mediately before him, on the square, steep height, where
the earliest little old Rome had huddled itself together,
arose the palace of the Csars. Half-veiling the vast
substruction of rough, brown stone-line upon line of
successive ages of buildersthe trim, old-fashioned garden
walks, under their closely-woven walls of dark glossy foliage,
test of long and careful cultivation, wound gradually,
among choice trees, statues and fountains, distinct and
sparkling in the full morning sunlight, to the richly tinted
mass of pavilions and corridors above, centering in the
lofty, white-marble dwelling-place of Apollo himself.
## p. 132 (#148) ############################################
132
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
How often had Marius looked forward to that first,
free wandering through Rome, to which he now went
forth, with a heat in the town sunshine (like a mist of
fine gold-dust spread through the air) to the height of his
desire, making the dun coolness of the narrow streets
welcome enough at intervals. He almost feared,
descending the stair hastily, lest some unforeseen accident
should snatch the little cup of enjoyment from him ere
he passed the door. In such morning rambles in places
new to him, life had always seemed to come at its
fullest : it was then he could feel his youth, that youth
the days of which he had already begun to count
jealously, in entire possession. So, the grave, pensive
figure, yet a figure far fresher than often came across it
now, moved through the old city, certainly not by the
most direct course, though eager to join the friend of
yesterday, towards the lodgings of Cornelius.
Bent as keenly on seeing, as if his first day in Rome
were to be also his last, the two friends descended along
the Vicus Tuscus, with its rows of incense-stalls, into the
Via Nova, where the fashionable people were busy
shopping; and Marius saw with much amusement the
frizzled heads, then  la mode. A glimpse of the
marmorata, the haven at the river-side, where specimens
of all the precious marbles of the world were lying amid
great white blocks from the quarries of Luna, took his
thoughts for a moment to his distant home. They
visited the flower-market, lingering where the coronarii
pressed on them the newest species, and purchased
zinias (like painted flowers, thought Marius) then in
blossom, to decorate the folds of their togas. Loitering
to the other side of the Forum, past the great Galen's
drug-shop, after a glance at the announcements of new
poems on sale attached to the doorpost of a famous
bookseller, they entered the curious library of the Temple
of Peace, then a favourite resort of literary men, and
## p. 133 (#149) ############################################
XI
133
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
read, fixed there for all to see, the Diurnal or Gazette
of the day, which announced, together with births and
deaths, prodigies and accidents, and much mere matter
of business, the date and manner of the philosophic
emperor's joyful return to his people ; and, thereafter,
with eminent names faintly disguised, what would carry
that day's news, in many copies, over the provincesa
certain matter concerning the great lady, known to be
dear to him, whom he had left at home. It was a story,
with the development of which "society" had indeed
for some time past edified or amused itself, rallying
sufficiently from its panic of a year ago, not only to
welcome back its ruler, but also to relish a chronique
scandaleuse ; so that when, soon after, Marius saw the
world's wonder, he was already acquainted with the
suspicions which have ever since hung about her name.
Twelve o'clock was come before they left the Forum,
waiting in a little crowd to hear the Accensus, according
to old custom, proclaim the hour of noonday, at the
moment when from the steps of the Senate-house, the
sun could be seen standing between the Rostra and the
Grcostasis. He exerted for this function a strength of
voice, which confirmed in Marius a judgment the modern
visitor may share with him, that Roman throats and
Roman chests, namely, must, in some peculiar way, be
differently constructed from those of other people-a
judgment he had formed in part the evening before,
noting, as a religious procession passed him, how much
noise a man and a boy could make, though not without
a great deal of real music, of which, indeed, the Romans
were then as ever passionately fond.
Hence the two friends took their way through the Via
Flaminia, almost along the line of the modern Corso,
already bordered with handsome villas, turning presently
to the left, into the Field-of-Mars, still the playground of
Rome. But the vast public edifices were grown to
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
be almost continuous over the grassy expanse, represented
now only by occasional open spaces of verdure and wild-
flowers. In one of these a crowd was standing, to watch
a party of athletes stripped for exercise. Marius had
been surprised at the luxurious variety of the litters
borne through Rome, where no carriage horses were
allowed; and just then one far more sumptuous than
the rest, with dainty appointments of ivory and gold,
was carried by, all the town pressing with eagerness to
get a glimpse of its most beautiful woman, as she passed
rapidly. Yes! there, was the wonder of the worldthe
empress Faustina herself: Marius could distinguish,
could distinguish clearly, the well-known profile, between
the floating purple curtains.
For indeed all Rome was ready to burst into gaiety
again, as it awaited with much real affection, hopeful and
animated, the return of its emperor, for whose ovation
various adornments were preparing along the streets
through which the imperial procession would pass. He
had left Rome just twelve months before, amid immense
gloom. The alarm of a barbarian insurrection along
the whole line of the Danube had
at the
moment when Rome was panic-stricken by the great
pestilence.
In fifty years of peace, broken only by that conflict
in the east, from which Lucius Verus, among other
curiosities, had brought back the plague, war had come
to seem a merely romantic, superannuated incident of
bygone history. And now it was almost upon Italian
soil. Terrible were the reports of the numbers and
audacity of the assailants. Aurelius, as yet untried in
war, and understood by a few only in the whole scope
of a really great character, was known to the majority of
his subjects as but a careful administrator, and a,
perhaps dilettante, student of philosophy. But he was also
the visible centre of government, towards which the hearts
come
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
of a whole people turned, grateful for fifty years of public
happiness  its good genius, its "Antonine "whose
fragile frame might be foreseen speedily giving way,
under the fatigues of military life, with a disaster
like that of the slaughter of the legions by Arminius.
Prophecies of the world's impending conflagration were
easily credited : "the secular fire " would descend from
heaven : superstitious fear had even demanded a human
victim.
Marcus Aurelius, always philosophically considerate
of the humours of other people, and indulging that
devout appreciation of every religious pretension which
was one of his most characteristic habits, had invoked,
in aid of the commonwealth, not only all native gods,
but all foreign deities also, however strange."Help!
Help! in the ocean space !" Multitudes of foreign
priests had been welcomed to Rome, with their various
peculiar religious rites. The sacrifices made on this
occasion were remembered for centuries; and the starving
poor, at least, had the profit of the flesh of those herds
"white bulls," which came into the city, day after
day, to yield the savour of their blood and breath to the
gods.
In spite of all this, the legions had but followed their
standards despondently. But prestige, personal prestige,
the name of emperor, still had its magic power over the
nations. The mere march of the Roman army made
an impression on the barbarians. Aurelius and his
colleague had hardly reached Aquileia when a deputation
arrived to ask for peace. And now the two imperial
" brothers" were returning home at leisure ; were waiting,
indeed, at a villa outside the walls, till the capital had
made ready to receive them. But although Rome was
thus in genial reaction, with much relief, and hopefulness
against the winter, facing itself industriously in damask
of red and gold, those two enemies were still unmis-
of
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
takeably extant: the barbarians of the Danube were but
over-awed for a season; and the plague, as we saw when
Marius was on his way to Rome, was not to depart till
it had done a large part in the formation of the melan-
choly picturesque of modern Italytill it had made, or
prepared for the making of the Roman Campagna. The
old, unaffected, really pagan, peace or gaiety, of Antoninus
Piusthat genuine though unconscious humanistwas
gone for ever. And, again and again, throughout this
day of varied observation, Marius had been reminded,
above all else, that he was not merely in "the most
religious city of the world," as one had said, but that
Rome was become the romantic home of the wildest
superstition. It presented itself almost as religious
mania, in many an incident of his long ramble,-
incidents to which he gave his full attention, though
contending in some measure with a reluctance on the
part of his companion, the motive of which he did
not understand till long afterwards. Marius certainly
did not allow this reluctance to deter his own curiosity.
Had he not come to Rome partly under poetic vocation,
to receive all those things, the very impress of life itself,
upon the visual, the imaginative, organ, as upon a
mirror ; to reflect them; to transmute them into golden
words? He must observe that strange medley of
superstition, that centuries' growth, layer upon layer, of
the curiosities of religion (one faith jostling another out
of place) at least for its picturesque interest, and as an
indifferent outsider might, not too deeply concerned
in the question which, if any of them, was to be the
survivor.
Superficially, at least, the Roman religion, allying
itself with much diplomatic economy to possible rivals,
was in possession, as a vast and complex system of
usage, intertwining itself with every detail of public and
private life, attractively enough for those who had but
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
"the historic temper," and a taste for the past, however
much a Lucian might depreciate it. Roman religion, as
Marius knew, had, indeed, been always something to be
done, rather than something to be thought, or believed,
or loved; something to be done in minutely detailed
manner, at a particular time and place, correctness in
which had long been a matter of laborious learning with
a whole school of ritualistsas also, now and again, a
matter of heroic sacrifice with certain exceptionally
devout souls, as when Caius Fabius Dorso, with his life
in his hand, succeeded in passing the sentinels of the
invading Gauls to perform a sacrifice on the Quirinal, and,
thanks to the divine protection, had returned in safety.
So jealous was the distinction between sacred and
profane, that, in the matter of the "regarding of days,"
it had made more than half the year a holiday. Aurelius
had, indeed, ordained that there should be no more than
a hundred and thirty-five festival days in the year; but
in other respects he had followed in the steps of his
predecessor, Antoninus Piuscommended especially for
his religion, his conspicuous devotion to its public
ceremoniesand whose coins are remarkable for their
reference to the oldest and most hieratic types of Roman
mythology. Aurelius had succeeded in more than
healing the old feud between philosophy and religion,
displaying himself, in singular combination, as at once
the most zealous of philosophers and the most devout
of polytheists, and lending himself, with an air of. con-
viction, to all the pageantries of public worship. To his
pious recognition of that one orderly spirit, which,
according to the doctrine of the Stoics, diffuses itself
through the world, and animates ita recognition, in
him, taking the form of constant effort towards an
inward likeness thereto, in the harmonious order of his
own soulhe had added a warm personal devotion
towards the whole multitude of the old national gods,
## p. 138 (#154) ############################################
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
and a great many new foreign ones besides, by him, at least,
not ignobly conceived ; in something like the way (if the
comparison may be reverently made) in which the
Catholic church has added the cultus of the saints to its
worship of the one Divine Being.
And to the view of the majority, though the emperor,
as the personal centre of religion, entertained the hope
of converting his people to philosophic faith, and had
even pronounced certain public discourses for their
instruction in it, that polytheistic devotion was his most
striking feature. Philosophers, indeed, had, for the most
part, thought with Seneca, " that man need not lift his
hands to heaven, nor ask the sacristan's leave to set his
mouth to the ear of an image, that prayer might be
heard the better." Marcus Aurelius, "a master in Israel,"
knew all that well enough: yet his outward devotion
was much more than a concession to popular sentiment,
or a mere result of that sense of fellow-citizenship with
others, which had made him again and again, under
most difficult circumstances, an excellent comrade.
Those others, too!-Amid all their ignorances, what were
they but instruments in the administration of the Divine
Reason, "from end to end sweetly and strongly dispos-
ing all things "? Meantime "Philosophy" itself had
assumed much of what we conceive to be the religious
character. It had even cultivated the habit, the power,
of "spiritual direction;" the troubled soul making
recourse in its hour of destitution, or amid the dis-
tractions of the world, to this or that director-philo-
sopho suowho could really best understand it.
And it had been in vain that the old, grave and
discreet religion of Rome had set itself, according to its
proper genius, to prevent or subdue all trouble and
disturbance in men's souls. In religion, as in other
things, plebeians had a taste for movement, for revolution;
and it had been ever in the most populous quarters that
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
religious changes began. It was to the apparatus of
foreign religion, above all, that recourse was made in
times of public disquietude or sudden terror; and in
those great religious celebrations, before proceeding
against the barbarians, Aurelius had even restored the
solemnities of Isis, prohibited in the capital since the
time of Augustus, making no secret of his worship of that
goddess, though her temple had been actually destroyed
by authority in the reign of Tiberius. Her singular and
in many ways beautiful ritual was now popular in Rome.
And then--what the enthusiasm of the swarming plebeian
quarters had initiated, was sure to be adopted, sooner
or later, by women of fashion. A blending of all the
religions of the ancient world had been accomplished.
The new gods had arrived, had been welcomed, and
found their places; though, certainly, with no real
security, in any adequate ideal of the divine nature itself
in the background of men's minds, that the presence of
the new-comer should be edifying, or even refining.
High and low addressed themselves to all alike without
scruple; confusing them together when they prayed, and
in the old, authorised, threefold veneration of their
visible images, by flowers, incense, and ceremonial lights
those beautiful usages, which the church, in her way
through the world, ever making spoil of the world's
goods for the better uses of the human spirit, took up
and sanctified in her service.
And certainly "the most religious city in the world"
took no care to veil its devotion, however fantastic.
The humblest house had its little chapel or shrine, its
image and lamp; while almost every one seemed to
exercise some religious function and responsibility.
Colleges, composed for the most part of slaves, provided
for the service of the Compitalian Laresthe gods who
presided, respectively, over the several quarters of the
city. In one street, Marius witnessed an incident of
## p. 140 (#156) ############################################
140
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the festival of the patron deity of that neighbourhood,
the way being strewn with box, the houses gay with out-
spread carpets, as the ancient idol was borne through it
in procession, arrayed in costly and curious robes. The
numerous religious clubs had their stated anniversaries,
on which the members issued with much ceremony from
their guild-hall, or schola, and traversed the thoroughfares
of Rome, preceded, like the confraternities of the present
day, by their sacred banners, to offer sacrifice before some
famous image. Black with the perpetual smoke of
lamps and incense, oftenest old and ugly, perhaps on
that account the more likely to listen to the desires of
the suffering,had not those sacred effigies sometimes
given sensible tokens that they were aware ? The
image of Fortuna Muliebris in the Via Latina, had
spoken (not once only) and declared ; Bene me, Matrone !
vidistis riteque dedicastis / The Apollo of Cum had
wept during three whole nights and days. The images
in the temple of Juno Sospita had been seen to sweat.
Nay! there was blood-divine bloodin the hearts of
some of them : the images in the Grove of Feronia had
sweated blood !
From one and all Cornelius had turned away: like
the "atheist," of whom Apuleius tells, he had never once
raised hand to lip in passing image or sanctuary, and had
parted from Marius finally when the latter determined
to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on their
return into the Forum, below the Palatine hill, where the
mothers were pressing in, with a multitude of every sort
of children, to touch the lightning-struck image of the
wolf-nurse of Romulusso tender to little ones !-just
discernible in its dark shrine, amid a blaze of lights.
Marius gazed after his companion of the day, as he
mounted the steps to his lodging, singing to himself, as
it seemed. Marius failed precisely to catch the words.
And, as the rich, fresh evening came on, there was
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
heard all over Rome, far above a whisper, the whole
town seeming hushed to catch it distinctly, the lively,
reckless call to "play," from the sons and daughters of
foolishness, to those in whom their life was still green-
Donec virenti canities abest !-Donec virenti canities abest !
Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have
taken the call. And as for himself, slight as was the
burden of positive moral obligation with which he had
entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant
affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had
committed him.
## p. 142 (#158) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH HEDGE A KING
But ah ! Mcenas is yclad in claye,
And great Augustus long ygoe is dead,
And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead,
That matter made for poets on to playe.
MARCUS AURELIUS who, though he had little relish for
them himself, had ever been willing to humour the taste
of his people for magnificent spectacles, was received
back to Rome with the lesser honours of the Ovation,
conceded by the Senate (so great was the public sense
of deliverance) with even more than the laxity which
had become its habit under imperial rule, for there had
been no actual bloodshed in the late achievement.
Clad in the civic dress of the chief Roman magistrate,
and with a crown of myrtle upon his head, his colleague
similarly attired walking beside him, he passed up to the
Capitol on foot, though in solemn procession along the
Sacred Way, to offer sacrifice to the national gods. The
victim, a goodly sheep, whose image we may still see
between the pig and the ox of the Suovetaurilia, filleted
and stoled almost like some ancient canon of the church,
on a sculptured fragment in the Forum, was conducted by
the priests, clad in rich white vestments, and bearing
their sacred utensils of massy gold, immediately behind a
company of flute-players, led by the great choir-master, or
## p. 143 (#159) ############################################
CHAP. XII
143
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
conductor, of the day, visibly tetchy or delighted, according
as the instruments he ruled with his tuning-rod, rose, more
or less adequately amid the difficulties of the way, to the
dream of perfect music in the soul within him. The
vast crowd, including the soldiers of the triumphant
army, now restored to wives and children, all alike in
holiday whiteness, had left their houses early in the fine,
dry morning, in a real affection for "the father of his
country," to await the procession, the two princes having
spent the preceding night outside the walls, at the old
Villa of the Republic. Marius, full of curiosity, had
taken his position with much care; and stood to see the
world's masters pass by, at an angle from which he could
command the view of a great part of the processional
route, sprinkled with fine yellow sand, and punctiliously
guarded from profane footsteps.
The coming of the pageant was announced by the
clear sound of the flutes, heard at length above the
acclamations of the peopleSalve Imperator ! Dii te
servent !shouted in regular time, over the hills. It
was on the central figure, of course, that the whole
attention of Marius was fixed from the moment when
the procession came in sight, preceded by the lictors
with gilded fasces, the imperial image-bearers, and pages
carrying lighted torches; a band of knights, among whom
was Cornelius in complete military array, following.
Amply swathed about in the folds of a richly worked
toga, after a manner now long since become obsolete with
meaner persons, Marius beheld a man of about five-and-
forty years of age, with prominent eyes eyes, which
although demurely downcast during this essentially
religious ceremony, were by nature broadly and benig-
nantly observant. He was still, in the main, as we see
him in the busts which represent his gracious and courtly
youth, when Hadrian had playfully called him, not Verus,
after the name of his father, but Verissimus, for his
## p. 144 (#160) ############################################
144
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
candour of gaze, and the bland capacity of the brow,
which, below the brown hair, clustering thickly as of old,
shone out low, broad, and clear, and still without a trace
of the trouble of the lips. It was the brow of one who,
amid the blindness or perplexity of the people about him,
understood all things clearly; the dilemma, to which his
experience so far had brought him, between Chance with
meek resignation, and a Providence with boundless possi-
bilities and hope, being for him at least distinctly defined.
That outward serenity, which he valued so highly as
a point of manner or expression not unworthy the care
of a public minister-outward symbol, it might be
thought, of the inward religious serenity it had been his
constant purpose to maintainwas increased to-day by
his sense of the gratitude of his people; that his life had
been one of such gifts and blessings as made his person
seem in very deed divine to them. Yet the cloud of
some reserved internal sorrow, passing from time to time
into an expression of fatigue and effort, of loneliness
amid the shouting multitude, -as if the sagacious hint
of one of his officers, "The soldiers can't understand
you : they don't know Greek," were applicable always to
his relationships with other people,-might have been
detected there by the more observant. The nostrils and
mouth seemed capable of peevishness even; and Marius
noted in them, as in the hands, and in the spare body
generally, what was new to his experiencesomething
of asceticism, as we say, of a bodily gymnastic, by which,
although it told pleasantly in the clear blue humours of
the eye, the flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer with
the spirit. It was hardly the expression of "the healthy
mind in the healthy body," but rather of a sacrifice of
the body to the soul, its needs and aspirations, that
Marius seemed to divine in this assiduous student of the
Greek sages-a sacrifice, in truth, far beyond the demands
of their very saddest philosophy of life.
## p. 145 (#161) ############################################
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Dignify thyself with modesty and simplicity for thine
ornaments !had been ever a maxim with this dainty
and high-bred Stoic, who still thought manners a true
part of morals, according to the old sense of the term,
and who regrets, now and again, that he cannot control
his thoughts equally well with his countenance. That
outward composure was deepened during the solemnities
of this day by an air of pontifical abstraction ; which,
though very far from being pride  nay, a sort of
humility rather  yet gave, to himself, an air of un-
approachableness, and to his whole proceeding, in which
every minutest act was considered, the character of a
ritual. Certainly, there was no haughtiness, social,
moral, or even philosophic, in Aurelius, who had
realised, under more trying conditions perhaps than any
one before, that no element of humanity could be alien
to him. Yet, as he walked to-day, the centre of ten
thousand observers, with eyes discreetly fixed on the
ground, veiling his head at times and muttering very
rapidly the words of the "supplications," there was some-
thing which many a spectator must have noted, again
as a thing new to his experience; for, unlike his pre-
decessors, Aurelius took all that with absolute seriousness.
The doctrine of the sanctity of kings, that, in the words
of Tacitus, Princes are as Gods-Principes instar deorum
esse-seemed to have taken a novel, because a literal,
For Aurelius, indeed, the old legend of his
descent from Numa, from Numa who had talked with
the gods, meant much. Attached in very early years to
the service of the altars, like many another noble youth,
"observed to perform all his sacerdotal functions
with a constancy and exactness unusual at that age; was
soon a master of the sacred music; and had all the forms
and ceremonies by heart." And now, as the emperor,
who had not only a vague divinity about his person,
but was actually the chief religious functionary of the
sense.
he was
L
## p. 146 (#162) ############################################
146
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
state, recited from time to time the forms of invocation,
he needed not the help of the prompter, or ceremoniarius,
who then approached, to assist him by whispering the
appointed words in his ear. It was that pontifical
abstraction which then impressed itself on Marius as
the leading outward characteristic of Aurelius; though
to him alone, perhaps, in that vast crowd of observers,
it was no strange thing, but a matter he had understood
from of old.
Some fanciful writers have assigned the origin of these
triumphal processions to the mythic pomps of Dionysus,
after his conquests in the East; the very word Triumph
being, according to this supposition, only Thriambos 
the Dionysiac Hymn. And certainly the younger of the
two imperial brothers," who, with the effect of a strong
contrast, walked beside Aurelius, and shared the honours
of the day, might well have reminded many of the
delicate Greek god of flowers and wine. This new con-
queror of the East was now about thirty-six years old,
but with his scrupulous care for all his advantages of
person, and soft curling beard powdered with gold, looked
many years younger. It was one result of the more
genial element in the wisdom of Aurelius that, amid very
difficult circumstances, he had known throughout life
how to act in union with persons of character very alien
from his own; to be more than loyal to the colleague,
the younger brother in empire, he had too lightly taken
to himself, five years before, then an uncorrupt youth,
"skilled in manly exercises and fitted for war." When
Aurelius thanks the gods that a brother had fallen to his
lot, whose character was a stimulus to the proper care of
his own, one sees that this could only have happened in
the way of an example, putting him on his guard against
insidious faults. But it is with sincere amiability that
the imperial writer, who was indeed little used to be
ironical, adds that the lively respect and affection of the
## p. 147 (#163) ############################################
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
junior had often "gladdened" him. To be able to make
his use of the flower, when the fruit perhaps was useless
or poisonous :that, was one of the practical successes
of his philosophy; and his people noted, with a blessing,
"the concord of the two Augusti."
The younger, certainly, possessed in full measure that
charm of a constitutional freshness of aspect which may
defy for a long time extravagant or erring habits of life;
a physiognomy, healthy-looking, cleanly, and firm, which
seemed unassociable with any form of self-torment, and
made one think of the nozzle of some young hound or
roe, such as human beings invariably like to stroke-
a physiognomy, in effect, with all the goodliness of
animalism of the finer sort, though still wholly animal.
It was the charm of the blond head, the unshrinking
gaze, the warm tints : neither more nor less than one
may see every English summer, in youth, manly enough,
and with the stuff which makes brave soldiers, in spite of
the natural kinship it seems to have with playthings and
But innate in Lucius Verus there was
that more than womanly fondness for fond things,
which had made the atmosphere of the old city of
Antioch, heavy with centuries of voluptuousness, a poison
to him : he had come to love his delicacies best out of
season, and would have gilded the very flowers. But
with a wonderful power of self-obliteration, the elder
brother at the capital had directed his procedure
successfully, and allowed him, now also the husband of
his daughter Lucilla, the credit of a "Conquest," though
Verus had certainly not returned a conqueror over him-
self. He had returned, as we know, with the plague in
his company, along with many another strange creature
of his folly; and when the people saw him publicly feed-
ing his favourite horse Fleet with almonds and sweet
grapes, wearing the animal's image in gold, and finally
building it a tomb, they felt, with some un-sentimental
gay flowers.
## p. 148 (#164) ############################################
148
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
misgiving, that he might revive the manners of Nero.-
What if, in the chances of war, he should survive the
protecting genius of that elder brother ?
He was all himself to-day : and it was with much
wistful curiosity that Marius regarded him. For Lucius
Verus was, indeed, but the highly expressive type of a
class,-the true son of his father, adopted by Hadrian.
Lucius Verus the elder, also, had had the like strange
capacity for misusing the adornments of life, with a
masterly grace; as if such misusing were, in truth, the
quite adequate occupation of an intelligence, powerful,
but distorted by cynical philosophy or some disappoint-
ment of the heart. It was almost a sort of genius, of
which there had been instances in the imperial purple :
it was to ascend the throne, a few years later, in the
person of one, now a hopeful little lad in the palace;
and it had its following, of course, among the wealthy
youth of Rome, who concentrated no inconsiderable
force of shrewdness and tact upon minute details of
attire and manner, as upon the one thing needful.
Certainly, flowers were pleasant to the eye. Such things
had even their sober use, as making the outside of
human life superficially attractive, and thereby promot-
ing the first steps towards friendship and social amity.
But what precise place could there be for Verus and his
charm, in that Wisdom, that Order of Reason "reaching
from end to end, strongly and sweetly disposing all
things," from the vision of which Aurelius came down,
so tolerant of persons like him ? Into such vision
Marius too was certainly well-fitted to enter, yet, noting
the actual perfection of Lucius Verus after his kind, his
undeniable achievement of the select, in all minor things,
felt, though with some suspicion of himself, that he entered
into, and could understand, that sort of character also.
There was a voice in the theory he had brought to
Rome with him which whispered "nothing is either great
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
nor small;"as there were times when he could have thought
that, as the "grammarian's " or the artist's ardour of soul
may be satisfied by the perfecting of the theory of a
sentence, or the adjustment of two colours, so his own
life also might have been fulfilled by an enthusiastic
quest after perfection ;-say, in the flowering and fold-
ing of a toga.
The emperors had burned incense before the image
of Jupiter, arrayed in its most gorgeous apparel, amid
sudden shouts from the people of Salve Imperator !
turned now from the living princes to the deity, as they
discerned his countenance through the great open doors.
The imperial brothers had deposited their crowns of
myrtle on the richly embroidered lapcloth of the god;
and, with their chosen guests, sat down to a public feast
in the temple itself. There followed what was, after all,
the great event of the day an appropriate discourse,
a discourse almost wholly de contemptu mundi, delivered
in the presence of the assembled Senate, by the emperor
Aurelius, who had thus, on certain rare occasions, con-
descended to instruct his people, with the double
authority of a chief pontiff and a laborious student of
philosophy. In those lesser honours of the ovation,
there had been no attendant slave behind the emperors,
to make mock of their effulgence as they went; and it
was as if with the discretion proper to a philosopher, and
in fear of a jealous Nemesis, he had determined himself
to protest in time against the vanity of all outward
success.
The Senate was assembled to hear the emperor's
discourse in the vast hall of the Curia Julia. A crowd
of high-bred youths was idling around on the steps
before the doors, with the marvellous toilets Marius had
noticed in the Via Nova; in attendance, as usual, to
learn by observation all the delicacies of the senatorial
procedure. Marius had already some acquaintance with
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150
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
them, and passing on found himself suddenly in the
presence of what was still the most august assembly the
world had seen. Under Aurelius, ever full of vener-
ation for this ancient traditional guardian of public
religion, the Senate had recovered all its old dignity and
independence. Among its members many hundreds in
number, visibly the most distinguished of them all,
Marius noted the great sophists or rhetoricians of the
day, in all their magnificence. The antique character
of their attire, and the ancient mode of wearing it, still
surviving with them, added to the imposing character
of their persons, as they sat, with their staves of ivory
in their hands, on their curule chairs (almost the exact
pattern of the chair, still in use in the Roman church
when a Bishop pontificates at the divine offices) "tranquil
and unmoved, with a majesty that seemed divine," as
Marius thought, like the old Gaul of the Invasion. The
rays of the early November sunset slanted full
upon
the
audience, and made it necessary for the officers of the
Court to draw the purple curtains over the windows,
adding to the solemnity of the scene. In the depth of
those warm shadows, surrounded by her noble ladies,
the empress Faustina was seated to listen. The
beautiful Greek statue of Victory, which ever since the
days of Augustus had presided over the assemblies of
the Senate, had been brought into the hall, and placed
near the chair of the emperor ; who, after rising to per-
form a brief sacrificial service in its honour, bowing
reverently to the assembled fathers left and right, took
his seat and began to speak.
There was a certain melancholy grandeur in the very
simplicity or triteness of the theme : as it were the very
quintessence of all the old Roman epitaphs, of all that
was monumental in that city of tombs, layer upon layer
of dead things and people. As if in the very fervour of
disillusion, he seemed to be composing-WOTEP  cypaps
## p. 151 (#167) ############################################
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
-- the sepulchral titles of ages and
whole peoples ; nay! the very epitaph of the living Rome
itself. The grandeur of the ruins of Rome,-heroism
in ruin : it was under the influence of an imaginative
anticipation of this, that he appeared to be speaking.
And though the impression of the actual greatness of
Rome on that day was but enhanced by that strain of
contempt, falling with an accent of pathetic conviction
from the emperor himself, and gaining from his pontifical
pretensions the authority of a religious intimation, yet
the curious interest of the discourse lay in this, that
Marius, as he listened, seemed to foresee a grass-grown
Forum, the broken ways of the Capitol, and the Palatine
hill itself in humble occupation. That impression con-
nected itself with what he had already noted of an actual
change even then coming over Italian scenery. Through-
out, he could trace something of a humour into which
Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the tendency to cry,
Abase yourselves! It was the almost inhuman impassi-
bility of one who had thought too closely on the
paradoxical aspect of the love of posthumous fame.
With the ascetic pride which lurks under all Platonism,
resultant from its opposition of the seen to the unseen,
as falsehood to truththe imperial Stoic, like his true
descendant, the hermit of the middle age, was ready, in
no friendly humour, to mock, there in its narrow bed,
the corpse, which had made so much of itself in life.
Marius could but contrast all that with his own Cyrenaic
eagerness, just then, to taste and see and touch ; reflect-
ing on the opposite issues deducible from the same text.
"The world, within me and without, flows away like a
river," he had said ; "therefore let me make the most of
what is here and now." "The world and the thinker
upon it, are consumed like a flame," said Aurelius,
"and therefore will I turn away my eyes from vanity :
renounce : withdraw myself alike from all affections."
66
## p. 152 (#168) ############################################
152
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
concern
He seemed tacitly to claim as a sort of personal dignity,
that he was very familiarly versed in this view of things,
and could discern a death's-head everywhere. Now
and again, Marius was reminded of the saying that
"with the Stoics all people are the vulgar save them-
selves ;" and at times the orator seemed to have for-
gotten his audience, and to be speaking only to himself.
"Art thou in love with men's praises, get thee into the
very soul of them, and see !see what judges they be,
even in those matters which
themselves.
Wouldst thou have their praise after death, bethink thee,
that they who shall come hereafter, and with whom thou
wouldst survive by thy great name, will be but as these,
whom here thou hast found so hard to live with. For
of a truth, the soul of him who is aflutter upon renown
after death, presents not this aright to itself, that of
all whose memory he would have each one will likewise
very quickly depart, until memory herself be put out, as
she journeys on by means of such as are themselves on
the wing but for a while, and are extinguished in their
turn.Making so much of those thou wilt never see !
It is as if thou wouldst have had those who were before
thee discourse fair things concerning thee.
"To him, indeed, whose wit hath been whetted by
true doctrine, that well-worn sentence of Homer sufficeth,
to guard him against regret and fear.
Like the race of leaves
The race of man is :-
The wind in autumn strows
The earth with old leaves : then the spring the woods with
new endows.
Leaves ! little leaves !thy children, thy flatterers, thine
enemies ! Leaves in the wind, those who would devote
thee to darkness, who scorn or miscall thee
as they also whose great fame shall outlast them. For all
these, and the like of them, are born indeed in the spring
even
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XII
153
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
season-    : and soon a wind hath
scattered them, and thereafter the wood peopleth itself
again with another generation of leaves. And what
is common to all of them is but the littleness of their
lives : and yet wouldst thou love and hate, as if these
things should continue for ever. In a little while thine
eyes also will be closed, and he on whom thou perchance
hast leaned thyself be himself a burden upon another.
" Bethink thee often of the swiftness with which the
things that are, or are even now coming to be, are swept
past thee: that the very substance of them is but the
perpetual motion of water : that there is almost nothing
which continueth : of that bottomless depth of time, so
close at thy side. Folly ! to be lifted up, or sorrowful,
or anxious, by reason of things like these! Think of
infinite matter, and thy portion-how tiny a particle, of
it! of infinite time, and thine own brief point there ; of
destiny, and the jot thou art in it; and yield thyself
readily to the wheel of Clotho, to spin of thee what web
she will.
"As one casting a ball from his hand, the nature of
things hath had its aim with every man, not as to the
ending only, but the first beginning of his course, and
passage thither. And hath the ball any profit of its
rising, or loss as it descendeth again, or in its fall? or
the bubble, as it groweth or breaketh on the air ? or the
flame of the lamp, from the beginning to the end of its
brief story?
"All but at this present that future is, in which
nature, who disposeth all things in order, will transform
whatsoever thou now seest, fashioning from its substance
somewhat else, and therefrom somewhat else in its turn,
lest the world
grow
old. We are such stuff as dreams
are made ofdisturbing dreams. Awake, then ! and see
thy dream as it is, in comparison with that erewhile it
seemed to thee.
## p. 154 (#170) ############################################
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
.
"And for me, especially, it were well to mind those
many mutations of empire in time past; therein peeping
also upon the future, which must needs be of like
species with what hath been, continuing ever within the
rhythm and number of things which really are; so that
in forty years one may note of man and of his ways
little less than in a thousand. Ah! from this higher place,
look we down upon the shipwrecks and the calm !
Consider, for example, how the world went, under the
emperor Vespasian. They are married and given in
marriage, they breed children ; love hath its way with
them; they heap up riches for others or for themselves;
they are murmuring at things as then they are; they are
seeking for great place; crafty, flattering, suspicious,
waiting upon the death of others :-festivals, business,
war, sickness, dissolution : and now their whole life is no
longer anywhere at all. Pass on to the reign of Trajan :
all things continue the same: and that life also is no
longer anywhere at all. Ah! but look again, and
consider, one after another, as it were the sepulchral
inscriptions of all peoples and times, according to one
pattern.What multitudes, after their utmost striving
-a little afterwards ! were dissolved again into their
dust.
"Think again of life as it was far off in the ancient
world; as it must be when we shall be gone; as it is
now among the wild heathen. How many have never
heard your names and mine, or will soon forget them !
How soon may those who shout my name to-day begin
to revile it, because glory, and the memory
of
men,
and
all things beside, are but vanitya sand-heap under the
senseless wind, the barking of dogs, the quarrelling of
children, weeping incontinently upon their laughter.
" This hasteth to be; that other to have been : of
that which now cometh to be, even now somewhat hath
been extinguished. And wilt thou make thy treasure of
## p. 155 (#171) ############################################
XII
155
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
any one of these things ? It were as if one set his love
upon the swallow, as it passeth out of sight through the
air !
"Bethink thee often, in all contentions public and
private, of those whom men have remembered by reason
of their anger and vehement spiritthose famous rages,
and the occasions of them - the great fortunes, and
misfortunes, of men's strife of old. What are they all
now, and the dust of their battles ? Dust and ashes
indeed; a fable, a mythus, or not so much as that. Yes!
keep those before thine eyes who took this or that, the
like of which happeneth to thee, so hardly; were so
querulous, so agitated. And where again are they?
Wouldst thou have it not otherwise with thee ?
"Consider how quickly all things vanish awaytheir
bodily structure into the general substance; the very
memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past
thoughts. Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earth thou art
creeping through lifea pigmy soul carrying a dead body
to its grave.
" Let death put thee upon the consideration both of
thy body and thy soul : what an atom of all matter hath
been distributed to thee; what a little particle of the
universal mind. Turn thy body about, and consider
what thing it is, and that which old age, and lust, and
the languor of disease can make of it. Or come to its
substantial and causal qualities, its very type : con-
template that in itself, apart from the accidents of matter,
and then measure also the span of time for which the
nature of things, at the longest, will maintain that special
type. Nay! in the very principles and first constituents
of things corruption hath its part  so much dust,
humour, stench, and scraps of bone ! Consider that
thy marbles are but the earth's callosities, thy gold and
silver its fces; this silken robe but a worm's bedding,
and thy purple an unclean fish. Ah! and thy life's
## p. 156 (#172) ############################################
156
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
breath is not otherwise, as it passeth out of matters like
these, into the like of them again.
"For the one soul in things, taking matter like wax
in the hands, moulds and remouldshow hastily !-
beast, and plant, and the babe, in turn: and that which
dieth hath not slipped out of the order of nature, but,
remaining therein, hath also its changes there, disparting
into those elements of which nature herself, and thou
too, art compacted. She changes without murmuring.
The oaken chest falls to pieces with no more complaining
than when the carpenter fitted it together. If one told
thee certainly that on the morrow thou shouldst die, or
at the furthest on the day after, it would be no great
matter to thee to die on the day after to-morrow, rather
than to-morrow. Strive to think it a thing no greater
that thou wilt dienot to-morrow, but a year, or two
years, or ten years from to-day.
"I find that all things are now as they were in the
days of our buried ancestors -all things sordid in their
elements, trite by long usage, and yet ephemeral. How
ridiculous, then, how like a countryman in town, is he,
who wonders at aught. Doth the sameness, the repeti-
tion of the public shows, weary thee? Even so doth
that likeness of events in the spectacle of the world.
And so must it be with thee to the end. For the wheel
of the world hath ever the same motion, upward and
downward, from generation to generation. When, when,
shall time give place to eternity ?
"If there be things which trouble thee thou canst
put them away, inasmuch as they have their being but
in thine own notion concerning them. Consider what
death is, and how, if one does but detach from it the
appearances, the notions, that hang about it, resting the
eye upon it as in itself it really is, it must be thought of
but as an effect of nature, and that man but a child
whom an effect of nature shall affright. Nay! not
## p. 157 (#173) ############################################
XII
157
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
:
Turn thy
function and effect of nature, only; but a thing profit-
able also to herself.
"To cease from actionthe ending of thine effort
to think and do: there is no evil in that.
thought to the ages of man's life, boyhood, youth,
maturity, old age : the change in every one of these also
is a dying, but evil nowhere. Thou climbedst into the
ship, thou hast made thy voyage and touched the shore :
go forth now! Be it into some other life : the divine
breath is everywhere, even there. Be it into forgetful-
ness for ever : at least thou wilt rest from the beating of
sensible images upon thee, from the passions which
pluck thee this way and that like an unfeeling toy, from
those long marches of the intellect, from thy toilsome
ministry to the flesh.
"Art thou yet more than dust and ashes and bare
bonea name only, or not so much as that, which,
also, is but whispering and a resonance, kept alive from
mouth to mouth of dying abjects who have hardly
known themselves; how much less thee, dead so
long ago !
"When thou lookest upon a wise man, a lawyer, a
captain of war, think upon another gone. When thou
seest thine own face in the glass, call up there before
thee one of thine ancestorsone of those old Csars.
Lo! everywhere, thy double before thee! Thereon,
let the thought occur to thee: And where are they?
anywhere at all, for ever? And thou, thyself-how
long? Art thou blind to that thou artthy matter,
how temporal; thy function, the nature of thy busi-
ness? Yet tarry, at least, till thou hast assimilated
even these things to thine own proper essence, as
quick fire turneth into heat and light whatsoever be cast
a
upon it.
" As words once in use are antiquated to us, so is it
with the names that were on all men's lips :
once
## p. 158 (#174) ############################################
158
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Camillus, Volesus, Leonnatus : then, in a little while,
Scipio and Cato, and then Augustus, and then Hadrian,
and then Antoninus Pius. How many great physicians
who lifted wise brows at other men's sick-beds, have
sickened and died ? Those wise Chaldeans, who fore-
told, as a great matter, another man's last hour, have
themselves been taken by surprise. Ay! and all those
others, in their pleasant places : those who doated on
a Capre like Tiberius, on their gardens, on the baths :
Pythagoras and Socrates, who reasoned so closely
upon immortality: Alexander, who used the lives of
others as though his own should last for everhe and
his mule-driver alike now !-one upon another. Well-
nigh the whole court of Antoninus is extinct. Panthea
and Pergamus sit no longer beside the sepulchre of
their lord. The watchers over Hadrian's dust have
slipped from his sepulchre.  It were jesting to stay .
longer. Did they sit there still, would the dead feel
it? or feeling it, be glad? or glad, hold those watchers
for ever ? The time must come when they too shall be
aged men and aged women, and decease, and fail from
their places; and what shift were there then for imperial
service? This too is but the breath of the tomb, and a
skinful of dead men's blood.
"Think again of those inscriptions, which belong
not to one soul only, but to whole families : "Eoxatos
To idiov yvovs : He was the last of his race.
Nay! of
the burial of whole cities : Helice, Pompeii: of others,
whose very burial-place is unknown.
"Thou hast been a citizen in this wide city. Count
not for how long, nor repine ; since that which sends
thee hence is no unrighteous judge, no tyrant, but
Nature, who brought thee hither; as when a player
leaves the stage at the bidding of the conductor who
hired him. Sayest thou, 'I have not played five acts'?
True! but in human life, three acts only make some-
## p. 159 (#175) ############################################
XII
159
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
snow.
times an entire play. That is the composer's business,
not thine. Retire with a good will; for that too hath,
perchance, a good will which dismisseth thee from thy
part.
The discourse ended almost in darkness, the evening
having set in somewhat suddenly, with a heavy fall of
The torches, made ready to do him a useless
honour, were of real service now, as the emperor was
solemnly conducted home; one man rapidly catching
light from another - a long stream of moving lights
across the white Forum, up the great stairs, to the
palace. And, in effect, that night winter began, the
hardest that had been known for a lifetime. The
wolves came from the mountains; and, led by the
carrion scent, devoured the dead bodies which had been
hastily buried during the plague, and, emboldened by
their meal, crept, before the short day was well past,
over the walls of the farmyards of the Campagna. The
eagles were seen driving the flocks of smaller birds
across the dusky sky. Only, in the city itself the winter
was all the brighter for the contrast, among those who
could pay for light and warmth. The habit-makers
made a great sale of the spoil of all such furry creatures
as had escaped wolves and eagles, for presents at the
Saturnalia ; and at no time had the winter roses from
Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red.
## p. 160 (#176) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
THE
MISTRESS AND MOTHER
OF PALACES
AFTER that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at
work, softening leaf and bud, as you might feel by a
faint sweetness in the air ; but he did his work behind
an evenly white sky, against which the abode of the
Csars, its cypresses and bronze roofs, seemed like a
picture in beautiful but melancholy colour, as Marius
climbed the long flights of steps to be introduced to the
emperor Aurelius.
Attired in the newest mode, his
legs wound in dainty fasci of white leather, with the
heavy gold ring of the ingenuus, and in his toga of
ceremony, he still retained all his country freshness of
complexion. The eyes of the "golden youth" of Rome
were upon him as the chosen friend of Cornelius,
and the destined servant of the emperor; but not
jealously. In spite of, perhaps partly because of,
his habitual reserve of manner, he had become
"the fashion," even among those who felt instinctively
the irony which lay beneath that remarkable self-
possession, as of one taking all things with a difference
from other people, perceptible in voice, in expression,
and even in his dress. It
was, in truth, the air of one
who, entering vividly into life, and relishing to the full-
the delicacies of its intercourse, yet feels all the while,
from the point of view of an ideal philosophy, that he is
## p. 161 (#177) ############################################
CHAP. XIII
161
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
but conceding reality to suppositions, choosing of his
own will to walk in a day-dream, of the illusiveness
of which he at least is aware.
In the house of the chief chamberlain Marius waited
for the due moment of admission to the emperor's
presence. He was admiring the peculiar decoration of
the walls, coloured like rich old red leather. In the
midst of one of them was depicted, under a trellis of
fruit you might have gathered, the figure of a woman
knocking at a door with wonderful reality of perspective.
Then the summons came; and in a few minutes, the
etiquette of the imperial household being still a simple
matter, he had passed the curtains which divided the
central hall of the palace into three parts  three
degrees of approach to the sacred personand was
speaking to Aurelius himself; not in Greek, in which
the emperor oftenest conversed with the learned, but,
more familiarly, in Latin, decorated however, or dis-
figured, by many a Greek phrase, as now and again
French phrases have made the adornment of fashionable
English. It was with real kindliness that Marcus
Aurelius looked upon Marius, as a youth of great
attainments in Greek letters and philosophy; and
he liked also his serious expression, being, as we know,
a believer in the doctrine of physiognomythat, as he
puts it, not love only, but every other affection of man's
soul, looks out very plainly from the window of the
eyes.
The apartment in which Marius found himself was
of ancient aspect, and richly adorned with the favourite
toys of two or three generations of imperial collectors,
now finally revised by the high connoisseurship of the
Stoic emperor himself, though destined not much longer
to remain together there. It is the repeated boast
of Aurelius that he had learned from old Antoninus
Pius to maintain authority without the constant use of
M
## p. 162 (#178) ############################################
162
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
do so.
guards, in a robe woven by the handmaids of his own
consort, with no processional lights or images, and "that a
prince may shrink himself almost into the figure of a private
gentleman." And yet, again as at his first sight of him,
Marius was struck by the profound religiousness of the
surroundings of the imperial presence. The effect
might have been due in part to the very simplicity,
the discreet and scrupulous simplicity, of the central
figure in this splendid abode ; but Marius could not
forget that he saw before him not only the head of
the Roman religion, but one who might actually have
claimed something like divine worship, had he cared to
Though the fantastic pretensions of Caligula
had brought some contempt on that claim, which had
become almost a jest under the ungainly Claudius, yet,
from Augustus downwards, a vague divinity had seemed
to surround the Csars even in this life; and the
peculiar character of Aurelius, at once a ceremonious
polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical calling,
and a philosopher whose mystic speculation encircled
him with a sort of saintly halo, had restored to his
person, without his intending it, something of that
divine prerogative, or prestige. Though he would
never allow the immediate dedication of altars to
himself, yet the image of his Geniushis spirituality
or celestial counterpart was placed among those of
the deified princes of the past; and his family,
including Faustina and the young Commodus, was
spoken of as the "holy" or "divine" house. Many a
Roman courtier agreed with the barbarian chief, who,
after contemplating a predecessor of Aurelius, withdrew
from his presence with the exclamation :"I have
seen Gods to-day!" The very roof of his house, rising
into a pediment or gable, like that of the sanctuary of a
god, the laurels on either side its doorway, the chaplet
of oak-leaves above, seemed to designate the place for
## p. 163 (#179) ############################################
XIII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
religious veneration. And notwithstanding all this, the
household of Aurelius was singularly modest, with none
of the wasteful expense of palaces after the fashion of
Lewis the Fourteenth; the palatial dignity being felt
only in a peculiar orderliness, the absence of all that
was casual, of vulgarity and discomfort. A merely
official residence of his predecessors, the Palatine had
become the favourite dwelling-place of Aurelius; its
many-coloured memories suiting, perhaps, his pensive
character, and the crude splendours of Nero and Hadrian
being now subdued by time. The window-less Roman
abode must have had much of what to a modern would
be gloom. How did the children, one wonders, endure
houses with so little escape for the eye into the world
outside? Aurelius, who had altered little else, choosing
to live there, in a genuine homeliness, had shifted, and
made the most of, the level lights, and broken out a
quite medieval window here and there, and the clear
daylight, fully appreciated by his youthful visitor, made
pleasant shadows among the objects of the imperial
collection; as some of them, by reason of their Greek
simplicity and grace, themselves shone out like spaces of
a purer, early light, amid the splendours of the later
Roman manufacture.
Though he looked, thought Marius, like a man who
did not sleep enough, he was abounding and bright
to-day, after one of those pitiless headaches, which since
boyhood had been the "thorn in his side," challenging
the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one in humble
endurances. At the first moment, to Marius, remem-
bering the spectacle of the emperor in ceremony, it was
almost bewildering to be in private conversation with
him. There was much in the philosophy of Aurelius
much consideration of mankind at large, of great bodies,
aggregates and generalities, after the Stoic manner-
which, on a nature less rich than his, might have
## p. 164 (#180) ############################################
164
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
acted as an inducement to care for people in inverse
proportion to their nearness to him. That has some-
times been the result of the Stoic cosmopolitanism.
Aurelius, however, determined to beautify by all means,
great or little, a doctrine which had in it some potential
sourness, had brought all the quickness of his intelligence,
and long years of observation, to bear on the conditions
of social intercourse. He had early determined "not to
make business an excuse to decline the offices of
humanitynot to pretend to be too much occupied
with important affairs to concede what life with others
may hourly demand;" and with such success, that, in
an age which made much of the finer points of that
intercourse, it was felt that the mere honesty of his con-
versation was more pleasing than other men's flattery.
His agreeableness to his young visitor to-day was, in
truth, a blossom of the same wisdom which had made
of Lucius Verus really a brotherthe wisdom of not being
exigent with men, any more than with fruit-trees (it is
his own favourite figure) beyond their nature. And
there was another person, still nearer to him, regarding
whom this wisdom became a marvel, of equityof
charity.
The centre of a group of princely children, in the
same apartment with Aurelius, amid all the refined
intimacies of a modern home, sat the empress Faustina,
warming her hands over a fire. With her long fingers
lighted up red by the glowing coals of the brazier Marius
looked close upon the most beautiful woman in the
world, who was also the great paradox of the age, among her
boys and girls. As has been truly said of the numerous
representations of her in art, so in life, she had the air
of one restless to enter into conversation with the first
She had certainly the power of stimulating a
very ambiguous sort of curiosity about herself. And
Marius found this enigmatic point in her expression, that
comer.
## p. 165 (#181) ############################################
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165
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
even after seeing her many times he could never pre-
cisely recall her features in absence. The lad of six
years, but looking older, who stood beside her, im-
patiently plucking a rose to pieces over the hearth, was,
in outward appearance, his fatherthe young Verissimus
-over again; but with a certain feminine length of
feature, and with all his mother's alertness, or license, of
gaze.
Yet rumour knocked at every door and window of
the imperial house regarding the adulterers who knocked
at them, or quietly left their lovers' garlands there.
Was not that likeness of the husband, in the boy beside
her, really the effect of a shameful magic, in which the
blood of the murdered gladiator, his true father, had
been an ingredient? Were the tricks for deceiving
husbands which the Roman poet describes, really hers,
and her household an efficient school of all the arts of
furtive love? Or, was the husband too aware, like
every one beside? Were certain sudden deaths which
happened there, really the work of apoplexy, or the
plague ?
The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumours
were meant to penetrate, was, however, faithful to his
sanguine and optimist philosophy, to his determination
that the world should be to him simply what the higher
reason preferred to conceive it; and the life's journey
Aurelius had made so far, though involving much moral
and intellectual loneliness, had been ever in affectionate
and helpful contact with other wayfarers, very unlike him-
self. Since his days of earliest childhood in the Lateran
gardens, he seemed to himself, blessing the gods for it
after deliberate survey, to have been always surrounded
by kinsmen, friends, servants, of exceptional virtue.
From the great St idea, that we are all fellow-citizens
of one city, he had derived a tenderer, more equitable
estimate than is common among Stoics, of the eternal
## p. 166 (#182) ############################################
166
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
are
more
shortcomings of men and women. Considerations that
might tend to the sweetening of his temper it was his daily
care to store away, with a kind of philosophic pride in the
thought that no one took more good-naturedly than he
the "oversights" of his neighbours. For had not Plato
taught, (it was not paradox, but simple truth of experience,)
that if people sin, it is because they know no better, and
under the necessity of their own ignorance"?
Hard to himself, he seemed at times to decline too softly
upon unworthy persons. Actually, he came thereby
upon many a useful instrument. The empress Faustina
he would seem at least to have kept, by a constraining
affection, from becoming altogether what most people
have believed her, and won in her (we must take him at
his word in the "Thoughts," abundantly confirmed by
letters, on both sides, in his correspondence with
Cornelius Fronto) a consolation, the secure,
perhaps, because misknown of others. Was the secret
of her actual blamelessness, after all, with him who has
at least screened her name ? At all events, the one
thing quite certain about her, besides her extraordinary
beauty, is her sweetness to himself.
No! The wise, who had made due observation on the
trees of the garden, would not expect to gather grapes
of thorns or fig-trees : he was the vine, putting forth his
genial fruit, by natural law, again and again, after his
kind, whatever use people might make of it. Certainly,
his actual presence never lost its power, and Faustina
was glad in it to-day, the birthday of one of her children,
a boy who stood at her knee holding in his fingers
tenderly a tiny silver trumpet, one of his birthday gifts.
"For my part, unless I conceive my hurt as such, I
have no hurt at all,"boasts the would be apathetic
emperor :"and how I care to conceive of the thing
rests with me." Yet when his children fall sick or die,
this pretence breaks down, and he is broken-hearted :
## p. 167 (#183) ############################################
XIII
167
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
and one of the charms of certain of his letters still
extant, is his reference to those childish sicknesses.-
"On my return to Lorium," he writes, "I found my
little lady-domnulam meamin a fever ;" and again,
in a letter to one of the most serious of men, "You will
be glad to hear that our little one is better, and running
about the room parvolam nostram melius valere et
intra cubiculum discurrere."
The young Commodus had departed from the cham-
ber, anxious to witness the exercises of certain gladiators,
with a native taste for such company, inherited, according
to popular rumour, from his true father-anxious also to
escape from the too impressive company of the gravest
and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had ever seen,
the tutor of the imperial children, who had arrived to
offer his birthday congratulations, and now, very
familiarly and affectionately, made a part of the group,
falling on the shoulders of the emperor, kissing the
empress Faustina on the face, and the little ones both on
the face and hands. Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the
"Orator," favourite among all the teachers of the
emperor's youth, afterwards his most trusted counsellor,
and now the undisputed occupant of the sophistic throne,
whose equipage, elegantly mounted with silver, Marius
had seen in the streets of Rome, had certainly turned
his many personal gifts to account with a good fortune,
remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to professors
or rhetoricians. The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius,
always generous to his teachers, arranging their very
quarrels sometimes, for they were not always fair to each
other, had helped him to a really great place in the
world. But his sumptuous appendages, including the
villa and gardens of Mcenas, had been borne with an
air perfectly becoming, by the professor of a philosophy
which, even in its most accomplished and elegant phase,
pre-supposed a gentle contempt for such things. With
## p. 168 (#184) ############################################
168
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
an intimate practical knowledge of manners, physiognomies,
smiles, disguises, flatteries, and courtly tricks of every kind
-a whole accomplished rhetoric of daily lifehe com-
manded them all for purposes of humanity, and especially
of 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 eloquencethe fame, the
echoes, of itlike warbling birds, or murmuring bees.
Setting forth in that fine medium the best ideas of
matured pagan philosophy, he had become the favourite
" director" of noble youth.
Yes! it was the one instance Marius, always eagerly
on the look-out for such, had yet seen of a perfectly
tolerable, perfectly beautiful, old age---an old age in
which there seemed, to one who perhaps habitually over-
valued the expression of youth, nothing to be regretted,
nothing really lost, in what years had taken away. The
wise old man, whose blue eyes and fair skin were so
delicate, uncontaminate and clear, would seem to have
replaced carefully and consciously each natural trait of
youth, as it departed from him, by an equivalent grace
of culture; and had the blitheness, the placid cheerful-
ness, as he had also the infirmity, the claim on stronger
people, of a delightful child. And yet he seemed to be
but awaiting his exit from lifethat moment with which
the Stoics were almost as much preoccupied as the
Christians, however differentlyand set Marius pondering
on the contrast between a placidity like that, at eighty
years, and the sort of desperateness he was aware of in
his own manner of entertaining that thought. His
infirmities nevertheless had been painful and long-
continued, with losses of children, of pet grandchildren.
What with the crowd, and the wretched streets, it was a
sign of affection which had cost him something, for the old
man to leave his own house at all that day; and he was
glad of the emperor's support, as he moved from place
## p. 169 (#185) ############################################
XIII
169
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
to place among the children he protests so often to have
loved as his own.
For a strange piece of literary good fortune, at the
beginning of the present century, has set free the long-
buried fragrance of this famous friendship of the old
world, from below a valueless later manuscript, in a
series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange, for
the most part their evening thoughts, especially at family
anniversaries, and with entire intimacy, on their children,
on the art of speech, on all the various subtleties of the
"science of images," above all, of course, on sleep and
matters of health. They are full of mutual admiration
of each other's eloquence, restless in absence till they
see each other again, noting, characteristically, their very
dreams of each other, expecting the day which will
terminate the office, the business or duty, which separates
them"as superstitious people watch for the star, at the
rising of which they may break their fast." To one of
the writers, to Aurelius, the correspondence was sincerely
of value. We see him once reading his letters with
genuine delight after retiring to rest. Fronto discourages
his pupil from writing in Greek.Why buy, at great
cost, a foreign wine, inferior to that from one's own vine-
yard ? Aurelius, on the other hand, with an extraordinary
innate susceptibility to wordsla parole pour la parole,
as the French saydespairs, in presence of Fronto's
rhetorical perfection.
Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline and some
other museums, Fronto had been struck, pleasantly
struck, by the family likeness among the Antonines; and
it was part of his friendship to make much of it, in the
case of the children of Faustina. "Well! I have seen
the little ones," he writes to Aurelius, then, apparently,
absent from them: "I have seen the little ones-
the pleasantest sight of my life; for they are as like
yourself as could possibly be. It has well repaid me for
## p. 170 (#186) ############################################
170
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
my journey over that slippery road, and up those steep
rocks; for I beheld you, not simply face to face before
me, but, more generously, whichever way I turned, to
my right or my left. For the rest, I found them,
Heaven be thanked! with healthy cheeks and lusty
voices. One was holding a slice of white bread, like a
king's son; the other a crust of brown bread, as becomes
the offspring of a philosopher. I pray the gods to have
the sower and the seed alike in their keeping; to watch
over this field wherein the ears of corn are so kindly
alike. Ah! I heard too their pretty voices, so sweet that
in the childish prattle of one and the other, I seemed
somehow to be listeningyes ! in that chirping of your
pretty chickensto the limpid and harmonious notes of
your own oratory. Take care ! you will find me growing
independent, having those I could love in your place :
love, on the surety of my eyes and ears."
Magistro meo salutem," replies the father, "I too
have seen my little ones in your sight of them; as, also,
I saw yourself in reading your letter. It is that charm-
ing letter that forces me to write thus."With reiterations
of affection, that is, which are continual in these letters,
on both sides, and which may strike a modern reader
as fulsome perhaps; or, again, as having something in
common with the old Judaic unction of friendship. They
were certainly sincere.
To one of those children Fronto had now brought
the birthday gift of the silver trumpet, upon which he
ventured to blow softly now and again, turning away with
eyes delighted at the sound, when he thought the old
man was not listening. It was the well-worn, valetudi-
narian subject of sleep, on which Fronto and Aurelius
were talking together; Aurelius always feeling it a
burden, Fronto a thing of magic capacities, so that he
had written an encomium in its praise, and often by
ingenious arguments recommends his imperial pupil not
## p. 171 (#187) ############################################
XIII
171
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
to be sparing of it. To-day, with his younger listeners
in mind, he had a story to tell about it :-
"They say that our father Jupiter, when he ordered
the world at the beginning, divided time into two parts
exactly equal : the one part he clothed with light, the
other with darkness : he called them Day and Night; and
he assigned rest to the night and to day the work of
life. At that time Sleep was not yet born and men
passed the whole of their lives awake : only, the quiet of
the night was ordained for them, instead of sleep. But
it came to pass, little by little, being that the minds of
men are restless, that they carried on their business
alike by night as by day, and gave no part at all to
repose. And Jupiter, when he perceived that even in
the night-time they ceased not from trouble and disputa-
tion, and that even the courts of law remained open it
was the pride of Marcus, as Fronto knew, to preside in
such courts till far into the night) resolved to appoint
one of his brothers to be the overseer of the night and
have authority over man's rest. But Neptune pleaded
in excuse the gravity of his constant charge of the seas,
and Father Dis the difficulty of keeping in subjection
the spirits below; and Jupiter, having taken counsel with
the other gods, perceived that the practice of nightly
vigils was somewhat in favour. It was by night, 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 night for his plots
and sallies; and the favour of Venus and Bacchus was
with those who roused by night. Then it was that
Jupiter formed the design of creating Sleep; and he
added him to the number of the gods, and gave him the
charge over night and rest, putting into his hands the
keys of human eyes. With his own hands he mingled
the juices wherewith Sleep should soothe the hearts of
mortalsherb of Enjoyment and herb of Safety, gathered
## p. 172 (#188) ############################################
172
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
from a grove in Heaven; and, from the meadows of
Acheron, the herb of Death ; expressing from it one
single drop only, no bigger than a tear that one might
hide. With this juice,' he said, "pour slumber upon
the eyelids of mortals. So soon as it hath touched them
they will lay themselves down motionless, under thy
power. But be not afraid : they shall revive, and in a
while stand up again upon their feet.' Thereafter,
Jupiter gave wings to Sleep, attached, not, like Mercury's,
to his heels, but to his shoulders, like the wings of Love.
For he said, 'It becomes thee not to approach men's
eyes as with the noise of chariots, and the rushing of a
swift courser, but in placid and merciful flight, as upon
the wings of a swallownay! with not so much as the
flutter of a dove. Besides all this, that he might be
yet pleasanter to men, he committed to him also a
multitude of blissful dreams, according to every man's
desire. One watched his favourite actor; another
listened to the flute, or guided a charioteer in the race:
in his dream, the soldier was victorious, the general was
borne in triumph, the wanderer returned home. Yes!
-and sometimes those dreams come true!"
Just then Aurelius was summoned to make the birth-
day offerings to his household gods. A heavy tapestry
was drawn back; and beyond it Marius gazed for a few
moments into the Lararium, or imperial chapel. A
patrician youth, in white habit, was in waiting, with a little
chest in his hand containing incense for the use of the altar.
On richly carved consoles, or side-boards, around this
narrow chamber, were arranged the rich apparatus of
worship and the golden or gilded images, adorned to-day
with fresh flowers, among them that image of Fortune
from the apartment of Antoninus Pius, and such of the
emperor's own teachers as were gone to their rest. A
dim fresco on the wall commemorated the ancient piety
of Lucius Albinius, who in flight from Rome on the
## p. 173 (#189) ############################################
XIII
173
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
morrow of a great disaster, overtaking certain priests on
foot with their sacred utensils, descended from the wagon
in which he rode and yielded it to the ministers of the
gods. As he ascended into the chapel the emperor
paused, and with a grave but friendly look at his young
visitor, delivered a parting sentence, audible to him
alone: Imitation is the most acceptable part of worship:
the gods had much rather mankind should resemble than
flatter them :-Make sure that those to whom you come
nearest be at least the happier through your presence !
It was the very spirit of the scene and the hourthe
hour Marius had spent in the imperial house. How
temperate, how tranquillising! what humanity! Yet, as
he left the eminent company concerning whose ways of
life at home he had been so youthfully curious, and
sought, after his manner, to determine the main trait
in all this, he had to confess that it was a sentiment
of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for once really
golden.
## p. 174 (#190) ############################################
CHAPTER XIV
MANLY AMUSEMENT
DURING the Eastern war there came a moment when
schism in the empire had seemed possible through the
defection of Lucius Verus; when to Aurelius it had also
seemed possible to confirm his allegiance by no less a
gift than his beautiful daughter Lucilla, the eldest of his
childrenthe domnula, probably, of those letters. The
little lady, grown now to strong and stately maidenhood,
had been ever something of the good genius, the better
soul, to Lucius Verus, by the law of contraries, her
somewhat cold and apathetic modesty acting as counter-
foil to the young man's tigrish fervour. Conducted to
Ephesus, she had become his wife by form of civil
marriage, the more solemn wedding rites being deferred
till their return to Rome.
The ceremony of the Confarreation, or religious
marriage, in which bride and bridegroom partook to-
gether of a certain mystic bread, was celebrated
accordingly, with due pomp, early in the spring;
Aurelius himself assisting, with much domestic feeling.
A crowd of fashionable people filled the space before
the entrance to the apartments of Lucius on the Palatine
hill, richly decorated for the occasion, commenting, not
always quite delicately, on the various details of the
rite, which only a favoured few succeeded in actually
1
## p. 175 (#191) ############################################
CHAP. XIV
175
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
witnessing "She comes !" Marius could hear them
say, "escorted by her young brothers : it is the young
Commodus who carries the torch of white-thorn-wood,
the little basket of work-things, the toys for the children :"
and then, after a watchful pause," she is winding the
woollen thread round the doorposts. Ah! I see the
marriage-cake : the bridegroom presents the fire and
water." Then, in a longer pause, was heard the chorus,
Thalassie! Thalassie! and for just a few moments, in
the strange light of many wax tapers at noonday, Marius
could see them both, side by side, while the bride was
lifted over the doorstep: Lucius Verus heated and
handsomethe pale, impassive Lucilla looking very long
and slender, in her closely folded yellow veil, and high
nuptial crown.
As Marius turned away, glad to escape from the
pressure of the crowd, he found himself face to face with
Cornelius, an infrequent spectator on occasions such as
this. It was a relief to depart with him so fresh and
quiet he looked, though in all his splendid equestrian
array in honour of the ceremonyfrom the garish heat of
the marriage scene. The reserve which had puzzled Marius
so much on his first day in Rome, was but an instance of
many, to him unaccountable, avoidances alike of things
and persons, which must certainly mean that an intimate
companionship would cost him something in the way of
seemingly indifferent amusements. Some inward standard
Marius seemed to detect there (though wholly unable to
estimate its nature) of distinction, selection, refusal, amid
the various elements of the fervid and corrupt life across
which they were moving together :some secret, con-
straining motive, ever on the alert at eye and ear, which
carried him through Rome as under a charm, so that
Marius could not but think of that figure of the white
bird in the market-place as undoubtedly made true of
him. And Marius was still full of admiration for this
## p. 176 (#192) ############################################
176
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
companion, who had known how to make himself very
pleasant to him. Here was the clear, cold corrective,
which the fever of his present life demanded. Without
that, he would have felt alternately suffocated and
exhausted by an existence, at once so gaudy and over-
done, and yet so intolerably empty; in which people,
at their best, seemed only to be brooding, like the wise
emperor himself, over a world's disillusion. For with all
the severity of Cornelius, there was such a breeze of hope-
fulness  freshness and hopefulness, as of new morning,
about him. For the most part, as I said, those refusals,
that reserve of his, seemed unaccountable. But there
were cases where the unknown monitor acted in a
direction with which the judgment, or instinct, of Marius
himself wholly concurred, though still further re-inforced
by the effective decision of Cornelius therein, as by a
kind of outwardly embodied conscience. And the
entire drift of his education determined him, on one
point at least, to be wholly of one mind with this
peculiar friend (they two, it might be, together, against
the world !) when, alone of a whole company of brilliant
youth, he had withdrawn from his appointed place in
the amphitheatre, at a grand public show, which
after an interval of many months, was presented
there, in honour of the nuptials of Lucius Verus and
Lucilla.
And it was still to the eye, through visible movement
and aspect, that the character, or genius of Cornelius
made itself felt by Marius; even as on that afternoon
when he had girt on his armour, among the expressive
lights and shades of the dim old villa at the roadside,
and every object of his knightly array had seemed like a
sign or symbol of some other thing far beyond it. Con-
sistently with his really poetic temper, things reached
Marius, even more exclusively than he was aware, through
the medium of sense. From Flavian, in that brief early
## p. 177 (#193) ############################################
XIV
177
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
summer of his existence, he had derived a powerful
impression of the "perpetual flux": he had caught there,
as in cipher or symbol, or low whispers more effective
than any definite language, his Cyrenaic philosophy,
presented thus, for the first time, in an image or person,
with much attractiveness, and touched also, consequently,
with a pathetic sense of personal sorrow :-a concrete
image, the abstract equivalent of which he recognised
afterwards, when the agitating personal influence had
settled down for him, clearly enough, into a theory of
practice. But of what possible intellectual formula could
this mystic Cornelius be the sensible exponent; seeming,
as he did, to live ever in close relationship with, and
recognition of, a mental view, a source of discernment,
a light upon his way, which had certainly not as yet
sprung up for Marius ? Meantime the discretion of
Cornelius, his energetic clearness and purity, were a
charm, rather physical than moral : his exquisite correct-
ness of spirit, at all events, accorded so perfectly with
the regular beauty of his person, as to seem to depend
And wholly different as was this later friend-
ship, with its exigency, its warnings, its restraints, from
that feverish attachment to Flavian, which had made
him at times like an uneasy slave, still, like that, it was
a reconciliation to the world of sense, the visible world.
From the hopefulness of this gracious presence, all
visible things around him, even the commonest objects
of everyday lifeif they but stood together to warm
their hands at the same fire-took for him a new poetry,
a delicate fresh bloom, and interest. It was as if his
bodily eyes had been indeed mystically washed, renewed,
strengthened.
And how eagerly, with what a light heart, would
Flavian have taken his place in the amphitheatre, among
the youth of his own age ! with what an appetite for every
detail of the entertainment, and its various accessories :-
upon it.
N
## p. 178 (#194) ############################################
178
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the sunshine, filtered into soft gold by the vela,
with their serpentine patterning, spread over the more
select part of the company; the Vestal virgins, taking
their privilege of seats near the empress Faustina, who
sat there in a maze of double-coloured gems, changing,
as she moved, like the waves of the sea; the cool circle
of shadow, in which the wonderful toilets of the fashion-
able told so effectively around the blazing arena, re-
covered at intervals during the many hours' show, with
clean sand for the absorption of certain great red patches
there, by troops of white-shirted boys, for whom the
good-natured audience provided a scramble of nuts and
small coin, flung to them over a trellis-work of amber
and silvergilt, the precious gift of Nero, while a rain of
flowers and perfume fell over themselves, as they paused
between the parts of their long feast upon animal
suffering
During his sojourn at Ephesus, Lucius Verus had
readily become a patron, or protg, of the great goddess
of Ephesus, the goddess of hunters; and the show,
celebrated by way of a compliment to him to-day, was
to present some incidents of her story, in which she
figures almost as the genius of madness, in animals, or
in the humanity which comes in contact with them.
The entertainment would have an element of old Greek
revival in it, welcome to the taste of a learned and
Hellenising society; and, as Lucius Verus was in some
sense a lover of animals, was to be a display of animals
mainly. There would be real wild and domestic creatures,
all of rare species; and a real slaughter. On so happy
an occasion, it was hoped, the elder emperor might even
concede a point, and a living criminal fall into the jaws
of the wild beasts. And the spectacle was, certainly, to
end in the destruction, by one mighty shower of arrows,
of a hundred lions, "nobly" provided by Aurelius himself
for the amusement of his people.Tam magnanimus
fuit!
## p. 179 (#195) ############################################
XIV
179
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
The arena, decked and in order for the first scene,
looked delightfully fresh, re-inforcing on the spirits of the
audience the actual freshness of the morning, which at
this season still brought the dew. Along the subter-
ranean ways that led up to it, the sound of an advancing
chorus was heard at last, chanting the words of a sacred
song, or Hymn to Diana; for the spectacle of the amphi-
theatre was, after all, a religious occasion, its bloodshed
having, in a manner, a sacrificial character, tending con-
veniently to soothe the humane sensibilities of so
religious an emperor as Aurelius, who, in his fraternal
complacency, had consented to preside over the shows.
Artemis or Diana, as she may be understood in the
actual development of her worship, was, indeed, the
symbolical expression of two allied yet contrasted elements
of human temper and experienceman's amity, and also
his enmity, towards the wild creatures, when they were
still, in a certain sense, his brothers. She is the com-
plete, and therefore highly complex, representative of a
state, in which man was still much occupied with
animals, not as his flock, or as his servants after the
pastoral relationship of our later, orderly world, but
rather as his equals, on friendly terms or the reverse,
a state full of primeval sympathies and antipathies, of
rivalries and common wantswhile he watched, and
could enter into the humours of those 'younger
brothers," with an intimacy, the survivals of which in a
later age seem often to have had a kind of madness about
them. Diana represents alike the bright and the dark
side of such relationship. But the humanities of that
relationship were all forgotten to-day in the excitement
of a show, in which mere cruelty to animals, their useless
suffering and death, formed the main point of interest.
The people watched their destruction, batch after batch,
in a not particularly inventive fashion ; though it was
expected that the animals themselves, as living creatures
## p. 180 (#196) ############################################
180
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
are apt to do when hard put to it, would become in-
ventive, and make up, by the fantastic accidents of their
agony, for the deficiencies of an age fallen behind in
this matter of manly amusement. It was as a Deity of
Slaughterthe Taurian goddess who demands the sacri-
fice of the shipwrecked sailors thrown on her coasts-
the cruel, moonstruck huntress, who brings not only
sudden death, but rabies, among the wild creatures, that
Diana was to be presented, in the person of a famous
courtesan. The aim at an actual theatrical illusion, after
the first, introductory scene, was frankly surrendered to
the display of the animals, artificially stimulated and
maddened to attack each other. And as Diana was also
a special protectress of new-born creatures, there would
be an interest in the dexterously contrived escape of the
young from their mothers' torn bosoms;
as many
pregnant animals as possible being carefully selected for
the purpose.
The time had been, and was to come again, when
the pleasures of the amphitheatre centered in a similar
practical joking upon human beings.
What more
ingenious diversion had stage manager ever contrived
than that incident, itself a practical epigram never to
be forgotten, when a criminal, who, like slaves and
animals, had no rights, was compelled to present the
part of Icarus; and, the wings failing him in due course,
had fallen into a crowd of hungry bears ? For the
long shows of the amphitheatre were, so to speak, the
novel-reading of that agethe current help provided for
sluggish imaginations, in the matter of grisly accidents
such as might happen to oneself; but with every facility
for comfortable inspection. Scvola might watch his
own hand consuming in the fire, in the person of a
culprit, willing to redeem his life by an act so delightful
to the eyes, the very ears, of a curious public. If the
part of Marsyas was called for, there was a criminal
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
condemned to lose his skin. It might be almost edify-
ing to study minutely the expression of his face, while
the assistants corded and pegged him to the bench,
cunningly; the servant of the law waiting by, who, after
one short cut with his knife, would slip the man's leg
from his skin, as neatly as if it were a stockinga finesse
in providing the due amount of suffering for wrong-doers
only brought to its height in Nero's living bonfires. But
then, by making his suffering ridiculous, you enlist against
the sufferer, some real, and all would-be manliness, and do
much to stifle any false sentiment of compassion. The
philosophic emperor, having no great taste for sport, and
asserting here a personal scruple, had greatly changed
all that; had provided that nets should be spread under
the dancers on the tight-rope, and buttons for the swords
of the gladiators. But the gladiators were still there.
Their bloody contests had, under the form of a popular
amusement, the efficacy of a human sacrifice; as, indeed,
the whole system of the public shows was understood to
possess a religious import. Just at this point, certainly,
the judgment of Lucretius on pagan religion is without
reproach-
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
And Marius, weary and indignant, feeling isolated in
the great slaughter-house, could not but observe that
Aurelius, in his habitual complaisance to Lucius Verus
who, with loud shouts of applause from time to time,
lounged beside him, had sat impassibly through all the
hours Marius himself had remained there. For the most
part indeed, the emperor had actually averted his eyes
from the show, reading, or writing on matters of public
business, but had seemed, after all, indifferent. He was
revolving, perhaps, that old Stoic paradox of the imper-
ceptibility of pain; which might serve as an excuse,
should those savage popular humours ever again turn
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CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
against men and women. Marius remembered well his
very attitude and expression on this day, when, a few
years later, certain things came to pass in Gaul, under
his full authority; and that attitude and expression defined
already, even thus early in their so friendly intercourse,
and though he was still full of gratitude for his interest,
a permanent point of difference between the emperor
and himselfbetween himself, with all the convictions
of his life taking centre to-day in his merciful, angry
heart, and Aurelius, as representing all the light, all the
apprehensive power there might be in pagan intellect.
There was something in a tolerance such as that, in the
bare fact that he could sit patiently through a scene like
that, which seemed to Marius to mark Aurelius as his
inferior now and for ever on the question of righteous-
ness; to set them on opposite sides, in some great con-
flict, of which this difference was but a single present-
ment. Due, in whatever proportions, to the abstract
principles he had formulated for himself, or in spite of
them, there was the loyal conscience within him, decid-
ing, judging himself and every one else, with a wonderful
sort of authority You ought, methinks, to be some-
thing quite different from that you are ; here ! and here !
Surely Aurelius must be lacking in that decisive conscience
at first sight, of the intimations of which Marius could
entertain no doubt  which he looked for in others.
He at least, the humble follower of the eye, was aware
of a crisis in life, in that brief, obscure existence, a fierce
opposition of real good and real evil around him, the
issues of which he must by no means compromise or
confuse; of the antagonisms of which the "wise" Marcus
Aurelius was unaware.
That long chapter of the cruelty of the Roman public
shows may, perhaps, leave with the children of the
modern world a feeling of self-complacency. Yet it
might seem well to ask ourselvesit is always well to
## p. 183 (#199) ############################################
XIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
do so, when we read of the slave-trade, for instance, or
of great religious persecutions on this side or on that,
or of anything else which raises in us the question,
"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing ? ".
not merely, what germs of feeling we entertain which,
under fitting circumstances, would induce us to the like ;
but, even more practically, what thoughts, what sort of
considerations, may be actually present to our minds
such as might have furnished us, living in another age,
and in the midst of those legal crimes, with plausible
excuses for them : each age, perhaps, having its great
point of blindness, with its consequent great sinthe
touch-stone there of an unfailing conscience in the select
few.
Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of
blindness, of deadness and stupidity, in the age of
Marius ; and his light had not failed him regarding it.
Yes! what was needed was the heart that would make
it impossible to witness all this; and the future would
be with the forces that could beget a heart like that.
His chosen philosophy had said,Trust the eye : Strive
to be right always in regard to the concrete experience :
Beware of falsifying your impressions. And its sanction
had at least been effective here, in protesting-It is what
you may not see !Surely evil was a real thing, and the
wise man wanting in the sense of it, where, not to have
been, by instinctive election, on the right side, was to
have failed in life.
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PART THE THIRD
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CHAPTER XV
STOICISM AT COURT
The very finest flower of the same company-Aurelius
with the gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of
exquisites, the empress Faustina herself, and all the
elegant blue-stockings of the day, who maintained, people
said, their private "sophists" to whisper philosophy into
their ears winsomely as they performed the duties of the
toiletwas assembled again a few months later, in a
different place and for a very different purpose. The
temple of Peace, a "modernising" foundation of
Hadrian, enlarged by a library and lecture-rooms, had
grown into an institution like something between a
college and a literary club; and here Cornelius Fronto
was to pronounce a discourse on the Nature of Morals.
There were some, indeed, who had desired the emperor
Aurelius himself to declare his whole mind on this matter.
Rhetoric was become almost a function of the state :
philosophy was upon the throne; and had from time to
time, by request, delivered an official utterance with
well-nigh divine authority. And it was as the delegate
of this authority, under the full sanction of the philoso-
pher-pontiff, that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to
expound some parts of the Stoic doctrine, with the view
of recommending morals to that refined but perhaps
prejudiced company, as being, in effect, one mode of
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188
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
was
comeliness in thingsas it were music, or a kind of
artistic order, in life. And he did this earnestly, with
an outlay of all his science of mind, and that eloquence
of which he was known to be a master. For Stoicism
was no longer a rude and unkempt thing. Received at
court, it had largely decorated itself: it was grown
persuasive and insinuating, and sought not only to
convince men's intelligence but to allure their souls.
Associated with the beautiful old age of the great
rhetorician, and his winning voice, it almost
Epicurean. And the old man was at his best on the
occasion; the last on which he ever appeared in this
way. To-day was his own birthday. Early in the
morning the imperial letter of congratulation had reached
him; and all the pleasant animation it had caused was
in his face, as, assisted by his daughter Gratia, he took
his place on the ivory chair, as president of the
Athenum of Rome, wearing with a wonderful grace the
philosophic pall, -in reality neither more nor less than
the loose woollen cloak of the common soldier, but
fastened on his right shoulder with a magnificent clasp,
the emperor's birthday gift.
It was an age, as abundant evidence shows, whose
delight in rhetoric was but one result of a general sus-
ceptibilityan age not merely taking pleasure in words,
but experiencing a great moral power in them. Fronto's
quaintly fashionable audience would have wept, and also
assisted with their purses, had his present purpose been,
as sometimes happened, the recommendation of an
object of charity. As it was, arranging themselves
at their ease among the images and flowers, these
amateurs of exquisite language, with their tablets open for
careful noting of all the more felicitous expressions, were
ready to give themselves wholly to the intellectual treat
prepared for them, applauding, blowing loud kisses
through the air sometimes, at the speaker's triumphant
## p. 189 (#205) ############################################
XV
189
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a
exit from one of his long, skilfully modulated sentences ;
while the younger of them meant to imitate everything
about him, down to the inflections of his voice and the
very folds of his mantle. Certainly there was rhetoric
enough : wealth of imagery ; illustrations from
painting, music, mythology, the experiences of love; a
management, by which subtle, unexpected meaning was
brought out of familiar words, like flies from morsels of
amber, to use Fronto's own figure. But with all its
richness, the higher claim of his style was rightly under-
stood to lie in gravity and self-command, and an especial
care for the purities of a vocabulary exclusive of every
term and phrase not stamped with the authority of the
most approved ancient models.
And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes
happen, that this general discourse to a general audience
had the effect of an utterance adroitly designed for him.
His conscience still vibrating painfully under the shock
of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full of the ethical
charm of Cornelius, he was questioning himself with
much impatience, as to the possibility of an adjustment
between his own elaborately thought-out intellectual
scheme and the "old morality." In that intellectual
scheme indeed the old morality had so far been allowed
no place, as seeming to demand from him the admission
of certain first principles such as might misdirector
retard him in his efforts towards a complete, many-sided
existence; or distort the revelations of the experience of
life; or curtail his natural liberty of heart and mind.
But now (his imagination being occupied for the moment
with the noble and resolute air, the gallantry, so to call
it, which composed the outward mien and presentment
of his strange friend's inflexible ethics) he felt already
some nascent suspicion of his philosophic programme, in
regard to the question of good taste. There was the
taint of a graceless "antinomianism" perceptible in it,
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190
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a dissidence, a revolt against accustomed modes, the
actual impression of which on other men might rebound
upon himself in some loss of that personal pride to
which it was part of his theory of life to allow so much.
And it was precisely a moral situation such as this that
Fronto appeared to be contemplating. He seemed to
have before his mind the case of one-Cyrenaic or Epi-
curean, as the courtier tends to be, by habit and instinct,
if not on principle  who yet experiences, actually, a
strong tendency to moral assents, and a desire, with as
little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place for
duty and righteousness, in his house of thought.
And the Stoic professor found the key to this problem
in the purely sthetic beauty of the old morality, as an
element in things, fascinating to the imagination, to good
taste in its most highly developed form, through associa-
tiona system or order, as a matter of fact, in possession,
not only of the larger world, but of the rare minority of
lite intelligences; from which, therefore, least of all
would the sort of Epicurean he had in view endure to
be, so to speak, an outlaw. He supposed his hearer to
be, with all sincerity, in search after some principle of
conduct (and it was here that he seemed to Marius to
be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of
motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of
life, determined partly by natural affection, partly by en-
lightened self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part
even to the mere fear of penalties; no element of which,
however, was distinctively moral, in the agent himself,
and providing him, therefore, no common ground with
a really moral being like Cornelius, or even like the
philosophic emperor. Performing the same offices;
actually satisfying, even as they, the external claims of
others; rendering to all their duesone thus circum-
stanced would be wanting, nevertheless, in the secret of
inward adjustment to the moral agents around him.
## p. 191 (#207) ############################################
191
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
are
How tenderlymore tenderly than many stricter souls
-he might yield himself to kindly instinct ! what fine-
ness of charity in passing judgment on others ! what an
exquisite conscience of other men's susceptibilities ! He
knows for how much the manner, because the heart
itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He goes beyond
most people in his care for all weakly creatures; judging,
instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess rights.
He conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call
them by that name, of the existence of which purely
duteous souls may have no suspicion. He has a kind
of pride in doing more than they, in a way of his own.
Sometimes, he may think that those men of line and
rule do not really understand their own business. How
narrow, inflexible, unintelligent ! what poor guardians
(he may reason) of the inward spirit of righteousness,
some supposed careful walkers according to its
letter and form! Yet all the while he admits, as such,
no moral world at all : no theoretic equivalent to so
large a proportion of the facts of life.
But, over and above such practical rectitude, thus
determined by natural affection or self-love or fear, he
may notice that there is a remnant of right conduct,
what he does, still more what he abstains from doing,
not so much through his own free election, as from a
deference, an "assent," entire, habitual, unconscious, to
customto the actual habit or fashion of others, from
whom he could not endure to break away, any more
than he would care to be out of agreement with them
on questions of mere manner, or, say, even, of dress.
Yes! there were the evils, the vices, which he avoided
as, essentially, a failure in good taste. An assent, such
as this, to the preferences of others, might seem to be
the weakest of motives, and the rectitude it could deter-
mine the least considerable element in moral life. Yet
here, according to Cornelius Fronto, was in truth the
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192
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
revealing example, albeit operating upon comparative
trifles, of the general principle required. There was one
great idea associated with which that determination to
conform to precedent was elevated into the clearest, the
fullest, the weightiest principle of moral action; a
principle under which one might subsume men's most
strenuous efforts after righteousness. He proceeded to
expound the idea of Humanityof a universal common-
wealth of mind, which becomes explicit, and as if
incarnate, in a select communion of just men made
perfect.
"    - the world is as it were
a commonwealth, a city : and there are observances,
customs, usages, actually current in it, things our friends
and companions will expect of us, as the condition of
our living there with them at all, as really their peers or
fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed, the
creation of a visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose
actual manners, whose preferences from of old, become
now a weighty tradition as to the way in which things
should or should not be done, are like a music, to which
the intercourse of life proceedssuch a music as no one
who had once caught its harmonies would willingly jar.
In this way, the becoming, as in Greek, or manners, as
both Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a
comprehensive term for duty. Righteousness would be,
in the words of "Csar" himself, of the philosophic
Aurelius, but a "following of the reasonable will of the
oldest, the most venerable, of all cities and polities of
the royal, the law-giving element in itforasmuch as we
are citizens in that supreme city on high, of which all
other cities beside are but as single habitations." But
as the old man spoke with animation of this supreme
city, this invisible society, whose conscience had become
explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose
common spirit, the trusted leaders of human conscience
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XV
133
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
own
had been but the mouthpiece, of whose successive
personal preferences in the conduct of life, the old
morality was the sum,-Marius felt that his
thoughts were passing beyond the actual intention of the
speaker; not in the direction of any clearer theoretic
and abstract definition of that ideal commonwealth, but
rather as if in search of its visible locality and abiding-
place, the walls and towers of which, so to speak, he
might really trace and tell, according to his own old,
natural habit of mind. It would be the fabric, the out-
ward fabric, of a system reaching, certainly, far beyond
the great city around him, even if conceived in all the
machinery of its visible and invisible influences at their
grandestas Augustus or Trajan might have conceived
of themhowever well the visible Rome might pass for
a figure of that new, unseen, Rome on high. At
moments, Marius even asked himself with surprise,
whether it might be some vast secret society, the speaker
had in view :that august community, to be an outlaw
from which, to be foreign to the manners of which, was
a loss so much greater than to be excluded, into the
ends of the earth, from the sovereign Roman common-
wealth. Humanity, a universal order, the great polity,
its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their
example over their successorsthese were the ideas,
stimulating enough in their way, by association with
which the Stoic professor had attempted to elevate, to
unite under a single principle, men's moral efforts, him-
self lifted up with so genuine an enthusiasm. But where
might Marius search for all this, as more than an in-
tellectual abstraction ? Where were those elect souls in
whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable,
winning, persuasive  whose footsteps through the
world were so beautiful in the actual order he saw-
whose faces averted from him, would be more than he
could bear? Where was that comely order, to which as
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194
CHAP. XV
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a great fact of experience he must give its due; to which,
as to all other beautiful "phenomena " in life, he must,
for his own peace, adjust himself?
Rome did well to be serious. The discourse ended
somewhat abruptly, as the noise of a great crowd in
motion was heard below the walls; whereupon, the
audience, following the humour of the younger element
in it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which
Marius saw the famous procession, or transvectio, of the
military knights, passing over the Forum, from their
trysting-place at the temple of Mars, to the temple of
the Dioscuri. The ceremony took place this year, not
on the day accustomedanniversary of the victory of
Lake Regillus, with its pair of celestial assistantsand
amid the heat and roses of a Roman July, but, by
anticipation, some months earlier, the almond-trees along
the way being still in leafless flower. Through that light
trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, arrayed in all
their gleaming ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive
around their helmets, the faces below which, what with
plague and battle, were nearly all youthful. It was a
flowery scene enough, but had to-day its fulness of war-
like meaning; the return of the army to the North,
where the enemy was again upon the move, being now
imminent. Cornelius had ridden along in his place, and,
on the dismissal of the company, passed below the steps
where Marius stood, with the new song he had heard
once before floating from his lips.
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CHAPTER XVI
SECOND THOUGHTS
AND Marius, for his part, was grave enough. The
discourse of Cornelius Fronto, with its wide prospect
over the human, the spiritual, horizon, had set him on a
review-on a review of the isolating narrowness, in
particular, of his own theoretic scheme. Long after the
roses even had faded, when "the town" had departed
to country villas or the baths or the war, he remained
behind in Rome; anxious to try the lastingness of his
own Epicurean rose-garden ; setting to work over again,
and deliberately passing from point to point of his old
argument with himself, down to its practical conclusions.
That age and our own have much in common-many
difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon me if
here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his
modern representativesfrom Rome, to Paris or London.
What really were its claims as a theory of practice,
of the sympathies that determine practice? It had
been a theory, avowedly, of loss and gain (so to call it)
of an economy. If, therefore, it missed something in
the commerce of life, which some other theory of
practice was able to include, if it made a needless sacrifice,
then, it must be, in a manner, inconsistent with itself,
and lack theoretic completeness. Did it make such a
sacrifice ? What did it lose ?
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CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done,
that Cyrenaicism is ever the characteristic philosophy of
youth, ardent, but narrow in its surveysincere, but apt
to be one-sided, and even fanatical. It is one of those
subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because
limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of
experience (in this case, of the beauty of the world and
the brevity of man's life there) which it may be
said to be the special vocation of the young to express.
In the school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh
Greek world, we see this philosophy where it is least
blas, as we say; in its most pleasant, its blithest and
yet perhaps its wisest form, youthfully bright in the
youth of European thought. But it grows young again
for a while in almost every youthful soul. It is spoken
of sometimes as the appropriate utterance of jaded men;
but in them it can hardly be sincere, or, by the nature
of the case, an enthusiasm. " Walk in the ways of
thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes," is, indeed,
most often, according to the supposition of the book
from which I quote it, the counsel of the young, who
feel that the sunshine is pleasant along their veins, and
wintry weather, though in a general way foreseen, a long
way off. The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism, the self-
abandonment to one favourite mode of thought or taste,
which occurs, quite naturally, at the outset of every really
vigorous intellectual career, finds its special opportunity in
a theory such as that so carefully put together by Marius,
just because it seems to call on one to make the sacrifice,
accompanied by a vivid sensation of power and will, of
what others value-sacrifice of some conviction, or doctrine,
or supposed first principlefor the sake of that clear-eyed
intellectual consistency, which is like spotless bodily
cleanliness, or scrupulous personal honour, and has itself
for the mind of the youthful student, when he first
comes to appreciate it, the fascination of an ideal.
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197
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of
strenuousness or enthusiasm, is not so properly the
utterance of the "jaded Epicurean," as of the strong
young man in all the freshness of thought and feeling,
fascinated by the notion of raising his life to the level of
a daring theory, while, in the first genial heat of existence,
the beauty of the physical world strikes potently upon
his wide-open, unwearied senses. He discovers a great
new poem every spring, with a hundred delightful things
he too has felt, but which have never been expressed, or
at least never so truly, before. The workshops of the
artists, who can select and set before us what is really
most distinguished in visible life, are open to him. He
thinks that the old Platonic, or the new Baconian
philosophy, has been better explained than by the
authors themselves, or with some striking original
development, this very month. In the quiet heat of
early summer, on the dusty gold morning, the music
comes, louder at intervals, above the hum of voices from
some neighbouring church, among the flowering trees,
valued now, perhaps, only for the poetically rapt faces
among priests or worshippers, or the mere skill and
eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and
righteousness. In his scrupulous idealism, indeed, he
feels himself to be something of a priest, and that devo-
tion of his days to the contemplation of what is beauti-
ful, a sort of perpetual religious service. Afar off, how
many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts await him! At
that age, with minds of a certain constitution, no very
choice or exceptional circumstances are needed to
provoke an enthusiasm something like this. Life in
modern London even, in the heavy glow of summer, is
stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to
build its "palace of art" of; and the very sense and
enjoyment of an experience in which all is new, are but
enhanced, like that glow of summer itself, by the thought
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198
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
of its brevity, giving him something of a gambler's zest,
in the apprehension, by dexterous act or diligently ap-
preciative thought, of the highly coloured moments which
are to pass away so quickly. At bottom, perhaps, in his
elaborately developed self-consciousness, his sensibilities,
his almost fierce grasp upon the things he values at all, he
has, beyond all others, an inward need of something
permanent in its character, to hold by : of which circum-
stance, also, he may be partly aware, and that, as with
the brilliant Claudio in Measure for Measure, it is, in
truth, but darkness he is "encountering, like a bride."
But the inevitable falling of the curtain is probably
distant; and in the daylight, at least, it is not often that
he really shudders at the thought of the gravethe
weight above, the narrow world and its company, within.
When the thought of it does occur to him, he may say
to himself :-Well ! and the rude monk, for instance,
who has renounced all this, on the security of some dim
world beyond it, really acquiesces in that "fifth act,"
amid all the consoling ministries around him, as little as
I should at this moment; though I may hope, that, as
at the real ending of a play, however well acted, I may
already have had quite enough of it, and find a true well-
being in eternal sleep.
And precisely in this circumstance, that, consistently
with the function of youth in general, Cyrenaicism will
always be more or less the special philosophy, or
"prophecy," of the young, when the ideal of a rich
experience comes to them in the ripeness of the recep-
tive, if not of the reflective, powersprecisely in this
circumstance, if we rightly consider it, lies the duly
prescribed corrective of that philosophy. For it is by
its exclusiveness, and by negation rather than positively,
that such theories fail to satisfy us permanently; and
what they really need for their correction, is the com-
plementary influence of some greater system, in which
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XVI
199
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
they may find their due place. That Sturm und Drang
of the spirit, as it has been called, that ardent and special
apprehension of half-truths, in the enthusiastic, and as
it were "prophetic" advocacy of which, devotion to
truth, in the case of the young-apprehending but one
point at a time in the great circumferencemost usually
embodies itself, is levelled down, safely enough, after-
wards, as in history so in the individual, by the weakness
and mere weariness, as well as by the maturer wisdom,
of our nature. And though truth indeed, resides, as
has been said, "in the whole "in harmonisings and
adjustments like thisyet those special apprehensions
may still owe their full value, in this sense of "the
whole," to that earlier, one-sided but ardent pre-occupa-
tion with them.
Cynicism and Cyrenaicism :they are the earlier
Greek forms of Roman Stoicism and Epicureanism, and
in that world of old Greek thought, we may notice with
some surprise that, in a little while, the nobler form of
CyrenaicismCyrenaicism cured of its faultsmet the
nobler form of Cynicism half-way. Starting from
opposed points, they merged, each in its most refined
form, in a single ideal of temperance or moderation.
Something of the same kind may be noticed regarding
some later phases of Cyrenaic theory. If it starts with
considerations opposed to the religious temper, which
the religious temper holds it a duty to repress, it is like
it, nevertheless, and very unlike any lower development
of temper, in its stress and earnestness, its serious
application to the pursuit of a very unworldly type of
perfection. The saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty,
it
may be thought, would at least understand each other
better than either would understand the mere man of
the world. Carry their respective positions a point
further, shift the terms a little, and they might actually
touch.
## p. 200 (#216) ############################################
200
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Perhaps all theories of practice tend, as they rise to
their best, as understood by their worthiest represent-
atives, to identification with each other. For the variety
of men's possible reflections on their experience, as of
that experience itself, is not really so great as it seems;
and as the highest and most disinterested ethical formula,
filtering down into men's everyday existence, reach the
same poor level of vulgar egotism, so, we may fairly
suppose that all the highest spirits, from whatever con-
trasted points they have started, would yet be found to
entertain, in the moral consciousness realised by them-
selves, much the same kind of mental company; to hold,
far more than might be thought probable, at first sight,
the same personal types of character, and even the same
artistic and literary types, in esteem or aversion; to con-
vey, all of them alike, the same savour of unworldliness.
And Cyrenaicism or Epicureanism too, new or old, may
be noticed, in proportion to the completeness of its
development, to approach, as to the nobler form of
Cynicism, so also to the more nobly developed phases
of the old, or traditional morality. In the gravity of its
conception of life, in its pursuit after nothing less than
a perfection, in its apprehension of the value of time-
the passion and the seriousness which are like a consecra-
tion-la passion et le srieux qui consacrentit may be
conceived, as regards its main drift, to be not so much
opposed to the old morality, as an exaggeration of one
special motive in it.
Some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one
part of his own nature, and of the nature of things, to
another, Marius seemed to have detected in himself,
meantime,-in himself, as also in those old masters
of the Cyrenaic philosophy. If they did realise the
, as it was called-the pleasure of the
"Ideal Now"if certain moments of their lives were
high-pitched, passionately coloured, intent with sensation,
## p. 201 (#217) ############################################
XVI
201
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
and a kind of knowledge which, in its vivid clearness,
was like sensationif, now and then, they apprehended
the world in its fulness, and had a vision, almost
"beatific," of ideal personalities in life and art, yet
these moments were a very costly matter : they paid a
great price for them, in the sacrifice of a thousand
possible sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed
through sympathy, from which they detached them-
selves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory
that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no
approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly,
repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and the
old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty
economists. The Greek religion was then alive : then,
still more than in its later day of dissolution, the higher
view of it was possible, even for the philosopher. Its
story made little or no demand for a reasoned or formal
acceptance. A religion, which had grown through and
through man's life, with so much natural strength ; had
meant so much for so many generations; or which ex-
pressed so much of their hopes, in forms so familiar and
so winning ; linked by associations so manifold to man as
he had been and wasa religion like this, one would think,
might have had its uses, even for a philosophic sceptic.
Yet those beautiful gods, with the whole round of their
poetic worship, the school of Cyrene definitely renounced.
The old Greek morality, again, with all its imperfec-
tions, was certainly a comely thing.Yes! a harmony, a
music, in men's ways, one might well hesitate to jar.
The merely sthetic sense might have had a legitimate
satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair order of choice
manners, in those attractive conventions, enveloping, so
gracefully, the whole of life, insuring some sweetness,
some security at least against offence, in the intercourse
of the world. Beyond an obvious utility, it could claim,
indeed, but customuse-and-wont, as we sayfor its
## p. 202 (#218) ############################################
202
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
sanction.
But then, one of the advantages of that
liberty of spirit among the Cyrenaics (in which, through
theory, they had become dead to theory, so that all
theory, as such, was really indifferent to them, and
indeed nothing valuable but in its tangible ministration
to life) was precisely this, that it gave them free play, in
the use of things, as mere ministers, which, to the un-
initiated, must be masters or nothing. Yet, how little
the followers of Aristippus made of that whole comely
system of manners or morals, then actually in possession
of life, is shown by the bold practical consequence,
which one of them maintained (with hard, self-opinion-
ated adherence to his peculiar theory of values) in the not
very amiable paradox that friendship and patriotism were
things one could do without; while another-Deaths-
advocate, as he was called-helped so many to self-destruc-
tion, by his pessimistic eloquence on the evils of life, that
his lecture-room was closed. That this was in the range of
their consequencesthat this was a possible, if remote,
deduction from the premises of the discreet Aristippus-
was surely an inconsistency in a thinker who professed
above all things an economy of the moments of life. And
yet those old Cyrenaics felt their way, as if in the dark,
we may be sure, like other men in the ordinary transactions
of life, beyond the narrow limits they drew of clear and abso-
lutely legitimate knowledge, admitting what was not of
immediate sensation, and drawing upon that "fantastic"
future which might never come. A little more of such
"walking by faith," a little more of such not unreasonable
assent," and they might have profited by a hundred
services to their culture, from Greek religion and Greek
morality, as they actually were. The spectacle of their
hard, exclusive, tenacious hold on their own
apprehension, makes one think of a picture with no
relief, no soft shadows nor breadth of space, or of a
drama without repose.
narrow
## p. 203 (#219) ############################################
XVI
203
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Yet it was of perfection that Marius (to return to him
again from his masters, his intellectual heirs) had been
really thinking all the time: a narrow perfection it
might be objected, the perfection of but one part
of his naturehis capacities of feeling, of exquisite
physical impressions, of an imaginative sympathybut
still, a true perfection of those capacities, wrought out to
their utmost degree, admirable enough in its way. He too
is an economist : he hopes, by that "insight" of which
the old Cyrenaics made so much, by skilful apprehension
of the conditions of spiritual success as they really are,
the special circumstances of the occasion with which he
has to deal, the special felicities of his own nature, to
make the most, in no mean or vulgar sense, of the few
years of life ; few, indeed, for the attainment of anything
like general perfection! With the brevity of that sum
of years his mind is exceptionally impressed; and this
purpose makes him no frivolous dilettante, but graver
than other men: his scheme is not that of a trifler, but
rather of one who gives a meaning of his own, yet a
very real one, to those old wordsLet us work while it
is day! He has a strong apprehension, also, of the
beauty of the visible things around him ; their fading,
momentary, graces and attractions. His natural sus-
ceptibility in this direction, enlarged by experience,
seems to demand of him an almost exclusive pre-occupa-
tion with the aspects of things; with their sthetic char-
acter, as it is calledtheir revelations to the eye and
the imagination : not so much because those aspects
of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as
because to be occupied, in this way, with the sthetic
or imaginative side of things, is to be in real contact
with those elements of his own nature, and of theirs,
which, for him at least, are matter of the most real kind of
apprehension. As other men are concentrated upon
truths
of number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on
## p. 204 (#220) ############################################
204
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
-an
the pleasures of appetite, so he is wholly bent on living
in that full stream of refined sensation. And in the
prosecution of this love of beauty, he claims an entire
personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty, above
all, from what may seem conventional answers to first
questions.
But, without him there is a venerable system of
sentiment and idea, widely extended in time and place,
in a kind of impregnable possession of human lifea
system, which, like some other great products of the
conjoint efforts of human mind through many genera-
tions, is rich in the world's experience; so that, in
attaching oneself to it, one lets in a great tide of that
experience, and makes, as it were with a single step, a
great experience of one's own, and with great conse-
quent increase to one's sense of colour, variety, and
relief, in the spectacle of men and things. The mere
sense that one belongs to a system, imperial system
or organisation-has, in itself, the expanding power of a
great experience; as some have felt who have been
admitted from narrower sects into the communion of the
Roman church; or as the old Roman citizen felt. It
is, we might fancy, like the coming into possession of a
very widely spoken language, with a great literature, which
is also the speech of the people we have to live among.
A wonderful order, actually in possession of human
life !-grown inextricably through and through it; pene-
trating into its laws, its very language, its mere habits of
decorum, in a thousand half-conscious ways; yet still
felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal; and, as such,
awakening hope, and an aim, identical with the one only
consistent aspiration of mankind ! In the apprehension
of that, just then, Marius seemed to have joined
company once more with his own old self; to have
overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to
Rome, with absolute sincerity, on the search for per-
## p. 205 (#221) ############################################
XVI
205
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
fection. It defined not so much a change of practice,
as of sympathy-a new departure, an expansion, of
sympathy. It involved, certainly, some curtailment of
his liberty, in concession to the actual manner, the
distinctions, the enactments of that great crowd of
admirable spirits, who have elected so, and not otherwise,
in their conduct of life, and are not here to give one, so
to term it, an "indulgence." But then, under the sup-
position of their disapproval, no roses would ever seem
worth plucking again. The authority they exercised
was like that of classic tastean influence so subtle,
yet so real, and which defines the loyalty of the
scholaror of some beautiful and venerable ritual, in
which every observance is become spontaneous and
almost mechanical, yet is found, the more carefully
one considers it, to have a reasonable significance and a
natural history.
And Marius saw that he would be but an inconsistent
Cyrenaic, mistaken in his estimate of values, of loss and
gain, and untrue to the well-considered economy of life
which he had brought with him to Romethat some
drops of the great cup would fall to the ground-if he
did not make that concession, if he did but remain just
there.
## p. 206 (#222) ############################################
CHAPTER XVII
MANY PROPHETS AND KINGS HAVE DESIRED TO SEE
THE THINGS WHICH YE SEE
pagan world.
The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the van-
guard of the mighty invading hosts of the fifth century.
Illusively repressed just now, those confused movements
along the northern boundary of the Empire were
destined to unite triumphantly at last, in the barbarism,
which, powerless to destroy the Christian church, was
yet to suppress for a time the achieved culture of the
The kingdom of Christ was to grow up in
a somewhat false alienation from the light and beauty of
the kingdom of nature, of the natural man, with a partly
mistaken tradition concerning it, and an incapacity, as it
might almost seem at times, for eventual reconciliation
thereto. Meantime Italy had armed itself once more,
in haste, and the imperial brothers set forth for the
Alps.
Whatever misgiving the Roman people may have felt
as to the leadership of the younger was unexpectedly
set at rest; though with some temporary regret for the
loss of what had been, after all, a popular figure on the
world's stage. Travelling fraternally in the same litter
with Aurelius, Lucius Verus was struck with sudden and
mysterious disease, and died as he hastened back
to Rome. His death awoke a swarm of sinister rumours,
## p. 207 (#223) ############################################
CHAP. XVII
207
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a
to settle on Lucilla, jealous, it was said, of Fabia her
sister, perhaps of Faustinaon Faustina herself, who had
accompanied the imperial progress, and was anxious
now to hide a crime of her own -even on the elder
brother, who, beforehand with the treasonable designs of
his colleague, should have helped him at supper to a
favourite morsel, cut with a knife poisoned ingeniously
on one side only. Aurelius, certainly, with sincere
distress, his long irritations, so dutifully concealed or
repressed, turning now into a single feeling of regret for
the human creature, carried the remains back to Rome,
and demanded of the Senate a public funeral, with
decree for the apothesis, or canonisation, of the dead.
For three days the body lay in state in the Forum,
en sed in an open coffin of cedar-wood, on a bed of
ivory and gold, in the centre of a sort of temporary
chapel, representing the temple of his patroness Venus
Genetrix. Armed soldiers watched around it, while
choirs of select voices relieved each other in the chanting
of hymns and monologues from the great tragedians. At
the head of the couch were displayed the various
personal decorations which had belonged to Verus in life.
Like all the rest of Rome, Marius went to gaze on the
face, he had last seen hardly disguised under the hood
of a travelling-dress, as the wearer hurried, at nightfall,
along one of the streets below the palace, on some amor-
ous appointment. Unfamiliar as he still was with dead
faces, he was taken by surprise, and touched far beyond
what he had reckoned on, by the piteous change there;
even the skill of Galen having been not wholly success-
ful in the process of embalmment. It was as if a brother
of his own were lying low before him, with that meek
and helpless expression, it would have been a sacrilege
to treat rudely.
Meantime, in the centre of the Campus Martius,
within the grove of poplars enclosing the space where
## p. 208 (#224) ############################################
208
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the body of Augustus was burnt, the great funeral pyre,
stuffed with shavings of various aromatic woods, had
been built up in many stages, separated from each other
by a light entablature of woodwork, and adorned abund-
antly with carved and tapestried images. Upon this flame-
shaped, or pyramidal structure lay the corpse, hidden now
under a mountain of flowers and incense brought by the
women, who from the first had had their fondness for
the wanton graces of the deceased. The dead body was
surmounted by a waxen effigy of great size, arrayed in
the triumphal ornaments. And at last the Centurions,
to whom the office belonged, drew near, torch in hand,
to ignite the pile at its four corners, while the soldiers,
in wild excitement, ran around it, casting into the flames
the decorations they had received for acts of valour
under the dead emperor's command.
It had been a really heroic order, spoiled a little, at
the last moment, through the somewhat tawdry artifice,
by which an eaglenot a very noble or youthful
specimen of its kindwas caused to take flight amid the
real or affected awe of the spectators, from the perishing
remains; a court chamberlain, according to ancient
etiquette, subsequently making official declaration before
the Senate, that the imperial "genius" had been seen in
this way, escaping from the fire. And Marius was
present when the Fathers, duly certified of the fact, by
"acclamation," muttering their judgment all together, in
a kind of low, rhythmical chant, decreed Clumthe
privilege of divine rank to the departed.
The actual gathering of the ashes in a white cere-
cloth by the widowed Lucilla, when the last flicker had
been extinguished by drops of wine; and the conveyance
of them to the little cell, already populous, in the central
mass of the sepulchre of Hadrian, still in all the splendour
of its statued colonnades, were matter of private or
domestic duty; after the due accomplishment of which
## p. 209 (#225) ############################################
XVII
209
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Aurelius was at liberty to retire for a time into the
privacy of his beloved apartments on the Palatine. And
hither, not long afterwards, Marius was summoned a
second time, to receive from the imperial hands the
great pile of manuscripts it was to be his business to
revise and arrange.
One year had passed since his first visit to the palace ;
and as he climbed the stairs to-day, the great cypresses
rocked against the sunless sky, like living creatures in
pain. He had to traverse a long subterranean gallery,
once a secret entrance to the imperial apartments, and
in our own day, amid the ruin of all around it, as smooth
and fresh as if the carpets were but just removed from
its floor after the return of the emperor from the shows.
It was here, on such an occasion, that the emperor
Caligula, at the age of twenty-nine, had come by his
end, the assassins gliding along it as he lingered to
watch the movements of a party of noble youths at play.
As Marius waited, a second time, in that little red room
in the house of the chief chamberlain, curious to look
once more upon its painted wallsthe very place into
which the assassins were said to have turned for conceal-
ment after the murderhe could all but see the figure,
which in its surrounding light and darkness seemed to
him the most melancholy in the history of Rome. He
called to mind the greatness of that popularity and early
promisethe stupefying height of irresponsible power,
from which, after all, only men's viler side had been
clearly visiblethe overthrow of reasonthe seemingly
irredeemable men
emory ; and still, above all, the beautiful
head in which the noble lines of the race of Augustus
were united to, he knew not what expression of fineness
and sensibility, not theirs, and for the like of which one
must pass onward the Antonines. Popular hatred
had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it
was to be found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like
P
## p. 210 (#226) ############################################
210
.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, preserved in the
museum of the Capitol, may seem to some perhaps the
finestrelic of Roman art. Had the very seal of empire upon
those sombre brows, reflected from the mirror, suggested
his insane attempt upon the liberties, the dignity of men-
"O humanity !" he seems to ask, "what hast thou done
to me that I should so despise thee?"And might not this
be indeed the true meaning of kingship after all, if the world
would have one man to reign over it? The like of this :
or, some incredible, surely never to be realised, height of
disinterestedness, in a king who should be the servant
of all, quite at the other extreme of the practical
dilemma involved in such a position. It was not
till some while after death that the body had been
decently interred by the piety of the sisters he
had driven into exile. Fraternity of feeling had been
no invariable feature in the incidents of Roman story.
One long Vicus Sceleratus, from its first dim founda-
tion in fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common
deliverance so touchinghad not almost every step in
it some gloomy memory of unnatural violence ? Romans
did well to fancy the traitress Tarpeia still "green in
earth," crowned, enthroned, at the roots of the Capitoline
rock. If in truth the religion of Rome was everywhere
in it, like that perfume of the funeral incense still upon
the air, so also was the memory of crime prompted by
a hypocritical cruelty, down to the erring, or not erring,
vestal calmly buried alive there, only eighty years ago,
under Domitian.
It was with a sense of relief that Marius found him-
self in the presence of Aurelius, whose gesture of friendly
intelligence, as he entered, raised a smile at the gloomy
train of his own thoughts just then, although since his
first visit to the palace a great change had passed over
it. The clear daylight found its way now into empty
To raise funds for the war, Aurelius, his
rooms.
## p. 211 (#227) ############################################
XVII
211
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
luxurious brother being no more, had determined to sell
by auction the accumulated treasures of the imperial
household The works of art, the dainty furniture, had
been removed, and were now on view" in the Forum,
to be the delight or dismay, for many weeks to come, of
the large public of those who were curious in these things.
In such wise had Aurelius come to the condition of
philosophic detachment he had affected as a boy, hardly
persuaded to wear warm clothing, or sleep otherwise
than on the bare floor. But, in the empty house, the
man of mind, who had always made so much of the
pleasures of philosophic contemplation, felt freer in
thought than ever. He had been reading, with less
self-reproach than usual, in the Republic of Plato, those
passages which describe the life of the philosopher-kings
-like that of hired servants in their own housewho,
possessed of the "gold undefiled" of intellectual vision,
forgo so cheerfully all other riches. It was one of his
happy days : one of those rare days, when, almost with
none of the effort, otherwise so constant with him, his
thoughts came rich and full, and converged in a mental
view, as exhilarating to him as the prospect of some wide
expanse of landscape to another man's bodily eye.
He
seemed to lie readier than was his wont to the imagina-
tive influence of the philosophic reasonto its suggestion
of a possible open country, commencing just where all
actual experience leaves off, but which experience, one's
own and not another's, may one day occupy.
he was seeking strength for himself, in his own way,
before he started for that ambiguous earthly warfare
which was to occupy the remainder of his life.
remember this," he writes, "that a happy life depends,
not on many things-  ."
And to-day,
committing himself with a steady effort of volition to the
mere silence of the great empty apartments, he might be
said to have escaped, according to Plato's promise to
In fact,
" Ever
## p. 212 (#228) ############################################
212
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
those who live closely with philosophy, from the evils of
the world.
In his "conversations with himself" Marcus Aurelius
speaks often of that City on high, of which all other cities
are but single habitations. It was from him that
Cornelius Fronto, in his late discourse, had borrowed the
expression; and he certainly meant by it more than the
whole commonwealth of Rome, in any idealisation of it,
however sublime. Incorporate somehow with the actual
city whose goodly stones were lying beneath his gaze, it
was also implicate in that reasonable constitution of
nature, by devout contemplation of which it was possible
for man to associate himself to the consciousness of God.
In that New Rome he had taken up his rest for awhile
on this day, deliberately feeding his thoughts on the
better air of it, as another might have gone for mental
renewal to a favourite villa.
"Men seek retirement in country-houses," he writes,
on the sea-coast, on the mountains; and you
have your-
self as much fondness for such places as another. But
there is little proof of culture therein ; since the
privilege is yours of retiring into yourself whensoever you
please,into that little farm of one's own mind, where
a silence so profound may be enjoyed." That it could
make these retreats, was a plain consequence of the
kingly prerogative of the mind, its dominion over circum-
stance, its inherent liberty."It is in thy power to
think as thou wilt: The essence of things is in thy
thoughts about them : All is opinion, conception : No
man can be hindered by another : What is outside thy
circle of thought is nothing at all to it; hold to this, and
you are safe : One thing is needfulto live close to the
divine genius within thee, and minister thereto worthily."
And the first point in this true ministry, this culture,
was to maintain one's soul in a condition of indifference
and calm. How continually had public claims, the
## p. 213 (#229) ############################################
XVII
213
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
claims of other persons, with their rough angularities of
character, broken in upon him, the shepherd of the flock.
But after all he had at least this privilege he could not
part with, of thinking as he would ; and it was well, now
and then, by an effort of volition, to indulge it for a
while, under systematic direction. The duty of thus
making discreet, systematic use of the power of imagina-
tive vision for purposes of spiritual culture, "since the
soul takes colour from its fantasies," is a point he has
frequently insisted on.
The influence of these seasonable meditations-a
symbol, or sacrament, because an intensified condition,
of the soul's own ordinary and natural lifewould remain
upon it, perhaps for many days. There were experiences
he could not forget, intuitions beyond price, he had come
by in this way, which were almost like the breaking of
a physical light upon his mind; as the great Augustus
was said to have seen a mysterious physical splendour,
yonder, upon the summit of the Capitol, where the altar
of the Sibyl now stood. With a prayer, therefore, for
inward quiet, for conformity to the divine reason, he
read some select passages of Plato, which bear upon the
harmony of the reason, in all its forms, with itself.
" Could there be Cosmos, that wonderful, reasonable
order, in him, and nothing but disorder in the world
without ?" It was from that question he had passed
on to the vision of a reasonable, a divine, order, not in
nature, but in the condition of human affairsthat
unseen Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolisin which,
a consciousness of the divine will being everywhere
realised, there would be, among other felicitous differ-
ences from this lower visible world, no more quite
hopeless death, of men, or children, or of their affections.
He had tried to-day, as never before, to make the most
of this vision of a New Rome, to realise it as distinctly
as he could, and, as it were, find his way along its
## p. 214 (#230) ############################################
214
CHAP. XVII
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
streets, ere he went down into a world so irksomely
different, to make his practical effort towards it, with a
soul full of pity for men as they were. However distinct
the mental image might have been to him, with the
descent of but one flight of steps into the market-place
below, it must have retreated again, as if at touch of
some magic wand, beyond the utmost verge of the
horizon. But it had been, actually, in his clearest
vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable
entry, a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted
by strange faces, whose new expression he, the great
physiognomist, could by no means read. Plato, indeed,
had been able to articulate, to see, at least in thought,
his ideal city. But just because Aurelius had passed
beyond Plato, in the scope of the gracious charities he
pre-supposed there, he had been unable really to track
his way about it. Ah! after all, according to Plato
himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this, his
heart's desire, no place his soul could ever have visited
in any region of the old world's achievements. He had
but divined, by a kind of generosity of spirit, the void
place, which another experience than his must fill.
Yet Marius noted the wonderful expression of peace,
of quiet pleasure, on the countenance of Aurelius, as he
received from him the rolls of fine clear manuscript,
fancying the emperor had been really occupied with the
famous prospect towards the Alban hills, from those lofty
windows.
## p. 215 (#231) ############################################
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CEREMONY OF THE DART"
THE ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aurelius,
ideas of large generalisation, have sometimes induced, in
those over whose intellects they have had real power, a
coldness of heart. It was the distinction of Aurelius
that he was able to harmonise them with the kindness,
one might almost say the amenities, of a humourist, as
also with the popular religion and its many gods.
Those vasty conceptions of the later Greek philosophy
had in them, in truth, the germ of a sort of austerely
opinionative "natural theology," and how often has that
led to religious drynessa hard contempt of everything
in religion, which touches the senses, or charms the
fancy, or really concerns the affections. Aurelius had
made his own the secret of passing, naturally, and with
no violence to his thought, to and fro, between the
richly coloured and romantic religion of those old gods
who had still been human beings, and a very abstract
speculation upon the impassive, universal soulthat
circle whose centre is everywhere, the circumference
nowhereof which a series of purely logical necessities
had evolved the formula. As in many another instance,
those traditional pieties of the place and the hour had
been derived by him from his mother :-  
T Ocoges. Purified, as all such religion of concrete
## p. 216 (#232) ############################################
216
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
time and place needs to be, by frequent confronting
with the ideal of godhead as revealed to that innate
religious sense in the possession of which Aurelius
differed from the people around him, it was the ground
of many a sociability with their simpler souls, and for
himself, certainly, a consolation, whenever the wings of
his own soul flagged in the trying atmosphere of purely
intellectual vision. A host of companions, guides,
helpers, about him from of old time, "the very court
and company of heaven," objects for him of personal
reverence and affectionthe supposed presence of the
old popular gods determined the character of much of
his daily life, and might prove the last stay of human
nature at its weakest. "In every time and place," he
had said, "it rests with thyself to use the event of the
hour religiously : at all seasons worship the gods." And
when he said "Worship the gods !" he did it, as strenu-
ously as everything else.
Yet here again, how often must he have experienced
disillusion, or even some revolt of feeling, at that contact
with coarser natures to which his religious conclusions
exposed him. At the beginning of the year one hundred
and seventy-three public anxiety was as great as ever; and
as before it brought people's superstition into unreserved
play. For seven days the images of the old gods, and
some of the graver new ones, lay solemnly exposed in
the open air, arrayed in all their ornaments, each in his
separate resting-place, amid lights and burning incense,
while the crowd, following the imperial example, daily
visited them, with offerings of flowers to this or that
particular divinity, according to the devotion of each.
But supplementing these older official observances,
the very wildest gods had their share of worship, --strange
creatures with strange secrets startled abroad into open
daylight. The delirious sort of religion of which Marius
was a spectator in the streets of Rome, during the seven
## p. 217 (#233) ############################################
XVIII
217
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
days of the Lectisternium, reminded him now and again of
an observation of Apuleius : it was "as if the presence of
the gods did not do men good, but disordered or weakened
them." Some jaded women of fashion, especially, found
in certain oriental devotions, at once relief for their
tearful souls and an opportunity for personal display;
preferring this or that "mystery," chiefly because the
attire it necessitated suited their peculiar manner of
beauty. And one morning Marius encountered an extra-
ordinary crimson object, borne in a litter through an
excited crowdthe famous courtesan Benedicta, still
fresh from the bath of blood to which she had submitted
herself, sitting below the scaffold where the victims
provided for that purpose were slaughtered by the priests.
Even on the last day of the solemnity, when the
emperor himself performed one of the oldest ceremonies
of the Roman religion, this fantastic piety had asserted
itself. There were victims enough certainly, brought
from the choice pastures of the Sabine mountains, and
conducted around the city they were to die for, in almost
continuous procession, covered with flowers and well-nigh
worried to death before the time by the crowds of people
superstitiously pressing to touch them. But certain old-
fashioned Romans, in these exceptional circumstances,
demanded something more than this, in the way of a
human sacrifice after the old pattern; as when, not so
long since, some Gauls or Greeks had been buried alive
in the Forum. At least, human blood should be shed;
and it was through a wild multitude of fanatics, cutting
their flesh with knives and whips and ardently licking up
the crimson stream, that the emperor repaired to the
temple of Bellona, and in solemn symbolic act cast the
bloodstained spear, or "dart," carefully preserved there,
towards the enemy's country towards that unknown
world of German homes, still warm, as some believed
under the faint northern twilight, with those innocent
## p. 218 (#234) ############################################
218
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
affections of which Romans had lost the sense, and the
ruin of which (so much was clear, amid all doubts of
abstract right or wrong on either side) was involved in
what Aurelius was then preparing, withYes ! the gods
be thanked for that achievement of an invigorating
philosophy !-almost with a light heart.
For, in truth, that departure, really so difficult to him,
for which Marcus Aurelius had needed to brace himself
so strenuously, came to test the power of a long-studied
theory of practice; and it was the development of this
theorya theria, literallya view, an intuition, of the
most important facts, and still more important possi-
bilities, concerning man in the world, that Marius now dis-
covered, almost as if by accident, below the dry surface
of the manuscripts entrusted to him. The great purple
rolls contained, first of all, statistics, a general historical
account of the writer's own time, and an exact diary ;
all alike, though in three different degrees of approach
to the writer's own personal experience, laborious,
formal, self-repressing. All this was for the instruction
of the public; and a part of it has, perhaps, found its
way into the Augustan Histories. But it was for the
especial guidance of his son Commodus that he had
permitted himself to break out, here and there, into
reflections upon what was passing, into conversations
with the reader. And then, as though he were put off his
guard in that way, there had escaped into the heavy
matter-of-fact, of which the main portion was composed,
morsels of his conversations with himself.
the romance of a soul, (to be traced only in hints, way-
side notes, quotations from older masters,) as it were in
lifelong, and often baffled search after some vanished or
elusive golden fleece, or Hesperidean fruit-trees, or some
mysterious light of doctrine, ever retreating before him.
A man, he had seemed to Marius from the first, of two lives,
as we say.
Of what nature, he had sometimes wondered,
It was
## p. 219 (#235) ############################################
XVIII
219
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
on the day, for instance, when he had interrupted his
musings in the empty palace, might be that placid
inward guest or inhabitant, who from amid the pre-
occupations of the man of practical affairs looked out
surprised at the things and faces round about. Here,
under the tame surface of a would-be life of business,
Marius discovered, welcoming a brother, the spon-
taneous self-revelation of a soul as delicate as his own,-
a soul for which conversation with itself was a necessity
of existence. Marius had always suspected that the
sense of such necessity was a peculiarity of his. Here,
certainly, was another, in this respect like himself; and
again he seemed to detect the advent of some new or
changed spirit into the world, mystic, and inward, hardly
to be satisfied with that wholly external and objective
habit of life, which had been sufficient for the old classic
soul. His purely literary curiosity was greatly stimulated
by this example of a book of self-portraiture. It was in
fact the position of the modern essayist,creature of
efforts rather than achievements, in the matter of
apprehending truth, but at least conscious of lights by
which he must needs acknowledge. What
seemed to underlie that position was the desire to make
the most of every outward or inward experience, to per-
petuate and display what was so fleeting, in a kind of
instinctive, pathetic protest against the imperial writer's
own theorythat theory of the "perpetual flux" of all
thingsto Marius from of old so plausible.
Besides, there was a special moral or doctrinal
significance in the making of such conversation with
oneself at all. The Logos, the reasonable spark, in
man, is common to him with the gods-Kouvs ato
- cum diis communis. . That might seem
but the truism of a certain school of philosophy: in
Aurelius it was clearly an original and lively apprehen-
sion. There could be no inward conversation with
the way,
:
## p. 220 (#236) ############################################
220
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
different ways.
oneself like this, unless there were indeed some one
aware of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or
displeased at one's disposition of oneself. Cornelius
Fronto too could enounce that proposition of the
reasonable community between men and God, in many
But then, he was a cheerful man, and
Aurelius a singularly sad one; and what to Fronto was
but a doctrine, or a motive of mere rhetoric, was to the
other a consolation. He walks and talks, for spiritual
refreshment without which he would faint by the way,
with what to the learned professor is but matter of
philosophic eloquence.
In performing his public religious functions Marcus
Aurelius had ever seemed like one taking part in some
great process, some real great thing done, with more
than the actually visible assistants about him. Here,
in these manuscripts, in a hundred marginal flowers of
thought or language, happy new phrases of his own like
the impromptus of an actual conversation, quotations
from other older masters of the inward life, taking
new significance from the chances of such intercourse,
was the record of his communion with that eternal
reason, which was also his own proper self, with the
divine companion, whose tabernacle was in the intelli-
gence of menthe journal of his daily commerce with
that.
Chance: or Providence ! Chance: or Wisdom,
one with nature and man, reaching from end to end,
through all time and all existence, orderly disposing
all things, according to fixed periodsas he describes
it, in terms very like certain well-known words of the
book of Wisdom those are the "fenced opposites"
of the speculative dilemma, the tragic embarras, of
which Aurelius cannot too often remind himself as
the summary of man's situation in the world. If there
be such a provident soul "behind the veil," truly,
## p. 221 (#237) ############################################
XVIII
221
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
even to him, even in the most intimate of those
conversations, it has never yet spoken with any quite
irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet one's choice
in that speculative dilemma, as he has found it, is on
the whole a matter of will."'Tis in thy power," again,
here too, "to think as thou wilt." For his part he has
asserted his will, and has the courage of his opinion.
"To the better of two things, if thou findest that, turn
with thy whole heart : eat and drink ever of the best
before thee." "Wisdom," says that other disciple of
the Sapiential philosophy, "hath mingled Her wine,
she hath also prepared Herself a table." To ploto
rlave: "Partake ever of Her best!' And what
Marius, peeping now very closely upon the intimacies of
that singular mind, found a thing actually pathetic and
affecting, was the manner of the writer's bearing as in
the presence of this supposed guest; so elusive, so
jealous of any palpable manifestation of himself, so tax-
ing to one's faith, never allowing one to lean frankly
upon him and be wholly at rest. Only, he would do
his part, at least, in maintaining the constant fitness, the
sweetness and quiet, of the guest-chamber. Seeming to
vary with the intellectual fortune of the hour, from the
plainest account of experience, to a sheer fantasy,
" believed almost because it was impossible," that one
hope was, at all events, sufficient to make men's common
pleasures and common ambition, above all their
commonest vices, seem very petty indeed, too petty to
know of. It bred in him a kind of magnificence of
character, in the old Greek sense of the term ; a temper
incompatible with any merely plausible advocacy of his
convictions, or merely superficial thoughts about any-
thing whatever, or talk about other people, or specula-
tion as to what was passing in their so visibly little souls,
or much talk of any kind, however clever or graceful.
A soul thus disposed had "already entered into the
## p. 222 (#238) ############################################
222
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
better life  was indeed in some sort a priest, a
minister of the gods." Hence, his constant "recollec-
tion"; a close watching of his soul, almost unique in
the ancient world. - Before all things examine into
thyself: strive to be at home with thyself !Marius, a
sympathetic witness of all this, might almost seem to
have had a foresight of monasticism itself, in the pro-
phetic future. With this mystic companion he had
gone a step onward out of the merely objective pagan
world. Here was already a master in that craft of self-
direction, which was about to play so large a part in the
forming of human mind, under the sanction of the
Christian church.
Yet it was in truth a very melancholy service, a
service on which one must needs move about, solemn,
serious, depressed, with the hushed footsteps of those
who move about the house where a dead body is lying.
Such was the impression which occurred to Marius again
and again as he read, with a growing sense of some pro-
found dissidence from his author. By certain quite
traceable links of association he was reminded, in spite
of the moral beauty of the philosophic emperor's ideas,
how he had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the shows.
For, actually, his contemplations had made him of a sad
heart, inducing in him that melancholyTristitiawhich
even monkish moralists have held to be of the nature of
mortal sin, akin to the mortal sin of Desidia or Inactivity.
Resignation, a sombre resignation, a sad heart, patient
bearing of the burden of a sad heart :Yes! this belonged
to the situation of an honest thinker upon the world.
Only, here there was too much of a complacent ac-
quiescence in the world as it is. And there could be no
true Thodice in that; no real accommodation of the
world as it is, to the divine pattern of the Logos,
the eternal reason, over against it. It amounted to a
tolerance of evil.
## p. 223 (#239) ############################################
XVIII
223
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but
little understand, yet prospereth on the journey :
If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be nought of
evil with thee therein :
If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men
are communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil
with theenothing to be afraid of:
Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every
man according to his desert :
If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require ?
Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits ?
That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the
whole :
The profit of the whole,that was sufficient !
These were links in a train of thought really generous.
Only, actually, its forced yet too facile optimism, refusing
to see evil anywhere, lacked, after all, the secret of genuine
cheerfulness : it left a weight upon the spirits; and with
that weight unlifted, there could be no real justification
of the ways of Heaven to man. " Let thine air be
cheerful," he had said ; and, with an effort, did himself
at times attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely
ought to accompany, as their outward flower and favour,
assumptions like those. Still, what in Aurelius was but
a passing expression, was with Cornelius (Marius could
but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable physio-
gnomy.
With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less
than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed
spirits of the perfect, the outward expression of which,
like a reflex of physical light upon human faces from the
land which is very far off," we may trace from Giotto, and
even earlier, to its consummation in the work of Raffaelle
the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, of those who
had been indeed delivered from death, and of which the
utmost degree of that famed "blitheness" of the Greeks
had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and
wholly superficial youth. And yet, in Cornelius, it was
certainly united with the bold recognition of evil as a
## p. 224 (#240) ############################################
224
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
fact in the world; real as an aching in the head or heart,
which one instinctively desires to have cured ; an enemy
with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully
visible, in a thousand formsin the apparent waste of
men's gifts in an early, or even in a late grave; in the
death, as such, of men, and even of animals; in the
disease and pain of the body.
And there was another point of dissidence between
Aurelius and his reader. The philosophic emperor
was a despiser of the body. Since it is "the peculiar
privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be
proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither
sensation nor passion to break in upon her," it follows
that the true interest of the spirit must ever be to treat
the body-Well ! as a corpse attached thereto, rather
than as a living companionnay, actually to promote
its dissolution. And here again, in opposition to an
inhumanity like this, presenting itself to that young
reader as nothing less than a sin against nature, the
person of Cornelius sanctioned the delight Marius had
always had in the body; at first, as but the consequence
of his sensuous or materialistic philosophy. To Corne-
lius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer
terms it, the one true temple in the world, ("we touch
Heaven when we lay our hand upon a human body,') or
rather the proper object of a worship, or sacred service,
in which the very finest gold might have its seemliness and
due symbolic use :-Ah! of what reverent, awe-stricken
pity also, in its dejection, down to the perishing white
bones of a poor man's grave !
Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved
in the philosopher's contempt for itsome diseased
point of thought, some moral dulness, leading logically
to what seemed to him the strangest of all the emperor's
inhumanities, the humour of the suicide ; for which
there was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world.
## p. 225 (#241) ############################################
XVIII
225
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
" 'Tis part of the business of life," he read, "to lose it
handsomely." On due occasion, "one might give life
the slip." The moral or mental powers might fail one ;
and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the
time for taking leave was not come : "Thou canst leave
this prison when thou wilt. Go forth boldly !" Just
there, in the bare capacity to entertain that question at
all, there was what Marius with a heart which must
always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical
sunshine, touching him as it touched the flies in the air,
could not away with. That, surely, was the sign of some
crookedness in the natural power of apprehension. It
was the attitude, the melancholy intellectual attitude, of
one who might be greatly mistaken in thingswho
might make the greatest of mistakes.
A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, and
even the weakness of others : of this Marius had
certainly found the trace, as a confidant of the emperor's
conversations with himself, in spite of those jarring
inhumanities, of that pretension to a stoical indifference,
and the many difficulties of his manner of writing. He
found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger
evidence, in this way.
As he read one morning early,
there slipped from the rolls of manuscript a sealed letter
with the emperor's superscription, which might well be
of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at once in
person; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one
of his favourite retreats, at Prneste, taking a few days
of quiet with his young children, before his departure
for the war.
A whole day passed as Marius crossed the
Campagna on horseback, pleased by the random autumn
lights bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture,
the shepherds in their picturesque dress, the golden elms,
tower and villa ; and it was after dark that he mounted
the steep street of the little hill-town to the imperial
residence. He was struck by an odd mixture of stillness
Q
## p. 226 (#242) ############################################
226
CHAP. XVIII
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
and excitement about the place. Lights burned at the
windows. It seemed that numerous visitors were within,
for the courtyard was crowded with litters and horses in
waiting. For the moment, indeed, all larger cares, even
the cares of war, of late so heavy a pressure, had been
forgotten in what was passing with the little Annius
Verus; who for his part had forgotten his toys, and had
been lying all day across the knees of his mother, as a
mere child's ear-ache grew rapidly to alarming sickness
with great manifest agony, only suspended a little, from
time to time, when he passed from very weariness into a
few moments of unconsciousness. The country surgeon
called in, had removed the imposthume with the knife.
There had been a great effort to bear this operation, for
the terrified child, hardly persuaded to submit himself,
when his pain was at its worst, and even more for the
parents. At last, amid a crowd of pupils pressing in
with him, as the custom was, to watch the proceedings
in the sickroom, the great Galen had arrived, only to
pronounce the thing done visibly useless, the patient now
fainting into longer intervals of delirium.
And it was
thus, through the pressure of the departing crowd, that
Marius was forced into the privacy of a grief, the desolate
face of which went deep into his memory, as he saw the
emperor carry the child away-quite conscious now,
but with a touching expression upon it of weakness and
defeat-pressed close to his bosom, as if yearning
just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely
one with it, in its obscure distress.
## p. 227 (#243) ############################################
CHAPTER XIX
THE WILL AS VISION
PARATUM COR MEUM DEUS ! PARATUM COR MEUM
The emperor only demanded of the Senate a decree for
the erection of images, memorial of the dead child ; that
a golden one should be carried, together with the other
images, in the great procession of the Circus, and his
name inserted in the Hymn of the Salian Priests : and
then, stifling private grief, without further delay set forth
for the war.
True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius,
had understood it, was essentially of the nature of a
service. If so be, you can discover a mode of life more
desirable than the being a king, for those who shall be
kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a
possibility; not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific
Vision be indeed possible, if philosophy really concludes
in an ecstasy, affording full fruition to the entire nature
of man; then, for certain elect souls at least, a mode of
life will have been discovered more desirable than being
a king. By love or fear you might induce such persons
to forgo their privilege ; to take upon them the distaste-
ful task of governing other men, or even of leading them
to victory in battle. But, by the very conditions of its
tenure, their dominion would be wholly a ministry to
others : they would have taken upon them "the form of
a servant :" they would be reigning for the wellbeing of
## p. 228 (#244) ############################################
228
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
others, not for themselves. The true king, the righteous
king, would be Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the
better land and its perfected companyso real a thing
to him, definite and real as the pictured scenes of his
psalterto arbitrate, or to take part in, men's quarrels,
about the transitory appearances of things. In a lower
degree (lower, in proportion as the highest Platonic dream
is lower than any Christian vision) the true king would
be Marcus Aurelius, drawn from the meditation of books,
to be the ruler of the Roman people in peace, and still
more, in war.
To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the
visions, however dim, which this mood brought with it,
were pleasant enough, together with the endearments of
home, to make his public rule nothing less than a sacri-
fice of himself according to Plato's requirement, now
consummated in his setting forth to the campaign on
the Danube. That it was such a sacrifice was to Marius
visible fact, as he saw him ceremoniously lifted into the
saddle amid all the pageantry of an imperial departure,
but with the air less of a sanguine and self-reliant leader
than of one in some way or other defeated. Through
the fortune of the subsequent years, passing and re-
passing so inexplicably from side to side, the rumour of
which reached him amid his own quiet studies, Marius
seemed always to see that central figure, with its habitual
hue of dejection grown now to an expression of positive
suffering, and all the stranger from its contrast with the
magnificent armour worn by the emperor on this occasion,
as it had been worn by his predecessor Hadrian.
-Totus et argento contextus et auro :
clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely
constructed armour of which Homer tells, but without
its miraculous lightsomeness he looked out baffled,
moribund, labouring, a comfortless shadow taking part
## p. 229 (#245) ############################################
XIX
229
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
seem
SO
in some shadowy reproduction of the labours of Hercules,
through those northern, mist-laden confines of the civilised
world. It was as if the familiar soul which had been so
friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to
Hades; and when he read the Conversations afterwards,
though his judgment of them underwent no material
change, it was nevertheless with the allowance we
make for the dead. The memory of that suffering
image, while it certainly strengthened his adhesion
to what he could accept at all in the philosophy
of Aurelius, added a strange pathos to what must
the writer's mistakes. What, after all, had
been the meaning of that incident, accepted as
fortunate an omen long since, when the prince, then a
little child much younger than was usual, had stood in
ceremony among the priests of Mars and flung his crown
of flowers with the rest at the sacred image reclining on
the Pulvinar ? The other crowns lodged themselves
here or there; when, Lo! the crown thrown by Aurelius,
the youngest of them all, alighted upon the very brows
of the god, as if placed there by a careful hand! He
was still young, again, when on the day of his adoption
by Antoninus Pius he saw himself in a dream, with as
it were shoulders of ivory, like the images of the gods,
and found them more capable than shoulders of flesh.
Yet he was now well-nigh fifty years of age, and with two-
thirds of life behind him setting out upon a labour which
would fill the remainder of it with anxietya labour
for which he had perhaps no capacity, certainly no taste.
That ancient suit of armour was almost the only
object Aurelius now possessed of all those much cherished
articles of vertu collected by the Csars, making the
imperial residence like a magnificent museum. Not
men alone were needed for the war, so that it became
necessary, to the great disgust alike of timid persons and
of the lovers of sport, to arm the gladiators, but money
## p. 230 (#246) ############################################
230
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
also was lacking. Accordingly, at the sole motion of
Aurelius himself, unwilling that the public burden should
be further increased, especially on the part of the poor,
the whole of the imperial ornaments and furniture, a
sumptuous collection of gems formed by Hadrian, with
many works of the most famous painters and sculptors,
even the precious ornaments of the emperor's chapel or
Lararium, and the wardrobe of the empress Faustina,
who seems to have borne the loss without a murmur,
were exposed for public auction. "These treasures,'
said Aurelius, "like all else that I possess, belong by
right to the Senate and People." Was it not a char-
acteristic of the true kings in Plato that they had in their
houses nothing of their own ? Connoisseurs had a keen
delight in the mere reading of the Prtor's list of the
property for sale. For two months the learned in these
matters were daily occupied in the appraising of the
embroidered hangings, the choice articles of personal
use selected for preservation by each succeeding age, the
great outlandish pearls from Hadrian's favourite cabinet,
the marvellous plate lying safe behind the pretty iron
wicker-work of the shops in the goldsmiths' quarter.
Meantime ordinary persons might inspect with interest
objects which had been as daily companions to people
so far above and remote from themthings so fine also
in workmanship and material as to seem; with their
antique and delicate air, a worthy survival of the grand
bygone eras, like select thoughts or utterances embodying
the very spirit of the vanished past. The town became
more pensive than ever over old fashions.
The pleasurable excitement of this last act of pre-
paration for the great war being now over, all Rome
seemed to settle down into a singular quiet, likely to
last long, as though bent only on watching from afar the
languid, somewhat uneventful course of the contest
itself. Marius took advantage of it as an opportunity
## p. 231 (#247) ############################################
XIX
231
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
for still closer study than of old, only now and then
going out to one of his favourite spots on the Sabine or
Alban hills for a quiet even greater than that of Rome
in the country air. On one of these occasions, as if by
favour of an invisible power withdrawing some unknown
cause of dejection from around him, he enjoyed a quite
unusual sense of self-possessionthe possession of his
own best and happiest self. After some gloomy thoughts
over-night, he had awoke in the morning sunlight, full,
in his entire refreshment, of that almost religious ap-
preciation of sleep, the graciousness of its influence on
men's spirits, which had made the old Greeks conceive
of it as a god. It was like one of those old joyful
wakings of childhood, now becoming rarer and rarer
with him, and looked back upon with much regret as a
measure of advancing age. In fact, the last bequest of
this serene sleep had been a dream, in which, as once
before, he had overheard those he loved best pronouncing
his name very pleasantly, as they passed through the
rich sunlight and shadow of a summer morning, along
the pavement of a cityAh ! fairer far than Rome! In
a moment, as he arose, a certain oppression of late setting
very heavily upon him was lifted away, as though by the
motion of physical air.
That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasur-
able excitement, but so easily ruffled by chance collisions
even with things or persons, he had begun to value as
the greatest treasure in life, was to be wholly his to-day,
he thought, as he rode towards Tibur, under the early
sunshine ; the marble of its villas glistening all the way
before him on the hillside. Why might he not hold
this serenity ever at command ? he asked, expert as he
was at last come to be, in the art of setting the house of
his thoughts in order. "'Tis in thy power to think as
thou wilt :" he repeated to himselfmost serviceable of
all the lessons enforced on him by those imperial
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
conversations.  " 'Tis in thy power to think as thou
wilt." And were those cheerful, sociable beliefs he had
there seen so much of (that bold adhesion, for instance,
to the hypothesis of an eternal friend to man, just
hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and material
order, but only just behind it, ready perhaps even now
to break through) after all, really a matter of choice, and
dependent on some deliberate act of volition on his part ?
Were they doctrines one might take for granted, gener-
ously take for granted, and led on by them, at first as
but well-defined hopes, grow at last into the corre-
sponding intellectual certitude ? "It is the truth I
seek," he had read," the truth, by which no one," grey and
depressing as it might seem, " was ever really injured."
And yet, on the other hand, the imperial wayfarer, he
had been able to go along with so far on his pilgrimage,
let fall many things concerning the practicability of
a deliberate, methodical, self-forced assent to certain
principles or pre-suppositions "one could not do
without." Were there (as the expression "one could not
do without" seemed to hint) beliefs, without which life itself
was almost impossible, which had their sufficient ground
of evidence in that fact? Experience certainly taught
that, as with regard to the sensible world he could
attend or not, almost at will, to this or that colour, this
or that train of sounds, in the whole tumultuous con-
course of colour and sound, so it was also, for the
well-trained intelligence, in regard to that hum of voices
which besiege the inward no less than the outward ear.
Might it be not otherwise with those various and
competing permissible hypotheses, which, in that open
field for hypothesis--one's own actual ignorance of the
origin and tendency of our being present themselves so
importunately, some of them with so emphatic a reitera-
tion, through all the mental changes of the various ages ?
Might the Will itself be an organ of knowledge, of vision ?
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
'On this day, certainly, no mysterious light, no
irresistibly leading hand from afar reached him ; only
the peculiarly tranquil influence of its first hour increased
steadily upon him, in a manner with which, as he
conceived, the aspects of the place he was then visiting
had something to do. The air there, air supposed to
possess the singular property of restoring the whiteness
of ivory, was pure and thin. An even veil of lawn-like
white cloud had now drawn over the sky ; and under its
broad, shadowless light every hue and tone of time
came out upon the yellow old temples, the elegant
pillared circle of the shrine of the patronal Sibyl, the
houses seemingly of a piece with the ancient funda-
mental rock. Some half-conscious motive of poetic
grace would appear to have determined their grouping;
in part resisting, partly going along with the natural
wildness and harshness of the place, its floods and
precipices. An air of immense age possessed, above
all, the vegetation arounda world of evergreen trees-
the olives especially, older than how many generations
of men's lives! and fretted and twisted by the com-
bining forces of life and death, into every conceivable
caprice of form. In the windless weather all seemed to
be listening to the roar of the immemorial waterfall,
plunging down so unassociably among these human
habitations, and with a motion so unchanging from age
to age as to count, even in this time-worn place, as an
image of unalterable rest. Yet the clear sky all but
broke to let through the ray
which silently
quickening everything in the late February afternoon,
and the unseen violet refined itself through the air. It
was as if the spirit of life in nature were but withholding
any too precipitate revelation of itself, in its slow, wise,
maturing work.
Through some accident to the trappings of his horse
at the inn where he rested, Marius had an unexpected
was
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
delay. He sat down in an olive-garden, and, all around
him and within turning still to reverie, the course of his
own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself into some
other world, disparted from this spectacular point where
he was now placed to survey it, like the distant road
below, along which he had travelled that morning across
the Campagna. Through a dreamy land he could see
himself moving, as if in another life, and like another
person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing
from point to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from
various dangers. And the vision brought, first of all, a
forcible impulse of nothing less than gratitude, as if he
must look round for some one to share his joy withto
whom he might tell the thing, for his own relief.
Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted, or
accomplished, or at least pleasant to him, had been,
through this and that long space of it, the chief delight
of the journey. And was it only the general resultant
sense of such familiarity, diffused through his memories,
which in a while suggested the question whether there
had not beenbesides Flavian, besides Cornelius even,
and amid the solitude which in spite of ardent friendship
he had perhaps loved best of all things--a companion,
a perpetual companion, ever at his side throughout ;
doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, recipient
of his depression or peevishness, above all, as of old, of
his grateful recognition of the fact that he was there at
all? Would not all have faded away altogether, had he
been left for one moment really alone in it? In his
deepest apparent solitude there had been rich entertain-
ment. It was as if there were not one but two
wayfarers, side by side, visible there across the plain, as
he indulged his fancy. A bird came and sang among
the wattled hedge-roses : an animal feeding crept nearer :
the child who kept it was gazing quietly : and the scene
and the hour still conspiring, he passed from that mere
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235
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
fantasy of a self not himself, beside him in his coming
and going to those divinations of a living com-
panionable spirit at work in all things, which he had
experienced from time to time in his old philosophic
readingsin Plato and others, last but not least, in
Aurelius. Through one reflection upon another, he
passed from such instinctive divinations, to the thoughts
which give them logical consistency, formulating at last,
as the necessary exponent of our own and the world's
life, that "reasonable Ideal" which the Old Testament
calls Creator, and the Greek philosophers Eternal Reason,
and the New Testament the Father of Meneven as
one builds up from act and word and expression of the
friend actually visible at one's side, an ideal of the spirit
within him.
In this peculiar and privileged hour, his body, as he
could recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of
its capacities, so entirely possessed by himnay! actually
his very selfwas yet determined by a far-reaching
system of material forces external to it, a thousand
combining currents from earth and sky. Its powers of
apprehension were in truth but susceptibilities to
influence. The perfection of its capacity might be said
to depend on its passive surrender, as of a leaf on the
wind, to the motions of the great stream of physical
energy outside it. And might not the intellectual being
also, that was still more truly and intimately himself,
after the analogy of this bodily life, be but a moment, an
impulse or series of impulses, a single process, of an
intellectual system external to it, diffused through all
time and placethat great stream of spiritual energy, of
which his own imperfect thoughts, yesterday or to-day,
must be but the remote, and therefore imperfect,
pulsations? It was the hypothesis (boldest, yet in reality
most conceivable of all hypotheses) that had dawned on
the contemplations of the two opposed great masters of
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236
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the old Greek thought, alike :the World of Ideas,
existent only in and by their being known, as Plato
conceived; the creative, incorruptible, informing Mind,
supposed by Aristotle, so sober-minded, yet in this
matter left after all something of a mystic. Might not
this whole material world, the very scene around him,
the immemorial rocks, the firm marble, the olive-gardens,
the falling water, be themselves but reflections in, or a
creation of, that one indefectible mind, wherein he too
became conscious, for an hour, a day, for so many years ?
Upon what other hypothesis could he so well understand
the persistency of all these things for his own inter-
mittent consciousness of them, for the intermittent
consciousness of so many generations, fleeting one after
another? It was easier to conceive of the material
fabric of things as but an element in a world of thought
as a thought in a mind, than of mind as an element,
or accident, or passing condition in a material order,
because mind was really nearer to himself: it was an
explanation of what was less known by what was known
better. The purely material world, that close, impassable
prison wall, seemed the unreal thing just then, to be
dissolving away all around him : he felt a quiet hope, a
quiet joy dawning faintly, in the dawning of this doctrine
upon him as an actually credible opinion : it was like
the break of day over a vast prospect with the "new
city," some "heavenly" New Rome, in the midst of it.
That divine companion figured no longer as but an
occasional wayfarer beside him, rather as the unfailing
assistant," without whose inspiration and concurrence
he could not breathe or see, instrumenting his bodily
senses, rounding, supporting his imperfect thoughts.
How often had the thought of their brevity spoiled for
him the most natural pleasures of life, confusing even
the present sense of them by the suggestion of disease,
of death in everything! How had he longed, sometimes,
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
that there were indeed one to whose boundless memory
he could commit his own most fortunate moments, love,
admiration, nay! the very sorrows of which he could not
bear quite to lose the sense -strong to retain them
though he forgot, in whose abler consciousness they
might subsist for ever, beyond that mere quickening of
capacity which was all that remained of them in himself!
"O that they might live before Thee!"To-day at least, in
the peculiar clearness of one privileged hour, he seemed to
have apprehended that in which the experiences he valued
most might find, one by one, an unfailing refuge. And again,
the resultant sense of companionship, of a person beside
him, evoked the faculty of conscience-conscience, as of
old when he had been at his best, in the form not of fear,
nor of self-reproach even, but of a certain lively gratitude.
Himselfhis sensations and ideas-never fell again
precisely into focus as on that day, yet he was the
richer by its experience. But for once to have come
under the power of that peculiar mood, to have felt the
train of reflections which belong to it really forcible and
conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion,
to have apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that
it defined personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly
hand laid upon him amid the shadows of the world, left
this one particular hour a marked point in life never to
be forgotten. It gave him the definitely ascertained
measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand
his soul must make upon the powers, whatsoever they
might be, which had brought him, as he was, into the
world at all. And again, would he be faithful to him-
self, to his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions,
if he did but remain just there? Must not all that
remained of life be but a search for the equivalent of
that Ideal, among so-called actual thingsa gathering
together of every trace or token of it, which actual
experience might present ?
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## p. 239 (#255) ############################################
PART THE FOURTH
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CHAPTER XX
TWO CURIOUS HOUSES
I. GUESTS
" Your old men shall dream dreams."
A NATURE like that of Marius, composed, in about
equal parts, of instincts almost physical, and of slowly
accumulated intellectual judgments, was perhaps even
less susceptible than other men's characters of essential
change. And yet the experience of that fortunate hour,
seeming to gather into one central act of vision all the
deeper impressions his mind had ever received, did not
leave him quite as he had been. For his mental view,
at least, it changed measurably the world about him, of
which he was still indeed a curious spectator, but which
looked further off, was weaker in its hold, and, in a
sense, less real to him than ever. It was as if he viewed
it through a diminishing glass. And the permanency of
this change he could note, some years later, when it
happened that he was a guest at a feast, in which the
various exciting elements of Roman life, its physical and
intellectual accomplishments, its frivolity and far-fetched
elegances, its strange, mystic essays after the unseen,
were elaborately combined. The great Apuleius, the
R
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242
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
was
poetic ideal of his boyhood, had arrived in Rome,-
now visiting Tusculum, at the house of their
common friend, a certain aristocratic poet who loved
every sort of superiorities; and it was to a supper-party
given in his honour that Marius was bidden.
It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to
his own early boyish hero-worship, and with some sense
of superiority in himself, seeing his old curiosity grown
now almost to indifference when on the point of satisfac-
tion at last, and with a truer measure of its object, that he
mounted to the little town on the hillside, the winding
ways of which were flights of easy steps gathered round
a single great house under shadow of the haunted
ruins of Cicero's villa on the wooded heights. There
was a touch of weirdness in the circumstance that in so
romantic a place he had been invited to meet the writer
who had come to seem almost like one of the personages
in his own fiction. As he turned now and then to gaze
at the evening scene through the tall narrow openings
of the street, up which the cattle were going home slowly
from the pastures below, the Alban mountains, stretched
between the great walls of the ancient houses, seemed close
at handa screen of vaporous dun violet against the set-
ting sunwith those waves of surpassing softness in the
boundary lines which indicate their volcanic formation.
The coolness of the little brown market-place, for profit
of which even the working people, in long file through
the olive-gardens, were leaving the plain for the night, was
grateful, after the heats of Rome. Those wild country
figures, clad in every kind of fantastic patchwork,
stained by wind and weather fortunately enough for the
eye, under that significant light inclined him to poetry.
And it was a very delicate poetry of its kind that seemed
to enfold him, as passing into the poet's house he
paused for a moment to glance back towards the heights
above; whereupon, the numerous cascades of the
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243
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
precipitous garden of the villa, framed in the doorway
of the hall, fell into a harmless picture, in its place
among the pictures within, and scarcely more real than
theya landscape-piece, in which the power of water
(plunging into what unseen depths !) done to the life,
was pleasant, and without its natural terrors.
At the further end of this bland apartment, fragrant
with the rare woods of the old inlaid panelling, the
falling of aromatic oil from the ready-lighted lamps, the
iris-root clinging to the dresses of the guests, as with
odours from the altars of the gods, the supper-table was
spread, in all the daintiness characteristic of the agree-
able petit-maitre, who entertained. He was already
most carefully dressed, but, like Martial's Stella, perhaps
consciously, meant to change his attire once and again
during the banquet; in the last instance, for an ancient
vesture (object of much rivalry among the young men of
fashion, at that great sale of the imperial wardrobes) a
toga, of altogether lost hue and texture. He wore it
with a grace which became the leader of a thrilling
movement then on foot for the restoration of that
disused garment, in which, laying aside the customary
evening dress, all the visitors were requested to appear,
setting off the delicate sinuosities and well-disposed
"golden ways" of its folds, with harmoniously tinted
flowers. The opulent sunset, blending pleasantly with
artificial light, fell across the quiet ancestral effigies of
old consular dignitaries, along the wide floor strewn with
sawdust of sandal-wood, and lost itself in the heap of
cool coronals, lying ready for the foreheads of the guests
on a sideboard of old citron.
The crystal cups darkened
with old wine, the hues of the early autumn fruit-
mulberries, pomegranates, and grapes that had long been
hanging under careful protection upon the vines, were
almost as much a feast for the eye, as the dusky fires of
the rare twelve-petalled roses. A favourite animal,
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244
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
white as snow, brought by one of the visitors, purred its
way gracefully among the wine-cups, coaxed onward
from place to place by those at table, as they reclined
easily on their cushions of German eider-down, spread
over the long-legged, carved couches.
A highly refined modification of the acroama-
musical performance during supper for the diversion of
the guestswas presently heard hovering round the
place, soothingly, and so unobtrusively that the company
could not guess, and did not like to ask, whether or not
it had been designed by their entertainer. They
inclined on the whole to think it some wonderful peasant-
music peculiar to that wild neighbourhood, turning, as it
did now and then, to a solitary reed-note, like a bird's,
while it wandered into the distance. It wandered quite
away at last, as darkness with a bolder lamplight came
on, and made way for another sort of entertainment.
An odd, rapid, phantasmal glitter, advancing from the
garden by torchlight, defined itself, as it came nearer,
into a dance of young men in armour. Arrived at
length in a portico, open to the supper-chamber, they
contrived that their mechanical march-movement should
fall out into a kind of highly expressive dramatic action;
and with the utmost possible emphasis of dumb motion,
their long swords weaving a silvery network in the air,
they danced the Death of Paris. The young Commodus,
already an adept in these matters, who had condescended
to welcome the eminent Apuleius at the banquet, had
mysteriously dropped from his place to take his share in the
performance; and at its conclusion reappeared, still wear-
ing the dainty accoutrements of Paris, including a breast-
plate, composed entirely of overlapping tigers' claws,
skilfully gilt. The youthful prince had lately assumed
the dress of manhood, on the return of the emperor for
a brief visit from the North ; putting up his hair, in
imitation of Nero, in a golden box dedicated to Capitoline
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Jupiter. His likeness to Aurelius, his father, had
become, in consequence, more striking than ever; and
he had one source of genuine interest in the great
literary guest of the occasion, in that the latter was the
fortunate holder of the monopoly of exhibiting wild beasts
and gladiatorial shows in the province of Carthage, where
he resided.
Still, after all complaisance to the perhaps somewhat
crude tastes of the emperor's son, it was felt that with
a guest like Apuleius whom they had come prepared
to entertain as veritable connoisseurs, the conversation
should be learned and superior, and the host at last
deftly led his company round to literature, by the way
of bindings. Elegant rolls of manuscript from his fine
library of ancient Greek books passed from hand to
hand about the table. It was a sign for the visitors
themselves to draw their own choicest literary curiosities
from their bags, as their contribution to the banquet ;
and one of them, a famous reader, choosing his lucky
moment, delivered in tenor voice the piece which follows,
with a preliminary query as to whether it could indeed
be the composition of Lucian of Samosata, understood
to be the great mocker of that day :-
"What sound was that, Socrates ?" asked Chrephon.
" It came from the beach under the cliff yonder, and
seemed a long way off.And how melodious it was !
Was it a bird, I wonder. I thought all sea-birds were
songless."
" It was
a sea-bird," answered Socrates, "a bird
called the Halcyon, and has a note full of plaining and
tears. There is an old story people tell of it. It was a
mortal woman once, daughter of olus, god of the
winds. Ceyx, the son of the morning-star, wedded her
in her early maidenhood. The son was not less fair
than the father; and when it came to pass that he died,
the crying of the girl as she lamented his sweet usage,
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246
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
was,Just that! And some while after, as Heaven
willed, she was changed into a bird. Floating now on
bird's wings over the sea she seeks her lost Ceyx there;
since she was not able to find him after long wandering
over the land."
"That then is the Halcyonthe kingfisher," said
Chrephon. "I never heard a bird like it before.
It has truly a plaintive note. What kind of a bird is it,
Socrates ?"
"Not a large bird, though she has received large
honour from the gods on account of her singular con-
jugal affection. For whensoever she makes her nest, a
law of nature brings round what is called Halcyon's
weather,days distinguishable among all others for
their serenity, though they come sometimes amid the
storms of winter-days like to-day ! See how trans-
parent is the sky above us, and how motionless the sea !
- like a smooth mirror."
"True! A Halcyon day, indeed! and yesterday
was the same. But tell me, Socrates, what is one to
think of those stories which have been told from the
beginning, of birds changed into mortals and mortals into
birds ? To me nothing seems more incredible."
"Dear Chrephon," said Socrates, "methinks we are
but half-blind judges of the impossible and the possible.
We try the question by the standard of our human faculty,
which avails neither for true knowledge, nor for faith,
nor vision. Therefore many things seem to us im-
possible which are really easy, many things unattainable
which are within our reach ; partly through inexperience,
partly through the childishness of our minds. For in
truth, every man, even the oldest of us, is like a little
child, so brief and babyish are the years of our life in
comparison of eternity. Then, how can we, who com-
prehend not the faculties of gods and the heavenly host,
tell whether aught of that kind be possible or no ?-
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XX
247
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
able and easy.
What a tempest you saw three days ago! One trembles
but to think of the lightning, the thunderclaps, the
violence of the wind! You might have thought the
whole world was going to ruin. And then, after a little,
came this wonderful serenity of weather, which has con-
tinued till to-day. Which do you think the greater and
more difficult thing to do :to exchange the disorder of
that irresistible whirlwind to a clarity like this, and be-
calm the whole world again, or to refashion the form of
a woman into that of a bird? We can teach even little
children to do something of that sort,to take wax or
clay, and mould out of the same material many kinds of
form, one after another, without difficulty. And it may
be that to the Deity, whose power is too vast for com-
parison with ours, all processes of that kind are manage-
How much wider is the whole heaven
than thyself ?More than thou canst express.
'Among ourselves also, how vast the difference we
may observe in men's degrees of power! To you and
me, and many another like us, many things are im-
possible which are quite easy to others. For those who
are unmusical, to play on the flute; to read or write, for
those who have not yet learned ; is no easier than to
make birds of women, or women of birds. From the
dumb and lifeless egg Nature moulds her swarms of
winged creatures, aided, as some will have it, by a
divine and secret art in the wide air around us. She
takes from the honeycomb a little memberless live thing ;
she brings it wings and feet, brightens and beautifies it
with quaint variety of colour :and Lo! the bee in her
wisdom, making honey worthy of the gods.
"It follows, that we mortals, being altogether of little
account, able wholly to discern no great matter, sometimes
not even a little one, for the most part at a loss regard-
what happens even with ourselves, may hardly speak
with security as to what may be the powers of the im-
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248
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
mortal gods concerning Kingfisher, or Nightingale.
Yet the glory of thy mythus, as my fathers bequeathed
it to me, O tearful songstress! that will I too hand on
to my children, and tell it often to my wives, Xanthippe
and Myrto :the story of thy pious love to Ceyx, and
of thy melodious hymns; and, above all, of the honour
thou hast with the gods!"
The reader's well-turned periods seemed to stimulate,
almost uncontrollably, the eloquent stirrings of the
eminent man of letters then present. The impulse to
speak masterfully was visible, before the recital was well
over, in the moving lines about his mouth, by no means
designed, as detractors were wont to say, merely to
display the beauty of his teeth. One of his followers,
expert in his humours, made ready to transcribe what
he would say, the sort of things of which a collection
was then forming, the "Florida" or Flowers, so to call
them, he was apt to let fall by the way-no impromptu
ventures, but rather elaborate, carved ivories of speech,
drawn, at length, out of the rich treasury of his memory,
as with a fine savour of old musk about them. Cer-
tainly in this case, as Marius thought, it was worth while
to hear a charming writer speak. Discussing, quite in
our modern way, the peculiarities of those suburban
views, especially the sea-views, of which he was a pro-
fessed lover, he was also every inch a priest of Aescula-
pius, patronal god of Carthage. There was a piquancy
in his rococo, very African, and as it were perfumed
personality, though he was now well-nigh sixty years old,
a mixture there of that sort of Platonic spiritualism
which can speak of the soul of man as but a sojourner
in the prison of the bodya mixture of that with such
a relish for merely bodily graces as availed to set the
fashion in matters of dress, deportment, accent, and the
like, nay! with something also which reminded Marius
of the vein of coarseness he had found in his "Golden
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XX
249
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Book." All this made the total impression he conveyed
a very uncommon one. Marius did not wonder, as he
watched him speaking, that people freely attributed to
him
many
of the marvellous adventures he had recounted
in that famous romance, over and above the wildest
version of his own actual story  his extraordinary
marriage, his religious initiations, his acts of mad gener-
osity, his trial as a sorcerer.
But a sign came from the imperial prince that it was
time for the company to separate. He was entertaining
his immediate neighbours at the table with a trick from
the streets; tossing his olives in rapid succession into
the air, and catching them, as they fell
, between his lips.
His dexterity in this performance made the mirth around
him noisy, disturbing the sleep of the furry visitor : the
learned party broke up; and Marius withdrew, glad to
escape into the open air. The courtesans with their
large wigs of false blond hair, were lurking for the guests,
with groups of curious idlers. A great conflagration was
visible in the distance. Was it in Rome; or in one of
the villages of the country ? Pausing for a few minutes
on the terrace to watch it, Marius was for the first time
able to converse intimately with Apuleius; and in this
moment of confidence the "illuminist," himself with
locks so carefully arranged, and seemingly so full of
affectations, almost like one of those light women there,
as it were, dropped a veil, and appeared, though still
permitting the play of a certain element of theatrical
interest in his bizarre tenets, to be ready to explain and
defend his position reasonably. For a moment his
fantastic foppishness and his pretensions to ideal vision
seemed to fall into some intelligible congruity with each
other. In truth, it was the Platonic Idealism, as he
conceived it, which for him literally animated, which
gave him so lively an interest in, the world of the purely
outward aspects of men and things.Did material things,
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
such things as they had had around them all that even-
ing, really need apology for being there, to interest one,
at all ?
Were not all visible objectsthe whole material
world, according to the consistent testimony of philosophy
in many formsfull of souls ? embarrassed perhaps,
partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls. Certainly,
the contemplative philosophy of Plato, with its figurative
imagery and apologue, its manifold sthetic colouring,
its measured eloquence, its music for the outward ear,
had been, like Plato's old master himself, a two-sided or
two-coloured thing. Apuleius was a Platonist : only, for
him, the Ideas of Plato were no creatures of logical
abstraction, but really informing souls, in every type and
variety of sensible things. Those noises in the house
all supper-time, sounding through the tables and along
the walls :were they only startings in the old rafters,
at the impact of the music and laughter; or rather
importunities of the secondary selves, the true unseen
selves, of the persons, nay! the very things around,
essaying to break through their frivolous, merely transi-
tory surfaces, to remind one of abiding essentials beyond
them, which might have their say, their judgment to
give, by and by, when the shifting of the meats and
drinks at life's table would be over ? Was not this the
true significance of the Platonic doctrine ?a hierarchy
of divine beings, associating themselves with particular
things and places, for the purpose of mediating between
God and man, who only needs due attention to be aware
of his celestial company, filling the air about him,
thick as motes in the sunbeam, for the ray of sympathetic
intelligence shot through it.
"Two kinds there are, of animated beings," he ex-
claimed: "Gods, entirely differing from men in the
infinite distance of their abode (one part of them only
is seen by our blunted visionthose mysterious stars !)
in the eternity of their existence, in the perfection of
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XX
251
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
their nature, contaminated by no contact with us : and
men, dwelling on the earth, with frivolous and anxious
minds, with infirm and mortal members, with variable
fortunes; labouring in vain ; taken altogether in their
whole species perhaps, eternal; but, severally, quitting
the scene in irresistible succession.
"What then ? Has nature connected itself together
by no bond, allowed itself to be thus crippled, and split
into the divine and human elements ? And you will say
to me: If so it be, that man is thus entirely exiled from
the immortal gods, that all communication is denied him,
that not one of them occasionally visits us, as a shepherd
his sheepto whom shall I address my prayers? Whom
shall I invoke as the helper of the unfortunate, the
protector of the good ?
"There are certain divine powers of a middle nature,
through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods,
and theirs to us. Passing between the inhabitants of
earth and heaven, they carry from one to the other
prayers and bounties, supplication and assistance, being
a kind of interpreters. This interval of the air is full of
them! Through them, all revelations, miracles, magic
processes, are effected. For, specially appointed members
of this order have their special provinces, with a ministry
according to the disposition of each. They go to and
fro without fixed habitation : or dwell in men's houses".
Just then a companion's hand laid in the darkness on
the shoulder of the speaker carried him away, and the
discourse broke off suddenly. But its singular utterances
were sufficient to cast back on all the circumstances of
this strange eveningthe dance, the readings, the distant
firea kind of allegoric expression; and made the whole
occasion seem like nothing so much as one of those same
famous Platonic figures or apologues. When Marius
recalled it, he seemed always to hear again the voice of
genuine conviction pleading, from amidst that scene of
## p. 252 (#268) ############################################
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CHAP. XX
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
at best elegant frivolity, for so boldly mystical a view of
man and his position in the world. For a moment, but
only for a moment, as he listened, the trees seemed, as of
old, to be growing "close against the sky." Yes! the
reception of theory, of hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a
great deal on temperament. They were the equivalents of
temperament. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven
to earth : that was what experience suggested to Apuleius :
it was what, in different forms, certain persons in every
age had instinctively supposed : they would be glad to
hear their supposition credited by the authority of a grave
philosophy. Marius, however, yearning as much as they,
in that hard world of Rome, for some celestial wing
across its unpeopled sky, must still object that they
assumed all that with a little too much facility. And
his second thought was that the indulgence, even for a
few moments, of such fantastic vision left the actual
world more lonely than ever. The little godship for
whom the countryman, unconscious Platonist, trimmed
his twinkling lamp, would never slip, for his solace, from
the bark of these immemorial olive-trees-no! not even
in the wildest moonlight. And for himself, he must
still hold by what his eyes really saw.
Only, he had to
concede also, that the very boldness of the theory bore
witness, at least, to a variety of human disposition and a
consequent variety of mental view, which mightwho
could tell ?be correspondent to, be defined by and
define, varieties of facts, of truths, just "behind the
veil," regarding the world they all alike had before them
for their original premiss; a world, wider, perhaps, in its
possibilities, than all possible fancies concerning it.
## p. 253 (#269) ############################################
CHAPTER XXI
TWO CURIOUS HOUSES
II. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA'S HOUSE
"And your young men shall see visions."
CORNELIUS had certain friends in or near Rome, whose
household, to Marius, as he pondered now and again
what might be the determining influences of that
peculiar character, presented itself as possibly its main
secretthe hidden source from which the beauty and
strength of a nature, so persistently fresh in the midst
of a somewhat jaded world, might be derived. But
Marius had never seen these friends; and it was
almost by accident that the veil of reserve was at last
lifted, and, with strange contrast to his visit to the poet's
villa at Tusculum, he entered another curious house.
"The house in which she lives," says that mystical
German writer quoted once before, "is for the orderly
soul, which does not live on blindly before her, but is
ever, out of her passing experiences, building and
adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for her-
self, only an expansion of the body; as the body,
according to the philosophy of Swedenborg, is but a
process, an expansion, of the soul.
For such an orderly
## p. 254 (#270) ############################################
254
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
soul, as she lives onward, all sorts of delicate affinities
establish themselves, between her and the doors and
passage-ways, the lights and shadows, of her outward
abode, until she may seem incorporate with ituntil at
last, in the entire expressiveness of what is outward,
there is for her, to speak properly, no longer any distinc-
tion between outward and inward at all; and the light
which creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture
or space upon the wall, the scent of flowers in the air at
a particular window, become to her, not so much appre-
hended objects, as themselves powers of apprehension,
and doorways to things beyond-seeds or rudiments of
new faculties, by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends
a matter lying beyond her actually attained capacity of
sense and spirit."
So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we
may think, together with that bodily "tent" or
" tabernacle," but one of many vestures of the pilgrim
soul, to be left by her, worn out one by one, as if on the
wayside ; as it was from her, indeed, that they borrowed
all the temporary value and significance they had.
The two friends were returning to Rome from a visit
to a country-house, where again a mixed company of
guests had been assembled ; Marius, for his part, a little
weary of gossip, and those sparks of ill-tempered rivalry,
which seem sometimes to be the only sort of fire that
the intercourse of men in general society can strike out
of them. Mere reaction against that as they started in
the clear morning, made their companionship, for one
of them at least, not less tranquillising than the solitude
he so much valued. Something in the south-west wind,
combining with their own intention, favoured increasingly,
as the hours wore on, a serenity like that Marius had
felt once before in journeying over the great plain
towards Tibura serenity which was to-day brotherly
amity also, and seemed to draw into its own charmed
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
circle all that was then present to eye or ear, while they
talked or were silent together, and all petty irritations, and
the like, shrank out of existence, or kept certainly beyond
its limits. The natural fatigue of the long journey over-
came them quite suddenly at last, when they were still
about two miles distant from Rome. The endless line
of tombs and cypress-trees had been visible for hours
against the sky towards the West; and it was just where
a cross-road from the Latin Way fell into the Appian,
that Cornelius halted at a doorway in a long, low wall-
the outer wall of the court of a villa, it might seem-as
if at liberty to enter, and rest there awhile. He held
the door open for his companion to enter also, if he
would; with an expression, as he lifted the latch, which
seemed to ask Marius, apparently shrinking from a
possible intrusion : "Would you like to see it?" Was
he willing to look upon that, the seeing of which might
define - yes ! define the critical turning-point in his
days?
The little doorway in this long, low wall admitted them,
in fact, into the courtyard or garden of a villa, disposed
in one of those abrupt natural hollows, which give its
character to the country in this place; the house itself,
with all its dependent buildings, the spaciousness of
which surprised Marius as he entered, being thus wholly
concealed from passengers along the road. All around,
in those well-ordered precincts, were the quiet signs of
wealth, and of a noble taste-a taste, indeed, chiefly
evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the
material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively
of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised,
with effects, both as regards colour and form, so delicate
as to seem really derivative from some finer intelligence
in these matters than lay within the resources of the
ancient world. was the old way of true Renaissance
-the
way
of nature with her roses, the divine way with
## p. 256 (#272) ############################################
256
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the body of man, it may be with his very soul-con-
ceiving the new organism by no sudden and abrupt
creation, but rather by the action of a new principle
upon elements, all of which had in truth already lived
and died many times. The fragments of older archi-
tecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious
corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by
such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an
air of grave thought, of intellectual purpose, in itself,
sthetically, very seductive. Lastly, herb and tree had
taken possession, spreading their seed-bells and light
branches, just alive in the trembling air, above the
ancient garden-walls, against the wide spaces of sunset.
And from the first they could hear singing, the singing
partly of children, it would seem, and of a new kind;
so novel indeed in its effect, that it carried the
memory of Marius back to those early efforts of Flavian
to beget some wholly novel world of poetic sound. It
was the expression not altogether of mirth, yet of a
wonderful happinessthe blithe expansion of a joyful
soul in people upon whom some all-subduing experience
had wrought heroically, and who still remembered, on
this bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance.
His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special
sympathies, of places, -above all, to any hieratic or
religious expression they might have, was at its liveliest,
as Marius, still encompassed by that peculiar singing,
and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion all
around him, entered the house. That intelligent serious-
ness about life, the lack of which had ever seemed to
remove those who were without it into some strange species
alien from himself, accumulating all the lessons of his
experience since those old days at White-nights, was as
it were translated here, as if in designed congruity with
his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision,
into an actual picture. If the true value of souls is in pro-
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XXI
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
portion to what they can admire, Marius was just then
an acceptable soul. As he passed through the various
chambers, great and small, one dominant thought in-
creased upon him, the thought of chaste women and
their children-of the various affections of family life
under its most natural conditions, yet developed, in
devout imitation of some sublime new type of it, into
large controlling passions. There reigned throughout,
an order and purity, an orderly disposition, as if by way
of making ready for some gracious spousals. The place
itself was like a bride adorned for her husband; and its
singular cheerfulness, the abundant light everywhere, the
sense of peaceful industry, of which he received a deep
impression though without precisely reckoning wherein
it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible con-
trast just at first to the place to which he was next con-
ducted by Cornelius still with a sort of eager, hurried,
half-troubled reluctance, and as if he forbore the
explanation which might well be looked for by his
companion.
An old flower-garden in the rear of the house, set here
and there with a venerable olive-tree-a picture in
pensive shade and fiery blossom, as transparent, under
that afternoon light, as the old miniature-painters' work
on the walls of the chambers withinwas bounded
towards the west by a low, grassy hill. A narrow open-
ing cut in its steep side, like a solid blackness there,
admitted Marius and his gleaming leader into a hollow
cavern or crypt, neither more nor less in fact than the
family burial-place of the Cecilii, to whom this residence
belonged, brought thus, after an arrangement then
becoming not unusual, into immediate connexion with
the abode of the living, in bold assertion of the unity
of family life, which the sanction of the Holy Family
would, hereafter, more and more reinforce.
in truth, the centre of the peculiar religious expressive-
Here was,
S
## p. 258 (#274) ############################################
258
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ness, the sanctity, of the whole scene. "Every person
makes the place which belongs to him a religious place,
at his own election, by the carrying of his dead into it :
--had been the persuasion of old Roman law, which
it was reserved for the early Christian societies, like
that established here by the piety of a wealthy Roman
matron, to realise in all its consequences.
Yet it was
certainly unlike any cemetery Marius had ever before
seen; most obviously in this, that these people had
returned to the older fashion of disposing of their dead
by burial instead of burning. In its origin a family
sepulchre, it was growing into a vast necropolis, a whole
township of the dead, by means of some free expansion
of the family interest beyond its amplest natural limits.
The air of venerable beauty which characterised the
house and its precincts above, was maintained also here.
It was certainly with a great outlay of labour that these
long, seemingly endless, yet carefully designed galleries,
were so rapidly increasing, with their layers of beds or
berths, one above another, cut, on either side the path-
way, in the porous tufa, through which all the moisture
filters downwards, leaving the parts above dry and
wholesome. All alike were carefully closed, and with all
the delicate costliness at command; some with simple
tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of marble, enriched
by fair inscriptions : marble, in some cases, taken from
an older pagan tombthe inscription sometimes a
palimpsest, the new epitaph being woven into the faded
letters of an earlier one.
As in an ordinary Roman cemetery, an abundance of
utensils for the worship or commemoration of the departed
was disposed around-lights, incense, flowers, their flame
or freshness relieved to the utmost by contrast with the
coal-like blackness of the soil itself, a volcanic sandstone,
the cinder of burnt-out fires. Would they ever kindle
again ?-possess, transform, the place ? Turning to an
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XXI
259
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ashen pallor where, at regular intervals, an air-hole or
luminare let in a hard beam of clear but sunless light,
with their heavy sleepers, row upon row, leaving a
passage so narrow that only one visitor at a time could
move along, cheek to cheek with them, the high walls
seemed to shut one in, into the great company of the
dead. Only the long straight pathway lay before him ;
opening, however, here and there, into a small chamber,
around a broad, table-like coffin or "altar-tomb," adorned
more profusely than the others, sometimes as if for some
anniversary observance. Clearly, these people, con-
curring here with the special sympathies of Marius him-
self, had adopted the practice of burial from some
peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the
body; a feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity, he
would fain have penetrated. The complete, the irre-
parable, disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, as
he had found it, so crushing to the spirits, had long since
induced in him a preference for the other mode of
settlement to the last sleep, as having something about
it homelike and more hopeful, at least in outward
seeming But whence the strange confidence that these
"handfuls of white dust" would hereafter re-compose
themselves once more into exulting human creatures ?
By what heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew from
above, such as was certainly never again to reach the
dead violets ?- Januarius, Agapetus, Felicitas ; Martyrs !
refresh, I pray you, the soul of Cecil, of Cornelius ! said
an inscription (one of many such) scratched, like a
passing sigh, when the mortar was still fresh that had
closed in the prison-door. All critical estimate of this
bold hope, as sincere apparently as it was audacious in
its claim, being set aside, here at least, carried further
than ever before, was that pious, systematic commemora-
tion of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal to forget
and wholly leave the helpless, had ever counted with
## p. 260 (#276) ############################################
260
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Marius as the central symbol or type of all natural
duty.
The stern soulof the excellent Jonathan Edwards, apply-
ing the faulty theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we
know, the vision of infants not a span long, on the floor of
hell. Every visitor to the Catacombs must have noticed,
in a very different theological connexion, the numerous
children's graves  beds of infants, but a span long
indeed, little, lowly, "prisoners of hope," on these sacred
floors. It was with great curiosity, certainly, that
Marius observed them ; in some instances adorned with
the favourite toys of their tiny occupants-toy-soldiers,
little chariot-wheels, all the paraphernalia of a baby-
house; and when he saw afterwards the living ones,
who sang and were busy abovesang their psalm
Laudate Pueri Dominum !their very faces caught for
him a sort of quaint unreality from the memory of those
others, the children of the Catacombs, but a little way
below them.
Here and there, mingling with the record of merely
natural decease, and sometimes even at these children's
graves, were the signs of violent death or "martyrdom "
-proofs that some "had loved not their lives unto the
death "in the little red phial of blood, the palm-
branch, the red flowers for their heavenly "birthday."
About one sepulchre in particular, distinguished in this
way, and devoutly arrayed for what, by a bold paradox,
was thus treated as, natalitiaa birthday, the peculiar
arrangements of the whole place visibly centered. And
it was with a curious novelty of feeling, the dawning of a
fresh order of experiences upon him, that, standing
beside those mournful relics, snatched in haste from the
common place of execution not many years before, Marius
became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the
whole possible force of evidence for a strange, new hope,
defining a new and weighty motive of action, in those
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XXI
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
tragic deaths for the "Christian superstition" of which
he had heard something indeed, but which had seemed
to him hitherto but one savagery, one self-provoked
savagery the more, in a cruel and stupid world.
And these poignant memorials seemed to draw him
onwards, towards a vivid image of still more pathetic
suffering, in the remote background. Yes! the interest,
the expression, of the entire neighbourhood was instinct
with that, like the savour of some precious incense.
Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching everything
around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make
all this visible mortality, death itself, more beautiful than
any fantastic dream of old mythology had ever hoped to
make it; and that, in simple sincerity of feeling about
a supposed historical fact. Peace ! Pax! Pax tecum ! 
the word, the thoughtwas put forth everywhere, with
images of hope, snatched sometimes even from that
jaded pagan world which had really afforded men so
little of it from first to last; all the consoling images it
had thrown off, of succour,
of regeneration, of escape
from death-Hercules wrestling with Death for posses-
sion of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the
Shepherd with his sheep, the Shepherd carrying the sick
lamb
upon his shoulders. Only, after all, these imageries
formed but the slightest contribution to the whole
dominant effect of tranquil hope there--a kind of heroic
cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart, again, as
with the sense of some real deliverance, which seemed
actually to deepen, the longer one lingered through
these strange and fearful passages. A figure (partly
pagan in character, yet the most frequently repeated of
all these visible parables) of one just escaped, as if from
the sea, in surprised joy still clinging to the shorethis
figure, with the inscription beneath it, seemed best to
express the sentiment of the whole.
And it was just as
he had puzzled out this inscription-
## p. 262 (#278) ############################################
262
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a
I went down to the bottom of the mountains :
The earth with her bars was about me for ever :
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption !
-that, hardly with any sense of suddenness or change,
Marius found himself emerging again, like a later mystic
traveller through similar dark places "quieted by hope,
into the daylight
They were still within the precincts of the house, still
in possession of that wonderful singing, though almost
in the open country, with a great view of the Campagna
before them, and the hills beyond. The orchard or
meadow, through which their path lay, was already grey
with twilight, though the western sky, where the greater
stars were visible, was still afloat in crimson splendour,
seeming to repress by contrast the colour of all earthly
things, though with the sense of a great richness lingering
in their shadows. Just then the voices of the singers,
"voice of joy and health," concentrated themselves,
with a solemn antistrophic movement, into an evening,
or "candle" hymn the hymn of the kindling of the
lamp. It was like the evening itself made audible, its
hope and fear, the stars shining in the midst of it. Half
above, half below the white level mist, which seemed to
divide light from darkness, the great wild flowers of the
meadow just distinguishable around her skirts as she
moved, came now the mistress of the place, the wealthy
Roman matron, left early a widow by the "confessor"
Cecilius a few years before. With a certain antique
severity in the gathering of her long mantle, and a coif
or veil folded under the chin, "grey within grey," to
Marius, in her temperate beauty, she suggested some-
thing of the virile and serious character of the noblest
female statuary of Greece.* Foreign, however, to any
Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care, with
"O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence !"
*
## p. 263 (#279) ############################################
XXI
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
which she carried the little child at rest in her arms.
Another child, a year or two older, walked beside, the
fingers of one hand within her girdle. She paused for a
moment with an evening greeting for Cornelius.
And that visionary scene was the close, the fitting
close, of the afternoon's strange experiences. A few
minutes later, passing forward on his way along the
public road, he could have fancied it a dream. The
house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious
house he had lately visited at Tusculum. Yet what a
contrast was presented by the former, in its suggestions
of hopeful industry, of immaculate cleanness, of respon-
sive affection !--all determined by the transporting dis-
covery of some fact, or series of facts, in which the old
puzzle of life had found its key. In truth, one of his
most characteristic and constant traits had ever been the
longing for escapesome sudden, relieving interchange,
even upon the spaces of life, along which he had lingered
most pleasantly-for a lifting, from time to time, of the
actual horizon. It was like the necessity under which
the painter finds himself, to set a window or open door-
way in the background of his picture; or like the sick
man's longing for northern coolness, the whispering
willow-trees, amid the breathless evergreen forests of the
south. To some such effect had this visit happened to
him, and through so slight an accident. Rome and
Roman life, just then, had come to seem like some
stifly forest of bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign
enchantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet
with roots in a deep, down-trodden soil of poignant
human susceptibilities. In the midst of its suffocation,
that old longing for escape had been satisfied by this
vision of the church in Cecilia's house, as never before.
It was still, indeed, according to the unchangeable law of
his temperament, to the eye, to the visual faculty of
mind, that those experiences appealedthe peaceful
## p. 264 (#280) ############################################
264
CHAP. XXI
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
light and shade, the boys whose very faces seemed to
sing, the virginal beauty of the mother and her children.
Only, in his case, all this constituted a very real, a very
exigent and controlling influence added anew to life, a
new element with which, according to his old maxim, he
must make terms.
The thirst for every kind of experience, encouraged
by a philosophy which taught that nothing was intrinsic-
ally great or small, had ever been at strife in him with
a hieratic refinement, in which the boy-priest survived,
prompting always the selection of what was perfect of its
kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of soul thereto.
This had carried him along ever in communion with
ideals, certainly realised in part, either in the conditions
of his own being, or in the actual company about him,
above all, in Cornelius. Surely, in this strange new
society he had touched for the first time to-dayin this
holy family, like "a garden enclosed "was the fulfil-
ment of all the preferences, the judgments, of that half-
understood friend, which had been so often his protection
of late years, amid the perplexities of life. Here was, it
might be, if not the cure, yet the anodyne or solace of
his great sorrows-of that constitutional sorrowfulness,
perhaps by no means peculiar to himself, but which had
certainly made his life like a long "disease of the spirit."
Here, merciful intention made itself known remedially in
the mere contact of the air, like a soft touch to aching
flesh. And yet, on the other hand, he was aware that it
might awaken also responsibilities  new, untried,
responsibilitieswith a demand for something from him
in return. Might this new vision, like that malignant
beauty of the old pagan Medusa, be, after all, exclusive
of all admiring gaze upon aught save itself? At least he
suspected that after it he could never again be altogether
as he had been before.
## p. 265 (#281) ############################################
CHAPTER XXII
THE MINOR
PEACE OF THE CHURCH
FAITHFUL to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy
and the impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal
inquiry about it, to anything that, as a matter of fact,
attracted or impressed him strongly, Marius informed
himself with much pains concerning the church in
Cecilia's house ; inclining at first to explain the peculi-
arities of that place by the establishment there of the
schola or common hall of one of those burial-guilds, which
then covered so much of the unofficial, and, as it might
be called, subterranean enterprise of Roman society.
And what he found, thus looking, literally, for the
dead among the living, was the vision of natural, a
scrupulously natural, love, transforming, by some new
gift of insight into the truth of human relationships, and
under the urgency of some new motive by him so far
unfathomable, all the conditions of life. He saw, in all
its primitive freshness and amid the lively facts of its
actual coming into the world, as a reality of experience,
that regenerate type of humanity, which, centuries later,
Giotto and his successors, down to the best and purest
days of the young Raffaelle, working under conditions
very friendly to the imagination; were to conceive as an
artistic ideal. He felt there, felt amid the stirring of
some wonderful new hope within himself, the genius, the
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266
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
unique power of Christianity; in exercise then, as it has
been exercised ever since, in spite of many hindrances,
and under the most inopportune circumstances. Chastity,
-as he seemed to understandthe chastity of men and
women, amid all the conditions, with the results, proper to
such chastity, is the most beautiful thing in the world and
the truest conservation of that creative energy by which
men and women were first brought into it. The nature of
the family, for which the better genius of old Rome itself
had sincerely cared, of the family and its appropriate affec-
tionsall that love of one's kindred by which obviously
one does triumph in some degree over deathhad never
been so felt before. Here, surely! in its nest-like warmth,
its jealous exclusion of all that was opposed to it, to
its own immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set around
the sacred thing on every side, this development of the
family did but carry forward, and give effect to, the
purposes, the kindness, of nature itself, friendly to man,
at all those points, more especially, where it involved (by
way of due recognition of some immeasurable divine
condescension in a certain historic fact) pity and a will-
ing self-sacrifice, for the weak, for the aged and for little
children, for the dead even. And then, for its constant
outward token, its significant manner or index, it issued
in a debonair grace, and some mystic attractiveness, a
courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that famed
Greek "blitheness," or gaiety, in the handling of life, had
been, after all, so great a success. Contrasting with the
incurable insipidity even of what was most exquisite in
the higher Roman life and still truest to the primitive
soul of goodness amid its evil, this new creation he now
looked onlike some fair picture beyond the skill of any
master of old pagan beauty had indeed the appropriate
freshness of "the bride adorned for her husband."
And still its grace was no mere simplicity. Things new
and old seemed to be coming as if out of some goodly
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XXII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
me.
treasure-house, the brain full of science, the heart
rich with various sentiment, possessing withal this
surprising healthfulness, this reality of heart.
"You would hardly believe," writes Pliny-to his
own wife !- "what a longing for you possesses me.
Habitthat we have not been used to be apartadds
herein to the primary force of affection. It is this
keeps me awake at night fancying I see you beside
That is why my feet take me unconsciously to
your sitting-room at those hours when I was wont
to visit you there. That is why I turn from the door
of the empty chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like an ex-
cluded lover."
There, is a real idyll from that family life, the pro-
tection of which had been the motive of so large a
part of the religion of the Romans, still surviving among
them; as it survived also in the disposition and aims of
Aurelius, and, in spite of slanderous tongues, in the
actual sweetness of his interior life. What Marius had
been permitted to see was a realisation of such life
higher still : and with Yes! with a more effective
sanction or consecration than it had ever possessed
before, in that fact, or series of facts, to be ascertained
by those who would.
The chief glory of the reign of the Antonines had
been indeed that society had attained in it, very im-
perfectly, and for the most part by cumbrous effort
of law, many of those ends which Christianity had
reached with all the sufficiency of a direct and ap-
propriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching
charity-sermons on occasions of great public distress ;
its charity-children in long file, in memory of the elder
empress Faustina ; its prototype under patronage of
Aesculapius, of the modern hospital for the sick, on the
island of Saint Bartholomew in the Tiber. But what
pagan charity was doing tardily, and as if with the
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268
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
we
painful calculation of old age, the church was doing,
almost without thinking about it, with all the liberal
enterprise of youth, because it was her very being thus
to do.
"You don't realise your own intentions," she
seems to say, to pagan virtue, pagan kindness. She
identified herself with those intentions and advanced
them with an unparalleled freedom and largeness. The
gentle Seneca would have reverent burial provided even
for the dead body of a criminal. Yet when a certain
woman collected for interment the insulted remains of
Nero, the pagan world surmised that she must be a
Christian : only a Christian would have been likely to
conceive so chivalrous a devotion towards wretchedness.
"We refuse to be witnesses even of a homicide com-
manded by the laws," boasts the dainty conscience of a
Christian apologist, take no part in your cruel
sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we
hold that to witness a murder is the same thing as to
commit one." And there was another duty almost
forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau brought back to
the degenerate society of a later age. In an impassioned
discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to
suckle their own infants; and there are Roman epitaphs
inscribed by children to their mothers which gratefully
record this proof of natural affection as a thing then
unusual. And in this matter again, what a sanction,
what a provocative to natural duty, lay in that image
discovered to Augustus by the Tiburtine Sibyl, amid the
aurora of a new age, the image of the Divine Mother and
the Child, just then rising upon the world like the dawn !
Christian belief had presented itself as a great inspirer
of chastity. Chastity, in turn, realised in the whole
scope of its conditions, fortified that rehabilitation of
peaceful labour, after the mind, the pattern, of the
workman of Galilee, which was another direct instinct
of the catholic church, as indeed the long-desired
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
initiator of a real religion of cheerfulness, and a true lover
of the industryso to term itthe labour, the creation,
of God.
And this severe yet genial re-assertion of the ideal of
woman, of the family, of industry, of man's work in life,
so close to the truth of nature, was also, in that charmed
hour of the minor "Peace of the church," realising itself
as an influence tending to beauty, to the adornment of
life and the world. The sword in the world, the right
eye plucked out, the right hand cut off, the spirit of
reproach which those images express, and of which
monasticism is the fulfilment, reflect one side only of the
nature of the divine missionary of the New Testament.
Opposed to, yet blent with, this ascetic or militant
character, is the function of the Good Shepherd, serene,
blithe and debonair, beyond the gentlest shepherd of
Greek mythology; whose daily spiritual food is the
beatific vision of a reign of peace-peace of heart-
among men. This aspect of the divine character of
Christ, rightly understood, is the final achievement of
that quality of bold and brilliant hopefulness in man,
which had sustained him so far through his immense
labour, his immense sorrows, and of which that peculiar
Greek gaiety in the handling of life, is but one mani-
festation. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, of those
two contrasted aspects of the character of Christ, have,
in different ages and under the urgency of differing
human needs, been at work also in the "mystical body."
Certainly, in that brief "Peace of the church " under the
Antonines, the spirit of a pastoral security and happiness
seems to have been largely expanding itself. There, in
the early Roman church, was to be seen, and on sufficiently
reasonable grounds, that satisfaction and serenity on a
dispassionate survey of the facts of life, which all hearts
had desired, though for the most part in vain, contrasting
itself for Marius, in particular, very forcibly, with the
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270
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
common
imperial philosopher's so heavy burden of unrelieved
melancholy. It was Christianity in its humanity, and
even in its humanism, in its generous hopes for man, its
sense and alacrity of cheerful service, its
sympathy with all creatures, its appreciation of beauty
and daylight.
"The angel of righteousness," says the Shepherd of
Hermas, the most characteristic religious book of that
age, its Pilgrim's Progress"the angel of righteousness
is delicate and modest and meek and quiet. Take from
thyself grief, for (as Hamlet will one day know !) it is
the sister of doubt and ill-temper. Grief is more evil
than all the spirits, and is most dreadful to the servants
of God, and beyond all spirits destroyeth man. For, as
when good news has come to any one in grief, straight-
way he forgetteth his former grief, and no longer attend-
eth to anything except the good news which he hath
heard, so do ye, also ! having received a renewal of
your spirit through the beholding of these good things.
Put on therefore gladness that hath always favour before
God, and is acceptable unto Him, and delight thyself in
it; for every man that is glad doeth the things that are
good, and thinketh good thoughts, despising grief."-
Such were the commonplaces of this new people, among
whom so much of what Marius had valued most in the
old world seemed also to be under renewal. Some
transforming spirit was at work to harmonise them, to
deepen their expressiona spirit which, in its dealing
with the elements of ancient life, was guided by a
wonderful tact of selection, exclusion, juxtaposition,
begetting thereby a unique effect of freshness, of a grave
yet wholesome beauty, because the whole outward world
of sense was understood to be but a showing-forth of the
unction and royalty of a certain kingship or priesthood
of the soul within, among the prerogatives of which was
a delightful sense of freedom.
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who,
Epicurean as he was, had his visionary aptitudes, by an
inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which he
was of course familiar, must have descended, by fore-
sight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated
Christian poetry and art as they come to be under the in-
fluence of Francis of Assisi. But if he dreamed on one of
those nights of the beautiful house of Cecilia, its flowers
and lights, of Cecilia herself moving among the lilies,
with a grace enhanced as things sometimes are in healthy
dreams, it was indeed hardly an anticipation. He had
lighted, by one of the peculiar intellectual good-fortunes
of his life, upon a period when, even more than in the
days of austere ascsis which had preceded and were to
follow it, the church was true for a moment, truer
perhaps than she would ever be again, to that element
of profound serenity in the soul of her founder, which
reflected the eternal goodwill of God to man, "in
whom," according to the oldest version of the angelic
message, "He is well-pleased."
For what Christianity did centuries afterwards in the
way of informing an art, a poetry, of graver and higher
beauty, we may think, than that of Greek art and poetry
at their best, was in truth conformable to the original
tendency of its genius; miscarried, indeed, in the "dark"
ages, through many circumstances, of which the later
persecutions, beginning with that under Aurelius himself,
constituted one, the blood of martyrs ceasing at a
particular period to be the true "seed of the church."
The original capacity of the catholic church in this
direction, already discoverable in the New Testament,
was also really at work, in that first "Peace," under the
Antoninesthe minor " Peace of the church," as we
might call it, in distinction from the final "Peace of the
church," commonly so called, under Constantine.
Francis of Assisi, with his following in the sphere of
## p. 272 (#288) ############################################
272
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
poetry and the artsthe voice of Dante, the hand of
Giotto-giving visible feature and colour, and a palpable
place among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-
establish a continuity, only suspended in part by those
troublous intervening centuries, with the gracious spirit
of the primitive church in that first early springtide of
her success. The "Peace" of Constantine, on the other
hand, in many ways, does but establish the exclusive-
ness, the puritanism, the ascetic gloom of the church in
the period between Aurelius and the first Christian
emperor, a little soured by oppression or misconstruction,
and driven inward upon herself in a world of tasteless
controversy. The church, in fact, finally comes to
terms, and effects something more than a modus vivendi
with the world, at a less fortunate moment of her own
and the world's development.*
Already in the reign of Antoninus Pius the time was
gone by when men became Christians under some
sudden and overpowering impression, with all the dis-
turbing results of such a crisis. At this period, perhaps,
a majority had been born Christians, had been ever with
peaceful hearts in the Father's house. The earlier belief
in the speedy coming of judgment and of the end of the
world, with the consequences it naturally involved in the
temper of men's minds, was dying out. Every day the
contrast between the church and the world was becoming
less pronounced. And now also, as the church rested
awhile from opposition, that rapid self-development
outward from within proper to times of peace, was in
progress.
Antoninus Pius, it might seem, more truly
even than Marcus Aurelius himself, was of that group of
pagan saints for whom Dante, like Augustine, has pro-
vided in his scheme of the house with many mansions.
A sincere old Roman piety had urged his fortunately
constituted nature to no mistakes, no offences against
* Compare Mill : On Liberty; p. 50.
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XXII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
season.
humanity. Of the total absence of guile in him one
reward was this singular happiness, that under his rule
there was no shedding of Christian blood. To him
belonged that half-humorous placidity of soul, of a kind
illustrated later very effectively by Montaigne, which,
starting with an instinct of mere fairness towards human
nature and the world, at last actually qualifies its
possessor to be almost the friend of the people of
Christ. Amiable, in its own nature, and full of a reason-
able gaiety, Christianity has often had its advantage of
characters like that. The geniality of Antoninus Pius,
like the geniality of the earth itself, had permitted the
church, as in truth no alien from that old mother earth,
to expand and thrive, as by natural process, for a
And this charmed period under the Antonines,
up to the later years of the reign of Aurelius, beautiful
brief chapter of church history, composes, as one of its
elements of interest, the earliest development of Christian
ritual under the presidence of the church of Rome.
Again as in one of those quaint, mystical visions of
the Shepherd of Hermas, "the aged woman was become
by degrees more and more youthful. And in the third
vision she was quite young, and radiant with beauty :
only her hair was that of an aged woman. And at the
last she was joyous, and seated upon a throneseated
upon a throne, because her position is a strong one."
The subterranean worship of the church belonged
properly to those periods of her early history in which
her worship was penal: or otherwise it would seem to
have blossomed freely above-ground, sometimes for
lengthy intervals. Hiding herself for awhile as the
conflict grew violent, she resumed, when there was felt
to be no more than ordinary risk her natural freedom.
And the kind of outward prosperity she was enjoying in
those moments of her first " Peace was re-inforced by
the decision at this point of a crisis in her internal history.
>>
T
## p. 274 (#290) ############################################
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CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
In the history of the church, as in all the moral
history of mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either
of which it is possible to followtwo conceptions, under
one or the other of which we may represent to ourselves
man's effort after the better lifecorresponding to those
two contrasted aspects, noted above, as discernible in
the picture presented by the New Testament itself of the
character of Christ. The ideal of Asceticism represents
that moral effort as essentially a sacrifice, the sacrifice of
one part of human nature to another, that it may live in
what survives the more completely; while the ideal of
Culture represents it as a harmonious development of all
the parts of human nature, in just proportion to each
other. It was to the latter order of ideas that the church,
and especially the church of Rome in this period of the
Antonines, was lending herself. In this earlier " Peace"
she had set up for herself the ideal of spiritual develop-
ment, by an instinct, through which, in those serene
moments, she was absolutely true to the peaceful soul
of her Founder. "Goodwill to men," she said, "in
whom God Himself is well-pleased !" For
a few
moments, at least, there was no forced opposition be-
tween the soul and the body, the world and the spirit,
and the grace of graciousness itself was pre-eminently
with the people of Christ. Tact, good sense (ever the
note of a true orthodoxy) the merciful compromises of
the church, indicative of her imperial vocation in regard
to all the varieties of human kind, with a universality of
which the old Roman pastorship she was superseding
was but the prototype, was already become conspicuous,
in spite of a discredited, irritating, vindictive society, all
around her.
Against that divine urbanity and moderation the old
Montanism we read of dimly, was a fanatical revolt-
sour, falsely anti-mundane, ever with an air of ascetic
affectation, and a bigoted distaste in particular for all the
!
## p. 275 (#291) ############################################
XXII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
peculiar graces of womanhood. By it the desire to
please was understood to come of the author of evil. In
that interval of quietness, it was inevitable, by the law of
reaction, that some such extravagance should arise. And
again it was the church of Rome, now becoming every
day more and more completely the capital of the Christ-
ian world, that checked the nascent puritanism of the time
vindicating for all Christian people a cheerful liberty of
heart, against many a narrow group of sectaries, all alike,
in their different ways, accusers of the genial creation of
God. With her full, fresh faith in the Evangelein a .
veritable regeneration of the earth and the body, in the
dignity of man's whole beingfor a season, at least, at
that critical period in the development of Christianity, she
was for reason, for common sense, for fairness to human
nature, and, generally, for what may be called the natural-
ness of Christianity, as also for its comely order. She
was to be " brought unto the King in raiment of needle-
work." It was through the bishops of Rome especially,
now transforming themselves rapidly in a really catholic
sense into universal pastors, that she defined for herself
this humanist path. "The dignified ecclesiastical hier-
archy claimed the right of absolution, and made use of it
with an ease which scandalised the puritans:" says Gibbon;
and how much is involved in that. As regards those
who had fallen from faith in an hour of weakness, the
Roman church, at least, elected by no means to be like
that elder brother of the prodigal son, but rather to pour
oil and wine into the aching wounds.
And then, in this season of expansion, as if now at
last the catholic church might venture to show her out-
ward lineaments as they really were, worshipthe beauty
of holiness, nay! the elegance of sanctityand here again
under the presidence of the church of Rome, was
developing, with a bold and confident gladness, such as
has not been the ideal of worship in any later age. The
## p. 276 (#292) ############################################
276
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
tables were turned, and the prize of a cheerful temper
on a survey of life was no longer with the Greek. The
sthetic charm of the catholic church, her evocative
power over all that is eloquent and expressive in the
better soul of man, her outward comeliness, her dignify-
ing convictions about human natureall this, as abund-
antly realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by
the great medieval church-builders, by the great ritualists
like Gregory, and the masters of sacred music in the
middle agewe may see, in dim anticipation, in that
charmed space towards the end of the second century.
Dissipated or turned aside, partly through the fatal
mistake of Marcus Aurelius, for a short time we may
discern that influence clearly predominant there. What
might seem harsh as dogma was already justifying itself
as worship; according to the sound rule: Lex orandi,
lex credendiOur Creeds are but the brief abstract of
our prayer and song.
The marvellous liturgic spirit of the church, her
wholly unparalleled genius for worship, being thus awake,
she was rapidly re-organising both pagan and Jewish
elements of ritual, for the expanding therein of her own
new heart of devotion. The ritual system of the church,
ranking as we see it in historic retrospect, like Gothic
architecture for example, as one of the great, conjoint,
and, so to term them, necessary, products of human mind,
and which has ever since directed with so deep a fascina-
tion men's religious instincts, was then growing together
as a recognisable new treasure in the sum of things.
And what has been on the whole the method of the
church, as "a power of sweetness and patience," in
dealing with matters like pagan art, was already manifest :
it has the character of the divine moderation of Christ
himself. It was only among the ignorant, only in the
"villages," that Christianity, even when victorious over
paganism, was really iconoclastic. In the final "Peace"
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XXII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
under Constantine, while there was plenty of destructive
fanaticism in the country, the revolution was accomplished
in the large towns, following the Roman pattern, in a
manner more orderly and discreet. The faithful were
bent less on the destruction of the old pagan temples
than on their conversion to a new and higher use: they
became Christian sanctuaries, with much beautiful
furniture ready to hand.
Already, in accordance with this later wisdom, that
church of the minor " Peace" had adopted many of the
graces of pagan feeling and pagan custom ; as being in-
deed a living creature, taking up, transforming, and
accommodating still more closely to the human heart what
of right belonged to it. It was thus that an obscure
synagogue expanded into the catholic church. Gather-
ing, from a richer and more varied field of sound than
had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies,
some notes of which Gregory the Great, centuries later,
and after generations of interrupted development, formed
into the Gregorian music, she was already, as we have
seen, the house of songof a wonderful new music and
poesy. As if in anticipation of the sixteenth century,
the church was becoming humanistic, in a best and
earliest Renaissance. Singing there had been in abund-
ance from the first; but often it dared only be " of the
heart." It broke out, when it might, into the beginnings
of a true ecclesiastical music; the Jewish psalter, which
it had inherited from the synagogue, turning now, grad-
ually, from Greek into broken Latininto Italian, as
the ritual use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular
superseded the earlier language of the Church. And
through certain surviving remnants of Greek in the later
Latin liturgies, we may still discern a highly interesting
intermediate phase of ritual development, in which the
Greek and the Latin were in combination ; the poor,
surelythe poor and the children of that liberal Roman
## p. 278 (#294) ############################################
278
CHAP. XXII
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
churchalready responding in their own "vulgar tongue,
to an office said in the original, liturgical Greek. That
hymn sung in the early morning, of which Pliny had
heard, was growing into the service of the Mass.
The Mass, indeed, would seem to have been said
continuously from the time of the Apostles. Its details,
as one by one they become visible in later history, have
already the character of what is ancient and venerable.
"We are very old, and ye are young !" they seem to
protest, to those who fail to understand them. Ritual,
indeed, like other elements of religion, must grow and
cannot be madegrow by the same law of development
which has prevailed everywhere else in the moral as in
the physical world. As to this particular phase of the
religious life, however, that development seems to have
been an unusually rapid one, in the subterranean age
which preceded Constantine; and with the very first
days of the final triumph of the church the Mass emerges
to general view already substantially complete.
" Wis-
dom" was dealing, as with the dust of creeds and
philosophies, so also with the dust of outworn religious
usage, like the very spirit of life itself, organising souls
and bodies out of the lime and clay of the earth, adopt-
ing in a generous eclecticism, within the church's liberty
and as by some providential power in her, as in other
matters so in ritual, one thing here another there, from
various sources-Gnostic, Jewish, Paganto adorn and
beautify the greatest act of worship the world has seen.
It was thus the liturgy of the church grew up, full of con-
solations for the human soul, and destined surely one day,
under the sanction of so many ages of human experience,
to take exclusive possession of the religious consciousness.
TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM
VENEREMUR CERNUI :
ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
NOVO CEDAT RITUI.
## p. 279 (#295) ############################################
CHAPTER XXIII
DIVINE SERVICE
"Wisdom hath builded herself a house : she hath mingled her wine :
she hath also prepared for herself a table
The more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present
instances of the summing up of a whole world of com-
plex associations under some single form, like the Zeus
of Olympia, or the series of frescoes which commemorate
The Acts of Saint Francis, at Assisi, or like the play of
Hamlet or Faust. It was not in an image, or series of
images, yet still in a sort of dramatic action, and with
the unity of a single appeal to eye and ear, that Marius
about this time found all his new impressions set forth,
regarding what he had already recognised, intellectually,
as for him at least the most beautiful thing in the
world.
To understand the influence upon him of what follows
the reader must remember that it was an experience which
came amid a deep sense of vacuity in things. The
fairest products of the earth seemed to be dropping to
pieces, as if in men's very hands, around him ; and still
how real was their sorrow, and his ! " His observation of
life" had come to be like the nt telling of a sorrow-
ful rosary, day after day; till, as if taking infection from the
cloudy sorrow of the mind, the senses also, the eye itself,
## p. 280 (#296) ############################################
280
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
were grown faint and sick.
And now it happened as
with the actual morning on which he found himself a
spectator of this new thing. The long winter had been
a season of unvarying sullenness : at last, on this day he
awoke at a sharp flash of lightning in the earliest twilight:
in a little while the heavy rain had filtered the air: the
clear light was abroad; and, as though the spring had
begun with a sudden leap in the heart of things, the
whole scene around him lay like an untarnished picture
beneath a sky of delicate blue. Under the spell of his
late depression, Marius had suddenly determined to
leave Rome for awhile. But desiring first to advertise
Cornelius of his movements, and failing to find him in
his lodgings, he had ventured, still early in the day, to
seek him in the Cecilian villa. Passing through its silent
and empty court-yard he loitered for a moment, to
admire. Under the clear but immature light of the
winter morning after the storm, all the details of form
and colour in the old marbles were distinctly visible, and
with a sort of sad hardness (so it struck him) amid their
beautyin them, and in all other details of the scene-
the cypresses, the bunches of pale daffodils in the grass,
the curves of the purple hills of Tusculum, with the
drifts of virgin snow still lying in their hollows.
The little open door, through which he passed from
the court-yard, admitted him into what was plainly the
vast Lararium, or domestic sanctuary, of the Cecilian
family, transformed in many particulars, but still richly
decorated, and retaining much of its ancient furniture
in metal-work and costly stone. The peculiar half-light
of dawn seemed to be lingering beyond its hour upon
the solemn marble walls; and here, though at that
moment in absolute silence, a great company of people
was assembled. In that brief period of peace (the
church emerging for awhile from her jealously guarded
subterranean life) the severity of an earlier rule of exclu-
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XXIII
281
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
sion had been somewhat relaxed ; and so it came to
pass that, on this morning Marius saw for the first time
the wonderful spectacle--wonderful above all in its
evidential power over himselfof those who believe.
There were noticeable, among those present, great
varieties of rank, of age, of personal type. The Roman
ingenuus, with the white toga and gold ring, stood side
by side with his slave; and the air of the whole com-
pany was, above all, a grave one, an air of recollection.
Coming thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so
entirely united, in a silence so profound, for some
purpose unknown to him, Marius felt for a moment as
if he had stumbled by chance upon some great con-
spiracy. Yet that could scarcely be, for the people here
collected might have figured as the earliest handsel, or
pattern, of a new world, from the very face of which
discontent had passed away. Corresponding to the
variety of human type there present, was the various
expression of every type of human sorrow assuaged.
What desire, what fulfilment of desire, had wrought so
pathetically on the faces of these ranks of aged men and
women of humble condition? Those young men, bent
down so discreetly on the details of their sacred service,
had faced life and were glad, by some science, or light
of knowledge they had, to which there had certainly
been no parallel in the older world. Was some credible
message from beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"
--a message of hope, regarding the place of men's souls
and their interest in the sum of thingsalready mould-
ing their very bodies, and looks, and voices, now and
here? At least, there was a cleansing and kindling
flame at work in them, which seemed to make every-
thing else Marius had ever known look comparatively
vulgar and mean. There were the children, above all
--troops of children-reminding him of those pathetic
children's graves, like cradles or garden-beds, he had
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
noticed in his first visit to these places; and they more
than satisfied the odd curiosity he had then conceived
about them, wondering in what quaintly expressive
forms they might come forth into the daylight, if
awakened from their sleep. Children of the Cata-
combs, some but "a span long," with features not so
much beautiful as heroic (that world of new, refining
sentiment having set its seal even on childhood) they
retained, certainly, no stain or trace of anything
subterranean this morning, in the alacrity of their
worshipas ready as if they had been at playstretch-
ing forth their hands, crying, chanting in a resonant
voice, and with boldly upturned faces, Christe Eleison !
For the silencesilence, amid those lights of early
morning to which Marius had always been consti-
tutionally impressible, as having in them a certain
reproachful austeritywas broken suddenly by resound-
ing cries of Kyrie Eleison ! Christe Eleison / repeated
again and again alternately, until the bishop, rising from
his chair, made sign that this prayer
should cease.
But
the voices burst out again soon afterwards in a richer
and more varied melody, though still antiphonal; the
men, the women and children, the deacons and the con-
gregation, answering each other, as in a Greek chorus.
But again with what a novelty of poetic accent; what a
genuine expansion of heart; what profound intimations
for the intellect, as the meaning of the words grew upon
him ! Cum grandi affectu et compunctione dicatur-says
an ancient eucharistic order; and certainly, the mystic
tone of this praying and singing was one with the
expression of deliverance, of grateful assurance and
sincerity, upon the faces of those assembled. As if
some profound correction, a regeneration of the body by
the spirit, had begun, and was already gone a great way,
the countenances of men, women, and children had a
brightness upon them which he could fancy reflected upon
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XXIII
283
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
himselfan amenity, a mystic amiability and unction,
which found its way most readily of all to the hearts of
children themselves. The religious poetry of those
Hebrew psalmsBenedixisti Domine terram tuam :
Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede a dextris meiswas in
marvellous accord with the lyrical instinct of his own
character. Those august hymns, he thought, must
ever remain with him thereafter as one of the well-tested
powers among things, to soothe and fortify his soul.
One could never grow tired of them !
In the old pagan worship there had been little to
call out the understanding. But the eloquence of
worship, Marius had here found conveyed, as he
gradually came to see, a fact or series of facts, for
intellectual reception. This became evident, more
especially, in those lections, or sacred readings, which,
like the singing, in broken vernacular Latin, occurred at
certain intervals, amid the silence of the assembly.
There were readings, again with bursts of chanted
invocation between for fuller light on a difficult path, in
which many a vagrant voice of human philosophy,
haunting men's minds from of old, recurred with clearer
accent than had ever belonged to it before, as if lifted,
above its first intention, into the harmony of some now
completed system of knowledge. And last of all came
a narrative which, with a thousand tender memories,
every one appeared to know by heart, displaying, in all
the vividness of a picture for the eye, the mournful figure
of him towards whom this whole act of worship still con-
sistently turneda figure which seemed to have absorbed,
like some deep tincture into his vesture, all that was
deep-felt and impassioned in the experiences of the past.
It was the anniversary of his birth as a little child
they were celebrating to-day. Astiterunt reges terre : so
the Gradual proceeded, the young men on the steps of
the altar responding in deep, clear, antiphon or chorus-
## p. 284 (#300) ############################################
284
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Astiterunt reges terr-
Adversus sanctum puerum tuum, Jesum :
Nunc, Domine, da servis tuis loqui verbum tuum-
Et signa fieri, per nomen sancti pueri Jesu.
And the proper action of the rite itself, like a half-
opened book to be read by the duly initiated mind took
up those suggestions, and carried them forward into the
present, as having reference to a power still efficacious,
and in some mystic sense even now in action among the
people there assembled. The entire office, indeed, with
its interchange of lections, hymns, and silences, was
itself like a single piece of highly composite, dramatic
music; a "song of degrees," rising to a climax. Not-
withstanding the absence of any central visible image,
the whole ceremonial process, like the place in which it
was enacted, seemed weighty with symbolical signific-
ance, and expressed a single leading motive.
It was
rather in the actions of one visible person that the whole
mystery centered. Distinguished among his assistants,
who stood ranged in semicircle around him, by the
extreme fineness of his white clothing, and the pointed
cap with golden ornaments on his head.
And Marius had never seen the pontifical character,
as he conceived it-sicut unguentum in capite, descendens
in oram vestimentiso fully realised, as in the expres-
sion, the manner and voice, of this novel pontiff, as
he took his seat on the white chair placed for him by
the
young men, and received his long staff into his hand,
or moved his handshands that seemed endowed with
some hidden mysterious powerat the Lavabo, or at
the various benedictions, or to bless certain objects on
the table before him, chanting in cadence of a grave
sweetness the leading parts of the rite. What profound
unction and mysticity! The solemnity of the singing
was at its height when he opened his lips. It was as if,
new sort of rhapsdos, for the moment he alone
a
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XXIII
285
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
possessed the words of the office, and they were flowing
anew from some permanent source of inspiration within
him. The table or altar at which he presided, below a
canopy on delicate spiral columns, was in reality the
tomb of a youthful "witness," of the family of the
Cecilii, who had shed his blood not many years before,
and whose relics were still in this place. It was for his
sake the bishop put his lips so often to the surface
before him; the regretful memory of this death intertwin-
ing itself, though with notes of triumph, as a matter of
special inward significance, throughout the service, which
was, besides other things, a commemoration of the whole
number of the beloved dead.
It was a sacrifice also,a sacrifice, it might seem,
like the most primitive, the most natural and enduringly
significant of old pagan sacrifices, of the simplest fruits
of the earth. And in connexion with this circumstance
again, as in the actual stones of the building so in the
rite itself, what Marius observed was not so much new
matter as a new spirit, moulding, informing, with a new
intention, many observances he did not witness now
for the first time. Men and women came to the altar
successively, in perfect order, and deposited below
the lattice-work of pierced white marble, their baskets
of wheat and grapes, incense, oil for the sanctuary
lamps; bread and wine especially-pure wheaten bread,
the
pure
white wine of the Tusculan vineyards. It was
a veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the
earth's gifts, of all that we can touch and seeof old
dead and dark matter itself, in some way redeemed at
last, in the midst of a jaded world that had lost the true
sense of it, and in strong contrast to the wise emperor's
renunciant and impassive attitude towards it. Certain
portions of that bread and wine were taken by the
bishop; and thereafter it was with an increasing
mysticity and effusion that the rite proceeded. Still in
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CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the strain of solemn inspired supplication, the antiphonal
singing developed, from this point, into a kind of dialogue
between the chief minister and the whole assisting
company-
SURSUM CORDA !
HABEMUS AD DOMINUM.
GRATIAS AGAMUS DOMINO DEO NOSTRO !-
It was the service, especially, of young men, standing
there, in long ranks, in severe and simple vesture of pure
whitea service in which they might seem to be flying
for refuge (their youth itself, in their hands as a treasure
to be preserved) to one like themselves, yet worthy of
their ready worship,worship, above all, in the way of
Aurelius, the way of imitation. Adoramus te Christe, quia
per crucem tuam redemisti mundum !they cried together.
So deep was the emotion that at moments it seemed to
Marius as if some there present perceived the very
object of all this pathetic crying himself drawing near.
From the first there had been an increasing assurance,
the sense, of one coming :-Yes! actually with them
now, according to the oft-repeated prayer or affirmation,
Dominus vobiscum! Some at least were quite sure of it ;
and the confidence of this remnant fired the hearts, and
gave meaning to the bold, ecstatic worship, of all the
rest about them.
Helped especially by the suggestions of that mysterious
old Jewish psalmody, to him so new-lection and hymn
and catching therewith a portion of the enthusiasm of
those around him, Marius could discern dimly, behind
the solemn recitation which now followed (at once a
narrative and a prayer) the most touching image he had
ever beheld.
It was the image of a young man giving up,
one by one, for the greatest of ends, the greatest gifts ;
actually parting with himself, and, above all, with the
serenity, the divine serenity, of his own mind; yet
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XXIII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
worship.*
from the midst of his desolation crying out upon the
greatness of his success, as if foreseeing this very
As the centre of the supposed facts which
for these people had become so constraining a motive of
hopefulness, of activity, this image seemed to propose
itself with an overwhelming claim on human gratitude.
What Saint Lewis of France discerned, and found so
irresistibly touching, through the dimness of many
centuries, as a painful thing done for love of him by one
he had never seen, was, to them, a thing of yesterday;
and their hearts were whole with it : it had the force,
among their interests, of an almost recent event in the
career of one whom their fathers' fathers might have
known. From memories so sublime, yet so close at
hand, had the narrative descended in which these acts
of worship centered ; and again the names of the more
recent dead were mingled with it. And it seemed as if
the very dead were aware; to be stirring beneath the
slabs of the sepulchres which lay so near, that they
might associate themselves to this enthusiasmto this
exalted worship of Jesus.
One by one, the faithful approached, and received
from the chief minister portions of the great, white,
wheaten cake, he had taken into his handsPerducat
vos ad vitam ternam ! he prays, half-silently, as they
depart again, after discreet embraces. The Eucharist of
those early days was, even more completely than at any
later or happier time, an act of thanksgiving; and
while the remnants of the feast were borne away for the
reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the rite
reached its highest point in the singing of a hymn: a
hymn like the spontaneous product of two opposed
powers or companies, contending accordantly together,
accumulating and heightening their witness, provoking
each other's worship in a kind of sacred rivalry.
* Psalm xxii. 22-31.
## p. 288 (#304) ############################################
288
CHAP. XXIII
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Ite ! Missa est ! cried the young deacons : and
Marius departed from that strange scene with the rest.
What was it ? Was this what made the way of Cornelius
so pleasant through the world ?As for Marius himself, 
the natural soul of worship in him had at last been
satisfied as never before. He felt, as he left that place,
that he must often hereafter experience a longing
memory, a kind of thirst, for all this, over again. More-
over, it seemed to define what he must require of the
powers, whatsoever they might be, that had brought him
into the world at all, to make him not unhappy in it.
## p. 289 (#305) ############################################
CHAPTER XXIV
A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINARY
In cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says Pliny
studia hilaritate proveniunt. It was still the habit of
Marius, encouraged by his experience that sleep is not
only a sedative but the best of stimulants, to seize the
morning hours for creation, making profit when he
might of the wholesome serenity which followed a
dreamless night. "The morning for creation," he would
say; "afternoon for the perfecting labour of the file;
the evening for receptionthe reception of matter from
without one, of other men's words and thoughtsmatter
for our own dreams, or the merely mechanic exercise of
the brain, brooding thereon silently, in its dark chambers."
It was therefore a rare thing for him to leave home
early in the day. One day he was induced to do so, on
the occasion of a visit to Rome of the famous writer
Lucian, whom he had been bidden to meet. The break-
fast over, he walked away with the learned guest, having
offered to be his guide to the lecture-room of a well-
known Greek rhetorician and expositor of the Stoic
philosophy, a teacher then much in fashion among the
studious youth of Rome. On reaching the place, how-
ever, they found the doors closed, with a slip of writing
attached, which proclaimed "a holiday"; and the
morning being a fine one, they walked further, along the
U
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290
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Appian Way. Mortality, with which the Queen of Ways
in reality the favourite cemetery of Romewas so
closely crowded, in every imaginable form of sepulchre,
from the tiniest baby-house, to the massive towers out of
which the Middle Ages would adapt a fortress, might
seem, on a morning like this, to be "smiling through
tears." The flower-stalls just beyond the city gates
presented to view an array of posies and garlands, fresh
enough for a wedding. At one and another of them
groups of persons, gravely clad, were making their
bargains before starting off to a perhaps distant spot on
the highway, to keep a dies rosationis (as this was the
time of roses) at the grave of a deceased relation. Here
and there, an actual funeral procession was slowly on its
way, in weird contrast to the gaiety of the hour.
The two companions, of course, read the epitaphs
as they strolled along. In one, reminding them of
the poet'sSi lacrim prosunt, visis te ostende videri -
a woman prayed that her lost husband might visit
her dreams. Their characteristic note, indeed, was an
imploring cry, still to be sought after by the living.
"While I live," was the promise of a lover to his dead
mistress, "you will receive this homage : after my death,
who can tell ? "post mortem nescio.
"If ghosts, my
sons, do feel anything after death, my sorrow will be
lessened by your frequent coming to me here ! ""This
is a privileged tomb; to my family and descendants has
been conceded the right of visiting this place as often as
they please." " This is an eternal habitation ; here lie
I; here I shall lie for ever." -"Reader ! if you doubt
that the soul survives, make your oblation and a prayer
for me; and you shall understand !"
The elder of the two readers, certainly, was little
affected by those pathetic suggestions. It was long ago
that having visited the banks of the Padus, and asked in
vain for the poplars which were the sisters of Phaethon,
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XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
seen
and whose tears were amber, he had once for all
arranged for himself a view of the world exclusive of all
reference to what might lie beyond its "flaming barriers."
And at the age of sixty he had no misgivings. His
elegant and self-complacent but far from unamiable
scepticism, long since brought to perfection, never failed
him. It surrounded him, as some are surrounded by a
magic ring of fine aristocratic manners, with "a rampart,
through which he himself never broke, nor permitted any
thing or person to break upon him. Gay, animated
content with his old age as it was, the aged student still
took a lively interest in studious youth.Could Marius
inform him of any such, now known to him in Rome ?
What did the young men learn, just then? and how ?
In answer, Marius became fluent concerning the
promise of one young student, the son, as it presently
appeared, of parents of whom Lucian himself knew
something : and soon afterwards the lad was
coming along brisklya lad with gait and figure well
enough expressive of the sane mind in the healthy body,
though a little slim and worn of feature, and with a pair
of eyes expressly designed, it might seem, for fine glanc-
ings at the stars. At the sight of Marius he paused
suddenly, and with a modest blush on recognising his
companion, who straightway took with the youth, so
prettily enthusiastic, the freedom of an old friend.
In a few moments the three were seated together,
immediately above the fragrant borders of a rose-farm,
on the marble bench of one of the exhedr for the use
of foot-passengers at the roadside, from which they could
overlook the grand, earnest prospect of the Campagna,
and enjoy the air. Fancying that the lad's plainly
written enthusiasm had induced in the elder speaker a
somewhat greater fervour than was usual with him,
Marius listened to the conversation which follows:-
"Ah! Hermotimus! Hurrying to lecture !if I may
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292
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
judge by your pace, and that volume in your hand.
You were thinking hard as you came along, moving your
lips and waving your arm : some fine speech you were
pondering, some knotty question or viewy doctrinenot
to be idle for a moment, to be making progress in
philosophy, even on your way to the schools. To-day,
however, you need go no further. We read a notice at
the schools that there would be no lecture.
Stay there-
fore, and talk awhile with us.
-With pleasure, Lucian.Yes! I was ruminating
yesterday's conference. One must not lose a moment.
Life is short and art is long ! And it was of the art of
medicine, that was first saida thing so much easier
than divine philosophy, to which one can hardly attain
in a lifetime, unless one be ever wakeful, ever on the
watch. And here the hazard is no little one :-By the
attainment of a true philosophy to attain happiness; or,
having missed both, to perish, as one of the vulgar herd.
- The prize is a great one, Hermotimus! and you
must needs be near it, after these months of toil, and
with that scholarly pallor of yours. Unless, indeed, you
have already laid hold upon it, and kept us in the dark.
How could that be, Lucian? Happiness, as
Hesiod says, abides very far hence; and the way to
it is long and steep and rough. I see myself still at
the beginning of my journey; still but at the mountain's
foot. I am trying with all my might to get forward.
What I need is a hand, stretched out to help me.
-And is not the master sufficient for that ? Could
he not, like Zeus in Homer, let down to you, from that
high place, a golden cord, to draw you up thither,
to himself and to that Happiness, to which he ascended
so long ago?
The very point, Lucian! If it had depended on
him I should long ago have been caught up.
'Tis I am
wanting.
## p. 293 (#309) ############################################
XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
-Well! keep your eye fixed on the journey's end,
and the happiness there above, with confidence in his
goodwill.
-Ah! there are many who start cheerfully on the
journey and proceed a certain distance, but lose heart
when they light on the obstacles of the way. Only,
those who endure to the end do come to the mountain's
top, and thereafter live in Happiness :-live a wonderful
manner of life, seeing all other people from that great
height no bigger than tiny ants.
-What little fellows you make of usless than the
pygmiesdown in the dust here. Well !
we,
'the
vulgar herd,' as we creep along, will not forget you in
our prayers, when you are seated up there above the
clouds, whither you have been so long hastening. But
tell me, Hermotimus when do you expect to arrive
there?
-Ah ! that I know not. In twenty years, perhaps,
I shall be really on the summit.-A great while ! you
think. But then, again, the prize I contend for is a
great one.
Perhaps ! But as to those twenty yearsthat you
will live so long. Has the master assured you of that?
Is he a prophet as well as a philosopher ? For I
suppose you would not endure all this, upon a mere
chancetoiling day and night, though it might happen
that just ere the last step, Destiny seized you by the
foot and plucked you thence, with your hope still
unfulfilled.
-Hence, with these ill-omened words, Lucian!
Were I to survive but for a day, I should be happy,
having once attained wisdom.
-How ?Satisfied with a single day, after all those
labours ?
-Yes! one blessed moment were enough !
-But again, as you have never been, how know you
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
that happiness is to be had up there, at allthe happi-
ness that is to make all this worth while ?
-I believe what the master tells me. Of a certainty
he knows, being now far above all others.
And what was it he told you about it? Is it
riches, or glory, or some indescribable pleasure ?
-Hush ! my friend! All those are nothing in com-
parison of the life there!
-What, then, shall those who come to the end of
this disciplinewhat excellent thing shall they receive,
if not these?
-Wisdom, the absolute goodness and the absolute
beauty, with the sure and certain knowledge of all things
-how they are. Riches and glory and pleasure-
whatsoever belongs to the bodythey have cast from
them : stripped bare of all that, they mount up, even as
Hercules, consumed in the fire, became a god. He too
cast aside all that he had of his earthly mother, and
bearing with him the divine element, pure and undefiled,
winged his way to heaven from the discerning flame.
Even so do they, detached from all that others prize, by
the burning fire of a true philosophy, ascend to the
highest degree of Happiness.
-Strange! And do they never come down again
from the heights to help those whom they left below ?
Must they, when they be once come thither, there remain
for ever, laughing, as you say, at what other men prize ?
- More than that! They whose initiation is entire
are subject no longer to anger, fear, desire, regret.
Nay! They scarcely feel at all.
-Well ! as you have leisure to-day, why not tell an
old friend in what way you first started on your philo-
sophic journey ? For, if I might, I should like to join
company with you from this very day
- If you be really willing, Lucian! you will learn in
no long time your advantage over all other people. They
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XXIV
295
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
will seem but as children, so far above them will be your
thoughts.
-Well ! Be you my guide ! It is but fair. But
tell meDo you allow learners to contradict, if anything
is said which they don't think right?
-No, indeed! Still, if you wish, oppose your
questions. In that way you will learn more easily.
-Let me know, then-Is there one only way which
leads to a true philosophyyour own waythe way of
the Stoics : or is it true, as I have heard, that there are
many ways of approaching it?
-Yes! Many ways! There are the Stoics, and the
Peripatetics, and those who call themselves after Plato :
there are the enthusiasts for Diogenes, and Antisthenes,
and the followers of Pythagoras, besides others.
-It was true, then. But again, is what they say
the same or different ?
-Very different.
Yet the truth, I conceive, would be one and the
same, from all of them. Answer me then-In what, or
whom, did you confide when you first betook yourself to
philosophy, and seeing so many doors open to you,
passed them all by and went in to the Stoics, as if there
alone lay the way of truth? What token had you?
Forget, please, all you are to-day-half-way, or more, on
the philosophic journey: answer me as you would have
done then, a mere outsider as I am now.
-Willingly! It was there the great majority went !
'Twas by that I judged it to be the better way.
-A majority how much greater than the Epicureans,
the Platonists, the Peripatetics? You, doubtless, counted
them respectively, as with the votes in a scrutiny.
-No! But this was not my only motive. I heard
it said by every one that the Epicureans were soft and
voluptuous, the Peripatetics avaricious and quarrelsome,
and Plato's followers puffed up with pride. But of the
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296
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Stoics, not a few pronounced that they were true men,
that they knew everything, that theirs was the royal road,
the one road, to wealth, to wisdom, to all that can be
desired.
-Of course those who said this were not themselves
Stoics : you would not have believed themstill less
their opponents. They were the vulgar, therefore.
-True ! But you must know that I did not trust
to others exclusively. I trusted also to myselfto what
I saw.
I saw the Stoics going through the world after
a seemly manner, neatly clad, never in excess, always
collected, ever faithful to the mean which all pronounce
golden.
-You are trying an experiment on me. You would
fain see how far you can mislead me as to your real
ground. The kind of probation you describe is applic-
able, indeed, to works of art, which are rightly judged
by their appearance to the eye. There is something in
the comely form, the graceful drapery, which tells surely
of the hand of Pheidias or Alcamenes. But if philo-
sophy is to be judged by outward appearances, what
would become of the blind man, for instance, unable to
observe the attire and gait of your friends the Stoics ?
- It was not of the blind I was thinking.
-Yet there must needs be some common criterion in
a matter so important to all. Put the blind, if you will,
beyond the privileges of philosophy; though they perhaps
need that inward vision more than all others.
those who are not blind, be they as keen-sighted as you
will, collect a single fact of mind from a man's attire,
from anything outward ?- Understand
You
attached yourself to these mendid you not ?- because
of a certain love you had for the mind in them, the
thoughts they had, desiring the mind in you to be im-
proved thereby ?
-Assuredly!
But can
me !
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XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
-How, then, did you find it possible, by the sort of
signs you just now spoke of, to distinguish the true
philosopher from the false ? Matters of that kind are
not wont so to reveal themselves. They are but hidden
mysteries, hardly to be guessed at through the words and
acts which may in some sort be conformable to them.
You, however, it would seem, can look straight into the
heart in men's bosoms, and acquaint yourself with what
really passes there.
-You are making sport of me, Lucian! In truth,
it was with God's help I made my choice, and I don't
repent it.
what you
-And still you refuse to tell me, to save me from
perishing in that 'vulgar herd.'
-Because nothing I can tell you would satisfy you.
-You are mistaken, my friend !
But since you
deliberately conceal the thing, grudging me, as I suppose,
that true philosophy which would make me equal to you,
I will try, if it may be, to find out for myself the exact
criterion in these mattershow to make a perfectly safe
choice. And, do you
listen.
- I will; there may be something worth knowing in
will
say.
-Well !-only don't laugh if I seem a little fumbling
in my efforts. The fault is yours, in refusing to share
your lights with me. Let Philosophy, then, be like a
citya city whose citizens within it are a happy people,
as your master would tell you, having lately come thence,
as we suppose.
All the virtues are theirs, and they are
little less than gods. Those acts of violence which
happen among us are not to be seen in their streets.
They live together in one mind, very seemly; the things
which beyond anything else cause men to contend against
each other, having no place among them. Gold and
silver, pleasure, vainglory, they have long since banished,
as being unprofitable to the commonwealth ; and their
## p. 298 (#314) ############################################
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
life is an unbroken calm, in liberty, equality, an equal
happiness.
-And is it not reasonable that all men should desire
to be of a city such as that, and take no account of the
length and difficulty of the way thither, so only they may
one day become its freemen ?
-It might well be the business of life :leaving all
else, forgetting one's native country here, unmoved by
the tears, the restraining hands, of parents or children, if
one had themonly bidding them follow the same road;
and if they would not or could not, shaking them off,
leaving one's very garment in their hands if they took
hold on us, to start off straightway for that happy place !
For there is no fear, I suppose, of being shut out if one
came thither naked. I remember, indeed, long ago an
aged man related to me how things passed there, offer-
ing himself to be my leader, and enrol me on my arrival
in the number of the citizens. I was but fifteen-
certainly very foolish : and it may be that I was then
actually within the suburbs, or at the very gates, of the
city. Well, this aged man told me, among other things,
that all the citizens were wayfarers from afar. Among
them were barbarians and slaves, poor menaye ! and
cripples-all indeed who truly desired that citizenship.
For the only legal conditions of enrolment werenot
wealth, nor bodily beauty, nor noble ancestrythings not
named among thembut intelligence, and the desire for
moral beauty, and earnest labour. The last comer, thus
qualified, was made equal to the rest : master and slave,
patrician, plebeian, were words they had notin that
blissful place. And believe me, if that blissful, that
beautiful place, were set on a hill visible to all the world,
I should long ago have journeyed thither. But, as you
say, it is far off : and one must needs find out for oneself
the road to it, and the best possible guide. And I find
a multitude of guides, who press on me their services, and
## p. 299 (#315) ############################################
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
protest, all alike, that they have themselves come thence.
Only, the roads they propose are many, and towards
adverse quarters. And one of them is steep and stony,
and through the beating sun; and the other is through
green meadows, and under grateful shade, and by many a
fountain of water. But howsoever the road may be, at
each one of them stands a credible guide ; he puts out
his hand and would have you come his way.
All other
ways are wrong, all other guides false. Hence my
difficulty !The number and variety of the ways ! For
you know, There is but one road that leads to Corinth.
-Well! If you go the whole round, you will find
no better guides than those. If you wish to get to
Corinth, you will follow the traces of Zeno and Chry-
sippus. It is impossible otherwise.
-Yes! The old, familiar language! Were one of
Plato's fellow-pilgrims here, or a follower of Epicurus
or fifty others each would tell me that I should
never get to Corinth except in his company.
One must
therefore credit all alike, which would be absurd ; or,
what is far safer, distrust all alike, until one has dis-
covered the truth. Suppose now, that, being as I am,
ignorant which of all philosophers is really in possession
of truth, I chose your sect, relying on yourselfmy
friend, indeed, yet still acquainted only with the way of
the Stoics; and that then some divine power brought
Plato, and Aristotle, and Pythagoras, and the others,
back to life again. Well! They would come round
about me, and put me on my trial for my presumption,
and say :'In whom was it you confided when you
preferred Zeno and Chrysippus to me?and me?-
masters of far more venerable age than those, who are
but of yesterday; and though you have never held any
discussion with us, nor made trial of our doctrine ? It
is not thus that the law would have judges dolisten to
one party and refuse to let the other speak for himself.
## p. 300 (#316) ############################################
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
If judges act thus, there may be an appeal to another
tribunal.' What should I answer? Would it be enough
to say :-'I trusted my friend Hermotimus ?''We
know not Hermotimus, nor he us,' they would tell me;
adding, with a smile, 'your friend thinks he may believe
all our adversaries say of us whether in ignorance or in
malice. Yet if he were umpire in the games, and if he
happened to see one of our wrestlers, by way of a
preliminary exercise, knock to pieces an antagonist of
mere empty air, he would not thereupon pronounce him
a victor. Well! don't let your friend Hermotimus sup-
pose, in like manner, that his teachers have really pre-
vailed over us in those battles of theirs, fought with our
mere shadows. That, again, were to be like children,
lightly overthrowing their own card-castles; or like boy-
archers, who cry out when they hit the target of straw.
The Persian and Scythian bowmen, as they speed along,
can pierce a bird on the wing.'
-Let us leave Plato and the others at rest. It is
not for me to contend against them. Let us rather
search out together if the truth of Philosophy be as
Why summon the athletes, and archers from
Persia ?
-Yes ! let them go, if you think them in the way.
And now do you speak! You really look as if you
had
something wonderful to deliver.
-Well then, Lucian! to me it seems quite possible
for one who has learned the doctrines of the Stoics only,
to attain from those a knowledge of the truth, without
proceeding to inquire into all the various tenets of the
others. Look at the question in this way. If one told
you that twice two make four, would it be necessary
you to go the whole round of the arithmeticians, to see
whether any one of them will say that twice two make
five, or seven ? Would you not see at once that the
man tells the truth?
I say.
for
## p. 301 (#317) ############################################
XXIV
301
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
-At once.
-Why then do you find it impossible that one who
has fallen in with the Stoics only, in their enunciation of
what is true, should adhere to them, and seek after no
others; assured that four could never be five, even if
fifty Platos, fifty Aristotles said so?
-You are beside the point, Hermotimus !
You are
likening open questions to principles universally received.
Have you ever met any one who said that twice two
make five, or seven?
-No! only a madman would say that.
And have you ever met, on the other hand, a Stoic
and an Epicurean who were agreed upon the beginning
and the end, the principle and the final cause, of things?
Never! Then your parallel is false. We are inquiring
to which of the sects philosophic truth belongs, and you
seize on it by anticipation, and assign it to the Stoics,
alleging, what is by no means clear, that it is they for
whom twice two make four. But the Epicureans, or
the Platonists, might say that it is they, in truth, who
make two and two equal four, while you make them five
Is it not so, when you think virtue the only
good, and the Epicureans pleasure; when you hold all
things to be material, while the Platonists admit some-
thing immaterial? As I said, you resolve offhand, in
favour of the Stoics, the very point which needs a
critical decision. If it is clear beforehand that the
Stoics alone make two and two equal four, then the
others must hold their peace. But so long as that is
the very point of debate, we must listen to all sects alike,
or be well-assured that we shall seem but partial in our
judgment.
-I think, Lucian! that you do not altogether under-
stand my meaning. To make it clear, then, let us suppose
that two men have entered a temple, of Aesculapius,
say! or Bacchus : and that afterwards one of the sacred
or seven.
## p. 302 (#318) ############################################
302
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
vessels is found to be missing. And the two men must
be searched to see which of them has hidden it under
his garment. For it is certainly in the possession of one
or the other of them. Well ! if it be found on the first
there will be no need to search the second ; if it is not
found on the first, then the other must have it; and
again, there will be no need to search him.
-Yes ! So let it be.
-And we too, Lucian ! if we have found the holy
vessel in possession of the Stoics shall no longer have
need to search other philosophers, having attained that
we were seeking. Why trouble ourselves further ?
-No need, if something had indeed been found, and
you knew it to be that lost thing : if, at the least, you
could recognise the sacred object when you saw it. But
truly, as the matter now stands, not two persons only
have entered the temple, one or the other of whom must
needs have taken the golden cup, but a whole crowd of
persons. And then, it is not clear what the lost object
really is-cup, or flagon, or diadem ; for one of the
priests avers this, another that; they are not even in
agreement as to its material : some will have it to be of
brass, others of silver, or gold. It thus becomes neces-
sary to search the garments of all persons who have
entered the temple, if the lost vessel is to be recovered.
And if you find a golden cup on the first of them, it will
still be necessary to proceed in searching the garments
of the others; for it is not certain that this cup really
belonged to the temple. Might there not be many such
golden vessels ? No! we must go on to every one of
them, placing all that we find in the midst together, and
then make our guess which of all those things may fairly
be supposed to be the property of the god. For, again,
this circumstance adds greatly to our difficulty, that
without exception every one searched is found to have
something upon him-cup, or flagon, or diadem, of
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XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
brass, of silver, of gold : and still, all the while, it is
not ascertained which of all these is the sacred thing.
And you must still hesitate to pronounce any one of
them guilty of the sacrilegethose objects may be their
own lawful property: one cause of all this obscurity being,
as I think, that there was no inscription on the lost
cup,
if
cup
it was.
Had the name of the god, or even
that of the donor, been upon it, at least we should have
had less trouble, and having detected the inscription
should have ceased to trouble any one else by our search.
-I have nothing to reply to that.
-Hardly anything plausible. So that if we wish to
find who it is has the sacred vessel, or who will be our
best guide to Corinth, we must needs proceed to every
one and examine him with the utmost care, stripping off
his garment and considering him closely. Scarcely,
even so, shall we come at the truth.
And if we are
to have a credible adviser regarding this question of
philosophywhich of all philosophies one ought to
followhe alone who is acquainted with the dicta of
every one of them can be such a guide : all others must
be inadequate. I would give no credence to them if
they lacked information as to one only. If some one
introduced a fair person and told us he was the fairest
of all men, we should not believe that, unless we knew
that he had seen all the people in the world. Fair he
might be; but, fairest of all-none could know, unless
he had seen all. And we too desire, not a fair one, but
the fairest of all. Unless we find him, we shall think
we have failed. It is no casual beauty that will content
us; what we are seeking after is that supreme beauty
which must of necessity be unique.
-What then is one to do, if the matter be really
thus? Perhaps you know better than I. All I see is
that very few of us would have time to examine all the
various sects of philosophy in turn, even if we began in
## p. 304 (#320) ############################################
304
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
But so
early life.
I know not how it is; but though you seem
to me to speak reasonably, yet (I must confess it) you
have distressed me not a little by this exact exposition
of yours. I was unlucky in coming out to-day, and in
my falling in with you, who have thrown me into utter
perplexity by your proof that the discovery of truth is
impossible, just as I seemed to be on the point of
attaining my hope.
-Blame your parents, my child, not me! Or
rather, blame mother Nature herself, for giving us but
seventy or eighty years instead of making us as long-
lived as Tithonus. For my part, I have but led you
from premise to conclusion.
-Nay! you are a mocker !
I know not wherefore,
but you have a grudge against philosophy; and it is your
entertainment to make a jest of her lovers.
-Ah! Hermotimus! what the Truth may be, you
philosophers may be able to tell better than I.
much at least I know of her, that she is one by no
means pleasant to those who hear her speak: in the
matter of pleasantness, she is far surpassed by False-
hood : and Falsehood has the pleasanter countenance.
She, nevertheless, being conscious of no alloy within,
discourses with boldness to all men, who therefore have
little love for her. See how angry you are now because
I have stated the truth about certain things of which we
are both alike enamouredthat they are hard to come
by. It is as if you had fallen in love with a statue and
hoped to win its favour, thinking it a human creature;
and I, understanding it to be but an image of brass or
stone, had shown you, as a friend, that your love was
impossible, and thereupon you had conceived that I bore
you some ill-will.
-But 11, does it not follow from what you said,
that we must renounce philosophy and pass our days in
idleness?
## p. 305 (#321) ############################################
XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
-When did you hear me say that? I did but assert
that if we are to seek after philosophy, whereas there are
many ways professing to lead thereto, we must with much
exactness distinguish them.
-Well, Lucian! that we must go to all the schools
in turn, and test what they say, if we are to choose the
right one, is perhaps reasonable ; but surely ridiculous,
unless we are to live as many years as the Phoenix, to
be so lengthy in the trial of each; as if it were not
possible to learn the whole by the part! They say that
Pheidias, when he was shown one of the talons of a lion,
computed the stature and age of the animal it belonged
to, modelling a complete lion upon the standard of a
single part of it. You too would recognise a human
hand were the rest of the body concealed. Even so
with the schools of philosophy :the leading doctrines
of each might be learned in an afternoon.
That over-
exactness of yours, which required so long a time, is by
no means necessary for making the better choice.
-You are forcible, Hermotimus! with this theory
of The Whole by the Part. Yet, methinks, I heard you
but now propound the contrary. But tell me; would
Pheidias when he saw the lion's talon have known that it
was a lion's, if he had never seen the animal ? Surely,
the cause of his recognising the part was his knowledge
of the whole. There is a way of choosing one's philosophy
even less troublesome than yours. Put the names of all
the philosophers into an urn. Then call a little child,
and let him draw the name of the philosopher you shall
follow all the rest of your days.
-Nay! be serious with me. Tell me; did you ever
buy wine?
-Surely.
-And did you first go the whole round of the wine-
merchants, tasting and comparing their wines ?
-By no means.
## p. 306 (#322) ############################################
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CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
How if you
-No! You were contented to order the first good
wine you found at your price. By tasting a little you
ascertained the quality of the whole cask.
had gone to each of the merchants in turn, and said, 'I
wish to buy a cotyl of wine. Let me drink out the whole
cask. Then I shall be able to tell which is best, and
where I ought to buy. Yet this is what you would do
with the philosophies. Why drain the cask when you
might taste, and see?
How slippery you are; how you escape from one's
fingers! Still, you have given me an advantage, and
are in your own trap.
-How so?
Thus! You take a common object known to
every one, and make wine the figure of a thing which
presents the greatest variety in itself, and about which
all men are at variance, because it is an unseen and
difficult thing. I hardly know wherein philosophy and
wine are alike unless it be in this, that the philosophers
exchange their ware for money, like the wine-merchants;
some of them with a mixture of water or worse, or giving
short measure. However, let us consider your parallel.
The wine in the cask, you say, is of one kind through-
out.
But have the philosophershas your own master
even-but one and the same thing only to tell you,
every day and all days, on a subject so manifold ?
Otherwise, how can you know the whole by the tasting
of one part ? The whole is not the sameAh! and it
may be that God has hidden the good wine of philosophy
at the bottom of the cask. You must drain it to the end
if you are to find those drops of divine sweetness you
seem so much to thirst for! Yourself, after drinking so
deeply, are still but at the beginning, as you said. But
is not philosophy rather like this? Keep the figure of
the merchant and the cask: but let it be filled, not with
wine, but with every sort of grain. You come to buy.
## p. 307 (#323) ############################################
XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
The merchant hands you a little of the wheat which lies
at the top
Could you tell by looking at that, whether
the chick-peas were clean, the lentils tender, the beans
full ? And then, whereas in selecting our wine we risk
only our money; in selecting our philosophy we risk
ourselves, as you told memight ourselves sink into the
dregs of the vulgar herd. Moreover, while you may
not drain the whole cask of wine by way of tasting,
Wisdom grows no less by the depth of your drinking.
Nay! if you take of her, she is increased thereby.
And then there is another similitude I have to pro-
pose, as regards this tasting of philosophy. Don't think
that I blaspheme her if I say that it may be as with
some deadly poison, hemlock or aconite.
These too,
though they cause death, yet kill not if one tastes but a
minute portion. You would suppose that the tiniest
particle must be sufficient.
-Be it as you will, Lucian! One must live a
hundred years
-one must sustain all this labour-other-
wise, philosophy is unattainable.
- Not so ! Though there were nothing strange in
that; if it be true, as you said at first, that Life is short
and art is long. But now, you take it hard that we are
not to see you this very day, before the sun goes down,
a Chrysippus, a Pythagoras, a Plato.
-You overtake me, Lucian ! and drive me into a
corner; I believe, in jealousy of heart, because I have
made some progress in doctrine whereas you have
neglected yourself.
-Well ! Don't attend to me! Treat me as
Corybant, a fanatic: and do you go forward on this road
of yours. Finish the journey in accordance with the
view you had of these matters at the beginning of it.
Only, be assured that my judgment on it will remain un-
changed. Reason still says, that without criticism,
without a clear, exact, unbiassed intelligence to try them,
a
## p. 308 (#324) ############################################
308
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
all those theoriesall thingswill have been seen in vain.
"To that end,' she tells us, 'much time is necessary,
many delays of judgment, a cautious gait; repeated
inspection. And we are not to regard the outward
appearance, or the reputation of wisdom, in any of the
speakers; but like the judges of Areopagus, who try
their causes in the darkness of the night, look only to
what they say.
-Philosophy, then, is impossible, or possible only in
another life!
-Hermotimus! I grieve to tell you that all that
even, may be found insufficient.
After all, we may
deceive ourselves in the belief that we have found some-
thing :-like the fishermen! Again and again they let
down the net. At last they feel something heavy, and
with vast labour draw up, not a load of fish, but only a
pot full of sand, or a great stone.
-I don't understand what you mean by the net. It
is plain that you have caught me in it.
-Try to get out! You can swim as well as another.
We may go to all philosophers in turn and make trial of
them. Still, I for my part, hold it by no means certain
that any one of them really possesses what we seek.
The truth may be a thing that not one of them has
found. You have twenty beans in your hand, and you
bid ten persons guess how many: one says five, another
fifteen ; it is possible that one of them may tell the true
number; but it is not impossible that all may be wrong.
So it is with the philosophers. All alike are in search of
Happinesswhat kind of thing it is. One says one
thing, one another : it is pleasure; it is virtue ;-what
not ? And Happiness may indeed be one of those
things. But it is possible also that it may be still some-
hing else, different and distinct from them all.
What is that ?There is something, I know not
how, very sad and disheartening in what you say.
We
## p. 309 (#325) ############################################
XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
As you
seem to have come round in a circle to the spot whence
we started, and to our first incertitude. Ah! Lucian,
what have you done to me? You have proved my
priceless pearl to be but ashes, and all my past labour to
have been in vain.
-Reflect, my friend, that you are not the first person
who has thus failed of the good thing he hoped for.
All philosophers, so to speak, are but fighting about the
'ass's shadow.' To me you seem like one who should
weep, and reproach fortune because he is not able to
climb
up into heaven, or go down into the sea by Sicily
and come up at Cyprus, or sail on wings in one day from
Greece to India. And the true cause of his trouble is
that he has based his hope on what he has seen in a
dream, or his own fancy has put together; without
previous thought whether what he desires is in itself
attainable and within the compass of human nature.
Even so, methinks, has it happened with you.
dreamed, so largely, of those wonderful things, came
Reason, and woke you up from sleep, a little roughly :
and then you are angry with Reason, your eyes being
still but half open, and find it hard to shake off sleep for
the pleasure of what you saw therein. Only, don't be
angry with me, because, as a friend, I would not suffer
you to pass your life in a dream, pleasant perhaps, but
still only a dream-because I wake you up and demand
that you should busy yourself with the proper business
of life, and send you to it possessed of common sense.
What your soul was full of just now is not very different
from those Gorgons and Chimras and the like, which
the poets and the painters construct for us, fancy-free :-
things which never were, and never will be, though
many believe in them, and all like to see and hear of
them, just because they are so strange and odd.
And you too, methinks, having heard from some such
maker of marvels of a certain woman of a fairness beyond
## p. 310 (#326) ############################################
310
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
nature-beyond the Graces, beyond Venus Urania
herselfasked not if he spoke truth, and whether
this woman be really alive in the world, but straightway
fell in love with her; as they say that Medea was
enamoured of Jason in a dream. And what more than
anything else seduced you into that passion, and others
like you, for a vain idol of the fancy, is, that he who told
you about that fair woman, from the very moment when
you first believed that what he said was true, brought
forward all the rest in consequent order. Upon her
alone your eyes were fixed; by her he led you along,
when once you had given him a hold upon youled
you along the straight road, as he said, to the beloved
one. All was easy after that. None of
you
asked again
whether it was the true way; following one after another,
like sheep led by the green bough in the hand of the
shepherd. He moved you hither and thither with his
finger, as easily as water spilt on a table !
My friend! Be not so lengthy in preparing the
banquet, lest you die of hunger!
I saw
one who
poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his
might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing use-
ful and necessary : but it remained water only, none the
less."
Just there the conversation broke off suddenly, and
the disputants parted.
The horses were
come for
Lucian. The boy went on his way, and Marius onward,
to visit a friend whose abode lay further. As he returned
to Rome towards evening the melancholy aspect, natural
to a city of the dead, had triumphed over the superficial
gaudiness of the early day. He could almost have
fancied Canidia there, picking her way among the rickety
lamps, to rifle some neglected or ruined tomb; for these
tombs were not all equally well cared for (Post mortem
nescio !) and it had been one of the pieties of Aurelius
to frame a severe law to prevent the defacing of the
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XXIV
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ancient monuments of the dead. To Marius there
seemed to be some new meaning in that terror of isola-
tion, of being left alone in these places, of which the
sepulchral inscriptions were so full. A blood-red sunset
was dying angrily, and its wild glare upon the shadowy
objects about him concurred with his own fancy, in
weaving all the associations of this famous way and its
deeply graven marks of immemorial travel (together with
all the associations of the morning's enthusiastic con-
ference on the true way of that other sort of travelling)
around a very melancholy image, almost ghastly in the
traces of its great sorrowsbearing along for ever, on
bleeding feet, the instrument of its punishmentwhich
was all Marius could recall distinctly of a certain
Christian legend he had heard. It was the legend, how-
ever, of an encounter upon this very spot, of two
wayfarers on the Appian Way, as also upon some very
dimly discerned mental journey, altogether different from
himself and his late companionsan encounter between
Love, literally fainting by the road, and Love "travelling
in the greatness of his strength," Love itself, suddenly
appearing to sustain that other. It was a strange contrast
to anything actually presented in that morning's con-
versation, yet somehow seemed to recall its very words
-"Do they never come down again (he seemed to hear
once more that well-modulated voice), Do they never
come down again from the heights, to help those whom
they left here below ?""And we too desire, not a fair
one, but the fairest of all. Unless we find him, we shall
think we have failed."
## p. 312 (#328) ############################################
CHAPTER XXV
SUNT LACRIM RERUM
It had become a habit with Marius-one of his
modernisms- developed by his assistance at the Em-
peror's conversations"
"with himself," to keep a
register of the movements of his own private thoughts
and humours; not continuously indeed, but sometimes
for lengthy intervals, during which it was no idle self-
indulgence, but a necessity of his intellectual life, to
"confess himself," with an intimacy, seemingly rare
among the ancients; ancient writers, at all events, having
been jealous, for the most part, of affording us so much
as a glimpse of that interior self, which in many cases
would have actually doubled the interest of their object-
ive informations.
"If a particular tutelary or genius," writes Marius,
"according to old belief, walks beside each one of us
through life, mine is certainly a capricious creature !
He fills one with wayward, unaccountable, yet quite
irresistible humours, and seems always to be in collusion
with some outward circumstance, often trivial enough in
itself the condition of the weather, forsooth !- the
people one meets by chancethe things one happens to
overhear them say (veritable vdiou ouodol, or omens
by the wayside, as the old Greeks fancied) to push on
the unreasonable prepossessions of the moment into
1
## p. 313 (#329) ############################################
CHAP. XXV
313
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
weighty motives. It was doubtless a quite explicable,
physical fatigue that presented me to myself, on awaking
this morning, so lack-lustre and trite. But I must needs
take my petulance, contrasting it with my accustomed
morning hopefulness, as a sign of the ageing of appetite,
of a decay in the very capacity of enjoyment. We need
some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal
which may shape vague hope, and transform it into
effective desire, to carry us year after year, without
disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a
part of life.
"Then, how if appetite, be it for real or ideal, should
itself fail one after awhile ? Ah, yes ! it is of cold
always that men die; and on some of us it creeps very
gradually. In truth, I can remember just such a lack-
lustre condition of feeling once or twice before. But I
note, that it was accompanied then by an odd indiffer-
ence, as the thought of them occurred to me, in regard
to the sufferings of othersa kind of callousness, so
unusual with me, as at once to mark the humour it
accompanied as a palpably morbid one that could not
last. Were those sufferings, great or little, I asked
myself then, of more real consequence to them than
mine to me, as I remind myself that 'nothing that will
end is really long '-long enough to be thought of im-
portance ? But to-day, my own sense of fatigue, the
pity I conceive for myself, disposed me strongly to
a tenderness for others. For a moment the whole
world seemed to present itself as a hospital of sick
persons; many of them sick in mind; and all of whom
it would be a brutality not to humour.
"Why, when I went out to walk-off my wayward
fancies, did I confront the very sort of incident (my un-
fortunate genius had surely beckoned it from afar to vex
me) likely to irritate it further ? A party of men were
coming down the street. They were leading a fine
## p. 314 (#330) ############################################
314
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
own.
race-horse; a handsome beast, but badly hurt some-
where, in the circus, and useless. They were taking
him to slaughter ; and I think the animal knew it: he
cast such looks, as if of mad appeal, to those who
passed him, as he went to die in his beauty and pride,
for just that one mischance or fault, among the
strangers to whom his old owner had deserted him ;
although the morning air was still so animating, and
pleasant to snuff. I could have fancied a soul in the
creature, swelling against its luck. And I had come
across the incident just when it would figure to me as
the very symbol of our poor humanity, in its capacities
for pain, its wretched accidents, its imperfect sympathies,
which can never quite identify us with each other; the
very power of utterance and appeal seeming to fail, in
proportion as our sorrows come home to ourselves, are
really our We are constructed for suffering !
What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we care to
note them, as we goa whole long chaplet of sorrowful
mysteries ! Sunt lacrim rerum et mentem mortalia
tangunt.
" Men's fortunes touch us ! The little children of
one of those institutions for the support of orphans,
now become fashionable among us as memorials of
eminent people deceased, are going, in long file, along
the street, on their way to a holiday in the country.
They halt, and count themselves with an air of triumph,
to show that they are all there. Their
gay
chatter has
disturbed a little group of peasants ; a young woman
and her husband, who have brought the old mother,
now past work and witless, to place her in a house
provided for such afflicted persons. They are fairly
affectionate, but anxious how the thing they have to do
may go-hope only that she may permit them to leave
her there quietly behind them. And the poor old soul
is excited by the noise made by the children, and partly
## p. 315 (#331) ############################################
XXV
315
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
aware of what is going to happen with her. She too
begins to count-one, two, three, five-on her trem-
bling fingers, misshapen by a life of toil.
"Yes ! yes !
and twice five make ten'they say, to pacify her. It
is her last appeal to be taken home again ; her proof
that all is not yet up with her ; that she is, at all events,
still as capable as those joyous children.
"At the baths, a party of labourers are at work upon
one of the great brick furnaces, in a cloud of black dust.
A frail young child has brought food for one of them,
and sits apart, waiting till his father comeswatching
the labour, but with a painful distaste for the din and
dirt. He is regarding wistfully his own place in the
world, prepared there before him. His mind, as he
watches, is grown up for a moment; and he foresees, as
it were, in that moment, all the long tale of days, of
early awakings, of his own coming life of drudgery at
work like this.
"A man comes along carrying a boy. whose rough
work has already begunthe only childwhose presence
beside him sweetened his toil a little. The boy has
been badly injured by a fall of brick-work, yet rides
boldly with an effort, on his father's shoulders. It will
be the way of natural affection to keep him alive as long
as possible, though with that miserably shattered body
-'Ah! with us still, and feeling our care beside him !'
and yet surely not without a heartbreaking sigh of
relief, alike from him and them, when the end comes.
"On the alert for incidents like these, yet of necessity
passing them by on the other side, I find it hard to get
rid of a sense that I, for one, have failed in love. 
could yield to the humour till I seemed to have had my
share in those great public cruelties, those shocking
legal crimes, like the cold blooded slaughter, according
to law, of the four hundred slaves, one by one, under
Nero, because one of their number was thought to have
## p. 316 (#332) ############################################
316
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
murdered his master. All that, together with the kind
of facile apologies which those who had no share in the
deed may have made for it, as they went about quietly
on their own affairs that day, seems to come very close
to me, as I think over it. And to how many of those
now actually around me, whose life is a sore one, must
I be indifferent, if I ever perceive the soreness at all ?
To some, perhaps, the circumstances of my own life may
cause me necessarily to be opposed, regarding those
interests which actually determine the happiness of
theirs. I would that a stronger love might arise in my
heart !
"Yet there is plenty of charity in the world. My
patron, the Stoic emperor, has made it even fashionable.
To celebrate one of his brief returns to Rome from the
war lately, over and above a largess of gold pieces to all
who would, the public debts were forgiven. He made
a nice show of it : for once, the Romans entertained
themselves with a good-natured spectacle, and the whole
town came to see the great bonfire in the Forum, into
which all bonds and evidence of debt were thrown on
delivery, by the emperor himself; many private creditors
following his example. That was done well enough !
Only, what I feel is, that no charity at all can get at a
certain natural unkindness which I find in things them-
selves.
"When I first came to Rome, eager to observe its
religion, especially its antiquities of religious usage, I
assisted at the most curious, perhaps, of them all, and
the most deeply marked with that immobility which is
a sort of ideal in the Roman religion. The ceremony
took place at a singular spot some miles distant from the
city, among the low hills on the bank of the Tiber,
beyond the Aurelian Gate. There, in a little wood of
venerable trees, piously allowed their own way, age after
ageilex and cypress remaining where they fell at last,
## p. 317 (#333) ############################################
XXV
317
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
one over the other, and all caught, in that early May-
time, under a riotous tangle of wild clematiswas to
be found a magnificent sanctuary, in which the members
of the Arval College assembled themselves on certain
days. The axe never touched those treesNay! it
was forbidden to introduce any iron thing whatsoever
within the precincts; not only because the deities of
these quiet places hate to be disturbed by the sound of
iron, but also in memory of that better agethe lost
Golden Agethe homely age of the potters, of which
the central act of the festival was a commemoration.
"The preliminary ceremonies were long and com-
plicated, but of a character familiar enough. What was
peculiar to the time and place was the solemn exposition,
after lavation of hands, processions backwards and
forwards, and certain changes of vestments, of the
identical earthen vessels (veritable relics of the old
religion of Numa) out of which the holy Numa himself
had eaten and drunk, set forth above a kind of altar,
amid a cloud of flowers and incense, and many lights, to
the veneration of the credulous or the faithful.
"They were vases or cups of burnt clay, rude in
form : and the religious veneration thus offered to them
expressed the desire to give honour to a simpler age,
before iron had found place in human lifethe persua-
sion that that age was worth remembering, a hope that
it might come again.
"That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return,
has been the hope or the dream of some, in every
period. Yet if he did come back, or any equivalent of
his presence, he could but alleviate, and by no means
wholly remove, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of
outraged human sense, in things, which one must care-
fully distinguish from all preventable accidents. Death,
and the little perpetual daily dyings, which have some-
thing of its sting, he must necessarily leave untouched.
## p. 318 (#334) ############################################
318
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
And, methinks, that were all the rest of man's life framed
entirely to his liking, he would straightway begin to
sadden himself, over the fatesay, of the flowers ! For
there is (has come to be since Numa lived perhaps) a
capacity for sorrow in his heart, which grows with all the
growth, alike of the individual and of the race, in
intellectual delicacy and power, and which will find its
aliment.
"Of that sort of golden age, indeed, one discerns
even now a trace, here and there. Often have I main-
tained that, in this generous southern country at least,
Epicureanism is the special philosophy of the poor.
How little I myself really need, when people leave me
alone, with the intellectual powers at work serenely.
The drops of falling water, a few wild flowers with their
priceless fragrance, even a few tufts of half-dead leaves,
changing colour in the quiet of a room that has but light
and shadow in it; these, for a susceptible mind, might
well do duty for all the glory of Augustus. I notice
often the true character of the fondness of the roughest
working-people for their young children, a fine apprecia-
tion, not only of their serviceable affection, but of their
visible graces : and indeed, in this country, the children
are almost always worth looking at. I see daily, in fine
weather, a child like a delicate nosegay, run to meet the
rudest of brick-makers as he comes from work. She is
not at all afraid to hang upon his rough hand : and
through her, he reaches out to, he makes his own,
something from that great world, so distant from him
yet so real, of humanity's refinements. What is of finer
soul, or of finer stuff in things, and demands delicate
touchingthe delicacy of the little child represents to
him that, initiates him into that. There, surely, is a
touch of the secular gold, of a perpetual age of gold.
But then again, think for a moment, with what a hard
humour at the nature of things, his struggle for bare life
## p. 319 (#335) ############################################
XXV
319
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
I saw
will go on, if the child should happen to die.
to-day, under one of the archways of the baths, two
children very seriously at playa fair girl and a per-
fectly crippled younger brother. Two toy chairs and a
little table, and sprigs of fir set upright in the sand for a
garden! They were playing at housekeeping. Well !
the girl thinks her life a perfectly good thing in the love
of this crippled brother. But she will have a jealous
lover in time: and the boy, though his face is not alto-
gether unpleasant, is after all a hopeless cripple.
"For there is a certain grief in things as they are,
in man as he has come to be, as he certainly is, over
and above those griefs of circumstance which are in a
measure removablean inexplicable shortcoming, or
misadventure, on the part of nature itself  death,
and old age as it must needs be, and that watching
of their approach, which makes every stage of life
like a dying over and over again. Almost all death
is painful, and in every thing that comes to an end
a touch of death, and therefore of a wretched coldness
struck home to one, of remorse, of loss and parting, of
outraged attachments. Given faultless men and women,
given a perfect state of society which should have no
need to practise on men's susceptibilities for its own
selfish ends, adding one turn more to the wheel of the
great rack for its own interest or amusement, there would
still be this evil in the world, of a certain necessary
sorrow and desolation, felt, just in proportion to the
moral, the nervous perfection men have reached. And
what is needed in the world, over against that, is a
certain general, permanent force of compassion-
humanity's standing self-pityas an elementary ingre-
dient of our social atmosphere, if we are to live in it
at all. I wonder, sometimes, how man has cajoled him-
self into the bearing of his burden so far, seeing how
every step his labour has won for him, from age to age,
## p. 320 (#336) ############################################
320
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
in the capacity of apprehension, must needs increase his
dejection; as if the increase of knowledge were but the
revelation of the radical hopelessness of his position: and
I would that there were one even as I, behind this vain
show of things !
"At all events, the actual conditions of our life being
as they are, and the capacity for suffering so large a
principle in things, and the only principle, always safe, a
sympathy with the pain one actually sees, it follows that
the constituent practical difference between men will be
their capacity for a trained insight into those conditions,
their capacity for sympathy; and the future with those
who have most of it. And for the present, those who
have much of it, have (I tell myself) something to hold
by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolu-
tion of self, which is, for every one, no less than the
dissolution of the world it represents for him. Nearly
all of us, I suppose, have had our moments, in which
any effective sympathy for us has seemed impossible, and
our pain in life a mere stupid outrage upon us, like some
overwhelming physical violence; and we could seek
refuge from it, at best, only in a mere general sense of
goodwill, somewhere perhaps. And then, to one's
surprise, the discovery of that goodwill, if it were only in
a not unfriendly animal, may seem to have explained,
and actually justified, the existence of our pain at all.
Certainly, there have been occasions when I have felt
that if others cared for me as I did for them, it would
be, not so much a solace of loss, as an equivalent for it
a certain real thing in itselfa touching of that
absolute ground among all the changes of phenomena,
such as our philosophers of late have professed them-
selves quite unable to find. In the mere clinging of
human creatures to each other, nay! in one's own
solitary self-pity, even amidst what might count as
absolute loss, I seem to touch the eternal. A certain
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XXV
321
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
very real new thing is evolved in that pitiful contact,
which, on a review of all the perplexity of life, satisfies
the moral sense, and removes that appearance of unkind-
ness in the soul of things themselves, and assures us that
not everything has been in vain.
"And I know not how, but in the thought thus
suggested, I seem to take up, and re-knit myself to, a
well-remembered hour, when by some gracious accident
(it was on a journey), all things about me fell into a more
perfect harmony than is their wont. For a moment, all
things seemed to be, after all, almost for the best.
Through the train of my thoughts, one against another,
it was as if I felt the dominance of a person in con-
troversya wrestlerwith me. Just now, I seem to be
at the point where I left off then. My antagonist has
closed with me again. A protest comes, out of the very
depth and dust of man's radically hopeless position in
the world, with the energy of one of those suffering yet
prevailing deities, of which old poetry tells. Dared one
hope that there is a heart, even as ours, in that divine
Assistant of one's thoughtsa heart even as mine,
behind this vain show of things !'
27
Y
## p. 322 (#338) ############################################
CHAPTER XXVI
THE MARTYRS
AH! VOIL LES AMES QU'IL FALLOIT  LA MIENNE !
Rousseau.
THE charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections,
wonderfully fresh in that threadbare world, would have
led Marius, if nothing else had done so, again and again,
to Cecilia's house.
He found a range of intellectual
pleasures, altogether new to him, in the sympathy of that
pure and elevated soul.
Elevation of soul, generosity,
humanity-little by little it came to seem to him as if
these existed nowhere else. The sentiment of maternity,
above all, as he understood it there, seemed to reinforce,
as with the sanction of some divine pattern of it higher
still, the claims of that, and of all natural feeling every-
where, down even to the sheep bleating on the hills, nay!
even to the mother-wolf, in her hungry cave.
its true place in the world given at last, to the bare
capacity for suffering in any creature, however feeble or
seemingly useless. In this chivalry, this anxious fidelity
to what could not help itself, or could scarcely dare
claim not to be forgotten, which seemed to leave the
world's heroism a mere property of the stage, what a
contrast to the hard contempt of death, of pain, of
glory even, in those discourses of Aurelius !
He saw
## p. 323 (#339) ############################################
CHAP. XXVI
323
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
But if Marius thought at times that some long-
cherished desires were here about to blossom for him,
in the sort of home he had sometimes pictured to him-
self, and the very charm of which would lie in its
distinction from random passions; that in this woman
to whom children instinctively clung, was the sister at
least, he had always longed for; there were also
circumstances which reminded him that a certain rule
against second marriages, among these people was still
of some force; incidents, moreover, which warned his
susceptible soul, like omens, not to mix together the
flesh and the spirit, nor to make the matter of a heavenly
banquet serve for earthly meat and drink.
One day he found Cecilia occupied with the burial of
one of the children of her household. It was on the
tiny brow of such a child, as he now heard, that the
Christian new light had first come to them in the light
of mere physical life, kindling again there, when the
child was dead, or supposed to be dead. The aged
servant of Christ had arrived in the midst of their noisy
grief; and mounting to the little chamber where it lay,
had returned, not long afterwards, with the child stirring
in his arms as he descended the stair rapidly; bursting
open the tightly-wound folds of its shroud and scattering
the flowers out of them, as life kindled again through its
limbs.
Old Roman common sense had taught people to
occupy their thoughts as little as might be with children
who died young.
Here, to-day, in this curious house,
all thoughts were tenderly bent on the little waxen
figure; yet with a kind of exultation and joy, notwith-
standing the loud weeping of the mother. The other
children, its late companions, broke with it, suddenly,
into the place where its black bed was lying open to
receive it. Pushing away the grim fossors, they ranged
themselves around it in order, and chanted that old
## p. 324 (#340) ############################################
324
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
psalm of theirsLaudate pueri dominum! Dead chil-
dren, children's gravesMarius had been always half
aware of an old superstitious fancy in his mind concern-
ing them; as if in coming near them he came near the
failure of some lately-born hope or purpose of his own.
And now, perusing intently the expression with which
Cecilia bent upon all this, and returned afterwards to
the house, he felt that he too had had to-day his funeral
of a little child. But it had always been his policy,
through all his pursuit of "experience," to fly in time
from any too disturbing passion, likely to quicken his
pulses beyond the point at which the quiet work of life
was practicable.
Had he after all been taken unawares,
so that it was no longer possible to fly? At least,
during the journey he took, by way of testing the exist-
ence of any chain about him, he found a certain dis-
appointment at his heart, greater than he could have
anticipated ; and as he passed over the crisp leaves,
nipped off in multitudes by the first sudden cold of
winter, he felt that the mental atmosphere within himself
was perceptibly colder.
Yet it was, finally, a quite successful resignation
which he achieved, on a review, after his manner, during
that absence, of loss and gain. The image of Cecilia
seemed already to have become like some matter of
history or poetry, or a picture on the wall. And on his
return to Rome there had been a rumour among those
people of things which certainly did not speak of any
merely tranquil loving, but hinted that he had come
across a world, the lightest contact with which might
make appropriate to him also the precept that "They
which have wives be as they that have none."
That was brought home to him, when, in early spring,
he ventured once more to listen to the sweet singing of
the Eucharist. It breathed more than ever the spirit
of a wonderful hope,-hopes more daring than poor,
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XXVI
325
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
labouring humanity had ever seriously entertained before,
though it was plain that a great terror had fallen. Even
amid stifled sobbing, as the pathetic words of the psalter
relieved the tension of their hearts, the people around
him still wore upon their faces that habitual gleam of joy
and placid satisfaction. They were still under the in-
Auence of an immense gratitude in thinking, even amid
their present distress, of the hour of a great deliverance.
As he followed again that mystical dialogue, he felt also
again, like a mighty breath about him, the influence,
the half-realised presence, of a great multitude, as if
thronging along all those awful passages, to hear the
sentence of its release from prison; a company which
represented nothing less than orbis terrarum - the
whole company of mankind. And the special note of
the day expressed that relief - a sound new to him,
drawn deep from some old Hebrew source, as he con-
jectured, repeated over and over again, at every pause
and movement of the long ceremony.
And then, in its place, by way of a sacred lection, in
shocking contrast with the peaceful dignity of all around
him, came the Epistle of the churches of Lyons and Vienne,
to "their sister," the church of Rome. For the "Peace"
of the church had been broken-broken, as Marius
could not but acknowledge, on the responsibility of the
emperor Aurelius himself, following tamely, as a matter
of course, the traces of his predecessors, and gratuitously
enlisting, against the good as well as the evil of that
great pagan world, the strange new heroism of which this
singular message was full ; and the greatness of which
certainly lifted away all merely private regret, inclining
one, at last, actually to draw sword for the oppressed,
as if in some new order of knighthood-
"The pains which our brethren have borne we are
not able fully to tell, for the foe fell upon us with his
whole strength. But the grace of God fought for us, set
## p. 326 (#342) ############################################
326
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
free the weak, and made ready those who, like pillars,
were able to bear the weight. These, coming now into
close strife with the foe, bore every kind of pang and
shame. At the time of the fair which is held here with
a vast crowd, the governor led forth the Martyrs as a
show. Holding what was thought great but little, and
that the pains of to-day are not deserving to be measured
against the glory that shall be made known, these worthy
wrestlers went on joyful; their delight and the sweet
favour of God mingling in their faces, so that their bonds
seemed but a goodly array, and like the golden bracelets
of a bride. Filled with the fragrance of Christ, they
seemed to some to have been touched with earthly
perfumes.
"Vettius Epagathus, though he was very young,
because he could not bear to see unjust judgment given
against us, vented his anger, and sought to be heard for
the brethren, for he was a youth of high place. Where-
upon the governor asked him whether he also were a
Christian. He confessed in a clear voice, and was
added to the Martyrs. But he had the Paraclete within
him ; as, in truth, he showed by the fulness of his love ;
glorying in the defence of his brethren, and to give his
life for theirs.
"Then was fulfilled the saying of the Lord that the
day would come, when every one that slayeth you will
think that he doeth God service. Most madly did the
mob, the governor and the soldiers rage against the
handmaiden Blandina, in whom Christ showed that what
seems mean among men is of price with Him. For
whilst we all, and her earthly mistress, who was herself
one of the contending Martyrs, were fearful lest through
the weak flesh she should be unable to profess her faith,
Blandina was filled with such power that her tormentors,
following upon each other from morning till night, owned
that they were overcome and had no more that they
## p. 327 (#343) ############################################
XXVI
327
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
could do to her; admiring that she still breathed after
her whole body was torn asunder.
"But this blessed one, in the midst of her witness
itself, renewed her strength; and to repeat, I am Christ's !
was to her rest, refreshment, and relief from pain. As
to Alexander, he neither uttered a groan nor any sound
at all, but in his heart talked with God. Sanctus, the
deacon, also, bearing beyond all measure the many pains
devised by them, hoping that they would get something
from him, did not even tell his name; but to all ques-
tions answered only, I am Christ's / For, this he con-
fessed instead of his name, his race, and everything
beside. Whence also a strife in torturing him arose
between the governor and those tormentors, so that
when they had nothing else they could do they set red-
hot plates of brass to the most tender parts of his body.
But he stood firm in his profession, strengthened and
cooled by that stream of living water which flows from
Christ. His corpse, a single wound, and that had
wholly lost the form of man, was the measure of his
pain. But Christ, paining in him, set forth a copy to
the restthat there is nothing fearful, nothing painful,
where the love of the Father overcomes. And as all
those cruelties were made null through the patience of
the Witnesses, they bethought them of other things;
among which was their imprisonment in a dark and
most sorrowful place, where many were privily strangled.
But though void of man's aid, they were filled with
power from the Lord, both in body and mind, and
strengthened the rest. Also, much joy was in our virgin
Mother, the church ; for, by means of these, those who
had fallen away retraced their stepswere again con-
ceived, were filled again with lively heat, and hastened
to make the confession of their faith.
"The holy bishop Pothinus, who was now past
ninety years old and weak in body, yet in his heat of
## p. 328 (#344) ############################################
328
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
soul and his longing for martyrdom, roused what strength
he had, and was also cruelly dragged to judgment, and
gave witness. Thereupon he suffered many stripes, all
thinking it would be a wickedness if they fell short in
ill-use of him, for that thus they would avenge their own
gods. Hardly drawing breath, he was thrown into
prison, and after two days there died.
"After these things their martyrdom was parted into
divers manners. Plaiting as it were one crown of many
colours and all kinds of flowers, they yielded it to God.
Maturus, therefore, Sanctus and Blandina, were led to
the wild beasts. And Maturus and Sanctus passed
through all the pains of the amphitheatre, as if they had
suffered nothing before: or rather, as having in many
trials overcome, and now contending for the prize itself,
were at last dismissed.
"But Blandina was bound and hung upon a stake,
and set forth as food for the assault of the wild beasts.
And as she thus seemed to be hanging upon the Cross,
by her fiery prayers she imparted much alacrity to those
contending Witnesses. For as they looked upon her
with the eye of flesh, through her, they saw Him that
was crucified. But as none of the beasts would then
touch her, she was taken down from the Cross, and sent
back to prison for another day: that, though weak and
mean, yet clothed with the mighty Wrestler, Christ
Jesus, she might by many conquests give heart to her
brethren.
"On the last day, therefore, of the shows, she was
brought forth again, together with Ponticus, a lad of
about fifteen years old. They were brought in every
day to behold the pains of the rest. And when they
wavered not, the mob was full of rage; pitying neither
the youth of the lad, nor the sex of the maiden. Hence,
they drave them through the whole round of pain. And
Ponticus, taking heart from Blandina, having borne well
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XXVI
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
the whole of those torments, gave up his life. Last of
all, the blessed Blandina herself, as a mother that had
given life to her children, and sent them like conquerors
to the great King, hastened, with joy at the end, to
them, as to a marriage-feast; even the foe owning that
no woman had ever borne pain, so manifold and great
as hers.
"Not even then was their anger appeased; some
among them seeking for us pains, if it might be, yet
greater; that the saying might be fulfilled, He that is
unjust, let him be unjust still. And their rage against
the Witnesses took a new form, so that we were in much
sorrow for lack of freedom to entrust their bodies to the
earth. Neither did the night-time, nor the offer of
money, avail us for this matter ; but they guarded them
by every means, as if it were a great gain to hinder their
burial. Therefore, after they had been displayed to
view for many days, they were at length burned to ashes,
and cast into the river Rhone, which flows by this place,
that there might be not a vestige of them left upon the
earth. For they said, Now shall we see whether they
will rise again, and whether their God can save them out
of our hands."
## p. 330 (#346) ############################################
CHAPTER XXVII
THE TRIUMPH OF MARCUS AURELIUS
It was not many months after the date of that epistle
that Marius, then expecting to leave Rome for a long
time, and in fact about to leave it for ever, stood to
witness the triumphal entry of Marcus Aurelius, almost
at the exact spot from which he had watched the
emperor's solemn return to the capital on his own first
coming thither. It was a full triumph this timeJustus
Triumphus-justified, by far more than the due amount of
bloodshed in those Northern wars, now it might seem
happily at an end. Among the captives, amid the
laughter of the crowds at his blowsy upper garment, his
trousered legs and conical wolf-skin cap, walked our own
ancestor, representative of subject Germany, under a
figure very familiar in later Roman sculpture; and,
though certainly with none of the grace of the Dying
Gaul, yet with plenty of uncouth pathos in his misshapen
features and pale, servile, yet angry eyes.
His children,
white-skinned and golden-haired "as angels," trudged
beside him. His brothers, of the animal world, the
ibex, the wild-cat, and the reindeer stalking and trumpet-
ing grandly, found their due place in the procession;
and among the spoil, set forth on a portable frame that
it might be distinctly seen (not a mere model, but the
very house he had lived in) a wattled cottage in all the
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CHAP. XXVII
331
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
simplicity of its snug contrivances against the cold, and
well-calculated to give a moment's delight to his new,
sophisticated masters.
Andrea Mantegna, working at the end of the fifteenth
century, for a society full of antiquarian fervour at the
sight of the earthy relics of the old Roman people, day
by day returning to light out of the claychildish still,
moreover, and with no more suspicion of pasteboard
than the old Romans themselves, in its unabashed love of
open-air pageantries, has invested this, the greatest, and
alas ! the most characteristic, of the splendours of imperial
Rome, with a reality livelier than any description. The
homely sentiments for which he has found place in
his learned paintings are hardly more lifelike than the
great public incidents of the show, there depicted. And
then, with all that vivid realism, how refined, how dignified,
how select in type, is this reflection of the old Roman
world ! especially, in its time-mellowed red and gold,
for the modern visitor to the old English palace.
It was under no such selected type that the great
procession presented itself to Marius; though, in effect,
he found something there, as it were prophetic, and
evocative of ghosts; as susceptible minds will do, in a
repetition such as this, after a long interval, of some
notable incident, which may yet perhaps have no direct
concern for themselves. In truth, he had been so bent
of late on certain very personal interests that the broad
current of the world's doings seemed to have withdrawn
into the distance, but now, in this procession, to return
once more into evidence for him. That, at least, had
been holding on its old way, and was all its old self,
thus passing by dramatically, and accentuating, in this
favourite spectacle, its mode of viewing things. And
even without the contrast of a very different scene from
that, he would have found it, just now, a somewhat
vulgar spectacle. The temples, wide open, with their
## p. 332 (#348) ############################################
332
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
ropes of roses, flapping in the wind against the rich,
reflecting marble, their startling draperies and heavy
cloud of incense, were but the centres of a great banquet
spread through all the gaudily coloured streets of Rome,
for which the carnivorous appetite of those who thronged
them in the glare of the mid-day sun was frankly enough
asserted. At best, they were but calling their gods to
share with them the cooked, sacrificial, and other meats,
reeking to the sky. The child, who was concerned for
the sorrows of one of those Northern captives as he
passed by, and explained to his comrade"There's
feeling in that hand, you know !" benumbed and lifeless
as it looked in the chain, seemed, in a moment, to turn
the whole show into its own proper tinsel. Yes! these
Romans were a coarse, a vulgar people; and their
vulgarity in full evidence here. And Aurelius himself
seemed to have undergone the world's coinage, and fallen
to the level of his reward, in a mediocrity no longer
golden.
Yet if, as he passed by (almost filling the quaint old
circular chariot with his magnificent attire, flowered with
gold) he presented himself to Marius, chiefly as one who
had made the great mistake; to the multitude he came
as a more than magnanimous conqueror.
That he had
"forgiven " the innocent wife and children of the dashing
and almost successful rebel Avidius Cassius, now no
more, was a recent circumstance still in memory.
the children went past, not among those who would
presently be detached from the great progress for execu-
tion, ere the emperor on his knees ascended the steps of
the Capitol, but happy and radiant, as adopted members
of the imperial family, the crowd actually enjoyed a
moral exhibition, which might become the fashion.
And it was in concession to some possible touch of a
heroism, that had really cost him something, in all
this, that Marius resolved to seek the emperor once
As
## p. 333 (#349) ############################################
XXVII
333
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
more, with an appeal for common sense, for reason and
justice.
He had set out at last to revisit his old home; and
knowing that Aurelius was then in retreat at the villa of
Lorium, which lay almost on his way thither, determined
there to present himself. Although the great plain was
steadily dying, a new race of wild birds establishing itself
there, as he knew enough of their habits to understand,
and the idle contadino, with his never-ending ditty
always of decay and death, replacing the lusty Roman
labourer, never had this poetic country between Rome
and the sea impressed him more than on the sunless
day of early autumn, under which all that fell within the
immense horizon was presented in one uniform tone of
a clear, penitential blue. Stimulatin
Stimulating to the fancy as
was that range of low hills to the northwards, already
troubled with the upbreaking of the Apennines, yet
the want of quiet in their outline, with a multitude of
wild jaggs and sudden upheavals, marked them as but
the ruins of nature; while at all the little ascents and
descents of the road might be noted traces of the aban-
doned work of man. At intervals, the way was still
redolent of the floral relics of summer, daphne and
myrtle-blossom, in the little, sheltered hollows and ravines.
At last, amid rocks here and there piercing the soil, as
those descents became steeper, and the main line of the
Apennines, now visible, gave a higher accent to the scene,
he espied over the plateau, almost like one of those
broken hills, cutting the horizon towards the sea, the old
brown villa itself favourite retreat of one after another
of the family of the Antonines. As he approached it,
reminiscences crowded upon him, above all of that old
life there of Antoninus Pius, in its mansuetude and calm.
It was here that his last moment had come, just as the
tribune of the watch had received from his lips the word
Aequanimitas ! as the watchword of the night. To see
## p. 334 (#350) ############################################
334
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
their emperor living there like one of his simplest
subjects, his hands red at vintage-time with the juice of
the grapes, hunting, teaching his children, starting be-
times for long days, with all who cared to join, in
antiquarian researches in the country around all this
had seemed to mean the peace of mankind.
Upon that had come (like a stain, it seemed to him,
just then) the more intimate life of Faustina. Surely,
that marvellous but malign beauty must still haunt those
rooms, like an unquiet, dead goddess, who might have
perhaps, after all, something reassuring to tell surviving
mortals about her ambiguous self. When the news had
come to Rome, two years before, that those eyes, always
so persistently turned to vanity, had suddenly closed for
ever, a strong desire to pray had come over Marius, as
he followed in fancy on its wild way the soul of one he
had spoken with now and again, and whose presence in
it for a time the world of art could so ill have spared.
Certainly, the honours freely accorded to embalm her
memory were poetic enoughthe rich temple left among
those wild villagers at the spot, now it was hoped sacred
for ever, where she had breathed her last; the golden
image, in her old place at the amphitheatre; the altar at
which the newly married might make their sacrifice;
above all, the great foundation for orphan girls, to be
called after her name.
It was precisely on account of that, that Marius
failed to see Aurelius again, and make the chivalrous
effort at enlightenment he had proposed to himself.
Entering the villa, he learned from an usher, at the
closed door of the long gallery famous in the memory
of many a visitor, for its prospects) which led to the
imperial apartments, that the emperor was already in
audience: Marius must await his turn he knew not
how long it inight be. An odd audience it seemed ;
for at that moment, through the closed door, came shouts
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XXVII
335
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a
of laughter, the laughter of a great crowd of children
(the "Faustinian Children " themselves, as he afterwards
learned) happy and at their ease, in the imperial presence.
It was the vagueness of the time for which so pleasant a
reception might last, so pleasant that he would hardly
have wished to shorten it, which made Marius finally
determine to proceed, it being necessary that he should
accomplish the first stage of his journey on that day.
The thing was not to be Vale ! anima infelicissima !
and he might at least carry away that sound of the
laughing orphan children, as not unamiable last
impression of kings and their houses.
The place he was now about to visit, as the resting-
place of his dead especially, had never been forgotten.
Only, the first eager period of his life in Rome had
slipped on rapidly; and, almost on a sudden, that old
time had come to seem very long ago. An almost
burdensome solemnity had grown about his memory of
the place, so that to revisit it seemed a thing that needed
preparation : it was what he could not have done hastily.
He half feared to lessen, or disturb, its value for himself.
And now as he travelled leisurely towards it, and so far
with quite tranquil mind, interested also in many another
place by the way, he discovered a shorter road to the
end of his journey, and found himself indeed approach-
ing the spot that was to him like no other. Dreaming
now only of the dead before him, he journeyed on
rapidly through the night; the thought of the thing
increasing on him, in the darkness. It was as if they
had been waiting for him there all those years, and felt
his footsteps approaching now, and understood his
devotion, quite gratefully, in spite of its tardiness, in
that lowliness of theirs. As morning came, his late
tranquillity of mind had given way to a grief which
surprised him by its freshness. He was moved more
than he could have thought possible by so distant a
## p. 336 (#352) ############################################
336
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
66
sorrow.
To-day !"they seemed to be saying, as the
hard dawn broke," Today, he will come !!" At last,
amid all his distractions, they had become the main
purpose of what he was then doing. The world around
it, when he actually reached the place later in the day,
was in a mood very differentso work-a-day, it seemed,
on that fine afternoon, and the villages he passed
through so silent; the inhabitants being, for the most
part, at their labour in the country. At last, above
the tiled outbuildings, there were the walls of the old
villa itself, with its tower for the pigeons; and among,
not cypresses, but poplar-trees with leaves like golden
fruit, the birds floating around it, the conical roof of the
burial-place itself. In the presence of an old servant
who remembered him, the great seals were broken, the
rusty key turned, at last in the lock, the door was forced
out among the weeds grown thickly about it, and Marius
was actually in the place which had been so often in his
thoughts.
He was shocked, with a touch of remorse however,
only by an odd air of neglect, the neglect of a place
merely allowed to remain as when it was last used, and
left in a hurry, till long years had covered all alike with
thick dustthe faded flowers, the burnt-out lamps, the
tools and hardened mortar of the workmen who had had
something to do there. A heavy fragment of woodwork
had fallen and chipped open one of the oldest of the
mortuary urns, many hundreds in number ranged around
the walls. It was not properly an urn, but a minute
coffin of stone, and the fracture had revealed a piteous
spectacle of the mouldering, unburned remains within ;
the bones of a child, as he understood, which might
have died, in ripe age, three times over, since it slipped
away from among his great-grandfathers, so far up in
the line. Yet the protruding baby hand seemed to stir
up in him feelings vivid enough, bringing him intimately
## p. 337 (#353) ############################################
XXVII
337
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
within the scope of dead people's grievances. He
noticed, side by side with the urn of his mother, that of
a boy of about his own ageone of the serving-boys of
the householdwho had descended hither, from the
light of childhood, almost at the same time with her.
It seemed as if this boy of his own age had taken filial
place beside her there, in his stead. That hard feeling,
again, which had always lingered in his mind with the
thought of the father he had scarcely known, melted
wholly away, as he read the precise number of his years,
and reflected suddenlyHe was of my own present age ;
no hard old man, but with interests, as he looked round him
on the world for the last time, even as mine to-day! And
with that came a blinding rush of kindness, as if two
alienated friends had come to understand each other at
last. There was weakness in all this; as there is in all
care for dead persons, to which, however, people will
always yield in proportion as they really care for each
other. After all, with a vain yearning to be able to do
something for them still, he reflected, as he stood there,
that such doing, must be, in the nature of things, mainly
for himself. His own epitaph might be that old one-
-He was the last of his rce !
Of those who might come hither after himself probably
no one would ever again come quite as he had done to-
day: and it was under the influence of this thought that
he determined to bury all that, deep below the surface,
to be remembered only by himself, and in a way which
would claim no sentiment from the indifferent. That took
many dayswas like a renewal of lengthy old burial rites
-as he himself watched the work, early and late ; coming
on the last day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the
last touches, while the workmen were absent : one young
lad only, finally smoothing down the earthy bed, greatly
surprised at the seriousness with which Marius Aung in
his flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould.
Z
## p. 338 (#354) ############################################
CHAPTER XXVIII
ANIMA NATURALITER CHRISTIANA
THOSE eight days at his old home, so mournfully
occupied, had been for Marius in some sort a forcible
disruption from the world and the roots of his life in it.
He had been carried out of himself as never before; and
when the time was over, it was as if the claim over him
of the earth below had been vindicated, over against the
interests of that living world around him. Dead, yet
sentient and caressing hands seemed to reach out of the
ground and to be clinging about him. Looking back
sometimes now, from about the midway of lifethe age,
as he conceived, at which one begins to re-descend one's
lifeand antedating it a little, in his sad humour, he
would note, almost with surprise, the unbroken placidity
of the contemplation in which it had been passed. His
own temper, his early theoretic scheme of things, would
have pushed him on to movement and adventure. Actu-
ally, as circumstances had determined, all its movement
had been inward; movement of observation only, or
even of pure meditation; partly, perhaps, because
throughout it had been something of a meditatio mortis,
ever facing towards the act of final detachment. But
death, of course, as he reflected, must be for every
nothing less than that fifth or last act of a drama, and,
as such, was likely to have something of the stirring
e
## p. 339 (#355) ############################################
CHAP. XXVIII
339
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
character of a dnouement. And, in fact, it was in form
tragic enough that his end not long afterwards came to
him.
In the midst of the extreme weariness and depression
which had followed those last days, Cornelius, then, as
it happened, on a journey and travelling near the place,
finding traces of him, had become his guest at White-
nights. It was just then that Marius felt, as he had
never done before, the value to himself, the overpower-
ing charm, of his friendship. - More than brother !"-
he felt"like a son also !" contrasting the fatigue of
soul which made himself practically an older man, with
the other's irrepressible youth. For it was still the
wonderful hopefulness of Cornelius, his seeming pre-
rogative over the future, which determined, and kept
alive, all other sentiment concerning him, A new hope
had sprung up in the world of which he, Cornelius, was
a depositary, which he must bear onward in it. Identify-
ing himself with Cornelius in so dear a friendship, through
him, Marius seemed to touch, to ally himself to, actually
to possess for himself, the coming world; even as happy
parents reach out, and take possession of it, in and
through the survival of their children. For in these
days their intimacy had grown very close, as they moved
hither and thither, leisurely, among the country-places
thereabout, Cornelius being on his way back to Rome,
till they came one evening to a little town (Marius
remembered having been there on his first journey)
which had even then its church and legendthe legend
and holy relics of the martyr Hyacinthus, a young
Roman soldier, whose blood had stained the soil of this
place in the days of the emperor Trajan.
The thought of that so recent death, haunted Marius
through the night, as if with audible sighs and crying
above the restless wind, which came and went around
their lodging. But towards dawn he slept heavily; and
## p. 340 (#356) ############################################
340
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
awaking in broad daylight, and finding Cornelius absent,
set forth to seek him. The plague was still in the place
-had indeed just broken out afresh ; with an outbreak
also of cruel superstition among its wild and miserable
inhabitants. Surely, the old gods were wroth at the
presence of this new enemy among them!
And it was
no ordinary morning into which Marius stepped forth.
There was a menace in the dark masses of hill, and
motionless wood, against the grey, although seemingly
unclouded sky. Under this sunless heaven the earth
itself seemed to fret and fume with a heat of its own, in
spite of the strong night-wind. And now the wind itself
had fallen. Marius seemed to be breathing some strange
heavy fluid, denser than any common air. He could
have fancied that the world had sunken in the night, far
below its proper level, into some close, thick abysm of
its atmosphere. The Christian people of the town,
hardly less terrified and overwrought by the haunting
sickness about them than their pagan neighbours, were
at prayer before the tomb of the martyr; and even as
Marius pressed among them to a place beside Cornelius,
on a sudden the hills seemed to roll like a sea in motion,
around the whole compass of the horizon.
For a
moment Marius supposed himself attacked with some
sudden sickness of brain, till the fall of a great mass of
building convinced him that not himself but the earth
under his feet was giddy. A few moments later the
little market-place was alive with the rush of the dis-
tracted inhabitants from their tottering houses; and as
they waited anxiously for the second shock of earthquake,
a long-smouldering suspicion leapt precipitately into well-
defined purpose, and the whole mass of people was
carried forward towards the band of worshippers below.
An hour later, in the wild tumult which followed, the
earth had been stained afresh with the blood of the
martyrs Felix and FaustinusFlores apparuerunt in
## p. 341 (#357) ############################################
XXVIII
341
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
terra nostra !and their brethren, together with Corne-
lius and Marius, thus, as it had happened, taken among
them, were prisoners, reserved for the action of the law.
Marius and his friend, with certain others, exercising the
privilege of their rank, made claim to be tried in Rome,
or at least in the chief town of the district; where,
indeed, in the troublous days that had now begun, a
legal process had been already instituted. Under the
care of a military guard the captives were removed, the
same day, one stage of their journey; sleeping, for
security, during the night, side by side with their
keepers, in the rooms of a deserted shepherd's house by
the wayside.
It was surmised that one of the prisoners was not a
Christian : their guards were forward to make the utmost
pecuniary profit of the circunstance, and during the
night, Marius, taking advantage of the loose charge kept
over them, and partly by a large bribe, had contrived
that Cornelius, as the really innocent person, should be
dismissed in safety on his way, to procure for him, as
Marius explained, the proper means of defence, when
the time of trial came.
And in the morning Cornelius in fact set forth alone,
from their miserable place of detention. Marius believed
that Cornelius was to be the husband of Cecilia ; and that,
perhaps strangely, had but added to the desire to get
him away safely.We wait for the great crisis which is
to try what is in us : we can hardly bear the pressure of
our hearts, as we think of it: the lonely wrestler, or
victim, which imagination foreshadows to us, can hardly
be oneself: it seems an outrage of our destiny that we
should be led along so gently and imperceptibly, to so
terrible a leaping-place in the dark, for more perhaps
than life death. At last, the great act, the critical
moment, comes, easily, almost unconsciously. Another
motion of the clock, and our fatal linethe "great climac-
## p. 342 (#358) ############################################
342
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
teric point"-has been passed, which changes ourselves or
our lives.
In one quarter of an hour, under a sudden,
uncontrollable impulse, hardly weighing what he did,
almost as a matter of course and as lightly as one hires
a bed for one's night's rest on a journey, Marius had
taken upon himself all the heavy risk of the position in
which Cornelius had then beenthe long and wearisome
delays of judgment, which were possible; the danger
and wretchedness of a long journey in this manner;
possibly the danger of death. He had delivered his
brother, after the manner he had sometimes vaguely
anticipated as a kind of distinction in his destiny ;
though indeed always with wistful calculation as to what
it might cost him: and in the first moment after the
thing was actually done, he felt only satisfaction at his
courage, at the discovery of his possession of "nerve."
Yet he was, as we know, no hero, no heroic martyr-
had indeed no right to be; and when he had seen
Cornelius depart, and, as he believed, on his blithe and
hopeful way, to become the husband of Cecilia ; actually,
as it had happened, without a word of farewell, suppos-
ing Marius was almost immediately afterwards to follow
(Marius indeed having avoided the moment of leave-
taking with its possible call for an explanation of the
circumstances) the reaction came.
He could only guess,
of course, at what might really happen. So far, he had
but taken upon himself, in the stead of Cornelius, a
great personal risk. It was danger, not even probable
death, that he faced. Still, for one like himself especi-
ally, with all those sensibilities of which his whole manner
of life had been but an education, the situation of one
under trial on a criminal charge was actually full of
distress. To him, in truth, a death such as the recent
death of those saintly brothers, seemed no glorious end.
In his case, at least, the Martyrdom, as it was called-
the overpowering act of testimony that Heaven had come
## p. 343 (#359) ############################################
XXVIII
343
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
down among menwould be but a common execution :
from the drops of his blood there would spring no
miraculous, poetic flowers; no eternal aroma would
indicate the place of his burial; no plenary grace, over-
flowing for ever upon those who might stand around it.
Had there been one to listen just then, there would have
come, from the very depth of his desolation, an eloquent
utterance at last, on the irony of men's fates, on the
singular accidents of life and death.
The guards, now safely in possession of whatever
money and other valuables the prisoners had had on
them, pressed them forward, over the rough mountain
paths, altogether careless of their sufferings. The
great autumn rains were falling. At night the soldiers
lighted a fire; but it was impossible to keep warm.
From time to time they stopped to roast portions of the
meat they carried with them, making their captives sit
round the fire, and pressing it upon them. But weari-
ness and depression of spirits had deprived Marius of
appetite, even if the food had been more attractive, and
for some days he partook of nothing but bad bread and
water. All through the dark mornings they dragged
over boggy plains, and up and down hills, wet through
sometimes with the heavy rain. Even in those
deplorable circumstances, he could but notice the wild,
dark beauty of those places the stormy sunrise, and
placid spaces of evening. One of the keepers, a very
young soldier, won him at times, by his simple kindness,
to talk a little, with wonder at the lad's half-conscious,
poetic delight in the adventures of the journey. At
times, the whole company would lie down for rest at the
roadside, hardly sheltered from the storm ; and in the
deep fatigue of his spirit, his old longing for inopportune
sleep overpowered him.Sleep anywhere, and under any
conditions, seemed at those times a thing one might well
offer the remnants of one's life for.
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344
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
1.
severe
It must have been about the fifth night, as he after-
wards conjectured, that the soldiers, believing him likely
to die, had finally left him unable to proceed further,
under the care of some country people, who to the
extent of their power certainly treated him kindly in his
sickness. He awoke to consciousness after a
attack of fever, lying alone on a rough bed, in a kind of
hut. It seemed a remote, mysterious place, as he looked
around in the silence; but so fresh (lying, in fact, in a
high pasture-land among the mountains) that he felt he
should recover, if only he might just lie there in quiet
long enough. Even during those nights of delirium he
had felt the scent of the new-mown hay pleasantly, with
a dim sense for a moment that he was lying safe in his
old home. The sunlight lay clear beyond the open
door ; the sounds of the cattle reached him softly from
the green places around. Recalling confusedly the tor-
turing hurry of his late journeys, he dreaded, as his con-
sciousness of the whole situation returned, the coming
of the guards. But the place remained in absolute
stillness. He was, in fact, at liberty, but for his own
disabled condition. And it was certainly a genuine
clinging to life that he felt just then, at the very bottom
of his mind. It had been so, obscurely, even through
all the wild fancies of his delirium, from the moment
which followed his decision for Cornelius, against
himself.
The occupants of the place were to be heard presently,
coming and going on their business, about him: and it
was as if the approach of death brought out in all their
force the merely human sentiments. There is that in
death which certainly makes indifferent persons anxious
to forget the deadto put them away out of their
thoughts altogether, as soon as possible. Conversely, in
the deep isolation of spirit which was now creeping upon
Marius, the faces of these people, casually visible, took
..
## p. 345 (#361) ############################################
XXVIII
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
a hold on his affections; the link of general brotherhood,
the feeling of human kinship, asserting itself most
strongly when it was about to be severed for ever. At
nights he would find this face or that impressed deeply
on his fancy; and his mind would, in a troubled sort of
manner, follow them onwards, on the ways of their
simple, humdrum, everyday life, with a strange yearning
to share it with them, envying the calm, earthy cheerful-
ness of all their days to-be, still under the sun (but
how indifferent, of course, to him !) as if these rude
people had been suddenly lifted into some height of
earthly good-fortune, which must needs isolate them from
himself.
Tristem neminem fecithe repeated to himself; his
old prayer shaping itself now almost as an epitaph.
Yes ! so much the very hardest judge must concede to
him. And the sense of satisfaction which that left with
him disposed him to a conscious effort of recollection,
while he lay there, unable now even to raise his head, as
he discovered on attempting to reach a pitcher of water
which stood near. Revelation, vision, the uncovering of
a vision, the seeing of a perfect humanity, in a perfect
worldthrough all his alternations of mind, by some
dominant instinct, determined by the original necessities
of his own nature and character, he had always set that
above the having, or even the doing, of anything. For,
such vision, if received with due attitude on his part, was,
in reality, the being something, such as was surely a
pleasant sacrifice to whatever gods there might be,
observant of him. And how goodly had the vision
been one long unfolding of beauty and energy in
things, upon the closing of which he might gratefully
utter his " Vixi !" Even then, just ere his eyes were
to be shut for ever, the things they had seen seemed a
veritable possession in hand; the persons, the places,
above all, the touching image of Jesus, apprehended
## p. 346 (#362) ############################################
346
CHAP.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
dimly through the expressive faces, the crying of the
children, in that mysterious drama, with a sudden sense
of peace and satisfaction now, which he could not explain
to himself. Surely, he had prospered in life! And
again, as of old, the sense of gratitude seemed to bring
with it the sense also of a living person at his side.
For still, in a shadowy world, his deeper wisdom had
ever been, with a sense of economy, with a jealous estimate
of gain and loss, to use life, not as the means to some
problematic end, but, as far as might be, from dying hour to
dying hour, an end in itselfa kind of music, all-sufficing
to the duly trained ear, even as it died out on the air.
Yet now, aware still in that suffering body of such vivid
powers of mind and sense, as he anticipated from time
to time how his sickness, practically without aid as he
was in this rude place, was likely to end, and that the
moment of taking final account was drawing very near, a
consciousness of waste would come, with half-angry tears
of self-pity, in his great weaknessa blind, outraged,
angry feeling of wasted power, such as he would have
himself experienced standing by the deathbed of another,
in condition similar to his own.
And yet it was the fact, again, that the vision of men
and things, actually revealed to him on his way through
the world, had developed, with a wonderful largeness,
the faculties to which it addressed itself, his whole
general capacity of vision; and in that too was a success,
in the view of certain, very definite, well-considered,
undeniable possibilities. Throughout that elaborate and
lifelong education of his receptive powers, he had ever
maintained the purpose of a self-preparation towards
possible further revelation, some dayan ampler vision,
which should take up into itself and explain this world's
delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry,
till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the
text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment,
## p. 347 (#363) ############################################
XXVIII
347
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily
through all those years, from experience to experience,
was at its height; the house was ready for the possible
guest, the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for
whatsoever divine fingers might choose to write there.
And was not this precisely the condition, the attitude
of mind, to which something higher than he, yet akin
to him, would be likely to reveal itself; to which that
influence he had felt now and again like a friendly
hand upon his shoulder, amid the actual obscurities of
the world, would be likely to make a further explanation ?
Surely, the aim of a true philosophy must lie, not in
futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man
to the circumstances in which he chances to find himself,
but in the maintenance of a kind of ingenuous dis-
content, in the face of the very highest achievement; the
unclouded and receptive soul quitting the world finally,
with the same fresh wonder with which it had entered it
still unimpaired, and going on its blind way at last with
the consciousness of some profound enigma in things, as
its pledge of something further to come. Marius seemed
to understand how one might look back upon life here,
and its excellent visions, as but the portion of a race-
course left behind him by a still swift runner : for a
moment, he felt a curiosity and ardour, with dim trouble
as of imminent vision, to enter upon a future, the
possibilities of which seemed so large.
And just then, again amid the memory of certain
touching actual words and images, came the thought of
the great hope, that hope against hope, which, as he
conceived, had arisen-Lux sedentibus in tenebrisupon
the aged world : the hope which Cornelius had seemed
to bear away upon him in his strength, with a buoyancy
which had made Marius feel somehow, less that, by a
caprice of destiny, he had been left to die in his place,
than that Cornelius had gone on a mission to deliver
## p. 348 (#364) ############################################
348
CHAP
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
him also from death. There had been a permanent
protest established in the world, a plea, a perpetual after-
thought, which humanity would henceforth ever possess
in reserve, against a wholly mechanical and dishearten-
ing theory of itself and its conditions. It was a thought
which relieved for him the iron outline of the horizon
about him, touching it as if with soft light from beyond ;
filling the shadowy, hollow places to which he was on
his
way with the warmth of definite affections; and con-
firming also certain considerations by which he seemed
to link himself to the generations to come in the world
he was leaving. Yes! through the survival of their
children, happy parents are able to think calmly, and
with a very practical affection, of a world in which they
are to have no direct share; planting, with a cheerful
good-humour, the acorns they carry about with them,
that their grand-children may be shaded from the sun
by the broad oak-trees of the future. That is nature's
way of easing death to us. It was thus too, surprised,
delighted, that Marius, under the power of that new
hope among men, could think of the generations to
come after him. Without it, dim in truth as it was, he
could hardly have dared to ponder the world which
limited all he really knew, as it would be when he should
have departed from it. A strange lonesomeness, like a
physical darkness, seemed to settle over the thought of
it; as if its business hereafter must be, as far as he was
concerned, carried on in some inhabited, but distant and
alien, star. But with the sense of that hope warm upon
him, he seemed to anticipate a care for himself, never to
fail even on earth, with a reverential care for his very
bodythat dear sister and companion of his soul, out-
worn, suffering, and in the very article of death, as it was
now.
For the weariness came back tenfold; and he had
finally to abstain from thoughts like those, as from what
## p. 349 (#365) ############################################
XXVIII
349
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
caused physical pain. And then, as before in the
wretched, sleepless nights of those forced marches, he
would try to fix his mind, as it were impassively, and like
a child thinking over the toys it loves, one after another,
that it may fall asleep so, and forget all about them, the
sooner, on all the persons he had loved in life on his
love for them, dead or living, grateful for his love or not,
rather than on theirs for himletting their images pass
away again, or rest with him, as they would. In the
bare sense of having loved he seemed to find, even amid
this foundering of the ship, that on which his soul might
"assuredly rest and depend." One after another, he
suffered those faces and voices to come and go, as in
some mechanical exercise, as he might have repeated all
the verses he knew by heart, or like the telling of beads
one by one, with many a sleepy nod between-whiles.
For there remained also, for the old earthy creature
still within him, that great blessedness of physical
slumber. To sleep, to lose oneself in sleepthat, as he
had recognised always, was a good thing. And it was
after a space of deep sleep that he awoke amid the
murmuring voices of the people who had kept and
tended him so carefully through his sickness, now kneel-
ing around his bed : and what he heard confirmed, in
his, then perfect, clearness of soul, the spontaneous
suggestion of his own bodily feeling. He had often
dreamt that he had been condemned to die, that the
hour, with wild thoughts of escape, had arrived; and
waking, with the sun all around him, in complete liberty
of life, had been full of gratitude, for his place there,
alive still, in the land of the living. He read surely,
now, in the manner, the doings, of these people, some of
whom were passing away through the doorway, where the
sun still lay heavy and full, that his last morning was
come, and turned to think again of the beloved. Of old,
he had often fancied that not to die on a dark and rainy
## p. 350 (#366) ############################################
350
CHAP. XXVIII
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
day would itself have a little alleviating grace or favour
about it. The people around his bed were praying
fervently Abi! Abil Anima Christiana ! In the
moments of his extreme helplessness their mystic bread
had been placed, had descended like a snow-flake from
the sky, between his lips. Soothing fingers had applied
to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the
senses, through which the world had come and
gone
from
him, now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil.
was the same people, who, in the grey, austere evening
of that day, took up his remains, and buried them
secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy
also, holding his death, according to their generous view
in this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyr-
dom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said, a
kind of sacrament with plenary grace.
It
1881-1884.
THE
END