Much has been written, before and after the day of Walter Pater,
concerning that singularly pure and yet singularly disappointing
character, Marcus Aurelius, and his times. The ethical and religious
ferment of the period has been described with great fullness and
sympathy by Professor Dill. Yet it may be said, without fear of
contradiction, that no book has ever been written, nor is likely ever to
appear, which has conveyed to those who came under its spell a more
intimate and familiar conception of that remarkable period and man than
that which has been given by Walter Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.
Opinion is divided about the value of Pater's work, and if it be true
that some of his admirers have provoked criticism by their unqualified
praise, it is no less true that many of his detractors appear never to
have come in contact with his mind at all. Born in 1839, he spent the
greater part of his life in Queen's College, Oxford, where he died in
1894. As literary critic, humanist, and master of a thoroughly original
style, he made a considerable impression upon his generation from the
first; but it may be safely said that it is only now, when readers are
able to look upon his work in a more spacious and leisurely way, that he
and his contribution to English thought and letters have come to their
own.
The family was of Dutch extraction, and while the sons of his
grandfather were trained in the Roman Catholic religion, the daughters
were Protestants from their childhood. His father left the Roman
Catholic communion early in life, without adopting any other form of
Christian faith. It is not surprising that out of so strongly marked and
widely mingled a heredity there should have emerged a writer prone to
symbolism and open to the sense of beauty in ritual, and yet too
cosmopolitan to accept easily the conventional religious forms. Before
his twentieth year he had come under the influence of Ruskin's writings,
but he soon parted from that wayward and contradictory master, whose
brilliant dogmatism enslaved so thoroughly, but so briefly, the taste of
young England. Ruskin, however, had awakened Pater, although to a style
of criticism very different from his own, and for this service we owe
him much. The environment of Oxford subjected his spirit to two widely
different sets of influences. On the one hand, he was in contact with
such men as Jowett, Nettleship, and Thomas Hill Green: on the other
hand, with Swinburne, Burne-Jones, and the pre-Raphaelites. Thus the
awakened spirit felt the dominion both of a high spiritual rationalism,
and of the beauty of flesh and the charm of the earth. A visit to Italy
in company with Shadwell, and his study of the Renaissance there, made
him an enthusiastic humanist. The immediate product of this second
awakening was the _Renaissance_ Essays, a very remarkable volume of his
early work. Twelve years later, _Marius the Epicurean_, his second book,
appeared in 1885. In Dr. Gosse, Pater has found an interpreter of rare
sympathy and insight, whose appreciations of his contemporaries are, in
their own right, fine contributions to modern literature.
The characteristics of his style were also those both of his thought and
of his character. Dr. Gosse has summed up the reserve and shy reticence
and the fastidious taste which always characterise his work, in saying
that he was "one of the most exquisite, most self-respecting, the most
individual prose writers of the age." Even in the matter of style he
consciously respected his own individuality, refusing to read either
Stevenson or Kipling for fear that their masterful strength might lead
him out of his path. Certainly his bitterest enemies could not accuse
him of borrowing from either of them. Mr. Kipling is apt to sacrifice
everything to force, while Pater is perhaps the gentlest writer of our
time. In Stevenson there is a delicate and yet vigorous human passion,
but also a sense of fitness, a consciousness of style that is all his
own. He is preaching, and not swearing at you, as you often feel Mr.
Kipling to be doing. To preach at one may be indeed to take a great
liberty, but of course much will depend upon whether the preaching is
good preaching. Be that as it may, Pater is distinctive, and borrows
nothing from any writer whose influence can be traced in his work. He
neither swears nor preaches, but weaves about his reader a subtle film
of thought, through whose gossamer all things seem to suffer a curious
change, and to become harmonious and suggestive, as dark and
quiet-coloured things often are. The writer does not force himself upon
his readers, nor tempt even the most susceptible to imitate him; rather
he presupposes himself, and dominates without appearing. His reticence,
to which we have already referred, is one of his most characteristic
qualities. Dr. Gosse ascribes it to a somewhat low and sluggish vitality
of physical spirits. For one in this condition "the first idea in the
presence of anything too vivacious is to retreat, and the most obvious
form of social retreat is what we call affectation." That Pater's style
has impressed many readers as affected there can be no question, and it
is as unquestionable that Dr. Gosse's explanation is the true one.
His style has been much abused by critics who have found it easy to say
smart things about such tempting peculiarities. We may admit at once
that the writing is laboured and shows constant marks of the tool. The
same criticism applies, for that matter, to much that Stevenson has
written. But unless a man's style is absolutely offensive, which Pater's
emphatically is not, it is a wise rule to accept it rather as a
revelation of the man than as a chance for saying clever things. As one
reads the work of some of our modern critics, one cannot but perceive
and regret how much of pleasure and of profit their cleverness has cost
them. Acknowledging his laboriousness and even his affectation, we still
maintain that the style of Walter Pater is a very adequate expression of
his mind. There is a calm suggestive atmosphere, a spirit half-childish
and half-aged about his work. It is the work of a solemn and sensitive
child, who has kept the innocence of his eye for impressions, and yet
brought to his speech the experience, not of years only, but of
centuries. He has many things to teach directly; but even when he is not
teaching so, the air you breathe with its delicate suggestion of faint
odours, the perfect taste in selection, the preferences and shrinkings
and shy delights, all proclaim a real and high culture. And, after all,
the most notable point in his style is just its exactness. Over-precise
it may be sometimes, and even meticulous, yet that is because it is the
exact expression of a delicate and subtle mind. In his _Appreciations_
he lays down, as a first canon for style, Flaubert's principle of the
search, the unwearied search, not for the smooth, or winsome, or
forcible word as such, but, quite simply and honestly, for the word's
adjustment to its meaning. It will be said in reply to any such defence
that the highest art is to conceal art. That is an old saying and a hard
one, and it is not possible to apply its rule in every instance. Pater's
immense sense of the value of words, and his choice of exact
expressions, resulted in language marvellously adapted to indicate the
almost inexpressible shades of thought. When a German struggles for the
utterance of some mental complexity he fashions new compounds of words;
a Frenchman helps out his meaning by gesture, as the Greek long ago did
by tone. Pater knows only one way of overcoming such situations, and
that is by the painful search for the unique word that he ought to use.
One result of this habit is that he has enriched our literature with a
large number of pregnant phrases which, it is safe to prophesy, will
take their place in the vernacular of literary speech. "Hard gem-like
flame," "Drift of flowers," "Tacitness of mind,"--such are some
memorable examples of the exact expression of elusive ideas. The house
of literature built in this fashion is a notable achievement in the
architecture of language. It reminds us of his own description of a
temple of Æsculapius: "His heart bounded as the refined and dainty
magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood of early
sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there, and with
all the singular expression of sacred order, a surprising cleanliness
and simplicity." Who would not give much to be able to say the thing he
wants to say so exactly and so beautifully as that is said? Indeed the
love of beauty is the key both to the humanistic thought and to the
simple and lingering style of Pater's writing. If it is not always
obviously simple, that is never due either to any vagueness or confusion
of thought, but rather to a struggle to express precise shades of
meaning which may be manifold, but which are perfectly clear to himself.
A mind so sensitive to beauty and so fastidious in judging of it and
expressing it, must necessarily afford a fine arena for the conflict
between the tendencies of idealism and paganism. Here the great struggle
between conscience and desire, the rivalry of culture and restraint, the
choice between Athens and Jerusalem, will present a peculiarly
interesting spectacle. In Walter Pater both elements are strongly
marked. The love of ritual, and a constitutional delight in solemnities
of all kinds, was engrained in his nature. The rationalism of Green and
Jowett, with its high spirituality lighting it from within, drove off
the ritual for a time at least. The result of these various elements is
a humanism for which he abandoned the profession of Christianity with
which he had begun. Yet he could not really part from that earlier
faith, and for a time he was, as Dr. Gosse has expressed it, "not all
for Apollo, and not all for Christ." The same writer quotes as
applicable to him an interesting phrase of Daudet's, "His brain was a
disaffected cathedral," and likens him to that mysterious face of Mona
Lisa, of whose fantastic enigma Pater himself has given the most
brilliant and the most intricate description. From an early Christian
idealism, through a period of humanistic paganism, he passed gradually
and naturally back to the abandoned faith again, but in readopting it he
never surrendered the humanistic gains of the time between. He accepted
in their fullness both ideals, and so spiritualised his humanism and
humanised his idealism. Anything less rich and complete than this could
never have satisfied him. Self-denial is obviously not an end in itself;
and yet the real end, the fulfilment of nature, can never by any
possibility be attained by directly aiming at it, but must ever involve
self-denial as a means towards its attainment. It is Pater's clear sight
of the necessity of these two facts, and his lifelong attempt to
reconcile them, that give him, from the ethical and religious point of
view, his greatest importance.
The story of this reconciliation is _Marius the Epicurean_. It is a
spiritual biography telling the inner history of a Roman youth of the
time of Marcus Aurelius. It begins with an appreciative interpretation
of the old Roman religion as it was then, and depicts the family
celebrations by which the devout were wont to seek "to produce an
agreement with the gods." Among the various and beautiful tableaux of
that Roman life, we see the solemn thoughtful boy reading hard and
becoming a precocious idealist, too old already for his years, but
relieving the inward tension by much pleasure in the country and the
open air. A time of delicate health brings him and us to a temple of
Æsculapius. The priesthood there is a kind of hospital college
brotherhood, whose teaching and way of life inculcate a mysteriously
sacramental character in all matters of health and the body.
Like all other vital youths, Marius must eat of the tree of knowledge
and become a questioner of hitherto accepted views. "The tyrannous
reality of things visible," and all the eager desire and delight of
youth, make their strong appeal. Two influences favour the temptation.
First there is his friend, Flavian the Epicurean, of the school that
delights in pleasure without afterthought, and is free from the burden
and restraint of conscience; and later on, _The Golden Book_ of
Apuleius, with its exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, and its search
for perfectness in the frankly material life. The moral of its main
story is that the soul must not look upon the face of its love, nor seek
to analyse too closely the elements from which it springs. Spirituality
will be left desolate if it breaks this ban, and its wiser course is to
enjoy without speculation. Thus we see the youth drawn earthwards, yet
with a clinging sense of far mystic reaches, which he refuses as yet to
explore. The death of Flavian rudely shatters this phase of his
experience, and we find him face to face with death. The section begins
with the wonderful hymn of the Emperor Hadrian to his dying soul--
Dear wanderer, gipsy soul of mine,
Sweet stranger, pleasing guest and comrade of my flesh,
Whither away? Into what new land,
Pallid one, stoney one, naked one?
But the sheer spectacle and fact of death is too violent an experience
for such sweet consolations, and the death of Flavian comes like a final
revelation of nothing less than the soul's extinction. Not unnaturally,
the next phase is a rebound into epicureanism, spiritual indeed in the
sense that it could not stoop to low pleasures, but living wholly in the
present none the less, with a strong and imperative appreciation of the
fullness of earthly life.
The next phase of the life of Marius opens with a journey to Rome,
during which he meets a second friend, the soldier Cornelius. This very
distinctly drawn character fascinates the eye from the first. In him we
meet a kind of earnestness which seems to interpret and fit in with the
austere aspects of the landscape. It is different from that disciplined
hardness which was to be seen in Roman soldiers as the result of their
military training; indeed, it seems as if this were some new kind of
knighthood, whose mingled austerity and blitheness were strangely
suggestive of hitherto unheard-of achievements in character.
The impression made by Rome upon the mind of Marius was a somewhat
morbid one. He was haunted more or less by the thought of its passing
and its eventual ruin, and he found much, both in its religion and its
pleasure, to criticise. The dominant figure in the imperial city was
that of Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, so famous in his day that for two
hundred years after his death his image was cherished among the Penates
of many pious families. Amid much that was admirable in him, there was a
certain chill in his stoicism, and a sense of lights fading out into the
night. His words in praise of death, and much else of his, had of course
a great distinction. Yet in his private intercourse with Marcus
Aurelius, Marius was not satisfied, nor was it the bleak sense that all
is vanity which troubled him, but rather a feeling of mediocrity--of a
too easy acceptance of the world--in the imperial philosophy. For in the
companionship of Cornelius there was a foil to the stoicism of Marcus
Aurelius, and his friend was more truly an aristocrat than his Emperor.
Cornelius did not accept the world in its entirety, either sadly or
otherwise. In him there was "some inward standard ... of distinction,
selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the period and the
corrupt life across which they were moving together." And, apparently as
a consequence of this spirit of selection, "with all the severity of
Cornelius, there was a breeze of hopefulness--freshness and
hopefulness--as of new morning, about him." Already, it may be, the
quick intelligence of the reader has guessed what is coming. Jesus
Christ said of Himself on one occasion, "For distinctions I am come into
the world." Marius' criticism of the Emperor reached its climax in his
disgust at the amusements of the amphitheatre, which also Marcus
Aurelius accepted.
There follows a long account of Roman life and thought, with much
speculation as to the ideal commonwealth. That dream of the philosophers
remains for ever in the air, detached from actual experiences and
institutions, but Marius felt himself passing beyond it to something in
which it would be actually realised and visibly localised, "the unseen
Rome on high." Thus in correcting and supplementing the philosophies,
and in insisting upon some actual embodiment of them on the earth, he is
groping his way point by point to Christ. The late Dean Church has said:
"No one can read the wonderful sayings of Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus
Aurelius, without being impressed, abashed perhaps, by their grandeur.
No one can read them without wondering the next moment why they fell so
dead--how little response they seem to have awakened round them." It is
precisely at this point that the young Christian Church found its
opportunity. Pagan idealisms were indeed in the air. The Christian
idealism was being realised upon the earth, and it was this with which
Marius was now coming into contact.
So he goes on until he is led up to two curious houses. The first of
these was the house of Apuleius, where in a subtle and brilliant system
of ideas it seemed as if a ladder had been set up from earth to heaven.
But Marius discovered that what he wanted was the thing itself and not
its mere theory, a life of realised ideals and not a dialectic. The
second house was more curious still. Much pains is spent upon the
description of it with its "quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble
taste," in which both colour and form, alike of stones and flowers,
seemed expressive of a rare and potent beauty in the personality that
inhabited them. There were inscriptions there to the dead martyrs,
inscriptions full of confidence and peace. Old pagan symbols were there
also--Herakles wrestling with death for possession of Alkestis, and
Orpheus taming the wild beasts--blended naturally with new symbols such
as the Shepherd and the sheep, and the Good Shepherd carrying the sick
lamb upon his shoulder. The voice of singers was heard in the house of
an evening singing the candle hymn, "Hail, Heavenly Light." Altogether
there seemed here to be a combination of exquisite and obvious beauty
with "a transporting discovery of some fact, or series of facts, in
which the old puzzle of life had found its solution."
It was none other than the Church of the early Christian days that
Marius had stumbled on, under the guidance of his new friend; and
already in heart he had actually become a Christian without knowing it,
for these friends of comeliness seemed to him to have discovered the
secret of actualising the ideal as none others had done. At such a
moment in his spiritual career it is not surprising that he should
hesitate to look upon that which would "define the critical
turning-point," yet he looked. He saw the blend of Greek and Christian,
each at its best--the martyrs' hope, the singers' joy and health. In
this "minor peace of the Church," so pure, so delicate, and so vital
that it made the Roman life just then "seem like some stifling forest of
bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the
generations of living trees," he seemed to see the possibility of
satisfaction at last. For here there was a perfect love and
self-sacrifice, outwardly expressed with a mystic grace better than the
Greek blitheness, and a new beauty which contrasted brightly with the
Roman insipidity. It was the humanism of Christianity that so satisfied
him, standing as it did for the fullness of life, in spite of all its
readiness for sacrifice. And it was effective too, for it seemed to be
doing rapidly what the best paganism was doing very slowly--attaining,
almost without thinking about it, the realisation of the noblest ideals.
"And so it came to pass that on this morning Marius saw for the first
time the wonderful spectacle--wonderful, especially, in its evidential
power over himself, over his own thoughts--of those who believe. There
were noticeable, among those present, great varieties of rank, of age,
of personal type. The Roman _ingenuus_, with the white toga and gold
ring, stood side by side with his slave; and the air of the whole
company was, above all, a grave one, an air of recollection. Coming thus
unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so entirely united, in a silence
so profound, for purposes unknown to him, Marius felt for a moment as if
he had stumbled by chance upon some great conspiracy. Yet that could
scarcely be, for the people here collected might have figured as the
earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new world, from the very face of
which discontent had passed away. Corresponding to the variety of human
type there present, was the various expression of every form of human
sorrow assuaged. What desire, what fulfilment of desire, had wrought so
pathetically on the features of these ranks of aged men and women of
humble condition? Those young men, bent down so discreetly on the
details of their sacred service, had faced life and were glad, by some
science, or light of knowledge they had, to which there had certainly
been no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from
beyond 'the flaming rampart of the world'--a message of hope regarding
the place of men's souls and their interest in the sum of
things--already moulding anew their very bodies, and looks, and voices,
now and here? At least, there was a cleansing and kindling flame at work
in them, which seemed to make everything else Marius had ever known look
comparatively vulgar and mean."
The spectacle of the Sacrament adds its deep impression, "bread and wine
especially--pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan
vineyards. There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and
animating, of the earth's gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself, now
in some way redeemed at last, of all that we can touch and see, in the
midst of a jaded world that had lost the true sense of such things."
The sense of youth in it all was perhaps the dominating impression--the
youth that was yet old as the world in experience and discovery of the
true meaning of life. The young Christ was rejuvenating the world, and
all things were being made new by him.
This is the climax of the book. He meets Lucian the aged, who for a
moment darkens his dawning faith, but that which has come to him has
been no casual emotion, no forced or spectacular conviction. He does not
leap to the recognition of Christianity at first sight, but very quietly
realises and accepts it as that secret after which his pagan idealism
had been all the time groping. The story closes amid scenes of plague
and earthquake and martyrdom in which he and Cornelius are taken
prisoners, and he dies at last a Christian. "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 martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the Church had
always said, was a kind of Sacrament with plenary grace."
Such is some very brief and inadequate conception of one of the most
remarkable books of our time, a book "written to illustrate the highest
ideal of the æsthetic life, and to prove that beauty may be made the
object of the soul in a career as pure, as concentrated, and as austere
as any that asceticism inspires. _Marius_ is an apology for the highest
Epicureanism, and at the same time it is a texture which the author has
embroidered with exquisite flowers of imagination, learning, and
passion. Modern humanism has produced no more admirable product than
this noble dream of a pursuit through life of the spirit of heavenly
beauty." Nothing could be more true, so far as it goes, than this
admirable paragraph, yet Pater's book is more than that. The main drift
of it is the reconciliation of Hellenism with Christianity in the
experience of a man "bent on living in the full stream of refined
sensation," who finds Christianity in every point fulfilling the ideals
of Epicureanism at its best.
The spiritual stages through which Marius passes on his journey towards
this goal are most delicately portrayed. In the main these are three,
which, though they recur and intertwine in his experience, yet may be
fairly stated in their natural order and sequence as normal types of
such spiritual progress.
The first of these stages is a certain vague fear of evil, which seems
to be conscience hardly aware of itself as such. It is "the sense of
some unexplored evil ever dogging his footsteps," which reached its
keenest poignancy in a constitutional horror of serpents, but which is a
very subtle and undefinable thing, observable rather as an undertone to
his consciousness of life than as anything tangible enough to be defined
or accounted for by particular causes. On the journey to Rome, the vague
misgivings took shape in one definite experience. "From the steep slope
a heavy mass of stone was detached, after some whisperings among the
trees above his head, and rushing down through the stillness fell to
pieces in a cloud of dust across the road just behind him, so that he
felt the touch upon his heel." That was sufficient, just then, to rouse
out of its hiding-place his old vague fear of evil--of one's "enemies."
Such distress was so much a matter of constitution with him, that at
times it would seem that the best pleasures of life could but be
snatched hastily, in one moment's forgetfulness of its dark besetting
influence. A sudden suspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of
enemies, seemed all at once to alter the visible form of things. When
tempted by the earth-bound philosophy of the early period of his
development, "he hardly knew how strong that old religious sense of
responsibility, the conscience, as we call it, still was within him--a
body of inward impressions, as real as those so highly valued outward
ones--to offend against which, brought with it a strange feeling of
disloyalty, as to a person." Later on, when the "acceptance of things"
which he found in Marcus Aurelius had offended him, and seemed to mark
the Emperor as his inferior, we find that there is "the loyal conscience
within him, deciding, judging himself and every one else, with a
wonderful sort of authority." This development of conscience from a
vague fear of enemies to a definite court of appeal in a man's judgment
of life, goes side by side with his approach to Christianity. The pagan
idealism of the early days had never been able to cope with that sense
of enemies, nor indeed to understand it; but in the light of his growing
Christian faith, conscience disentangles itself and becomes clearly
defined.
Another element in the spiritual development of Marius is that which may
be called his consciousness of an unseen companion. Marius was
constitutionally _personel_, and never could be satisfied with the dry
light of pure reason, or with any impersonal ideal whatsoever. For him
the universe was alive in a very real sense. At first, however, this was
the vaguest of sentiments, and it needed much development before it
became clear enough to act as one of the actual forces which played upon
his life. We first meet with it in connection with the philosophy of
Marcus Aurelius and his habit of inward conversation with himself, made
possible by means of the _Logos_, "the reasonable spark in man, common
to him with the gods." "There could be no inward conversation with
oneself such as this, unless there were indeed some one else aware of
our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or displeased at one's
disposition of oneself." This, in a dim way, seemed a fundamental
necessity of experience--one of those "beliefs, without which life
itself must be almost impossible, principles which had their sufficient
ground of evidence in that very fact." So far Marcus Aurelius. But the
conviction of some august yet friendly companionship in life beyond the
veil of things seen, took form for Marius in a way far more picturesque.
The passage which describes it is one of the finest in the book, and may
be given at length.
"Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving, as if in another
life, and like another person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes,
passing from point to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various
dangers. That prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively
gratitude: it was as if he must look round for some one else to share
his joy with: for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own
relief. Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this
way or that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or
another long span of it, the chief delight of the journey. And was it
only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through
his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not
been--besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude
which in spite of ardent friendship he had perhaps loved best of all
things--some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side
throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of
his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful
recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was
there at all? Must not the whole world around have faded away for him
altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?" One can
see in this sense of constant companionship the untranslated and indeed
the unexamined Christian doctrine of God. And, because this God is
responsive to all the many-sided human experience which reveals Him, it
will be an actual preparation not for Theism only, but for that
complexity in unity known as the Christian Trinity. Nothing could better
summarise this whole achievement in religion than Pater's apt sentence,
"To have apprehended the _Great Ideal_, so palpably that it defined
personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid
the shadows of the world."
The third essential development of Marius' thought is that of the City
of God, which for him assumes the shape of a perfected and purified
Rome, the concrete embodiment of the ideals of life and character. This
is indeed the inevitable sequel of any such spiritual developments as
the fear of enemies and the sense of an unseen companion. Man moves
inevitably to the city, and all his ideals demand an embodiment in
social form before they reach their full power and truth. In that house
of life which he calls society, he longs to see his noblest dreams find
a local habitation and a name. This is the grand ideal passed from hand
to hand by the greatest and most outstanding of the world's seers--from
Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Dante--the ideal of the City of
God. It is but little developed in the book which we are now
considering, for that would be beside the purpose of so intimate and
inward a history. Yet we see, as it were, the towers and palaces of this
"dear City of Zeus" shining in the clear light of the early Christian
time, like the break of day over some vast prospect, with the new City,
as it were some celestial new Rome, in the midst of it.
These are but a few glimpses at this very significant and far-reaching
book, which indeed takes for its theme the very development from pagan
to Christian idealism with which we are dealing. In it, in countless
bright and vivid glances, the beauty of the world is seen with virgin
eye. Many phases of that beauty belong to the paganism which surrounds
us as we read, yet these are purified from all elements that would make
them pagan in the lower sense, and under our eyes they free themselves
for spiritual flights which find their resting-place at last and become
at once intelligible and permanent in the faith of Jesus Christ.