Marius, the Epicurean : his sensations and ideas

Presented to the

LIBRARY of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

by

Professor E. Wallace

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN

HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS

BY

WALTER PATER, M.A.

FELLOW OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD.

Xeifiepivbs 6veipos, 8re fifyiarat at vvktcs.

VOLUME II.

SECOND EDITION.

LONDON :
MACMILLAN AND CO
1885.

[ All rights reserved, ]

5/ 3d

THIRD THOUSAND.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Eduiburgh.

CONTENTS.

PART THE THIRD.

I'll \PTER

XV. STOICISM AT COURT

XVI. SECOND THOUGHTS

XVII. MANY PROPHETS AND KINGS HAVE DESIRED
TO SEE THE THINGS WHICH YE SEE
XVIII. "THE CEREMONY OF THE DART "
XIX. PARATUM COE MEUM, DEUS ! . .

PAOE

9
19

37
48
63

PART THE FOURTH.

XX. GUESTS ... . .

XXI. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA'S. HOUSE .

XXII. THE MINOR " PEACE OF THE CHURCH"

XXIII. SAPIENTIA ^DIFICAVIT SIBI DOMUM

XXIV. A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINARY .
XXV. SUNT LACRIM.E RERUM .

XXVI. AH ! VOILA LES AMES QU'lL FALLOIT

mienne!

xxvii. the triumph of marcus aurelius
xx viii. anima naturaliter christiana .

A LA

81

96

112

130
142

171

183
193

203

PAET THE THIED.

CHAPTEE XY.

STOICISM AT COURT.

The very finest flower of the same company — Aurelius
with the gilt fasces borne before him, a crowd of
exquisites, the empress Faustina herself, and all the
elegant blue-stockings of the day, who maintained, it
was said, their own private sophists to whisper philo-
sophy into their ears as they made their toilets — was
assembled again a few months later, in a different place
and for a very different purpose. The temple of Peace,
a foundation of Hadrian's, enlarged by a library and
lecture-rooms, had grown into an institution resem-
bling something between a college and a literary club ;
and here Cornelius Fronto was to deliver 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. Ehetoric had
become almost a function of the state. Philosophy
was upon the throne ; and had from time to time, by
request, delivered an official utterance with well-nigh
divine authority. And it was as the delegate of this
authority, under the full sanction of the philosopher-

10 MABIUS THE EPICUREAN.

pontiff, that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to
expound some parts of the Stoic doctrine, with the
view of recommending morals and making them
acceptable to that refined but perhaps prejudiced
company, as being, in effect, one mode of comeliness
in things — a fair order, and, as it were, a kind of
music 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. Eeceived
at court, it had largely decorated itself : it had be-
come persuasive and insinuating, and sought not only
to convince men's intelligences but to allure their
souls. Associated with that fair 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, as, assisted by his daughter
Gratia, he took his place on the ivory chair, as presi-
dent of the Athenceum of Eome, wearing with a
wonderful grace the philosophic pall — in reality,
nothing else than the loose woollen cloak of the
common soldier, but fastened on his right shoulder
with a magnificent clasp, the emperor's birthday gift.
It was an age, as sufficient evidence shows, whose
delight in rhetoric was but one element of a general
susceptibility ; an age not merely taking pleasure in

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 1 1

words, but experiencing a great moral power in them :
and Fronto's quaintly fashionable audience would
have wept, and also assisted with their purses, had
his purpose to-day been, as sometimes happened, the
recommendation of some object of charity. As it
was, arranging themselves at their ease among the
images and flowers, these amateurs of beautiful lan-
guage, with their tablets for noting carefully all the
orator's most exquisite expressions, were ready to give
themselves wholly to the intellectual treat prepared
for them; applauding, blowing loud kisses through
the air sometimes, at the speaker's triumphant exit
from one of his long, skilfully modulated sentences ;
while the younger of them meant to imitate every-
thing about him, down to the inflections of his voice
and the very folds of his mantle. Certainly there
was rhetoric enough for them — 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
words, like flies from morsels of amber, to use
Fronto's own figure. But with all its richness, the
higher claim of Fronto's style was rightly understood
to lie in gravity and self-command, and an especial
care for the purity of a vocabulary which rejected
every term and phrase not stamped with the authority
of the most approved ancient models.

And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes
happen, that this general discourse to a general
audience had the effect of an utterance dexterously

12 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

designed for him. With a conscience still vibrating
forcibly under the shock of that day in the amphi-
theatre, and full of the ethical charm of the character
of his friend Cornelius, as he conceived it, he was
questioning himself with much impatience, as to the
possibility of an adjustment between his own elabor-
ately thought-out intellectual scheme and the old
morality ; which, as such, had as yet found no place
in it, inasmuch as that old morality seemed to demand
the concession of certain first principles which might
misdirect or retard him in the effort towards a
complete, many-sided existence ; or distort the revela-
tions of the experience of life ; or curtail his natural
liberty of heart and mind. And yet there was the
taint of a possible antinomianism there ; of which
(his imagination being filled just then with the noble
and resolute air, the gaiety almost, which composed
the outward mien and presentment of his friend's
inflexible ethics) he felt a nascent jealousy, as being,
to say the least, a kind of slur upon his taste, wound-
ing that intellectual pride to which it was one peculiar-
ity of his philosophic scheme to allow so much. And
it was precisely such a moral situation as this that
Fronto appeared to be contemplating. He seemed to
have before his mind the case of one — Cyrenaic or Epi-
curean, as the courtier tends to be, by habit and instinct,
if not on principle — who yet experiences, actually, a
strong tendency to moral assents, and a desire, with as
little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place
for duty and righteousness, in his house of thought.

MAKIUS THE EMOUBBAK. 13

And the Stoic professor found the key to this
problem in the purely aesthetic beauty of the old
morality, as a prevailing actual system in things,
fascinating to the imagination — to taste in its most
developed form — through association; a system or
order, as a matter of fact in possession, not only
of the great world, but of the rare minority of dlite
intelligences ; from which, therefore, least of all would
the sort of Epicurean he was contemplating endure
to be, so to speak, an outlaw. He supposed his
hearer to be sincerely in search of a practical principle
(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 of life — a probity and
cleanness of life, in fact — determined partly by
purely natural affection, partly by an enlightened
self-interest, or the feeling of honour; due in part
even to the mere fear of penalties : no element of
which, however, was distinctively moral, as such, in
the agent ; and affording, therefore, no common
ground of sympathy with a really ethical 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 — a person thus circumstanced would
be wanting, nevertheless, in a principle of inward
adjustment to the moral beings around him. How
tenderly — more tenderly than many stricter souls —
might such an one yield himself to kindly instinct !
what a fineness of charity in passing judgment on

14 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 still, all the while, he allows
no moral world as such; real though it be to
^schylus, to Socrates, to Virgil ; as also to a thousand
commonplace souls.

But, over and above those practical rectitudes, 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 in questions of mere manner,
or, say, even, of dress. Yes ! there were the evils,

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 15

the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a soil.
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 moral life. Yet here, according to Fronto,
was in truth the revealing example, albeit operating
upon comparative trifles, of the general principle
required. There was one great idea (Fronto pro-
ceeded to expound the idea of humanity — of a uni-
versal commonwealth of minds — which yet somehow
becomes conscious, and as if incarnate, in a select
body of just men made perfect) in association with
which the determination to conform to precedent
was elevated into the weightiest, the fullest, the
clearest principle of moral action ; a principle under
which one might subsume men's most strenuous
efforts after righteousness.

'O Kocr/i.os wcTGU'ei 7roAis 'ia-Tiv-Uth.Q 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 obser-
vances 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 be
or not be done, are like a music, to which the inter-
course of life proceeds — such a music as no one who
had once caught its harmonies would willingly jar.

16 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

In this way, the becoming, as the Greeks — or manners,
as both Greeks and Eomans said, would indeed be a
comprehensive term for duty. Eighteousness would
be, in the words of the Caesar himself, but the
"following of the reasonable will and ordinance of
the oldest, the most venerable, of all cities and
polities — the reasonable will of the royal, the law-
giving element in it — forasmuch as we are citizens
in that supreme city on high, of which all other cities
beside are but as single habitations." But as the old
man spoke with animation of this supreme city, this
invisible society, whose conscience had become ex-
plicit in its inner circle of inspired souls ; of whose
common, pervading spirit, the trusted leaders of
human conscience had been but the mouthpiece, and
of whose successive personal preferences in the con-
duct of life, the old morality was the sum, — Marius,
who had been so jealous of the claims of that old
morality, felt that his own thoughts were passing
beyond the actual intention of the speaker; not in
the direction of any clearer theoretic and abstract
definition of that ideal commonwealth, but rather as
if in search of its visible locality and abiding-place,
the towers of which, so to speak, he might see and
count, 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

MABIUS THE EPICUREAN". 17

them — however well that visible Rome might pass
for a figure of this new. unseen Rome on high. At
moments, Marias even asked himself with surprise,
whether it could be some vast secret society, to which
Fronto referred? — that august community, to be an
outlaw from which, to he foreign to the manners of
which, was a loss so much greater than to be ex-
cluded, into the ends of the earth, from the sovereign
Roman commonwealth. Humanity, a universal order,
the great polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the
master}' of their example over their successors — these
were the stimulating ideas, the abstract intellectual
conceptions, by association with which the Stoic pro-
fessor had tried to elevate, and unite under a single
principle, men's moral efforts, himself lifted up with
so real an enthusiasm. But where should Marias
search for all that, as more than an intellectual
abstraction 1 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 and relate himself ?

Rome did well to be serious. Fronto's discourse
ended somewhat abruptly, as the noise of a great
crowd in motion was heard below the walls; where-

VOL. II. C

18 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

upon, the audience, following the humour of its more
youthful element, poured itself into the colonnade,
from the steps of which Marius saw the famous pro-
cession, or transvectio of the military knights, passing
over the Forum, from their trysting- place at the
temple of Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri. It
was taking place this year, not on the day accustomed
— anniversary of the victory of the Lake Eegillus,
with its pair of celestial assistants— and amid the
heat and roses of a Roman July ; but, by anticipa-
tion, some months earlier; the almond-trees along
the way being still in leafless flower. Behind their
light trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, arrayed
in all their gleaming ornaments, and wearing chaplets
of olive round their casques ; the faces below which,
what with plague and battle, were nearly all youth-
ful. It was a flowery scene enough ; but had to-day
its fulness of Avarlike meaning ; the return of the
army to the north, where the enemy was again upon
the move, being imminent. Cornelius had ridden
along in his place ; and, on the dismissal of the com-
pany, passed below the steps where Marius stood,
with that new song which he had heard once before
floating from his lips.

CHAPTER XVI

SECOND THOUGHTS.

And Marias, for his part, was grave enough. Fronto's
discourse, 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 even the roses
had faded, when " the town " had departed to country-
villas or the baths or the war, he remained behind in
Eome ; anxious to try the lastingness of his own
Epicurean rose-garden ; setting to work over again,
and deliberately passing from point to point of that
old argument with himself, down to its practical con-
clusions. That age and our own have much in com-
mon— many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader
pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from
Mariiis to his modern representatives — from Rome,
to Paris or London.

What really were its claims as a theory of feeling
and practice? It had been a theory, avowedly, of
loss and gain, so to call it — of an economy : and if
it missed something in the commerce of life, which

20 MAMUS THE EPICUREAN.

some other theory of feeling and practice found itself
able to save, 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 1

And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done,
that that new Cyrenaicism of his is ever the character-
istic philosophy of youth — ardent, but narrow in its
survey; sincere, but apt to be one-sided, and even
fanatical. It is one of those subjective and partial ideals,
based on vivid, because limited, apprehension of the
truth of one aspect of experience — in this case, of the
beauty of the world and the brevity of man's life in
it — of which it ma}'' be said, that it is the special
vocation of the young to express them. In the
school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh Greek
world, we may think we see that philosophy where
it is least blasd, 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 youth-
ful soul. We hear it spoken of sometimes, as the
appropriate utterance of jaded men ; but in them it
can hardly be sincere, or, by the nature of the case,
an enthusiasm. "Walk in the ways of thine heart,
and in the sight of thine eyes," is, indeed, most often,
according to the supposition of the book from which
I quote it, the counsel of the young, who feel that
the sunshine is pleasant along their veins, and wintry
weather, though in a general way foreseen, a long way

MAKIUS THE EPICUEEAX. 21

off. The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism, the self-
abandonment to one favourite school or phase, 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, accom-
panied by a vivid sensation of power and will, of
what others value — the sacrifice of some conviction,
or doctrine, or supposed first principle — for the sake
of that clear-eyed intellectual integrity or consistency,
which is like spotless bodily cleanliness and nicety, or
scrupulous personal honour ; and which has for the
mind of the youthful student, when he first comes to
appreciate it, itself the fascination of an ideal.

The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive
of earnestness or enthusiasm, is not so properly the
utterance of the "jaded Epicurean," as of the strong
young man in all the freshness of his thought and
feeling, fascinated by the notion of at least lifting up
his life to the level of some bold, adventurous theory;
while, in the first genial heat of existence, physical
objects, also fair and strong, beat potently upon his
unwearied and widely opened senses. He discovers
a great new poem every spring, with a hundred
thoughts and feelings never expressed, or at least
never expressed so well, before. The workshops of
the artists, who can select and set before one what is
really most distinguished in visible life, are open to
him. He thinks that the old Platonic, or the new

22 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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
almond-trees in blossom ; valued now, perhaps, only
for the poetically rapt faces among priests or wor-
shippers, and the mere eloquence and tact of its
preachers of righteousness and religion ; for indeed,
in his scrupulous idealism, he feels himself to be some-
thing 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 of life are needed to pro-
voke an enthusiasm something like this. Life in
modern London even, in the heavy glow of summer,
is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth
to build its " palace of art " of ; and the very sense
and enjoyment of an experience in which all is new,
are but enhanced, like that glow of summer itself, by
the thought of its brevity ; which gives him something
of the gambler's zest, in the apprehension, by dex-
terous act or diligently appreciative thought, of the
highly coloured moments which are to pass away so
quickly. At bottom, perhaps, in his elaborately de-
veloped self-consciousness, his sensibilities, his almost
fierce grasp upon the things he values at all, he has,

M.VRIUS THE BPICUBEAN. 23

beyond all others, an inward need of something per-
manent in its character, to hold by: of which circum-
stance, also, he may be partly aware, and that, as with
the brilliant Clandio in "Measure for Measure," it is,
in truth, but darkness he is "encountering, likea bride."
But the inevitable falling of the curtain is probably
a long way off; and in the daylight, at least, it is
not often that he really shudders at the thought of
the grave — the weight above, and the narrow world
and its company, within. When the thought of it
does occur to him, he may say to himself — Well ! and
the 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 wellbeing
in eternal sleep.

And precisely in this circumstance, that, consis-
tently with the function of youth in general, Cyrenaic-
ism will always be more or less the special philosophy,
or prophecy, of the young, when the ideal of a rich
experience comes to them in the ripeness of their
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 negatively rather than
positively, that such theories fail to satisfy us perma-
nently : and what they really need for their correction,

24 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

is the complementary influence of some greater system,
in which they may find their clue place. That Sturm
unci 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, a devotion to truth, in the case of the young
— apprehending but one point at a time in the great
circumference — most naturally embodies itself, is
levelled down, surely and 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: — happily! if the enthusiasm which
answered to but one phase of intellectual growth
really blends, as it loses its decisiveness, in a larger
and commoner morality, with wider though perhaps
vaguer hopes. And though truth indeed, lies, 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.

In the world of old Greek thought, we may notice
with some surprise, that, in a little while, the nobler
form of Cyrenaicism — Cyrenaicism cured of its faults
— met the nobler form of Cynicism halfway. Start-
ing from opposed points, they merged, each in its
most refined form, in a single ideal of temperance or
moderation ; which again was almost identical with
the practical wisdom of Socrates, reflecting, in its
worthiest form, the conscience of Greece. Something

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 25

of the same kind may be noticed regarding some later
phases of Cyrenaicism. If it starts with a series of
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 de-
velopment of temper, in its stress and earnestness, its
serious application to the pursuit of a very unworldly
type of perfection: and it may be thought that the
saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty, would at
least understand each other better than either would
understand the mere man of the world. Stretch them
one point further, shift the terms a little, and they
might actually touch.

Perhaps all theories of morals tend, as they rise to
their best, and as conceived by their worthiest dis-
ciples, to identification with each other : the most
unlikely neighbours meeting at some point higher
than any one of them. For the variety of men's
possible reflections on their experience, as of that
experience itself, is not really as great as it seems :
and as the highest and most disinterested of ethical

mulce, filtering down into men's actual everyday
existence, reach the same poor level of vulgar egotism ;
so, we may fairly suppose that all the highest spirits,
from whatever contrasted points they may have
started, would yet be found to entertain, in their
moral consciousness as actually realised, much the
same kind of 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

26 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

literary types, in esteem or aversion ; and to have,
all of them alike, the same savour of unworldlines?.
Cyrenaicism, then, old or new, may be noticed, just
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 ethics. In the gravity of its conception
of life, in its pursuit after nothing less than a perfec-
tion, in its apprehension of the value of time — the
passion and the seriousness which are like a consecra-
tion— la passion et le sirieux 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 ; it might, with no real
misrepresentation, be referred or adjusted to that old
morality, as a part to the whole. And if we see this,
then comes the question of the value, in all ethical
speculation, of common terms — of terms, that is,
which bring the narrower, or exceptional ideals and
tendencies of character, into connexion with those
which are larger and more generally typical ; which,
instead of opposing them, explain the former through
the latter. Such terms, or conceptions are important
in practical ethics, because they largely decide our
manner of receiving experience, and the measure we
receive of it. They are like instruments, or points
of view, which determine how much, and how truly,
we shall reflect of life ; they lead our attention to
this or that element in it, to this or that capacity in
ourselves, in preference to another; and, like some

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN". 27

optical contrivances in the sensible world, they may
greatly narrow the field of that experience, in their
concentration upon some one, single, though perhaps
veiy important interest in it, to which they give a
false isolation or relief.

It was some such cramping, narrowing, costly
preference of one part of his own nature, and of the
nature of things, to another, that Marias seemed to
have detected in himself, as also in his old masters
in the Cyrenaic philosophy. If they did realise the
//'M'^povos 17001/17, as they said — the pleasure of the
ideal nmr — if certain moments and spaces of their
lives were high-pitched, passionately coloured, intent
with sensation, and a kind of knowledge which, in
its vivid clearness, was like sensation — if, now and
then, they apprehended the world in its fulness/and
had a vision, almost "beatific," of ideal personalities
in life and art/ yet, these moments were a very costly
matter : they paid a great price for them, if we duly
consider it, in a thousand possible sympathies, and
things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from
which they detached themselves, in the mere intel-
lectual pride of loyalty to a thecpy which would take
nothing for granted, and assent to no hypothetical or
approximate truths. If metaphysical acumen had
cleared away the metaphysical pretension to know
what is, that free place might be left for what ap-
rs ; surely, the attractive aspects of morality and
religion, as then popularly understood, might have
ranked as at least ^avracriai — observable, perhaps

28 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

amiable, appearances — among the rest. The Greek
religion was then alive : then, even 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 intel-
lectual acceptance. A religion, which had grown
through and through man's life, so strongly and
quietly ; which had meant so much for so many
generations ; expressing so much of their hopes, in
forms so lovely and so familiar ; a tradition so tran-
quillising, linked by such complex associations 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 ; without embarrassing him by
any doubtful theory of its intellectual groundwork, or
pushing him on to further conclusions, or in any way
tarnishing that intellectual integrity, which will not
suffer one, out of mere self-respect, to pass doubtful
intellectual coin. But those beautiful gods, with the
whole round of their beautiful service, the Cyrenaic
school definitely renounced : and Euemerus, who has
given his name to the coldest and thinnest of all
phases of rationalism, was one of its accredited
masters.

The Greek morality, again, with all its imperfec-
tions, was certainly a comely thing. — Yes! a harmony,
a music, in men's ways, one might well hesitate to
jar. The merely aesthetic sense might have had a
legitimate satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair
order of choice manners ; in those attractive conven-

MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN. 29

tions, enveloping, so gracefully, the whole of life;
insuring some sweetness, some security at least against

ace, in the intercourse of the world. The discreet
muster of Cyrene himself had heen in all but entire
practical sympathy with it. 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
ib ad to theory, so that all theory, as such, was really
indifferent to them, and indeed nothing valuable but
in its tangible ministration to life) was precisely this,
that it gave them free play, in the use of things, as
mere ministers, which', to the 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 hard, self-opinionated
adherence to his peculiar theory of values) in the not
very amiable paradox that friendship and patriotism

e things one could do without : while another —
Dt ' i -Kate, as he was called — helped so many to
self-destruction, by his pessimistic eloquence on the
evils of life, that his lecture-room was closed. That
that was in the range of their consequences — that that
was a possible, if remote, deduction from the premises
of the discreet Aristippus — was surely an inconsis-
tency in a thinker who professed above all things an
economy of the moments of life ; and such inconsis-

30 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

tcncy, surely a double fault, in a thinker who had
started with a very high ideal of intellectual severity.
Those old Cyrenaics felt their way, as it were in the
dark, Ave 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 reasonable '.'assent," and of
that common sense by which eternal " Wisdom," it
may be, " assists " the incomplete intelligence of the
individual — and they might have profited by a hun-
dred services to their culture, from Greek religion
and Greek morality, as they actually were. The
spectacle of their hard, isolated, tenacious hold on
their own narrow apprehension, makes one think of
a picture with no relief, no soft shadows or breadth
of space, or of a drama without repose. Contrasted
with the liberality of one like Socrates, their theory
of practice, even at its best, has the narrowness — the
fanatic narrowness — if, also, the intense force, of a
"heresy."

Heresy, theologians are careful to explain, consists
not so much in positive error, as in disproportion of
truth; in the exaggeration of this or that side or
aspect, of the truth, out of the proportion of faith :
it being assumed that such exceptional apprehensions
of special aspects of the faith, by individual minds,
are really provided for in the great system of catholic

MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN. 31

doctrine. Such a system — such a proportion of faith
— is represented for us, in the moral order, by that
body of moral ideas common to all Christian lands ;
which, in those lands, forms a sort of territory common
to human society and the Christian church, and which
is, in reality, the total product and effect of all the
higher moral experience of many generations, and
all their aspirations after a more perfect world : it
expresses the moral judgment of the honest dead —
a body so much more numerous than the living.

And the drift of the evolution of morals has cer-
tainly been to allow those theories, which, as I have
said, may easily become heresies; theories which
have, from time to time, expressed the finer, or the
bolder, apprehensions of peculiar spirits — Bentham,
Shelley, Carlyle, the old or the new Cyrenaics —
theories, the motive of which is to bring special
elements, or neglected elements it may be, of our
common moral effort, into prominence, by explaining
them in unusual terms, or in the terms of some non-
moral interest in human life; so much influence, but
only so much, as they can exercise, in proportion
with that system or organisation of moral ideas,
which, in Christian lands, are the common property
of human society. And the moral development of
the individual may well follow the tendency of that
larger current, and permit its flights and heats, its
Hans, as the French say, only so much freedom of
play as may be consistent with full sympathy with,
and a full practical assent to, the moral preferences

32 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

of that " great majority," which exercises the autho-
rity of humanity ; and is actually a vast force all
■ around us. Harmonised, reduced to its true function,
in this way, Cyrenaicism, old or new, with its ardent
pursuit of beauty, might become, as I said, at the
least a very salutary corrective, in a generation which
has certainly not overvalued the aesthetic side of
its duties, or even of its pleasures. I have been
making use of theological terms ; and there is another
theological term which precisely expresses what I
mean. Such or such a heroic proposal, say the theo-
logians, is not a precept of the church, but a " counsel
of perfection." Such counsels of perfection may be-
come, by exaggeration or wilfulness, heresies; yet
they define the special vocations, success in which
earns the "special crown," in the case of those for
whom they are really meant ; and it is in this way
that Cyrenaicism, with its worship of beauty — of the
body — of physical beauty — might perform its legi-
timate moral function, as a "counsel of perfection,"
for the few.

For it was of perfection that Marius (to mount up
to him again, from 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 whole nature — his capacities, namely, of feeling,
of receiving exquisite physical impressions, of an
imaginative sympathy — but still, a true perfection of
those capacities, wrought out to their utmost degree,
and admirable enough in its way. He is an econo-

M ARIL'S THE EPICUREAN. 33

mist: he hopes, by that "insight" of which the old
Cyrenaics made so much, by a highly-trained skill in
the apprehension of what the conditions of spiritual
success really are, and the special circumstances of
the occasion with which he has to deal — the special
happinesses 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 ! Witb the brevity of those 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, but a quite real and
sincere one, to those old words — Let us work tchile 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 own natural
susceptibility in this direction, confirmed by experi-
ence, demands of him an almost exclusive preoccupa-
tion with the aspects of things ; their aesthetic character,
as it is called — their revelations to the eye and the
imagination : not so much because the spectacle of
these elements in them yields 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 least, are
matters of the most real kind of apprehension. As
other men concentrate themselves on truths of number,
or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of appetite,
VOL. II. D

34 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 of
heart and mind — liberty, above all, from conventional
answers to first questions.

But, without him there is a venerable system of
sentiment and ideas, widely extended in time and
place, actually 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 that, 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 ; with a great, consequent increase to one's
mind, of colour, variety, and relief, in the spectacle
of men and things. The mere sense of belonging 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 Eoman
church ; or as the old Roman citizen felt. It is, we
might fancy, like the coming into possession of a
very widely spoken language, with a vast literature,
which is also the speech of the people we have to
live among.

Cyrenaic or Epicurean doctrine, then — the Cyrenaic-
ism with which Marius had come to Rome, or our
own new Cyrenaicism of the nineteenth century —
does but need its proper complement. Refer it, as a

MAUIUS THE EPICUREAN. 35

part to the whole, to that larger, well-adjusted system
of the old morality, through which the better portion
of mankind strive, in common, towards the realisation
of a better world than the present — give it a modus
vivendi, as lawyers say, with that common everyday
morality, the power of which is continuous in human
affairs — excise its antinomian usurpations; and the
heresy becomes a counsel of perfection. Our Oyrenaic
iinds his special apprehension of the fact of life, amid
all his own personal colour of mind and temper —
finds himself again — though it be but as a single
element in an imposing system, a wonderful harmony
of principles, exerting a strange power to sustain —
to carry him and his effort still onward to perfection,
when, through one's inherent human weakness, his
own peculiar source of energy fails him, or his own
peculiar apprehension becomes obscured for a while.

A wonderful order, actually in possession of the
world! — grown over it and into it, inextricably;
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, which is iden-
tical with the one only consistent, aspiration of man-
kind ! In the apprehension of that, just then, Marius
seemed to have joined company again 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 change, an

36 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

expansion, of sympathy. There was involved in it,
certainly, a voluntary curtailing of his liberty, in
concession to the actual manner, the distinctions and
enactments of that great crowd of admirable spirits,
who have elected so, and not otherwise, in their con-
duct of life ; and who are not here to give one, so to
term it, an " indulgence." But then, under the sup-
position of their . frown, 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, and which defines the loyalty of the
scholar — or of some beautiful and venerable ritual, in
which every observance has become spontaneous and
almost mechanical, yet is found, the more carefully
one considers it, to have a reasonable significance
and a real history.

And Marius saw that he would be but an incon-
sistent Cyrenaic — mistaken in his estimate of values,
of loss and gain, and untrue to the well-considered
economy of life which he had brought to Rome with
him — 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.

CHAPTER XVII.

MANY PROPHETS AND KINGS HAVE DESIRED TO SEE
THE THINGS WHICH YE SEE.

The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the
vanguard of the mighty invading hosts of the fifth
century. Illusively repressed just now, those con-
fused 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 : and with
this lamentable result, that the kingdom of Christ
grew up in a somewhat false alienation from the
beauty and light of the kingdom of the natural man,
developing a partly mistaken tradition concerning it,
and an incapacity, as it might almost seem at times,
for eventual reconciliation with it. Meantime, Italy
had armed itself once more, in haste ; and the im-
perial brothers set forth for the Alps.

Whatever misgiving the Roman people may have
felt as to the leadership of the }-ounger of them was
unexpectedly set at rest; though with some tem-
porary regret for the loss of what had been, after all,

38 MARIUS THE EPICUKEAN.

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, per-
haps 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 ingeni-
ously on one only of its sides. Aurelius, certainly,
with unfeigned distress, his long irritations, so duti-
fully repressed or disguised, turning now into a single
sentiment of regret for the human creature, carried
the remains back to Eome, and demanded of the
Senate a public funeral, with a decree for the apo-
theosis, or canonisation, of the deceased.

For three days the body lay in state before the
Tribunal 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 Venus Genetrix; while armed soldiers watched
around it, and choirs of chosen voices relieved each
other in the chanting of hymns and monologues from
the great tragedians. At the head of the couch were
displayed the various personal decorations which had
belonged to Verus in life. Like all the rest of Eome,
Marius went to gaze on the face, which he had last

MABIUS THE EHCUREAN. 39

seen hardly disguised under the hood of a travelling-
dress, as the wearer hurried, at nightfall, along one of
the streets below the palace, on some amorous appoint-
ment. And unfamiliar as he still was with dead faces,
he was taken by surprise, and touched beyond what
he could have thought possible, 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, which it would
have been a sacrilege to treat rudely.

Meantime, in the centre of the Campus Martius,
within the grove of poplars enclosing the space where
the body of Augustus had been burnt, the great
funeral pyre, stuffed with shavings of various aromatic
woods, had been built up in many stages, separated
from each other by a light entablature of woodwork,
and abundantly adorned with tapestries, flowers, and
images. Upon the top of this pyramidal, or flamc-
shaped structure, was placed the corpse, hidden now
under a mountain of garlands and incense brought by
the women, who from the first had had their fondness
for the wanton graces of the deceased. The dead
body was surmounted by a waxen effigy of great size,
arrayed in the triumphal ornaments; and at last the
centurions, whose office it was, approached with their
torches to ignite the pile at its four corners, while the
soldiers, in wild excitement, ran around it, casting into
the flames the decorations they had received for acts
of valour under his command.

40 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 made to take
flight from the perishing remains ; a court chamber-
lain, according to ancient etiquette, subsequently
making official declaration, before the Senate, that
the imperial genius had been seen in this way, escaping
from the ashes. 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 — ccelum — 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 popu-
lous, in the central mass of the sepulchre of Hadrian,
still in all the splendour of its statues and colonnades,
were a matter of private or domestic duty ; after the
due accomplishment of which Aurelius was at liberty
to retire for a time into the privacy of his beloved
apartments on the Palatine. And hither, not long after-
wards, Marius was summoned a second time, to receive
from the imperial hands the great pile of manuscripts
it was to be his business to revise and arrange.

Just 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

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 41

subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the
imperial apartments, and in our own day, amid the
ruin of almost all else around it, as smooth and fresh
as if the carpets had but just been removed from the
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 ; his assassins gliding through it upon him, while
he stayed yet a little while longer to watch the
exercises of a party of noble youths at play. As
Marina waited, a second time, in the little red room,
in the house of the chief chamberlain, curious to look
once more at its painted walls — the very place into
which the assassins were said to have turned for con-
cealment after the murder — he could all but see the
figure, which, in its surrounding light and darkness,
had always seemed to him perhaps the most melan-
choly in the whole history of Rome. He called to
mind the greatness of that early promise and popular-
ity— the stupefying height of irresponsible power,
from which, after all, only men's viler side had been
clearly visible — the incipient overthrow of reason —
the irredeemable memory ; and still, above all, the
beautiful head in which the noble lines of the family
of Augustus were united to, he knew not what ex-
pression of fineness and sensibility, not theirs, and
for the like of which one must pass onward to the
Antonines. A legitimate popular hatred was careful
to destroy the semblance of it, wherever it could be
found ; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a

42 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

wonderful finish and style, preserved in the Museum
of the Capitol, is still one of the very finest art-treasures
of Rome. Had the very seal of empire upon those
sombre brows, reflected to him from his mirror, sug-
gested his mad attempts upon the liberty, the dignity
of humanity — 0 humanity ! what hast thou done to me
that I should so despise thee ? — And yet might not all
that be indeed the true meaning of kingship, if the
world would have one man to reign over it 1 that — or,
some incredible, surely never to be realised, height
of disinterestedness, in a king who should be the
servant of all, quite at the other extreme of the
practical dilemma involved in such a position. It was
not till some time after his death that his body was
decently interred by the sisters he had driven into
exile. Fraternity of feeling had not been an invari-
able feature in the incidents of Roman story — one
long Vicus Sceleratus, from its first dim foundation in
a fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common deliver-
ance so touching — had not almost every step in it
some gloomy memory of unnatural violence1? Romans
did well to fancy the traitress Tarpeia still "green in
earth," and established on a throne, at the roots of
the Capitoline rock. If in truth the religion of Rome
was everywhere in it, like the perfume of the funeral
incense still in the air Marius was breathing, so also
was the memory of its crimes, prompted by a hypo-
critical cruelty, down to the erring, or not erring,
vestal, calmly buried alive there, only eighty years
ago, under Domitian.

©

MABIUS THE EPICUKEAN. 43

It was with a sense of relief that Mariua found
himself in the presence of Aurelius, whose look and
gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered, made
him 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 day-
light found its way now into empty rooms. To raise
funds for the war, Aurelius, his luxurious brother
being now no more, had determined to sell by auction
the accumulated treasures of the imperial household.
The works of art, and the dainty furniture, had been
removed, and were now " on view " in the Forum, to
be the delight or dismay, for many weeks to come,
of the large public of those who were curious in such
things. In such wise had Aurelius come to that
condition of philosophic detachment, which he had
affected as a boy, when he had hardly been persuaded
to wear warm clothing, and to sleep otherwise than on
the bare floor. But, in the empty house, the man of
mind, who had always made so much of the pleasures
of philosophic contemplation, felt freer in thought
than ever. He had been reading, with less self-
reproach than usual, in the Republic of Plato, those
passages which describe the life of the king-philoso-
phers— like that of hired servants in their own house
— who, possessed of the " gold undefiled " of intellec-
tual vision, forego 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,

44 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

converging 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 those suggestions, conveyed by
philosophic reason to an alert imagination — sugges-
tions of a possible open country, commencing just
upon the verge where all actual experience leaves off,
but which experience, one's own and not another's,
may one day occupy. In fact, he was seeking strength
for himself, in his own way, before he started for that
ambiguous earthly warfare which was to occupy the
rest of his life. "Ever remember this," he writes,
"that a happy life depends not on many things —
iv oAtyicrTots kcltcu." And to-day, committing him-
self 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 Aure-
lius speaks often of a City on high, of which all other
cities beside are but single habitations. It was from
him that Cornelius Fronto, in his late discourse, had
borrowed the expression : and he certainly meant by
it more than the whole commonwealth of Rome, even
in any idealisation of it, however remote. Incorporate
somehow with the actual city, whose goodly stones
were lying beneath his gaze, it was also identical with
that constitution of universal nature, by a devout
contemplation of which it was possible for man to
associate himself to the consciousness of God. It

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 45

was in that new Rome that 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, at the
seaside, on the mountains ; and you have yourself as
much fondness for such places as another. Still,
there is no proof of culture in that ; for the privilege
is yours of retiring into yourself whensoever you
please — into that little farm of one's own mind, where
a silence so profound may be enjoyed." — That it could
make these retreats, was a plain consequence of the
prerogative, the kingship of the mind over its own
conditions, its real, 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 — concep-
tion : 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, or culture, was to keep one's soul
in a condition of pure 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 ah1, he had at least this privilege he could not
part with, of thinking as he would : and it was well,
now and then, by an effort of will, to indulge it for
a time, under an artificial and systematic direction.

46 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

The duty of thus making discreet, systematic use of
the power of imaginative vision for the 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 intenser form, of
the soul's own proper and natural life — would remain
upon it, perhaps for many days. There were experi-
ences 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 light, over there, upon the summit of the
Capitol, where the altar of the Sibyl now stood.
With a prayer, therefore, for inward quiet, and con-
formity to the divine reason, he read over some select
passages from Plato, which bear upon the harmony of
the reason, in all its forms, with itself — " Could there
be cosmos, that wonderful, reasonable order, in him,
and nothing but disorder in the world without ? " It
was from that question he had passed on to the vision,
of system, of the reasonable order, not in nature, but
in the condition of human affairs — the Celestial City,
Uranopolis, CaUipolis — in which, a consciousness of
the divine will being everywhere realised, there would
be, among other felicitous differences from this lower
visible order, 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 ;

MAEIUS TnE EPICUREAN. 47

and, as it were, to 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 pity for men as they were. However distinct the
mental image of that might have been to him, with
the descent of one flight of steps from the palace into
the market-place below, it would have retreated again,
as if at touch of a 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 tower or entry, here or there, and haunted
by strange faces, whose new expression he, the great
physiognomist, could by no means read. Plato, in-
deed, had been able to articulate, to see, in thought
at least, his ideal city. But just because Aurelius had
passed beyond Plato, in the scope of the philanthropy
— the Philadelphia — he supposed there, he had been
unable really to find his way about it. Ah ! after all,
according to Plato himself, all vision was but remi-
niscence, and this, his heart's desire, no place his soul
had ever 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 Aure-
lius, as he received from him the rolls of fine cleat
manuscript, fancying the emperor had been really
occupied with the famous prospect towards the .Sabine
and Alban hills, from those lofty windows.

CHAPTER XVIII.

"THE CEREMONY OF THE DART."

The ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus
Aurelius, ideas of large generalisation (it must be
repeated) have often induced, in those over whose
intellects they have had real power, a dullness of
heart. It was the distinction of Aurelius that he
was capable of harmonising them with the charities,
the amenities, one might almost say, 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," as it is called ; and
how often has that led to a socinian dryness — a hard
contempt of everything in religion, which touches
the senses, or charms the imagination, or really con-
cerns 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
been still human beings, and a somewhat fatalistic
speculation upon the impassive, universal soul — circle

M ALIUS THE KPH UI.I'.AN. 49

whose circumference was everywhere and centre
nowhere — of which a series of purely logical neces-
sities 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 —
Trapct rys p/Tpos to 6We/^es. Purified, as all such
religion of concrete time and place needs to be puri-
fied, by a frequent confronting with the ideal of god-
head, revealed by that innate theistic sense, in the
possession of which Aurelius differed from the reli-
gious people around him, it was the ground of many
a sociability with their simpler souls; and, for him-
self, a consolation, whenever the wings of his own
soul flagged, in the trying atmosphere of intellectual
speculation. 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 — their supposed presence de-
termined the character of much of his daily life, and
might prove the last stay of his human nature at its
weakest "In every time and place," he had said,
"it rests with thyself to use the event of the hour
religiously : at all seasons worship the gods." And
when he said "worship the gods," he did it as strenu-
ously as all besides.

And yet, here again, how often must he have ex-
perienced disillusion, or even a revolt of feeling, at
the contact with coarser natures to which his religious
conclusions exposed him. At the beginning of the
r a.d. 173 public anxiety was as great as ever;

VOL. II. E

50 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

and, as before, it brought people's superstition into
unreserved play. For- seven days the images of the
old gods, and of some of the graver new ones, lay
solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their
ornaments, each one 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 old, official observances,
the very wildest gods had their share of worship, like
some strange creatures with strange secrets startled
abroad into the open day. The delirious sort of
worship of which Marius was a spectator in the
streets of Eome, during the seven days of the Lectk-
iernium, reminded him, now and again, of an obser-
vation of Apuleius — it was " as iithe presence of the
gods did not do men good, but weakened or dis-
ordered them." Some jaded women of fashion, espe-
cially, found in certain oriental devotions, at once a
relief for their tearful souls and an opportunity for
personal display; preferring this or that mystery,
chiefly because the attire it required suited their
peculiar style of beauty. And one morning Marius
encountered an extraordinary crimson object, borne
along 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 the
purpose were slaughtered by the priests. Even on

MAKIL'S THE EPICUKKAX. 51

the last day of the solemnity, when the emperor him-
self performed one of the oldest ceremonies of the
Roman religion, this fantastic piety asserted itself.
There were victims enough, certainly, brought from
the choice pastures of the Sabine mountains, and led
around the city they were to die for, in almost con-
tinuous procession, covered with Mowers and well-nigh
worried to death before the time by the crowds press-
ing superstitiously to touch them. But some old-
fashioned Romans, in these exceptional circumstances,
demanded something more than that, in the way of
a human sacrifice, after the old pattern ; as when, not
so long since, some Gauls or Greeks had been buried
alive in the Forum. At least, human blood should
be shed : and it was through a wild multitude of
fanatics, cutting their flesh with whips and knives
and ardently licking up the crimson stream, that the
emperor repaired to the temple of Bellona, and in
solemn symbolic act cast the blood-stained spear, or
"dart/' which was preserved there, towards the
enemy's country — towards that unknown world of
German homes, still warm, as some thought, imder
the faint northern twilight, with those innocent affec-
tions of which Romans had lost the sense ; and the
ruin of which (so much was clear, amid all doubts of
abstract right or wrong on either side) was involved
in what Aurelius was then preparing ; 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, for

52 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

which Marcus Aurelius had needed to hrace himself so
strenuousty, came to test the power of a long-studied
theory of practice : and it was the development of
this theory — literally, a theoria, a view, an intuition—
of the most important facts, and still more important
possibilities, concerning man in the world — that Ma-
rius now discovered, almost as if by accident, below
the dry surface of the manuscripts entrusted to him.
The great purple rolls contained — statistics, a general
historical account of the writer's own time, and an
exact diary : all alike, though in three different de-
grees of approach to the writer's own personal ex-
perience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing. All this
was for the instruction of the public ; and a part of
it has, perhaps, found its way into the Augustan
Histories. But it was for the especial guidance of his
son Commodus that he had permitted himself to
break out, here and there, into reflections upon what
was passing, into conversations with the reader. And
then, as if put off his guard in that way, there had
escaped into the heavy statistical matter, of which the
main portion was composed, morsels of his conversa-
tions 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 wondered some-

MAKICS Till, BHI IIM'.AX. 53

times, as, for instance, when he bad interrupted his
musings in the empty palace, mighl 1"' that placid

inward guest or inhabitant, who from amid tin' pre-
occupations of the man of practical affairs looked
out surprised at the things and faces about it. Here,
under the tame surface of a would-be life of business,
Marius discovered, welcoming a brother, the spon-
taneous, irrepressible self-revelation of a soul as deli-
cate as his own a soul for which conversation with
[f was a necessity of existence. Marius had always
suspected that the feeling of rach necessity was a
peculiarity of his. Here, certainly, was another, in
this respect like himself: and again he seemed to
detect the advent of some new, or changed spirit into
the world, mystic, and inward, and very different
from that wholly external and objective habit of life,
with which the old classic sold had satisfied itself:
and his purely literary curiosity was greatly stimu-
lated by this example of a book of self-portraiture. It
was reallythe position of the modern essayist— creature
of efforts rather than achievements, in the matter of
apprehending truth — but at least conscious of lights
by the way, which he must needs acknowledge. What
seemed to underlie it was the desire to make the
mosl of every outward or inward experience, to per-
petuate and display what was BO fleeting, in a kind
of instinctive, pathetic protest against the imperial
■writer's own theory- thai theory of the perpetual flux
of all things — from of old so plausible to Marius.
Besides, there was a special doctrinal, or moral

54 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

significance in the making of such conversation Avith
oneself at all. The reasonable spark, the Logos in
man, is common to him with the gods — koivos avro
Trpus rows 9eovs — cum diis communis. That might
seem but the truism of certain schools of philosophy :
in Aurelius it was clearly an original and lively ap-
prehension. There could be no inward conversation
with oneself like that, unless there were indeed some
one aware of our actual feelings 'and thoughts, pleased
or displeased at one's disposition of oneself. Fronto
too, the learned professor, could enounce that pro-
position 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 mere
motive of rhetoric, was to the other a consolation.
He walks and talks, for a spiritual refreshment, with-
out which he would faint by the way, with what to
the other is but a matter of philosophic eloquence.

In performing those public religious acts, Marcus
Aurelius had ever seemed like one taking his part in
some high, real, process, a real thing done, with more
than the actually visible assistants about him. Here,
in a hundred marginal flowers of feeling and language,
happy new phrases of his own like the impromptus of
a real conversation, or those quotations from other
older masters of the inward life, taking new signifi-
cance 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 in-

KABIUS Tin: BPICUBEAK. 55

telligible companion, whose tabernacle was in the
intelligence of men; — the journal of his daily com-
with that
Chance or Providence! Chance: or Wisdom —

one with nature and man ; reaching from end to end,
through all time and all existence, orderly disposing
all things, according to fixed periods — aa he describes
it, in terms very like certain well-known words of the
book of //' those are the "fenced opposites," of

the sp wmlative dilemma, the tragic embarras, <>f which
Aureliua cannot* too often remind himself as the
summary of man's situation in the world. If there
be such a provident soul "behind the veil," truly,
even to him, even in the most intimate of those con-
versations, it has never yet spoken with any quite
irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet that specu-
lative choice, as he has found it, is on the whole a
matter of will — " Tis in thy power," again, here too,
"to think as thou wilt." And for hie part lie has
made his choice and is true to it. "To the better of
two things, if thou findest that, turn with thy whole
hear! : ea1 and drink ever of the best before thee."
•• Wisdom," says that other disciple of the Sapiential
philosophy, ''hath mingled her wine, she hath also
prepared herself a table." — To£ dpio-rov d:ro'Aai'€ —
"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 his bearing as in the
presence of this 8Uppos< d guest; so elusive, so jealous

56 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

of any broad manifestation of himself, so taxing to
one's faith, never allowing one to lean frankly upon
him and be wholly at rest. Only, he would do his
own part, at least, in maintaining the constant fitness,
the quiet and sweetness of the guest-chamber. Seem-
ing to vary with the intellectual fortune of the hour,
from being the plainest account of experience, to a
sheer fantasy, believed almost because it was im-
possible,— that one hope was, at all events, sufficient
to make men's common pleasures, and common ambi-
tion, above all their commonest vices, seem very petty
indeed, too petty to know of ; and 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 super-
ficial thoughts about anything whatever, or talk about
other people, or speculation as to what was passing
in their so visibly little souls, or much talk of any
kind, however clever or graceful. A soul thus disposed
had already entered into the better life — was indeed in
some sort a priest, a minister of the gods. Hence, his
constant circumspection ; a close watching of his soul,
almost unique in the ancient world. — Before all things
examine into thyself: strive to be at home with thyself/ —
Marius a sympathetic witness of all that, might almost
seem to have foreseen monasticism itself, in the pro-
phetic future. With this mystic companion he had
gone a step onward, out of the merely objective pagan
world. Here was already a master in that craft of
self-direction, which was then coming to play so large

KAXXUB Tin: EPICUBEAN. 57

apart in the human mind, at the prompting of the
Christian church.

\\ t it was in truth a very melancholy service, a

servi<v upon which one must needs move about,
solemn, serious, depressed : with the hushed footsteps
of people who move aboul a house of mourning whi re
a dead body is lying. That was an impression which

occurred to Marias, again ami again, as lie read, with
the growing sense of some profound dissidence from
his author. By certain, quite traceable links of

.iatioii, he was reminded, in spite of the moral
beauty of the philosophic emperor's ideas, how he had
Bat, essentially unconcerned, at the gladiatorial she
For, actually, his contemplations had made him of a
sad heart ; inducing in him that sadness — TristUia —
which even monkish moralists have held to be of the
nature of mortal sin, akin to the mortal sin of —
Deiidia — Inactivity or Sloth. Resignation, a sombre
resignation, a sad heart, patient hearing of the burden
of a sad heart — Yes ! that was in the situation of an
honest thinker upon the world. Only, here there
was too much of a tame acquiescence in it. And
there could he no true Thdodkie in that; no real

immodation of the world as it is, to the divine
pattern of the Logos < dust it. It amounted to

a tolerance of evil.

The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but
little understand, yel prosperetb "ii the journey:

If thou sufferest nought contrary to nature, there can be nought
of evil with thee th<

58 MAPJUS THE EPICUREAN.

If thou hast done anything in harmony with that reason in
which men are communicant with the gods, there also can be
nought 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 !

Those were some of the links in a train of thought
really generous. Only, actually, its forced and yet
too facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere,
had no secret of genuine cheerfulness in it ; it left a
weight upon the spirits. No ! with that weight un-
lifted, there could indeed be no genuine Thfodicde, no
real justification of the ways of Heaven to man.
"Let thine air be cheerful," he had said; and, with
an effort, did at times himself attain to that serenity
of aspect, which surely ought to accompany, as their
outward flower and favour, assumptions like those.
Still, what in Aurelius was a passing expression, was
in Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast)
nature, and a veritable physiognomy. It was in fact,
we may say, nothing less than the joy which Dante
apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect ; the
outward expression of which, like a physical light
upon human faces, from the land which is very far
off, we may trace from Giotto, and even earlier, to
its consummation in the purer and better work of
Raffaelle, — the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, the
blitheness of those who had been indeed delivered

MABIUS THE EPICUREAN. 59

from death, <>f which the utmost degree of that famed
Greek blitheness or HeiterJceii is 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 : as 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 — in the apparent wasting of men's
gifts in an early, or even in a late grave; in the
death, as such, of men, and even of animals; in the
disease and pain of the body.

And there was another point of dissidence between
Aurelius and his reader. — The philosophic Aurelius
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, both of which are of animal and
inferior quality, to break in upon her;" it must follow
thai the true aim of the spirit will be to treat the
ho.ly -o orttf/tariKos rtK-pos — ever a carcase rather
than a companion as a thing really dead, a corpse;
and actually to promote its dissolution. And here
again, in opposition to an inhumanity like this, pre-
Benting itself to that young reader as nothing less
than a kind of sin against nature, the person of Come
lius sanctioned or justified the delight Marius had
always had in the body; at, first, as hut one of the
consequences of his material or sensualistic philo-
sophy. To Cornelius, the body of man was unmis-

60 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

takably, as a later seer terms it, the one temple in
the world ("we touch Heaven when we lay our hand
upon a human body"), and the proper object of a
sort of worship, or sacred service, in which the very
finest gold might have its seemliness and due symbolic
use — Ah ! and of what awe-stricken pity or reverence
also, in its dejection, down even to the perishing
white bones of the poor man's grave !

Some flaw in vision, thought Marius, must be in-
volved in the philosopher's contempt for it — some
disease in thought, or moral dulness ; leading logically
to what seemed to him the strangest of all the em-
peror's inhumanities, the humour of the suicide ; for
which there Avas 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 mental and moral
powers might flag with one ; and then it were a fair
question, precisely, whether the time for taking leave
had not come — "Thou canst leave this prison when
thou wilt. Go forth boldly !"— Just there, in the
mere capacity to entertain that question at all, there
was what Marius, whose heart must always leap up in
loyal gratitude for the mere, physical sunshine, if for
nothing else, touching him as it touched the flies in the
air, could not away with. In that, surely, was the sign
of some distortion in the natural power of apprehen-
sion. It was the attitude, the melancholy intellectual
attitude, of one who might be greatly mistaken in
things — who might make the greatest of mistakes.

ICABIUS TIIK BPICUEEAN. 6]

A heari that could forgel itself in the misfortune,
and even the weakness of others:— of that, .Marius
had certainly found the trace, as a confidant of the
emperor's conversations with himself, in spite of those
jarring inhumanities, his pretension to a stoical in-
difference, and the many difficulties of his manner of
writing. He found it again not Ion-- afterwards, in
still stronger evidence, in this way. As he read one
morning early, there slipped from the rolls of manu-
script a sealed letter with the emperor's superscrip-
tion, which might wJl he of importance, and he felt
bound to deliver it at once in person; Aurelius being
then absent from Home in one of his favourite re-
treats, at Prseneste, taking a few days of quiet with
his young children, before his departure for the war.
A lung day passed as Marius crossed the Cam/pagna
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 long after dark that he
mounted the steep street of the little hill-town to
the imperial residence. He was struck by an odd
mixture of stillness and excitement about the place.
Lights burned at the windows. It seemed that
numerous visitors were within, for the courtyard
was crowded with litters and horses in waiting. For
the moment, indeed, all larger cares, even the cares
of war, of late so heavy a pressure, had been for-
gotten in what was passing with the little Annius
VerUBj who for his part had forgotten his toys, and

62 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

had been lying all day across the knees of his mother,
as a mere child's ear-ache grew rapidly to an alarm-
ing sickness with great manifest agony, only sus-
pended a little, from time to time, as he passed from
very weariness into a few minutes of unconsciousness.
The country surgeon called in, had removed the im-
posthume with the knife. There had been a great
effort to bear this operation, for the terrified child,
hardly persuaded to submit himself, when his pain
was at its worst, and even more for the parents. At
last, amid a crowd of pupils pressing in with him, as
the custom was, to watch the proceedings in the sick-
room, the great Galen had arrived, only to pronounce
the thing done visibly useless, the patient now faint-
ing into longer intervals of delirium. And it was
just then, through the pressure of the departing
crowd, that Marius was forced into being privy to a
grief, the desolate face of which went deep into his
memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away
— quite conscious now, but with a touching expression
of helplessness and defeat upon it — pressed closely
to his bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing
only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in
its obscure distress.

CHAPTEB XIX.

l-AKAH M OOB MI'.IM, DEUS ! PARATUM COR MEUM.

Tin: emperor required only that the Senate should
decree the erection of images, memorial of the dead
child ; that a golden image of him should be carried,
with the other images, in the great procession of the
Circus, and that his name should be inserted in the
Hymn of the Salian Priests: and so, stilling private
f, without further delay set forth for the war.
True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aure-
lius, 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 he kings ; thru, the true Ideal of the State
will become a possibility ; and not otherwise. And
if a life of Beatific Vision be indeed possible, if philo-
Bophy really concludes in an ecstasy affording its
full fruition to the entire nature of man ; then, for
tain elect souls at Least) a mode of life will have
been discovered more desirable than being a king.
By love or fear you might induce such an one to
forego his privilege; to take upon him the distasteful

64 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

task of governing other men, or even of leading them
to victory in battle : and by the very conditions of
its tenure, his dominion would be wholly a ministry
to others ; he would have taken upon him " the form
of a servant;" he would be reigning for the well-
being of others, not for himself. The true king, the
rightful king, would be Saint Lewis, exiling himself
from the better land and its perfected company — so
real a thing to him, as real and definite as the pic-
tured pages of his psalter — to arbitrate, or to take
part in, men's quarrels about the transitory appear-
ances of things. In a lower degree — lower, in pro-
portion 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 leader of the Eoman people in peace, and still
more, in war.

To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the
visions, however dim, which this mood brought with
it, were pleasant enough, together with those endear-
ments of home, to make his public rule nothing less
than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato's require-
ments, now consummated in his setting forth to the
campaign on the Danube. That it was such a sacri-
fice was to Marius a visible fact, as he saw him cere-
moniously lifted into the saddle amid all the pageantry
of an imperial departure, but with the air less of a
triumphant and self-willed leader than of one in some
way or other defeated. Through the fortunes of the
subsequent years, passing and repassing so inexplic-

MARIUS Till: EPICUREAN. 65

ably from ride bo side, the rumours <>f which reached

him amid his own quiet studies, Mai ; med alwa\ B

to Bee thai central image, with its habitual hue of
dejection grown now to an expression of positive
Buffering; all the stranger from its contrast with the
magnificenl armour worn by the emperor on that occa

si.m, as it had been worn by his predecessor Hadrian.

Totua el argento contextua et auro —
clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old

divinely constructed armour of which Eomer speaks,

luit wit hunt its miraculous lightsomencss — he looked
out baffled, moribund, labouring, like a comfortless
shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction
of the labours of a Hercules through those mist-laden
Northern confines of the civilised world. It wa
if the familiar soul which had been so friendly dis-
posed towards him were actually departed to Hades;
and when he read his Conversations afterwards, thou-di
he did not materially change his judgment of them,
it was nevertheless with the allowance we make for
the dead. The memory of that Buffering image, while
it certainly deepened his adhesion to what he could
ipt in those remains of Aurelius, added a strange
pathos to what must seem the writer'- mistaki
What, after all, had been the meaning ui that inci-
dent, accepted as bo fortunate an omen long ago, when
the Prince, then a little child much younger than was
usual, had stood in ceremony among the priests of
.Mais and Hung his crown of flowers with the rest at

VOL II.

66 MAEIUS THE EPICUKEAN.

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,
alighted upon the very brows of the god, as if placed
there by a careful hand ! He was still young, again,
when on the day of his adoption by Antoninus Pius
he saw himself in a dream, with as it were shoulders
of ivory, like the images of the gods, and found them
more capable than shoulders of flesh. Yet he was
now well-nigh fifty years of age, and with two-thirds
of life behind him was setting out upon a labour
which was to fill the remainder of it with anxiety — a
labour for which he had perhaps no capacity, certainly
no taste.

That ancient suit of armour was almost the only
object which Aurelius now possessed out of all those
much cherished articles of vertu collected by the
Caesars, making the imperial residence like a mag-
nificent museum. For not men only were needed for
the war, so that it was necessary, to the great disgust
alike of timid persons and of the lovers of sport, to
arm the gladiators : money also was lacking. Ac-
cordingly, 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 imperial
chapel or Lararium, and the wardrobe of the empress

ICABIUS THE EPICUBBAH". 67

Faustina, who senns to have borne the loss without
.1 murmur, were exposed for public auction "These
treasures," said Aurelius, "like all else that I possess,

ing by righl to the Senate and people." W.
Dot a characteristic <»f the true kings in Plato that
they had in their houses nothing of their <>•
I 's had a keen delight in the mere reading

of the Prcetor's list of the property for sale. For two
months the learned in these matters were daily oc-
cupied in the appraising of the embroidered hangin
the choice articles of personal use selected for pre-
servation by each succeeding age, the great outlandish
pearls from Hadrian's favourite cabinet, the marvel-
lous plate lying safe behind the pretty iron wicker-
work of the shops in the goldsmiths' quarter. Mean-
time ordinary persons might inspect with interest
objects which had been as daily companions to people
so far above and remote from them — things so fine
also in material and workmanship as to seem, with
their antique and delicate air, a worthy survival of
the grand bygone eras — like select thoughts or utter-
ances, embodying the very spirit of the vanished past.
The town became mure pensive than ever over old
fashions.

The pleasurable excitement of this last act of pre-
paration for the great war being over, all Rome
seemed to settle down into a singular quiet, likely to
la-t long, as though bent only On watching from afar
the languid, somewhat uneventful course of the con-
test itself. Marius took advantage of it as an oppor-

68 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

tunity for still closer study than of old ; only no-w-
and then going out to one of his favourite spots on
the Alban or the Sabine hills, for a quiet even greater
than that of Rome, in the country air. On one of
those occasions, as if by the favour of an invisible
power, withdrawing some unsuspected cause of op-
pression 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 had awoke in the morning sunlight, full,
in his entire refreshment, of that almost religious
appreciation of sleep, the graciousness of its influence
on men's spirits, which had made the old Greeks
conceive of it as a god. It was like one of those old
joyful wakings of childhood, now becoming rarer and
rarer with him, and looked back upon with much
regret as a measure of advancing age. In fact, the
last bequest of this serene sleep had been a dream,
in which, as once before, he had overheard those he
loved best pronouncing his name very pleasantly, as
they passed through the rich sunlight and shadow
of a summer morning, along the pavement of a city
— Ah ! fairer far than Eome ! In a moment, as he
awoke, a dejection which of late had settled heavily
upon him was lifted away as if by the motion of
physical air.

That flawless serenity, better than the most plea-
surable excitement, but so easily ruffled by chance
collisions even with things or persons, he had begun
to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to be

MAEIUS THE EPICUBEAN. G9

wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards
Tibur, under rly sunshine ; the old yellow

marble of its villas glittering all the way before him
on the hillside. Why might he not hold thai serenity
at command '!-- b I himself expei t, as lie

had at last cod , in the art to setting the house

of his thoughts in order. "Tis in thy power to
think as thou will :" he repeated to himself most
serviceable of all the Lessons enforced on him hy
those imp rial / " I 'i • in thy power to

think as thou wilt." And were those cheerful, sociable
beliefs he had there seen so much of (that hold selec-
tion, for instance, of the hypothesis of an eternal
friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a me-
chanical and material order, yet only just behind it
and ready perhaps even now to break through), after
all, perhaps, really a ma;' choice, and depend* at

on a deliberate act <>f volition on his part? Y\

\ doctrines one might take for granted, generously
take for granted— and led along by them, at first as
hut well-defined hop. Last into the corre-

sponding intellectual certitude? "It is the truth I
k "—he had read -"the truth, by which no one,"
y and depressing as it might seem, "was ever
ly injured."' Ami yet, on the other hand, the
imperial wayfarer, he had been abl with

so far on his pilgrimage, lei fall many things concern-
ing the practicability of a forced, constructive, method-
ical assenl to principles or dogmas, which one could
not do without. Were there (as the expression

70 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

dvayKata — which one could not do without — seemed to
hint) opinions, without which life itself was almost
impossible, and which had their sufficient ground of
evidence in that fact 1 Experience certainly taught
that, as with regard to the sensible world he could
attend or not, almost at will, to this or that colour,
this or that train of sounds, amid the whole tumult
of sound and colour, so it was also, for a well-trained
intelligence, in regard to the hum of voices which
besiege the inward no less than the outward ear.
Might it be not otherwise with those various and
competing, permissible hypotheses, which, in that open
field for hypothesis — one's own actual ignorance of
the origin and tendency of our being — present them-
selves so importunately, some of them with so em-
phatic a reiteration, through all the mental changes of
the various ages; present themselves as instinctive
reflections of the facts of experience? Might the
Will itself be an organ of knowledge, of vision ?

On this day, certainly, no mysterious light, no
irresistibly leading hand from afar reached him ; only,
the peculiarly tranquillising influence with which it
had begun increased steadily upon him, in a manner
with which, as he conceived according to his habit,
the aspects of the place he was then visiting had
something to do. The air there, air which it was
fancied had the singular property of preserving or
restoring the whiteness of ivory, Avas pure and thin.
An even veil of lawn-like white cloud had now drawn
over the sky ; and under its broad, shadowless light

MABIU 3 THE BPICUBEAN. 71

cvcrv tunc ;iml hue <>f time came out upon the old
yellow temples" and houses, seeming continuous with
the rooks they rose from. Some half conscious
motive of poetic grace would appear to have deter-
mined their grouping; partlj resisting, partly going
along with the natural wildnesa and harshness of the
place, its floods and precipices An air of immense
possessed, above all, the vegetation around — a
world of evergreen t ices— the olives especially (older
than how many generations of men's Lives!) fretted
and twisted by the combining forces of life and
death, into every conceivable caprice of form. In
the windless weather all seemed to be listening to
the roar of the immemorial waterfall, piling iwn

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, Yei 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

hois,' at the inn where he rested, Marius had an

i delay. He sal down in one of those

olive-gardens, and, all within and around him turning

still to reverie*, the course of bis own life hitherto

■nod to retire from him into some other world,

72 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

distinct from the point at which he was now placed
to watch it, like the distant road below, over which
he had travelled that morning across the Campagna.
Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving,
as if in another life, detached from the present, and
like another person, through all his fortunes and mis-
fortunes, passing from point to point, weeping or
delighted, escaping from various dangers. And the
vision brought, first of all, a forcible impulse of
nothing else than gratitude, as if he must actually
look round for some one to share his joy with — to
whom he might tell of it, as a relief. Companion-,
ship, indeed, familiarity with souls noble and gifted,:
or at least sweet to him, had been, through this and,
that long space of it, the chief delight of the journey:,
and was it only the general sense and residue of that
familiarity, diffused through his memories, which, in
a while, suggested the question whether there had
not been — besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even,
and through the solitude which in spite of ardent
friendship he had perhaps loved best of all things —
a companion, a perpetual companion, ever at his side
throughout ; doubling his pleasure in the joses by
the way, recipient of his depression or peevishness,
above all, as of old, of his grateful recognition of the
fact that he himself was there at all 1 "Would not all
have faded away altogether, had he been left for one
moment really alone in it 1 In his deepest apparent
solitude there had been rich entertainment. It was
as if there were not one but two wayfarers, side by

KABIUS Tin. EPICUB1

side, visible there across the plain, as he indul
fancy. A bird came and Bang among the wattled
s: an animal feeding crept Dearer: the
child who kept it \ quietly : and the sc<

and the hum- still conspiring, he | from thai

.mere fantasy of a Belt not himself, beside him in
coming and going, to those divinations of a breath
of the spirit^ at work in all things, of which there had
been glimpses for him from time to time in his old
philosophic readings in Plato, in Aristotle, and
others — last but not least, in Aurelius. Through one
reflection upon another, he passed from those instinc
live feelings or divinations, to the thoughts which
articulate and give them logical consistency, and for-
mulate at last, out of our experiences of our own
and the world's life, that reasonable Ideal, which the
Old Testament calls the ( , and the Gi

philosophers !'. rnal Rt and the New Testa

inent the Father of Men — as one builds up from act
and word and expression of the friend actually visible
at one's side, an ideal of the spirit within him.

in this peculiar and privileged hour, his body, as

lie i M recognise, although just then, in the whole

sum of its capacities, bo entirely possessed by him —
Day I by some mysterious intimacy, actually his \
self wasyel determined by avast system of mat.
influences external to it. a thousand combining
incuts from earth and sky, in the currents of the air,
on that bland afternoon. Its powers of apprehension
were but susceptibilities to influenci Its perfection

74 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

of capacity might be said to lie in this, that it sur-
rendered itself impassively, like a leaf on the wind,
to the motions of the great stream of material
energies outside itself. Might not the intellectual
being also, which was still more intimately himself,
after that analogy of the bodily life, be but a moment, •
an impulse or series of impulses, belonging to an in-
tellectual system without him, diffusing itself through
all time and place — that great stream of spiritual
energy, of which his own imperfect thoughts, yesterdaj''
or to-day, were the remote, and therefore imperfect,
pulsations. It was the hypothesis (boldest, yet in
reality 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 in and by their
being known, as Plato conceived ; the creative, incorrupt-
ible, informing Mind, supposed by Aristotle, so sober-
minded, yet in this matter left, after all, something
of a mystic. Might not that whole material world,
then playing so masterfully upon his bodily organ-
isation, the very scene around him, the immemorial
rocks, the carved marble, the rushing water, be them-
selves but reflections in, or a creation of, that per-
petual mind, wherein he too became conscious, for
an hour, a day, or for so many years 1 Upon what
other hypothesis could he so well understand the
persistency of all these things for his own inter-
mittent consciousness of them, for #the intermittent
consciousness of so many generations, fleeting away

MAUls THE EPICUW 75

one after another 1 It was easier to conceive of the
materia] fabric of the world around him as bul an
elemenl in a world of thought— as a thought in a
mind— than of mind as an element, or accident, or
passing condition, in a material order; because mind
was really aearer to himself: it was an explanation
of what was Less known by what was known better.
Just thru, the merely material world, .so often like
a heavy wall about him, seemed the unreal tiling,
and to he breaking away all around; and he felt a
quiet hope and joy in the dawning of this doctrine
upon him as an actually credible opinion: it was like
the dawning of day over a vast prospect with the
"new city" in it. That divine companion figured no
longer as only an occasional wayfarer beside him, but
he unfailing " assistant," without whose inspiration
and concurrence he could not breathe or see, in-
strumenting his bodily senses, rounding and support-
his imperfect thoughts. How often had the
recollection of their transitoriness spoiled his most
natural pleasures in life, actually confusing his sense
of them by a suggestion of failure and death in
everything! How had he longed, sometimes, that
there were indeed one to whose memory he could
commit his own most fortunate moments, his admir
ation and love, nay! the very sorrows of which he
could not hear quite to lose the sense — one, strong to
retain them even Bhould he forget, in whose abler

consciousness they might remain present i - res
things still, over and above that mere quickening of

76 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

capacity which was all that remained of them in
himself ! And he had apprehended to-day, in the
special clearness of one privileged hour, that in which
the experiences he most valued might as it were take
refuge— hirds of passage as they were for himself, in
and hy himself, soon out of sight or with broken
wing ; yet not really lost, after all, on their Avay to
the enduring light, in which the fair hours of life
would present themselves as living creatures for ever
before the perpetual observer. And again, that sense
of companionship, of a person beside him, evoked the
faculty of conscience — of conscience, as of old when
he had been at his best — in the form not of fear, nor
of self-reproach even, but of a certain lively gratitude.
Himself — his ideas and sensations — never fell again
precisely into focus as on that day, yet he was the
richer by its experience. But for once to have come
into subjection to 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 con-
clusion— to have apprehended the Great Ideal, so
palpably that it defined a personal gratitude and the
sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the
shadows of the world, made this- one particular day
among all days a space marked in life and for ever
recognisable. It gave him a definite and ascertained |
measure of his moral or intellectual need, of what his
soul really demanded from the powers, whatever they
might be, which had brought him, as he was, into the
world at all. And, again, would he be faithful to'

M \l:n 8 i HE E5PIC1 Rl 77

himself, to In* own habits and leading Buppositit
if he did but remain just there? Musi not all the
rest of bis life be king after the equivalent

that reasonable [deal, anion- Bo-called actual thii
— a gathering up of every trace and aote of it, I
or there, which actual experience might present I
liim '

PART THE FOURTH.

CHAPTEB XX

TWO CURIOUS HOUSES.

I. GUESTS.

" Your old mm shall dream dreams, and your young men
she! I see visions."

A NATURE like that of Marius, composed, in about
equal parts, of instincts almost physical, and of slowly
accumulated intellectual judgments, was perhaps even
It )8S 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
upon it, did not Leave him quite as he had been : for
his mental new, at least, it changed measurably tho
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, mentally, through a
diminishing glass. And the permanency of this change
he could note, some years later, when it happened
that he was a guest at a feast, in which the various
exciting elements of Roman life, its physical and

VOL. II. Q

82 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

intellectual accomplishments, its frivolity and far-
fetched elegancies, its strange, mystic essays after the
unseen, were elaborately combined. The great Apu-
leius, the poetic ideal of his boyhood, had come to
Rome — was now visiting Tusculum, at the house of
their common friend, a certain aristocratic poet who
loved every sort of superiorities : and it was to a
supper -party ghren in his honour that Marius had
been invited.

It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession
to his own early boyish hero-worship, and with some
sense of superiority in himself, as he saw his old
curiosity grown now almost to indifference, with a
truer measure of its object when it was on the point
of satisfaction at last, that he mounted to the little
town on the hillside, the streets of which were broad
nights of easy steps, gathered round a single great
house below Cicero's villa on the heights, now in ruins
and "haunted." There was a touch of weirdness in
the circumstance that it was in this romantic place he
had been bidden to meet the writer who had come to
seem almost like one of the personages in his own
fiction. Through the tall openings of the stair-cased
streets, up which, here and there, the cattle were
going home slowly from the pastures below, the Alban
heights, between the great walls of the ancient houses,
seemed close upon him— a vaporous screen of dun
violet against the setting sun — with those waves of
surpassing softness in their boundary line, characteris-
ing them as volcanic hills. The coolness of the little

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. 83

brow 11 market-place, for the sake of which even the
working people were leaving the plain, in long file
through the olive-gardens, to pass the night, w;is
grateful, after the heats of Eome. 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, which seemed to enfold him, as passing into the
poet's house he turned to glance for a moment to-
wards the height 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 hardly
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 the odours of the altars of the gods, the supper-
table was spread, in all the daintiness characteristic
of the agreeable petit ma it re, who entertained. He
was already must carefully dressed j but, like Martial's
Stella, perhaps consciously, meant to change his attire
once and again during the banquet; in the hist in-
stance, for an ancient vesture (object of much rivalry
among the young men of fashion, at that great sale of

84 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

the imperial wardrobes), a toga, of altogether lost hue
and texture. He wore it with the grace becoming
the leader of a thrilling movement then on foot for
the restoration of that disused garment, in which, lay-
ing aside the customary evening dress, all the visitors
were requested to appear, setting off the dainty
sinuosities and well-disposed "golden ways" of its
folds, with harmoniously tinted flowers. The opulent
sunset, blending pleasantly with artificial light, fell
past the quiet ancestral effigies of old consular digni-
taries, across 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 side-
board of old citron-wood. The crystal cups darkened
with old wine, the hues of the early autumn fruit —
mulberries, pomegranates, and grapes that had long
been hanging under careful protection upon the vines,
were almost as much a feast for the eye, as the dusky
fires of the rare twelve-petalled roses. A favourite
animal, white as snow, brought by one of the visitors,
purred its way gracefully among the wine-cups, coaxed
onward from place to place by those at table, as they
reclined easily on their cushions of German eider-
down, spread over the long-legged, carved couches.

A highly refined modification of the acroama — a
musical performance during a meal for the diversion
of guests — came presently, 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 ; inclin-

KAMI'S THE EPICUREAN. 85

ing <m tlic whole to think it sonic wonderful pcasant-
music peculiar to that wild neighbourhood, turning,
as it did now and then, to a solitary reed-note, like
B 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 l>y 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 Com-
modus, already an adept in these matters, who had
condescended to welcome the eminent Apuleius at
the banquet, had mysteriously dropped from his place,
to take his share in the performance ; and at its con-
clusion reappeared, still wearing the dainty accoutre-
ment- 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 imita-
tion of Nero, in a golden box dedicated to Capitolinc
Jupiter. His likeness to Aurelius, his father, had
become, in consequence, more Btriking than ever;
and he had one source of genuine interest in the

86 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN

great literary guest of the occasion, in that the latter
was the fortunate holder of the monopoly of ex-
hibiting wild beasts and gladiatorial shows in the
province of Carthage, where he resided.

Still, after all complaisance to the perhaps some-
what crude tastes of the good 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 round the table. It
was a sign for the visitors themselves to draw their
own choicest literary curiosities from their bags, as
their contribution to the banquet : and one of them,
a famous reader, choosing his lucky moment, delivered
in tenor voice the piece which follows, with a pre-
liminary 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 Chsere-
phon. " 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 Avonder. I
thought all sea-birds were songless."

"It was a sea-bird," answered Socrates, "a bird
called the Halcyon, and has a note full of plaining
and tears. There is an old story people tell of it.
It was a mortal woman once, daughter of iEolus,

MABIDS Tin: EPICUREAN. 87

god of the winds. Ceyx, the son of the morning-
star, wedded her in her early maidenhood The son
\\a< not leas fail than the father; and when it came
to pass that he died, the crying of the girl as she
lamented hia Bweet usage, was — Just, that! And
some while after, as Heaven willed it, she was
changed into a bird. Floating now on bird's wings
over the sea, she seeks her lost Ceyx, there; since
was not able to find him after long wandering
the land."

''That then is the Halcyon — the kingfisher," said
Chasrephon. "I never heard a bird like it before.
It lias truly a plaintive note. What kind of a bird
is it, Socrates'?"

" Not a large bird, though she has received large
honour from the gods, on account of her singular con-
jugal affection, For whensoever she makes her nest,
a law of nature brings round what is called Halcyon's
weather days distinguishable among all others for
their serenity, though they come sometimes amid the
Storms of winter — Days like to-day ! See how trans-
parent is the sky above us, and how motionless the
—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 Ch8erephon,M said Socrates, "methinks we

88 MARIUS THE EPICUEEAN.

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 com-
parison of eternity. Then, how can we, who com-
prehend not the faculties of gods and the heavenly
host, tell whether aught of that kind be possible or
no ? — What a tempest you saw three days ago ! One
trembles but to think of the lightning, the thunder-
claps, 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 whirl-
wind 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
aro manageable and easy. — How much wider is the

makii s Tin; EPICUREAN. 89

whole heaven than thyself!— More than thou canal

I'Xpl I

"Among ourselves also, how vast the differences

we observe in men's degrees of power! T" yon ami

me ami many another like us, many things are im-
possible which are quite easy to others. For those
vhti are unmusical, to play on the flute j 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 ami lifeless egg Nature
moulds her swarms of winged creatures, aided, as
some will have it, by a divine and secret art in the
wide aii' 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 as to what happens even with ourselves;
may hardly Bpeak with security as to what those
-vast powers of the immortal gods may be concerning
Kingfisher, or Nightingale. Yet the glory of thy
mythus, as my fathers bequeathed it to me, 0 !
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 Ci yw and
of th\ melodious hymns ; ami above all of the honour
thou hast with the gods !"

90 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

The reader's well-turned periods seemed to stimu-
late, almost uncontrollably, the eloquent stirrings of
the eminent man of letters then present. The im-
pulse to speak masterfully was visible, before the
recital was well over, in the moving lines about his
mouth — by no means designed, as detractors were
wont to say, merely to display the beauty of his
teeth : and one of his followers, aware of his humours,
made ready to transcribe what he would say, the
sort of things of which a collection was then forming
— the Florida or Flowers, so to call them, he was
apt to let fall by the way : no impromptu ventures,
but rather elaborate, carved ivories of speech, drawn,
at length, out of the rich treasury of his memory, and
as with a fine savour of old musk about them. Cer-
tainly in this case, thought Marius, 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 iEsculapius, the patron-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 of that sort of Pla-
tonic spiritualism which could speak of the soul of
man as but a sojourner in the prison of the body
really foreign to it, 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

MARK'S THE KPICURI 91

coarseness he had found in the "(!<>lden Mook." All
this made the total impression he conveyed a very
uncommon one. Marina did not wonder, as he
watched him speaking, that people freely attributed
to him many of the marvellous adventures which he
had recounted in thai famous romance, over and
above the wildest version "i his own actual history —
his extraordinary marriage, his religious initiations,
his acts of mad generosity, and his trial as a sorcerer.
But a sign fame from the imperial prince that it

was time for the company to separate, lie was enter
taming his immediate neighbours at the table with a
trick from the Btreete; tossing his olives in rapid suc-
cession into the air, and catching them as they fell,
between his lips. His dexterity in this caused the
mirth around him to become noisy, disturbing the
sleep of the furry visitor: the learned part} hroke
up ; and Matins withdrew, glad to escape into the
open air. The courtesans with their large wigs of
false blond hair, were lurking for the ' -, with

groups of curious idlers. A greal conflagration was
visible in the distance. Was it in Rome itself, or in
one of the villages of the country1? Pausing on the
terrace for a few minutes to watch it, Matins was for
the first time able to converse intimately with
Apuleius ; and in this moment of confidence the
"illuminist," himself with hair so carefully arranged,
and who had seemed so full of affectations, almost
like one of those light women there, as it were,
dropped a veil, and appeared, while still permitting

92 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 idealism and vision,
seemed to fall into an intelligible congruity with each
other. In truth, it was the Platonic idealism, as he
conceived it, which animated, and gave him so lively
an interest in, the 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 1
Were not all visible objects — the whole material
world, according to the consistent testimony of philo-
soph}', in many forms — full of souls; embarrassed
perhaps, partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls.
Certainly, the 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 realty 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 start-
ings in the old rafters, at the sound of the music and
laughter; or rather importunities of the secondary
selves, the true unseen selves, of all the things and
persons around; essaying to break through their
mere, frivolous, transitory surfaces, and reminding

1£ABIU8 THE BPIOUBEAN.

ono of abiding essentials beyond them, which might
have their say, their judgment to give, by ami by,
when tlic shifting of the meats and drinks at life's
table should be overl Was aot this the true signi-
ficance of the Platonic doctrine— a hierarchy of divine
l>''i:r-. a-sociating themselves with particular things

and places, for the purpose of mediating between God
and man, who only needs due attention to be aware
of his celestial company, filling the air aboul him as
thick as motes in the sunbeam, for the ray of sym-
pathetic intelligence shot through it1?

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

■• What then f Has nature connected itself together
hy no bond, hut allowed itself to he thus crippled,
and split into the divine and human elements? And
you will say to me : If BO it 18, that man is so entirely
exiled from the immortal gods that all communication
whatever is denied him, and not one of them occa-
sionally visits us, as a shepherd visits his sheep — to
whom shall I address my prayers? Whom shall I

94 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

invoke as the helper of the unfortunate, the protector
of the good 1

" 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 inhabi-
tants of the earth and those of Heaven, they carry
from one to the other prayers and bounties, supplica-
tion and assistance, being a kind of interpreters. This
interval of the air is full of them ! Through them,
all revelations, miracles, magical processes, are effected.
For, specially appointed individuals of this number
have their special provinces, administered according
to the disposition of each. They wander without
fixed habitation ; or dwell in men's houses—-"

Just then a companion's hand, laid on the shoulder
of the speaker in the darkness, carried him away, and
the discourse broke off suddenly. But its singular
utterances were sufficient to cast back on all the cir-
cumstances of this strange evening — the dance, the
readings, the distant fire — a kind of allegoric ex-
pression; and made the whole occasion seem like
nothing so much as one of those same famous Pla-
tonic figures or apologues. When Marius recalled it,
he seemed always to hear again the voice of genuine
conviction, from amidst that scene of at best elegant
frivolity, pleading for so boldly mystical a view of
things. For a moment, but only for a moment, as he
listened, the trees seemed, as of old, to be growing
"close against the sky." .'Yes! the reception of
theory, of hypothesis, did depend a great deal on

IfABIUS Tin: EPICUREAN. '•'■>

temperament ; was the equivalent of temperament
That celestial ladder, or hierarchy, was what ex-
perience sated to Annleine: it was what, in
Blightly different forms, certain peraona in every
had tended to believe; they were glad to hear it
asserted, on the authority of a grave philosophy:
although he, Marina, certainly, would aever feel that
force of kindly warmth in the ver] contaci of the
air aboul him. learning, aa much as they, for audible
or visible companionship, in that hard world of Rome
— for some wing not visionary, across its unpeopled
.sky he mii-t stall object, that they assumed all that
with too much facility. Bis Becond thought upon
it was that the presentation, even for a few moments
of such fantastic vision, left the actual world more
lonely. The little godship for whom the countryman
(unconscious Platonist) trimmed his twinkling lamp,
would never slip, for him, out of the hark of these
immemorial olive-tree8 — no! not even in the wildest
moonlight. And for himself, he must still hold by
what his eyes really saw. Only, he had to concede
•, that this boldness of Platonic theory was the
witness, al least, to a variety of human disposition,
and a consequent variety of mental view, which might

— who could tell .' be correspondent to, he denned

by and define, varieties of facts, of truths just "lie-
hind the \eil." regarding the world they all alike had
before them for their given premiss; a world, wider,
perhaps, in its possibilities, than all possible fancies
about it.

CHAPTER XXI.

TWO CURIOUS HOUSES.

II. THE CHURCH IN CECILIA'S HOUSE.

' ' Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men
shall see visions. "

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

"The house in which she lives," says that mystical
German writer quoted once before, "is for the orderly
soul, which does not live on blindly before her, but is
evei', out of her passing experiences, building and
adorning the parts of a many-roomed abode for her-

m \i;irs Tiir. BPI01 EU 97

Belf, only an expansion of the body ; as the body,
irding t<> the philosophy of Swedenborg, is but an
expansion of the soul. For such an orderly bouI, as
Bhe lives onward, all sorts of delicate affinities estab-
lish themselves, between her and the doors and
ways, the lights and shadows, of her outward
abode, until she seems incorporate into it- -till at !
in the entire expressivenes ot what is outward, there
is for her, to speak properly, no longer an} distinction
between outward and inward, at all; and the light
which creeps al a particular hum- on a particular pic-
ture or Bpace upon the wall, the scent of flowers in the
air at a particular window, become to her, not so much
apprehended objei themselves powers of appre-

hension, and doorways to things beyond — seeds or
rudiments of new faculties, by which she, dimly yet
surely, apprehends a matter lying beyond her actually
attained capacity of sense and spirit."

So it must needs be in a world which is itself, we
may think, together with that bodily "tent" or
bernacle," but one of the many vestures of the
pilgrim soul, to be left by her, worn out one by one,
as if on the wayside ; as it was from her, indeed, that
they borrowed all the temporary value and signifi-

tcy they had.

The two friends were returning to Rome from a
visit to a country-house, where again a mixed com*
pany of guests had been tbled Marius, for his

part, a little weary <>t gossip, and those parks of ill-
tempered rivalry, which seem sometimes to be the

VOL. II. II

98 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

only sort of fire that the intercourse of men in general
society can strike out of them. Mere reaction against
all this, as they started in the clear morning, made
their companionship, for one of them at least, not less
tranquillising than that 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 which was to-day brotherly amity
also, and which seemed to draw into its own charmed
circle all that was then present to eye or ear, while
they talked or were silent together, and all petty
irritations, and the like, shrank out of existence, or
were certainly beyond its limits. The natural fatigue
of the long journey overcame them quite suddenly at
last, while they were still about two miles distant from
Eome. The endless line of tombs and cypress-trees
had been visible for hours against the sky towards
the West ; and it was just where a cross-road from
the Latin Way fell into the Appian, that Cornelius
halted at a doorway in a long, low wall — the boundary-
wall of the court of a villa, it might seem — as if at
liberty to enter, and rest there awhile. He held the
open door 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 in-
trusion— "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 ?

MAIM is THE EPICUREAN.

The little doorway in this long, low wall, so old
that it seemed almost a part of the rocky Boil on
which it was built, admitted them, in fact, into the
outer courtyard or garden of a villa, disposed in ■

of those abrupt natural hollows, which give its char-
acter to the country in this place ; so that the house
If, and all its dependenl buildings, the apacious-
3 of which surprised Matins as he entered, were
wholly concealed from passengers alon^ the road.
All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were
quiet signs of wealth and a noble taste— a taste, in-
deed, chiefly evidence. 1 in the selection and juxta-
position "f the material it had to deal with, consisting
almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here
arranged and harmonised, with effects, both as re-
gards colour and form, so delicate, as to seem really
derivative from a spirit fairer than any which lay

within the resources of the ancient world. It was
the old way of true Renaissance — the way of nature
with her roses, the divine way with the body of man,
and it may be with his very soul — conceiving the
new organism, by no sudden and abrupt creation, hut
rather by the action of a new- principle upon elements
all of which had indeed lived and died many times.
The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the
spiral columns the precious corner-stones of imme-
morial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition,
a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave
thought and intellectual purpose, in itself, aestheti-
cally, very seductive. Lastly, herh and tree had

100 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

taken possession of it all, spreading their seed-bells
and light branches, just alive in the trembling air,
above the ancient garden -"walls, against the wide
spaces of sunset. And from the»first they could hear
singing — the singing partly of children, it would seem,
and of a new sort ; so novel indeed in its effect, that
it carried the memory of Marius back to those old
efforts of Flavian to conceive a new poesy. It was
the expression not altogether of mirth, yet of a
wonderful happiness — the blithe expansion of a joy-
ful soul, in people upon whom some all-subduing ex-
perience had wrought heroically, and who still re-
membered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a
great deliverance.

His old native susceptibility to the spirit, the
sympathies, of places — above all to any hieratic or
religious expression they might have — was at its
liveliest, as Marius, still possessed by that peculiar
singing, and still amid the evidences of a grave
discretion all around him, entered the house itself.
That intelligent seriousness about life, the lack of
which had always seemed to him to make those who
were without it of some strange, different species
from himself, summing up all the lessons of his
experience, from those old days at White-nights, was
concentrated here, as if in designed congruity with
his favourite precepts of the power of phj^sical 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

MARIT's TIJK BPICUBEAN. I'M

the various chain1' reat and small, one dominant

thought in i uponhim the thought of eh..

women and their children; of the various aU'.Tti..n>
of the family life amid it- most natural conditions,
but developed, in devoul imitation of some sublime
type of it, into great controlling passions. There
reigned throughout, an order and [unity, an orderly
disposition, as if by way o! making ready for some

ioua Bpousala The place itself was like a bri
adorned for her husband: and its singular cheer-
fulness, the abundant light everywhere, the sense of
,1 indue which he received a deep im-

pression without < :oning wherein it re-

sided, n- he moved on rapidly, were in forcible con-
I 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
an explanation which might well be looked for by
his companion.

An old flo !'ti in the rear of the house, set

here and there with a venerable olive-tree — a pic
in pensive shade and fiery blossom, as transparent, in
that afternoon light, as the old miniature -painl
work on th.' walls of the chambers above— was
bounded, towards the . by a low, grassy hill. A
narrow opening cut in its Bteep side, like a solid
blackness there, admitted Marios and his gleaming

ipanion into a hollow cavern or crypt, which
indeed but the family burial-place of th.' Cecilii (to
whom this real belonged) brought thus, after an

102 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

arrangement then becoming not unusual, into imme-
diate connexion with the abode of the living ; in a
bold assertion of the unity of family life, which the
sanction of the Holy Family would, hereafter, more
and more reinforce. Here was, in fact, the centre of
the peculiar religious expressiveness, the sanctity, of
the whole place. 'Every person makes the place
that belongs to him a religious place at his own
election, by the carrying of his dead into it " — had been
a persuasion of old Eoman law, which it was reserved
for the early Christian societies, like that which the
piety of a wealthy Roman matron had here established,
to realise in all its consequences. Yet certainly it
was unlike any cemetery Marius had ever yet seen :
most obviously in this, that these people had returned
to the older fashion of disjiosing of their dead by
burial instead of burning. A family sepulchre in the
first instance, it was growing into a vast necropolis, a
whole township of the dead, by means of some free
expansion of the family interest beyond its amplest
natural limits. The air of venerable beauty which
characterised the house and its precincts above, was
maintained here also. It was certainly with a great
outlay of labour that these long, seemingly endless,
yet carefully designed galleries, were so rapidly in-
creasing, with their orderly layers of beds or berths,
one above another, cut on both sides of the pathway,
in the porous black tufa, through which all the moist-
ure filters downwards, leaving the parts above dry
and wholesome. All alike were carefully closed, and

■■ \i;irs THE BPICUBEAN. 103

with all the delicate costliness at command j some
with simple tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of
marble, enriched by fair inscriptions — marble, in some
a from an older pagan tomb the inscrip-
tion sometimes a palimpsest, the aew epitaph being
woven into the fading Letters "i" an earlier one.

A- in a pagan cemetery, an abundance of utensils
for the worship ami commemoration of the dead \
disposed around incense, \< E floating oil-lights,

above all, garlands and flowers, relieved into all the

mger Aeriness by the coal-like blackness of the
s^il itself in this place, a volcanic sandstone, I
cinder of burnt-out fires. (Would they ever kindle,

:e possession of, and transform the place again I)
Turning into an ashy paleness whe] Jar

intervals, a himinare, or air-hole, let in a hard beam
of clear but sunless light from above, with their
heavy sleepers, row upon row, leaving a passage so
narrow thai only a single person could move along
ii at a time, cheek to cheek with them, the high
walls seemed to shut one in, into the great company
of the dead. Only jusl the long straight pathway
remained before him: opening, ho . here and

there, into a .-mall chamber, around a broad, table-
like coffin, or "altar" tomb (one or more), adorned
more profusely than the others, sometimes as if in
observance of an anniversary. Clearly, these people,
concurring here with the special sympathies of Marius
himself, had adopted this practice of burial from some
peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning

/

104 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

the body ; a feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity,
he would fain have understood. The complete, irre-
parable disappearance of the dead on the funeral
pyre, so crushing to the spirits, as he had found
it, had long since given him a preference for this
mode of settlement to the last sleep, as having some-
thing more homelike and hopeful about it, at least
in outward seeming. But whence the strange con-
fidence that these "handfuls of white dust" would
hereafter recompose themselves once more into exult-
ing human creatures 1 By what heavenly alchemy,
what reviving dew from above, which was certainly
never again to reach the dead violets'?- — Januarius,
Agapetus, Felicitas — Martyrs ! refresh, I pray you, the
soul of Cecil, of Cornelius ! said an inscription (one of
many such) scratched, like a passing sigh, when the
mortar was still fresh which had closed-in the prison-
door. All criticism of this bold hope, apparently as
sincere 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 and
wholly leave the helpless, had always seemed to
Marius the central type or symbol of all natural duty.
The stern soul of 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. All visitors to the Catacombs must
have noticed, in a very different theological connexion,
the numerous children's graves — beds of infants, but

IfABIUS THE EPICUREAN. 105

>an long indeed — little, lowly prisoners of hope,
on these sacred floors. It was with curiosity,

ainly, that Marina observed them ; in some in-
adorned with tin- favourite toys of their tiny
occupants — toy-soldiers, little chariot-wheels, all the
ilia of a baby-house; and when he saw
rwards the living ones, who Bang and were busy,
y their psalm Laudai > Dominium/ —

r very faces caught for him a sort of quaint un-
reality, from the memory of those others, the children
of the Catacombs, but a little way below.

Hie congests jacet quseris si turba piorum:

Corpora sanctorum retinent veneranda sepulcra ! —

Here and there, mingling with the record of merely

natural decease, and sometimes ev< o at these children's

. were tlie signs of violent death or martyrdom

— the proof that some "had loved not their lives

unto the death " — in the little red phial of bl 1, the

palm branch, the red flowers for their heavenly "birth-
day." It was in one sepulchre, in particular, dis-
tinguished in this way, and devoutly adorned for
what, by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia
— a birthday, that the arrangements of the whole
place visibly centered. And it was with a curious
novelty of feeling, of the dawning oi a fresh order of
rices upon him, that, standing beside those
mournful relics, snatched in haste from the common
place of execution not many years before, .M alius
became, as by some gleam of foresight, aware of the

106 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

whole possible force of evidence for a strange, new
hope, defining a new and weighty motive of action in
the world, in those tragic deaths for the " Christian
superstition ; " of which he had heard something in-
deed ; but which had seemed to him hitherto but one
savagery, one self -provoked savagery, the more, in a
cruel and stupid world.

And that poignant memory of suffering seemed
to draw him on towards a still more vivid and
pathetic image of suffering, in a distant but not dim
background. Yes ! the interest, the expression of the
entire place was filled with that, like the savour of
some precious incense. Penetrating the whole atmos-
phere, touching everything around with its peculiar
sentiment, it seemed to make all this visible mortality,
death itself, more beautiful than any fantastic dream
of old mythology had ever hoped to make it; and
that, in a simple sincerity of feeling about a supposed
actual fact. The thought, the word, Pax — Pax Tecum/
— was put forth everywhere, with images of hope,
snatched sometimes even from that jaded pagan-
world, which had really afforded men so little of it
from first to last, — the consoling images it had thrown
off, of succour, of regeneration, of escape from death,
— 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. Only, after all, these imageries
formed but the slightest contribution to the whole
dominant effect of tranquil hope there — of a kind of

makiis THE BPIOUBEAH. 107

heroic cheerfulness and grateful expansion of heart ;
again, aa with the sense of some real deliverance, and
which seemed actually to deepen, the longer one
lingered through these strange and fearful passages.
A liuuic, partly pagan, yet the most frequently re-
peated of all those visible parables — the figure of one
!, as if from the sea, still in strengthless,
surprised joy, clinging to the very verge of the shore
— together with the inscription beneath it, seemed
besl to express the sentiment of the whole. And it
was i;i-t as he had puzzled out this inscription —

I bottom of the mountains ;

'n with Tier bars u-as about vie for ever ;
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption !

— that, hardly with a sense of surprise or change,
Marina found himself emerging again, like a later
mystic traveller through similar dark places "quieted
by hope," into the daylight

They were still within the precincts of the house,
still in possession of that wonderful singing, though
almost in the open country, with a greai view of the
Gampagna before them, and the hills beyond. The
orchard or meadow, through which their path lav,
was already gray in the dewy twilight, though the
western sky, in which the greater stars were \isible,
was still afloat with ruddy splendour, Beeming to
repress by contrast the colouring of all earthly things,
yel with the sense of a greai richness lingering in
their shadows. Jus! then the voices of the singers,

108 MAPJUS THE EPICUREAN.

a " voice of joy and health," concentrated themselves,
with a solemn antistrophic movement, into an even-
ing, or " candle " hymn — the hymn of the kindling of the
lamp. It was like the evening itself, its hope and
fears, and the stars shining in the midst of it, made
audible. Half above, half below the level mist,
which seemed to divide light from darkness (the
great wild flowers of the meadow just distinguishable
around her skirts, as she moved across the grass)
came now the mistress of the place, the wealthy
Roman matron, left early a widow by the confessor
Cecilius a few years before. Arrayed in long robes,
with heavy, antique folds, and a veil or coif folded
under the chin, "gray within gray," she seemed to
Marius to have, in her temperate beauty, something
of the male and serious character of the best Greek
female statuary.1 Very foreign, however, to any
Greek statuary was the expression of pathetic care,
with which she carried the child in her arms, warm
within the folds of her mantle. Another little child,
a year or two older, walked beside her, with the
fingers of one hand bent upon her girdle. They
stayed for a moment to give an evening greeting to
Cornelius, as they passed.

And that visionary scene was the fitting close of
the afternoon's strange experiences. A few minutes
afterwards, as he was passing again upon the public
road, it might have seemed a dream. The house of

1 "0, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,

Methought she purged the air of pestilence !"

IIABIU8 Till! EPIOUEKAN. 109

( aped itself beside that other curioua house

he had lately visited at Tusculum. 5Te1 whal b con-
did the fonner present, in its suggestions of
hopeful industry, of immaeu] be clean] pon-

sivc affection! all determined by the transporting
ry of a fact, or series <■ in which the

old puzzle of life had found its key. In truth, one of
most constant and characteristic traits had ever
i the longing for for Budden, relieving

interchange, <\ en upon the s] >f life, along which

he had lingered most pleasantly - for a lifting, from
time to time, of the actual horizon. It was like the
necessity the painter is under, to put an open window
or doorway in the background of his picture, which,
without that, would be heavy and inanimate; or like
the sick man's longing for northern coolness, and
whispering willow-trees, amid the breathless and
motionless evergreen forests of the south. Just in
this way had that visit happened to him, through so
slight an accident. Rome and Roman life, just then,
had come to seem to him like a close wood of beauti-
ful bronze-work, transformed, by some malign en-
chantment, out of the generations of living trees, yet
with its roots in a deep, downtrodden 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 l»fore.
It was .-till, indeed, according to the unchangeable
law ,.t" his character, to the eye, to the visual faculty
of mind, that those experiences appealed tl

110 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

ful light and shade, the boys whose very faces seemed
to sing, the virginal beauty of the mother and her
children. Only, in his case, all that constituted a
very real, and controlling or exigent matter, added to
life, with which, according to his old maxim, he must
make terms.

The thirst for every kind of "experience," prompted
by a philosophy which said that nothing was intrinsi-
cally great or small, had ever been at strife in him
with a hieratic refinement, in which the boy-priest
survived ; prompting the selection, the choice, of what
was perfect of its kind ; and a subsequent chivalrous
adherence of mind to that. That had led him along;
always in communion with ideals, at least half-realised
in his own conditions of being, or in the actual com-
pany about him, above all, in Cornelius. Surely, in
this strange new society he had known for the first
time to-day — in this holy family, like a fenced garden
— was the fulfilment of all the judgments and prefer-
ences of that half-known friend, which of late years
had been so often his protection in the perplexities of
his life. Here was, it might be, if not the cure, yet
the solace and anodyne of his great sorrows ; of that
constitutional sorrowfulness, which might be by no
means peculiar to himself, but which had made his
life, at all events, indeed like a long " disease of the
spirit." The very air of this place seemed to come
out to meet him, as if full of mercy in its mere con-
tact ; like a soothing touch to an aching limb. And
yet, on the other hand, he was aware that it might

MAKirs Tin: KPICUBEAN. 1 11

awaken responsibilities — new, untried responsibilities
— and demand something from him, in return. Mighl

this new vision, like the niali-naiit beauty of that old

1 1 1 Medusa, be exclusive of all admiring gaze on

anything save itself 1 At least he suspected thai after

ii he could never again be altogether as he had been

before.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE MINOR "PEACE OF THE CHURCH.

>>

Faithful to the spirit of his early Epicurean philo-
sophy and the impulse to surrender himself, in per-
fectly 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 estab-
lishment there of the schola or common hall of one
of those burial-guilds, which at that time covered so
much of the unofficial, and, as it might be called,
subterranean, enterprise of Roman society.

And what he found, thus looking as it were for
the dead among the living, was the vision of a
natural, a scrupulously natural, love ; transforming,
by some new finesse of insight into the truth of human
relationships, and under the urgency of . some new
motive by him so far unfathomable, all the conditions
of life. He saw, in all its primitive freshness and
amid the lively facts of its actual coming into the
world, as a reality of experience, that regenerate type

MAUirs IBB BPIOUBl 1 !■'.

of humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and his
Buccessors, down to tho best and purest days of
the young Raffaelle, working under conditions very
friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an
artistic ideal He felt there, fell amid the starring
of some wonderful new hope within himself, the
genius, the unique power of Christianity ; in exercise
then, as it lias been exercised ever since, in spite of
many hindrances and under the most inopportune
circumstances. Chastity — he seemed to understand
— the chastity of men and women, with all the con-
ditions and results proper to that chastity, is the most
beautiful thing in the world, and the truest con
vation of the 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 bo sincerely eared, 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,
Bnrely ! in its nest-like peace and warmth, its jealous
exclusion of all that was against itself and its own
immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set around the
Bacred thing od every side, this re-institution of the
family did but carry forward, and give effect to, the
purposes, the kindness of nature itself, friendly to
man, at all those points, more especially, where it
involved (by way of due recognition <>f some un-
fathomed divine condescension, in a certain fact or

series of tacts) pity, and a willing sacrifice of oneself,

VOL. II. I

114 MARIUS THE EPICUKEAN.

for the weak, for children and the aged, for the dead
even. And then, for its constant outward token, its
significant manner or index, it issued in a debonair
grace, and some mystic attractiveness — a courtesy,
which made Marins doubt whether, after all, that
famed Greek gaiety or blitheness in the handling of
life, had been so great a success. In contrast with
the incurable insipidity even of what was most ex-
quisite in the higher Roman life, and still truest to
the old primitive soul of goodness amid its evil, this
new creation he saw (a fair picture, beyond the skill
of any master of old pagan beauty) had indeed the
appropriate freshness of " the bride adorned for her
husband." And still its grace was no mere simplicity.
Things, new and old, seemed to be coming as if out of
some goodly treasure-house, the brain full of science,
and the heart rich with various sentiment, possessing
withal this surprising healthfulness, this reality of heart.

"You would hardly believe," writes Pliny to his
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 that
keeps me awake at night fancying I see you beside
me. That is why my feet take me unconsciously to
your sitting-room, at those hours when I was wont
to visit you there. That is why I turn from the door
of the empty chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like an
excluded lover." —

There is a real idyll from that family life, the con-
servation of which had been the motive of so large a

ICARIU8 Tin: ii'iii i;i w I L6

pari <>f the religion of tin' Romans, still surviving
among them; as it survived also in the disposition

ami aims «>f Amvlius, ami, in spite of slanderous
tongues, in the actual sweetness of his interior life.
What Alarius had been permitted to see was a realisa-
tion of such life hi Jh r still : and with- -Yes !— with

a more effective sanction or consecration than hail

ever been known before, in that fad. or -cries of facts,
to h tained by those who would.

The chief glory of the reign of the Antonines hail
1 i n, indeed, that society had attained in it, ven im-
perfectly, ami for the most part by cumbrous effort
of law, many of those ends which Christianity had
reached with all the sufficiency of a direct ami ap-
propriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching
charity- sermons on occasions of great public distress;
its charity -children in long file, in memory of the
elder empress Faustina ; its predecessor, under patron-
of J'.M-uiapius, to the in. (liiii hospital for the .-iek
mi the island of - Bartholomew in the 'liber.

But what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as it
were with the painful calculation of old age, the
church was doing, almost without thinking ahout it,
in the plenary masterfulness of youth, because it was
her very being thus to do. " You don't understand
your own efforts," she seems to say, to pagan virtue.
She possessed herself of those efforts, ami advanced
them with an unparalleled liberality and larger
The gentle Seneca would have reverent burial pro-
vided even for the dead corpse of a criminal. Yet

116 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

when a certain woman gathered for interment the
insulted remains of Nero, the pagan world surmised
that she must be a Christian : only a Christian would
have been likely to conceive so chivalrous a devotion
towards wretchedness. "We refuse to be witnesses
even of a homicide commanded by the laws," pleads 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 conscience of which Rousseau stirred
up in a later degenerate age. In an impassioned
discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to
suckle their own infants ; and there are Roman epi-
taphs inscribed by children to their mothers which
gratefully record this proof of natural affection, as a
thing then unusual. And in this matter again, Avhat
a sanction, what a provocative to natural duty, lay in
that image of the new Madonna, just then rising upon
the world like the dawn !

Christianity had, indeed, revealed itself as the great
source and motive of chastity. And this chastity, re-
affirmed in all its conditions, fortified that rehabilita-
tion of peaceful labour, after the mind, the pattern,
of the workman of Galilee, which was another direct
instinct of the catholic church, as indeed the long-
desired initiator of a real religion of cheerfulness, and
a true lover of the industry (so to term it), the labour,
the creation, of God.

And that high-toned yet genial reasscrtion of the

HABITS Till; KPICUREAN. 117

idea] of woman, of the family, of industry, of man's
work in life, bo close to the truth of nature, was also,

in that charmed moment of the minor " Peace of the
church," realising itself as an influence tending to

beauty, to the adornment of life and the world.
The sword in the world, the right eye plucked out,
the right hand cut oil', the spirit of reproach which
thoso images express, and of which monasticism is
tho 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 image of the Good Shepherd —
favourite sacred image of the primitive church —
serene, hlitho, and debonair, beyond the gentlest
shepherd of Greek mythology; the daily food of
whose spirit is the beatific vision of the kingdom of
peace among men. And this latter side of the divine
character of Christ, rightly understood, is the final
achievement of that vein of bold and brilliant hope-
fulness in man, which had sustained him so far
through his immense labour, his immense sorrows; and
of which that peculiarly Greek gaiety, in the handling
of life, is but one manifestation. Sometimes one,
sometimes the other, of those two contrasted aspects
of the character of Christ, have, in different ages and
under the urgency of differing human needs, been at
work also in his "mystical body." I !< rtainly, in that
brief "Peace of the church n under the Antonines,
the spirit of a pastoral security and happiness Beems
to have been largely expanding itself. There, in the

118 MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN.

early Roman church, was to be seen, and on a basis
of reasonable grounds, that long -sought serenity of
satisfaction, on a dispassionate survey of the facts of
life, contrasting itself for Marius, in particular, very
forcibly, with the imperial philosopher's so heavy
burden of unrelieved melancholy. It was Christ-
ianity in its humanity, or even in its humanism,
in its generous hopefulness 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 righteous-
ness is delicate and modest, and meek and quiet :
Take from thyself grief, for (as Hamlet will one
day know ! ) it is the sister of doubt and ill -temper :
Grief is more evil than all the spirits, and is most
dreadful to the servants of God, and beyond all
spirits destroy eth man : For, as when good news
has come to any one in grief, straightway he for-
getteth 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
spirit through the beholding of these good things :
Put on therefore gladness that hath always favour
before God, and is acceptable unto Him, and delight
thyself in it ; for every man that is glad doeth the
things that are good, and thinketh good thoughts,
despising grief." — Such were the popular utterances

U JJHU8 THE BPII UR] 119

of this new people, among whom so much of whal

Matin- had valued most in the world seemed to be

under renewal ; heightened and harmonised by b<
transforming spirit, a spirit which, in its dealing with

the elements of the old world, was guided by B

wonderful tact of selection, exclusion, juxtaposition ;
begetting thereby a unique expression of freshness, of
animation and a grave beauty, because the whole

outward world of sense was understood to be but
a showing-forth of the unction and royalty of an
inward priesthood and kingship in the bouI, among
the prerogatives of which was a delightful sense of
fi eedom.

The reader may think perhaps, that Marius, who,
Epicurean as he was, had his visionary aptitudes, by
an inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which
he was of course familiar, must have descended, by
sight, upon a later age than his own. and anti-
cipated the reign of Christian poetry and art under
Francis of Assisi But if he dreamed on one of those
ni-hts of the beautiful house of Cecilia, its flowers
and lights, of Cecilia herself moving among the lib
with a grace enhanced as things sometimes arc 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 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

120 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

of her founder, which reflected the eternal goodwill
of God to man, "in whom," according to the oldest
version of the angelic message, " He is well-pleased."
For what Christianity did centuries later in the
way of informing an art, a poesy, of higher and
graver beauty, as some may think, than even Greek
art and poetry at their best, was in truth conformable
to the original tendency of its genius ; miscarried,
indeed, in the true dark ages, through many circum-
stances, of which the later persecutions it sustained,
beginning with that under Aurelius himself, con-
stituted one ; the blood of martyrs ceasing at a
particular period to be the true " seed of the church."
The original capacity of the catholic church in this
direction, amply asserted, as I have said, in the New
Testament, was also really at work, in that her first
early "Peace," under the Antonines — the minor "Peace
of the church," as we might call it, in distinction from
the final "Peace of the church," commonly so-called,
under Constantine. Francis of Assisi, with his fol-
lowing in the sphere of poetry and 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 real
continuity, suspended in part by those troublous
intervening centuries, with the gracious spirit of the
primitive church in that first early springtide of
her prosperity : as that also is continuous with the
divine happiness, the peace, of her Founder. Con-
stan tine's later " Peace," on the other hand, in many

\!Ai;[is tiii: EPICUREAN. 121

ways, docs l>ut establish the exolusiveness, the puri-
banism, bhe ascetic or monastic gloom oi the church
in the period between Aureliusand the first Christian
emperor, soured a little by oppression and miscon-
struction, and driven inward upon herself in a world
of tasteless controversy : the church then finally
coming to terms, and effecting something more than
a modus rin mli with the world, at a less fortunate
momenl oi the world's development,1

Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time
had -one by when men became Christians under the
influence of some sudden overpowering impression,
and with all the untranquillising effects of such a
crisis. At this period a majority perhaps had been
born Christians, had been ever with peaceful hearts
in their Father's house. Millenarianism — the expect-
ation of the speedy coming of judgment— with all
the consequences it involved in men's tempers, was
dying out. Every day the contrast between the
church and the world was becoming less trenchant,
And now also, as the church rested awhile from
persecution, that rapid self-development outward from
within, proper to a period of peace, was in progress.
Antoninus Pius indeed, far more truly than Marcus
Aurelius, belonged to that group of pagan saints for
whom Dante, like Augustine, has provided in his
scheme of the house with many mansions, A sincere
old Etonian piety urged his fortunately constituted
nature to no mistakes, no offences against humanity.
1 Compare Mill on Liberty, page 50.

122 MAKIUS THE EPICUEEAN.

There was a kind of guilelessness in him, one reward
of which was this singular haj^piness, that under his
reign there was no shedding of Christian blood. To
him belonged that half -humorous placidity of soul,
of a kind illustrated later very effectively by Mon-
taigne, which, starting with an instinct of mere fair-
ness towards human nature and the world, at last
actually qualifies its possessor to be almost the friend
of the people of Christ. Itself, in its own nature,
simple, amiable, full of a reasonable gaiety, Christ-
ianity has often had its advantage of characters like
that. And this geniality of Antoninus Pius, like
the geniality of the old earth itself, caused the church,
which is indeed no alien from that old mother earth,
to expand and thrive as by natural process, under
his sight. " The period of the embryogeny of Christ-
ianity," says M. Renan, "was then complete. At
that date the infant is in possession of all its organs,
is detached from its mother, and will live hence-
forward by its own proper powers of life." And the
beautiful chapter of this charmed period of the church
under the Antonines, up to the later years of the
reign of Aurelius, contains, as one of its elements of
interest, the earliest development of Christian ritual
under the presidency of the church of Rome.

Again as in one of those quaint, mystical visions
of the Shepherd of Hermas, "the aged woman, that
true Sibyl, had become more and more youthful :
And in the third vision she was quite young, and
radiant with beauty ; only her hair was that of an

MABIU8 Tin: BPIOUM L23

1 woman: And at the last ahe was joyous, ami
Boated upon a throne" — seated upon a throne, "be-
cause Iht position is a strong one." The subterranean
worship of the church properly belonged to th<
periods of her early history in which her worship
was made penal : at other times it blossomed broadly
aboveground, sometimes for Length) intervals. Hiding
herself for awhile when persecution became vioL
she resumed, when there was felt to be no more than
ordinary danger, "her free yet modesi ways." And

the sort of outward prosperity which she was enjoying
in the period of her first "Peace" was reinforced
by the decision at this moment of a crisis in her
internal history.

In the life of the church, as in all the moral life of
mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either of which
it is possible to follow — two conceptions, under one
or the other of which we may represent to OUrsel
man's effort after the better life — corresponding to
those two contrasted aspects, noted above, as dis-
cernible in the picture presented by the New Testa-
ment itself of the character of Christ The ideal of
eticism represents that moral effort as essentially
a sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of human nature
to another, that it may live in what survives the more
completely ; while the ideal of Culture represents it
as a harmonious development of all the parts of

human nature, in jusl proportion to each other. ' It

to the latter order of ideas thai the church, and

especially the church of Rome, in this period of the

124 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

Antonines, was lending herself. In this earlier
"Peace" she had set up for herself the ideal of
spiritual development, by an instinct, through which,
in those serene moments, she was absolutely true to
the peaceful soul of her Founder. "Goodwill to
men," she said, "in whom God Himself is well-
pleased ! " For a moment, at least, there was no
forced opposition between the soul and the body,
the world and the spirit, and the grace of gracious-
ness 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
Eoman pastorship she was to supersede was but
the prototype) had already become conspicuous, in
spite of a discredited, irritating, vindictive society,
all around her.

Against that divine urbanity and moderation, the
old Montanism we read of dimly, was a fanatical re-
action— sour, falsely anti-mundane, ever with an air
of ascetic affectation, and a bigoted distaste, in par-
ticular, for all the peculiar graces of womanhood.
By it, the desire to please was understood to come
of the author of evil. In that interval of quietness,
it was inevitable, by a law of reaction, that some such
rigorism should arise. And again, it was the church
of Rome especially, now becoming every day more
and more the capital of the Christian world, feeling her
way already to a universality of guidance in spiritual

MAkirs mi: BPICUBEAN. L25

things equal to that of tlie earlier Rome in tho political
order, and part of the secret of which must he a
generous tolerance of diversities, which checked the

nascent pnritanism of that time, and vindicated 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.
In her full, fresh faith in the Evangek —in a real
Miration of the earth and the ho<ly, in the dignity
man's whole nature — for a moment, at least, at
that critical period in the development of Christianity,
she was for reason, for common sense, for fairness
to human nature, for the due place of woman in the
church, and, generally, for what may be called the
naturalness of Christianity; as also for its comely
order. It was through the bishops of Rome especi-
ally, now transforming themselves rapidly in a really
catholic sense into universal pastors, that she was
defining for herself this humanist path. "The
dignified ecclesiastical hierarchy claimed the right of
absolution, and made use of it with an ease which
scandalised the puritans." And as regards those who
had fallen from faith in an hour of weakness, the
church of Rome, especially, elected by no means to
be as the elder brother of the prodigal son, but rather
to pour her oil and wine into the aching wounds.

And then, in this season of expansion, as if now
at last the catholic church might venture to show
her outward lineaments as they really were, worship
— the beauty of holiness, nay ! the elegance of sanctity

126 MAHIUS THE EPICUREAN.

— and here again under the presidency of the church
of Rome, was developing, with a bold and confident
gladness, such as has not been the ideal of worship
in any later age of the church. The tables were
turned, and the prize of a cheerful temper on a survey
of life was no longer with the Greek. The aesthetic
charm of the catholic church, her evocative power
over all that is eloquent and expressive in the better
soul of man, her outward comeliness, her dignifying
convictions about human nature — all this, as abun-
dantly realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto,
by the great church-builders, by the great ritualists
like Gregory, and the masters of sacred music in the
middle age — we maj' see, in dim anticipation, in that
charmed space towards the end of the second century.
Dissipated, or turned aside, partly through the great
mistake of Marcus Aurelius, for a short time we
may discern that influence clearly predominant there.
What might seem harsh as dogma was already justify-
ing itself as worship ; according to the sound rule —
Lex orandi, lex credendi.

The marvellous liturgic spirit of the church, her
wholly unparalleled genius for worship, being thus
awake, she was rapidly reorganising both pagan and
Jewish elements of ritual, for the expanding therein
of her own new heart of devotion. The ritual system
of the church, which must rank as we see it in historic
retrospect, like the Gothic architecture for instance,
as one of the great, conjoint, and, so to term them,
necessary, products of human mind, and which has

MAKirs Tin: EPICUREAN. 127

ever since directed, with bo deep a fascination, men's
religious instincts, was then growing together, as a
recognisable new treasure in the sum of things. And
what has hem on the whole the method of the church,
a power of sweetness and patience," in dealing
with matters like pagan art, was already manifest: it
has the character of the < li \ i 1 1 . ■ moderation of Christ
himself. It was only among the ignorant, only in the
"villages," that Christianity, even when victorious
over paganism, was really iconoclastic In the great
"PeaceMunder Constantino, while there was plenty
of destructive fanaticism in the country, the revolu-
tion was accomplished in the large towns, following
the Roman pattern, in a manner more orderly and
discreet. The faithful were bent less on the destruc-
tion of the pagan temples than on the conversion of
them and of their furniture to better uses ; and the
temples became Christian sanctuaries, with much
beautiful furniture ready to hand. — In hoc. nwrmore
ilium olim ma nsa fwmaba/nt.

Already, in accordance with this later wisdom, that
church of the minor "Peace" had adopted many of
the beauties of pagan feeling and pagan custom; as
being indeed a living creatine, taking up, transform-
ing, and accommodating still more closely to the
human heart, what of right belonged to it. It was
thus that an obscure synagogue expanded into the
catholic church, feathering, from a richer and more
varied field of sound than remained for him, those old
Roman harmonies, some notes of which Gregory the

128 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

Great, centuries later, and after generations of inter-
rupted development, formed into the Gregorian music,
she was already, as we have seen, 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 a best and earliest Renaissance.
Singing there had been in abundance from the first ;
but often it dared only be "of the heart." It broke
out, when it might, into the beginnings of a true
ecclesiastical music ; the Jewish psalter, which it had
inherited from the synagogue, turning now, gradually,
from Greek into broken Latin — into Italian ; as the
ritual use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular
superseded the earlier language of the church. And
through certain surviving remnants of Greek in the
later Latin liturgies, we may still discern a highly
interesting intermediate phase of ritual development,
in which the Greek and Latin were in combination ;
the poor, surely — the poor and the children, of that
liberal Eoman church — already responding in their
own "vulgar tongue," to an office said in the original,
liturgical Greek : and thus that hymn sung in the
early morning, of which Pliny had heard, grew into
the service of the Mass.

The Mass, indeed, would seem to have been said
continuously from the time of the Apostles. Its de-
tails, as one by one they become visible in later his-
tory, 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

MARIUS THE I'.IMi T IM.AX. 129

them. Ritual, indeed, like other elements of religion,
must grow ami cannot be made grow by the same
law nf development which has prevailed in all the rest
of the moral world. In this particular phase of the
religious life, however, that development seems to

have 1 n an unusually rapid one, in the suliterranean

age which preceded Constantino; doubtless, there
also, more especially in such time of partial reconcili-
ation as that minor "Peace :" and in the very first
• lays of the final triumph of the church the Mass
emerges to general view already substantially com-
plete. Thus did the liturgy of the church grow up,
full of consolations for the human soul, and destined,
Burely, one day, under the sanction of so many ages
of human experience, to take exclusive possession of
tin- religious consciousness. "Wisdom" was deal u aj,
as with the dust of creeds and philosophies, so also
with the dust of outworn religious usage, like the
Bpirit of life itself, organising souls and bodies
out of the lime and day of the earth, adopting, in a
generous eclecticism, within the church's liberty and
as by some providential power in her, as in other
bers so in ritual, one thing here another there,
from various sources — Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan — to
adorn and beautify the greatest ad of worship the
world has seen —

Pulchriua ecce nitet rcnovati gloria fontis !
Cedf vi'tus aumen I novitati cede retnstaal

VOL. IT.

CHAPTER XXIII.

SAPIENTIA ^EDIFICAVIT SIBI DOMUM.

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

The great, favoured ages of imaginative art present
instances of the summing up of a whole 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 over him of what
follows you must remember that it was an experience
which came in the midst of a deep sense of vacuity
in things. The fairest products of the earth seemed
to be dropping to pieces, as if in men's very hands,
around him ; and still, how real was their sorrow,

MAKirs Tin: EPIOUBEAN. 131

ami his! " Observation of life " had come to be like
the constant telling of a Borrowful rosary, day after
day : till, as if baking infection from the cloudy
sorrow of the mind, the Benses also, the eye itself,
had 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 Beason of unvarying sullenness: at last, on
this day he awoke at a sharp flash of lightning in the
earliest twilight ; and in a little while the heavy rain
had filtered the air: the clear light was abroad ; and,
as though the spring had begun with a sudden leap
in the heart of things, the whole scene around him
lay like an untarnished picture beneath a sky of deli-
cate blue. Under the spell of his late depression,
Marine had suddenly determined to leave Home for
awhile. But desiring first to advertise Cornelius of
his movements) and failing to find him in his lodgings,
he had ventured, still early in the day, to seek him
in the Cecilian villa Passing through its silent and
ity courtyard he loitered tor a moment, to admire.
Under the clear but immature light of the winter
morning after the storm, all the details of form and
colour in the old marbles were distinctly visible ; and
with a sort of sad hardness (so it struck him), amid
their beauty; in them, and in all other details of the
scene — the cyp the bunches of pale daffodils

in the grass, the curve- of the purple hills of Tuseu-

huu, with the drifts of virgin ■-now still lying in their

hollows.

132 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

The little open cloor, through which he passed
from the courtyard, admitted him into what was
plainly the vast Lararium, or domestic sanctuary,
of the Cecilian family, transformed in many par-
ticulars, but still richly decorated, and retaining much
of its ancient furniture in costly stone and metal-
work. The peculiar half-light of dawn seemed to
be lingering beyond its hour upon its solemn marble
walls ; and here, though at that moment in absolute
silence, a great company of people was assembled.
In that brief period of peace (the church emerging
for awhile from her jealously guarded subterranean
life) the severity of her earlier rule of exclusion had
been somewhat relaxed ; and so it came to pass that,
on this morning, Marius saw for the first time the
wonderful spectacle — wonderful above all in its evi-
dential power — of those who believe.

There were noticeable, among those assembled,
great varieties of rank, of age, of personal type. The
Roman ingenuus, with the white toga and gold ring,
stood side by side with his slave : and the air of the
whole company was, above all, a grave one, an air of
recollection. Coming thus unexpectedly upon this
large assembly, so entirely united, in a silence so pro-
found, for some purpose 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

tt&Bius the EncrcEAX. 133

away. Corresponding fco the variety of human type
there present, was the various expression of every
type of human Borrow assuaged What desire, and ful-
filment of desire, had wrought so pathetically in the
a of these ranks of aged men and women of humble
condition 1 Those young men, bent down so discreetly
on the details of their Bacred service, had faced life
and were glad, by some science, or tight of knowledge
they had, to which there was certainly no parallel in
the older world. Was some credible message from
•ml "the flaming rampart of the world" — a mes-
oi hope, regarding the place of men's souls and
their interest in the sum of things — already moulding
their very bodies, and looks and voices, now and here 1
Ar least, there was a 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
— who reminded him of those pathetic children's
graves, like cradles or garden-beds, he had noticed in
his first vi-it to these places; and they more than
-lied the odd curiosity he had then felt about
them, wondering in what quaintly expressive forms
they might come forth into the daylight, if awakened
from their sleep. Children of the Catacombs, some
but "a span long" with features not so much beauti-
ful as heroic (that world of new, refining sentiment
having set its seal even on childhood, like everything
else in Rome, naturally heroic), they retained, cer-
tainly, no spot or trace of anything subterranean this

134 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

morning, in the alacrity of their worship — as ready
as if they had been at their 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 constitu-
tionally impressible, as having in them a certain re-
proachful austerity — was broken suddenly by resound-
ing cries of Kyrie Eleison ! Christe Eleison ! repeated
again and again alternately, until the bishop, rising
from his throne, made sign that this prayer should
cease. But the voices burst out again soon afterwards
in a richer and more varied melody, though still
antiphonal ; the men, the women and children, the
deacons and the congregation, answering each other,
as in a Greek chorus. But, again, with what a novelty
of poetic accent ; what a genuine expansion of heart ;
what profound intimations for the intellect, as the
meaning of the words grew upon him ! The " hymn,"
of which Pliny had heard something, had grown into
this. Cum grandi affectu et compunctione dicatur — says
an ancient eucharistic order ; and certainly, the mystic
tone of this praying and singing was one with the
' expression of deliverance, of grateful assurance and
sincerity, upon the faces of those assembled. As if
some profound correction, and regeneration of the
body by the spirit, had been begun, and already gone
a great way, the countenances of men, women, and
children had a brightness upon them which he could
fancy reflected upon himself — an amenity, a mystic

MAKII s THE F.PICUREAV 136

amiability and unction, which found its way, n
readily of all, t<> the hearts of children themselves.
The religious poetry of those Hebrew psalms B
dixisti Domini tarram tuam : Dixit Domimus Domino meo,
a dextrii mas -■was in marvellous accord with the
lyrical instinct of his own character. Those august
hymns, he thought, would remain ever hereafter one
of the well-tested powers among things, to soothe and
fortify his soul. < Ins could never grow tired of them !
In the old pagan worship there had been little to
call out the intelligence. The eloquence of worship,
which Mucins found here — an eloquence, wherein
there were many very various ingredients, of which
that singing wa< only one — presented, as he gradually
came to see, a fact, or series of facts, for intellectual
reception. This became evident, more especially, in
those lections, or sacred readings, which, like the
ringing, in broken vernacular Latin, occurred at
certain intervals, amid the silence of the assembly.
re wen- read; . ain 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, came sounding
in clearer tones than had ever belonged to them
before] a-- if lifted, above their natural purpose, into
the harmonics of Borne more masterly Bystem of
knowledge. Ami Last of all came a narrative, in a
form which every one appeared to know by heart with
a thousand tender memories, and which displayed, in
all the vividness of a picture for the eye, the mourn-

136 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

ful figure of him, towards whom the intention of
this whole act of worship was directed — a figure
which seemed to have absorbed, like a tincture of
deep dyes into his vesture, all that was deep-felt
and impassioned in the experiences of the past.

It was the anniversary of his birth as a little child
they were celebrating to-day. Astiterunt reges terrce
— -proceeded the Sequence, the young men on the steps
of the altar responding in deep, clear, antiphon or
chorus —

Astiterunt reges terras —

Ad versus sanctum puerum tuum, Jesum :

Nunc, Doinine, da servis tuis loqui verbum tuum —

Et signa fieri, per nomen sancti pueri Jesu !

And the proper action of the rite itself, like a half-
opened book to be read by the duly initiated mind,
took up those suggestions, and carried them on into
the present, as having reference to a power still effi-
cacious, and in action among the people there as-
sembled, in some mystic sense. The whole office,
indeed, with its interchange of lections, hymns and
silences, was itself like a single piece of highly com-
posite, dramatic music; a "song of degrees," rising
to a climax Notwithstanding the absence of any
definite or central visible image, the entire ceremonial
process, like the place in which it was enacted, seemed
weighty with symbolical significance, and expressed
a single leading motive. It was in the actions of
one person that the whole mystery centered. Dis-
tinguished among his assistants, who stood ranged in

MAIM I rfl Till'. KPICUREAN. 137

semicircle around him (themselves parted from the
genera] con bion by trcmsemruBj or lattice-work, of
pierced white marble) by the extreme fineness or
whiteness of his vesture, and the pointed cap with
golden ornaments on his head, this person, nevertle
less, struck Marina as ha\in,u something about him
like one of the wild shepherds (if the Cumpagna.

Ami yet he had never seen the pontifical character,
as he conceived it — sieut unguentum in capite, desa ndt ns
in oram vestimenti — so fully realised, as in the ex-
pression, the voire and manner of action, of this novel
pout ill', 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 seeming to
be indeed endowed with mysterious, hidden powers —
at the Lavabo, or at the various benedictions, or to
bless certain objects on the table before him, chanting
in cadence of a grave sweetness the leading parts of
the rite. What profound unction and mysticity! The
solemnity of the singing was at its height when he
opened his lips. It was as if, a new sort of rhapsodos,
he alone possessed the words of the office, and they
were flowing fresh from some source of inspiration
within him. The table or altar at which he presided,
below a canopy of spiral columns, and with the carved
palm-branch, standing in the midst of a semicircle of
seats for the priests, was in reality the tomb of a
youthful "witness," of the family of the Cecilii, who
had shed his blood not many years before, and whose
relics were still in this place. It was for his sake

138 MABIUS THE EPICUREAN.

that the bishop put his lips so often to the surface
before him ; the regretful memory of this death inter-
twining itself, though with a note of triumph, as a
matter of special inward significancy, throughout
this whole service, which was, besides other things,
a commemoration of the whole number of the be-
loved dead.

It was a sacrifice also, in its essence — a sacrifice, it
might seem, like the most primitive, 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, it was not so much a
new matter, as a new spirit which Marius observed,
moulding, informing, with a new intention, many ob-
servances which he did not witness now for the first
time. Men and women came to the altar successively,
in perfect order; and deposited there, below the
marble lattice, their baskets filled with wheat and
grapes, their incense, and oil for the lamps of the
sanctuary ; bread and wine especially — pure wheaten
bread, and the pure white wine of the Tusculan
vineyards. It was a veritable consecration, hopeful
and animating, of the earth's gifts, of all that we can
touch and see — of old dead and dark matter itself,
somehow redeemed at last, in the midst of a jaded
world that had lost the true sense of it, and in strong
contrast to the wise emperor's renunciant and im-
passive attitude towards it. Certain portions of that
bread and wine were selected by the bishop ; and

IfABIUS THE EPICUREAN. 139

(thereafter it was with an increasing mysticity and
effusion that the rite proceeded Like an invocation
or supplication, full of a powerful vn-breathing or
neusis — the antiphonal winging developed, from
this point, into a kind of solemn <li;doguo between the
ehief ministrant and the whole assisting company —

SURSUM CORD

HABEMUS A3 DOMINUM.

GRATIAS A.GAMUS DOMINO DEO NOSTRO ! —

It was the service, especially, of young men, stand-
ing there, in long ranks, arrayed in severe and simple
ure of pure white — a service in which they would
seem to be flying for refuge (with their youth itself,
as a treasure in their hands to be preserved) to one
like themselves, whom they were also ready to wor-
ship ; to worship, above all in the way of Aurelius,
by imitation and conformity to his image. Adorwmm
te Chrit . /"/• orucem hum redemisti mwndwm/ —

they cried together. So deep was the emotion, that,
at moments, it seemed to Marius as if some at least
there present perceived the very object of all this
pathetic crying himself drawing near. Throughout
the rite there had been a growing sense and assurance
of one coining — Yes! actually with them now; ac-
cording to the oft-repeated prayer or affirmation,
Dom&iis vobiscwm ! Some at least were quite sure
of it : and the confidence of this remnant tired the
hearts, and gave meaning to the bold, ecstatic wor-
ship, of all the rest about them

140 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

Helped especially by the suggestions of that mys-
terious old Hebrew psalmody, to him so new — lection
and hymn — and catching therewith a portion of the
enthusiasm of those around him, Marius could dis-
cern dimly, behind the solemn recitation which now
followed (at once a narrative and an invocation or
prayer) the most touching image he had ever beheld.
It was the image of a young man giving up, one
by one, for the greatest of ends, the greatest gifts ;
parting with himself, and, above all, with the serenity,
the deep and divine serenity, of his own mind ; yet,
from the midst of his distress, crying out upon the
greatness of his success, as if foreseeing this very
worship. As the centre of the supposed facts, which
for these people had become so constraining a motive
of activity and hope, this image seemed to propose
itself with an overwhelming claim on human grati-
tude. What Saint Lewis of France discerned, and
found so irresistibly touching, through the dimness
of many centuries, as a painful thing done for love
of him by one he had never seen, was, to them, a
thing of yesterday; and their hearts were whole
with it : it had the force, among their interests, of
an almost recent event in the career of one whom
their fathers' fathers might have known. From
memories so sublime, yet so close to them, had the
narration descended in which these acts of worship
centered ; and again the names of the more recent
dead were mingled with it. And it seemed as if
the very dead were aware ; to be stirring beneath

MARIUS THE BPICUEEAN. Ill

the slabs of the sepulchres which la}- so near, that
they might associate themselves to that enthusiasm
— to thai exalted worship of Jesus.

One by one, the faithful approached, and received
from thr chief ministranl portions of the great, white,
wheaten cake, he had taken into his hands Perducat
vos ail viiam tetemam .'-■ he prays, half-ailently, as they
depart again, after 'li-creet embraces. The Eucharist
of those early day- was, even more completely than
at any later or happier time, an act of thanksgiving;
and while what remained was borne away for the
reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the
rite reached its highest point in the singing of a
hymn : a hymn which was as the spontaneous product
of two opposed companies or powers, yet contending
accordantly together, accumulating and heightening
their witness, and provoking each other's worship,
in a kind of sacred rivalry.

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

CHAPTEE XXIV.

A CONVERSATION NOT IMAGINARY.

In cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says
Pliny — studia hilaritate proveniunt. It was still the
habit of Marius, encouraged by his experience that
sleep is not only a sedative but the best of stimulants,
to seize the morning hours for creation, making profit
when he might of the wholesome serenity which
followed a dreamless night. "The morning for
creation," he would say; "afternoon for the per-
fecting 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."! It
was therefore a rare thing for him to leave home
early in the day. One day he had been induced to
do so, on the occasion of a visit to Eome of the
famous writer Lucian, whom he had been bidden to
meet. The breakfast over, he walked away with the
learned guest, having offered to be his guide to the
lecture-room of a well-known Greek rhetorician and

MAKirs THE BPIC1 BEAN. 143

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 pro-
claimed "a holiday;' and the morning being a tine
one, they strolled further, along the A.ppian 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 babj house, to the massive towers out of
which the Middle Ages would adapt a fortress, might
seem, on a morning like this, to he "smiling through
tears." The flower-stalls just beyond the city gates
presented to view an array of garlands and posies,
fresh enough for a wedding. At one and another of
them groups of persons, gravely clad, were making
their bargains before starting off to a perhaps distant
spot on the highway, to keep a dies rosationis (as this
was the time of roses) at the grave of a deceased
relation. Here and there, an actual funeral pro-
cession 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
poet's — Si lacrimcB prosunt, visis te ostende viderif
— a woman prayed that her lost husband might visit
her dreams. Their characteristic note, indeed, was
an imploring cry, still to be sought after by the
living. "While I live, was the promise of a lover
to his dead mistress, "you will receive this homage :

144 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 sur-
vives, make your oblation and a prayer for me ; and
you shall understand ! "

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

MAK'li S Till". EPICUREAN. 1 15

promise of one j oung Btudent, the son, as it presently
appeared, of parents of whom Lucian himself knew
something : and Boon afterwards the lad was seen
coming along briskly a lad with gail and figure well
enough expressive of the sane mind in the healthy
body, though a little Blim and worn of feature, and
with a pair of eyes expressly designed, it mighl seem,
for fine glancings at the stars. At the Bight of
Mariua he paused suddenly, and with a modesl blush
mi recognising his companion, who straightway took
with the youth, bo prettily enthusiastic, the freedom
of ui old friend.

In a few moments the three were Boated together,
immediately above the fragranl borders of a rose-farm,
.hi the marble bench of one of the • chedra for the use of
foot-passengers at the roadside, from which they could
overlook the grand, earnesl prospectrof the Cwmpagna^
and enjoy the air. Fancying that the lad's plainly
written enthusiasm had induced in the elder speaker
a somewhat greater fervour than was usual with him,
Mariua listened to the conversation which follows —

"Ah! Hermotimus! Hurrying to lecture! — if
I may judge by your pace, and that volume iu
your hand. You were thinking hard us you came
along, moving your lips and waving your arm : some
fine speech you were pondering, some knotty ques-
tion or viewy doctrine -nol 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
do further. We read a notice at the schools that

VOL. II. I.

146 MAEIUS THE EPICUEEAN.

there would be no lecture. Stay therefore, and talk
awhile with us.

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

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

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

— And is not the master sufficient for that 1 Could
he not, like Zeus in Homer, let down to you, from
that high place, a golden cord, to draw you up
thither, to himself and to that Happiness, to which
he ascended so long ago ?
. — The very point Lucian ! If it had depended

MAKH'S THE EPICUEEAN. 1 \7

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 the happiness there above, with confidence
in his goodwill.

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

— What little fellows you make of us — less than
the pygmies — down in the dust here. Well ! we,
1 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, per-
haps, I shall be really on the summit. — A great
while ! you think. But then, again, the prize I con-
tend 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 1
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

U8 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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.

■ — How1? — Satisfied with a single day, after all
those labours 1

— Yes ! one blessed moment were enough !

— But again, as you have never been thither, how
know you that happiness is to be had up there, at
all — the happiness that is to make all this worth
while 1

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

— And what was it he told you about it 1 Is it
riches, or glory, or some indescribable pleasure 1

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

— What, then, shall those who come to the end of
this discipline — what excellent thing shall they re-
ceive, if not these 1

—Wisdom, the absolute goodness and the absolute
beauty, with the sure and certain knowledge of all
things — how they are. Eiqhes and glory and plea-
sure— 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

M A Kirs Tin: EPICUREAN. 1 10

the discerning flame. Even bo do they, detached
from all that others prize, by the burning fire of a
true philosophy, ascend to the highest degree of
Happim
— Strange I And do they never come down again

from the heights to help those whom they left belowl
M ist they, when they be once come thither, tl,
remain for ever, laughing, as you say, at what other
tin n prize .'

— More than that ! They whose initiation is entire
are subject no Longer to anger, fear, desire, regret
: 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 1 For, if I might, I should like
to join company with you from this very day.

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

— Well! Be you my guide ! It is hut fair. But
tell me — Do you allow learners to contradict, if any-
thing 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, B8 1 have heard, that there
are many ways of approaching it?

— Yes! Many ways! There are the Stoics, and

150 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 1

— Very different.

— Yet the truth, I conceive, would be one and the
same, from all of them. Answer me then — In what,
or whom, did you confide when you first betook your-
self 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 1 What token had
you? Forget, please, all you are to-day — halfway,
or more, on the philosophic journey : answer me as
you would have done then, a mere outsider as I am
now.

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

— A majority how much greater than the Epicu-
reans, the Platonists, the Peripatetics'? You, doubt-
less, 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 quar-
relsome, 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

I£ABIUS Tin: BPI< OBEAN. 151

was the royal road, the one road, to wealth, to wis-
dom, to all that can be desired

— Of course those who said this were not them-

selves Stoics: you would not have believed them —

still less their opponents. They were the vulgar,
therefore.

— True ! I'.ut you most know that I did not fcrasl
toothers exclusively. 1 trusted also to myself— to

what I saw. 1 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 gdd\ n.

— Von are trying an experiment on me. You
would fain see how far you can mislead me as to your
real ground. The kind of probation yon 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 Alca-
menes. But if philosophy is to he judged by out-
ward appearances, what would become of the Mind
man, for instance, unable to observe the attire and
gait of your friends the Stoics 1

— It was not of the blind I was thinking.

— Yet there must needs he 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

152 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

mind from a man's attire, from anything outward '
Understand me ! You attached yourself to these
men — did you not 1 — because of a certain love you
had for the mind in them, the thoughts they had,
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 1 Matters of that kind are
not wont so to reveal themselves. They are but
hidden mysteries, hardly to be guessed at through
the words and acts which may in some sort be con-
formable 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

MAKIUS Tin: BPIC1 i;i:a\. I.".:;

fumbling in my efforl The fault is yours, in re-
fusing to share your lights with me. Lei 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 Buppose. 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 j the things which beyond
anything else cause men t<> contend against each
other, having do place among them. ( rold 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 iiecm

— 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 mad : 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. 1 remember, Ind 1, 1"; • d man

ited to me hovi things passed there, offering him-

154 MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN.

self 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 Avas
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 way-
farers from afar. Among them were barbarians and
slaves, poor 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 bliss-
ful, 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

1IABIUS THE EPICUREAN. 155

you conio his way. All other ways arc wrong, all
other guides false. Eence my difficulty! — The
number ;m<l variety of the ways! For yon know,
Then is but one road thai leads to (''ninth.

— Well ! If you go the whole round, you will find
no better guides than those. If you wish to get to
Corinth, you will follow the traces of Zeno and
Chrysippus. It is impossible others ise.

— 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 he ab-
surd ; 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 chose 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 Pytha-
goras, 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 }-ou preferred Zeno and
Chrysippus to me.' and me1? — masters of far more
venerable age than th08e, 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.

156 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

If judges act thus, there may be an appeal to another
tribunal.' What should I answer? "Would it be
enough to say — 'I trusted my friend Hermotimus1?'
— ' 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 1

— Yes ! let them go, if you think them in the
way. And now do you speak [ You really look as
if you had something wonderful to deliver.

— Well then, Lucian ! to me it seems quite possible
for one who has learned the doctrines of the Stoics
only, to attain from those a knowledge of the truth,

MABIU8 THE EPICUREAN. 157

withoul proceeding to inquire into all the various
tenets of the othera Look at the question in this
way. If one told you thai twice two make four,
would it be necessary for you to go the whole round
of the arithmeticians, to Bee whether any one of them

will say that twice two make five, Or .-run.' 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 enun-
ciation of what is true, should adhere to them, and
s after no others ; assured that four could never
be five, even if fifty Platos, fifty Axistotles said so1?

— Sou 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 ti\ e, or seven I

— 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
inning and the end, the principle and the final
cause, of things i Never 1 Then your parallel is false.
We are inquiring to which of the .-rets philosophic
truth belongs, and you seize on it by anticipation,
and assign it to the Stoics, alleging, what is by no
mean- clear, that it is they for whom twice two make
four. But tile Epicureans, or the Platonists, might

that it is they, in truth, who make two and two

equal four, while you make them five or Beven, Is

it not so, when you think virtue the only good, and

158 MAKIUS THE EPICUKEAN.

the Epicureans pleasure; when you hold all things
to be material, while the Platonists admit something
im-material ? 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 have entered a temple, of
^Esculapius — 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, 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

MAUI i a THE BPIC1 BEAN. L59

it. But truly, as the matter now stands, nol 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
dear what the lost object really is — cup, or flagon, or
diadem ; for one of the priests avers this, another
that ; they are no1 even in agreement as to it- material:
some will have it to be of brass, others of silver, or
gold. It thus becomes necessary to Bearch the gar-
ments of all pei-'ii-; who have end reel the temple, if

the lost vessel is to he recovered. And it" yon find a

golden cup on the first of them, it will still he neces-
sary to proceed in searching the garments of the
others; for it is not certain that. this cup really
belonged to the temple. Mi-ht there not he 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 he supposed to he 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, oi brass, of silver, of gold: and
still, all the while, it is not ascertained which of all
those is the sacred thing : ami 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 1 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,

160 MARIUS THE EPICUEEAN.

been upon it, we should at least have had less trouble,
and having detected the inscription we should have
ceased to trouble any one else by our search.

— I have nothing to reply to that.

— Hardly anything plausible. 80 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 oft" 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 some one introduced a fair person and
told us he was the fairest of all men, we should not
believe that, unless we knew that he had seen all the
people in the world. Fair he might be ; but, fairest
of all — none could know, unless he had seen all.
And we too desire, not a fair one, but the fairest of
all. Unless we find him, we shall think we have
failed. It is no casual beauty that will content us ;
what we are seeking after is that supreme beauty
which must of necessity be unique.

— What then is one to do, if the matter be really
thus 1 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

makii's tin: RPICUBEAN. 161

we began in early life. I know not how LI la ; bul
though yon Beem to me to speak reasonably, yel
(I must confess it) you have distressed me do1 b
little by this exact exposition of yours, I was un-
lucky in coming out today, and in my falling in
with you, who have thrown me into utter perplexity
by your proof thai the discovery of truth is impos-
sible, just as I seemed to I d the point of attaining

my hope.

— Blame your parents, my child, not me! Or
rather, Manic 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 where-
fore, but you have a grudge against philosophy ;
and it is your entertainment to make a jest of her
lovers.

— Ah : llermotimus I what the Truth may be, you
philosophers may be able to tell better than I. But
so much at least I know of her, thai 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 1 have Btated 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

VoL. ii. M

162 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

fallen in love with a statue and hoped to win its
favour, thinking it a human creature ; and I, under-
standing 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 ridic-
ulous, unless we are to live as many years as the
Phoenix, to be so lengthy in the trial of each ; as if
it were not possible to learn the whole by the part !
They say that Pheidias, when he was shown one of
the talons of a lion, computed the stature and age
of the animal it belonged to, modelling a complete
lion upon the standard of a single part of it. You
too would recognise a human hand were the rest of
the body concealed. Even so with the schools of
philosophy :— the leading doctrines of each might be
learned in an afternoon. That over-exactness of yours,
which requires so long a time, is by no means necessary
for making the better choice.

— You are forcible, Hermotimus ! with this theory

MA1MI 9 THE EPICUBEAN. 163

of The Whole by tit'- Part, Xet, methinks, I heard
you I. ut dow propound the contrary. Bui tell me;
would Pheidiaa when he saw the lion's talon have
known that it was a linn's, it he had never seen the
animal .' Surely, the cause of his recognising the
pari was his knowledge of the whole. There is .1
way of choosing one's philosophy even Less trouble-
some than youra Put the names of all the philo-
sophers into an urn. Then call a little child, and let
him draw the name of the philosopher you Bhall follow
all the rest of your da

— Nay! bo serious with me. Tell me; did you
ever buy wine?

— Surely.

— Ami did you first go the whole round of the
wine-merchants, tasting and comparing their wines 1

— By no means.

— No! You were content el to order the first good
wine you found at your price. By tasting a little
you ascertained the qualify of the whole cask-, flow
if you had -one to each of the merchants in turn, and
-aid, ' I wish to buy a cotyU of wine. Let me drink
out the whole, cask Then I shall be able to tell
which is best, and wdiere I ought to buy.' Yet this
is what you would do with the philosophies. Why
drain the cask when you might taste, and -

— How slippery you are; how yon escape from
one's fingers '. Still, yon have given me an advantage,
and are in your own trap.

— How so ?

164 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

— 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. How-
ever, let us consider your parallel. The wine in the
cask, you say, is of one kind throughout. But have
the philosophers — has your own master even — but
one and the same thing only to tell you, every day
and all days, on a subject so manifold 1 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 1 And then, whereas in selecting our
wine we risk only our money ; in selecting our

MABIUS Tin: BPIOUBBAN. 1G5

philosophy wo 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 there is another similitude I have to pro-
pose, as regards this tasting of philosophy. Don't
think that I blaspheme her if I say that it may be as
with some deadly poison, hemlock or aconite. These
too, though they cause death, yet kill not if one tastes
but a minute portion. You would suppose that the
tiniest particle must be sufficient.

— Be it as you will, Lucian ! One must live a
hundred years— one must sustain all this labour —
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 lung. But now, you take it hard that
we are not to see you this very day, before the sun
goes down, a I'hrysippus, a Pythagoras, a Plato.

— You overtake me, Lucian ! and drive me into a
corner; I believe, in jealousy of heart, because I have
made some progress in doctrine whereas you have
neglected yourself.

— Well! Don't attend to me! Treat me as a
Corybant, a fanatic : and do you go forward on this
road of yours. Finish the journey iii accordance with
the view vou had of these matters at the I ^gaining of
it. Only, be assured that my judgment on it will

166 MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 in vain. 'To that end,' she tells us, 'much
time is necessary, many delays of judgment, a cautious
gait, repeated inspection.' And we are not to regard
the outward appearance, or the reputation of wisdom,
in any of the speakers ; but like the judges of Areo-
pagus, who try their causes in the darkness of the
night, look only to what they say.

— Philosophy, then, is impossible, or possible only
in another life !

— Hermotimus ! I grieve to tell you that all that
even, may be found insufficient. After all, we may
deceive ourselves in the belief that we have found
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 means
certain that any one of them really possesses what
we seek. The truth may be a thing that not one
of them has found. You have twenty beans in your
hand, and you bid ten persons guess how many : one
says five, another fifteen ; it is possible that one of
them may tell the true number ; but it is not impos-

makii B IBB BPIOUBIAN. 167

aible that all may be wrong So it La with the philo-
sophers. All alike are in search of Happiness — what
kind <»f thing it is. One says one thing, one another:
it is pleasure; it is virtue; — what not? And Happi
ness may indeed he one of those things. But it i-
possible also that it may l»e Btil] something else, dif-
ferent and distinct from them all.

' — What is that? — There ia something, I know not
how, very sad and disheartening in what you say.
We seem to have come round in a circde 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
la hour 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 for-
tune 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
ha- based his hope on what he has seen in a dream,
or his own fancy has put together j without previousi
thought whether what he desires ia in itself attain-
able and within the compass of human nature. Kven
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:

168 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

and then you are angry with Eeason, your eyes
being still but half open, and find it hard to shake
off sleep for the pleasure of what you saw therein.
Only, don't be angry with me, because, as a friend,
I would not suffer you to pass your life in a dream,
pleasant perhaps, but still only a dream — because I
wake you up and demand that you should busy your-
self 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 Chimseras 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 into that
passion, and others like you, for a vain idol of the
fancy, is, that he who told you about that fair woman,
from the very moment when you first believed that
what he said was true, brought forward all the rest
in consequent order. Upon her alone your eyes were
fixed j by her he led you along, when once you had
given him a hold upon you — led you along the

MAHirs Tin: BPIOUBEAN. 169

straight road, as he said, to the beloved one. All
\v;i~ easj after that. None of you asked again
whether it was the true way ; following one after
another, like sheep led by the green bough in the
hand of the shepherd. He moved you hither and
thither with his finger, U easily U water spilt on

a table I

My friend! He not so lengthy in preparing the
banquet, lest you die of hanger I 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 oft" suddenly, and
the disputants parted. The horses had been brought
for Lucian. The boy went home, and Marius onward,
to visit a friend whose abode lay further. As he
returned to Koine toward- 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
ruined or neglected 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
very severe law to prevent the defacing of the ancient
monuments of the dead. There seemed to Marius 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

170 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

dying angrily, and its wild glare upon the shadowy
objects about him concurred with his own fancy, in
weaving all the associations of this famous way and
its deeply graven marks of immemorial travel (to-
gether with all the associations of the morning's
enthusiastic conference on the true way of that other
sort of travelling) around a very melancholy image,
almost ghastly in the traces of its great sorrows —
bearing along for ever, on bleeding feet, the instru-
ment of its punishment — which was all Marius could
recall distinctly' of a certain Christian legend he had
heard. It was the legend, however, of an encounter
upon this very spot, of two wayfarers on the Appian
Way, as also upon some very dimly discerned mental
journey, altogether different from himself and his
late 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. It was a strange
contrast to anything actually presented in that morn-
ing's conversation, yet somehow seemed to recall its
very words — " Do they never come down again (he
seemed to hear once more that well-modulated voice),
Do they never come down again from the heights,
to help those whom they left here below?" — "And
we too desire, not a fair one, but the fairest of all.
Unless we find him, we shall think we have failed."

CHAPTEE XXV.

Sl n i LAi i:im E RERUM.

It had become a habit with Marias — one of hie
modernisms— developed by his assistance at those
" conversations " of Aureliua with himself, to keep a
register of the movements of his own private thoughts
or humours ; not continuously indeed, but sometimes
for lengthy intervals, during which it was no idle
Belf-indulgence, but a necessity of his intellectual life,
to "confess himself/' with an intimacy, seemingly rare
among the ancients j 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 in-
terest of their objective informations.

"If a particular tutelary or genius," writes Marina,
"according to old belief, walks beside each one of us
through life, mine is certainly a capricious creature!
He fills one with wayward, unaccountable, yet quite
irresistible humours, and seems always to be in col-
lusion with some outward circumstance, often trivial
enough in itself — the condition of the weather, for-

172 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

sooth ! — the people one meets by chance — the things
one happens to overhear them say (veritable ivoStot
a-v/j-fSoXoi, or omens by the wayside, as the old Greeks
fancied), to push on the unreasonable prepossessions
of the moment into weighty motives. It was doubt-
less a quite explicable, physical fatigue which pre-
sented 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. IWe need
some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal
which may shape vague hope, and transform it into
effective desire, to carry us year after year, without
disgust, through the routine-work which is so large
a part of life.

" Then, how if appetite, be it for real or ideal, should
itself fail one after awhile ? Ah, yes ! it is of cold
always that men die ; and on some of us it creeps
very gradually. In truth, I can remember just such
a lack-lustre condition of feeling once or twice before.
But I note, that it was accompanied then by an odd
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, which would not last. Were those sufferings,
great or little, I asked myself then, of more real con-
sequence to them than mine to me, as I remind my-
self that ' nothing that will end is really long ' — long

KASTOS TIIH BMOUBEAN. 17.°.

enough to be thoughl of importance'? But to-day,
my «>wn sense of fatigue, the pity I conceive for my*

self, disposed me strongly to a tenderness for others.

For a moment the whole world seemed to present
itself as a hospital of sick persons; many of them
sick in mind ; and all of whom it would be a brutality
not to humour.

"Why, when 1 went out to walk oil' my wayward
fancies, did I confront the very sort of incident (my
unfortunate genius had surely beckoned it from afar
to ve\ me) likely to irritate it further? A party of
men were coming down the street. They were lead-
ing 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 to die in his beauty
and pride, for just that one mischance or fault, among
the strangers to whom his old owner had deserted
him ; although the morning air was still so animating,
and pleasant to muff I could have fancied a soul in
the creature, swelling against its luck. And I had
come across the incident just wjien it would figure
to me as the very symbol of our poor humanity, in
its capacities for pain, its wretched accidents, its
imperfect sympathies, which can never quite identify
us with each other: the very power of utterance
and appeal seeming to fail, in proportion as our
sorrows come home to ourselves, are really our own.
We are constructed for suffering I What proofs of

174 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

it does but one day afford, if wc care to note them,
as we go — a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mys-
teries ! Sunt lacrimce rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

" Men's fortunes touch us ! The little children of
one of those institutions for the support of orphans,
now become fashionable among us as memorials of
eminent people deceased, are going, in long file, along
the street, on their way to a holiday in the country.
They halt, and count themselves with an air of
triumph, to show that they are all there. Their gay
chatter has disturbed a little group of peasants ; a
young woman and her husband, who have brought
the old mother, now past work and witless, to place
her in a house provided for such afflicted persons.
They are fairly affectionate, but anxious how the
thing they have to do may go — hope only that she
may permit them to leave her there quietly behind
them. And the poor old soul is excited by the noise
made by the children, and partly 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. ' 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

makii a mi: bpioue] 175

cornea watching the labour, bat with a painful dis-
taste for the din and dirt. Be Lb regarding wistfully
bis i.un place in the world, prepared there before
him. His mind, as lie watches, is grown-up for a
moment ; and he foresees, as it were, in that moment,

all the long tale of days, of early awakin-s, of his OWD

coming life of drudgery at work like this.

"A man comes along carrying a hoy whose rough
work has already begun — the only child, whose pres.
ence beside him Bweetened his toil a little. The boy
has been badly injured by a fall of brick-work, yet
rides boldly with an effort) on his father's shoulders.
It will be the way of natural affection to keep him
alive as long as possible, though with that miserably
shattered body — 'Ah ! with us still, and feeling our
care beside him!' — and yet surely not without a
heartbreaking righ of relief, alike from him ami them,
when the end conies.

"On the alert for incidents like these, yet of neces-
sity passing them by on tie' other side, I find it hard
to get rid of a sense that I, for one, have failed in love.
I coidd yield to the humour till I seemed to have had
my share in those great public cruelties, those shock-
ing legal crimes, like the cold-blooded slaughter, ac-
cording to law, of the four hundred slaves, one by
one, under Nero, because one of their number was
thought to have murdered his master. All that, to-
gether with the kind of facile apologies which those
who had no share in the deed may have made for it,
as they went about quietly on their own affairs that

176 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

day, seems to come very close to me, as I think over
it. And to how many of those now actually around
me, whose life is a sore one, must I be indifferent, if
I ever perceive the soreness at alii To some, per-
haps, the circumstances of my own life may cause me
necessarily to be opposed, regarding those interests
which actually determine the happiness of theirs. I
would that a stronger love might arise in my heart !

" Yet there is plenty of charity in the world. My
patron, the Stoic emperor, has even made it fashion-
able. To celebrate one of his brief returns to Rome
from the war lately, over and above a largess of gold
pieces to all who would, the public debts were for-
given. He made a nice show of it : for once, the
Romans entertained themselves with a good-natured
spectacle, and the whole town came to see the great
bonfire in the Forum, into which all bonds and evi-
dence of debt were thrown on delivery, by the em-
peror himself ; many private creditors following his
example. That was done well enough ! Only, what
I feel is, that no charity at all can get at a certain
natural unkindness which I find in things 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, and
the most deeply marked with that immobility which
is a sort of ideal in the Roman religion. The ceremony
took place at a singular spot some miles distant from
the city, among the low hills on the bank of the Tibei
beyond the Aurelian Gate. There, in a little wood

MARIU8 Till: KTh ( l;i:\\ 177

of venerable trees, piously allowed to have their own
way, age alter age- ilex unci cypress remaining where
they fell at laM, one over the other, and all caught, in
that early May-time, under a riotous tangle of wild
clematis- -was to be found i 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 those quiet place-, hate to be
disturbed by the noise of iron, but also in memory
of thai better age — the lost Golden Age — the homely
age of the potters, of which the central act of the
festival was a commemoration.

" The preliminary ceremonies were long and com-
plicated, but of a character familiar enough. What
was peculiar to the time and place was the solemn ex-
position, after Lavatdon of hands, processions backwards
and forwards, and certain changes of vestments, of the
identical earthen vessels (veritable relics of the old re-
Iigion of Numa) out of which the holy Numa himself
had eaten and drunk, exposed above a kind of altar,
amid a cloud <>f flowers and incense, and many lights,
to the veneration of the credulous or the faithful.

"They were rases or cups of burnt clay, rude in
form : and the religious veneration thus offered to
them expressed the desire to uri\c honour to a
simpler age, before iron had found place in human
life — the persuasion that that age was worth remem-
bering, and a hope that it might come again.

VOL. II. N

178 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

"That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return,
has been the hope or the dream of some, in every
age. Yet if he did come back, or any equivalent
of his presence, he could but alleviate, and by no
means wholly remove, that root of evil, certainly of
sorrow, of outraged human sense, in things, which
one must carefully distinguish from all preventible
accidents. Death, and the little perpetual daily
dyings, which have something of its sting, he must
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 (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, even a
few tufts of half-dead leaves, changing colour in the
quiet of a room that has but light and shadow in it ;
these, for a susceptible mind, might well do duty for
all the glory of Augustus. I notice often the true
character of the fondness of the roughest working-

MAI; 1 1- mi; EPIl I BEAN.

L78

people for their young children, a delicate apprecia-
tion, not only of their serviceable affection, but of
their visible graces : ami indeed, in this country, the
children are almost always worth looking at. I see
daily, in fine weather, a child like a delicate nosegay,
run to meet the rudest of brick-makers as he comes
from work. She is not at all afraid to hang upon his
rough hand : and through her, he reaches out to, he
makes his own, something out of that gnat world, so
distant from him yet so real, of humanity's refine-
ments. What is of finer soul, or of finer stuff', in
things, and demands delicate touching — the delicacy
of the little child represents to him that, initiates
him into that. There, surely, is a touch of the secular
gold, of a perpetual age of gold. But then again,
think for a moment, with what a hard humour at the
nature of things, his struggle for bare life will go on,
if the child should happen to die. I saw to-day,
under one of the archways of the baths, two children
very seriously at play — a fair girl and a perfectly
crippled younger brother. Two toy chairs and a
little table, ami sprigs of fir set upright in the sand
for a garden ! They were playing at housekeeping.
Well ! the girl think- her life a perfectly good thing
in the love of this crippled brother. But she will
have a jealous lover in time ; ami 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

180 MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN.

and above those griefs of circumstance which are in a
measure removable — an inexplicable shortcoming,
or misadventure, on the part of nature itself — death,
and old age as it must needs be, and that watching of
their approach, which makes every stage of life like
a dying over and over again. Almost all death is
painful, and in every thing that comes to an end a
touch of death, and therefore of a wretched coldness
struck home to one, of remorse, of loss and parting,
of outraged attachments. Given faultless men and
women, given a perfect state of society which should
have no need to practise on men's susceptibilities for
its own selfish ends, adding one turn more to the
wheel of the great rack for its own interest or amuse-
ment, there would still be this evil in the world, of a
certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in
proportion to the moral, the nervous perfection men
have reached. And what is needed in the world,
over against that, is a certain general, permanent force
of compassion — humanity's standing self-pity — as an.
elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we
are to live in it at all. I wonder, sometimes, how
man has cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden
so far, seeing how every step his labour has won for
him, from age to age, in the capacity of apprehension,
must needs increase his dejection ; as if the increase
of knowledge were but the revelation of the radical
hopelessness of his position : and I would that there
were one even as I, behind this vain show of things !
"At all events, the actual conditions of our life

ICABIUB Tin: EPIOl BEAK. 181

being as they are, and the capacity for Buffering so
large a principle in things, and the onlj principle,

always safe, a sympathy with the pain one actually
sees, it follows that the constituent practical differ
ence between men will be their capacity for a trained
insighl into those conditions, their capacity for sym-
pathy i and the future with those who have most of
it. And for the present, those who have much of it,
have (1 tell myself) 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 has seemed impossible, and
our pain in life a mere stupid outrage upon us, like
some overwhelming physical violence ;' and we could
seek refuge from it, at best, only in a mere general
sense of goodwill, somewhere perhaps. And then,
to one's surprise, the discovery of that goodwill, if it
were only in a Dot unfriendly animal, may seem to
have explained, and actually justified, the existence
of our pain at all. Certainly, there have been occa-
sions when 1 have felt that if others cared for me as
I did for them, it would be, not so much a solace of
loss, as an equivalent for it — a certain real thing in
if- If — a touching of that absolute ground among all
the changes of phenomena, such as our philosophers
of late have professed themselves quite unable to rind.
In the mere clinging of human creatures to each other,
nay ! in one's own solitary -elf pity, even amidst what

182

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

mi^ht seem absolute loss, I seem to touch the eternal.
. . . . . . i

A certain very real new thing is evolved in that piti-
ful contact, which, on a review of all the perplexity
of life, satisfies the moral sense, and removes that
appearance of unkindness in the soul of things them-
selves, 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 acci-
dent (it was on a journey), all things about me fell
into a more perfect harmony than is their wont. For
a moment, all things seemed to be, after all, almost
for the best. Through the train of my thoughts, one
against another, it was as if I felt the dominance of a
person in controversy — a wrestler — with me. Just
now, I seem to be at the point where I left off then.
My antagonist has closed with me again. A protest
comes, out of the very depth and dust of man's radi-
cally hopeless position in the world, with the energy
of one of those suffering yet prevailing deities, of
which old poetry tells. Dared one hope that there is
a heart, even as ours, in that divine Assistant of one's
thoughts — a heart even as mine, behind this vain
show of things ! "

CHAPTEB XXVI.

AH! VOIlA LES AMES QU'lL FALLOIT A LA MIENNE I

-scau.

The charm of its poetry, ;i poetry of the affections,
wonderfully fresh in that threadbare world, would
have led Marina, 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 el->\
The sentiment of maternity, above all, as he under-
stood it there, seemed to reinforce, as with the
sanction of some divine pattern of it higher still, the
claims of that, and of all natural feeling everywhere,
down even to the sheep bleating on the hills, nay !
even to the mother-wolf, in her hungry cave. He
saw its true place in the world given at last, to the
bare capacity for suffering in any creature, however
feeble or seemingly useless. In this chivalry, this
anxious fidelity to what could not help itself, or
could hardly dare claim not to bo forgotten, which
seemed to leave the world's heroism a mere property

184 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

of the stage, what a contrast to the hard contempt of
death, of pain, of glory even, in those discourses of
Aurelius !

But if Marius thought at times that some long-
cherished desires were here about to blossom for him,
in the sort of home he had sometimes pictured to
himself, and the very charm of which would lie in
its distinction from random passions ; that in this
woman to whom children instinctively clung, was
the sister at least, he had always longed for; there
were also circumstances which reminded him that a
certain rule against second marriages, among these
people was still of some force; incidents, moreover,
which warned his susceptible soul, like omens, not to
mix together the flesh and the spirit, nor to make
the matter of a heavenly banquet serve for earthly
meat and drink.

One day he found Cecilia occupied with the burial
of one of the children of her household. It was on
the tiny brow of such a child, as he now heard, that
the Christian new light had first come to them — in
the light of mere physical life, kindling again there,
when the child was dead, or supposed to be dead.
The aged servant of Christ had arrived in the midst
of their noisy grief ; and mounting to the little cham-
ber where it lay, had returned, not long afterwards,
with the child stirring in his arms as he descended
the stair rapidly; bursting open the tightly -wound
folds of its shroud and scattering the flowers out of
them, as life kindled again through its limbs.

UABIUS Tin: BPIi I BEAK. 1>:>

Old Roman common sense had tanghl people to

occupy their thoughts as little as might be with chil-
dren who died young. Here, bo-day, in this enrious
In. use, all thoughts were tenderly Lent 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 its black bed was
lying open to receive it. Pushing away the grim
.-, they ranged themselves around it in order,
and chanted that old psalm of theirs — Laudate jw, ,i
domi a inn .' Dead children, children's graves — Marina
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, per-
iling intently the expression with which Cecilia
bent upon all this, and returned afterwards to the
house, he felt that he too had had today his funeral
of a little child. But it had always been his policy,
through all his pursuit of " experience," to By in time
from any too disturbing passion, likely to quicken
his pulses beyond the point at which the quiet work
of life was practical ile. Had he after all been taken
unawares, so that it was no longer possible to fly?
At least, during the journey he took, by way of
testing the 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

186 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

first sudden cold of winter, he felt that the mental
atmosphere within himself was perceptibly colder.

Yet it was, finally, a quite successful resignation
which he achieved, on a review, after his manner,
during that absence, of loss and gain. The image
of Cecilia seemed already to have become like some
matter of history or poetry, or a picture on the wall.
And on his return to Rome there had been a rumour
among those people of things which certainly did not
speak of any merely tranquil loving, but hinted that
he had come across a world, the lightest contact with
which might make appropriate to him also the pre-
cept that " They which have wives be as they that
have none."

That was brought home to him, when, in early
spring, he ventured once more to listen to the sweet
singing of the Eucharist. It breathed more than ever
the spirit of a wonderful hope, — hopes more daring
than poor, labouring humanity had ever seriously
entertained before, though it was plain that a great
terror had fallen. Even amid stifled sobbing, as the
pathetic words of the psalter relieved the tension of
their hearts, the people around him still wore upon
their faces that habitual gleam of joy and placid satis-
faction. They were still under the influence of an
immense gratitude in thinking, even amid their pre-
sent distress, of the hour of a great deliverance. As
he followed again that mystical dialogue, he felt also
again, like a mighty breath about him, the influence,
the half-realised presence, of a great multitude, as if

MAKIis THE BPICUBEAN, 1-7

thronging along all those awful passages, to hear the
sentence of its release from prison ; a company which
represented nothing less than orbis terrarum- the
whole company of mankind. And the special note
of the <la\ expressed thai relief a sound new to him,
drawn deep from some old Hebrew source, as he
conjectured, repeated over and over again, at everj
pause and movemenl of the long ceremony.

And then, in its place, by way oi a sacred lection,
in shocking contrast with the peaceful dignity of all
around him, came the Epistle of the churches of Lyons
and /'< to '•their sister," the church of Rome.

For the " Peace " of the church had been broken —
broken, as Marius could not but acknowledge, on the
responsibility of the emperor Aurelius himself, follow-
ing tamely, as a matter of course, the traces of bis
predecessors, and gratuitously enlisting, againsi the
good as well as the evil of that great pagan world,
the strange new heroism of winch this singular message

- full ; and the greatness of which certainly lifted
away all merely private regret, inclining one, at last,
actually to draw sword for the oppressed, as if in some
new order of knighthood —

" The pains which our brethren have home we are
not able fully to tell, for the foe fell upon us with his
whole strength. But the grace of God fought for us,
set free the weak, and made ready those who, like
pillars, were able to beat 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

188 MAEIUS THE EPICUREAN.

held here with a vast crowd, the governor led forth
the Martyrs as a show. Holding what was thought
great but little, and that the pains of to-day are not
deserving to be measured against the glory that shall
be made known, these worthy wrestlers went on
joyful ; their delight and the sweet favour of God
mingling in their faces, so that their bonds seemed
but a goodly array, and like the golden bracelets of
a bride. Filled with the fragrance of Christ, they
seemed to some to have been touched with earthly
perfumes.

"Vettius Epagathus, though he was very young,
because he could not bear to see unjust judgment
given against us, vented his anger, and sought to be
heard for the brethren, for he was a youth of high
place. Whereupon the governor asked him whether
he also were a Christian. He confessed in a clear
voice, and was added to the Martyrs. But he had
the Paraclete within him ; as, in truth, he showed by
the fulness of his love ; glorying in the defence of his
brethren, and to give his life for theirs.

" Then was fulfilled the saying of the Lord that
the day would come, when every one that slayeth you
will think that he docth God service. Most madly
did the mob, the governor and the soldiers rage
against the handmaiden Blandina, in whom Christ
showed that what seems mean among men is of
price with Him. For whilst we all, and her earthly
mistress, who was herself one of the contending
Martyrs, were fearful lest through the weak flesh

makiis Tin; BMC! BEAN. I 39

she should be unable to profess her faith, Blandina
was tilled with such power that her torment)
following upon each other from morning till night,
owned that they were overcome, and hail no more

that they could do to her ; admiring thai Bhe still

breathed after her whole body was torn asunder.

"But this blessed one, in the midst of her witness
Itself, renewed her strength; and to repeat, I am
</'-.' was to her rest, refreshment, ami relief
from pain. As to Alexander, he neither uttered a
tn nor any sound at all, hut in his heart talked
with God. Sanctus, the deacon, also, bearing beyond
all measure the many pains devised by them, hoping
that they would get something from him, did not
even tell his name; hut to all question- answered
only, / 'mi Christ's.' For, this he confessed instead
of his name, hi- tare, and everything beside. Whence
also a strife in torturing him arose hetween tie' gover-
nor and those tormentors, so that when tiny had
nothing else they could do they set red-hot plates of
brass to the most tender parts of hi- body. But he
stood firm in his profession, strengthened and cooled
by that stream of living water which flows from
Christ. His corpse, a single wound, and that had
wholly lost the form of man. was the measure of his
pain. Hut Christ, paining in him. -<-t forth a eopj 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 Witnesses, they bethought them of other

190 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

things ; among which was their imprisonment in a
dark and most sorrowful place, where many were
privily strangled. But though void of man's aid,
they were filled with power from the Lord, both in
body and mind, and strengthened the rest. Also,
much joy Avas in our virgin Mother, the church ; for,
by means of these, those who had fallen away re-
traced their steps — were again conceived, were filled
again with lively heat, and hastened to make the
confession of their faith.

"The holy bishop Pothinus, who was now past
ninety years old and weak in body, yet in his heat
of soul and his longing for martyrdom, roused what
strength he had, and was also cruelly dragged to
judgment, and gave witness. Thereupon he suffered
many stripes, all thinking it Avould be a wickedness
if they fell short in ill-use of him, for that thus they
would avenge their own gods. Hardly drawing
breath, he was thrown into prison, and after two days
there died.

"After these things their martyrdom was parted
into divers manners. Plaiting as it were one crown
of many colours and all kinds of flowers, they yielded
it to God. Maturus, therefore, Sanctus and Blandina,
were led to the wild beasts. And Maturus and
Sanctus passed through all the pains of the amphi-
theatre, 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 dis-
missed.

MABIUS Tin: BPIGUBEAN. 191

"But Blandina was bound and bung apou a stake,
and set forth as food for the assault of the wild
beasts. And as she thus seemed to be hanging
upon the Cross, by her fiery prayers she imparted

much alacrity to those contending Wit n. For as

they looked upon her with the eye of ll<'-h, through
her, they saw Him that was crucified Bui as none
of the beast- would thru touch her, she was taken
down from the Cross, and sent hack to prison for
another day: that, though weak ami mean, yet
clothed with the mighty Wrestler, Christ Jesus, she
might by many conquests give heart to her brethren.

"On the last day, therefore, of the shows, she was
brought forth again, together with Ponticus, a lad
of about fifteen years old. They were brought in
every day to behold the pains of the rest. And
when they wavered not, the moh 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
torment e up his life. Last of all, the blessed

Blandina herself, as a mother that had given life to
her children, and sent them like conquerors to the
great King, hastened, with joy at the end, to them,

boa marriage feast ; even the foe owning that no
woman had ever home pain. BO manifold and great
as hers.

" Not even then was their anger appeased ; some
among them seeking for us pains, if it might be,

192 MARIUS THE EPICUKEAN.

yet greater ; that the saying might be fulfilled, He
that is unjust, let him be unjust still. And their rage
against the Witnesses took a new form, so that we
were in much sorrow for lack of freedom to entrust
their bodies to the earth. Neither did the night-
time, nor the offer of money, avail us for this matter ;
but they guarded them by every means, as if it were
a great gain to hinder their burial. Therefore, after
they had been displayed to view for many days, they
were at length burned to ashes, and cast into the river
Rhone, which flows by this place, that there might
be not a vestige of them left upon the earth. For
they said, Now shall we see whether they will rise
again, and whether their God can save them out of
our hands."

CHAPTEB XXVII.

THE TRIUMPH OP MARCUS AUHELIUS.

It was not many months after the date of that epistle
that .Marias, then expect inn to leave Rome for a long
time, and in fact about to leave it for ever, stood to
witness the triumphal entry of Marcus Aurelius,
almost at the exact spot from which he had watched
the emperor's solemn return to the capital on his own
first coming thither. It was a ///// triumph this time
— Justus Triwmphus -justified, by far more than the

due amounl of 1»1 [shed in those Northern wars,

now it might seem happily at an end. Among the
captives, amid the Laughter of the crowds at his blowsy
upper garment, his trousered legs and conical wolf-
skin cap, walked our own ancestor, representative of
subject Germany, under a figure very familiar in later
Roman sculpture; and, though certainly with none of
the grace of I . yel with plenty of un-

couth pathos in his misshapen features and pale,
Bervile, yet an Bis children, white-skinned

and golden-haired "aa angels," trudged beside him.
His brothers, of the animal world, the ibex, the wild-
voi* II. o

194 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 (not a mere model, but the very
house he had lived in) a Avattled 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 them-
selves, in its unabashed love of open-air pageantries,
has invested this, the greatest, and alas ! the most
characteristic, of the splendours of imperial Rome,
with a reality livelier than any description. The
homely sentiments for which he has found place in
his learned paintings are hardly more lifelike than
the great public incidents of the show, there depicted.
And then, with all that vivid realism, how refined,
how dignified, how select in type, is this reflection of
the old Roman world ! especially, in its time-mellowed
red and gold, for the modern visitor to the old English
palace.

It was under no such selected type that the great
procession presented itself to Marius j though, in
effect, he found something there, as it were prophetic,
and evocative of ghosts ; as susceptible minds will do,

makii s tiii: i ii« i BEAN. 195

in a repetition such as this, after ;i Long interval, oi
Borne notable incident, which may yet perhaps in
no direct concern for themselvea En truth, he had
been bo bent of lute on certain very persona] inter
that the broad current of the world's doings seemed
bo have withdrawn into the distance, but dow, in this
procession, to return once more into ei idence for him.
That, at least, had been holding on its old way, and
was all its old Belf, thus passing by dramatically, and
accentuating in this favourite spectacle, it- mode of
viewing things. And even without the contrast oi a
very different scene from that, he would have found
it, just now, a Bomewhat vulgar spectacle. The
temples, wide open, with their ropes of roses flapping
in the wind againsl the rich, reflecting marble, their
startling draperies and heavy cloud of incense, were
but the centres of a great banquet Bpread through all
the gaudily coloured Btreets of Rome, for which the
carnivorous appetite <>f those who thronged them in
the glare of the mid-day sun was frankly enough
asserted. At best, they were bul calling their goda
to share with them the cooked, Bacrificial, and other
meats, reeking to the sky. The child, who was con-
cerned for the Borrows of one of those Northern
captives as he passed by, and explained to his comrade
— "There's feeling in that hand, you knowl" be-
numbedand lifeless as il Looked in the chain, seemed,

in a moment, to turn the whole show into its own

proper tinsel Xes ! th< se Romans v.

vulgar people; and their vulgarity in full evidence

196 MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN.

here. And Aurelius himself seemed to have under-
gone the world's coinage, and fallen to the level of
his reward, in a mediocrity no longer golden.

Yet if, as he passed by (almost filling the quaint
old circular chariot with his magnificent attire, flow-
ered with gold) he presented himself to Marius,
chiefly as one who had made the great mistake ; to
the multitude he came as a more than magnanimous
conqueror. That he had " forgiven " the innocent
wife and children of the dashing and almost success-
ful rebel Avidius Cassius, now no more, was a recent
circumstance still in memory. As the children went
past, not among those who would presently be
detached from the great progress for execution, ere
the emperor on his knees ascended the steps of the
Capitol, but happy and radiant, as adopted members
of the imperial family, the crowd actually enjoyed
a moral exhibition, which might become the fashion.
And it was in concession to some possible touch of a
heroism, that had really cost him something, in all
this, that Marius resolved to seek the emperor once
more, with an appeal for common sense, for reason
and justice.

He had set out at last to revisit his old home ; and
knowing that Aurelius was then in retreat at the
villa of Lorium, which lay almost on his way thither,
determined there to present himself. Although the
great plain was steadily dying, a new race of wild
birds establishing itself there, as he knew enough of
their habits to understand, and the idle contadino, with

maiiii's Tin: BPIOUBEAN. 197

his never -ending < 1 i 1 1 \- always of decay and death,
replacing the lusty Etonian labourer, never had this
poetic country between Rome and the sea impressed
him more than on the sunless day of early autumn,
under which all that fell within the immense horizon
WBC presented in one uniform tone of a clear, peniten
tial blue. Stimulating to the fancy as was that ranj^e
of low hills to the northwards, already troubled with
thr upbreaking of the Apennines, yel the want of
quiel in their outline, with a multitude of wild j
and Budden upheavals, marked them as but the ruins
of nature ; while at all the little ascents and descents
of the road might be noted traces of the abandoned
work of man. At intervals, the way was still redo-
lent of the floral relics of summer, daphne and myrtle-
blossom, in the little, sheltered hollows and ravines.
At last, amid rocks here and there piercing the soil,
as those descents became steeper, and the main line
of the Apennines, now visible, gave a higher accent
to the seen.-, he espied over the plateau, almost like
one of those broken hills, cutting the horizon towards
the sea, the ol«l brown villa itself — favourite retreat
of one after another of the family of the Antoninea
be approached it, reminiscences crowded upon him,
above all of thai old life there of Antoninus Pius, in
its mansuetude and calm It was here thai bis lasi
moment had come, just as the tribune of the watch
had received from bis lips the word A$gvanimiia$ / as
the watchword of the night. To pee their emperor
living there like one of his simplest subjects, his

198 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

hands red at vintage-time with the juice of the grapes,
hunting, teaching his children, starting betimes for
long days, with all who cared to join, in antiquarian
researches in the country around — all this had seemed
to mean the peace of mankind.

Upon that had come (like a stain, it seemed to him,
just then) the more intimate life of Faustina. Surely,
that marvellous hut malign beauty must still haunt
those rooms, like an unquiet, dead goddess, who might
have perhaps, after all, something reassuring to tell
surviving mortals about her ambiguous self. When
the news had come to Rome, two years before, that
those eyes, always so persistently turned to vanity,
had suddenly closed for ever, a strong desire to pray
had come over Marius, as he followed in fancy on
its wild way the soul of one he had spoken with now
and again, and Avhose 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 sacri-
fice ; above all, the great foundation for orphan girls,
to be called after her name.

It was precisely on account of that, that Marius
failed to see Aurelius again, and make the chivalrous
effort at enlightenment he had proposed to himself.
Entering the villa, he learned from an usher, at the

M.VKM'S THE EPICUE] L99

closed door of the long gallery (famous in the memory
of many a visitor, for its prospect | which Led t<> the
imperial apartments, thai the emperor was already in
audience: Martin most await his turn -he knew not
how long it might l>c. An odd audience it seemed ;
for at that moment, through the closed door, came
shouts of laughter, t' great crowd of

children (the " Faustiniazi Children" themselves, as
he afterwards learned) happy and at their ease, in
the imperial presence. It was the vagueness of the
time for which so pleasant a reception might lav
pleasant that he would hardly have wished to shorten
it, which made Marius finally determine to proceed,
it being necessary that lie should accomplish the first
stage of his journey <m that day. The thing was ool
to be — Valet anvma infelicissirna/sindhe might at
Least carry away that sound of the laughing orphan
children, as a not unamiahle last impression of ki
and their housi

The place he was now about to visit, as the resting-
place of his dead especially, had never been forgotten.
Only, the first eager period <>f his life in Rome hud
slipped on rapidly ; and, almost on a sudden, that <>ld
time had com ■ in very long ago. An aim

burdensome solemnity had grown about his memory
of the place, go that to revisit, it seemed a thing that
needed preparation : it was what he could not have
dime hastily, lie halt' feared t" lessen, or disturb,
its >a!ue for himself. And now as he travelled
leisurely towards it, and so far with quite tranquil

200 MAltlUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 the thing increas-
ing on him, in the darkness. It was as if they had
been waiting for him there all those years, and felt
his footsteps approaching now, and understood his
devotion, quite gratefully, in spite of its tardiness, in
that lowliness of theirs. As morning came, his late
tranquillity of mind had given way to a grief which
surprised him by its freshness. He was moved more
than he could have thought possible by so distant a
sorrow. "To-day/" — they seemed to be saying, as
the hard dawn broke, — "To-day, he will came/" At
last, amid all his distractions, they had become the
main purpose of what he was then doing. The world
around it, when he actually reached the place later
in the day, was in a mood very different — so work-a-
day, it seemed, on that fine afternoon, and the vil-
lages he passed through so silent; the inhabitants
being, for the most part, at their labour in the country.
At last, above the tiled outbuildings, there were the
walls of the old villa itself, with its tower for the
pigeons ; and among, not cypresses, but poplar-trees
with leaves like golden fruit, the birds floating around
it, the conical roof of the burial-place itself. In the
presence of an old servant who remembered him, the
great seals were broken, the rusty key turned at last

MAUI Till EPICUREAN. 201

in the lock, the door was forced out among the weeds
grown thickly aboul it, and tdariua was actually in
the place which had been so often in hie thoughts.

He was shocked, with a touch of remorse however,
only by an odd air of neglect, the aeglecl of b place
merely allowed to remain as when it was last used,
and left in a hurry, till long years had covered all
alike with thick dust — 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 vi 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 g piteOUS Bpectacl

the mouldering, unburned remains within ; the 1"
of a child, as he undersfo od, which might hare 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 (hail people's grievances. He
noticed, side by ride 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 right of childhood, almost at the same time
with her. It seemed as if this hoy of his own
had taken tilial place beside her there, in his stead.
Thftt hard feeling, again, which had always lingered
in his mind with the thought of the father he had

202 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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
ivith interests, as he looked round him on the world for the
last time, even as mine to-day ! And with that came a
blinding rush of kindness, as if two alienated friends
had come to understand each other at last. There
was weakness in all this ; as there is in all care for
dead persons, to which, however, people will always
yield in proportion as they really care for each other.
After all, with a vain yearning to be able to do some-
thing for them still, he reflected, as he stood there,
that such doing, must be, in the nature of things,
mainly for himself. His own epitaph might be that
old one — ecrxa-ros tou ISiov ykvovs — He was the last of
his race ! Of those who might come hither after him-
self probably no one would ever again come quite as
he had done to-day : and it was under the influence
of this thought that he determined to bury all that,
deep below the surface, to be remembered only by
himself, and in a way which would claim no sentiment
from the indifferent. That took many days — was
like a renewal of lengthy old burial rites — as he him-
self watched the work, early and late ; coming on the
last day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the
last touches, while the Avorkmen 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.

I IIAl'TKl; X.Will.

A\IM \ N \TI K AI.lM'.i: I IIUIST! AN \.

Those eight daya at his old borne, so mournfully
npied, bad been for Marius in Borne sort a forcible
disruption from the world and the runts of his life in
it. Ho had been carried out of himself as never
before ; and when the time was over, it was as if the
claim over him of the earth below had been vindicated,
over against the interests of that Living world around
him. Dead, yet. sentient and caressing hands seemed
to reach out of the ground and to he clinging ahout
him. Looking hack sometimes now, from about the
midway of life — the age, as he conceived, at which
one begins to re-descend one's life — and antedating
it a little, in his sad humour, he would note, almost
with surprise, the unbroken placidity of the contem-
plation in which it had been passed. 1 lis own temper,
his early theoretic scheme of things, would have
pushed him on to movement and adventure. Actu-
ally, as circumstances had determined, all its in
ment had been inward; movemenl of observation
only, or even of pure meditation ; partly, perhaps,

204 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

because throughout it had been something of a medi-
fatio mortis, ever facing towards the act of final de-
tachment. But death, of course, as he reflected,
must be for every one nothing less than that 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 depres-
sion 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 !" contrast-
ing the fatigue of soul which made himself practically
an older man, with the other's irrepressible youth.
For it was still the wonderful hopefulness of Cornelius,
his seeming prerogative over the future, which deter-
mined, and kept alive, all other sentiment concerning
him. A new hope had sprung up in the world of
which he, Cornelius, was a depositary, which he must
bear onward in it. Identifying himself with Cornelius
in so dear a friendship, through him, Marius seemed
to touch, to ally himself to, actually to possess for
himself, the coming world ; even as happy parents
reach out, and take possession of it, in and through
the survival of their children. For in these days
their intimacy had grown very close, as they moved

ICABIUS Tin: EMCUKEAN. 205

bither and thither, leisurely, among the country*
places thereabout, I ornelius being on his way back
to Rome, till they came one evening to a little town

(Marius remembered having been ther i bis Oral

journey) which had even then its church and legend
— the legend and holy relics of the martyr llva-
cinthus, a young Etonian Boldier, whose blood had
stained the soil of this place in the days of the
emperor Trajan.

The thought of that so recent death, haunted
Mai iu- through the nfght, as if with audible bj
and crying 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, - t forth to seek him.
Idie 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 width at the presence of
this new enemy among them ! And it was no ordi-
nary morning into which Marina stepped forth. There
was a menace in the dark masses of hill, and motion-
less wood, against tie- gray, although seemingly un-
clouded sky. Under this sunless heaven the earth
itself seemed to fret and fume with a heat of its own,
in spite of the strong night-wind. And now the wind
itself had fallen. Marin- seemed breathing

some strange heavy Quid, denser than any common
air. He could have fancied that the world had
sunken in the night, far below it- proper level, into

206 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

some close, thick abysm of its atmosphere. The
Christian people of the town, hardly less terrified and
overwrought by the haunting sickness about them
than their pagan neighbours, were at prayer before
the tomb of the martyr ; and even as Marius pressed
among them to a place beside Cornelius, on a sudden
the hills seemed to roll like a sea in motion, around
the whole compass of the horizon. For a moment
Marius supposed himself attacked with some sudden
sickness of brain, till the fall of a great mass of
building convinced him that not himself but the
earth under his feet was giddy. A few moments later
the little market-place was alive with the rush of
the 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
mass of people was carried forward towards the band
of worshippers below. An hour later, in the wild
tumult which followed, the earth had been stained
afresh with the blood of the martyrs Felix and
Faustinus — Flores 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.

MABIUS i iir. EPIC1 i;i 207

Under the care of a military guard the capti
were removed, the Bame day, one Btage of their
journey ; Bleeping, Eor security, during the night, aide
by dde with their keepers, in the rooms of a deserted
shepherds' house by the wayside.

It was Burmised that one of the prisoners was uot
a Christian: their guards were forward to make the
utmosl pecuniary profit of the circumstance, and
during the night, Marina, taking advantage of the
Loose charge kept over them, and partly by a Uu
bribe, had contrived that Cornelius, as the roalTj
innocent prison, should be dismissed in safety on his
way, to procure for him, as .Marias explained, the
proper means of defence, when the time of trial cama

And in the morning Cornelius m fact set forth
alone, from their miserable place of detention. Marius
believed that Cornelius was to lie the husband of

Cecilia; and that, perhaps Strangely, had but added

to the desire to gel him away safely.— We wait for
the great crisis which is to try what is in us : we can
hardly bear the pressure of our hearts, as we think
of it : the lonely wrestler, or victim, which imagination
foreshadows to us, can hardly be oneself: it Beems
an outrage of our destiny that we should be led al<
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, col
ily, almost unconsciously. Another motion of the

clock, and OUT fatal line the "great climacteric

point " — has been passed, which cht orselves or

208 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 posi-
tion 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 de-
livered his brother, after the manner he had some-
times vaguely anticipated as a kind of distinction
in his destiny; though indeed always with wistful
calculation as to what it might cost him : and in the
first moment after the thing was actually done, he
felt only satisfaction at his courage, at the discovery
of his possession of "nerve."

Yet he was, as we know, no hero, no heroic martyr
— had indeed no right to be ; and when he had seen
Cornelius depart, and, as he believed, on his blithe
and hopeful way, to become the husband of Cecilia ;
actually, as it had happened, without a word of fare-
well, supposing Marius was almost immediately after-
wards to follow (Marius indeed having avoided the
moment of leave-taking with its possible call for an
explanation of the circumstances) the reaction came.
He could only guess, of course, at what might really
happen. So far, he had but taken upon himself, in
the stead of Cornelius, a great personal risk. It was
danger, not even probable death, that he faced. Still,
for one like himself especially, with all those sensi-

MAKH 9 THE I 1'ICIKKAN. 209

bilities of which bis whole manner of life had been
but an education, the situation of one under trial on
;i criminal charge was actually full of distresa To

liiui, in truth, a death such as the recent death of
those saintly brothers, Beamed n<> glorious end. In

his case, at leaet, the Martyrdom, as it was called —

the overpowering act of testimony that Heaven had
come down among men — would lie hut a common
execution: From the drops of his blood there would
spring no miraculous, poetic flowers ; no eternal aroma

would indicate the |>lace 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, an eloquent utterance at last, on the
irony of men's fates, on the singular accidents of life
and death.

The guards, qow 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 Bufferinga The
autumn rains were falling. At night the soldiers
lighted a firej butil was impossible to keep warm.
From time to time they stopped to roast portions of

the meat tiny cairied with tlielii, making their cap-
tives sit round the fire, and pressing it upon them.
Bui weariness and depression of spirits had deprived
Marine of appetite, even if the food had Keen more

attractive, and for some days he partook of nothing
but bad I 'lead and water. All through the dark
VOL. II. P

210 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

mornings they dragged over boggy plains, and up and
down hills, wet through sometimes with the heavy
rain. Even in those deplorable circumstances, he
could but notice the wild, dark beauty of those places
— the stormy sunrise, and placid spaces of evening.
One of the keepers, a very young soldier, won him at
times, by his simple kindness, to talk a little, with
wonder at the lad's half-conscious, poetic delight in
the adventures of the journey. At times, the whole
company would lie down for rest at the roadside,
hardly sheltered from the storm; and in the deep
fatigue of his spirit, his old longing for inopportune
sleep overpowered him. — Sleep anywhere, and under
any conditions, seemed at those times a thing one
might well offer the remnants of one's life for.

It must have been about the fifth night, as he after-
wards conjectured, that the soldiers, believing him
likely to die, had finally left him unable to proceed
further, under the care of some country people, who
to the extent of their power certainly treated him
kindly in his sickness. He awoke to consciousness
after a 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 only he
might just lie there in quiet long enough. Even
during those nights of delirium he had felt the scent
of the new-mown hay pleasantly, with a dim sense
for a moment that he was lying safe in his old home.

MAKIIS THE EPI01 IM L'l 1

The sunlight lay clear beyond the open door; the
sounds oi the cattle reached him Boftly from the
green places around Recalling confusedly the tor
taring hurry oi his late journeys, he dreaded, as his
consciousness of the whole situation returned, the
ting of the guards. Bui the place remained in
absolute tillneas. He was, in fact, at liberty, but
for his own disabled condition. And it was certainly
a genuine clinging to life thai he felt just then, at
the very bottom of his mind. It had been
obscurely, erven through all the wild fancies of his
delirium, from the moment which followed his de-
;• ( lornelius, against himself.
The occupants of the place were to be heard pre-
sently, coming ami going on their business, about
him : ami i; was as if the approach of death brought
out in all their force the merely human sentiments.
There is that in death which certainly make- indif-
ferent persons anxious t<> forget the d< i '1 t.> put
them away out of their thoughts altogether, as soon
us possible. Conversely, in the deep isolation of
spirit which was now creeping upon Marins, the faces
of these people, casually visible, took a hoM on his
affections ; the link of general brotherhood, the feeling
of human kinship, asserting itself most Btrongly when
it was about to be severed for ever. At nights he
would find this face or that impressed deeply on
his tamy ; ami hi> mind would, in a troubled sort
of ticinner, follow them onwards, on the ways of

their simple, humdrum, e\ei\d;i\ life, with a

212 MAKIUS THE EPICUREAN.

yearning to share it with them, envying the calm,
earthy cheerfulness of all their days to-be, still under
the sun (but how indifferent, of course, to him !) as
if these rude people had been suddenly lifted into
some height of earthly good -fortune, which must
needs isolate them from himself.

Tristem neminem fecit — he repeated to himself ; his
old prayer shaping itself now almost as an epitaph.
Yes ! so much the very hardest judge must concede
to him. And the sense of satisfaction which that
left with him disposed him to a conscious effort of
recollection, while he lay there, unable now even to
raise his head, as he discovered on attempting to
reach a pitcher of water which stood near. Revela-
tion, vision, the uncovering 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, such as was
surely a pleasant sacrifice to Avhatever 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

MAKirs i in; BPICUBEAN. 213

Jesus, apprehended dimly through the expressive
faces, the crying <>f the children, in that mysteA
drama, with a sudden sense oi peace and satisfaction
now, which he could nol 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 bis aide

For still, in a shadowy world, his deeper wisdom
had ever been, with a sense of economy, with a
jealous i -timate of Lcain and loss, to use life, not as
the means to some problematic end. hut, as fai
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 <>n the air. Yet now, aware
still in that suffering body of Bueh vivid powers of
mind and sense, as he anticipated from time to time
how his sickness, practically without aid as he wa-
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 lie would have himself experienced standing by the

deathbed of another, in condition .similar to bis own.

And yet it was the fa in, 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,

hifl whole general capaciu of virion : ami in that too
w.t- a mccess, in the view ot certain, wry definite.

214 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

well-considered, undeniable possibilities. Throughout
that elaborate and lifelong education of his receptive
powers, he had ever maintained the purpose of a self-
preparation towards possible further revelation, some
J day — an ampler vision, which should take up into
itself and explain this world's delightful shows, as the
scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-
understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost
epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his un-
clouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through
all those years, from experience to experience, was at
its height ; the house was ready for the possible guest,
the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatso-
ever 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 ex-
planation ? Surely, the aim of a true philosophy must
lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accom-
modation of man to the circumstances in which he
chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a
kind of ingenuous 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 it still unimpaired,
and going on its blind way at last with the conscious-
ness of some profound enigma in things, as its pledge

MAK1I s Tin: RPIl -J If)

of something farther to come Bdariu mod to
understand how one might look book upon life 1
and its excellent visions, as hut the portion of a i
course left behind him by a BtUl Bwift runner: for a
moment, ho felt a curiosity and ardour, with dim
trouble as of imminent vision, to enter upon a future,
tin; possibilities of which Beemed so larg

And just thru, 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 /. ntUms in tenebru —

upon the aged world ; the hope which Cornelius had
Beemed to bear away upon him in his strength, with
a buoyancy which had made Eoarius feel somehow, less
that, by a caprice of destiny, he had been left to <lic
in his place, than that Cornelius had gone on a mis-
sion to deliver him also from death. There had I
a permanent prot blished in the world, a plea,

a perpetual aftertho Lghn, which humanity would
henceforth ever p in reserve, against a wholly

mechanical and disheartening theory of itself and
its conditions. It was a thought which relieved for
him the iron outline of the horizon about him, touch-
ing it as if with soft light from beyond; filling the
shadowy, hollow places to which he was on his way
with the warmth of definite affections ; and confirming
also certain considerations by which he seemed to link
himself to the generations to come in the world he
was leaviu . i i ! through the survival of their chil-
dren, happy parents are able to think calmly, and with

216 MARIUS THE EPICUREAN.

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 grandchildren 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 lonesome-
ness, like a physical darkness, seemed to settle over the
thought of it ; as if its business hereafter must be, as
far as he was concerned, carried on in some inhabited,
but distant and alien, star. But with the sense of that
hope warm upon him, he seemed to anticipate a care
for himself, never to fail even on earth, with a rever-
ential 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 those, 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 may fall asleep so, and forget all about
them, the sooner, on all the persons he had loved in'
life — on his love for them, dead or living, grateful for

MAILTOS Tin: BPK n:i:.\.\. 217

his love or not, rather than on theirs for him — letting
their images pa-- away again, or rest with him, as they

would. In the bare Benseoi having loved he -
to find, even amid this foundering of the ship, thai
on which his soul might "assuredly reel and depend."
One after another, he Buffered thoei and voi

to come and go, as in some mechanical exercise,
he might have repeated all the verses he knew l>\
heart, or like the telling of beads one by one, with
many a sleepy nod between-whilea

For there remained also, for the old earthy creature
still within him, that great blessedness of physical
slumber. To sleep, to lose oneself in sleep — that, as
he had recognised always, was a good thing. And
it was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke
amid the murmuring voices of the people who had
kept and tended him so carefully through his sick-
ness, now kneeling around his bed : and what he
heard confirmed, in his, then perfect, clearness of soul,
the spontaneous suggestion of his own bodily feeling.
He had often dreamt that he had been condemned
to die, that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape.
had arrived; and waking, with the sun all around
him, in complete liberty of life, had been full of
gratitude, for his place there, alive still, in the land
of the living. He read surely, now, in the manner,
the doings, of these people, some of whom v ■
passing away through the doorway, where the sun
still lay heavy and full, that his last morning was
come, and turned to think again of the beloved. Of

VOL. II. Q

218 MARIUS THE EPICUEEAN.

old, he had often fancied that not to die on a dark
and rainy day would itself have a little alleviating
grace or favour about it. The people around his bed
were praying fervently — AM ! Abi ! anima Christi-
ana! In the moments of his extreme helplessness
their mystic bread had been placed, had descended
like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips.
Soothing fingers had applied to hands and feet, to all
those old passage-ways of the senses, through which
the world had come and gone from him, now so
dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the
same people, who, in the grey, austere evening of that
day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly,
with their accustomed prayers ; but with joy also,
holding his death, according to their generous view in
this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyr-
dom ; and martyrdom, as the church had always said,
a kind of sacrament with plenary grace.

THE END.

1881-1884.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.

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