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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Marius the Epicurean, Vol. II, by Walter Pater
+#8 in our series by Walter Pater
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+Title: Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two
+
+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
+
+Release Date: May, 2003  [Etext #4058]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 10/25/01]
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Marius the Epicurean, Vol. II, by Walter Pater
+************This file should be named 7mrs210.txt or 7mrs210.zip************
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+
+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
+appre-hension.  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 Project Gutenberg Etext of Marius the Epicurean Vol. II by Walter Pater
+