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+Project Gutenberg's Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two, by Walter Horatio Pater
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two
+
+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
+
+Posting Date: June 13, 2009 [EBook #4058]
+Release Date: May, 2003
+First Posted: October 25, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME TWO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Alfred J. Drake.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME TWO
+
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
+
+
+
+
+NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
+
+Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a style inconvenient
+in an electronic edition.  I have therefore placed an asterisk
+immediately after each of Pater's footnotes and a + sign after my own
+notes, and have listed each chapter's notes at that chapter's end.
+
+Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy, I
+have transferred original pagination to brackets.  A bracketed numeral
+such as [22] indicates that the material immediately following the
+number marks the beginning of the relevant page.  I have preserved
+paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
+
+Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text
+does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
+
+Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
+Pater's Greek quotations.  If there is a need for the original Greek,
+it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
+Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
+and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME TWO
+
+WALTER PATER
+
+
+    Cheimerinos oneiros, hote mekistai hai vyktes.+
+
+    +"A winter's dream, when nights are longest."
+    Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.
+
+
+    CONTENTS
+
+
+    PART THE THIRD
+
+    15. Stoicism at Court: 3-13
+    16. Second Thoughts: 14-28
+    17. Beata Urbs: 29-40
+    18. "The Ceremony of the Dart": 41-56
+    19. The Will as Vision: 57-72
+
+    PART THE FOURTH
+
+    20. Two Curious Houses--1. Guests: 75-91
+    21. Two Curious Houses--2. The Church in Cecilia's House: 92-108
+    22. "The Minor Peace of the Church": 109-127
+    23. Divine Service: 128-140
+    24. A Conversation Not Imaginary: 141-171
+    25. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: 172-185
+    26. The Martyrs: 186-196
+    27. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius: 197-207
+    28. Anima Naturaliter Christiana: 208-224
+
+
+
+
+PART THE THIRD
+
+CHAPTER XV: STOICISM AT COURT
+
+[3] THE very finest flower of the same company--Aurelius with the
+gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress
+Faustina herself, and all the elegant blue-stockings of the day, who
+maintained, people said, their private "sophists" to whisper philosophy
+into their ears winsomely as they performed the duties of the
+toilet--was assembled again a few months later, in a different place
+and for a very different purpose.  The temple of Peace, a "modernising"
+foundation of Hadrian, enlarged by a library and lecture-rooms, had
+grown into an institution like something between a college and a
+literary club; and here Cornelius Fronto was to pronounce a discourse
+on the Nature of Morals.  There were some, indeed, who had desired the
+emperor Aurelius himself to declare his whole mind on this matter.
+Rhetoric was become almost a function of the state: philosophy was upon
+the throne; and had from time to time, by [4] request, delivered an
+official utterance with well-nigh divine authority.  And it was as the
+delegate of this authority, under the full sanction of the philosophic
+emperor--emperor and pontiff, that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to
+expound some parts of the Stoic doctrine, with the view of recommending
+morals to that refined but perhaps prejudiced company, as being, in
+effect, one mode of comeliness in things--as it were music, or a kind
+of artistic order, in life.  And he did this earnestly, with an outlay
+of all his science of mind, and that eloquence of which he was known to
+be a master.  For Stoicism was no longer a rude and unkempt thing.
+Received at court, it had largely decorated itself: it was grown
+persuasive and insinuating, and sought not only to convince men's
+intelligence but to allure their souls.  Associated with the beautiful
+old age of the great rhetorician, and his winning voice, it was almost
+Epicurean.  And the old man was at his best on the occasion; the last
+on which he ever appeared in this way.  To-day was his own birthday.
+Early in the morning the imperial letter of congratulation had reached
+him; and all the pleasant animation it had caused was in his face, when
+assisted by his daughter Gratia he took his place on the ivory chair,
+as president of the Athenaeum of Rome, wearing with a wonderful grace
+the philosophic pall,--in reality neither more nor less than the loose
+woollen cloak of the common soldier, but fastened [5] on his right
+shoulder with a magnificent clasp, the emperor's birthday gift.
+
+It was an age, as abundant evidence shows, whose delight in rhetoric
+was but one result of a general susceptibility--an age not merely
+taking pleasure in words, but experiencing a great moral power in them.
+Fronto's quaintly fashionable audience would have wept, and also
+assisted with their purses, had his present purpose been, as sometimes
+happened, the recommendation of an object of charity.  As it was,
+arranging themselves at their ease among the images and flowers, these
+amateurs of exquisite language, with their tablets open for careful
+record of felicitous word or phrase, were ready to give themselves
+wholly to the intellectual treat prepared for them, applauding, blowing
+loud kisses through the air sometimes, at the speaker's triumphant exit
+from one of his long, skilfully modulated sentences; while the younger
+of them meant to imitate everything about him, down to the inflections
+of his voice and the very folds of his mantle.  Certainly there was
+rhetoric enough:--a wealth of imagery; illustrations from painting,
+music, mythology, the experiences of love; a management, by which
+subtle, unexpected meaning was brought out of familiar terms, like
+flies from morsels of amber, to use Fronto's own figure.  But with all
+its richness, the higher claim of his style was rightly understood to
+lie in gravity and self-command, and an especial care for the [6]
+purities of a vocabulary which rejected every expression unsanctioned
+by the authority of approved ancient models.
+
+And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes happen, that this
+general discourse to a general audience had the effect of an utterance
+adroitly designed for him.  His conscience still vibrating painfully
+under the shock of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full of the
+ethical charm of Cornelius, he was questioning himself with much
+impatience as to the possibility of an adjustment between his own
+elaborately thought-out intellectual scheme and the "old morality."  In
+that intellectual scheme indeed the old morality had so far been
+allowed no place, as seeming to demand from him the admission of
+certain first principles such as might misdirect or retard him in his
+efforts towards a complete, many-sided existence; or distort the
+revelations of the experience of life; or curtail his natural liberty
+of heart and mind.  But now (his imagination being occupied for the
+moment with the noble and resolute air, the gallantry, so to call it,
+which composed the outward mien and presentment of his strange friend's
+inflexible ethics) he felt already some nascent suspicion of his
+philosophic programme, in regard, precisely, to the question of good
+taste.  There was the taint of a graceless "antinomianism" perceptible
+in it, a dissidence, a revolt against accustomed modes, the actual
+impression of which on other [7] men might rebound upon himself in some
+loss of that personal pride to which it was part of his theory of life
+to allow so much.  And it was exactly a moral situation such as this
+that Fronto appeared to be contemplating.  He seemed to have before his
+mind the case of one--Cyrenaic or Epicurean, as the courtier tends to
+be, by habit and instinct, if not on principle--who yet experiences,
+actually, a strong tendency to moral assents, and a desire, with as
+little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place for duty and
+righteousness in his house of thought.
+
+And the Stoic professor found the key to this problem in the purely
+aesthetic beauty of the old morality, as an element in things,
+fascinating to the imagination, to good taste in its most highly
+developed form, through association--a system or order, as a matter of
+fact, in possession, not only of the larger world, but of the rare
+minority of elite intelligences; from which, therefore, least of all
+would the sort of Epicurean he had in view endure to become, so to
+speak, an outlaw.  He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in
+search after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he seemed
+to Marius to be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of
+motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life,
+determined partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened
+self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere
+fear of penalties; no element of which, [8] however, was distinctively
+moral in the agent himself as such, and providing him, therefore, no
+common ground with a really moral being like Cornelius, or even like
+the philosophic emperor.  Performing the same offices; actually
+satisfying, even as they, the external claims of others; rendering to
+all their dues--one thus circumstanced would be wanting, nevertheless,
+in the secret of inward adjustment to the moral agents around him.  How
+tenderly--more tenderly than many stricter souls--he might yield
+himself to kindly instinct! what fineness of charity in passing
+judgment on others! what an exquisite conscience of other men's
+susceptibilities!  He knows for how much the manner, because the heart
+itself, counts, in doing a kindness.  He goes beyond most people in his
+care for all weakly creatures; judging, instinctively, that to be but
+sentient is to possess rights.  He conceives a hundred duties, though
+he may not call them by that name, of the existence of which purely
+duteous souls may have no suspicion.  He has a kind of pride in doing
+more than they, in a way of his own.  Sometimes, he may think that
+those men of line and rule do not really understand their own business.
+How narrow, inflexible, unintelligent! what poor guardians (he may
+reason) of the inward spirit of righteousness, are some supposed
+careful walkers according to its letter and form.  And yet all the
+while he admits, as such, no moral world at all: no [9] theoretic
+equivalent to so large a proportion of the facts of life.
+
+But, over and above such practical rectitude, thus determined by
+natural affection or self-love or fear, he may notice that there is a
+remnant of right conduct, what he does, still more what he abstains
+from doing, not so much through his own free election, as from a
+deference, an "assent," entire, habitual, unconscious, to custom--to
+the actual habit or fashion of others, from whom he could not endure to
+break away, any more than he would care to be out of agreement with
+them on questions of mere manner, or, say, even, of dress.  Yes! there
+were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a failure
+in good taste.  An assent, such as this, to the preferences of others,
+might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the rectitude it could
+determine the least considerable element in a moral life. Yet here,
+according to Cornelius Fronto, was in truth the revealing example,
+albeit operating upon comparative trifles, of the general principle
+required.  There was one great idea associated with which that
+determination to conform to precedent was elevated into the clearest,
+the fullest, the weightiest principle of moral action; a principle
+under which one might subsume men's most strenuous efforts after
+righteousness.  And he proceeded to expound the idea of Humanity--of a
+universal commonwealth of mind, which [10] becomes explicit, and as if
+incarnate, in a select communion of just men made perfect.
+
+Ho kosmos hosanei polis estin+--the world is as it were a commonwealth,
+a city: and there are observances, customs, usages, actually current in
+it, things our friends and companions will expect of us, as the
+condition of our living there with them at all, as really their peers
+or fellow-citizens.  Those observances were, indeed, the creation of a
+visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose actual manners, whose
+preferences from of old, become now a weighty tradition as to the way
+in which things should or should not be done, are like a music, to
+which the intercourse of life proceeds--such a music as no one who had
+once caught its harmonies would willingly jar.  In this way, the
+becoming, as in Greek--to prepon: or ta ethe+ mores, manners, as both
+Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a comprehensive term for duty.
+Righteousness would be, in the words of "Caesar" himself, of the
+philosophic Aurelius, but a "following of the reasonable will of the
+oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities--of the royal, the
+law-giving element, therein--forasmuch as we are citizens also in that
+supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but as
+single habitations."  But as the old man spoke with animation of this
+supreme city, this invisible society, whose conscience was become
+explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose [11] common
+spirit, the trusted leaders of human conscience had been but the
+mouthpiece, of whose successive personal preferences in the conduct of
+life, the "old morality" was the sum,--Marius felt that his own
+thoughts were passing beyond the actual intention of the speaker; not
+in the direction of any clearer theoretic or abstract definition of
+that ideal commonwealth, but rather as if in search of its visible
+locality and abiding-place, the walls and towers of which, so to speak,
+he might really trace and tell, according to his own old, natural habit
+of mind.  It would be the fabric, the outward fabric, of a system
+reaching, certainly, far beyond the great city around him, even if
+conceived in all the machinery of its visible and invisible influences
+at their grandest--as Augustus or Trajan might have conceived of
+them--however well the visible Rome might pass for a figure of that
+new, unseen, Rome on high.  At moments, Marius even asked himself with
+surprise, whether it might be some vast secret society the speaker had
+in view:--that august community, to be an outlaw from which, to be
+foreign to the manners of which, was a loss so much greater than to be
+excluded, into the ends of the earth, from the sovereign Roman
+commonwealth.  Humanity, a universal order, the great polity, its
+aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their example over their
+successors--these were the ideas, stimulating enough in their way, [12]
+by association with which the Stoic professor had attempted to elevate,
+to unite under a single principle, men's moral efforts, himself lifted
+up with so genuine an enthusiasm.  But where might Marius search for
+all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction?  Where were those
+elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable, winning,
+persuasive--whose footsteps through the world were so beautiful in the
+actual order he saw--whose faces averted from him, would be more than
+he could bear? Where was that comely order, to which as a great fact of
+experience he must give its due; to which, as to all other beautiful
+"phenomena" in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust himself?
+
+Rome did well to be serious.  The discourse ended somewhat abruptly, as
+the noise of a great crowd in motion was heard below the walls;
+whereupon, the audience, following the humour of the younger element in
+it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which the famous
+procession, or transvectio, of the military knights was to be seen
+passing over the Forum, from their trysting-place at the temple of
+Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri.  The ceremony took place this
+year, not on the day accustomed--anniversary of the victory of Lake
+Regillus, with its pair of celestial assistants--and amid the heat and
+roses of a Roman July, but, by [13] anticipation, some months earlier,
+the almond-trees along the way being still in leafless flower.  Through
+that light trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, arrayed in all
+their gleaming ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive around their
+helmets, the faces below which, what with battle and the plague, were
+almost all youthful.  It was a flowery scene enough, but had to-day its
+fulness of war-like meaning; the return of the army to the North, where
+the enemy was again upon the move, being now imminent.  Cornelius had
+ridden along in his place, and, on the dismissal of the company, passed
+below the steps where Marius stood, with that new song he had heard
+once before floating from his lips.
+
+NOTES
+
+10. +Transliteration: Ho kosmos hosanei polis estin.  Translation: "The
+world is like a city."
+
+10. +Transliteration: to prepon ... ta ethe.  Translation: "That which
+is seemly ... mores."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI: SECOND THOUGHTS
+
+[14] AND Marius, for his part, was grave enough.  The discourse of
+Cornelius Fronto, with its wide prospect over the human, the spiritual,
+horizon, had set him on a review--on a review of the isolating
+narrowness, in particular, of his own theoretic scheme. Long after the
+very latest roses were faded, when "the town" had departed to country
+villas, or the baths, or the war, he remained behind in Rome; anxious
+to try the lastingness of his own Epicurean rose-garden; setting to
+work over again, and deliberately passing from point to point of his
+old argument with himself, down to its practical conclusions.  That age
+and our own have much in common--many difficulties and hopes.  Let the
+reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to
+his modern representatives--from Rome, to Paris or London.
+
+What really were its claims as a theory of practice, of the sympathies
+that determine [15] practice?  It had been a theory, avowedly, of loss
+and gain (so to call it) of an economy.  If, therefore, it missed
+something in the commerce of life, which some other theory of practice
+was able to include, if it made a needless sacrifice, then it must be,
+in a manner, inconsistent with itself, and lack theoretic completeness.
+Did it make such a sacrifice?  What did it lose, or cause one to lose?
+
+And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaicism is
+ever the characteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in its
+survey--sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical. It is
+one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because
+limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this
+case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man's life there)
+which it may be said to be the special vocation of the young to
+express.  In the school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh Greek
+world, we see this philosophy where it is least blase, 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, [16] according to the supposition of the book from
+which I quote it, the counsel of the young, who feel that the sunshine
+is pleasant along their veins, and wintry weather, though in a general
+sense foreseen, a long way off.  The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism,
+the self-abandonment to one favourite mode of thought or taste, which
+occurs, quite naturally, at the outset of every really vigorous
+intellectual career, finds its special opportunity in a theory such as
+that so carefully put together by Marius, just because it seems to call
+on one to make the sacrifice, accompanied by a vivid sensation of power
+and will, of what others value--sacrifice of some conviction, or
+doctrine, or supposed first principle--for the sake of that clear-eyed
+intellectual consistency, which is like spotless bodily cleanliness, or
+scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the mind of the youthful
+student, when he first comes to appreciate it, the fascination of an
+ideal.
+
+The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of strenuousness or
+enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance of the "jaded Epicurean,"
+as of the strong young man in all the freshness of thought and feeling,
+fascinated by the notion of raising his life to the level of a daring
+theory, while, in the first genial heat of existence, the beauty of the
+physical world strikes potently upon his wide-open, unwearied senses.
+He discovers a great new poem every spring, with a hundred delightful
+things he too has felt, but [16] which have never been expressed, or at
+least never so truly, before. The workshops of the artists, who can
+select and set before us what is really most distinguished in visible
+life, are open to him.  He thinks that the old Platonic, or the new
+Baconian philosophy, has been better explained than by the authors
+themselves, or with some striking original development, this very
+month.  In the quiet heat of early summer, on the dusty gold morning,
+the music comes, louder at intervals, above the hum of voices from some
+neighbouring church, among the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps,
+only for the poetically rapt faces among priests or worshippers, or the
+mere skill and eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and
+righteousness.  In his scrupulous idealism, indeed, he too feels
+himself to be something of a priest, and that devotion of his days to
+the contemplation of what is beautiful, a sort of perpetual religious
+service.  Afar off, how many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts await
+him!  At that age, with minds of a certain constitution, no very choice
+or exceptional circumstances are needed to provoke an enthusiasm
+something like this.  Life in modern London even, in the heavy glow of
+summer, is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to
+build its "palace of art" of; and the very sense and enjoyment of an
+experience in which all is new, are but enhanced, like that glow of
+summer itself, by the [18] thought of its brevity, giving him something
+of a gambler's zest, in the apprehension, by dexterous act or
+diligently appreciative thought, of the highly coloured moments which
+are to pass away so quickly.  At bottom, perhaps, in his elaborately
+developed self-consciousness, his sensibilities, his almost fierce
+grasp upon the things he values at all, he has, beyond all others, an
+inward need of something permanent in its character, to hold by: of
+which circumstance, also, he may be partly aware, and that, as with the
+brilliant Claudio in Measure for Measure, it is, in truth, but darkness
+he is, "encountering, like a bride."  But the inevitable falling of the
+curtain is probably distant; and in the daylight, at least, it is not
+often that he really shudders at the thought of the grave--the weight
+above, the narrow world and its company, within.  When the thought of
+it does occur to him, he may say to himself:--Well! and the rude monk,
+for instance, who has renounced all this, on the security of some dim
+world beyond it, really acquiesces in that "fifth act," amid all the
+consoling ministries around him, as little as I should at this moment;
+though I may hope, that, as at the real ending of a play, however well
+acted, I may already have had quite enough of it, and find a true
+well-being in eternal sleep.
+
+And precisely in this circumstance, that, consistently with the
+function of youth in general, Cyrenaicism will always be more or [19]
+less the special philosophy, or "prophecy," of the young, when the
+ideal of a rich experience comes to them in the ripeness of the
+receptive, if not of the reflective, powers--precisely in this
+circumstance, if we rightly consider it, lies the duly prescribed
+corrective of that philosophy.  For it is by its exclusiveness, and by
+negation rather than positively, that such theories fail to satisfy us
+permanently; and what they really need for their correction, is the
+complementary influence of some greater system, in which they may find
+their due place.  That Sturm und Drang of the spirit, as it has been
+called, that ardent and special apprehension of half-truths, in the
+enthusiastic, and as it were "prophetic" advocacy of which, devotion to
+truth, in the case of the young--apprehending but one point at a time
+in the great circumference--most usually embodies itself, is levelled
+down, safely enough, afterwards, as in history so in the individual, by
+the weakness and mere weariness, as well as by the maturer wisdom, of
+our nature.  And though truth indeed, resides, as has been said, "in
+the whole"--in harmonisings and adjustments like this--yet those
+special apprehensions may still owe their full value, in this sense of
+"the whole," to that earlier, one-sided but ardent pre-occupation with
+them.
+
+Cynicism and Cyrenaicism:--they are the earlier Greek forms of Roman
+Stoicism and Epicureanism, and in that world of old Greek [20] thought,
+we may notice with some surprise that, in a little while, the nobler
+form of Cyrenaicism--Cyrenaicism cured of its faults--met the nobler
+form of Cynicism half-way.  Starting from opposed points, they merged,
+each in its most refined form, in a single ideal of temperance or
+moderation.  Something of the same kind may be noticed regarding some
+later phases of Cyrenaic theory.  If it starts with considerations
+opposed to the religious temper, which the religious temper holds it a
+duty to repress, it is like it, nevertheless, and very unlike any lower
+development of temper, in its stress and earnestness, its serious
+application to the pursuit of a very unworldly type of perfection.  The
+saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty, it may be thought, would at
+least understand each other better than either would understand the
+mere man of the world.  Carry their respective positions a point
+further, shift the terms a little, and they might actually touch.
+
+Perhaps all theories of practice tend, as they rise to their best, as
+understood by their worthiest representatives, to identification with
+each other.  For the variety of men's possible reflections on their
+experience, as of that experience itself, is not really so great as it
+seems; and as the highest and most disinterested ethical formulae,
+filtering down into men's everyday existence, reach the same poor level
+of vulgar egotism, so, we may fairly suppose that all the highest
+spirits, from [21] whatever contrasted points they have started, would
+yet be found to entertain, in the moral consciousness realised by
+themselves, much the same kind of mental company; to hold, far more
+than might be thought probable, at first sight, the same personal types
+of character, and even the same artistic and literary types, in esteem
+or aversion; to convey, all of them alike, the same savour of
+unworldliness.  And Cyrenaicism or Epicureanism too, new or old, may be
+noticed, in proportion to the completeness of its development, to
+approach, as to the nobler form of Cynicism, so also to the more nobly
+developed phases of the old, or traditional morality.  In the gravity
+of its conception of life, in its pursuit after nothing less than a
+perfection, in its apprehension of the value of time--the passion and
+the seriousness which are like a consecration--la passion et le serieux
+qui consacrent--it may be conceived, as regards its main drift, to be
+not so much opposed to the old morality, as an exaggeration of one
+special motive in it.
+
+Some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own
+nature, and of the nature of things, to another, Marius seemed to have
+detected in himself, meantime,--in himself, as also in those old
+masters of the Cyrenaic philosophy.  If they did realise the
+monochronos hedone+ as it was called--the pleasure of the "Ideal
+Now"--if certain moments of their lives were high-pitched, passionately
+coloured, intent with sensation, [22] and a kind of knowledge which, in
+its vivid clearness, was like sensation--if, now and then, they
+apprehended the world in its fulness, and had a vision, almost
+"beatific," of ideal personalities in life and art, yet these moments
+were a very costly matter: they paid a great price for them, in the
+sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies, of things only to be
+enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in
+intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing
+for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths.  In
+their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and
+the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty economists.
+The Greek religion was then alive: then, still more than in its later
+day of dissolution, the higher view of it was possible, even for the
+philosopher.  Its story made little or no demand for a reasoned or
+formal acceptance.  A religion, which had grown through and through
+man's life, with so much natural strength; had meant so much for so
+many generations; which expressed so much of their hopes, in forms so
+familiar and so winning; linked by associations so manifold to man as
+he had been and was--a religion like this, one would think, might have
+had its uses, even for a philosophic sceptic.  Yet those beautiful
+gods, with the whole round of their poetic worship, the school of
+Cyrene definitely renounced.
+
+[23] The old Greek morality, again, with all its imperfections, was
+certainly a comely thing.--Yes! a harmony, a music, in men's ways, one
+might well hesitate to jar.  The merely aesthetic sense might have had
+a legitimate satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair order of choice
+manners, in those attractive conventions, enveloping, so gracefully,
+the whole of life, insuring some sweetness, some security at least
+against offence, in the intercourse of the world. Beyond an obvious
+utility, it could claim, indeed but custom--use-and-wont, as we
+say--for its sanction.  But then, one of the advantages of that liberty
+of spirit among the Cyrenaics (in which, through theory, they had
+become dead to theory, so that all theory, as such, was really
+indifferent to them, and indeed nothing valuable but in its tangible
+ministration to life) was precisely this, that it gave them free play
+in using as their ministers or servants, things which, to the
+uninitiated, must be masters or nothing.  Yet, how little the followers
+of Aristippus made of that whole comely system of manners or morals,
+then actually in possession of life, is shown by the bold practical
+consequence, which one of them maintained (with a hard,
+self-opinionated adherence to his peculiar theory of values) in the not
+very amiable paradox that friendship and patriotism were things one
+could do without; while another--Death's-advocate, as he was
+called--helped so many to self-destruction, by his [24] pessimistic
+eloquence on the evils of life, that his lecture-room was closed.  That
+this was in the range of their consequences--that this was a possible,
+if remote, deduction from the premisses of the discreet Aristippus--was
+surely an inconsistency in a thinker who professed above all things an
+economy of the moments of life.  And yet those old Cyrenaics felt their
+way, as if in the dark, we may be sure, like other men in the ordinary
+transactions of life, beyond the narrow limits they drew of clear and
+absolutely legitimate knowledge, admitting what was not of immediate
+sensation, and drawing upon that "fantastic" future which might never
+come.  A little more of such "walking by faith," a little more of such
+not unreasonable "assent," and they might have profited by a hundred
+services to their culture, from Greek religion and Greek morality, as
+they actually were.  The spectacle of their fierce, exclusive,
+tenacious hold on their own narrow apprehension, makes one think of a
+picture with no relief, no soft shadows nor breadth of space, or of a
+drama without proportionate repose.
+
+Yet it was of perfection that Marius (to return to him again from his
+masters, his intellectual heirs) had been really thinking all the time:
+a narrow perfection it might be objected, the perfection of but one
+part of his nature--his capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical
+impressions, of an imaginative sympathy--but still, a true perfection
+of those capacities, wrought out [25] to their utmost degree, admirable
+enough in its way.  He too is an economist: he hopes, by that "insight"
+of which the old Cyrenaics made so much, by skilful apprehension of the
+conditions of spiritual success as they really are, the special
+circumstances of the occasion with which he has to deal, the special
+felicities of his own nature, to make the most, in no mean or vulgar
+sense, of the few years of life; few, indeed, for the attainment of
+anything like general perfection!  With the brevity of that sum of
+years his mind is exceptionally impressed; and this purpose makes him
+no frivolous dilettante, but graver than other men: his scheme is not
+that of a trifler, but rather of one who gives a meaning of his own,
+yet a very real one, to those old words--Let us work while it is day!
+He has a strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the visible things
+around him; their fading, momentary, graces and attractions.  His
+natural susceptibility in this direction, enlarged by experience, seems
+to demand of him an almost exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of
+things; with their aesthetic character, as it is called--their
+revelations to the eye and the imagination: not so much because those
+aspects of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as because
+to be occupied, in this way, with the aesthetic 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 [26] least, are matter of the most
+real kind of apprehension.  As other men are concentrated upon truths
+of number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures
+of appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of
+refined sensation.  And in the prosecution of this love of beauty, he
+claims an entire personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty,
+above all, from what may seem conventional answers to first questions.
+
+But, without him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea,
+widely extended in time and place, in a kind of impregnable possession
+of human life--a system, which, like some other great products of the
+conjoint efforts of human mind through many generations, is rich in the
+world's experience; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one lets in a
+great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were with a single
+step, a great experience of one's own, and with great consequent
+increase to one's sense of colour, variety, and relief, in the
+spectacle of men and things.  The mere sense that one belongs to a
+system--an imperial system or organisation--has, in itself, the
+expanding power of a great experience; as some have felt who have been
+admitted from narrower sects into the communion of the catholic church;
+or as the old Roman citizen felt.  It is, we might fancy, what the
+coming into possession of a very widely spoken language might be, with
+a great literature, which is also [27] the speech of the people we have
+to live among.
+
+A wonderful order, actually in possession of human life!--grown
+inextricably through and through it; penetrating into its laws, its
+very language, its mere habits of decorum, in a thousand half-conscious
+ways; yet still felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal; and, as
+such, awakening hope, and an aim, identical with the one only
+consistent aspiration of mankind!  In the apprehension of that, just
+then, Marius seemed to have joined company once more with his own old
+self; to have overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to Rome,
+with absolute sincerity, on the search for perfection.  It defined not
+so much a change of practice, as of sympathy--a new departure, an
+expansion, of sympathy.  It involved, certainly, some curtailment of
+his liberty, in concession to the actual manner, the distinctions, the
+enactments of that great crowd of admirable spirits, who have elected
+so, and not otherwise, in their conduct of life, and are not here to
+give one, so to term it, an "indulgence."  But then, under the
+supposition of their disapproval, no roses would ever seem worth
+plucking again.  The authority they exercised was like that of classic
+taste--an influence so subtle, yet so real, as defining the loyalty of
+the scholar; or of some beautiful and venerable ritual, in which every
+observance is become spontaneous and almost mechanical, yet is found,
+[28] the more carefully one considers it, to have a reasonable
+significance and a natural history.
+
+And Marius saw that he would be but an inconsistent Cyrenaic, mistaken
+in his estimate of values, of loss and gain, and untrue to the
+well-considered economy of life which he had brought with him to
+Rome--that some drops of the great cup would fall to the ground--if he
+did not make that concession, if he did but remain just there.
+
+NOTES
+
+21. +Transliteration: monochronos hedone.  Pater's definition "the
+pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now."  The definition is
+fitting; the unusual adjective monochronos means, literally, "single or
+unitary time."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII: BEATA URBS
+
+
+"Many prophets and kings have desired to see the things which ye see."
+
+[29] THE enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the vanguard of the
+mighty invading hosts of the fifth century.  Illusively repressed just
+now, those confused movements along the northern boundary of the Empire
+were destined to unite triumphantly at last, in the barbarism, which,
+powerless to destroy the Christian church, was yet to suppress for a
+time the achieved culture of the pagan world.  The kingdom of Christ
+was to grow up in a somewhat false alienation from the light and beauty
+of the kingdom of nature, of the natural man, with a partly mistaken
+tradition concerning it, and an incapacity, as it might almost seem at
+times, for eventual reconciliation thereto. Meantime Italy had armed
+itself once more, in haste, and the imperial brothers set forth for the
+Alps.
+
+Whatever misgiving the Roman people may [30] have felt as to the
+leadership of the younger was unexpectedly set at rest; though with
+some temporary regret for the loss of what had been, after all, a
+popular figure on the world's stage.  Travelling fraternally in the
+same litter with Aurelius, Lucius Verus was struck with sudden and
+mysterious disease, and died as he hastened back to Rome.  His death
+awoke a swarm of sinister rumours, to settle on Lucilla, jealous, it
+was said, of Fabia her sister, perhaps of Faustina--on Faustina
+herself, who had accompanied the imperial progress, and was anxious now
+to hide a crime of her own--even on the elder brother, who, beforehand
+with the treasonable designs of his colleague, should have helped him
+at supper to a favourite morsel, cut with a knife poisoned ingeniously
+on one side only.  Aurelius, certainly, with sincere distress, his long
+irritations, so dutifully concealed or repressed, turning now into a
+single feeling of regret for the human creature, carried the remains
+back to Rome, and demanded of the Senate a public funeral, with a
+decree for the apotheosis, or canonisation, of the dead.
+
+For three days the body lay in state in the Forum, enclosed in an open
+coffin of cedar-wood, on a bed of ivory and gold, in the centre of a
+sort of temporary chapel, representing the temple of his patroness
+Venus Genetrix.  Armed soldiers kept watch around it, while choirs of
+select voices relieved one another in the chanting of hymns or
+monologues from the great tragedians.
+
+[31] At the head of the couch were displayed the various personal
+decorations which had belonged to Verus in life.  Like all the rest of
+Rome, Marius went to gaze on the face he had seen last scarcely
+disguised under the hood of a travelling-dress, as the wearer hurried,
+at night-fall, along one of the streets below the palace, to some
+amorous appointment.  Unfamiliar as he still was with dead faces, he
+was taken by surprise, and touched far beyond what he had reckoned on,
+by the piteous change there; even the skill of Galen having been not
+wholly successful in the process of embalming.  It was as if a brother
+of his own were lying low before him, with that meek and helpless
+expression it would have been a sacrilege to treat rudely.
+
+Meantime, in the centre of the Campus Martius, within the grove of
+poplars which enclosed the space where the body of Augustus had been
+burnt, the great funeral pyre, stuffed with shavings of various
+aromatic woods, was built up in many stages, separated from each other
+by a light entablature of woodwork, and adorned abundantly with carved
+and tapestried images.  Upon this pyramidal or flame-shaped structure
+lay the corpse, hidden now under a mountain of flowers and incense
+brought by the women, who from the first had had their fondness for the
+wanton graces of the deceased.  The dead body was surmounted by a waxen
+effigy of great size, arrayed in the triumphal ornaments. [32] At last
+the Centurions to whom that office belonged, drew near, torch in hand,
+to ignite the pile at its four corners, while the soldiers, in wild
+excitement, flung themselves around it, casting into the flames the
+decorations they had received for acts of valour under the dead
+emperor's command.
+
+It had been a really heroic order, spoiled a little, at the last
+moment, through the somewhat tawdry artifice, by which an eagle--not a
+very noble or youthful specimen of its kind--was caused to take flight
+amid the real or affected awe of the spectators, above the perishing
+remains; a court chamberlain, according to ancient etiquette,
+subsequently making official declaration before the Senate, that the
+imperial "genius" had been seen in this way, escaping from the fire.
+And Marius was present when the Fathers, duly certified of the fact, by
+"acclamation," muttering their judgment all together, in a kind of low,
+rhythmical chant, decreed Caelum--the privilege of divine rank to the
+departed.
+
+The actual gathering of the ashes in a white cere-cloth by the widowed
+Lucilla, when the last flicker had been extinguished by drops of wine;
+and the conveyance of them to the little cell, already populous, in the
+central mass of the sepulchre of Hadrian, still in all the splendour of
+its statued colonnades, were a matter of private or domestic duty;
+after the due accomplishment of which Aurelius was at [33] liberty to
+retire for a time into the privacy o his beloved apartments of the
+Palatine.  And hither, not long afterwards, Marius was summoned a
+second time, to receive from the imperial hands the great pile of
+Manuscripts it would be his business to revise and arrange.
+
+One year had passed since his first visit to the palace; and as he
+climbed the stairs to-day, the great cypresses rocked against the
+sunless sky, like living creatures in pain.  He had to traverse a long
+subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the imperial
+apartments, and in our own day, amid the ruin of all around it, as
+smooth and fresh as if the carpets were but just removed from its floor
+after the return of the emperor from the shows.  It was here, on such
+an occasion, that the emperor Caligula, at the age of twenty-nine, had
+come by his end, the assassins gliding along it as he lingered a few
+moments longer to watch the movements of a party of noble youths at
+their exercise in the courtyard below.  As Marius waited, a second
+time, in that little red room in the house of the chief chamberlain,
+curious to look once more upon its painted walls--the very place
+whither the assassins were said to have turned for refuge after the
+murder--he could all but see the figure, which in its surrounding light
+and darkness seemed to him the most melancholy in the entire history of
+Rome.  He called to mind the greatness of that popularity and early
+[34] promise--the stupefying height of irresponsible power, from which,
+after all, only men's viler side had been clearly visible--the
+overthrow of  reason--the seemingly irredeemable memory; and still,
+above all, the beautiful head in which the noble lines of the race of
+Augustus were united to, he knew not what expression of  sensibility
+and fineness, not theirs, and for the like of which one must pass
+onward to the Antonines.  Popular hatred had been careful to destroy
+its semblance wherever it was to be found; but one bust, in dark
+bronze-like basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, preserved in
+the museum of the Capitol, may have seemed to some visitors there
+perhaps the finest extant relic of Roman art.  Had the very seal of
+empire upon those sombre brows, reflected from his mirror, suggested
+his insane attempt upon the liberties, the dignity of men?--"O
+humanity!" he seems to ask, "what hast thou done to me that I should so
+despise thee?"--And might not this be indeed the true meaning of
+kingship, if the world would have one man to reign over it?  The like
+of this: or, some incredible, surely never to be realised, height of
+disinterestedness, in a king who should be the servant of all, quite at
+the other extreme of the practical dilemma involved in such a position.
+Not till some while after his death had the body been decently interred
+by the piety of the sisters he had driven into exile.  Fraternity [35]
+of feeling had been no invariable feature in the incidents of Roman
+story.  One long Vicus Sceleratus, from its first dim foundation in
+fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common deliverance so
+touching--had not almost every step in it some gloomy memory of
+unnatural violence?  Romans did well to fancy the traitress Tarpeia
+still "green in earth," crowned, enthroned, at the roots of the
+Capitoline rock.  If in truth the religion of Rome was everywhere in
+it, like that perfume of the funeral incense still upon the air, so
+also was the memory of crime prompted by a hypocritical cruelty, down
+to the erring, or not erring, Vesta calmly buried alive there, only
+eighty years ago, under Domitian.
+
+It was with a sense of relief that Marius found himself in the presence
+of Aurelius, whose gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered,
+raised a smile at the gloomy train of his own thoughts just then,
+although since his first visit to the palace a great change had passed
+over it.  The clear daylight found its way now into empty rooms.  To
+raise funds for the war, Aurelius, his luxurious brother being no more,
+had determined to sell by auction the accumulated treasures of the
+imperial household.  The works of art, the dainty furniture, had been
+removed, and were now "on view" in the Forum, to be the delight or
+dismay, for many weeks to come, of the [36] large public of those who
+were curious in these things.  In such wise had Aurelius come to the
+condition of philosophic detachment he had affected as a boy, hardly
+persuaded to wear warm clothing, or to sleep in more luxurious manner
+than on the bare floor.  But, in his empty house, the man of mind, who
+had always made so much of the pleasures of philosophic contemplation,
+felt freer in thought than ever.  He had been reading, with less
+self-reproach than usual, in the Republic of Plato, those passages
+which describe the life of the philosopher-kings--like that of hired
+servants in their own house--who, possessed of the "gold undefiled" of
+intellectual vision, forgo so cheerfully all other riches.  It was one
+of his happy days: one of those rare days, when, almost with none of
+the effort, otherwise so constant with him, his thoughts came rich and
+full, and converged in a mental view, as exhilarating to him as the
+prospect of some wide expanse of landscape to another man's bodily eye.
+He seemed to lie readier than was his wont to the imaginative influence
+of the philosophic reason--to its suggestions of a possible open
+country, commencing just where all actual experience leaves off, but
+which experience, one's own and not another's, may one day occupy.  In
+fact, he was seeking strength for himself, in his own way, before he
+started for that ambiguous earthly warfare [37] which was to occupy the
+remainder of his life.  "Ever remember this," he writes, "that a happy
+life depends, not on many things--en oligistois keitai."+  And to-day,
+committing himself with a steady effort of volition to the mere silence
+of the great empty apartments, he might be said to have escaped,
+according to Plato's promise to those who live closely with philosophy,
+from the evils of the world.
+
+In his "conversations with himself" Marcus Aurelius speaks often of
+that City on high, of which all other cities are but single
+habitations.  From him in fact Cornelius Fronto, in his late discourse,
+had borrowed the expression; and he certainly meant by it more than the
+whole commonwealth of Rome, in any idealisation of it, however sublime.
+Incorporate somehow with the actual city whose goodly stones were lying
+beneath his gaze, it was also implicate in that reasonable constitution
+of nature, by devout contemplation of which it is possible for man to
+associate himself to the consciousness of God.  In that New Rome he had
+taken up his rest for awhile on this day, deliberately feeding his
+thoughts on the better air of it, as another might have gone for mental
+renewal to a favourite villa.
+
+"Men seek retirement in country-houses," he writes, "on the sea-coast,
+on the mountains; and you have yourself as much fondness for such
+places as another.  But there is little proof of culture therein; since
+the privilege is yours of [38] retiring into yourself whensoever you
+please,--into that little farm of one's own mind, where a silence so
+profound may be enjoyed."  That it could make these retreats, was a
+plain consequence of the kingly prerogative of the mind, its dominion
+over circumstance, its inherent liberty.--"It is in thy power to think
+as thou wilt: The essence of things is in thy thoughts about them: All
+is opinion, conception: No man can be hindered by another: What is
+outside thy circle of thought is nothing at all to it; hold to this,
+and you are safe: One thing is needful--to live close to the divine
+genius within thee, and minister thereto worthily."  And the first
+point in this true ministry, this culture, was to maintain one's soul
+in a condition of indifference and calm. How continually had public
+claims, the claims of other persons, with their rough angularities of
+character, broken in upon him, the shepherd of the flock.  But after
+all he had at least this privilege he could not part with, of thinking
+as he would; and it was well, now and then, by a conscious effort of
+will, to indulge it for a while, under systematic direction.  The duty
+of thus making discreet, systematic use of the power of imaginative
+vision for purposes of spiritual culture, "since the soul takes colour
+from its fantasies," is a point he has frequently insisted on.
+
+The influence of these seasonable meditations--a symbol, or sacrament,
+because an intensified [39] condition, of the soul's own ordinary and
+natural life--would remain upon it, perhaps for many days.  There were
+experiences he could not forget, intuitions beyond price, he had come
+by in this way, which were almost like the breaking of a physical light
+upon his mind; as the great Augustus was said to have seen a mysterious
+physical splendour, yonder, upon the summit of the Capitol, where the
+altar of the Sibyl now stood.  With a prayer, therefore, for inward
+quiet, for conformity to the divine reason, he read some select
+passages of Plato, which bear upon the harmony of the reason, in all
+its forms, with itself--"Could there be Cosmos, that wonderful,
+reasonable order, in him, and nothing but disorder in the world
+without?"  It was from this question he had passed on to the vision of
+a reasonable, a divine, order, not in nature, but in the condition of
+human affairs--that unseen Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs
+Beata--in which, a consciousness of the divine will being everywhere
+realised, there would be, among other felicitous differences from this
+lower visible world, no more quite hopeless death, of men, or children,
+or of their affections. He had tried to-day, as never before, to make
+the most of this vision of a New Rome, to realise it as distinctly as
+he could,--and, as it were, find his way along its streets, ere he went
+down into a world so irksomely different, to make his practical effort
+towards it, with a soul full of [40] compassion for men as they were.
+However distinct the mental image might have been to him, with the
+descent of but one flight of steps into the market-place below, it must
+have retreated again, as if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond
+the utmost verge of the horizon.  But it had been actually, in his
+clearest vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable entry,
+a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose
+novel expression he, the great physiognomist, could by no means read.
+Plato, indeed, had been able to articulate, to see, at least in
+thought, his ideal city.  But just because Aurelius had passed beyond
+Plato, in the scope of the gracious charities he pre-supposed there, he
+had been unable really to track his way about it. Ah! after all,
+according to Plato himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this,
+his heart's desire, no place his soul could ever have visited in any
+region of the old world's achievements.  He had but divined, by a kind
+of generosity of spirit, the void place, which another experience than
+his must fill.
+
+Yet Marius noted the wonderful expression of peace, of quiet pleasure,
+on the countenance of Aurelius, as he received from him the rolls of
+fine clear manuscript, fancying the thoughts of the emperor occupied at
+the moment with the famous prospect towards the Alban hills, from those
+lofty windows.
+
+NOTES
+
+37.  +Transliteration: en oligistois keitai.  Definition "it lies in
+the fewest [things]."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII: "THE CEREMONY OF THE DART"
+
+[41] THE ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aurelius, ideas of
+large generalisation, have sometimes induced, in those over whose
+intellects they have had real power, a coldness of heart.  It was the
+distinction of Aurelius that he was able to harmonise them with the
+kindness, one might almost say the amenities, of a humourist, as also
+with the popular religion and its many gods.  Those vasty conceptions
+of the later Greek philosophy had in them, in truth, the germ of a sort
+of austerely opinionative "natural theology," and how often has that
+led to religious dryness--a hard contempt of everything in religion,
+which touches the senses, or charms the fancy, or really concerns the
+affections.  Aurelius had made his own the secret of passing,
+naturally, and with no violence to his thought, to and fro, between the
+richly coloured and romantic religion of those old gods who had still
+been human beings, and a very abstract speculation upon the impassive,
+[42] universal soul--that circle whose centre is everywhere, the
+circumference nowhere--of which a series of purely logical necessities
+had evolved the formula.  As in many another instance, those
+traditional pieties of the place and the hour had been derived by him
+from his mother:--para tes metros to theosebes.+ Purified, as all such
+religion of concrete time and place needs to be, by frequent
+confronting with the ideal of godhead as revealed to that innate
+religious sense in the possession of which Aurelius differed from the
+people around him, it was the ground of many a sociability with their
+simpler souls, and for himself, certainly, a consolation, whenever the
+wings of his own soul flagged in the trying atmosphere of purely
+intellectual vision.  A host of companions, guides, helpers, about him
+from of old time, "the very court and company of heaven," objects for
+him of personal reverence and affection--the supposed presence of the
+ancient popular gods determined the character of much of his daily
+life, and might prove the last stay of human nature at its weakest.
+"In every time and place," he had said, "it rests with thyself to use
+the event of the hour religiously: at all seasons worship the gods."
+And when he said "Worship the gods!" he did it, as strenuously as
+everything else.
+
+Yet here again, how often must he have experienced disillusion, or even
+some revolt of [43] feeling, at that contact with coarser natures to
+which his religious conclusions exposed him.  At the beginning of the
+year one hundred and seventy-three public anxiety was as great as ever;
+and as before it brought people's superstition into unreserved play.
+For seven days the images of the old gods, and some of the graver new
+ones, lay solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their
+ornaments, each in his separate resting-place, amid lights and burning
+incense, while the crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited
+them, with offerings of flowers to this or that particular divinity,
+according to the devotion of each.
+
+ But supplementing these older official observances, the very wildest
+gods had their share of worship,--strange creatures with strange
+secrets startled abroad into open daylight.  The delirious sort of
+religion of which Marius was a spectator in the streets of Rome, during
+the seven days of the Lectisternium, reminded him now and again of an
+observation of Apuleius: it was "as if the presence of the gods did not
+do men good, but disordered or weakened them."  Some jaded women of
+fashion, especially, found in certain oriental devotions, at once
+relief for their religiously tearful souls and an opportunity for
+personal display; preferring this or that "mystery," chiefly because
+the attire required in it was suitable to their peculiar manner of
+beauty.  And one morning Marius  [44] encountered an extraordinary
+crimson object, borne in a litter through an excited crowd--the famous
+courtesan Benedicta, still fresh from the bath of blood, to which she
+had submitted herself, sitting below the scaffold where the victims
+provided for that purpose were slaughtered by the priests.  Even on the
+last day of the solemnity, when the emperor himself performed one of
+the oldest ceremonies of the Roman religion, this fantastic piety had
+asserted itself.  There were victims enough certainly, brought from the
+choice pastures of the Sabine mountains, and conducted around the city
+they were to die for, in almost continuous procession, covered with
+flowers and well-nigh worried to death before the time by the crowds of
+people superstitiously pressing to touch them.  But certain
+old-fashioned Romans, in these exceptional circumstances, demanded
+something more than this, in the way of a human sacrifice after the
+ancient pattern; as when, not so long since, some Greeks or Gauls had
+been buried alive in the Forum. At least, human blood should be shed;
+and it was through a wild multitude of fanatics, cutting their flesh
+with knives and whips and licking up ardently the crimson stream, that
+the emperor repaired to the temple of Bellona, and in solemn symbolic
+act cast the bloodstained spear, or "dart," carefully preserved there,
+towards the enemy's country-- [45] towards that unknown world of German
+homes, still warm, as some believed under the faint northern twilight,
+with those innocent affections of which Romans had lost the sense.  And
+this at least was clear, amid all doubts of abstract right or wrong on
+either side, that the ruin of those homes was involved in what Aurelius
+was then preparing for, with,--Yes! the gods be thanked for that
+achievement of an invigorating philosophy!--almost with a light heart.
+
+ For, in truth, that departure, really so difficult to him, for which
+Marcus Aurelius had needed to brace himself so strenuously, came to
+test the power of a long-studied theory of practice; and it was the
+development of this theory--a theoria, literally--a view, an intuition,
+of the most important facts, and still more important possibilities,
+concerning man in the world, that Marius now discovered, almost as if
+by accident, below the dry surface of the manuscripts entrusted to him.
+The great purple rolls contained, first of all, statistics, a general
+historical account of the writer's own time, and an exact diary; all
+alike, though in three different degrees of nearness to the writer's
+own personal experience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing.  This was
+for the instruction of the public; and part of it has, perhaps, found
+its way into the Augustan Histories.  But it was for the especial
+guidance of his son Commodus that he had permitted himself to break
+out, here [46] and there, into reflections upon what was passing, into
+conversations with the reader.  And then, as though he were put off his
+guard in this way, there had escaped into the heavy matter-of-fact, of
+which the main portion was composed, morsels of his conversation with
+himself.  It was the romance of a soul (to be traced only in hints,
+wayside notes, quotations from older masters), as it were in lifelong,
+and often baffled search after some vanished or elusive golden fleece,
+or Hesperidean fruit-trees, or some mysterious light of doctrine, ever
+retreating before him.  A man, he had seemed to Marius from the first,
+of two lives, as we say.  Of what nature, he had sometimes wondered, on
+the day, for instance, when he had interrupted the emperor's musings in
+the empty palace, might be that placid inward guest or inhabitant, who
+from amid the pre-occupations of the man of practical affairs looked
+out, as if surprised, at the things and faces around.  Here, then,
+under the tame surface of what was meant for a life of business, Marius
+discovered, welcoming a brother, the spontaneous self-revelation of a
+soul as delicate as his own,--a soul for which conversation with itself
+was a necessity of existence.  Marius, indeed, had always suspected
+that the sense of such necessity was a peculiarity of his. But here,
+certainly, was another, in this respect like himself; and again he
+seemed to detect the advent of some [47] new or changed spirit into the
+world, mystic, inward, hardly to be satisfied with that wholly external
+and objective habit of life, which had been sufficient for the old
+classic soul.  His purely literary curiosity was greatly stimulated by
+this example of a book of self-portraiture. It was in fact the position
+of the modern essayist,--creature of efforts rather than of
+achievements, in the matter of apprehending truth, but at least
+conscious of lights by the way, which he must needs record,
+acknowledge.  What seemed to underlie that position was the desire to
+make the most of every experience that might come, outwardly or from
+within: to perpetuate, to display, what was so fleeting, in a kind of
+instinctive, pathetic protest against the imperial writer's own
+theory--that theory of the "perpetual flux" of all things--to Marius
+himself, so plausible from of old.
+
+ There was, besides, a special moral or doctrinal significance in the
+making of such conversation with one's self at all.  The Logos, the
+reasonable spark, in man, is common to him with the gods--koinos auto
+pros tous theous+--cum diis communis.  That might seem but the truism
+of a certain school of philosophy; but in Aurelius was clearly an
+original and lively apprehension.  There could be no inward
+conversation with one's self such as this, unless there were indeed
+some one else, aware of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or
+displeased at [48] one's disposition of one's self.  Cornelius Fronto
+too could enounce that theory of the reasonable community between men
+and God, in many different ways.  But then, he was a cheerful man, and
+Aurelius a singularly sad one; and what to Fronto was but a doctrine,
+or a motive of mere rhetoric, was to the other a consolation.  He walks
+and talks, for a spiritual refreshment lacking which he would faint by
+the way, with what to the learned professor is but matter of
+philosophic eloquence.
+
+In performing his public religious functions Marcus Aurelius had ever
+seemed like one who took part in some great process, a great thing
+really done, with more than the actually visible assistants about him.
+Here, in these manuscripts, in a hundred marginal flowers of thought or
+language, in happy new phrases of his own like the impromptus of an
+actual conversation, in quotations from other older masters of the
+inward life, taking new significance from the chances of such
+intercourse, was the record of his communion with that eternal reason,
+which was also his own proper self, with the divine companion, whose
+tabernacle was in the intelligence of men--the journal of his daily
+commerce with that.
+
+Chance: or Providence!  Chance: or Wisdom, one with nature and man,
+reaching from end to end, through all time and all existence, orderly
+disposing all things, according to [49] fixed periods, as he describes
+it, in terms very like certain well-known words of the book of
+Wisdom:--those are the "fenced opposites" of the speculative dilemma,
+the tragic embarras, of which Aurelius cannot too often remind himself
+as the summary of man's situation in the world.  If there be, however,
+a provident soul like this "behind the veil," truly, even to him, even
+in the most intimate of those conversations, it has never yet spoken
+with any quite irresistible assertion of its presence.  Yet one's
+choice in that speculative dilemma, as he has found it, is on the whole
+a matter of will.--"'Tis in thy power," here too, again, "to think as
+thou wilt."  For his part he has asserted his will, and has the courage
+of his opinion.  "To the better of two things, if thou findest that,
+turn with thy whole heart: eat and drink ever of the best before thee."
+"Wisdom," says that other disciple of the Sapiential philosophy, "hath
+mingled Her wine, she hath also prepared Herself a table."  Tou aristou
+apolaue:+ "Partake ever of Her best!"  And what Marius, peeping now
+very closely upon the intimacies of that singular mind, found a thing
+actually pathetic and affecting, was the manner of the writer's bearing
+as in the presence of this supposed guest; so elusive, so jealous of
+any palpable manifestation of himself, so taxing to one's faith, never
+allowing one to lean frankly upon him and feel wholly at rest.  Only,
+he [50] would do his part, at least, in maintaining the constant
+fitness, the sweetness and quiet, of the guest-chamber. Seeming to vary
+with the intellectual fortune of the hour, from the plainest account of
+experience, to a sheer fantasy, only "believed because it was
+impossible," that one hope was, at all events, sufficient to make men's
+common pleasures and their common ambition, above all their commonest
+vices, seem very petty indeed, too petty to know of.  It bred in him a
+kind of magnificence of character, in the old Greek sense of the term;
+a temper incompatible with any merely plausible advocacy of his
+convictions, or merely superficial thoughts about anything whatever, or
+talk about other people, or speculation as to what was passing in their
+so visibly little souls, or much talking of any kind, however clever or
+graceful.  A soul thus disposed had "already entered into the better
+life":--was indeed in some sort "a priest, a minister of the gods."
+Hence his constant "recollection"; a close watching of his soul, of a
+kind almost unique in the ancient world.--Before all things examine
+into thyself: strive to be at home with thyself!--Marius, a sympathetic
+witness of all this, might almost seem to have had a foresight of
+monasticism itself in the prophetic future.  With this mystic companion
+he had gone a step onward out of the merely objective pagan existence.
+Here was already a master in that craft of self-direction, which was
+about to [51] play so large a part in the forming of human mind, under
+the sanction of the Christian church.
+
+Yet it was in truth a somewhat melancholy service, a service on which
+one must needs move about, solemn, serious, depressed, with the hushed
+footsteps of those who move about the house where a dead body is lying.
+Such was the impression which occurred to Marius again and again as he
+read, with a growing sense of some profound dissidence from his author.
+By certain quite traceable links of association he was reminded, in
+spite of the moral beauty of the philosophic emperor's ideas, how he
+had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the public shows.  For, actually,
+his contemplations had made him of a sad heart, inducing in him that
+melancholy--Tristitia--which even the monastic moralists have held to
+be of the nature of deadly sin, akin to the sin of Desidia or
+Inactivity.  Resignation, a sombre resignation, a sad heart, patient
+bearing of the burden of a sad heart:--Yes! this belonged doubtless to
+the situation of an honest thinker upon the world.  Only, in this case
+there seemed to be too much of a complacent acquiescence in the world
+as it is.  And there could be no true Theodice in that; no real
+accommodation of the world as it is, to the divine pattern of the
+Logos, the eternal reason, over against it.  It amounted to a tolerance
+of evil.
+
+     The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little
+     understand, yet prospereth on the journey:
+
+     [52] If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be
+     nought of evil with thee therein.
+
+     If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are
+     communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with
+     thee--nothing to be afraid of:
+
+     Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every
+     man according to his desert:
+
+     If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require?
+
+     Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits?
+
+     That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the whole.
+
+     The profit of the whole,--that was sufficient!+
+
+--Links, in a train of thought really generous! of which, nevertheless,
+the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere,
+might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness.  It left in
+truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there
+could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man.  "Let
+thine air be cheerful," he had said; and, with an effort, did himself
+at times attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely ought to
+accompany, as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like
+those.  Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with
+Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable
+physiognomy.  With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy
+which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the
+outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human
+faces from "the land which is very far off," we may trace from Giotto
+onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael--the serenity, the
+[53] durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from
+death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed "blitheness "of the
+Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly
+superficial youth.  And yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with
+the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching
+in the head or heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an
+enemy with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in
+a thousand forms--the apparent waste of men's gifts in an early, or
+even in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of animals;
+the disease and pain of the body.
+
+And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius and his
+reader.--The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body.  Since it
+is "the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be
+proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither sensation nor
+passion to break in upon her," it follows that the true interest of the
+spirit must ever be to treat the body--Well! as a corpse attached
+thereto, rather than as a living companion--nay, actually to promote
+its dissolution.  In counterpoise to the inhumanity of this, presenting
+itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin against nature,
+the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that
+reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man.
+Such delight indeed had been but [54] a natural consequence of the
+sensuous or materialistic character of the philosophy of his choice.
+Now to Cornelius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer
+terms it, the one true temple in the world; or rather itself the proper
+object of worship, of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold
+might have its seemliness and due symbolic use:--Ah! and of what
+awe-stricken pity also, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones
+of a poor man's grave!
+
+Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the
+philosopher's contempt for it--some diseased point of thought, or moral
+dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all
+the emperor's inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for which there
+was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world. "'Tis part of the
+business of life," he read, "to lose it handsomely."  On due occasion,
+"one might give life the slip."  The moral or mental powers might fail
+one; and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the time for
+taking leave was not come:--"Thou canst leave this prison when thou
+wilt.  Go forth boldly!" Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain
+such question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must
+always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching
+him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with.  There,
+surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of
+apprehension.  It was the [55] attitude, the melancholy intellectual
+attitude, of one who might be greatly mistaken in things--who might
+make the greatest of mistakes.
+
+A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, or even in the
+weakness of others:--of this Marius had certainly found the trace, as a
+confidant of the emperor's conversations with himself, in spite of
+those jarring inhumanities, of that pretension to a stoical
+indifference, and the many difficulties of his manner of writing.  He
+found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger evidence, in this
+way.  As he read one morning early, there slipped from the rolls of
+manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor's superscription, which
+might well be of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at once in
+person; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one of his favourite
+retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with his young
+children, before his departure for the war.  A whole day passed as
+Marius crossed the Campagna on horseback, pleased by the random autumn
+lights bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture, the shepherds
+in their picturesque dress, the golden elms, tower and villa; and it
+was after dark that he mounted the steep street of the little hill-town
+to the imperial residence.  He was struck by an odd mixture of
+stillness and excitement about the place.  Lights burned at the
+windows.  It seemed that numerous visitors were within, for the
+courtyard was crowded with litters and horses [56] in waiting. For the
+moment, indeed, all larger cares, even the cares of war, of late so
+heavy a pressure, had been forgotten in what was passing with the
+little Annius Verus; who for his part had forgotten his toys, lying all
+day across the knees of his mother, as a mere child's ear-ache grew
+rapidly to alarming sickness with great and manifest agony, only
+suspended a little, from time to time, when from very weariness he
+passed into a few moments of unconsciousness.  The country surgeon
+called in, had removed the imposthume with the knife.  There had been a
+great effort to bear this operation, for the terrified child, hardly
+persuaded to submit himself, when his pain was at its worst, and even
+more for the parents.  At length, amid a company of pupils pressing in
+with him, as the custom was, to watch the proceedings in the sick-room,
+the eminent Galen had arrived, only to pronounce the thing done visibly
+useless, the patient falling now into longer intervals of delirium.
+And thus, thrust on one side by the crowd of departing visitors, Marius
+was forced into the privacy of a grief, the desolate face of which went
+deep into his memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away--quite
+conscious at last, but with a touching expression upon it of weakness
+and defeat--pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for
+one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its
+obscure distress.
+
+NOTES
+
+42. +Transliteration: para tes metros to theosebes.  Translation:
+"rites deriving from [his] mother."
+
+47. +Transliteration: koinos auto pros tous theous.  Translation:
+"common to him together with the gods."
+
+49. +Transliteration: Tou aristou apolaue.  Translation: "[Always] take
+the best."
+
+52. +Not indented in the original.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX: THE WILL AS VISION
+
+     Paratum cor meum deus! paratum cor meum!
+
+[57] THE emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of
+images in memory of the dead prince; that a golden one should be
+carried, together with the other images, in the great procession of the
+Circus, and the addition of the child's name to the Hymn of the Salian
+Priests: and so, stifling private grief, without further delay set
+forth for the war.
+
+True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius, had understood it,
+was essentially of the nature of a service.  If so be, you can discover
+a mode of life more desirable than the being a king, for those who
+shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a
+possibility; but not otherwise.  And if the life of Beatific Vision be
+indeed possible, if philosophy really "concludes in an ecstasy,"
+affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain
+elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been [58] discovered
+more desirable than to be a king.  By love or fear you might induce
+such persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon them the
+distasteful task of governing other men, or even of leading them to
+victory in battle.  But, by the very conditions of its tenure, their
+dominion would be wholly a ministry to others: they would have taken
+upon them-"the form of a servant": they would be reigning for the
+well-being of others rather than their own.  The true king, the
+righteous king, would be Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the better
+land and its perfected company--so real a thing to him, definite and
+real as the pictured scenes of his psalter--to take part in or to
+arbitrate men's quarrels, about the transitory appearances of things.
+In a lower degree (lower, in proportion as the highest Platonic dream
+is lower than any Christian vision) the true king would be Marcus
+Aurelius, drawn from the meditation of books, to be the ruler of the
+Roman people in peace, and still more, in war.
+
+To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the visions, however dim,
+which this mood brought with it, were sufficiently pleasant to him,
+together with the endearments of his home, to make public rule nothing
+less than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato's requirement, now
+consummated in his setting forth for the campaign on the Danube.  That
+it was such a sacrifice was to Marius visible fact, as he saw him [59]
+ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all the pageantry of an
+imperial departure, yet with the air less of a sanguine and
+self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other already defeated.
+Through the fortune of the subsequent years, passing and repassing so
+inexplicably from side to side, the rumour of which reached him amid
+his own quiet studies, Marius seemed always to see that central figure,
+with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive
+suffering, all the stranger from its contrast with the magnificent
+armour worn by the emperor on this occasion, as it had been worn by his
+predecessor Hadrian.
+
+     Totus et argento contextus et auro:
+
+clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed
+armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous
+lightsomeness--he looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere
+comfortless shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction of the
+labours of Hercules, through those northern, mist-laden confines of the
+civilised world.  It was as if the familiar soul which had been so
+friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to Hades; and when
+he read the Conversations afterwards, though his judgment of them
+underwent no material change, it was nevertheless with the allowance we
+make for the dead.  The memory of that suffering image, while it
+certainly strengthened his adhesion [60] to what he could accept at all
+in the philosophy of Aurelius, added a strange pathos to what must seem
+the writer's mistakes.  What, after all, had been the meaning of that
+incident, observed as so fortunate an omen long since, when the prince,
+then a little child much younger than was usual, had stood in ceremony
+among the priests of Mars and flung his crown of flowers with the rest
+at the sacred image reclining on the Pulvinar?  The other crowns lodged
+themselves here or there; when, Lo! the crown thrown by Aurelius, the
+youngest of them all, alighted upon the very brows of the god, as if
+placed there by a careful hand! He was still young, also, when on the
+day of his adoption by Antoninus Pius he saw himself in a dream, with
+as it were shoulders of ivory, like the images of the gods, and found
+them more capable than shoulders of flesh.  Yet he was now well-nigh
+fifty years of age, setting out with two-thirds of life behind him,
+upon a labour which would fill the remainder of it with anxious
+cares--a labour for which he had perhaps no capacity, and certainly no
+taste.
+
+That ancient suit of armour was almost the only object Aurelius now
+possessed from all those much cherished articles of vertu collected by
+the Caesars, making the imperial residence like a magnificent museum.
+Not men alone were needed for the war, so that it became necessary, to
+the great disgust alike of timid persons and of [61] the lovers of
+sport, to arm the gladiators, but money also was lacking.  Accordingly,
+at the sole motion of Aurelius himself, unwilling that the public
+burden should be further increased, especially on the part of the poor,
+the whole of the imperial ornaments and furniture, a sumptuous
+collection of gems formed by Hadrian, with many works of the most
+famous painters and sculptors, even the precious ornaments of the
+emperor's chapel or Lararium, and the wardrobe of the empress Faustina,
+who seems to have borne the loss without a murmur, were exposed for
+public auction.  "These treasures," said Aurelius, "like all else that
+I possess, belong by right to the Senate and People."  Was it not a
+characteristic of the true kings in Plato that they had in their houses
+nothing they could call their own?  Connoisseurs had a keen delight in
+the mere reading of the Praetor's list of the property for sale.  For
+two months the learned in these matters were daily occupied in the
+appraising of the embroidered hangings, the choice articles of personal
+use selected for preservation by each succeeding age, the great
+outlandish pearls from Hadrian's favourite cabinet, the marvellous
+plate lying safe behind the pretty iron wicker-work of the shops in the
+goldsmiths' quarter.  Meantime ordinary persons might have an interest
+in the inspection of objects which had been as daily companions to
+people so far above and remote from them--things so fine also [62] in
+workmanship and material as to seem, with their antique and delicate
+air, a worthy survival of the grand bygone eras, like select thoughts
+or utterances embodying the very spirit of the vanished past.  The town
+became more pensive than ever over old fashions.
+
+The welcome amusement of this last act of preparation for the great war
+being now over, all Rome seemed to settle down into a singular quiet,
+likely to last long, as though bent only on watching from afar the
+languid, somewhat uneventful course of the contest itself. Marius took
+advantage of it as an opportunity for still closer study than of old,
+only now and then going out to one of his favourite spots on the Sabine
+or Alban hills for a quiet even greater than that of Rome in the
+country air.  On one of these occasions, as if by favour of an
+invisible power withdrawing some unknown cause of dejection from around
+him, he enjoyed a quite unusual sense of self-possession--the
+possession of his own best and happiest self.  After some gloomy
+thoughts over-night, he awoke under the full tide of the rising sun,
+himself full, in his entire refreshment, of that almost religious
+appreciation of sleep, the graciousness of its influence on men's
+spirits, which had made the old Greeks conceive of it as a god. It was
+like one of those old joyful wakings of childhood, now becoming rarer
+and rarer with him, and looked back upon with much regret as a measure
+of advancing age.  In fact, [63] the last bequest of this serene sleep
+had been a dream, in which, as once before, he overheard those he loved
+best pronouncing his name very pleasantly, as they passed through the
+rich light and shadow of a summer morning, along the pavement of a
+city--Ah! fairer far than Rome!  In a moment, as he arose, a certain
+oppression of late setting very heavily upon him was lifted away, as
+though by some physical motion in the air.
+
+That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasurable excitement,
+yet so easily ruffled by chance collision even with the things and
+persons he had come to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to
+be wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards Tibur, under the
+early sunshine; the marble of its villas glistening all the way before
+him on the hillside.  And why could he not hold such serenity of spirit
+ever at command? he asked, expert as he was at last become in the art
+of setting the house of his thoughts in order.  "'Tis in thy power to
+think as thou wilt:" he repeated to himself: it was the most
+serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him by those imperial
+conversations.--"'Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt."  And were
+the cheerful, sociable, restorative beliefs, of which he had there read
+so much, that bold adhesion, for instance, to the hypothesis of an
+eternal friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and
+material order, but only just behind it, [64] ready perhaps even now to
+break through:--were they, after all, really a matter of choice,
+dependent on some deliberate act of volition on his part? Were they
+doctrines one might take for granted, generously take for granted, and
+led on by them, at first as but well-defined objects of hope, come at
+last into the region of a corresponding certitude of the intellect?
+"It is the truth I seek," he had read, "the truth, by which no one,"
+gray and depressing though it might seem, "was ever really injured."
+And yet, on the other hand, the imperial wayfarer, he had been able to
+go along with so far on his intellectual pilgrimage, let fall many
+things concerning the practicability of a methodical and self-forced
+assent to certain principles or presuppositions "one could not do
+without."  Were there, as the expression "one could not do without"
+seemed to hint, beliefs, without which life itself must be almost
+impossible, principles which had their sufficient ground of evidence in
+that very fact? Experience certainly taught that, as regarding the
+sensible world he could attend or not, almost at will, to this or that
+colour, this or that train of sounds, in the whole tumultuous concourse
+of colour and sound, so it was also, for the well-trained intelligence,
+in regard to that hum of voices which besiege the inward no less than
+the outward ear.  Might it be not otherwise with those various and
+competing hypotheses, the permissible hypotheses, which, [65] in that
+open field for hypothesis--one's own actual ignorance of the origin and
+tendency of our being--present themselves so importunately, some of
+them with so emphatic a reiteration, through all the mental changes of
+successive ages?  Might the will itself be an organ of knowledge, of
+vision?
+
+On this day truly no mysterious light, no irresistibly leading hand
+from afar reached him; only the peculiarly tranquil influence of its
+first hour increased steadily upon him, in a manner with which, as he
+conceived, the aspects of the place he was then visiting had something
+to do.  The air there, air supposed to possess the singular property of
+restoring the whiteness of ivory, was pure and thin.  An even veil of
+lawn-like white cloud had now drawn over the sky; and under its broad,
+shadowless light every hue and tone of time came out upon the yellow
+old temples, the elegant pillared circle of the shrine of the patronal
+Sibyl, the houses seemingly of a piece with the ancient fundamental
+rock.  Some half-conscious motive of poetic grace would appear to have
+determined their grouping; in part resisting, partly going along with
+the natural wildness and harshness of the place, its floods and
+precipices.  An air of immense age possessed, above all, the vegetation
+around--a world of evergreen trees--the olives especially, older than
+how many generations of men's lives! fretted and twisted by the
+combining forces of [66] life and death, into every conceivable caprice
+of form.  In the windless weather all seemed to be listening to the
+roar of the immemorial waterfall, plunging down so unassociably among
+these human habitations, and with a motion so unchanging from age to
+age as to count, even in this time-worn place, as an image of
+unalterable rest. Yet the clear sky all but broke to let through the
+ray which was silently quickening everything in the late February
+afternoon, and the unseen violet refined itself through the air.  It
+was as if the spirit of life in nature were but withholding any too
+precipitate revelation of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work.
+
+Through some accident to the trappings of his horse at the inn where he
+rested, Marius had an unexpected delay.  He sat down in an
+olive-garden, and, all around him and within still turning to reverie,
+the course of his own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself into some
+other world, disparted from this spectacular point where he was now
+placed to survey it, like that distant road below, along which he had
+travelled this morning across the Campagna.  Through a dreamy land he
+could see himself moving, as if in another life, and like another
+person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to
+point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various dangers.  That
+prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude: it
+was as if he must look round for some one [67] else to share his joy
+with: for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own relief.
+Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this way or
+that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or another
+long span of it, the chief delight of the journey.  And was it only the
+resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through his
+memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not
+been--besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude he
+had which in spite of ardent friendship perhaps loved best of all
+things--some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side
+throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of
+his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful
+recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was
+there at all?  Must not the whole world around have faded away for him
+altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?  In his
+deepest apparent solitude there had been rich entertainment.  It was as
+if there were not one only, but two wayfarers, side by side, visible
+there across the plain, as he indulged his fancy.  A bird came and sang
+among the wattled hedge-roses: an animal feeding crept nearer: the
+child who kept it was gazing quietly: and the scene and the hours still
+conspiring, he passed from that mere fantasy of a self not himself,
+beside him in his coming and [68] going, to those divinations of a
+living and companionable spirit at work in all things, of which he had
+become aware from time to time in his old philosophic readings--in
+Plato and others, last but not least, in Aurelius.  Through one
+reflection upon another, he passed from such instinctive divinations,
+to the thoughts which give them logical consistency, formulating at
+last, as the necessary exponent of our own and the world's life, that
+reasonable Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator,
+which for the philosophers of Greece is the Eternal Reason, and in the
+New Testament the Father of Men--even as one builds up from act and
+word and expression of the friend actually visible at one's side, an
+ideal of the spirit within him.
+
+In this peculiar and privileged hour, his bodily frame, as he could
+recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of its capacities, so
+entirely possessed by him--Nay! actually his very self--was yet
+determined by a far-reaching system of material forces external to it,
+a thousand combining currents from earth and sky.  Its seemingly active
+powers of apprehension were, in fact, but susceptibilities to
+influence.  The perfection of its capacity might be said to depend on
+its passive surrender, as of a leaf on the wind, to the motions of the
+great stream of physical energy without it.  And might not the
+intellectual frame also, still [69] more intimately himself as in truth
+it was, after the analogy of the bodily life, be a moment only, an
+impulse or series of impulses, a single process, in an intellectual or
+spiritual system external to it, diffused through all time and
+place--that great stream of spiritual energy, of which his own
+imperfect thoughts, yesterday or to-day, would be but the remote, and
+therefore imperfect pulsations?  It was the hypothesis (boldest, though
+in reality the most conceivable of all hypotheses) which had dawned on
+the contemplations of the two opposed great masters of the old Greek
+thought, alike:--the "World of Ideas," existent only because, and in so
+far as, they are known, as Plato conceived; the "creative,
+incorruptible, informing mind," supposed by Aristotle, so sober-minded,
+yet as regards this matter left something of a mystic after all.  Might
+not this entire material world, the very scene around him, the
+immemorial rocks, the firm marble, the olive-gardens, the falling
+water, be themselves but reflections in, or a creation of, that one
+indefectible mind, wherein he too became conscious, for an hour, a day,
+for so many years?  Upon what other hypothesis could he so well
+understand the persistency of all these things for his own intermittent
+consciousness of them, for the intermittent consciousness of so many
+generations, fleeting away one after another?  It was easier to
+conceive of the material fabric of things as [70] but an element in a
+world of thought--as a thought in a mind, than of mind as an element,
+or accident, or passing condition in a world of matter, because mind
+was really nearer to himself: it was an explanation of what was less
+known by what was known better.  The purely material world, that close,
+impassable prison-wall, seemed just then the unreal thing, to be
+actually dissolving away all around him: and he felt a quiet hope, a
+quiet joy dawning faintly, in the dawning of this doctrine upon him as
+a really credible opinion.  It was like the break of day over some vast
+prospect with the "new city," as it were some celestial New Rome, in
+the midst of it.  That divine companion figured no longer as but an
+occasional wayfarer beside him; but rather as the unfailing
+"assistant," without whose inspiration and concurrence he could not
+breathe or see, instrumenting his bodily senses, rounding, supporting
+his imperfect thoughts.  How often had the thought of their brevity
+spoiled for him the most natural pleasures of life, confusing even his
+present sense of them by the suggestion of disease, of death, of a
+coming end, in everything!  How had he longed, sometimes, that there
+were indeed one to whose boundless power of memory he could commit his
+own most fortunate moments, his admiration, his love, Ay! the very
+sorrows of which he could not bear quite to lose the sense:--one strong
+to retain them even though [71] he forgot, in whose more vigorous
+consciousness they might subsist for ever, beyond that mere quickening
+of capacity which was all that remained of them in himself!  "Oh! that
+they might live before Thee"--To-day at least, in the peculiar
+clearness of one privileged hour, he seemed to have apprehended that in
+which the experiences he valued most might find, one by one, an
+abiding-place.  And again, the resultant sense of companionship, of a
+person beside him, evoked the faculty of conscience--of conscience, as
+of old and when he had been at his best, in the form, not of fear, nor
+of self-reproach even, but of a certain lively gratitude.
+
+Himself--his sensations and ideas--never fell again precisely into
+focus as on that day, yet he was the richer by its experience.  But for
+once only to have come under the power of that peculiar mood, to have
+felt the train of reflections which belong to it really forcible and
+conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion, to have
+apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal
+gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the
+shadows of the world, left this one particular hour a marked point in
+life never to be forgotten.  It gave him a definitely ascertained
+measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul must
+make upon the powers, whatsoever they might be, which [72] had brought
+him, as he was, into the world at all.  And again, would he be faithful
+to himself, to his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions, if he
+did but remain just there?  Must not all that remained of life be but a
+search for the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual
+things--a gathering together of every trace or token of it, which his
+actual experience might present?
+
+
+
+PART THE FOURTH
+
+
+CHAPTER XX: TWO CURIOUS HOUSES
+
+I. GUESTS
+
+      "Your old men shall dream dreams."+
+
+[75] 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 [76] happened that he was a guest
+at a feast, in which the various exciting elements of Roman life, its
+physical and intellectual accomplishments, its frivolity and
+far-fetched elegances, its strange, mystic essays after the unseen,
+were elaborately combined.  The great Apuleius, the literary ideal of
+his boyhood, had arrived in Rome,--was now visiting Tusculum, at the
+house of their common friend, a certain aristocratic poet who loved
+every sort of superiorities; and Marius was favoured with an invitation
+to a supper given in his honour.
+
+It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to his own early
+boyish hero-worship, yet with some sense of superiority in himself,
+seeing his old curiosity grown now almost to indifference when on the
+point of satisfaction at last, and upon a juster estimate of its
+object, that he mounted to the little town on the hillside, the
+foot-ways of which were so many flights of easy-going steps gathered
+round a single great house under shadow of the "haunted" ruins of
+Cicero's villa on the wooded heights.  He found a touch of weirdness in
+the circumstance that in so romantic a place he had been bidden to meet
+the writer who was come to seem almost like one of the personages in
+his own fiction.  As he turned now and then to gaze at the evening
+scene through the tall narrow openings of the street, up which the
+cattle were going home slowly from the [77] pastures below, the Alban
+mountains, stretched between the great walls of the ancient houses,
+seemed close at hand--a screen of vaporous dun purple against the
+setting sun--with those waves of surpassing softness in the boundary
+lines which indicate volcanic formation.  The coolness of the little
+brown market-place, for profit of which even the working-people, in
+long file through the olive-gardens, were leaving the plain for the
+night, was grateful, after the heats of Rome.  Those wild country
+figures, clad in every kind of fantastic patchwork, stained by wind and
+weather fortunately enough for the eye, under that significant light
+inclined him to poetry.  And it was a very delicate poetry of its kind
+that seemed to enfold him, as passing into the poet's house he paused
+for a moment to glance back towards the heights above; whereupon, the
+numerous cascades of the precipitous garden of the villa, framed in the
+doorway of the hall, fell into a harmless picture, in its place among
+the pictures within, and scarcely more real than they--a
+landscape-piece, in which the power of water (plunging into what unseen
+depths!) done to the life, was pleasant, and without its natural
+terrors.
+
+At the further end of this bland apartment, fragrant with the rare
+woods of the old inlaid panelling, the falling of aromatic oil from the
+ready-lighted lamps, the iris-root clinging to the dresses of the
+guests, as with odours from the [78] altars of the gods, the
+supper-table was spread, in all the daintiness characteristic of the
+agreeable 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 vessels darkened with old wine, the hues of
+the early autumn fruit--mulberries, pomegranates, and grapes that had
+long been hanging under careful protection upon the vines, were almost
+as much a feast for the eye, as the dusky fires of the rare
+twelve-petalled roses.  A favourite animal, white as snow, brought by
+one of the visitors, purred its way [79] gracefully among the
+wine-cups, coaxed onward from place to place by those at table, as they
+reclined easily on their cushions of German eider-down, spread over the
+long-legged, carved couches.
+
+A highly refined modification of the acroama--a musical performance
+during supper for the diversion of the guests--was presently heard
+hovering round the place, soothingly, and so unobtrusively that the
+company could not guess, and did not like to ask, whether or not it had
+been designed by their entertainer.  They inclined on the whole to
+think it some wonderful peasant-music peculiar to that wild
+neighbourhood, turning, as it did now and then, to a solitary
+reed-note, like a bird's, while it wandered into the distance.  It
+wandered quite away at last, as darkness with a bolder lamplight came
+on, and made way for another sort of entertainment.  An odd, rapid,
+phantasmal glitter, advancing from the garden by torchlight, defined
+itself, as it came nearer, into a dance of young men in armour. Arrived
+at length in a portico, open to the supper-chamber, they contrived that
+their mechanical march-movement should fall out into a kind of highly
+expressive dramatic action; and with the utmost possible emphasis of
+dumb motion, their long swords weaving a silvery network in the air,
+they danced the Death of Paris.  The young Commodus, already an adept
+in these matters, who had condescended to [80] welcome the eminent
+Apuleius at the banquet, had mysteriously dropped from his place to
+take his share in the performance; and at its conclusion reappeared,
+still wearing the dainty accoutrements of Paris, including a
+breastplate, composed entirely of overlapping tigers' claws, skilfully
+gilt.  The youthful prince had lately assumed the dress of manhood, on
+the return of the emperor for a brief visit from the North; putting up
+his hair, in imitation of Nero, in a golden box dedicated to Capitoline
+Jupiter.  His likeness to Aurelius, his father, was become, in
+consequence, more striking than ever; and he had one source of genuine
+interest in the great literary guest of the occasion, in that the
+latter was the fortunate possessor of a monopoly for the exhibition of
+wild beasts and gladiatorial shows in the province of Carthage, where
+he resided.
+
+Still, after all complaisance to the perhaps somewhat crude tastes of
+the emperor's son, it was felt that with a guest like Apuleius whom
+they had come prepared to entertain as veritable connoisseurs, the
+conversation should be learned and superior, and the host at last
+deftly led his company round to literature, by the way of bindings.
+Elegant rolls of manuscript from his fine library of ancient Greek
+books passed from hand to hand about the table.  It was a sign for the
+visitors themselves to draw their own choicest literary curiosities
+from their bags, as their contribution to the banquet; and one of them,
+a [81] famous reader, choosing his lucky moment, delivered in tenor
+voice the piece which follows, with a preliminary query as to whether
+it could indeed be the composition of Lucian of Samosata,+ understood
+to be the great mocker of that day:--
+
+"What sound was that, Socrates?" asked Chaerephon.  "It came from the
+beach under the cliff yonder, and seemed a long way off.--And how
+melodious it was!  Was it a bird, I wonder.  I thought all sea-birds
+were songless."
+
+"Aye! a sea-bird," answered Socrates, "a bird called the Halcyon, and
+has a note full of plaining and tears.  There is an old story people
+tell of it.  It was a mortal woman once, daughter of Aeolus, god of the
+winds.  Ceyx, the son of the morning-star, wedded her in her early
+maidenhood.  The son was not less fair than the father; and when it
+came to pass that he died, the crying of the girl as she lamented his
+sweet usage, was, Just that!  And some while after, as Heaven willed,
+she was changed into a bird.  Floating now on bird's wings over the sea
+she seeks her lost Ceyx there; since she was not able to find him after
+long wandering over the land."
+
+"That then is the Halcyon--the kingfisher," said Chaerephon.  "I never
+heard a bird like it before.  It has truly a plaintive note. What kind
+of a bird is it, Socrates?"
+
+"Not a large bird, though she has received [82] large honour from the
+gods on account of her singular conjugal affection.  For whensoever she
+makes her nest, a law of nature brings round what is called Halcyon's
+weather,--days distinguishable among all others for their serenity,
+though they come sometimes amid the storms of winter--days like to-day!
+See how transparent is the sky above us, and how motionless the
+sea!--like a smooth mirror."
+
+True!  A Halcyon day, indeed! and yesterday was the same.  But tell me,
+Socrates, what is one to think of those stories which have been told
+from the beginning, of birds changed into mortals and mortals into
+birds?  To me nothing seems more incredible."
+
+"Dear Chaerephon," said Socrates, "methinks we are but half-blind
+judges of the impossible and the possible.  We try the question by the
+standard of our human faculty, which avails neither for true knowledge,
+nor for faith, nor vision.  Therefore many things seem to us impossible
+which are really easy, many things unattainable which are within our
+reach; partly through inexperience, partly through the childishness of
+our minds.  For in truth, every man, even the oldest of us, is like a
+little child, so brief and babyish are the years of our life in
+comparison of eternity.  Then, how can we, who comprehend not the
+faculties of gods and of the heavenly host, tell whether aught of that
+kind be possible or no?--What a tempest you saw [83] three days ago!
+One trembles but to think of the lightning, the thunderclaps, the
+violence of the wind!  You might have thought the whole world was going
+to ruin.  And then, after a little, came this wonderful serenity of
+weather, which has continued till to-day. Which do you think the
+greater and more difficult thing to do: to exchange the disorder of
+that irresistible whirlwind to a clarity like this, and becalm the
+whole world again, or to refashion the form of a woman into that of a
+bird?  We can teach even little children to do something of that
+sort,--to take wax or clay, and mould out of the same material many
+kinds of form, one after another, without difficulty.  And it may be
+that to the Deity, whose power is too vast for comparison with ours,
+all processes of that kind are manageable and easy.  How much wider is
+the whole circle of heaven than thyself?--Wider than thou canst express.
+
+"Among ourselves also, how vast the difference we may observe in men's
+degrees of power!  To you and me, and many another like us, many things
+are impossible which are quite easy to others.  For those who are
+unmusical, to play on the flute; to read or write, for those who have
+not yet learned; is no easier than to make birds of women, or women of
+birds.  From the dumb and lifeless egg Nature moulds her swarms of
+winged creatures, aided, as some will have it, by a divine and secret
+[84] art in the wide air around us.  She takes from the honeycomb a
+little memberless live thing; she brings it wings and feet, brightens
+and beautifies it with quaint variety of colour:--and Lo! the bee in
+her wisdom, making honey worthy of the gods.
+
+"It follows, that we mortals, being altogether of little account, able
+wholly to discern no great matter, sometimes not even a little one, for
+the most part at a loss regarding what happens even with ourselves, may
+hardly speak with security as to what may be the powers of the immortal
+gods concerning Kingfisher, or Nightingale. Yet the glory of thy
+mythus, as my fathers bequeathed it to me, O tearful songstress! that
+will I too hand on to my children, and tell it often to my wives,
+Xanthippe and Myrto:--the story of thy pious love to Ceyx, and of thy
+melodious hymns; and, above all, of the honour thou hast with the gods!"
+
+The reader's well-turned periods seemed to stimulate, almost
+uncontrollably, the eloquent stirrings of the eminent man of letters
+then present.  The impulse to speak masterfully was visible, before the
+recital was well over, in the moving lines about his mouth, by no means
+designed, as detractors were wont to say, simply to display the beauty
+of his teeth.  One of the company, expert in his humours, made ready to
+transcribe what he would say, the sort of [85] things of which a
+collection was then forming, the "Florida" or Flowers, so to call them,
+he was apt to let fall by the way--no impromptu ventures at random; but
+rather elaborate, carved ivories of speech, drawn, at length, out of
+the rich treasure-house of a memory stored with such, and as with a
+fine savour of old musk about them.  Certainly in this case, as Marius
+thought, it was worth while to hear a charming writer speak.
+Discussing, quite in our modern way, the peculiarities of those
+suburban views, especially the sea-views, of which he was a professed
+lover, he was also every inch a priest of Aesculapius, patronal god of
+Carthage.  There was a piquancy in his rococo, very African, and as it
+were perfumed personality, though he was now well-nigh sixty years old,
+a mixture there of that sort of Platonic spiritualism which can speak
+of the soul of man as but a sojourner m the prison of the body--a
+blending of that with such a relish for merely bodily graces as availed
+to set the fashion in matters of dress, deportment, accent, and the
+like, nay! with something also which reminded Marius of the vein of
+coarseness he had found in the "Golden Book."  All this made the total
+impression he conveyed a very uncommon one.  Marius did not wonder, as
+he watched him speaking, that people freely attributed to him many of
+the marvellous adventures he had recounted in that famous romance, [86]
+over and above the wildest version of his own actual story--his
+extraordinary marriage, his religious initiations, his acts of mad
+generosity, his trial as a sorcerer.
+
+But a sign came from the imperial prince that it was time for the
+company to separate.  He was entertaining his immediate neighbours at
+the table with a trick from the streets; tossing his olives in rapid
+succession into the air, and catching them, as they fell, between his
+lips.  His dexterity in this performance made the mirth around him
+noisy, disturbing the sleep of the furry visitor: the learned party
+broke up; and Marius withdrew, glad to escape into the open air.  The
+courtesans in their large wigs of false blond hair, were lurking for
+the guests, with groups of curious idlers.  A great conflagration was
+visible in the distance.  Was it in Rome; or in one of the villages of
+the country?  Pausing for a few minutes on the terrace to watch it,
+Marius was for the first time able to converse intimately with
+Apuleius; and in this moment of confidence the "illuminist," himself
+with locks so carefully arranged, and seemingly so full of
+affectations, almost like one of those light women there, dropped a
+veil as it were, and appeared, though still permitting the play of a
+certain element of theatrical interest in his bizarre tenets, to be
+ready to explain and defend his position reasonably.  For a moment his
+fantastic foppishness and his pretensions to ideal [87] vision seemed
+to fall into some intelligible congruity with each other.  In truth, it
+was the Platonic Idealism, as he conceived it, which for him literally
+animated, and gave him so lively an interest in, this world of the
+purely outward aspects of men and things.--Did material things, such
+things as they had had around them all that evening, really need
+apology for being there, to interest one, at all?  Were not all visible
+objects--the whole material world indeed, according to the consistent
+testimony of philosophy in many forms--"full of souls"? embarrassed
+perhaps, partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls?  Certainly, the
+contemplative philosophy of Plato, with its figurative imagery and
+apologue, its manifold aesthetic colouring, its measured eloquence, its
+music for the outward ear, had been, like Plato's old master himself, a
+two-sided or two-coloured thing. Apuleius was a Platonist: only, for
+him, the Ideas of Plato were no creatures of logical abstraction, but
+in very truth informing souls, in every type and variety of sensible
+things.  Those noises in the house all supper-time, sounding through
+the tables and along the walls:--were they only startings in the old
+rafters, at the impact of the music and laughter; or rather
+importunities of the secondary selves, the true unseen selves, of the
+persons, nay! of the very things around, essaying to break through
+their frivolous, merely transitory surfaces, to remind one of abiding
+essentials beyond them, [88] which might have their say, their judgment
+to give, by and by, when the shifting of the meats and drinks at life's
+table would be over?  And was not this the true significance of the
+Platonic doctrine?--a hierarchy of divine beings, associating
+themselves with particular things and places, for the purpose of
+mediating between God and man--man, who does but need due attention on
+his part to become aware of his celestial company, filling the air
+about him, thick as motes in the sunbeam, for the glance of sympathetic
+intelligence he casts through it.
+
+"Two kinds there are, of animated beings," he exclaimed: "Gods,
+entirely differing from men in the infinite distance of their abode,
+since one part of them only is seen by our blunted vision--those
+mysterious stars!--in the eternity of their existence, in the
+perfection of their nature, infected by no contact with ourselves: and
+men, dwelling on the earth, with frivolous and anxious minds, with
+infirm and mortal members, with variable fortunes; labouring in vain;
+taken altogether and in their whole species perhaps, eternal; but,
+severally, quitting the scene in irresistible succession.
+
+"What then?  Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed
+itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human
+elements?  And you will say to me: If so it be, that man is thus
+entirely exiled from the immortal gods, that all communication is
+denied [89] him, that not one of them occasionally visits us, as a
+shepherd his sheep--to whom shall I address my prayers?  Whom, shall I
+invoke as the helper of the unfortunate, the protector of the good?
+
+"Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom
+our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. Passing
+between the inhabitants of earth and heaven, they carry from one to the
+other prayers and bounties, supplication and assistance, being a kind
+of interpreters.  This interval of the air is full of them!  Through
+them, all revelations, miracles, magic processes, are effected.  For,
+specially appointed members of this order have their special provinces,
+with a ministry according to the disposition of each.  They go to and
+fro without fixed habitation: or dwell in men's houses"--
+
+Just then a companion's hand laid in the darkness on the shoulder of
+the speaker carried him away, and the discourse broke off suddenly. Its
+singular intimations, however, were sufficient to throw back on this
+strange evening, in all its detail--the dance, the readings, the
+distant fire--a kind of allegoric expression: gave it the character of
+one of those famous Platonic figures or apologues which had then been
+in fact under discussion.  When Marius recalled its circumstances he
+seemed to hear once more that voice of genuine conviction, pleading,
+from amidst a [90] scene at best of elegant frivolity, for so boldly
+mystical a view of man and his position in the world.  For a moment,
+but only for a moment, as he listened, the trees had seemed, as of old,
+to be growing "close against the sky." Yes! the reception of theory, of
+hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a great deal on temperament.  They
+were, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament.  A celestial
+ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth: that was the assumption which
+the experience of Apuleius had suggested to him: it was what, in
+different forms, certain persons in every age had instinctively
+supposed: they would be glad to find their supposition accredited by
+the authority of a grave philosophy. Marius, however, yearning not less
+than they, in that hard world of Rome, and below its unpeopled sky, for
+the trace of some celestial wing across it, must still object that they
+assumed the thing with too much facility, too much of self-complacency.
+And his second thought was, that to indulge but for an hour fantasies,
+fantastic visions of that sort, only left the actual world more lonely
+than ever.  For him certainly, and for his solace, the little godship
+for whom the rude countryman, an unconscious Platonist, trimmed his
+twinkling lamp, would never slip from the bark of these immemorial
+olive-trees.--No! not even in the wildest moonlight.  For himself, it
+was clear, he must still hold by what his eyes really saw.  Only, he
+had to concede also, that [91] the very boldness of such theory bore
+witness, at least, to a variety of human disposition and a consequent
+variety of mental view, which might--who can tell?--be correspondent
+to, be defined by and define, varieties of facts, of truths, just
+"behind the veil," regarding the world all alike had actually before
+them as their original premiss or starting-point; a world, wider,
+perhaps, in its possibilities than all possible fancies concerning it.
+
+NOTES
+
+75. Joel 2.28.
+
+81. +Halcyone.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI: TWO CURIOUS HOUSES
+
+II.  THE CHURCH IN CECILIA'S HOUSE
+
+     "Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see
+     visions."
+
+[92] CORNELIUS had certain friends in or near Rome, whose household, to
+Marius, as he pondered now and again what might be the determining
+influences of that peculiar character, presented itself as possibly its
+main secret--the hidden source from which the beauty and strength of a
+nature, so persistently fresh in the midst of a somewhat jaded world,
+might be derived.  But Marius had never yet seen these friends; and it
+was almost by accident that the veil of reserve was at last lifted,
+and, with strange contrast to his visit to the poet's villa at
+Tusculum, he entered another curious house.
+
+"The house in which she lives," says that mystical German writer quoted
+once before, "is for the orderly soul, which does not live on [93]
+blindly before her, but is ever, out of her passing experiences,
+building and adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for herself,
+only an expansion of the body; as the body, according to the philosophy
+of Swedenborg,+ is but a process, an expansion, of the soul.  For such
+an orderly soul, as life proceeds, all sorts of delicate affinities
+establish themselves, between herself and the doors and passage-ways,
+the lights and shadows, of her outward dwelling-place, until she may
+seem incorporate with it--until at last, in the entire expressiveness
+of what is outward, there is for her, to speak properly, between
+outward and inward, no longer any distinction at all; and the light
+which creeps at a particular hour on a particular picture or space upon
+the wall, the scent of flowers in the air at a particular window,
+become to her, not so much apprehended objects, as themselves powers of
+apprehension and door-ways to things beyond--the germ or rudiment of
+certain new faculties, by which she, dimly yet surely, apprehends a
+matter lying beyond her actually attained capacities of spirit and
+sense."
+
+So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we may think, together
+with that bodily "tent" or "tabernacle," only one of many vestures for
+the clothing of the pilgrim soul, to be left by her, surely, as if on
+the wayside, worn-out one by one, as it was from her, indeed, they
+borrowed what momentary value or significance they had.
+
+[94] The two friends were returning to Rome from a visit to a
+country-house, where again a mixed company of guests had been
+assembled; Marius, for his part, a little weary of gossip, and those
+sparks of ill-tempered rivalry, which would seem sometimes to be the
+only sort of fire the intercourse of people in general society can
+strike out of them.  A mere reaction upon this, as they started in the
+clear morning, made their companionship, at least for one of them,
+hardly less tranquillising than the solitude he so much valued.
+Something in the south-west wind, combining with their own intention,
+favoured increasingly, as the hours wore on, a serenity like that
+Marius had felt once before in journeying over the great plain towards
+Tibur--a serenity that was to-day brotherly amity also, and seemed to
+draw into its own charmed circle whatever was then present to eye or
+ear, while they talked or were silent together, and all petty
+irritations, and the like, shrank out of existence, or kept certainly
+beyond its limits.  The natural fatigue of the long journey overcame
+them quite suddenly at last, when they were still about two miles
+distant from Rome.  The seemingly endless line of tombs and cypresses
+had been visible for hours against the sky towards the west; and it was
+just where a cross-road from the Latin Way fell into the Appian, that
+Cornelius halted at a doorway in a long, low wall--the outer wall of
+some villa courtyard, it might be supposed-- [95] as if at liberty to
+enter, and rest there awhile.  He held the door open for his companion
+to enter also, if he would; with an expression, as he lifted the latch,
+which seemed to ask Marius, apparently shrinking from a possible
+intrusion: "Would you like to see it?"  Was he willing to look upon
+that, the seeing of which might define--yes! define the critical
+turning-point in his days?
+
+The little doorway in this long, low wall admitted them, in fact, into
+the court or garden of a villa, disposed in one of those abrupt natural
+hollows, which give its character to the country in this place; the
+house itself, with all its dependent buildings, the spaciousness of
+which surprised Marius as he entered, being thus wholly concealed from
+passengers along the road.  All around, in those well-ordered
+precincts, were the quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste--a
+taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of
+the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the
+remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects, both
+as regards colour and form, so delicate as to seem really derivative
+from some finer intelligence in these matters than lay within the
+resources of the ancient world.  It was the old way of true
+Renaissance--being indeed the way of nature with her roses, the divine
+way with the body of man, perhaps with his soul--conceiving the new
+organism by no sudden and [96] abrupt creation, but rather by the
+action of a new principle upon elements, all of which had in truth
+already lived and died many times.  The fragments of older
+architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious
+corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such
+juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave
+thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically, very
+seductive.  Lastly, herb and tree had taken possession, spreading their
+seed-bells and light branches, just astir in the trembling air, above
+the ancient garden-wall, against the wide realms of sunset. And from
+the first they could hear singing, the singing of children mainly, it
+would seem, and of a new kind; so novel indeed in its effect, as to
+bring suddenly to the recollection of Marius, Flavian's early essays
+towards a new world of poetic sound.  It was the expression not
+altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness--the
+blithe self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some
+all-subduing experience had wrought heroically, and who still
+remembered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance.
+
+His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the special sympathies, of
+places,--above all, to any hieratic or religious significance they
+might have,--was at its liveliest, as Marius, still encompassed by that
+peculiar singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave discretion
+all around him, passed into the house.  That intelligent seriousness
+[97] about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those
+who lacked it into some strange species wholly alien from himself,
+accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days
+at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed
+congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision,
+into an actual picture.  If the true value of souls is in proportion to
+what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul.  As he
+passed through the various chambers, great and small, one dominant
+thought increased upon him, the thought of chaste women and their
+children--of all the various affections of family life under its most
+natural conditions, yet developed, as if in devout imitation of some
+sublime new type of it, into large controlling passions.  There reigned
+throughout, an order and purity, an orderly disposition, as if by way
+of making ready for some gracious spousals.  The place itself was like
+a bride adorned for her husband; and its singular cheerfulness, the
+abundant light everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which he
+received a deep impression though without precisely reckoning wherein
+it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast just at
+first to the place to which he was next conducted by Cornelius still
+with a sort of eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he
+forbore the explanation which might well be looked for by his companion.
+
+[98] An old flower-garden in the rear of the house, set here and there
+with a venerable olive-tree--a picture in pensive shade and fiery
+blossom, as transparent, under that afternoon light, as the old
+miniature-painters' work on the walls of the chambers within--was
+bounded towards the west by a low, grass-grown hill.  A narrow opening
+cut in its steep side, like a solid blackness there, admitted Marius
+and his gleaming leader into a hollow cavern or crypt, neither more nor
+less in fact than the family burial-place of the Cecilii, to whom this
+residence belonged, brought thus, after an arrangement then becoming
+not unusual, into immediate connexion with the abode of the living, in
+bold assertion of that instinct of family life, which the sanction of
+the Holy Family was, hereafter, more and more to reinforce.  Here, in
+truth, was the centre of the peculiar religious expressiveness, of the
+sanctity, of the entire scene.  That "any person may, at his own
+election, constitute the place which belongs to him a religious place,
+by the carrying of his dead into it":--had been a maxim of old Roman
+law, which it was reserved for the early Christian societies, like that
+established here by the piety of a wealthy Roman matron, to realise in
+all its consequences.  Yet this was certainly unlike any cemetery
+Marius had ever before seen; most obviously in this, that these people
+had returned to the older fashion of disposing of [99] their dead by
+burial instead of burning. Originally a family sepulchre, it was
+growing to a vast necropolis, a whole township of the deceased, by
+means of some free expansion of the family interest beyond its amplest
+natural limits.  That air of venerable beauty which characterised the
+house and its precincts above, was maintained also here.  It was
+certainly with a great outlay of labour that these long, apparently
+endless, yet elaborately designed galleries, were increasing so
+rapidly, with their layers of beds or berths, one above another, cut,
+on either side the path-way, in the porous tufa, through which all the
+moisture filters downwards, leaving the parts above dry and wholesome.
+All alike were carefully closed, and with all the delicate costliness
+at command; some with simple tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of
+marble, enriched by fair inscriptions: marble taken, in some cases,
+from older pagan tombs--the inscription sometimes a palimpsest, the new
+epitaph being woven into the faded letters of an earlier one.
+
+As in an ordinary Roman cemetery, an abundance of utensils for the
+worship or commemoration of the departed was disposed around--incense,
+lights, flowers, their flame or their freshness being relieved to the
+utmost by contrast with the coal-like blackness of the soil itself, a
+volcanic sandstone, cinder of burnt-out fires. Would they ever kindle
+again?--possess, transform, the place?--Turning to an [100] ashen
+pallor where, at regular intervals, an air-hole or luminare let in a
+hard beam of clear but sunless light, with the heavy sleepers, row upon
+row within, leaving a passage so narrow that only one visitor at a time
+could move along, cheek to cheek with them, the high walls seemed to
+shut one in into the great company of the dead.  Only the long straight
+pathway lay before him; opening, however, here and there, into a small
+chamber, around a broad, table-like coffin or "altar-tomb," adorned
+even more profusely than the rest as if for some anniversary
+observance.  Clearly, these people, concurring in this with the special
+sympathies of Marius himself, had adopted the practice of burial from
+some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the body; a
+feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity, he would fain have
+penetrated.  The complete and irreparable disappearance of the dead in
+the funeral fire, so crushing to the spirits, as he for one had found
+it, had long since induced in him a preference for that other mode of
+settlement to the last sleep, as having something about it more
+home-like and hopeful, at least in outward seeming.  But whence the
+strange confidence that these "handfuls of white dust" would hereafter
+recompose themselves once more into exulting human creatures?  By what
+heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew from above, such as was certainly
+never again to reach the dead violets?-- [101] Januarius, Agapetus,
+Felicitas; Martyrs! refresh, I pray you, the soul of Cecil, of
+Cornelius! said an inscription, one of many, scratched, like a passing
+sigh, when it was still fresh in the mortar that had closed up the
+prison-door. All critical estimate of this bold hope, as sincere
+apparently as it was audacious in its claim, being set aside, here at
+least, carried further than ever before, was that pious, systematic
+commemoration of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal to forget
+or finally desert the helpless, had ever counted with Marius as the
+central exponent or symbol of all natural duty.
+
+ The stern soul of the excellent Jonathan Edwards, applying the
+faulty theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we know, the vision of
+infants not a span long, on the floor of hell.  Every visitor to the
+Catacombs must have observed, in a very different theological
+connexion, the numerous children's graves there--beds of infants, but a
+span long indeed, lowly "prisoners of hope," on these sacred floors.
+It was with great curiosity, certainly, that Marius considered them,
+decked in some instances with the favourite toys of their tiny
+occupants--toy-soldiers, little chariot-wheels, the entire
+paraphernalia of a baby-house; and when he saw afterwards the living
+children, who sang and were busy above--sang their psalm Laudate Pueri
+Dominum!--their very faces caught for him a sort of quaint unreality
+from the memory [102] of those others, the children of the Catacombs,
+but a little way below them.
+
+Here and there, mingling with the record of merely natural decease, and
+sometimes even at these children's graves, were the signs of violent
+death or "martyrdom,"--proofs that some "had loved not their lives unto
+the death"--in the little red phial of blood, the palm-branch, the red
+flowers for their heavenly "birthday."  About one sepulchre in
+particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly arrayed for what,
+by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia--a birthday, the
+peculiar arrangements of the whole place visibly centered.  And it was
+with a singular novelty of feeling, like the dawning of a fresh order
+of experiences upon him, that, standing beside those mournful relics,
+snatched in haste from the common place of execution not many years
+before, Marius became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the
+whole force of evidence for a certain strange, new hope, defining in
+its turn some new and weighty motive of action, which lay in deaths so
+tragic for the "Christian superstition."  Something of them he had
+heard indeed already.  They had seemed to him but one savagery the
+more, savagery self-provoked, in a cruel and stupid world.
+
+And yet these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards
+to-day, as if towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering,
+[103] in the remote background.  Yes! the interest, the expression, of
+the entire neighbourhood was instinct with it, as with the savour of
+some priceless incense.  Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching
+everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all
+this visible mortality, death's very self--Ah! lovelier than any fable
+of old mythology had ever thought to render it, in the utmost limits of
+fantasy; and this, in simple candour of feeling about a supposed fact.
+Peace! Pax tecum!--the word, the thought--was put forth everywhere,
+with images of hope, snatched sometimes from that jaded pagan world
+which had really afforded men so little of it from first to last; the
+various consoling images it had thrown off, of succour, of
+regeneration, of escape from the grave--Hercules wrestling with Death
+for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the
+Shepherd with his sheep, the Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his
+shoulders.  Yet these imageries after all, it must be confessed, formed
+but a slight contribution to the dominant effect of tranquil hope
+there--a kind of heroic cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart,
+as with the sense, again, of some real deliverance, which seemed to
+deepen the longer one lingered through these strange and awful
+passages.  A figure, partly pagan in character, yet most frequently
+repeated of all these visible parables--the figure of one just [104]
+escaped from the sea, still clinging as for life to the shore in
+surprised joy, together with the inscription beneath it, seemed best to
+express the prevailing sentiment of the place.  And it was just as he
+had puzzled out this inscription--
+
+     I went down to the bottom of the mountains.
+     The earth with her bars was about me for ever:
+     Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption!
+
+--that with no feeling of suddenness or change Marius found himself
+emerging again, like a later mystic traveller through similar dark
+places "quieted by hope," into the daylight.
+
+They were still within the precincts of the house, still in possession
+of that wonderful singing, although almost in the open country, with a
+great view of the Campagna before them, and the hills beyond.  The
+orchard or meadow, through which their path lay, was already gray with
+twilight, though the western sky, where the greater stars were visible,
+was still afloat in crimson splendour.  The colour of all earthly
+things seemed repressed by the contrast, yet with a sense of great
+richness lingering in their shadows.  At that moment the voice of the
+singers, a "voice of joy and health," concentrated itself with solemn
+antistrophic movement, into an evening, or "candle" hymn.
+
+     "Hail!  Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured,
+     Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest:--
+     Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung
+     With undefiled tongue."--
+
+[105] It was like the evening itself made audible, its hopes and fears,
+with the stars shining in the midst of it.  Half above, half below the
+level white mist, dividing the light from the darkness, came now the
+mistress of this place, the wealthy Roman matron, left early a widow a
+few years before, by Cecilius "Confessor and Saint." With a certain
+antique severity in the gathering of the long mantle, and with coif or
+veil folded decorously below the chin, "gray within gray," to the mind
+of Marius her temperate beauty brought reminiscences of the serious and
+virile character of the best female statuary of Greece.  Quite foreign,
+however, to any Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care,
+with which she carried a little child at rest in her arms.  Another, a
+year or two older, walked beside, the fingers of one hand within her
+girdle.  She paused for a moment with a greeting for Cornelius.
+
+That visionary scene was the close, the fitting close, of the
+afternoon's strange experiences.  A few minutes later, passing forward
+on his way along the public road, he could have fancied it a dream.
+The house of Cecilia grouped itself beside that other curious house he
+had lately visited at Tusculum.  And what a contrast was presented by
+the former, in its suggestions of hopeful industry, of immaculate
+cleanness, of responsive affection!--all alike determined by that
+transporting discovery of some fact, or series [106] of facts, in which
+the old puzzle of life had found its solution.  In truth, one of his
+most characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing
+for escape--for some sudden, relieving interchange, across the very
+spaces of life, it might be, along which he had lingered most
+pleasantly--for a lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon.
+It was like the necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set
+a window or open doorway in the background of his picture; or like a
+sick man's longing for northern coolness, and the whispering
+willow-trees, amid the breathless evergreen forests of the south.  To
+some such effect had this visit occurred to him, and through so slight
+an accident.  Rome and Roman life, just then, were come to seem like
+some stifling forest of bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign
+enchantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet with roots in
+a deep, down-trodden soil of poignant human susceptibilities.  In the
+midst of its suffocation, that old longing for escape had been
+satisfied by this vision of the church in Cecilia's house, as never
+before.  It was still, indeed, according to the unchangeable law of his
+temperament, to the eye, to the visual faculty of mind, that those
+experiences appealed--the peaceful light and shade, the boys whose very
+faces seemed to sing, the virginal beauty of the mother and her
+children. But, in his case, what was thus visible constituted a moral
+[107] or spiritual influence, of a somewhat exigent and controlling
+character, added anew to life, a new element therein, with which,
+consistently with his own chosen maxim, he must make terms.
+
+The thirst for every kind of experience, encouraged by a philosophy
+which taught that nothing was intrinsically great or small, good or
+evil, had ever been at strife in him with a hieratic refinement, in
+which the boy-priest survived, prompting always the selection of what
+was perfect of its kind, with subsequent loyal adherence of his soul
+thereto.  This had carried him along in a continuous communion with
+ideals, certainly realised in part, either in the conditions of his own
+being, or in the actual company about him, above all, in Cornelius.
+Surely, in this strange new society he had touched upon for the first
+time to-day--in this strange family, like "a garden enclosed"--was the
+fulfilment of all the preferences, the judgments, of that
+half-understood friend, which of late years had been his protection so
+often amid the perplexities of life.  Here, it might be, was, if not
+the cure, yet the solace or anodyne of his great sorrows--of that
+constitutional sorrowfulness, not peculiar to himself perhaps, but
+which had made his life certainly like one long "disease of the
+spirit."  Merciful intention made itself known remedially here, in the
+mere contact of the air, like a soft touch upon aching [108] flesh.  On
+the other hand, he was aware that new responsibilities also might be
+awakened--new and untried responsibilities--a demand for something from
+him in return.  Might this new vision, like the malignant beauty of
+pagan Medusa, be exclusive of any admiring gaze upon anything but
+itself?  At least he suspected that, after the beholding of it, he
+could never again be altogether as he had been before.
+
+NOTES
+
+93. +Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish mystic writer, 1688-1772.  Return.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII: "THE MINOR PEACE OF THE CHURCH"
+
+[109] FAITHFUL to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy and the
+impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to
+anything that, as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him
+strongly, Marius informed himself with much pains concerning the church
+in Cecilia's house; inclining at first to explain the peculiarities of
+that place by the establishment there of the schola or common hall of
+one of those burial-guilds, which then covered so much of the
+unofficial, and, as it might be called, subterranean enterprise of
+Roman society.
+
+And what he found, thus looking, literally, for the dead among the
+living, was the vision of a natural, a scrupulously natural, love,
+transforming, by some new gift of insight into the truth of human
+relationships, and under the urgency of some new motive by him so far
+unfathomable, all the conditions of life.  He saw, in all its primitive
+freshness and amid the lively facts of its actual coming into the
+world, as a reality of [110] experience, that regenerate type of
+humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and his successors, down to
+the best and purest days of the young Raphael, working under conditions
+very friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an artistic
+ideal.  He felt there, felt amid the stirring of some wonderful new
+hope within himself, the genius, the unique power of Christianity; in
+exercise then, as it has been exercised ever since, in spite of many
+hindrances, and under the most inopportune circumstances.
+Chastity,--as he seemed to understand--the chastity of men and women,
+amid all the conditions, and with the results, proper to such chastity,
+is the most beautiful thing in the world and the truest conservation of
+that creative energy by which men and women were first brought into it.
+The nature of the family, for which the better genius of old Rome
+itself had sincerely cared, of the family and its appropriate
+affections--all that love of one's kindred by which obviously one does
+triumph in some degree over death--had never been so felt before.
+Here, surely! in its genial warmth, its jealous exclusion of all that
+was opposed to it, to its own immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set
+around the sacred thing on every side, this development of the family
+did but carry forward, and give effect to, the purposes, the kindness,
+of nature itself, friendly to man.  As if by way of a due recognition
+of some immeasurable divine condescension manifest in a [111] certain
+historic fact, its influence was felt more especially at those points
+which demanded some sacrifice of one's self, for the weak, for the
+aged, for little children, and even for the dead.  And then, for its
+constant outward token, its significant manner or index, it issued in a
+certain debonair grace, and a certain mystic attractiveness, a
+courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that famed Greek
+"blitheness," or gaiety, or grace, in the handling of life, had been,
+after all, an unrivalled success.  Contrasting with the incurable
+insipidity even of what was most exquisite in the higher Roman life, of
+what was still truest to the primitive soul of goodness amid its evil,
+the new creation he now looked on--as it were a picture beyond the
+craft of any master of old pagan beauty--had indeed all the appropriate
+freshness of a "bride adorned for her husband."  Things new and old
+seemed to be coming as if out of some goodly treasure-house, the brain
+full of science, the heart rich with various sentiment, possessing
+withal this surprising healthfulness, this reality of heart.
+
+"You would hardly believe," writes Pliny,--to his own wife!--"what a
+longing for you possesses me.  Habit--that we have not been used to be
+apart--adds herein to the primary force of affection.  It is this keeps
+me awake at night fancying I see you beside me.  That is why my feet
+take me unconsciously to your sitting-room at those hours when I was
+wont to [112] visit you there.  That is why I turn from the door of the
+empty chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like an excluded lover."--
+
+There, is a real idyll from that family life, the protection of which
+had been the motive of so large a part of the religion of the Romans,
+still surviving among them; as it survived also in Aurelius, his
+disposition and aims, and, spite of slanderous tongues, in the attained
+sweetness of his interior life.  What Marius had been permitted to see
+was a realisation of such life higher still: and with--Yes! with a more
+effective sanction and motive than it had ever possessed before, in
+that fact, or series of facts, to be ascertained by those who would.
+
+The central glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had
+attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by
+cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went
+straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and
+appropriate instinct.  Pagan Rome, too, had its touching
+charity-sermons on occasions of great public distress; its
+charity-children in long file, in memory of the elder empress Faustina;
+its prototype, under patronage of Aesculapius, of the modern hospital
+for the sick on the island of Saint Bartholomew.  But what pagan
+charity was doing tardily, and as if with the painful calculation of
+old age, the church was doing, almost without thinking about it, with
+all the liberal [113] enterprise of youth, because it was her very
+being thus to do.  "You fail to realise your own good intentions," she
+seems to say, to pagan virtue, pagan kindness.  She identified herself
+with those intentions and advanced them with an unparalleled freedom
+and largeness.  The gentle Seneca would have reverent burial provided
+even for the dead body of a criminal.  Yet when a certain woman
+collected for interment the insulted remains of Nero, the pagan world
+surmised that she must be a Christian: only a Christian would have been
+likely to conceive so chivalrous a devotion towards mere wretchedness.
+"We refuse to be witnesses even of a homicide commanded by the law,"
+boasts the dainty conscience of a Christian apologist, "we take no part
+in your cruel sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we
+hold that to witness a murder is the same thing as to commit one."  And
+there was another duty almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau
+brought back to the degenerate society of a later age.  In an
+impassioned discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle
+their own infants; and there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers,
+which gratefully record this proof of natural affection as a thing then
+unusual.  In this matter too, what a sanction, what a provocative to
+natural duty, lay in that image discovered to Augustus by the Tiburtine
+Sibyl, amid the aurora of a new age, the image of the Divine Mother and
+the [114] Child, just then rising upon the world like the dawn!
+
+Christian belief, again, had presented itself as a great inspirer of
+chastity.  Chastity, in turn, realised in the whole scope of its
+conditions, fortified that rehabilitation of peaceful labour, after the
+mind, the pattern, of the workman of Galilee, which was another of the
+natural instincts of the catholic church, as being indeed the
+long-desired initiator of a religion of cheerfulness, as a true lover
+of the industry--so to term it--the labour, the creation, of God.
+
+And this severe yet genial assertion of the ideal of woman, of the
+family, of industry, of man's work in life, so close to the truth of
+nature, was also, in that charmed hour of the minor "Peace of the
+church," realised as an influence tending to beauty, to the adornment
+of life and the world.  The sword in the world, the right eye plucked
+out, the right hand cut off, the spirit of reproach which those images
+express, and of which monasticism is the fulfilment, reflect one side
+only of the nature of the divine missionary of the New Testament.
+Opposed to, yet blent with, this ascetic or militant character, is the
+function of the Good Shepherd, serene, blithe and debonair, beyond the
+gentlest shepherd of Greek mythology; of a king under whom the beatific
+vision is realised of a reign of peace--peace of heart--among men.
+Such aspect of the divine character of Christ, rightly understood,
+[115] is indeed the final consummation of that bold and brilliant
+hopefulness in man's nature, which had sustained him so far through his
+immense labours, his immense sorrows, and of which pagan gaiety in the
+handling of life, is but a minor achievement.  Sometimes one, sometimes
+the other, of those two contrasted aspects of its Founder, have, in
+different ages and under the urgency of different human needs, been at
+work also in the Christian Church.  Certainly, in that brief "Peace of
+the church" under the Antonines, the spirit of a pastoral security and
+happiness seems to have been largely expanded.  There, in the early
+church of Rome, was to be seen, and on sufficiently reasonable grounds,
+that satisfaction and serenity on a dispassionate survey of the facts
+of life, which all hearts had desired, though for the most part in
+vain, contrasting itself for Marius, in particular, very forcibly, with
+the imperial philosopher's so heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy.
+It was Christianity in its humanity, or even its humanism, in its
+generous hopes for man, its common sense and alacrity of cheerful
+service, its sympathy with all creatures, its appreciation of beauty
+and daylight.
+
+"The angel of righteousness," says the Shepherd of Hermas, the most
+characteristic religious book of that age, its Pilgrim's Progress--"the
+angel of righteousness is modest and delicate and meek and quiet.  Take
+from thyself grief, for (as Hamlet will one day discover) 'tis the
+sister [116] of doubt and ill-temper.  Grief is more evil than any
+other spirit of evil, and is most dreadful to the servants of God, and
+beyond all spirits destroyeth man.  For, as when good news is come to
+one in grief, straightway he forgetteth his former grief, and no longer
+attendeth to anything except the good news which he hath heard, so do
+ye, also! having received a renewal of your soul through the beholding
+of these good things.  Put on therefore gladness that hath always
+favour before God, and is acceptable unto Him, and delight thyself in
+it; for every man that is glad doeth the things that are good, and
+thinketh good thoughts, despising grief."--Such were the commonplaces
+of this new people, among whom so much of what Marius had valued most
+in the old world seemed to be under renewal and further promotion.
+Some transforming spirit was at work to harmonise contrasts, to deepen
+expression--a spirit which, in its dealing with the elements of ancient
+life, was guided by a wonderful tact of selection, exclusion,
+juxtaposition, begetting thereby a unique effect of freshness, a grave
+yet wholesome beauty, because the world of sense, the whole outward
+world was understood to set forth the veritable unction and royalty of
+a certain priesthood and kingship of the soul within, among the
+prerogatives of which was a delightful sense of freedom.
+
+The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was,
+had his visionary [117] aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato's
+peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have
+descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated
+Christian poetry and art as they came to be under the influence of
+Saint Francis of Assisi.  But if he dreamed on one of those nights of
+the beautiful house of Cecilia, its lights and flowers, of Cecilia
+herself moving among the lilies, with an enhanced grace as happens
+sometimes in healthy dreams, it was indeed hardly an anticipation.  He
+had lighted, by one of the peculiar intellectual good-fortunes of his
+life, upon a period when, even more than in the days of austere ascesis
+which had preceded and were to follow it, the church was true for a
+moment, truer perhaps than she would ever be again, to that element of
+profound serenity in the soul of her Founder, which reflected the
+eternal goodwill of God to man, "in whom," according to the oldest
+version of the angelic message, "He is well-pleased."
+
+For what Christianity did many centuries afterwards in the way of
+informing an art, a poetry, of graver and higher beauty, we may think,
+than that of Greek art and poetry at their best, was in truth
+conformable to the original tendency of its genius.  The genuine
+capacity of the catholic church in this direction, discoverable from
+the first in the New Testament, was also really at work, in that
+earlier "Peace," under [118] the Antonines--the minor "Peace of the
+church," as we might call it, in distinction from the final "Peace of
+the church," commonly so called, under Constantine.  Saint Francis,
+with his following in the sphere of poetry and of the arts--the voice
+of Dante, the hand of Giotto--giving visible feature and colour, and a
+palpable place among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-establish
+a continuity, only suspended in part by those troublous intervening
+centuries--the "dark ages," properly thus named--with the gracious
+spirit of the primitive church, as manifested in that first early
+springtide of her success.  The greater "Peace" of Constantine, on the
+other hand, in many ways, does but establish the exclusiveness, the
+puritanism, the ascetic gloom which, in the period between Aurelius and
+the first Christian emperor, characterised a church under
+misunderstanding or oppression, driven back, in a world of tasteless
+controversy, inwards upon herself.
+
+Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time was gone by when men
+became Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression, and
+with all the disturbing results of such a crisis.  At this period the
+larger number, perhaps, had been born Christians, had been ever with
+peaceful hearts in their "Father's house."  That earlier belief in the
+speedy coming of judgment and of the end of the world, with the
+consequences it so naturally involved in the temper [119] of men's
+minds, was dying out.  Every day the contrast between the church and
+the world was becoming less pronounced.  And now also, as the church
+rested awhile from opposition, that rapid self-development outward from
+within, proper to times of peace, was in progress. Antoninus Pius, it
+might seem, more truly even than Marcus Aurelius himself, was of that
+group of pagan saints for whom Dante, like Augustine, has provided in
+his scheme of the house with many mansions.  A sincere old Roman piety
+had urged his fortunately constituted nature to no mistakes, no
+offences against humanity.  And of his entire freedom from guile one
+reward had been this singular happiness, that under his rule there was
+no shedding of Christian blood.  To him belonged that half-humorous
+placidity of soul, of a kind illustrated later very effectively by
+Montaigne, which, starting with an instinct of mere fairness towards
+human nature and the world, seems at last actually to qualify its
+possessor to be almost the friend of the people of Christ.  Amiable, in
+its own nature, and full of a reasonable gaiety, Christianity has often
+had its advantage of characters such as that.  The geniality of
+Antoninus Pius, like the geniality of the earth itself, had permitted
+the church, as being in truth no alien from that old mother earth, to
+expand and thrive for a season as by natural process.  And that charmed
+period under the Antonines, extending to the later years of the [120]
+reign of Aurelius (beautiful, brief, chapter of ecclesiastical
+history!), contains, as one of its motives of interest, the earliest
+development of Christian ritual under the presidence of the church of
+Rome.
+
+Again as in one of those mystical, quaint visions of the Shepherd of
+Hermas, "the aged woman was become by degrees more and more youthful.
+And in the third vision she was quite young, and radiant with beauty:
+only her hair was that of an aged woman.  And at the last she was
+joyous, and seated upon a throne--seated upon a throne, because her
+position is a strong one."  The subterranean worship of the church
+belonged properly to those years of her early history in which it was
+illegal for her to worship at all.  But, hiding herself for awhile as
+conflict grew violent, she resumed, when there was felt to be no more
+than ordinary risk, her natural freedom.  And the kind of outward
+prosperity she was enjoying in those moments of her first "Peace," her
+modes of worship now blossoming freely above-ground, was re-inforced by
+the decision at this point of a crisis in her internal history.
+
+In the history of the church, as throughout the moral history of
+mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either of which it is possible
+to maintain--two conceptions, under one or the other of which we may
+represent to ourselves men's efforts towards a better
+life--corresponding to those two contrasted aspects, noted above, as
+[121] discernible in the picture afforded by the New Testament itself
+of the character of Christ.  The ideal of asceticism represents moral
+effort as essentially a sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of human
+nature to another, that it may live the more completely in what
+survives of it; while the ideal of culture represents it as a
+harmonious development of all the parts of human nature, in just
+proportion to each other.  It was to the latter order of ideas that the
+church, and especially the church of Rome in the age of the Antonines,
+freely lent herself.  In that earlier "Peace" she had set up for
+herself the ideal of spiritual development, under the guidance of an
+instinct by which, in those serene moments, she was absolutely true to
+the peaceful soul of her Founder.  "Goodwill to men," she said, "in
+whom God Himself is well-pleased!"  For a little while, at least, there
+was no forced opposition between the soul and the body, the world and
+the spirit, and the grace of graciousness itself was pre-eminently with
+the people of Christ.  Tact, good sense, ever the note of a true
+orthodoxy, the merciful compromises of the church, indicative of her
+imperial vocation in regard to all the varieties of human kind, with a
+universality of which the old Roman pastorship she was superseding is
+but a prototype, was already become conspicuous, in spite of a
+discredited, irritating, vindictive society, all around her.
+
+Against that divine urbanity and moderation [122] the old error of
+Montanus we read of dimly, was a fanatical revolt--sour, falsely
+anti-mundane, ever with an air of ascetic affectation, and a bigoted
+distaste in particular for all the peculiar graces of womanhood.  By it
+the desire to please was understood to come of the author of evil. In
+this interval of quietness, it was perhaps inevitable, by the law of
+reaction, that some such extravagances of the religious temper should
+arise.  But again the church of Rome, now becoming every day more and
+more completely the capital of the Christian world, checked the nascent
+Montanism, or puritanism of the moment, vindicating for all Christian
+people a cheerful liberty of heart, against many a narrow group of
+sectaries, all alike, in their different ways, accusers of the genial
+creation of God.  With her full, fresh faith in the Evangele--in a
+veritable regeneration of the earth and the body, in the dignity of
+man's entire personal being--for a season, at least, at that critical
+period in the development of Christianity, she was for reason, for
+common sense, for fairness to human nature, and generally for what may
+be called the naturalness of Christianity.--As also for its comely
+order: she would be "brought to her king in raiment of needlework."  It
+was by the bishops of Rome, diligently transforming themselves, in the
+true catholic sense, into universal pastors, that the path of what we
+must call humanism was thus defined.
+
+[123] And then, in this hour of expansion, as if now at last the
+catholic church might venture to show her outward lineaments as they
+really were, worship--"the beauty of holiness," nay! the elegance of
+sanctity--was developed, with a bold and confident gladness, the like
+of which has hardly been the ideal of worship in any later age.  The
+tables in fact were turned: the prize of a cheerful temper on a candid
+survey of life was no longer with the pagan world.  The aesthetic charm
+of the catholic church, her evocative power over all that is eloquent
+and expressive in the better mind of man, her outward comeliness, her
+dignifying convictions about human nature:--all this, as abundantly
+realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by the great medieval
+church-builders, by the great ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the
+masters of sacred music in the middle age--we may see already, in dim
+anticipation, in those charmed moments towards the end of the second
+century.  Dissipated or turned aside, partly through the fatal mistake
+of Marcus Aurelius himself, for a brief space of time we may discern
+that influence clearly predominant there.  What might seem harsh as
+dogma was already justifying itself as worship; according to the sound
+rule: Lex orandi, lex credendi--Our Creeds are but the brief abstract
+of our prayer and song.
+
+The wonderful liturgical spirit of the church, her wholly unparalleled
+genius for worship, [124] being thus awake, she was rapidly
+re-organising both pagan and Jewish elements of ritual, for the
+expanding therein of her own new heart of devotion.  Like the
+institutions of monasticism, like the Gothic style of architecture, the
+ritual system of the church, as we see it in historic retrospect, ranks
+as one of the great, conjoint, and (so to term them) necessary,
+products of human mind.  Destined for ages to come, to direct with so
+deep a fascination men's religious instincts, it was then already
+recognisable as a new and precious fact in the sum of things.  What has
+been on the whole the method of the church, as "a power of sweetness
+and patience," in dealing with matters like pagan art, pagan literature
+was even then manifest; and has the character of the moderation, the
+divine moderation of Christ himself.  It was only among the ignorant,
+indeed, only in the "villages," that Christianity, even in conscious
+triumph over paganism, was really betrayed into iconoclasm.  In the
+final "Peace" of the Church under Constantine, while there was plenty
+of destructive fanaticism in the country, the revolution was
+accomplished in the larger towns, in a manner more orderly and
+discreet--in the Roman manner.  The faithful were bent less on the
+destruction of the old pagan temples than on their conversion to a new
+and higher use; and, with much beautiful furniture ready to hand, they
+became Christian sanctuaries.
+
+[125] Already, in accordance with such maturer wisdom, the church of
+the "Minor Peace" had adopted many of the graces of pagan feeling and
+pagan custom; as being indeed a living creature, taking up,
+transforming, accommodating still more closely to the human heart what
+of right belonged to it.  In this way an obscure synagogue was expanded
+into the catholic church.  Gathering, from a richer and more varied
+field of sound than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies,
+some notes of which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after
+generations of interrupted development, formed into the Gregorian
+music, she was already, as we have heard, the house of song--of a
+wonderful new music and poesy.  As if in anticipation of the sixteenth
+century, the church was becoming "humanistic," in an earlier, and
+unimpeachable Renaissance.  Singing there had been in abundance from
+the first; though often it dared only be "of the heart."  And it burst
+forth, when it might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical
+music; the Jewish psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now,
+gradually, from Greek into Latin--broken Latin, into Italian, as the
+ritual use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the
+earlier authorised language of the Church. Through certain surviving
+remnants of Greek in the later Latin liturgies, we may still discern a
+highly interesting intermediate phase of ritual development, when the
+Greek [126] and the Latin were in combination; the poor, surely!--the
+poor and the children of that liberal Roman church--responding already
+in their own "vulgar tongue," to an office said in the original,
+liturgical Greek.  That hymn sung in the early morning, of which Pliny
+had heard, was kindling into the service of the Mass.
+
+The Mass, indeed, would appear to have been said continuously from the
+Apostolic age.  Its details, as one by one they become visible in later
+history, have already the character of what is ancient and venerable.
+"We are very old, and ye are young!" they seem to protest, to those who
+fail to understand them.  Ritual, in fact, like all other elements of
+religion, must grow and cannot be made--grow by the same law of
+development which prevails everywhere else, in the moral as in the
+physical world.  As regards this special phase of the religious life,
+however, such development seems to have been unusually rapid in the
+subterranean age which preceded Constantine; and in the very first days
+of the final triumph of the church the Mass emerges to general view
+already substantially complete. "Wisdom" was dealing, as with the dust
+of creeds and philosophies, so also with the dust of outworn religious
+usage, like the very spirit of life itself, organising soul and body
+out of the lime and clay of the earth.  In a generous eclecticism,
+within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power
+within her, [127] she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other
+matters so in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various
+sources--Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan--to adorn and beautify the greatest act
+of worship the world has seen.  It was thus the liturgy of the church
+came to be--full of consolations for the human soul, and destined,
+surely! one day, under the sanction of so many ages of human
+experience, to take exclusive possession of the religious consciousness.
+
+     TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM VENEREMUR CERNUI:
+     ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
+     NOVO CEDAT RITUI.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII: DIVINE SERVICE.
+
+     "Wisdom hath builded herself a house: she hath mingled her wine:
+     she hath also prepared for herself a table."
+
+[128] THE more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present
+instances of the summing up of an entire world of complex associations
+under some single form, like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of
+frescoes which commemorate The Acts of Saint Francis, at Assisi, or
+like the play of Hamlet or Faust.  It was not in an image, or series of
+images, yet still in a sort of dramatic action, and with the unity of a
+single appeal to eye and ear, that Marius about this time found all his
+new impressions set forth, regarding what he had already recognised,
+intellectually, as for him at least the most beautiful thing in the
+world.
+
+To understand the influence upon him of what follows the reader must
+remember that it was an experience which came amid a deep sense of
+vacuity in life.  The fairest products of [129] the earth seemed to be
+dropping to pieces, as if in men's very hands, around him.  How real
+was their sorrow, and his!  "His observation of life" had come to be
+like the constant telling of a sorrowful rosary, day after day; till,
+as if taking infection from the cloudy sorrow of the mind, the eye
+also, the very senses, were grown faint and sick.  And now it happened
+as with the actual morning on which he found himself a spectator of
+this new thing.  The long winter had been a season of unvarying
+sullenness.  At last, on this day he awoke with a sharp flash of
+lightning in the earliest twilight: in a little while the heavy rain
+had filtered the air: the clear light was abroad; and, as though the
+spring had set in with a sudden leap in the heart of things, the whole
+scene around him lay like some untarnished picture beneath a sky of
+delicate blue.  Under the spell of his late depression, Marius had
+suddenly determined to leave Rome for a while. But desiring first to
+advertise Cornelius of his movements, and failing to find him in his
+lodgings, he had ventured, still early in the day, to seek him in the
+Cecilian villa.  Passing through its silent and empty court-yard he
+loitered for a moment, to admire. Under the clear but immature light of
+winter morning after a storm, all the details of form and colour in the
+old marbles were distinctly visible, and with a kind of severity or
+sadness--so it struck him--amid their beauty: [130] in them, and in all
+other details of the scene--the cypresses, the bunches of pale
+daffodils in the grass, the curves of the purple hills of Tusculum,
+with the drifts of virgin snow still lying in their hollows.
+
+The little open door, through which he passed from the court-yard,
+admitted him into what was plainly the vast Lararium, or domestic
+sanctuary, of the Cecilian family, transformed in many particulars, but
+still richly decorated, and retaining much of its ancient furniture in
+metal-work and costly stone.  The peculiar half-light of dawn seemed to
+be lingering beyond its hour upon the solemn marble walls; and here,
+though at that moment in absolute silence, a great company of people
+was assembled.  In that brief period of peace, during which the church
+emerged for awhile from her jealously-guarded subterranean life, the
+rigour of an earlier rule of exclusion had been relaxed.  And so it
+came to pass that, on this morning Marius saw for the first time the
+wonderful spectacle--wonderful, especially, in its evidential power
+over himself, over his own thoughts--of those who believe.
+
+There were noticeable, among those present, great varieties of rank, of
+age, of personal type.  The Roman ingenuus, with the white toga and
+gold ring, stood side by side with his slave; and the air of the whole
+company was, above all, a grave one, an air of recollection. Coming
+[131] thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so entirely united,
+in a silence so profound, for purposes unknown to him, Marius felt for
+a moment as if he had stumbled by chance upon some great conspiracy.
+Yet that could scarcely be, for the people here collected might have
+figured as the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new world, from the
+very face of which discontent had passed away. Corresponding to the
+variety of human type there present, was the various expression of
+every form of human sorrow assuaged.  What desire, what fulfilment of
+desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features of these ranks of
+aged men and women of humble condition? Those young men, bent down so
+discreetly on the details of their sacred service, had faced life and
+were glad, by some science, or light of knowledge they had, to which
+there had certainly been no parallel in the older world.  Was some
+credible message from beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"--a
+message of hope, regarding the place of men's souls and their interest
+in the sum of things--already moulding anew their very bodies, and
+looks, and voices, now and here? At least, there was a cleansing and
+kindling flame at work in them, which seemed to make everything else
+Marius had ever known look comparatively vulgar and mean.  There were
+the children, above all--troops of children--reminding him of those
+pathetic children's graves, like cradles or garden- [132] beds, he had
+noticed in his first visit to these places; and they more than
+satisfied the odd curiosity he had then conceived about them, wondering
+in what quaintly expressive forms they might come forth into the
+daylight, if awakened from sleep.  Children of the Catacombs, some but
+"a span long," with features not so much beautiful as heroic (that
+world of new, refining sentiment having set its seal even on
+childhood), they retained certainly no stain or trace of anything
+subterranean this morning, in the alacrity of their worship--as ready
+as if they had been at play--stretching forth their hands, crying,
+chanting in a resonant voice, and with boldly upturned faces, Christe
+Eleison!
+
+For the silence--silence, amid those lights of early morning to which
+Marius had always been constitutionally impressible, as having in them
+a certain reproachful austerity--was broken suddenly by resounding
+cries of Kyrie Eleison!  Christe Eleison! repeated alternately, again
+and again, until the bishop, rising from his chair, made sign that this
+prayer should cease.  But the voices burst out once more presently, in
+richer and more varied melody, though still of an antiphonal character;
+the men, the women and children, the deacons, the people, answering one
+another, somewhat after the manner of a Greek chorus.  But again with
+what a novelty of poetic accent; what a genuine expansion of heart;
+what profound intimations for the [133] intellect, as the meaning of
+the words grew upon him! Cum grandi affectu et compunctione
+dicatur--says an ancient eucharistic order; and certainly, the mystic
+tone of this praying and singing was one with the expression of
+deliverance, of grateful assurance and sincerity, upon the faces of
+those assembled.  As if some searching correction, a regeneration of
+the body by the spirit, had begun, and was already gone a great way,
+the countenances of men, women, and children alike had a brightness on
+them which he could fancy reflected upon himself--an amenity, a mystic
+amiability and unction, which found its way most readily of all to the
+hearts of children themselves.  The religious poetry of those Hebrew
+psalms--Benedixisti Domine terram tuam: Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede
+a dextris meis--was certainly in marvellous accord with the lyrical
+instinct of his own character.  Those august hymns, he thought, must
+thereafter ever remain by him as among the well-tested powers in things
+to soothe and fortify the soul.  One could never grow tired of them!
+
+In the old pagan worship there had been little to call the
+understanding into play.  Here, on the other hand, the utterance, the
+eloquence, the music of worship conveyed, as Marius readily understood,
+a fact or series of facts, for intellectual reception. That became
+evident, more especially, in those lessons, or sacred readings, which,
+like the singing, in broken [134] vernacular Latin, occurred at certain
+intervals, amid the silence of the assembly. There were readings, again
+with bursts of chanted invocation between for fuller light on a
+difficult path, in which many a vagrant voice of human philosophy,
+haunting men's minds from of old, recurred with clearer accent than had
+ever belonged to it before, as if lifted, above its first intention,
+into the harmonies of some supreme system of knowledge or doctrine, at
+length complete.  And last of all came a narrative which, with a
+thousand tender memories, every one appeared to know by heart,
+displaying, in all the vividness of a picture for the eye, the mournful
+figure of him towards whom this whole act of worship still consistently
+turned--a figure which seemed to have absorbed, like some rich tincture
+in his garment, all that was deep-felt and impassioned in the
+experiences of the past.
+
+It was the anniversary of his birth as a little child they celebrated
+to-day.  Astiterunt reges terrae: so the Gradual, the "Song of
+Degrees," proceeded, the young men on the steps of the altar responding
+in deep, clear, antiphon or chorus--
+
+     Astiterunt reges terrae--
+     Adversus sanctum puerum tuum, Jesum:
+     Nunc, Domine, da servis tuis loqui verbum tuum--
+     Et signa fieri, per nomen sancti pueri Jesu.
+
+And the proper action of the rite itself, like a [135] half-opened book
+to be read by the duly initiated mind took up those suggestions, and
+carried them forward into the present, as having reference to a power
+still efficacious, still after some mystic sense even now in action
+among the people there assembled.  The entire office, indeed, with its
+interchange of lessons, hymns, prayer, silence, was itself like a
+single piece of highly composite, dramatic music; a "song of degrees,"
+rising steadily to a climax.  Notwithstanding the absence of any
+central image visible to the eye, the entire ceremonial process, like
+the place in which it was enacted, was weighty with symbolic
+significance, seemed to express a single leading motive. The mystery,
+if such in fact it was, centered indeed in the actions of one visible
+person, distinguished among the assistants, who stood ranged in
+semicircle around him, by the extreme fineness of his white vestments,
+and the pointed cap with the golden ornaments upon his head.
+
+Nor had Marius ever seen the pontifical character, as he conceived
+it--sicut unguentum in capite, descendens in oram vestimenti--so fully
+realised, as in the expression, the manner and voice, of this novel
+pontiff, as he took his seat on the white chair placed for him by the
+young men, and received his long staff into his hand, or moved his
+hands--hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious
+power--at the Lavabo, or at the various benedictions, or [136] to bless
+certain objects on the table before him, chanting in cadence of a grave
+sweetness the leading parts of the rite.  What profound unction and
+mysticity!  The solemn character of the singing was at its height when
+he opened his lips.  Like some new sort of rhapsodos, it was for the
+moment as if he alone possessed the words of the office, and they
+flowed anew from some permanent source of inspiration within him.  The
+table or altar at which he presided, below a canopy on delicate spiral
+columns, was in fact the tomb of a youthful "witness," of the family of
+the Cecilii, who had shed his blood not many years before, and whose
+relics were still in this place.  It was for his sake the bishop put
+his lips so often to the surface before him; the regretful memory of
+that death entwining itself, though not without certain notes of
+triumph, as a matter of special inward significance, throughout a
+service, which was, before all else, from first to last, a
+commemoration of the dead.
+
+A sacrifice also,--a sacrifice, it might seem, like the most primitive,
+the most natural and enduringly significant of old pagan sacrifices, of
+the simplest fruits of the earth.  And in connexion with this
+circumstance again, as in the actual stones of the building so in the
+rite itself, what Marius observed was not so much new matter as a new
+spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many observances not
+[137] witnessed for the first time to-day.  Men and women came to the
+altar successively, in perfect order, and deposited below the
+lattice-work of pierced white marble, their baskets of wheat and
+grapes, incense, oil for the sanctuary lamps; bread and wine
+especially--pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan
+vineyards.  There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and
+animating, of the earth's gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself,
+now in some way redeemed at last, of all that we can touch or see, in
+the midst of a jaded world that had lost the true sense of such things,
+and in strong contrast to the wise emperor's renunciant and impassive
+attitude towards them.  Certain portions of that bread and wine were
+taken into the bishop's hands; and thereafter, with an increasing
+mysticity and effusion the rite proceeded.  Still in a strain of
+inspired supplication, the antiphonal singing developed, from this
+point, into a kind of dialogue between the chief minister and the whole
+assisting company--
+
+     SURSUM CORDA!
+     HABEMUS AD DOMINUM.
+     GRATIAS AGAMUS DOMINO DEO NOSTRO!--
+
+It might have been thought the business, the duty or service of young
+men more particularly, as they stood there in long ranks, and in severe
+and simple vesture of the purest white--a service in which they would
+seem to be flying [138] for refuge, as with their precious, their
+treacherous and critical youth in their hands, to one--Yes! one like
+themselves, who yet claimed their worship, a worship, above all, in the
+way of Aurelius, in the way of imitation. Adoramus te Christe, quia per
+crucem tuam redemisti mundum!--they cry together.  So deep is the
+emotion that at moments it seems to Marius as if some there present
+apprehend that prayer prevails, that the very object of this pathetic
+crying himself draws near.  From the first there had been the sense, an
+increasing assurance, of one coming:--actually with them now, according
+to the oft-repeated affirmation or petition, Dominus vobiscum!  Some at
+least were quite sure of it; and the confidence of this remnant fired
+the hearts, and gave meaning to the bold, ecstatic worship, of all the
+rest about them.
+
+Prompted especially by the suggestions of that mysterious old Jewish
+psalmody, so new to him--lesson and hymn--and catching therewith a
+portion of the enthusiasm of those beside him, Marius could discern
+dimly, behind the solemn recitation which now followed, at once a
+narrative and a prayer, the most touching image truly that had ever
+come within the scope of his mental or physical gaze.  It was the image
+of a young man giving up voluntarily, one by one, for the greatest of
+ends, the greatest gifts; actually parting with himself, above all,
+with the serenity, the divine serenity, of his [139] own soul; yet from
+the midst of his desolation crying out upon the greatness of his
+success, as if foreseeing this very worship.*  As centre of the
+supposed facts which for these people were become so constraining a
+motive of hopefulness, of activity, that image seemed to display itself
+with an overwhelming claim on human gratitude. What Saint Lewis of
+France discerned, and found so irresistibly touching, across the
+dimness of many centuries, as a painful thing done for love of him by
+one he had never seen, was to them almost as a thing of yesterday; and
+their hearts were whole with it.  It had the force, among their
+interests, of an almost recent event in the career of one whom their
+fathers' fathers might have known.  From memories so sublime, yet so
+close at hand, had the narrative descended in which these acts of
+worship centered; though again the names of some more recently dead
+were mingled in it.  And it seemed as if the very dead were aware; to
+be stirring beneath the slabs of the sepulchres which lay so near, that
+they might associate themselves to this enthusiasm--to this exalted
+worship of Jesus.
+
+One by one, at last, the faithful approach to receive from the chief
+minister morsels of the great, white, wheaten cake, he had taken into
+his hands--Perducat vos ad vitam aeternam! he prays, half-silently, as
+they depart again, after [140] discreet embraces.  The Eucharist of
+those early days was, even more entirely than at any later or happier
+time, an act of thanksgiving; and while the remnants of the feast are
+borne away for the reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the
+rite reaches its highest point in the singing of a hymn: a hymn like
+the spontaneous product of two opposed militant companies, contending
+accordantly together, heightening, accumulating, their witness,
+provoking one another's worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry.
+
+Ite!  Missa est!--cried the young deacons: and Marius departed from
+that strange scene along with the rest.  What was it?--Was it this made
+the way of Cornelius so pleasant through the world?  As for Marius
+himself,--the natural soul of worship in him had at last been satisfied
+as never before.  He felt, as he left that place, that he must
+hereafter experience often a longing memory, a kind of thirst, for all
+this, over again.  And it seemed moreover to define what he must
+require of the powers, whatsoever they might be, that had brought him
+into the world at all, to make him not unhappy in it.
+
+NOTES
+
+139. *Psalm xxii.22-31.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV: A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINARY
+
+[141] IN cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says Pliny--studia
+hilaritate proveniunt.  It was still the habit of Marius, encouraged by
+his experience that sleep is not only a sedative but the best of
+stimulants, to seize the morning hours for creation, making profit when
+he might of the wholesome serenity which followed a dreamless night.
+"The morning for creation," he would say; "the afternoon for the
+perfecting labour of the file; the evening for reception--the reception
+of matter from without one, of other men's words and thoughts--matter
+for our own dreams, or the merely mechanic exercise of the brain,
+brooding thereon silently, in its dark chambers."  To leave home early
+in the day was therefore a rare thing for him.  He was induced so to do
+on the occasion of a visit to Rome of the famous writer Lucian, whom he
+had been bidden to meet.  The breakfast over, he walked away with the
+learned guest, having offered to be his guide [142] to the lecture-room
+of a well-known Greek rhetorician and expositor of the Stoic
+philosophy, a teacher then much in fashion among the studious youth of
+Rome.  On reaching the place, however, they found the doors closed,
+with a slip of writing attached, which proclaimed "a holiday"; and the
+morning being a fine one, they walked further, along the Appian Way.
+Mortality, with which the Queen of Ways--in reality the favourite
+cemetery of Rome--was so closely crowded, in every imaginable form of
+sepulchre, from the tiniest baby-house, to the massive monument out of
+which the Middle Age would adapt a fortress-tower, might seem, on a
+morning like this, to be "smiling through tears."  The flower-stalls
+just beyond the city gates presented to view an array of posies and
+garlands, fresh enough for a wedding.  At one and another of them
+groups of persons, gravely clad, were making their bargains before
+starting for some perhaps distant spot on the highway, to keep a dies
+rosationis, this being the time of roses, at the grave of a deceased
+relation.  Here and there, a funeral procession was slowly on its way,
+in weird contrast to the gaiety of the hour.
+
+The two companions, of course, read the epitaphs as they strolled
+along.  In one, reminding them of the poet's--Si lacrimae prosunt,
+visis te ostende videri!--a woman prayed that her lost husband might
+visit her dreams.  Their characteristic note, indeed, was an imploring
+cry, still [143] to be sought after by the living.  "While I live,"
+such was the promise of a lover to his dead mistress, "you will receive
+this homage: after my death,--who can tell?"--post mortem nescio.  "If
+ghosts, my sons, do feel anything after death, my sorrow will be
+lessened by your frequent coming to me here!"  "This is a privileged
+tomb; to my family and descendants has been conceded the right of
+visiting this place as often as they please."  "This is an eternal
+habitation; here lie I; here I shall lie for ever." "Reader! if you
+doubt that the soul survives, make your oblation and a prayer for me;
+and you shall understand!"
+
+The elder of the two readers, certainly, was little affected by those
+pathetic suggestions.  It was long ago that after visiting the banks of
+the Padus, where he had sought in vain for the poplars (sisters of
+Phaethon erewhile) whose tears became amber, he had once for all
+arranged for himself a view of the world exclusive of all reference to
+what might lie beyond its "flaming barriers."  And at the age of sixty
+he had no misgivings.  His elegant and self-complacent but far from
+unamiable scepticism, long since brought to perfection, never failed
+him.  It surrounded him, as some are surrounded by a magic ring of fine
+aristocratic manners, with "a rampart," through which he himself never
+broke, nor permitted any thing or person to break upon him.  Gay,
+animated, content with his old age [144] as it was, the aged student
+still took a lively interest in studious youth.--Could Marius inform
+him of any such, now known to him in Rome?  What did the young men
+learn, just then? and how?
+
+In answer, Marius became fluent concerning the promise of one young
+student, the son, as it presently appeared, of parents of whom Lucian
+himself knew something: and soon afterwards the lad was seen coming
+along briskly--a lad with gait and figure well enough expressive of the
+sane mind in the healthy body, though a little slim and worn of
+feature, and with a pair of eyes expressly designed, it might seem, for
+fine glancings at the stars.  At the sight of Marius he paused
+suddenly, and with a modest blush on recognising his companion, who
+straightway took with the youth, so prettily enthusiastic, the freedom
+of an old friend.
+
+In a few moments the three were seated together, immediately above the
+fragrant borders of a rose-farm, on the marble bench of one of the
+exhedrae for the use of foot-passengers at the roadside, from which
+they could overlook the grand, earnest prospect of the Campagna, and
+enjoy the air.  Fancying that the lad's plainly written enthusiasm had
+induced in the elder speaker somewhat more fervour than was usual with
+him, Marius listened to the conversation which follows.--
+
+"Ah!  Hermotimus!  Hurrying to lecture! [145] --if I may judge by your
+pace, and that volume in your hand.  You were thinking hard as you came
+along, moving your lips and waving your arms.  Some fine speech you
+were pondering, some knotty question, some viewy doctrine--not to be
+idle for a moment, to be making progress in philosophy, even on your
+way to the schools.  To-day, however, you need go no further.  We read
+a notice at the schools that there would be no lecture.  Stay
+therefore, and talk awhile with us.
+
+--With pleasure, Lucian.--Yes!  I was ruminating yesterday's
+conference.  One must not lose a moment.  Life is short and art is
+long!  And it was of the art of medicine, that was first said--a thing
+so much easier than divine philosophy, to which one can hardly attain
+in a lifetime, unless one be ever wakeful, ever on the watch. And here
+the hazard is no little one:--By the attainment of a true philosophy to
+attain happiness; or, having missed both, to perish, as one of the
+vulgar herd.
+
+--The prize is a great one, Hermotimus! and you must needs be near it,
+after these months of toil, and with that scholarly pallor of yours.
+Unless, indeed, you have already laid hold upon it, and kept us in the
+dark.
+
+--How could that be, Lucian?  Happiness, as Hesiod says, abides very
+far hence; and the way to it is long and steep and rough.  I see myself
+still at the beginning of my journey; still [146] but at the mountain's
+foot.  I am trying with all my might to get forward.  What I need is a
+hand, stretched out to help me.
+
+--And is not the master sufficient for that?  Could he not, like Zeus
+in Homer, let down to you, from that high place, a golden cord, to draw
+you up thither, to himself and to that Happiness, to which he ascended
+so long ago?
+
+--The very point, Lucian!  Had it depended on him I should long ago
+have been caught up.  'Tis I, am wanting.
+
+--Well! keep your eye fixed on the journey's end, and that happiness
+there above, with confidence in his goodwill.
+
+--Ah! there are many who start cheerfully on the journey and proceed a
+certain distance, but lose heart when they light on the obstacles of
+the way.  Only, those who endure to the end do come to the mountain's
+top, and thereafter live in Happiness:--live a wonderful manner of
+life, seeing all other people from that great height no bigger than
+tiny ants.
+
+--What little fellows you make of us--less than the pygmies--down in
+the dust here.  Well! we, 'the vulgar herd,' as we creep along, will
+not forget you in our prayers, when you are seated up there above the
+clouds, whither you have been so long hastening.  But tell me,
+Hermotimus!--when do you expect to arrive there?
+
+--Ah! that I know not.  In twenty years, [147] perhaps, I shall be
+really on the summit.--A great while! you think.  But then, again, the
+prize I contend for is a great one.
+
+--Perhaps!  But as to those twenty years--that you will live so long.
+Has the master assured you of that?  Is he a prophet as well as a
+philosopher?  For I suppose you would not endure all this, upon a mere
+chance--toiling day and night, though it might happen that just ere the
+last step, Destiny seized you by the foot and plucked you thence, with
+your hope still unfulfilled.
+
+--Hence, with these ill-omened words, Lucian!  Were I to survive but
+for a day, I should be happy, having once attained wisdom.
+
+--How?--Satisfied with a single day, after all those labours?
+
+--Yes! one blessed moment were enough!
+
+--But again, as you have never been, how know you that happiness is to
+be had up there, at all--the happiness that is to make all this worth
+while?
+
+--I believe what the master tells me.  Of a certainty he knows, being
+now far above all others.
+
+--And what was it he told you about it?  Is it riches, or glory, or
+some indescribable pleasure?
+
+--Hush! my friend!  All those are nothing in comparison of the life
+there.
+
+--What, then, shall those who come to the [148] end of this
+discipline--what excellent thing shall they receive, if not these?
+
+--Wisdom, the absolute goodness and the absolute beauty, with the sure
+and certain knowledge of all things--how they are.  Riches and glory
+and pleasure--whatsoever belongs to the body--they have cast from them:
+stripped bare of all that, they mount up, even as Hercules, consumed in
+the fire, became a god.  He too cast aside all that he had of his
+earthly mother, and bearing with him the divine element, pure and
+undefiled, winged his way to heaven from the discerning flame.  Even so
+do they, detached from all that others prize, by the burning fire of a
+true philosophy, ascend to the highest degree of happiness.
+
+--Strange!  And do they never come down again from the heights to help
+those whom they left below?  Must they, when they be once come thither,
+there remain for ever, laughing, as you say, at what other men prize?
+
+--More than that!  They whose initiation is entire are subject no
+longer to anger, fear, desire, regret.  Nay!  They scarcely feel at all.
+
+--Well! as you have leisure to-day, why not tell an old friend in what
+way you first started on your philosophic journey?  For, if I might, I
+should like to join company with you from this very day.
+
+--If you be really willing, Lucian! you will learn in no long time your
+advantage over all [149] other people.  They will seem but as children,
+so far above them will be your thoughts.
+
+--Well!  Be you my guide!  It is but fair.  But tell me--Do you allow
+learners to contradict, if anything is said which they don't think
+right?
+
+--No, indeed!  Still, if you wish, oppose your questions.  In that way
+you will learn more easily.
+
+--Let me know, then--Is there one only way which leads to a true
+philosophy--your own way--the way of the Stoics: or is it true, as I
+have heard, that there are many ways of approaching it?
+
+--Yes!  Many ways!  There are the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, and
+those who call themselves after Plato: there are the enthusiasts for
+Diogenes, and Antisthenes, and the followers of Pythagoras, besides
+others.
+
+--It was true, then.  But again, is what they say the same or different?
+
+--Very different.
+
+--Yet the truth, I conceive, would be one and the same, from all of
+them.  Answer me then--In what, or in whom, did you confide when you
+first betook yourself to philosophy, and seeing so many doors open to
+you, passed them all by and went in to the Stoics, as if there alone
+lay the way of truth?  What token had you?  Forget, please, all you are
+to-day--half-way, or more, on the philosophic journey: [150] answer me
+as you would have done then, a mere outsider as I am now.
+
+--Willingly!  It was there the great majority went!  'Twas by that I
+judged it to be the better way.
+
+--A majority how much greater than the Epicureans, the Platonists, the
+Peripatetics?  You, doubtless, counted them respectively, as with the
+votes in a scrutiny.
+
+--No!  But this was not my only motive.  I heard it said by every one
+that the Epicureans were soft and voluptuous, the Peripatetics
+avaricious and quarrelsome, and Plato's followers puffed up with pride.
+But of the Stoics, not a few pronounced that they were true men, that
+they knew everything, that theirs was the royal road, the one road, to
+wealth, to wisdom, to all that can be desired.
+
+--Of course those who said this were not themselves Stoics: you would
+not have believed them--still less their opponents.  They were the
+vulgar, therefore.
+
+--True!  But you must know that I did not trust to others exclusively.
+I trusted also to myself--to what I saw.  I saw the Stoics going
+through the world after a seemly manner, neatly clad, never in excess,
+always collected, ever faithful to the mean which all pronounce
+'golden.'
+
+--You are trying an experiment on me.  You would fain see how far you
+can mislead [151] me as to your real ground.  The kind of probation you
+describe is applicable, indeed, to works of art, which are rightly
+judged by their appearance to the eye.  There is something in the
+comely form, the graceful drapery, which tells surely of the hand of
+Pheidias or Alcamenes.  But if philosophy is to be judged by outward
+appearances, what would become of the blind man, for instance, unable
+to observe the attire and gait of your friends the 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.  But can 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 me!  You attached yourself to these
+men--did you not?--because of a certain love you had for the mind in
+them, the thoughts they possessed desiring the mind in you to be
+improved thereby?
+
+--Assuredly!
+
+--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 [152] 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.
+
+--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 matters--how to make a perfectly safe choice.
+And, do you listen.
+
+--I will; there may be something worth knowing in what you 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 city--a 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 [153] everything else cause men to contend
+against each other, having no place upon them.  Gold and silver,
+pleasure, vainglory, they have long since banished, as being
+unprofitable to the commonwealth; and their 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 them--only 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,
+offering 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 [154] men--aye! and cripples--all indeed
+who truly desired that citizenship.  For the only legal conditions of
+enrolment were--not wealth, nor bodily beauty, nor noble
+ancestry--things not named among them--but 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 not--in 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 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 [155] will find no better
+guides than those.  If you wish to get to Corinth, you will follow the
+traces of Zeno and Chrysippus.  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 discovered the truth.
+Suppose now, that, being as I am, ignorant which of all philosophers is
+really in possession of truth, I choose your sect, relying on
+yourself--my 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 do--listen to one party and refuse to
+let the other speak for himself.  If judges act thus, there may be an
+appeal to another tribunal.'  What should I answer?  Would it [156] 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
+suppose, in like manner, that his teachers have really prevailed 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 I say.  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 [157] 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 for 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?
+
+--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, [158] might say that it
+is they, in truth, who make two and two equal four, while you make them
+five or seven.  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 something 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 understand my meaning. To
+make it clear, then, let us suppose that two men had entered a temple,
+of Aesculapius,--say! or Bacchus: and that afterwards one of the sacred
+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,
+[159] 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 necessary 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 brass, of silver, [160] 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 sacrilege--those 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 philosophy--which of all
+philosophies one ought to follow--he 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 somebody 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 [161] 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 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 [162] be, you philosophers may be
+able to tell better than I.  But so 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 Falsehood: 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
+enamoured--that 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 still, does it not follow from what you said, that we must
+renounce philosophy and pass our days in idleness?
+
+--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 [163] 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 [164] the wine-merchants,
+tasting and comparing their wines?
+
+--By no means.
+
+--No!  You were contented to order the first good wine you found at
+your price.  By tasting a little you were ascertained of the quality of
+the whole cask.  How if you had gone to each of the merchants in turn,
+and said, 'I wish to buy a cotyle 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 throughout.
+But have the philosophers--has your own [165] 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 same--Ah! 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.  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 me--might 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 I have another similitude to propose, as regards this tasting
+of philosophy.  Don't think I blaspheme her if I say that it may be
+with her as with some deadly poison, [166] 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; otherwise 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; in jealousy of
+heart, I believe, because I have made some progress in doctrine whereas
+you have neglected yourself.
+
+--Well!  Don't attend to me!  Treat me as a 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 unchanged. Reason still
+says, that without criticism, without a clear, exact, unbiassed
+intelligence to try them, all those theories--all things--will have
+been seen but 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 [167] 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 this even, may be in truth
+insufficient.  After all, we may deceive ourselves in the belief that
+we have found something:--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 mean certain that any one of them really possesses what
+we seek.  The truth may be a thing that not one of them has yet 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
+Happiness--what 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 [168] also that it may be
+still something else, different and distinct from them all.
+
+--What is this?--There is something, I know not how, very sad and
+disheartening in what you say.  We 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.  As 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, [169] 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 Chimaeras 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 nature--beyond the Graces, beyond
+Venus Urania herself--asked 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, and others like you, into that
+passion, 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 you--led you along the straight road, as
+he said, to the beloved one.  All was easy after that. [170] 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 useful 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 such monuments.  To Marius there seemed to be
+some new meaning in that terror of isolation, 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 around helped to combine [171] the associations of this famous
+way, its deeply graven marks of immemorial travel, together with the
+earnest questions of the morning as to the true way of that other sort
+of travelling, around an image, almost ghastly in the traces of its
+great sorrows--bearing along for ever, on bleeding feet, the instrument
+of its punishment--which was all Marius could recall distinctly of a
+certain Christian legend he had heard.  The legend told of an encounter
+at 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 companions--an 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.  A
+strange contrast to anything actually presented in that morning's
+conversation, it seemed nevertheless to echo its very words--"Do they
+never come down again," he heard once more the 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."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV: SUNT LACRIMAE RERUM+
+
+[172] It was become a habit with Marius--one of his
+modernisms--developed by his assistance at the Emperor's "conversations
+with himself," to keep a register of the movements of his own private
+thoughts and humours; not continuously indeed, yet 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 objective informations.
+
+"If a particular tutelary or genius," writes Marius,--"according to old
+belief, walks through life beside each one of us, mine is very
+certainly a capricious creature.  He fills one with wayward,
+unaccountable, yet quite irresistible humours, [173] 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 chance--the things one happens to overhear them say, veritable
+enodioi symboloi,+ or omens by the wayside, as the old Greeks
+fancied--to push on the unreasonable prepossessions of the moment into
+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 such as 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! is it 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 indifference, as the
+thought of them occurred to me, in regard to the sufferings of
+others--a kind of callousness, so unusual with me, as at once to mark
+the humour it accompanied as a palpably morbid one [174] 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
+importance?  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; all of whom it would be a brutality
+not to humour, not to indulge.
+
+"Why, when I went out to walk off my wayward fancies, did I confront
+the very sort of incident (my unfortunate genius had surely beckoned it
+from afar to vex me) likely to irritate them further?  A party of men
+were coming down the street.  They were leading a fine race-horse; a
+handsome beast, but badly hurt somewhere, 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 among the strangers to whom his former owner had committed him, to
+die, in his beauty and pride, for just that one mischance or fault;
+although the morning air was still so animating, and pleasant to snuff.
+I could have fancied a human 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 [175] of our poor humanity, in its capacities for
+pain, its wretched accidents, and those imperfect sympathies, which can
+never quite identify us with one another; the very power of utterance
+and appeal to others seeming to fail us, in proportion as our sorrows
+come home to ourselves, are really our own.  We are constructed for
+suffering!  What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we care to
+note them, as we go--a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries!  Sunt
+lacrimae 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 by way of memorial of eminent persons 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 people.  They are fairly affectionate, but anxious how
+the thing they have to do may go--hope only she may permit them to
+leave her there behind quietly.  And the poor old soul is excited by
+the noise made by the children, and partly aware of what is going to
+happen with her.  She too begins to count--one, two, three, five--on
+her trembling fingers, misshapen by a life of toil.
+
+[176] '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
+comes--watching the labour, but with a sorrowful distaste for the din
+and dirt.  He is regarding wistfully his own place in the world, 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
+begun--the only child--whose presence beside him sweetened the father's
+toil a little.  The boy has been badly injured by a fall of brick-work,
+yet, with an effort, he rides boldly 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 [177] it hard to get rid of a sense that
+I, for one, have failed in love.  I could yield to the humour till I
+seemed to have had my share in those great public cruelties, the
+shocking legal crimes which are on record, like that cold-blooded
+slaughter, according to law, of the four hundred slaves in the reign of
+Nero, because one of their number was thought to have murdered his
+master.  The reproach of that, together with the kind of facile
+apologies 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 upon it.  And to how many of those now
+actually around me, whose life is a sore one, must I be indifferent, if
+I ever become aware of their soreness at all?  To some, perhaps, the
+necessary conditions of my own life may cause me to be opposed, in a
+kind of natural conflict, 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 lately from the war, 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 [178] 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!  But still the
+feeling returns to me, that no charity of ours can get at a certain
+natural unkindness which I find in things themselves.
+
+"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, the most distinctly 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 age--ilex and cypress remaining where they fell at last, one over
+the other, and all caught, in that early May-time, under a riotous
+tangle of wild clematis--was to be found a magnificent sanctuary, in
+which the members of the Arval College assembled themselves on certain
+days.  The axe never touched those trees--Nay! 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
+harsh noise of metal, but also in memory of that better age--the lost
+Golden Age--the homely age of the potters, of [179] which the central
+act of the festival was a commemoration.
+
+"The preliminary ceremonies were long and complicated, but of a
+character familiar enough.  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!--the vessels
+from 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,
+for the veneration of the credulous or the faithful.
+
+"They were, in fact, cups or vases of burnt clay, rude in form: and the
+religious veneration thus offered to them expressed men's desire to
+give honour to a simpler age, before iron had found place in human
+life: the persuasion 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 weaken, and by no means smite
+through, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human
+sense, in things, which one must carefully distinguish from all
+preventible accidents.  Death, and the little perpetual daily dyings,
+which have something of its sting, he must [180] necessarily leave
+untouched.  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 fate--say, of the flowers!  For there is, there 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 maintained 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, a few tufts
+even 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 sometimes what I
+conceive to be the precise character of the fondness of the roughest
+working-people for their young children, a fine appreciation, 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,
+running to meet the rudest of brick- [181] 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
+strange region, so distant from him yet so real, of the world's
+refinement.  What is of finer soul, of finer stuff in things, and
+demands delicate touching--to him the delicacy of the little child
+represents that: it 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 will go on, if the child should happen to die.
+I observed to-day, under one of the archways of the baths, two children
+at play, a little seriously--a fair girl and her crippled younger
+brother.  Two toy chairs and a little table, and sprigs of fir set
+upright in the sand for a garden!  They played at housekeeping.  Well!
+the girl thinks her life a perfectly good thing in the service of this
+crippled brother.  But she will have a jealous lover in time: and the
+boy, though his face is not altogether 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 removable--some inexplicable
+shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself--death, and
+old age as it [182] must needs be, and that watching for 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 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, or nervous perfection men have attained to.
+And what we need in the world, over against that, is a certain
+permanent and general power of compassion--humanity's standing force of
+self-pity--as an elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we
+are to live in it at all.  I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has
+cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how
+every step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him,
+from age to age, must needs increase his dejection.  It is as if the
+increase of knowledge were but an increasing 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 [183] life being as they
+are, and the capacity for suffering so large a principle in
+things--since the only principle, perhaps, to which we may always
+safely trust is a ready sympathy with the pain one actually sees--it
+follows that the practical and effective difference between men will
+lie in their power of insight into those conditions, their power of
+sympathy.  The future will be with those who have most of it; while for
+the present, as I persuade myself, those who have much of it, have
+something to hold by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that
+dissolution 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
+on the part of others has seemed impossible; in which our pain has
+seemed a stupid outrage upon us, like some overwhelming physical
+violence, from which we could take refuge, at best, only in some mere
+general sense of goodwill--somewhere in the world 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, to have actually
+justified to us, the fact of our pain.  There have been occasions,
+certainly, when I have felt that if others cared for me as I cared for
+them, it would be, not so much a consolation, as an equivalent, for
+what one has lost or suffered: a realised profit on the summing up
+[184] of one's accounts: a touching of that absolute ground amid all
+the changes of phenomena, such as our philosophers have of late
+confessed themselves quite unable to discover.  In the mere clinging of
+human creatures to each other, nay! in one's own solitary self-pity,
+amid the effects even of what might appear irredeemable loss, I seem to
+touch the eternal.  Something in that pitiful contact, something new
+and true, fact or apprehension of fact, is educed, which, on a review
+of all the perplexities of life, satisfies our moral sense, and removes
+that appearance of unkindness 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.  Everything seemed to be, for
+a moment, after all, almost for the best.  Through the train of my
+thoughts, one against another, it was as if I became aware of the
+dominant power of another person in controversy, wrestling with me. I
+seem to be come round to the point at which I left off then.  The
+antagonist has closed with me again.  A protest comes, out of the very
+depths of man's radically hopeless condition in the world, with the
+energy of one of those suffering yet prevailing [185] deities, of which
+old poetry tells.  Dared one hope that there is a heart, even as ours,
+in that divine 'Assistant' of one's thoughts--a heart even as mine,
+behind this vain show of things!"
+
+NOTES
+
+172. Virgil, Aeneid Book 1, line 462.  "There are the tears of
+things..."  See also page 175 of this chapter, where the same text is
+quoted in full.
+
+173. +Transliteration: enodioi symboloi.  Pater's Definition: "omens by
+the wayside."
+
+175. +Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.  Virgil, Aeneid
+Book 1, line 462.  Translation: "Here also there be tears for what men
+bear, and mortal creatures feel each other's sorrow," from Vergil,
+Aeneid, Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston.  Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI: THE MARTYRS
+
+     "Ah! voila les ames qu'il falloit a la mienne!"
+                                           Rousseau.
+
+[186] THE charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections, wonderfully
+fresh in the midst of a 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
+it might be understood there,--its claims, with the claims of all
+natural feeling everywhere, down to the sheep bleating on the hills,
+nay! even to the mother-wolf, in her hungry cave--seemed to have been
+vindicated, to have been enforced anew, by the sanction of some divine
+pattern thereof.  He saw its legitimate place in the world given at
+last to the bare capacity for [187] suffering in any creature, however
+feeble or apparently useless.  In this chivalry, seeming to leave the
+world's heroism a mere property of the stage, in this so scrupulous
+fidelity to what could not help itself, could scarcely claim not to be
+forgotten, what a contrast to the hard contempt of one's own or other's
+pain, of death, of glory even, in those discourses of Aurelius!
+
+But if Marius thought at times that some long-cherished desires were
+now about to blossom for him, in the sort of home he had sometimes
+pictured to himself, the very charm of which would lie in its contrast
+to any random affections: that in this woman, to whom children
+instinctively clung, he might find such a sister, at least, as he had
+always longed for; there were also circumstances which reminded him
+that a certain rule forbidding second marriages, was among these people
+still in force; ominous incidents, moreover, warning a susceptible
+conscience not to mix together the spirit and the flesh, nor 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 from the tiny brow of such a child,
+as he now heard, that the new light had first shone forth upon
+them--through the light of mere physical life, glowing there again,
+when the child was dead, or supposed to be dead.  The [188] 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 closely-wound folds of the shroud and
+scattering the funeral flowers from them, as the soul kindled once more
+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,
+however, in this curious house, all thoughts were tenderly bent on the
+little waxen figure, yet with a kind of exultation and joy,
+notwithstanding the loud weeping of the mother.  The other children,
+its late companions, broke with it, suddenly, into the place where the
+deep black bed lay open to receive it.  Pushing away the grim fossores,
+the grave-diggers, they ranged themselves around it in order, and
+chanted that old psalm of theirs--Laudate pueri dominum! Dead children,
+children's graves--Marius had been always half aware of an old
+superstitious fancy in his mind concerning 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
+assisted, directed, returned afterwards to her 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 [189] of "experience," to take
+flight in time from any too disturbing passion, from any sort of
+affection 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 for him to fly?  At least,
+during the journey he took, by way of testing the existence of any
+chain about him, he found a certain disappointment 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 or gain.
+The image of Cecilia, it would seem, was already become for him like
+some matter of poetry, or of another man's story, or a picture on the
+wall.  And on his return to Rome there had been a rumour in that
+singular company, of things which spoke certainly not of any merely
+tranquil loving: hinted rather that he had come across a world, the
+lightest contact with which might make appropriate to himself also the
+precept that "They which have wives be as they that have none."
+
+This was brought home to him, when, in early spring, he ventured once
+more to listen to the sweet singing of the Eucharist.  It breathed
+[190] more than ever the spirit of a wonderful hope--of hopes more
+daring than poor, labouring humanity had ever seriously entertained
+before, though it was plain that a great calamity was befallen.  Amid
+stifled sobbing, even as the pathetic words of the psalter relieved the
+tension of their hearts, the people around him still wore upon their
+faces their habitual gleam of joy, of placid satisfaction. They were
+still under the influence 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 spirit about him, the potency, the half-realised presence, of a
+great multitude, as if thronging along 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 conjectured, Alleluia!
+repeated over and over again, Alleluia!  Alleluia! at every pause and
+movement of the long Easter ceremonies.
+
+And then, in its place, by way of sacred lection, although in shocking
+contrast with the peaceful dignity of all around, 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 [191]
+Marius could not but acknowledge, on the responsibility of the emperor
+Aurelius himself, following tamely, and as a matter of course, the
+traces of his predecessors, 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.  The greatness of it 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 endured we have no power fully to
+tell, for the enemy came upon us with his whole strength.  But the
+grace of God fought for us, set 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 great 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 joyfully on their way; their delight and the sweet
+favour of God mingling in their faces, so that their bonds seemed but a
+goodly array, or like the golden bracelets of a bride.  Filled with the
+fragrance of Christ, to some they seemed to have been touched with
+earthly perfumes.
+
+[192] "Vettius Epagathus, though he was very young, because he would
+not endure 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.  Whereupon the governor asked him whether he also were a
+Christian.  He confessed in a clear voice, and was added to the number
+of 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 should come,
+When he 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 weakness of the flesh she should be unable to profess the
+faith, Blandina was filled with such power that her tormentors,
+following upon each other from morning until night, owned that they
+were overcome, and had no more that they could do to her; admiring that
+she still breathed after her whole body was torn asunder.
+
+"But this blessed one, in the very midst of her 'witness,' renewed her
+strength; and to [193] repeat, I am Christ's! was to her rest,
+refreshment, and relief from pain.  As for Alexander, he neither
+uttered a groan nor any sound at all, but in his heart talked with God.
+Sanctus, the deacon, also, having borne beyond all measure pains
+devised by them, hoping that they would get something from him, did not
+so much as tell his name; but to all questions answered only, I am
+Christ's!  For this he confessed 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, cooled and fortified
+by that stream of living water which flows from Christ.  His corpse, a
+single wound, having wholly lost the form of man, was the measure of
+his pain.  But Christ, paining in him, set forth an ensample to the
+rest--that 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 Martyrs, they bethought them of other
+things; among which was their imprisonment in a dark and most sorrowful
+place, where many were privily strangled. But destitute of man's aid,
+they were filled with power from the Lord, both in body and mind, and
+strengthened their brethren.  Also, much joy was in our virgin mother,
+the [194] Church; for, by means of these, such as were fallen away
+retraced their steps--were again conceived, were filled again with
+lively heat, and hastened to make the profession of their faith.
+
+"The holy bishop Pothinus, who was now past ninety years old and weak
+in body, yet in his heat of soul and 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 cruelty towards him, for that thus
+their own gods would be avenged.  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 every sort of
+flowers, they offered 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 hung
+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 [195] 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 day by 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 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 to
+them, with joy at the end, as to a marriage-feast; the enemy himself
+confessing that no woman had ever borne pain so manifold and great as
+hers.
+
+"Nor even so 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
+Martyrs took a new form, insomuch that we were in great sorrow for lack
+of freedom to entrust their bodies to the earth.
+
+[196] "Neither did the night-time, nor the offer of money, avail us for
+this matter; but they set watch with much carefulness, as though it
+were a great gain to hinder their burial.  Therefore, after the bodies
+had been displayed to view for many days, they were at last burned to
+ashes, and cast into the river Rhone, which flows by this place, that
+not a vestige of them might be 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."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII: THE TRIUMPH OF MARCUS AURELIUS
+
+[197] NOT many months after the date of that epistle, 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.  His triumph was
+now a "full" one--Justus Triumphus justified, by far more than the due
+amount of bloodshed in those Northern wars, at length, 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 the pale, servile, yet angry
+eyes.  His children, [198] 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 trumpeting grandly, found
+their due place in the procession; and among the spoil, set forth on a
+portable frame that it might be distinctly seen (no mere model, but the
+very house he had lived in), a wattled cottage, in all the 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
+clay--childish 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!--now especially, in its
+time-mellowed red and gold, for the modern visitor to the old English
+palace.
+
+[199] It was under no such selected types that the great procession
+presented itself to Marius; though, in effect, he found something there
+prophetic, so to speak, and evocative of ghosts, as susceptible minds
+will do, upon a repetition after long interval of some notable
+incident, which may yet perhaps have no direct concern for themselves.
+In truth, he had been so closely 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, as he witnessed this procession,
+to return once more into evidence for him.  The world, certainly, had
+been holding on its old way, and was all its old self, as it thus
+passed by dramatically, accentuating, in this favourite spectacle, its
+mode of viewing things.  And even apart from the contrast of a very
+different scene, he would have found it, just now, a somewhat vulgar
+spectacle.  The temples, wide open, with their 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  [200] 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 transform the entire show into its own proper tinsel.  Yes! these
+Romans were a coarse, a vulgar people; and their vulgarities of soul 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 golden-flowered attire, 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.  As the children went past--not among those who, ere the
+emperor ascended the steps of the Capitol, would be detached from the
+great progress for execution, happy rather, and radiant, as adopted
+members of the imperial family--the crowd actually enjoyed an
+exhibition of the moral order, such as might become perhaps the
+fashion.  And it was in consideration of some possible touch of a
+heroism herein that might really have cost him something, that Marius
+resolved to seek the emperor once more, [201] 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 a favourite villa, which lay almost on
+his way thither, determined there to present himself.  Although the
+great plain was dying steadily, 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 of decay and death,
+replacing the lusty Roman labourer, never had that poetic region
+between Rome and the sea more deeply impressed him than on this 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.
+Stimulating to the fancy as was that range of low hills to the
+northwards, already troubled with the upbreaking of the Apennines, yet
+a want of quiet in their outline, the record of wild fracture there, of
+sudden upheaval and depression, marked them as but the ruins of nature;
+while at every little descent and ascent of the road might be noted
+traces of the abandoned work of man.  From time to time, the way was
+still redolent of the floral relics of summer, daphne and
+myrtle-blossom, sheltered in the little 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, [202] 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, rich in memories of one after another of the family
+of the Antonines.  As he approached it, such reminiscences crowded upon
+him, above all of the life there of the aged Antoninus Pius, in its
+wonderful mansuetude and calm.  Death had overtaken him here at the
+precise moment when the tribune of the watch had received from his lips
+the word Aequanimitas! as the watchword of the night.  To see 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 betimes, with all who cared to join him, for long
+days of antiquarian research in the country around:--this, and the like
+of this, had seemed to mean the peace of mankind.
+
+Upon that had come--like a stain! it seemed to Marius just then--the
+more intimate life of Faustina, the life of Faustina at home. 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,
+two years since, the news had reached Rome that those eyes, always so
+persistently turned to vanity, had suddenly closed for ever, a strong
+desire to pray had come [203] 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 enough--the 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.
+
+The latter, precisely, was the cause why Marius failed in fact 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 door of the long gallery, famous still for its grand prospect in
+the memory of many a visitor, and then leading to the imperial
+apartments, that the emperor was already in audience: Marius must wait
+his turn--he knew not how long it might be.  An odd audience it seemed;
+for at that moment, through the closed door, came shouts 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.  Uncertain, then, of the time for which so pleasant
+a reception might last, so pleasant that he would hardly have wished to
+[204] shorten it, Marius finally determined to proceed, as it was
+necessary that he should accomplish the first stage of his journey on
+this day.  The thing was not to be--Vale! anima infelicissima!--He
+might at least carry away that sound of the laughing orphan children,
+as a not unamiable last impression of kings and their houses.
+
+The place he was now about to visit, especially as the resting-place of
+his dead, 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 then, 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 approaching 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 them increasing on him, in the
+darkness.  It was as if they had been waiting for him there through all
+those years, and felt his footsteps approaching now, and understood his
+devotion, quite gratefully, in that lowliness of theirs, in spite of
+its tardy [205] fulfilment.  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
+sorrow.  "To-day!"--they seemed to be saying as the hard dawn
+broke,--"To-day, he will come!"  At last, amid all his distractions,
+they were 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 different from his:--so 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.
+Then, at length, above the tiled outbuildings, were the walls of the
+old villa itself, with the tower for the pigeons; and, not among
+cypresses, but half-hidden by aged poplar-trees, their leaves like
+golden fruit, the birds floating around it, the conical roof of the
+tomb 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 struck, not however without a touch of remorse thereupon,
+chiefly by an odd air of neglect, the neglect of a place allowed to
+remain as when it was last used, and left in a hurry, till long years
+had covered all alike with thick dust [206] --the 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 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 age--one of the serving-boys of
+the household--who had descended hither, from the lightsome world 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 suddenly--He 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!
+
+[207] 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 nevertheless people will always yield in proportion as they
+really care for one another.  With a vain yearning, as he stood there,
+still to be able to do something for them, he reflected that such doing
+must be, after all, in the nature of things, mainly for himself.  His
+own epitaph might be that old one eskhatos tou idiou genous+ --He was
+the last of his race!  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 him, and in
+a way which would claim no sentiment from the indifferent.  That took
+many days--was 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
+flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould.
+
+NOTES
+
+207. +Transliteration: eskhatos tou idiou genous.  Translation: "[he
+was] the last of his race."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII: ANIMA NATURALITER CHRISTIANA
+
+[208] 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.  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 life--the age, as
+he conceived, at which one begins to redescend one's life--though
+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.  Actually, as
+circumstances had determined, all its movement [209] had been inward;
+movement of observation only, or even of pure meditation; in part,
+perhaps, because throughout it had been something of a meditatio
+mortis, ever facing towards the act of final detachment.  Death,
+however, as he reflected, must be for every one nothing less than the
+fifth or last act of a drama, and, as such, was likely to have
+something of the stirring character of a denouement.  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 overpowering charm, of his
+friendship.  "More than brother!"--he felt--like a son also!"
+contrasting the fatigue of soul which made himself in effect an older
+man, with the irrepressible youth of his companion.  For it was still
+the marvellous hopefulness of Cornelius, his seeming prerogative over
+the future, that 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 was to bear onward in it.
+Identifying himself with Cornelius in so dear a friendship, through
+him, Marius seemed to touch, to ally himself to, [210] actually to
+become a possessor of 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 that he had been there on
+his first journey to Rome) which had even then its church and
+legend--the legend and holy relics of the martyr Hyacinthus, a young
+Roman soldier, whose blood had stained the soil of this place in the
+reign of the emperor Trajan.
+
+The thought of that so recent death, haunted Marius through the night,
+as if with audible crying and sighs above the restless wind, which came
+and went around their lodging.  But towards dawn he slept heavily; and
+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 gray, although apparently
+unclouded sky.  Under this sunless [211] 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 had fallen.
+
+Marius felt that he breathed 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
+own 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 marketplace was alive with
+the rush of the distracted 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 body 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 Faustinus--Flores  [212] apparuerunt in terra
+nostra!--and their brethren, together with Cornelius 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 on 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 shepherd's deserted house by the wayside.
+
+It was surmised that one of the prisoners was not a Christian: the
+guards were forward to make the utmost pecuniary profit of this
+circumstance, and in the night, Marius, taking advantage of the loose
+charge kept over them, and by means partly of a large bribe, had
+contrived that Cornelius, as the really innocent person, should be
+dismissed in safety on his way, to procure, as Marius explained, the
+proper means of defence for himself, 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
+[213] 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 one's self; 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 or death.  At last, the great act, the critical
+moment itself comes, easily, almost unconsciously.  Another motion of
+the clock, and our fatal line--the "great climacteric 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 been--the 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 [214] martyr--had indeed no
+right to be; and when he had seen Cornelius depart, on his blithe and
+hopeful way, as he believed, to become the husband of Cecilia;
+actually, as it had happened, without a word of farewell, supposing
+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 certain amount of
+personal risk; though he hardly supposed himself to be facing the
+danger of death.  Still, especially for one such as he, with all the
+sensibilities of which his whole manner of life had been but a
+promotion, the situation of a person 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 down among men--would 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, overflowing 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, [215] 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 weariness
+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, 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 regions--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, [216] seemed just then
+a thing one might well exchange the remnants of one's life for.
+
+It must have been about the fifth night, as he afterwards 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 severe 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 he might but 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; and the sounds of the cattle reached him softly from the green
+places around.  Recalling confusedly the torturing hurry of his late
+journeys, he dreaded, as his consciousness 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.  So it had been,
+obscurely, even through all the wild fancies of his delirium, from the
+moment which followed [217] his decision against himself, in favour of
+Cornelius.
+
+The occupants of the place were to be heard presently, coming and going
+about him on their business: 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 dead: to put them--those aliens--away out of their thoughts
+altogether, as soon as may be.  Conversely, in the deep isolation of
+spirit which was now creeping upon Marius, the faces of these people,
+casually visible, took a strange 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, in a
+troubled sort of manner, his mind would follow them onwards, on the
+ways of their simple, humdrum, everyday life, with a peculiar yearning
+to share it with them, envying the calm, earthy cheerfulness of all
+their days to be, still under the sun, though so 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 neminen fecit+--he repeated to himself; his old prayer shaping
+itself now almost as his epitaph.  Yes! so much the very hardest judge
+[218] must concede to him.  And the sense of satisfaction which that
+thought 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 discovery of a vision, the seeing of a
+perfect humanity, in a perfect world--through 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,
+and as such was surely a pleasant offering or 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 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.
+
+[219] 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 itself--a 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 must be 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 weakness--a blind, outraged, angry feeling
+of wasted power, such as he might have experienced himself standing by
+the deathbed of another, in condition like 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 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 kept in view the purpose of preparing
+himself towards possible further revelation some day--towards some
+ampler vision, which [220] 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, his unclouded receptivity of
+soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to
+experience, was at its height; the house 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 candid discontent, 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 the
+world still unimpaired, and going on its blind way at last with the
+consciousness of some profound enigma in things, as but a pledge of
+something further to come.  Marius seemed to understand how one might
+look back upon life here, and its [221] excellent visions, as but the
+portion of a race-course left behind him by a runner still swift of
+foot: for a moment he experienced a singular curiosity, almost an
+ardent desire 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 tenebris+--upon
+the aged world; the hope Cornelius had seemed to bear away upon him in
+his strength, with a buoyancy which had caused Marius to feel, not so
+much that by a caprice of destiny, he had been left to die in his
+place, as that Cornelius was gone on a mission to deliver him also from
+death.  There had been a permanent protest established in the world, a
+plea, a perpetual after-thought, which humanity henceforth would ever
+possess in reserve, against any wholly mechanical and disheartening
+theory of itself and its conditions. That 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;
+confirming 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 [222]
+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 physical darkness, seemed to
+settle upon 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. Contrariwise, with the sense of that hope warm about him,
+he seemed to anticipate some kindly care for himself; never to fail
+even on earth, a care for his very body-that dear sister and companion
+of his soul, outworn, 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 these, as from what 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 [223] may
+fall asleep thus, 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 him--letting
+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 one's
+self in sleep--that, as he had always recognised, 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 kneeling around his bed: and what he heard confirmed,
+in the then perfect clearness of his soul, the inevitable suggestion of
+his own bodily feelings. He had often dreamt he was condemned to die,
+that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape, was 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 [224] land of the
+living.  He read surely, now, in the manner, the doings, of these
+people, some of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the
+heavy sunlight in very deed lay, that his last morning was come, and
+turned to think once more of the beloved.  Often had he fancied of old
+that not to die on a dark or rainy day might itself have a little
+alleviating grace or favour about it.  The people around his bed were
+praying fervently--Abi! Abi!  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.  Gentle fingers had
+applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses,
+through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and
+obstructed, a medicinable oil.  It was the same people who, in the
+gray, 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 martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said,
+a kind of sacrament with plenary grace.
+
+1881-1884.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+NOTES
+
+217. +"He made no one unhappy."
+
+218. +"I have lived!"
+
+221. +From the Latin Vulgate Bible, Matthew 4:16: "populus qui sedebat
+in tenebris lucem vidit magnam et sedentibus in regione et umbra mortis
+lux orta est eis."  King James Bible translation: "The people which sat
+in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and
+shadow of death light is sprung up."
+
+224. "Depart!  Depart!  Christian Soul!"  The thought is from the
+Catholic prayer for the departing.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two, by
+Walter Horatio Pater
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