EUPHUISM
So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius, with an
expression changed in some ways from the original and on the whole
graver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more like
that “Lord, of terrible aspect,” who stood at Dante’s bedside and wept,
or had at least grown to the manly earnestness of the Erôs of
Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, this
episode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation,
already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative
love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean—an
ideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued it
at various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty, as
the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed to
him just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken celestial fire,
to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, soul or spirit in
things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the pure brilliancy, and as
it were in the happy light, of youth and morning and the springtide,
men’s actual loves, with which at many points the book brings one into
close contact, might appear to him, like the general tenor of their
lives, to be somewhat mean and sordid. The hiddenness of perfect
things: a shrinking mysticism, a sentiment of diffidence like that
expressed in Psyche’s so tremulous hope concerning the child to be born
of the husband she had never yet seen—“in the face of this little
child, at the least, shall I apprehend thine”—in hoc saltem parvulo
cognoscam faciem tuam: the fatality which seems to haunt any signal+
beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something
illicit and isolating: the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in
the vulgar:—these were some of the impressions, forming, as they do, a
constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience, from Medusa
and Helen downwards, which the old story enforced on him. A book, like
a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise
moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident
counts with us for something more than its independent value. The
Metamorphoses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured for him
as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal gratitude to its
writer, and saw in it doubtless far more than was really there for any
other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in his remembrance,
never quite losing its power in frequent return to it for the revival
of that first glowing impression.
Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical one: it stimulated
the literary ambition, already so strong a motive with him, by a signal
example of success, and made him more than ever an ardent,
indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of the
literary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of that
through which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one can
actually take effect upon others, to over-awe or charm them to one’s
side, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connexion
with that desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of which
another might have relied on the acquisition and display of brilliant
military qualities. In him, a fine instinctive sentiment of the exact
value and power of words was connate with the eager longing for sway
over his fellows. He saw himself already a gallant and effective
leader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in the
rehabilitation of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished and
languid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the only
sort of patriotic feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves.
The popular speech was gradually departing from the form and rule of
literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial. While
the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously
pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand
chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at
least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was
coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understand
Cicero; though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius,
who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been a
fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days of
Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.
The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himself
would be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in its
dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and
revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of the
proletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the younger
Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the Latin
tongue, had said,—“I am one of those who admire the ancients, yet I do
not, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius which our
own times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if weary and
effete, no longer produces what is admirable.” And he, Flavian, would
prove himself the true master of the opportunity thus indicated. In his
eagerness for a not too distant fame, he dreamed over all that, as the
young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns. Others might brutalise or
neglect the native speech, that true “open field” for charm and sway
over men. He would make of it a serious study, weighing the precise
power of every phrase and word, as though it were precious metal,
disentangling the later associations and going back to the original and
native sense of each,—restoring to full significance all its wealth of
latent figurative expression, reviving or replacing its outworn or
tarnished images. Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of
routine and languor; and what was necessary, first of all, was to
re-establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and
expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words
their primitive power.
For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force,
were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forcibly
impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of
making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful,
of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but
middling, tame, or only half-true even to him—this scrupulousness of
literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of
chivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience of execution!
what research for the significant tones of ancient idiom—sonantia verba
et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building—gravis et decora
constructio! He felt the whole meaning of the sceptical Pliny’s
somewhat melancholy advice to one of his friends, that he should seek
in literature deliverance from mortality—ut studiis se literarum a
mortalitate vindicet. And there was everything in the nature and the
training of Marius to make him a full participator in the hopes of such
a new literary school, with Flavian for its leader. In the refinements
of that curious spirit, in its horror of profanities, its fastidious
sense of a correctness in external form, there was something which
ministered to the old ritual interest, still surviving in him; as if
here indeed were involved a kind of sacred service to the
mother-tongue.
Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in
which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties
towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it does
but modify a little the principles of all effective expression at all
times. ’Tis art’s function to conceal itself: ars est celare artem:—is
a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, has perhaps been
oftenest and most confidently quoted by those who have had little
literary or other art to conceal; and from the very beginning of
professional literature, the “labour of the file”—a labour in the case
of Plato, for instance, or Virgil, like that of the oldest of
goldsmiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the work by far more
than the weight of precious metal it removed—has always had its
function. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples of it, this Roman
Euphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty in writing—es kallos
graphein+—might lapse into its characteristic fopperies or mannerisms,
into the “defects of its qualities,” in truth, not wholly unpleasing
perhaps, or at least excusable, when looked at as but the toys (so
Cicero calls them), the strictly congenial and appropriate toys, of an
assiduously cultivated age, which could not help being polite,
critical, self-conscious. The mere love of novelty also had, of course,
its part there: as with the Euphuism of the Elizabethan age, and of the
modern French romanticists, its neologies were the ground of one of the
favourite charges against it; though indeed, as regards these tricks of
taste also, there is nothing new, but a quaint family likeness rather,
between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here, as elsewhere, the power
of “fashion,” as it is called, is but one minor form, slight enough, it
may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper yearning of human
nature towards ideal perfection, which is a continuous force in it; and
since in this direction too human nature is limited, such fashions must
necessarily reproduce themselves. Among other resemblances to later
growths of Euphuism, its archaisms on the one hand, and its neologies
on the other, the Euphuism of the days of Marcus Aurelius had, in the
composition of verse, its fancy for the refrain. It was a snatch from a
popular chorus, something he had heard sounding all over the town of
Pisa one April night, one of the first bland and summer-like nights of
the year, that Flavian had chosen for the refrain of a poem he was then
pondering—the Pervigilium Veneris—the vigil, or “nocturn,” of Venus.
Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a constant
part in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries are
playing in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation or
unreality in that minute culture of form:—Cannot those who have a thing
to say, say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like the old
writers of Greece? And this challenge had at least the effect of
setting his thoughts at work on the intellectual situation as it lay
between the children of the present and those earliest masters.
Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greek
genius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence of
imitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent, laid
upon every artist, increased since then! It was all around one:—that
smoothly built world of old classical taste, an accomplished fact, with
overwhelming authority on every detail of the conduct of one’s work.
With no fardel on its own back, yet so imperious towards those who came
labouring after it, Hellas, in its early freshness, looked as distant
from him even then as it does from ourselves. There might seem to be no
place left for novelty or originality,—place only for a patient, an
infinite, faultlessness. On this question too Flavian passed through a
world of curious art-casuistries, of self-tormenting, at the threshold
of his work. Was poetic beauty a thing ever one and the same, a type
absolute; or, changing always with the soul of time itself, did it
depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick of apprehension, the fashion,
as we say, of each successive age? Might one recover that old, earlier
sense of it, that earlier manner, in a masterly effort to recall all
the complexities of the life, moral and intellectual, of the earlier
age to which it had belonged? Had there been really bad ages in art or
literature? Were all ages, even those earliest, adventurous, matutinal
days, in themselves equally poetical or unpoetical; and poetry, the
literary beauty, the poetic ideal, always but a borrowed light upon
men’s actual life?
Homer had said—
Hoi d’ hote dê limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d’ en nêi melainê...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phêgmini thalassês.+
And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was
always telling things after this manner. And one might think there had
been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical
transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which
one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, the
sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in “the great
style,” against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of
an age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer’s
poetry? Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer,
the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader and
the actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, in
an age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on his
opportunity for the touch of “golden alchemy,” or at least for the
pleasantly lighted side of things themselves? Might not another, in
one’s own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had been
through the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in like manner,
discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it? Would not a future
generation, looking back upon this, under the power of the
enchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with its
own languor—the languor that for some reason (concerning which
Augustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt men always? Had
Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to some
of the people of his own age, as seemed to happen with every new
literature in turn? In any case, the intellectual conditions of early
Greece had been—how different from these! And a true literary tact
would accept that difference in forming the primary conception of the
literary function at a later time. Perhaps the utmost one could get by
conscious effort, in the way of a reaction or return to the conditions
of an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas, artificial
artlessness, naïveté; and this quality too might have its measure of
euphuistic charm, direct and sensible enough, though it must count, in
comparison with that genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, not
as the freshness of the open fields, but only of a bunch of
field-flowers in a heated room.
There was, meantime, all this:—on one side, the old pagan culture, for
us but a fragment, for him an accomplished yet present fact, still a
living, united, organic whole, in the entirety of its art, its thought,
its religions, its sagacious forms of polity, that so weighty authority
it exercised on every point, being in reality only the measure of its
charm for every one: on the other side, the actual world in all its
eager self-assertion, with Flavian himself, in his boundless animation,
there, at the centre of the situation. From the natural defects, from
the pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, he
was saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to present, very
real, at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante with what
might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose
of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain
strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things
as really being, with important results, thus, rather than
thus,—intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called upon
to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the model
within. Flavian too, with his fine clear mastery of the practically
effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic in
literature: that to know when one’s self is interested, is the first
condition of interesting other people. It was a principle, the forcible
apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in the selection
of his intellectual food; often listless while others read or gazed
diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere complaisance to
people’s emotions: it served to foster in him a very scrupulous
literary sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demand
for a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personal
intuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved his
euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice.
Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddess
Venus, the work of his earlier manhood, and designed originally to open
an argument less persistently sombre than that protest against the
whole pagan heaven which actually follows it? It is certainly the most
typical expression of a mood, still incident to the young poet, as a
thing peculiar to his youth, when he feels the sentimental current
setting forcibly along his veins, and so much as a matter of purely
physical excitement, that he can hardly distinguish it from the
animation of external nature, the upswelling of the seed in the earth,
and of the sap through the trees. Flavian, to whom, again, as to his
later euphuistic kinsmen, old mythology seemed as full of untried,
unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself, had long been
occupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the vernal principle of life in
things; a composition shaping itself, little by little, out of a
thousand dim perceptions, into singularly definite form (definite and
firm as fine-art in metal, thought Marius) for which, as I said, he had
caught his “refrain,” from the lips of the young men, singing because
they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa. And as oftenest happens
also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal
beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunate
incidents, the physical heat and light, of one singularly happy day.
It was one of the first hot days of March—“the sacred day”—on which,
from Pisa, as from many another harbour on the Mediterranean, the Ship
of Isis went to sea, and every one walked down to the shore-side to
witness the freighting of the vessel, its launching and final
abandonment among the waves, as an object really devoted to the Great
Goddess, that new rival, or “double,” of ancient Venus, and like her a
favourite patroness of sailors. On the evening next before, all the
world had been abroad to view the illumination of the river; the
stately lines of building being wreathed with hundreds of many-coloured
lamps. The young men had poured forth their chorus—
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit,
Quique amavit cras amet—
as they bore their torches through the yielding crowd, or rowed their
lanterned boats up and down the stream, till far into the night, when
heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home. Morning broke,
however, smiling and serene; and the long procession started betimes.
The river, curving slightly, with the smoothly paved streets on either
side, between its low marble parapet and the fair dwelling-houses,
formed the main highway of the city; and the pageant, accompanied
throughout by innumerable lanterns and wax tapers, took its course up
one of these streets, crossing the water by a bridge up-stream, and
down the other, to the haven, every possible standing-place, out of
doors and within, being crowded with sight-seers, of whom Marius was
one of the most eager, deeply interested in finding the spectacle much
as Apuleius had described it in his famous book.
At the head of the procession, the master of ceremonies, quietly waving
back the assistants, made way for a number of women, scattering
perfumes. They were succeeded by a company of musicians, piping and
twanging, on instruments the strangest Marius had ever beheld, the
notes of a hymn, narrating the first origin of this votive rite to a
choir of youths, who marched behind them singing it. The tire-women and
other personal attendants of the great goddess came next, bearing the
instruments of their ministry, and various articles from the sacred
wardrobe, wrought of the most precious material; some of them with long
ivory combs, plying their hands in wild yet graceful concert of
movement as they went, in devout mimicry of the toilet. Placed in their
rear were the mirror-bearers of the goddess, carrying large mirrors of
beaten brass or silver, turned in such a way as to reflect to the great
body of worshippers who followed, the face of the mysterious image, as
it moved on its way, and their faces to it, as though they were in fact
advancing to meet the heavenly visitor. They comprehended a multitude
of both sexes and of all ages, already initiated into the divine
secret, clad in fair linen, the females veiled, the males with shining
tonsures, and every one carrying a sistrum—the richer sort of silver, a
few very dainty persons of fine gold—rattling the reeds, with a noise
like the jargon of innumerable birds and insects awakened from torpor
and abroad in the spring sun. Then, borne upon a kind of platform, came
the goddess herself, undulating above the heads of the multitude as the
bearers walked, in mystic robe embroidered with the moon and stars,
bordered gracefully with a fringe of real fruit and flowers, and with a
glittering crown upon the head. The train of the procession consisted
of the priests in long white vestments, close from head to foot,
distributed into various groups, each bearing, exposed aloft, one of
the sacred symbols of Isis—the corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand
of equity, and among them the votive ship itself, carved and gilt, and
adorned bravely with flags flying. Last of all walked the high priest;
the people kneeling as he passed to kiss his hand, in which were those
well-remembered roses.
Marius followed with the rest to the harbour, where the mystic ship,
lowered from the shoulders of the priests, was loaded with as much as
it could carry of the rich spices and other costly gifts, offered in
great profusion by the worshippers, and thus, launched at last upon the
water, left the shore, crossing the harbour-bar in the wake of a much
stouter vessel than itself with a crew of white-robed mariners, whose
function it was, at the appointed moment, finally to desert it on the
open sea.
The remainder of the day was spent by most in parties on the water.
Flavian and Marius sailed further than they had ever done before to a
wild spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony,
which, having had its eager, stirring life at the time when Etruria was
still a power in Italy, had perished in the age of the civil wars. In
the absolute transparency of the air on this gracious day, an
infinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with sparkling
clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves—Flavian at work
suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land at
last. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with a
tumble-down of quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine of
Venus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and napkins and gilded
shells which these people had offered to the image. Flavian and Marius
sat down under the shadow of a mass of gray rock or ruin, where the
sea-gate of the Greek town had been, and talked of life in those old
Greek colonies. Of this place, all that remained, besides those rude
stones, was—a handful of silver coins, each with a head of pure and
archaic beauty, though a little cruel perhaps, supposed to represent
the Siren Ligeia, whose tomb was formerly shown here—only these, and an
ancient song, the very strain which Flavian had recovered in those last
months. They were records which spoke, certainly, of the charm of life
within those walls. How strong must have been the tide of men’s
existence in that little republican town, so small that this circle of
gray stones, of service now only by the moisture they gathered for the
blue-flowering gentians among them, had been the line of its rampart!
An epitome of all that was liveliest, most animated and adventurous, in
the old Greek people of which it was an offshoot, it had enhanced the
effect of these gifts by concentration within narrow limits. The band
of “devoted youth,”—hiera neotês.+—of the younger brothers, devoted to
the gods and whatever luck the gods might afford, because there was no
room for them at home—went forth, bearing the sacred flame from the
mother hearth; itself a flame, of power to consume the whole material
of existence in clear light and heat, with no smouldering residue. The
life of those vanished townsmen, so brilliant and revolutionary,
applying so abundantly the personal qualities which alone just then
Marius seemed to value, associated itself with the actual figure of his
companion, standing there before him, his face enthusiastic with the
sudden thought of all that; and struck him vividly as precisely the
fitting opportunity for a nature like his, so hungry for control, for
ascendency over men.
Marius noticed also, however, as high spirits flagged at last, on the
way home through the heavy dew of the evening, more than physical
fatigue in Flavian, who seemed to find no refreshment in the coolness.
There had been something feverish, perhaps, and like the beginning of
sickness, about his almost forced gaiety, in this sudden spasm of
spring; and by the evening of the next day he was lying with a burning
spot on his forehead, stricken, as was thought from the first, by the
terrible new disease.
NOTES
93. +Corrected from the Macmillan edition misprint “singal.”
98. +Transliteration: es kallos graphein. Translation: “To write
beautifully.”
100. +Iliad 1.432-33, 437. Transliteration:
Hoi d’ hote dê limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d’ en nêi melainê...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phêgmini thalassês.
Etext editor’s translation:
When they had safely made deep harbor
They took in the sail, laid it in their black ship...
And went ashore just past the breakers.
109. +Transliteration: hiera neotês. Pater translates the phrase,
“devoted youth.”