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Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two




"Why, when I went out to walk off my wayward fancies, did I confront
the very sort of incident (my unfortunate genius had surely beckoned
it from afar to vex me) likely to irritate them further? A party of
men were coming down the street. They were leading a fine race-horse;
a handsome beast, but badly hurt somewhere, in the circus, and useless.
They were taking him to slaughter; and I think the animal knew it: he
cast such looks, as if of mad appeal, to those who passed him, as he
went among the strangers to whom his former owner had committed him,
to die, in his beauty and pride, for just that one mischance or fault;
although the morning air was still so animating, and pleasant to snuff.
I could have fancied a human soul in the creature, swelling against
its luck. And I had come across the incident just when it would figure
to me as the very symbol [175] of our poor humanity, in its capacities
for pain, its wretched accidents, and those imperfect sympathies, which
can never quite identify us with one another; the very power of
utterance and appeal to others seeming to fail us, in proportion as
our sorrows come home to ourselves, are really our own. We are
constructed for suffering! What proofs of it does but one day afford,
if we care to note them, as we go--a whole long chaplet of sorrowful
mysteries! Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.+

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

[176] 'Yes! yes! and twice five make ten'--they say, to pacify her.
It is her last appeal to be taken home again; her proof that all is
not yet up with her; that she is, at all events, still as capable as
those joyous children.

"At the baths, a party of labourers are at work upon one of the great
brick furnaces, in a cloud of black dust. A frail young child has
brought food for one of them, and sits apart, waiting till his father
comes--watching the labour, but with a sorrowful distaste for the din
and dirt. He is regarding wistfully his own place in the world, there
before him. His mind, as he watches, is grown up for a moment; and he
foresees, as it were, in that moment, all the long tale of days, of
early awakings, of his own coming life of drudgery at work like this.

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

"On the alert for incidents like these, yet of necessity passing them
by on the other side, I find [177] it hard to get rid of a sense that
I, for one, have failed in love. I could yield to the humour till I
seemed to have had my share in those great public cruelties, the
shocking legal crimes which are on record, like that cold-blooded
slaughter, according to law, of the four hundred slaves in the reign
of Nero, because one of their number was thought to have murdered his
master. The reproach of that, together with the kind of facile
apologies those who had no share in the deed may have made for it, as
they went about quietly on their own affairs that day, seems to come
very close to me, as I think upon it. And to how many of those now
actually around me, whose life is a sore one, must I be indifferent,
if I ever become aware of their soreness at all? To some, perhaps,
the necessary conditions of my own life may cause me to be opposed,
in a kind of natural conflict, regarding those interests which
actually determine the happiness of theirs. I would that a stronger
love might arise in my heart!

"Yet there is plenty of charity in the world. My patron, the Stoic
emperor, has made it even fashionable. To celebrate one of his
brief returns to Rome lately from the war, over and above a largess
of gold pieces to all who would, the public debts were forgiven.
He made a nice show of it: for once, the Romans entertained themselves
with a good-natured spectacle, and the whole town came to see the
great bonfire [178] in the Forum, into which all bonds and evidence
of debt were thrown on delivery, by the emperor himself; many private
creditors following his example. That was done well enough! But
still the feeling returns to me, that no charity of ours can get at
a certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves.

"When I first came to Rome, eager to observe its religion, especially
its antiquities of religious usage, I assisted at the most curious,
perhaps, of them all, the most distinctly marked with that immobility
which is a sort of ideal in the Roman religion. The ceremony took
place at a singular spot some miles distant from the city, among the
low hills on the bank of the Tiber, beyond the Aurelian Gate. There,
in a little wood of venerable trees, piously allowed their own way,
age after age--ilex and cypress remaining where they fell at last,
one over the other, and all caught, in that early May-time, under a
riotous tangle of wild clematis--was to be found a magnificent
sanctuary, in which the members of the Arval College assembled
themselves on certain days. The axe never touched those trees--Nay!
it was forbidden to introduce any iron thing whatsoever within the
precincts; not only because the deities of these quiet places hate to
be disturbed by the harsh noise of metal, but also in memory of that
better age--the lost Golden Age--the homely age of the potters, of
[179] which the central act of the festival was a commemoration.

"The preliminary ceremonies were long and complicated, but of a
character familiar enough. Peculiar to the time and place was the
solemn exposition, after lavation of hands, processions backwards
and forwards, and certain changes of vestments, of the identical
earthen vessels--veritable relics of the old religion of Numa!--the
vessels from which the holy Numa himself had eaten and drunk, set
forth above a kind of altar, amid a cloud of flowers and incense,
and many lights, for the veneration of the credulous or the faithful.

"They were, in fact, cups or vases of burnt clay, rude in form: and
the religious veneration thus offered to them expressed men's desire
to give honour to a simpler age, before iron had found place in human
life: the persuasion that that age was worth remembering: a hope that
it might come again.

"That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, has been the hope or
the dream of some, in every period. Yet if he did come back, or any
equivalent of his presence, he could but weaken, and by no means smite
through, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human
sense, in things, which one must carefully distinguish from all
preventible accidents. Death, and the little perpetual daily dyings,
which have something of its sting, he must [180] necessarily leave
untouched. And, methinks, that were all the rest of man's life framed
entirely to his liking, he would straightway begin to sadden himself,
over the fate--say, of the flowers! For there is, there has come to
be since Numa lived perhaps, a capacity for sorrow in his heart,
which grows with all the growth, alike of the individual and of the
race, in intellectual delicacy and power, and which will find its
aliment.

"Of that sort of golden age, indeed, one discerns even now a trace,
here and there. Often have I maintained that, in this generous
southern country at least, Epicureanism is the special philosophy of
the poor. How little I myself really need, when people leave me alone,
with the intellectual powers at work serenely. The drops of falling
water, a few wild flowers with their priceless fragrance, a few tufts
even of half-dead leaves, changing colour in the quiet of a room that
has but light and shadow in it; these, for a susceptible mind, might
well do duty for all the glory of Augustus. I notice sometimes what
I conceive to be the precise character of the fondness of the roughest
working-people for their young children, a fine appreciation, not
only of their serviceable affection, but of their visible graces: and
indeed, in this country, the children are almost always worth looking
at. I see daily, in fine weather, a child like a delicate nosegay,
running to meet the rudest of brick- [181] makers as he comes from
work. She is not at all afraid to hang upon his rough hand: and
through her, he reaches out to, he makes his own, something from that
strange region, so distant from him yet so real, of the world's
refinement. What is of finer soul, of finer stuff in things, and
demands delicate touching--to him the delicacy of the little child
represents that: it initiates him into that. There, surely, is a
touch of the secular gold, of a perpetual age of gold. But then
again, think for a moment, with what a hard humour at the nature of
things, his struggle for bare life will go on, if the child should
happen to die. I observed to-day, under one of the archways of the
baths, two children at play, a little seriously--a fair girl and her
crippled younger brother. Two toy chairs and a little table, and
sprigs of fir set upright in the sand for a garden! They played at
housekeeping. Well! the girl thinks her life a perfectly good thing
in the service of this crippled brother. But she will have a jealous
lover in time: and the boy, though his face is not altogether
unpleasant, is after all a hopeless cripple.

"For there is a certain grief in things as they are, in man as he
has come to be, as he certainly is, over and above those griefs
of circumstance which are in a measure removable--some inexplicable
shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself--death,
and old age as it [182] must needs be, and that watching for their
approach, which makes every stage of life like a dying over and over
again. Almost all death is painful, and in every thing that comes
to an end a touch of death, and therefore of wretched coldness
struck home to one, of remorse, of loss and parting, of outraged
attachments. Given faultless men and women, given a perfect state of
society which should have no need to practise on men's susceptibilities
for its own selfish ends, adding one turn more to the wheel of the
great rack for its own interest or amusement, there would still be
this evil in the world, of a certain necessary sorrow and desolation,
felt, just in proportion to the moral, or nervous perfection men have
attained to. And what we need in the world, over against that, is a
certain permanent and general power of compassion--humanity's standing
force of self-pity--as an elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere,
if we are to live in it at all. I wonder, sometimes, in what way man
has cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing
how every step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for
him, from age to age, must needs increase his dejection. It is as if
the increase of knowledge were but an increasing revelation of the
radical hopelessness of his position: and I would that there were one
even as I, behind this vain show of things!

"At all events, the actual conditions of our [183] life being as they
are, and the capacity for suffering so large a principle in things--
since the only principle, perhaps, to which we may always safely trust
is a ready sympathy with the pain one actually sees--it follows that
the practical and effective difference between men will lie in their
power of insight into those conditions, their power of sympathy. The
future will be with those who have most of it; while for the present,
as I persuade myself, those who have much of it, have something to
hold by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution
of self, which is, for every one, no less than the dissolution of the
world it represents for him. Nearly all of us, I suppose, have had
our moments, in which any effective sympathy for us on the part of
others has seemed impossible; in which our pain has seemed a stupid
outrage upon us, like some overwhelming physical violence, from which
we could take refuge, at best, only in some mere general sense of
goodwill--somewhere in the world perhaps. And then, to one's surprise,
the discovery of that goodwill, if it were only in a not unfriendly
animal, may seem to have explained, to have actually justified to us,
the fact of our pain. There have been occasions, certainly, when I
have felt that if others cared for me as I cared for them, it would
be, not so much a consolation, as an equivalent, for what one has
lost or suffered: a realised profit on the summing up [184] of one's
accounts: a touching of that absolute ground amid all the changes of
phenomena, such as our philosophers have of late confessed themselves
quite unable to discover. In the mere clinging of human creatures to
each other, nay! in one's own solitary self-pity, amid the effects
even of what might appear irredeemable loss, I seem to touch the
eternal. Something in that pitiful contact, something new and true,
fact or apprehension of fact, is educed, which, on a review of all the
perplexities of life, satisfies our moral sense, and removes that
appearance of unkindness in the soul of things themselves, and assures
us that not everything has been in vain.

"And I know not how, but in the thought thus suggested, I seem to take
up, and re-knit myself to, a well-remembered hour, when by some
gracious accident--it was on a journey--all things about me fell into
a more perfect harmony than is their wont. Everything seemed to be,
for a moment, after all, almost for the best. Through the train of my
thoughts, one against another, it was as if I became aware of the
dominant power of another person in controversy, wrestling with me.
I seem to be come round to the point at which I left off then. The
antagonist has closed with me again. A protest comes, out of the very
depths of man's radically hopeless condition in the world, with the
energy of one of those suffering yet prevailing [185] deities, of which
old poetry tells. Dared one hope that there is a heart, even as ours,
in that divine 'Assistant' of one's thoughts--a heart even as mine,
behind this vain show of things!"

NOTES

172. Virgil, Aeneid Book 1, line 462. "There are the tears of
things. . ." See also page 175 of this chapter, where the same
text is quoted in full.

173. +Transliteration: enodioi symboloi. Pater's Definition:
"omens by the wayside."

175. +Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Virgil, Aeneid
Book 1, line 462. Translation: "Here also there be tears for what men
bear, and mortal creatures feel each other's sorrow," from Vergil,
Aeneid, Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910.



CHAPTER XXVI: THE MARTYRS

"Ah! voilà les âmes qu'il falloit à la mienne!"
Rousseau.

[186] THE charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections,
wonderfully fresh in the midst of a threadbare world, would have led
Marius, if nothing else had done so, again and again, to Cecilia's
house. He found a range of intellectual pleasures, altogether new to
him, in the sympathy of that pure and elevated soul. Elevation of
soul, generosity, humanity--little by little it came to seem to him
as if these existed nowhere else. The sentiment of maternity, above
all, as it might be understood there,--its claims, with the claims of
all natural feeling everywhere, down to the sheep bleating on the
hills, nay! even to the mother-wolf, in her hungry cave--seemed to
have been vindicated, to have been enforced anew, by the sanction of
some divine pattern thereof. He saw its legitimate place in the
world given at last to the bare capacity for [187] suffering in any
creature, however feeble or apparently useless. In this chivalry,
seeming to leave the world's heroism a mere property of the stage, in
this so scrupulous fidelity to what could not help itself, could
scarcely claim not to be forgotten, what a contrast to the hard
contempt of one's own or other's pain, of death, of glory even, in
those discourses of Aurelius!

But if Marius thought at times that some long-cherished desires were
now about to blossom for him, in the sort of home he had sometimes
pictured to himself, the very charm of which would lie in its
contrast to any random affections: that in this woman, to whom
children instinctively clung, he might find such a sister, at least,
as he had always longed for; there were also circumstances which
reminded him that a certain rule forbidding second marriages, was
among these people still in force; ominous incidents, moreover,
warning a susceptible conscience not to mix together the spirit and
the flesh, nor make the matter of a heavenly banquet serve for
earthly meat and drink.

One day he found Cecilia occupied with the burial of one of the
children of her household. It was from the tiny brow of such a
child, as he now heard, that the new light had first shone forth upon
them--through the light of mere physical life, glowing there again,
when the child was dead, or supposed to be dead. The [188] aged
servant of Christ had arrived in the midst of their noisy grief; and
mounting to the little chamber where it lay, had returned, not long
afterwards, with the child stirring in his arms as he descended the
stair rapidly; bursting open the closely-wound folds of the shroud
and scattering the funeral flowers from them, as the soul kindled
once more through its limbs.

Old Roman common-sense had taught people to occupy their thoughts as
little as might be with children who died young. Here, to-day,
however, in this curious house, all thoughts were tenderly bent on
the little waxen figure, yet with a kind of exultation and joy,
notwithstanding the loud weeping of the mother. The other children,
its late companions, broke with it, suddenly, into the place where
the deep black bed lay open to receive it. Pushing away the grim
fossores, the grave-diggers, they ranged themselves around it in
order, and chanted that old psalm of theirs--Laudate pueri dominum!
Dead children, children's graves--Marius had been always half aware
of an old superstitious fancy in his mind concerning them; as if in
coming near them he came near the failure of some lately-born hope or
purpose of his own. And now, perusing intently the expression with
which Cecilia assisted, directed, returned afterwards to her house,
he felt that he too had had to-day his funeral of a little child.
But it had always been his policy, through all his pursuit [189] of
"experience," to take flight in time from any too disturbing passion,
from any sort of affection likely to quicken his pulses beyond the
point at which the quiet work of life was practicable. Had he, after
all, been taken unawares, so that it was no longer possible for him
to fly? At least, during the journey he took, by way of testing the
existence of any chain about him, he found a certain disappointment
at his heart, greater than he could have anticipated; and as he
passed over the crisp leaves, nipped off in multitudes by the first
sudden cold of winter, he felt that the mental atmosphere within
himself was perceptibly colder.

Yet it was, finally, a quite successful resignation which he
achieved, on a review, after his manner, during that absence, of loss
or gain. The image of Cecilia, it would seem, was already become for
him like some matter of poetry, or of another man's story, or a
picture on the wall. And on his return to Rome there had been a
rumour in that singular company, of things which spoke certainly not
of any merely tranquil loving: hinted rather that he had come across
a world, the lightest contact with which might make appropriate to
himself also the precept that "They which have wives be as they that
have none."

This was brought home to him, when, in early spring, he ventured once
more to listen to the sweet singing of the Eucharist. It breathed
[190] more than ever the spirit of a wonderful hope--of hopes more
daring than poor, labouring humanity had ever seriously entertained
before, though it was plain that a great calamity was befallen. Amid
stifled sobbing, even as the pathetic words of the psalter relieved
the tension of their hearts, the people around him still wore upon
their faces their habitual gleam of joy, of placid satisfaction.
They were still under the influence of an immense gratitude in
thinking, even amid their present distress, of the hour of a great
deliverance. As he followed again that mystical dialogue, he felt
also again, like a mighty spirit about him, the potency, the half-
realised presence, of a great multitude, as if thronging along those
awful passages, to hear the sentence of its release from prison; a
company which represented nothing less than--orbis terrarum--the
whole company of mankind. And the special note of the day expressed
that relief--a sound new to him, drawn deep from some old Hebrew
source, as he conjectured, Alleluia! repeated over and over again,
Alleluia! Alleluia! at every pause and movement of the long Easter
ceremonies.

And then, in its place, by way of sacred lection, although in
shocking contrast with the peaceful dignity of all around, came the
Epistle of the churches of Lyons and Vienne, to "their sister," the
church of Rome. For the "Peace" of the church had been broken--
broken, as [191] Marius could not but acknowledge, on the
responsibility of the emperor Aurelius himself, following tamely, and
as a matter of course, the traces of his predecessors, gratuitously
enlisting, against the good as well as the evil of that great pagan
world, the strange new heroism of which this singular message was
full. The greatness of it certainly lifted away all merely private
regret, inclining one, at last, actually to draw sword for the
oppressed, as if in some new order of knighthood--

"The pains which our brethren have endured we have no power fully to
tell, for the enemy came upon us with his whole strength. But the
grace of God fought for us, set free the weak, and made ready those
who, like pillars, were able to bear the weight. These, coming now
into close strife with the foe, bore every kind of pang and shame.
At the time of the fair which is held here with a great crowd, the
governor led forth the Martyrs as a show. Holding what was thought
great but little, and that the pains of to-day are not deserving to
be measured against the glory that shall be made known, these worthy
wrestlers went joyfully on their way; their delight and the sweet
favour of God mingling in their faces, so that their bonds seemed but
a goodly array, or like the golden bracelets of a bride. Filled with
the fragrance of Christ, to some they seemed to have been touched
with earthly perfumes.

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

"Then was fulfilled the saying of the Lord that the day should come,
When he that slayeth you will think that he doeth God service. Most
madly did the mob, the governor and the soldiers, rage against the
handmaiden Blandina, in whom Christ showed that what seems mean among
men is of price with Him. For whilst we all, and her earthly
mistress, who was herself one of the contending Martyrs, were fearful
lest through the weakness of the flesh she should be unable to
profess the faith, Blandina was filled with such power that her
tormentors, following upon each other from morning until night, owned
that they were overcome, and had no more that they could do to her;
admiring that she still breathed after her whole body was torn
asunder.

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