WHITE-NIGHTS
To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the
childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as
you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,—surely nothing could
happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie.
White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.* “The red rose
came first,” says a quaint German mystic, speaking of “the mystery of
so-called white things,” as being “ever an after-thought—the doubles,
or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real,
half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which,
as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by
horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the
priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal.” So,
white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should
be nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but passed in continuous
dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainly the place was, in such
case, true to its fanciful name in this, that you might very well
conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in the daytime might come
to much there.
* _Ad Vigilias Albas_.
The young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had come
down to him much curtailed through the extravagance of a certain
Marcellus two generations before, a favourite in his day of the
fashionable world at Rome, where he had at least spent his substance
with a correctness of taste Marius might seem to have inherited from
him; as he was believed also to resemble him in a singularly pleasant
smile, consistent however, in the younger face, with some degree of
sombre expression when the mind within was but slightly moved.
As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and nearer to
the dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a trace of workday
negligence or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some,
for the young master himself among them. The more observant passer-by
would note, curious as to the inmates, a certain amount of dainty care
amid that neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance to
disturb old associations. It was significant of the national character,
that a sort of elegant gentleman farming, as we say, had been much
affected by some of the most cultivated Romans. But it became something
more than an elegant diversion, something of a serious business, with
the household of Marius; and his actual interest in the cultivation of
the earth and the care of flocks had brought him, at least, intimately
near to those elementary conditions of life, a reverence for which, the
great Roman poet, as he has shown by his own half-mystic pre-occupation
with them, held to be the ground of primitive Roman religion, as of
primitive morals. But then, farm-life in Italy, including the culture
of the olive and the vine, has a grace of its own, and might well
contribute to the production of an ideal dignity of character, like
that of nature itself in this gifted region. Vulgarity seemed
impossible. The place, though impoverished, was still deservedly dear,
full of venerable memories, and with a living sweetness of its own for
to-day.
To hold by such ceremonial traditions had been a part of the struggling
family pride of the lad’s father, to which the example of the head of
the state, old Antoninus Pius—an example to be still further enforced
by his successor—had given a fresh though perhaps somewhat artificial
popularity. It had been consistent with many another homely and
old-fashioned trait in him, not to undervalue the charm of
exclusiveness and immemorial authority, which membership in a local
priestly college, hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To set a
real value on these things was but one element in that pious concern
for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as Marius afterwards
discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. The ancient
hymn—Fana Novella!—was still sung by his people, as the new moon grew
bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leaping through heaps
of blazing straw on a certain night in summer was not discouraged. The
privilege of augury itself, according to tradition, had at one time
belonged to his race; and if you can imagine how, once in a way, an
impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mystic intimation, of
the meaning and consequences of all that, what was implied in it
becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the mind of Marius, in
whose house the auspices were still carefully consulted before every
undertaking of moment.
The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally—and that is all
many not unimportant persons ever find to do—a certain tradition of
life, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling with
which he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that of awe;
though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he
could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so
weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman
religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. On the part of
his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband’s memory, there
was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the recognition, as
Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice to be credited to the
dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowy enough but for the
poignancy of that regret, was like one long service to the departed
soul; its many annual observances centering about the funeral urn—a
tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white and fair, in the
family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowers from the
garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a somewhat
closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought still to
protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself—a closeness
which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our human
sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country,
might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout
interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother’s sorrow. After the
deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so
much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images.
To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding
of him a similar collectedness. The severe and archaic religion of the
villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout circumspection
lest he should fall short at any point of the demand upon him of
anything in which deity was concerned. He must satisfy with a kind of
sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest he be found wanting to,
the claims of others, in their joys and calamities—the happiness which
deity sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself felt. And from
habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world of men and
things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side,
came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept him serious
and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in after years much
engrossed him, and when he had learned to think of all religions as
indifferent, serious amid many fopperies and through many languid days,
and made him anticipate all his life long as a thing towards which he
must carefully train himself, some great occasion of self-devotion,
such as really came, that should consecrate his life, and, it might be,
its memory with others, as the early Christian looked forward to
martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon it.
The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his
first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the
face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the
white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to
the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble,
mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the
exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries
of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay
along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble
plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds had
forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and
farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a
still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. The old Roman
architects seem to have well understood the decorative value of the
floor—the real economy there was, in the production of rich interior
effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface they trod on.
The pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness; but,
though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a piece
of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age.
Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn
chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant
Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to
Marius, just then so full of animation and country colour. A chamber,
curved ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the mansion,
still contained his collection of works of art; above all, that head of
Medusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the old
Greek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the thing, as it
seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands of
which it was drawn up in a fisherman’s net, with the fine golden
laminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellus
also who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the white
pigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazed
windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape—the
pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the
purple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marble
going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark
headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summer
nights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of
the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.
Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral
or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the
whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar
sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the
deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can
give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them—the
“subjective immortality,” to use a modern phrase, for which many a
Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter,
still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any such considerations
regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that secondary
existence, that warm place still left, in thought at least, beside the
living, the desire for which is actually, in various forms, so great a
motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, even thus early, came
to think of women’s tears, of women’s hands to lay one to rest, in
death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural want. The soft
lines of the white hands and face, set among the many folds of the veil
and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music
sometimes, defined themselves for him as the typical expression of
maternity. Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for
her musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such
things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying duly his
country-grown habits—the sense of a certain delicate blandness, which
he relished, above all, on returning to the “chapel” of his mother,
after long days of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For
poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English,
the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its
generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is
beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit afterwards in
his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the
winters especially, when the sufferings of the animal world became so
palpable even to the least observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for
all creatures, for the almost human troubles and sicknesses of the
flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which had in it something of
religious veneration for life as such—for that mysterious essence which
man is powerless to create in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at
the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and
springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she
told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in
his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul was like that!
Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the opposite side,
unruffled and unsoiled? And as his mother became to him the very type
of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and
maternity itself the central type of all love;—so, that beautiful
dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal
of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many
distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.
And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced still
further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security. His
religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the really
light-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom,
its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls of
Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always as the
prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as his
accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it;
and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made
him oddly suspicious of particular places and persons. Though his
liking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer,
as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and
ever afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for there
was something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep
uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almost
passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an
African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile
writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into
the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all
sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to
puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of
a snake’s bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into
the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A
kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have
killed or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the
very circumstance of their life, being what they were. It was something
like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral feeling, for
the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or feathers, so
different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect in
its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and
sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it
awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmity against him.
Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, a second time, a
showman with his serpents, he remembered the night which had then
followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine’s vein, on the real greatness of
those little troubles of children, of which older people make light;
but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected how richly possessed
his life had actually been by beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing
how greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace.
Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to
contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an
earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his
solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of
the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and
became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an
idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from
within, by the exercise of meditative power. A vein of subjective
philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, there
would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct,
with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men’s valuations. And
the generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace up
to the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance to
him. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis
perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might
describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal
function hereditary in his family—the sort of mystic enjoyment he had
in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such
preparation involved. Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of
the play of Euripides, who every morning sweeps the temple floor with
such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in
sacred places, with a susceptibility to their peculiar influences which
he never outgrew; so that often in after-times, quite unexpectedly,
this feeling would revive in him with undiminished freshness. That
first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication,
survived through all the distractions of the world, and when all
thought of such vocation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in
spirit at least, towards a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the
conduct of life.
And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the lad’s
pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble to the
coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and
delightful signs, one after another—the abandoned boat, the ruined
flood-gates, the flock of wild birds—that one was approaching the sea;
the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds. And
it was characteristic of him that he relished especially the grave,
subdued, northern notes in all that—the charm of the French or English
notes, as we might term them—in the luxuriant Italian landscape.