Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  And so with the death of Flavian the first part closes in desolation.

  The death of his friend is the event which, at the beginning of the second part, flings Marius into philosophical speculation. “To Marius... the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing less than the soul’s extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as the fire among those still beloved ashes.” Thus he is confronted in the sternest and saddest way with the mystery of death: and the thought comes home to him that he must at all costs realise the significance of life, and how he must play his part in the days that remain before he too passes into shadow and silence; the religion of his childhood deserts him; and he is forced to turn to the “honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence.”

  He secluded himself in a severe intellectual meditation, becoming something of a mystery to his fellows. He was reading, “for the most part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.” He studies Heraclitus, and learns to mistrust habitual impressions and uncorrected sensation, and to discern the movement in things of “the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine reason.” He accepts the canon that the individual must be to himself the measure of all things, and resolves to limit his researches to what immediately interests him, resting peacefully in a profound ignorance of all beside. “He would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow its due weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in the conditions of man’s life.” And here he fell under the dominion of Aristippus of Cyrene, who was the first to translate the abstractions of metaphysics into a practical sentiment. He, too, was more than half an agnostic; but instead of his agnosticism leading to a languid enervation, it led rather to a perpetual and inextinguishable thirst for experience.

  “What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories”; and the practical conclusion he arrived at was that self-culture was probably the best solution, the impulse to “adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touch upon — these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the intercourse of society.” —

  Aristippus, indeed, became to Marius a master of decorous and high-minded living. Metaphysic, as described by Michelet, “the art of bewildering oneself methodically,” he must spend little time upon that. “Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed,” and to acquire this, to regard life as the end of life, the only way was through “insight, through culture, into all that the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.”

  The pursuit of vivid sensations and intellectual apprehensions must be his work, until such a manner of life, by its effort to live days “lovely and pleasant,” might become a kind of hidden mystic religion. But there was no touch of hedonism in this: —

  “Not pleasure, but fulness of life, and ‘insight’ as conducting to that fulness — energy, variety, and choice of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life... whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal: from these the ‘new Cyrenaicism’ of Marius took its criterion of values.”

  This would involve “a life of industry, of industrious study, only possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body and soul.”

  Marius then, with his creed formulated, at nineteen years of age, sets out for Rome, where he has an old family mansion, to become the amanuensis of the Emperor. There is a beautiful description of his journey: how the sun went down “though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn cornfields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling gray heights of an old temple.”

  On the journey he meets the young Christian knight, Cornelius. And it must be here confessed that the youthful soldier of the Imperial guard, with his gilded armour, his blithe manliness, his sense of secret serenity, is one of the least convincing figures of the book. To put it in the plainest way possible, there is an indefinable taint of priggishness about Cornelius, and Pater in vain labours to create a charm about him. To weave such a charm the elaborate narrative style is inadequate; one gets no glimpse into the blithe and serene mind of Cornelius; he is “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null” — no touch of humanity ever comes to relieve his statuesque pose, and one wearies of his golden armour and his handsome face. Nothing but dramatic art, such as the art of Scott, could have given Cornelius attractiveness; and even he would have been baffled by the sober perfection of the young knight. One longs that he should lose his temper, make some human mistake, exhibit some trace of emotion or even frailty; but he takes instead his icy shining way through the story, and the heart never desires to follow him.

  Then comes Marius’ first sight of Rome, his realisation of the fact that it was, beside being a city of palaces, become the romantic home of the most restless religious instinct, of the wildest superstition. Religions were draining into Rome, as the rivers into the sea. In the midst moved the stately figure of the Stoic Emperor, whom Marius first sees in a religious procession, and whose calm face, with its prominent eyes demurely downcast, but yet “broadly and benignantly observant,” candid gaze, and ascetic air, as though “the flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer with the spirit,” impressed him profoundly. With him walked the goodly, comely, sensual Lucius Verus, the other Augustus, with his “strange capacity for misusing the adornments of life, with a masterly grace.” Then follows the Emperor’s discourse on the Vanity of Human Ambitions, delivered in the Senate, a skilful cento of aphorisms taken from the Meditations, and finally Marius’ introduction to the Imperial household, his sight of Faustina the Empress, Fronto the philosopher, and the Emperor himself. He sees, too, a gladiatorial show, at which the Emperor sits impassibly, writing and reading, and wonders at the tolerance, “which seemed to Marius to mark Aurelius as his inferior now and for ever on the question of righteousness; to set them on opposite sides, in some great conflict.”

  It may be freely confessed that Pater does contrive, by pathetic and emotional touches, to bring out with wonderful vividness the human charm of the Emperor, his deep patience, his fatigue, his affectionateness, his devotion to duty. He and Flavian remain as the two vital figures of the book, apart from the hero himself; and it may be held a true triumph of a species of historical art to have evolved so real, so dignified, so intensely vivid a figure out of the somewhat chilly abstractedness that had hitherto surrounded the philosophic Lord of legions, the Stoic master of the world.

  In the third part of Marius, which is much shorter than any of the other parts, the revelation grows more distinct. Marius, overcome with doubt as to whether his new intellectual scheme can be harmonised with the old serious morality of his childhood, hears a discourse by Fronto on the question of morals.

  “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.... 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.”

  And then the orator proceeds to sketch a kind of universal commonwealth, a heavenly citizenship, in which all men should realise their position, their duty; and Marius falls to wondering whether there could be any such inner community of humanity, wider than even the community of nationality, and with a larger patriotism, with an aristocracy of elect spirits, an ever-widening example, and a comely order of its own. He realises that his Cyrenaicism is after all but an enthusiasm characteristic of youth, almost a fanaticism, and that something wider, larger, more impersonal is needed, as life goes on. He realised that in his first philosophy there had been “some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own nature,” and that he had paid a great price “in the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies” for the intense personal appreciation of the beauty of the moment. It was a narrow perfection that he had been aiming at after all, the perfection of “capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical impressions, of an imaginative sympathy.” But he had rejected the wider, the more venerable system of religious sentiments and ideas, which had grown up in the vast field of human experience. And thus he saw that he could not stay where he was; that he must recognise not only his own personal point of view, but the wider community of humanity.

  In this frame of mind Marius has a memorable interview with the Emperor, who, in order to raise funds for the war, has determined to sell by public auction the accumulated treasures of the Imperial palace, and is feeling with an austere joy the pleasure of a deep philosophical detachment from the world. Marius sees that this kind of renunciation, a renunciation of the very things of the purest quality of beauty that his philosophy had taught him to value, may bring with it a loftier and simpler kind of joy than even the sober and refined enjoyment of them. Aurelius, with a supreme sense of duty, is about to plunge into the uncongenial labours of a great campaign, and Marius sees that in the selfless surrender to what appears the Divine will lay his true generosity of soul. He sees that one of the strongest features of the Emperor’s character is the union of intellectual independence with a tender sympathy for all the manifestations of the popular religious sense, realising, as he does, that men must reach their ideal by very different paths. Marius finds, among the Emperor’s papers committed to him, a document, a species of diary, full of the most intimate self-communings. And in spite of the magnificence of character, the resolute determination, the amazing generosity there revealed, there is a note of heaviness. He sees how “the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man.” The cheerfulness of demeanour, indeed, to which the Emperor had attained, was not a spontaneous joy breaking out from an inner source of happy faith, but a practised, a deliberate attitude, attained by a rigorous self-restraint. Marius thinks of Cornelius, whose cheerfulness seems of a totally different kind, “united with the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world,” yet he sees or suspects in Cornelius an irrepressible and impassioned hopefulness. He finds it necessary to go to Praeneste, where the Emperor is staying for a few days with his younger children, and arrives to find the little Annius Verus dying; and here comes one of the beautiful touches through which one comes so close to the humanity of Aurelius: —

  “He saw the emperor carry the child away — quite conscious at last, but with a touching expression... of weakness and defeat — pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress.”

  And so the Emperor sets out on the campaign from which he has reason to think that he may never return. The pageantry of his departure, the magnificent armour that he wears, are in strange contrast to the face of Aurelius, “with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive suffering.” He departs, and Marius returns to his musings; but in a lonely ride into the Sabine Hills he has a strange uplifting of spirit, in which he feels that behind all the complexity of life, “behind the veil of a mechanical and material order, but only just behind it,” there moves a guide, a heavenly friend, ever at his side, to whom he is perhaps dearer than even to himself, a Father of Men.

  Marius felt that after the realisation of this possibility, his life could never be quite the same again, and that only in the light of this hope could he apprehend the secret of the lonely pilgrimage upon which he seemed to be bound.

  Some time is now supposed to elapse, and in the fourth part Marius comes upon the scene again at a banquet at which the young Commodus is present, and also the great Apuleius, with whom Marius has a few moments of private conversation. Apuleius unfolds to his companion his belief in a kind of middle order of beings, between man and God, by whom the prayers and aspirations of humanity can be carried and interpreted to God. It is, indeed, the doctrine of the ministry of angels which is thus foreshadowed; and the effect on Marius is to give a heightened sense of unreality to the world in which he moves; and it is at this juncture that he visits with Cornelius the villa of Cecilia, and is deeply impressed with the order, the industry, the joyful peace of the household. Cornelius takes his friend through a garden and into the old catacomb of the Cecilii, where Marius sees the graves of Christians, and reads with a strange thrill of spirit the touching and inspiring inscriptions on their tombs, that seem to exorcise the terrors of death by a serene and lively hope. The fresh and cool sensation of peace with which the whole surroundings are invested is to Marius like a window opened from a hot and fragrant room into the dawn of some other morning. Here, he fancied, might be the cure, the anodyne for the deep sorrowfulness of spirit under which he seemed to have been always labouring. He began to discern the source of that untroubled serenity, that quiet happiness of which he had always been conscious in his friend. The Christian ideal of that period, during the peace of the Antonines, had lent itself to the harmonious development of human nature, in a due proportion, rather than to the idea of ascetic self-sacrifice; and the divine urbanity and moderation of this secluded household exercised a strong spell over the sensuous temperament of Marius.

  But here there creeps in the intense liturgical and ritual preoccupation of the author. Marius goes to find Cornelius at the Cecilian villa, and becomes by accident the spectator of a solemn celebration of the Eucharistic mystery.

  The description of the service is exquisitely, almost lusciously rendered; it satisfies Marius’ deep instinct for worship to the uttermost. But here the reader cannot help feeling a lack of proportion; the sensuous element triumphs over the intellectual. The choir of children, the white-robed youths, the bishop himself, “moving the hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious power... or chanting in cadence of a grave sweetness the leading parts of the rite,” have a certain unreality about them, an impossible peace, an almost mawkishness of conception. It seems, perhaps, a hard and unsympathic criticism to make of a passage into which so much tender idealism has passed, but there is a taint as of the Sunday-school type about the incident, which not even its elaborate art can surmount. One feels in a false atmosphere, an atmosphere which is not only unrealisable but actually undesirable. It lacks the salt of humanity, and is touched with the unalloyed meekness which the manly heart, however tender, however responsive, does not really wish to enforce. The narrative then passes with a singular abruptness back to Marius’ literary preoccupations; and the intrusion of this chapter at this point may be held to be one of the few artistic mistakes of the book. It interrupts the progress, as if by a whimsical diversion, at a crucial point; it introduces the figure of the satirist Lucian, and relates a conversation with Hermotimus, a beautiful thing in itself, but with no real bearing on the development of
the central theme. The upshot of the talk, which is in itself a delicious Platonic dialogue, full of humour and fancy, is that there is no certain criterion of philosophical ideas, but that the adoption of any form of philosophical belief is dictated by a preference and an instinct in the disciple; Lucian, employing a species of Socratic questioning, extinguishes, by a sort of affectionate and tender scepticism, the burning enthusiasm of the boy’s ardent philosophy. The real gist of the chapter lies in the sight which Marius has as he returns to Rome of a wayside crucifix; and the echoes of the conversation take shape in his mind, making him reflect whether it were possible that Love “in the greatness of his strength” could condescend to sustain Love “fainting by the road.” It is just a hint, like a ray of light through a half-opened door.

  There follow passages of a diary of Marius with many vignettes of small sorrowful and loving things; a racehorse led to death, a crippled child at play with his sister, a boy, the son of a labourer, waiting with his father’s dinner, and gazing “with a sorrowful distaste for the din and dirt” at the brick-kiln where his father is at work. The motif of the chapter is that an enlarged charity, a passionate sympathy with humanity, so apt to be excluded by a philosophical system, contains perhaps a truer estimate of the secret of life.

  “A protest comes, out of the very depths of man’s radically hopeless condition in the world.... Dared one hope that there is a heart, even as ours... a heart even as mine, behind this vain show of things!”