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Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two

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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME TWO
WALTER HORATIO PATER

London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)


NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

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

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

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

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






MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME TWO
WALTER PATER


Cheimerinos oneiros, hote mêkistai hai vyktes.+

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


CONTENTS


PART THE THIRD

15. Stoicism at Court: 3-13
16. Second Thoughts: 14-28
17. Beata Urbs: 29-40
18. "The Ceremony of the Dart": 41-56
19. The Will as Vision: 57-72

PART THE FOURTH

20. Two Curious Houses--1. Guests: 75-91
21. Two Curious Houses--2. The Church in Cecilia's House: 92-108
22. "The Minor Peace of the Church": 109-127
23. Divine Service: 128-140
24. A Conversation Not Imaginary: 141-171
25. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: 172-185
26. The Martyrs: 186-196
27. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius: 197-207
28. Anima Naturaliter Christiana: 208-224



PART THE THIRD

CHAPTER XV: STOICISM AT COURT

[3] THE very finest flower of the same company--Aurelius with the
gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress
Faustina herself, and all the elegant blue-stockings of the day, who
maintained, people said, their private "sophists" to whisper
philosophy into their ears winsomely as they performed the duties of
the toilet--was assembled again a few months later, in a different
place and for a very different purpose. The temple of Peace, a
"modernising" foundation of Hadrian, enlarged by a library and
lecture-rooms, had grown into an institution like something between a
college and a literary club; and here Cornelius Fronto was to
pronounce a discourse on the Nature of Morals. There were some,
indeed, who had desired the emperor Aurelius himself to declare his
whole mind on this matter. Rhetoric was become almost a function of
the state: philosophy was upon the throne; and had from time to time,
by [4] request, delivered an official utterance with well-nigh divine
authority. And it was as the delegate of this authority, under the
full sanction of the philosophic emperor--emperor and pontiff, that
the aged Fronto purposed to-day to expound some parts of the Stoic
doctrine, with the view of recommending morals to that refined but
perhaps prejudiced company, as being, in effect, one mode of
comeliness in things--as it were music, or a kind of artistic order,
in life. And he did this earnestly, with an outlay of all his
science of mind, and that eloquence of which he was known to be a
master. For Stoicism was no longer a rude and unkempt thing.
Received at court, it had largely decorated itself: it was grown
persuasive and insinuating, and sought not only to convince men's
intelligence but to allure their souls. Associated with the
beautiful old age of the great rhetorician, and his winning voice, it
was almost Epicurean. And the old man was at his best on the
occasion; the last on which he ever appeared in this way. To-day was
his own birthday. Early in the morning the imperial letter of
congratulation had reached him; and all the pleasant animation it had
caused was in his face, when assisted by his daughter Gratia he took
his place on the ivory chair, as president of the Athenaeum of Rome,
wearing with a wonderful grace the philosophic pall,--in reality
neither more nor less than the loose woollen cloak of the common
soldier, but fastened [5] on his right shoulder with a magnificent
clasp, the emperor's birthday gift.

It was an age, as abundant evidence shows, whose delight in rhetoric
was but one result of a general susceptibility--an age not merely
taking pleasure in words, but experiencing a great moral power in
them. Fronto's quaintly fashionable audience would have wept, and
also assisted with their purses, had his present purpose been, as
sometimes happened, the recommendation of an object of charity. As
it was, arranging themselves at their ease among the images and
flowers, these amateurs of exquisite language, with their tablets
open for careful record of felicitous word or phrase, were ready to
give themselves wholly to the intellectual treat prepared for them,
applauding, blowing loud kisses through the air sometimes, at the
speaker's triumphant exit from one of his long, skilfully modulated
sentences; while the younger of them meant to imitate everything
about him, down to the inflections of his voice and the very folds of
his mantle. Certainly there was rhetoric enough:--a wealth of
imagery; illustrations from painting, music, mythology, the
experiences of love; a management, by which subtle, unexpected
meaning was brought out of familiar terms, like flies from morsels of
amber, to use Fronto's own figure. But with all its richness, the
higher claim of his style was rightly understood to lie in gravity
and self-command, and an especial care for the [6] purities of a
vocabulary which rejected every expression unsanctioned by the
authority of approved ancient models.

And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes happen, that this
general discourse to a general audience had the effect of an
utterance adroitly designed for him. His conscience still vibrating
painfully under the shock of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full
of the ethical charm of Cornelius, he was questioning himself with
much impatience as to the possibility of an adjustment between his
own elaborately thought-out intellectual scheme and the "old
morality." In that intellectual scheme indeed the old morality had
so far been allowed no place, as seeming to demand from him the
admission of certain first principles such as might misdirect or
retard him in his efforts towards a complete, many-sided existence;
or distort the revelations of the experience of life; or curtail his
natural liberty of heart and mind. But now (his imagination being
occupied for the moment with the noble and resolute air, the
gallantry, so to call it, which composed the outward mien and
presentment of his strange friend's inflexible ethics) he felt
already some nascent suspicion of his philosophic programme, in
regard, precisely, to the question of good taste. There was the
taint of a graceless "antinomianism" perceptible in it, a dissidence,
a revolt against accustomed modes, the actual impression of which on
other [7] men might rebound upon himself in some loss of that
personal pride to which it was part of his theory of life to allow so
much. And it was exactly a moral situation such as this that Fronto
appeared to be contemplating. He seemed to have before his mind the
case of one--Cyrenaic or Epicurean, as the courtier tends to be, by
habit and instinct, if not on principle--who yet experiences,
actually, a strong tendency to moral assents, and a desire, with as
little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place for duty and
righteousness in his house of thought.

And the Stoic professor found the key to this problem in the purely
aesthetic beauty of the old morality, as an element in things,
fascinating to the imagination, to good taste in its most highly
developed form, through association--a system or order, as a matter
of fact, in possession, not only of the larger world, but of the rare
minority of élite intelligences; from which, therefore, least of all
would the sort of Epicurean he had in view endure to become, so to
speak, an outlaw. He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity,
in search after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he
seemed to Marius to be speaking straight to him) which might give
unity of motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of
life, determined partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened
self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere
fear of penalties; no element of which, [8] however, was
distinctively moral in the agent himself as such, and providing him,
therefore, no common ground with a really moral being like Cornelius,
or even like the philosophic emperor. Performing the same offices;
actually satisfying, even as they, the external claims of others;
rendering to all their dues--one thus circumstanced would be wanting,
nevertheless, in the secret of inward adjustment to the moral agents
around him. How tenderly--more tenderly than many stricter souls--he
might yield himself to kindly instinct! what fineness of charity in
passing judgment on others! what an exquisite conscience of other
men's susceptibilities! He knows for how much the manner, because
the heart itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He goes beyond most
people in his care for all weakly creatures; judging, instinctively,
that to be but sentient is to possess rights. He conceives a hundred
duties, though he may not call them by that name, of the existence of
which purely duteous souls may have no suspicion. He has a kind of
pride in doing more than they, in a way of his own. Sometimes, he
may think that those men of line and rule do not really understand
their own business. How narrow, inflexible, unintelligent! what poor
guardians (he may reason) of the inward spirit of righteousness, are
some supposed careful walkers according to its letter and form. And
yet all the while he admits, as such, no moral world at all: no [9]
theoretic equivalent to so large a proportion of the facts of life.

But, over and above such practical rectitude, thus determined by
natural affection or self-love or fear, he may notice that there is a
remnant of right conduct, what he does, still more what he abstains
from doing, not so much through his own free election, as from a
deference, an "assent," entire, habitual, unconscious, to custom--to
the actual habit or fashion of others, from whom he could not endure
to break away, any more than he would care to be out of agreement
with them on questions of mere manner, or, say, even, of dress. Yes!
there were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a
failure in good taste. An assent, such as this, to the preferences
of others, might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the rectitude
it could determine the least considerable element in a moral life.
Yet here, according to Cornelius Fronto, was in truth the revealing
example, albeit operating upon comparative trifles, of the general
principle required. There was one great idea associated with which
that determination to conform to precedent was elevated into the
clearest, the fullest, the weightiest principle of moral action; a
principle under which one might subsume men's most strenuous efforts
after righteousness. And he proceeded to expound the idea of
Humanity--of a universal commonwealth of mind, which [10] becomes
explicit, and as if incarnate, in a select communion of just men made
perfect.

Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin+--the world is as it were a commonwealth,
a city: and there are observances, customs, usages, actually current
in it, things our friends and companions will expect of us, as the
condition of our living there with them at all, as really their peers
or fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed, the creation of
a visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose actual manners, whose
preferences from of old, become now a weighty tradition as to the way
in which things should or should not be done, are like a music, to
which the intercourse of life proceeds--such a music as no one who
had once caught its harmonies would willingly jar. In this way, the
becoming, as in Greek--to prepon: or ta êthê+ mores, manners, as both
Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a comprehensive term for
duty. Righteousness would be, in the words of "Caesar" himself, of
the philosophic Aurelius, but a "following of the reasonable will of
the oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities--of the royal,
the law-giving element, therein--forasmuch as we are citizens also in
that supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but
as single habitations." But as the old man spoke with animation of
this supreme city, this invisible society, whose conscience was
become explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose [11]
common spirit, the trusted leaders of human conscience had been but
the mouthpiece, of whose successive personal preferences in the
conduct of life, the "old morality" was the sum,--Marius felt that
his own thoughts were passing beyond the actual intention of the
speaker; not in the direction of any clearer theoretic or abstract
definition of that ideal commonwealth, but rather as if in search of
its visible locality and abiding-place, the walls and towers of
which, so to speak, he might really trace and tell, according to his
own old, natural habit of mind. It would be the fabric, the outward
fabric, of a system reaching, certainly, far beyond the great city
around him, even if conceived in all the machinery of its visible and
invisible influences at their grandest--as Augustus or Trajan might
have conceived of them--however well the visible Rome might pass for
a figure of that new, unseen, Rome on high. At moments, Marius even
asked himself with surprise, whether it might be some vast secret
society the speaker had in view:--that august community, to be an
outlaw from which, to be foreign to the manners of which, was a loss
so much greater than to be excluded, into the ends of the earth, from
the sovereign Roman commonwealth. Humanity, a universal order, the
great polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their
example over their successors--these were the ideas, stimulating
enough in their way, [12] by association with which the Stoic
professor had attempted to elevate, to unite under a single
principle, men's moral efforts, himself lifted up with so genuine an
enthusiasm. But where might Marius search for all this, as more than
an intellectual abstraction? Where were those elect souls in whom
the claim of Humanity became so amiable, winning, persuasive--whose
footsteps through the world were so beautiful in the actual order he
saw--whose faces averted from him, would be more than he could bear?
Where was that comely order, to which as a great fact of experience
he must give its due; to which, as to all other beautiful "phenomena"
in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust himself?

Rome did well to be serious. The discourse ended somewhat abruptly,
as the noise of a great crowd in motion was heard below the walls;
whereupon, the audience, following the humour of the younger element
in it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which the famous
procession, or transvectio, of the military knights was to be seen
passing over the Forum, from their trysting-place at the temple of
Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri. The ceremony took place this
year, not on the day accustomed--anniversary of the victory of Lake
Regillus, with its pair of celestial assistants--and amid the heat
and roses of a Roman July, but, by [13] anticipation, some months
earlier, the almond-trees along the way being still in leafless
flower. Through that light trellis-work, Marius watched the riders,
arrayed in all their gleaming ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive
around their helmets, the faces below which, what with battle and the
plague, were almost all youthful. It was a flowery scene enough, but
had to-day its fulness of war-like meaning; the return of the army to
the North, where the enemy was again upon the move, being now
imminent. Cornelius had ridden along in his place, and, on the
dismissal of the company, passed below the steps where Marius stood,
with that new song he had heard once before floating from his lips.

NOTES

10. +Transliteration: Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin. Translation:
"The world is like a city."

10. +Transliteration: to prepon . . . ta êthê. Translation: "That
which is seemly . . . mores."



CHAPTER XVI: SECOND THOUGHTS

[14] AND Marius, for his part, was grave enough. The discourse of
Cornelius Fronto, with its wide prospect over the human, the
spiritual, horizon, had set him on a review--on a review of the
isolating narrowness, in particular, of his own theoretic scheme.
Long after the very latest roses were faded, when "the town" had
departed to country villas, or the baths, or the war, he remained
behind in Rome; anxious to try the lastingness of his own Epicurean
rose-garden; setting to work over again, and deliberately passing
from point to point of his old argument with himself, down to its
practical conclusions. That age and our own have much in common--
many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon me if here and
there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives
--from Rome, to Paris or London.

What really were its claims as a theory of practice, of the
sympathies that determine [15] practice? It had been a theory,
avowedly, of loss and gain (so to call it) of an economy. If,
therefore, it missed something in the commerce of life, which some
other theory of practice was able to include, if it made a needless
sacrifice, then it must be, in a manner, inconsistent with itself,
and lack theoretic completeness. Did it make such a sacrifice? What
did it lose, or cause one to lose?

And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaicism
is ever the characteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in
its survey--sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical.
It is one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid,
because limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of
experience (in this case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity
of man's life there) which it may be said to be the special vocation
of the young to express. In the school of Cyrene, in that
comparatively fresh Greek world, we see this philosophy where it is
least blasé, as we say; in its most pleasant, its blithest and yet
perhaps its wisest form, youthfully bright in the youth of European
thought. But it grows young again for a while in almost every
youthful soul. It is spoken of sometimes as the appropriate
utterance of jaded men; but in them it can hardly be sincere, or, by
the nature of the case, an enthusiasm. "Walk in the ways of thine
heart, and in the sight of thine eyes," is, indeed, most often, [16]
according to the supposition of the book from which I quote it, the
counsel of the young, who feel that the sunshine is pleasant along
their veins, and wintry weather, though in a general sense foreseen,
a long way off. The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism, the self-
abandonment to one favourite mode of thought or taste, which occurs,
quite naturally, at the outset of every really vigorous intellectual
career, finds its special opportunity in a theory such as that so
carefully put together by Marius, just because it seems to call on
one to make the sacrifice, accompanied by a vivid sensation of power
and will, of what others value--sacrifice of some conviction, or
doctrine, or supposed first principle--for the sake of that clear-
eyed intellectual consistency, which is like spotless bodily
cleanliness, or scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the
mind of the youthful student, when he first comes to appreciate it,
the fascination of an ideal.

The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of strenuousness or
enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance of the "jaded
Epicurean," as of the strong young man in all the freshness of
thought and feeling, fascinated by the notion of raising his life to
the level of a daring theory, while, in the first genial heat of
existence, the beauty of the physical world strikes potently upon his
wide-open, unwearied senses. He discovers a great new poem every
spring, with a hundred delightful things he too has felt, but [16]
which have never been expressed, or at least never so truly, before.
The workshops of the artists, who can select and set before us what
is really most distinguished in visible life, are open to him. He
thinks that the old Platonic, or the new Baconian philosophy, has
been better explained than by the authors themselves, or with some
striking original development, this very month. In the quiet heat of
early summer, on the dusty gold morning, the music comes, louder at
intervals, above the hum of voices from some neighbouring church,
among the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps, only for the
poetically rapt faces among priests or worshippers, or the mere skill
and eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and
righteousness. In his scrupulous idealism, indeed, he too feels
himself to be something of a priest, and that devotion of his days to
the contemplation of what is beautiful, a sort of perpetual religious
service. Afar off, how many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts
await him! At that age, with minds of a certain constitution, no
very choice or exceptional circumstances are needed to provoke an
enthusiasm something like this. Life in modern London even, in the
heavy glow of summer, is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination
of a youth to build its "palace of art" of; and the very sense and
enjoyment of an experience in which all is new, are but enhanced,
like that glow of summer itself, by the [18] thought of its brevity,
giving him something of a gambler's zest, in the apprehension, by
dexterous act or diligently appreciative thought, of the highly
coloured moments which are to pass away so quickly. At bottom,
perhaps, in his elaborately developed self-consciousness, his
sensibilities, his almost fierce grasp upon the things he values at
all, he has, beyond all others, an inward need of something permanent
in its character, to hold by: of which circumstance, also, he may be
partly aware, and that, as with the brilliant Claudio in Measure for
Measure, it is, in truth, but darkness he is, "encountering, like a
bride." But the inevitable falling of the curtain is probably
distant; and in the daylight, at least, it is not often that he
really shudders at the thought of the grave--the weight above, the
narrow world and its company, within. When the thought of it does
occur to him, he may say to himself:--Well! and the rude monk, for
instance, who has renounced all this, on the security of some dim
world beyond it, really acquiesces in that "fifth act," amid all the
consoling ministries around him, as little as I should at this
moment; though I may hope, that, as at the real ending of a play,
however well acted, I may already have had quite enough of it, and
find a true well-being in eternal sleep.

And precisely in this circumstance, that, consistently with the
function of youth in general, Cyrenaicism will always be more or [19]
less the special philosophy, or "prophecy," of the young, when the
ideal of a rich experience comes to them in the ripeness of the
receptive, if not of the reflective, powers--precisely in this
circumstance, if we rightly consider it, lies the duly prescribed
corrective of that philosophy. For it is by its exclusiveness, and
by negation rather than positively, that such theories fail to
satisfy us permanently; and what they really need for their
correction, is the complementary influence of some greater system, in
which they may find their due place. That Sturm und Drang of the
spirit, as it has been called, that ardent and special apprehension
of half-truths, in the enthusiastic, and as it were "prophetic"
advocacy of which, devotion to truth, in the case of the young--
apprehending but one point at a time in the great circumference--most
usually embodies itself, is levelled down, safely enough, afterwards,
as in history so in the individual, by the weakness and mere
weariness, as well as by the maturer wisdom, of our nature. And
though truth indeed, resides, as has been said, "in the whole"--in
harmonisings and adjustments like this--yet those special
apprehensions may still owe their full value, in this sense of "the
whole," to that earlier, one-sided but ardent pre-occupation with
them.

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