A PAGAN END
For the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor Marcus
Aurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in his train,
among the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive. People actually
sickened at a sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as they watched in
dense crowds the pathetic or grotesque imagery of failure or success in
the triumphal procession. And, as usual, the plague brought with it a
power to develop all pre-existent germs of superstition. It was by
dishonour done to Apollo himself, said popular rumour—to Apollo, the
old titular divinity of pestilence, that the poisonous thing had come
abroad. Pent up in a golden coffer consecrated to the god, it had
escaped in the sacrilegious plundering of his temple at Seleucia by the
soldiers of Lucius Verus, after a traitorous surprise of that town and
a cruel massacre. Certainly there was something which baffled all
imaginable precautions and all medical science, in the suddenness with
which the disease broke out simultaneously, here and there, among both
soldiers and citizens, even in places far remote from the main line of
its march in the rear of the victorious army. It seemed to have invaded
the whole empire, and some have even thought that, in a mitigated form,
it permanently remained there. In Rome itself many thousands perished;
and old authorities tell of farmsteads, whole towns, and even entire
neighbourhoods, which from that time continued without inhabitants and
lapsed into wildness or ruin.
Flavian lay at the open window of his lodging, with a fiery pang in the
brain, fancying no covering thin or light enough to be applied to his
body. His head being relieved after a while, there was distress at the
chest. It was but the fatal course of the strange new sickness, under
many disguises; travelling from the brain to the feet, like a material
resident, weakening one after another of the organic centres; often,
when it did not kill, depositing various degrees of lifelong infirmity
in this member or that; and after such descent, returning upwards
again, now as a mortal coldness, leaving the entrenchments of the
fortress of life overturned, one by one, behind it.
Flavian lay there, with the enemy at his breast now in a painful cough,
but relieved from that burning fever in the head, amid the rich-scented
flowers—rare Paestum roses, and the like —procured by Marius for his
solace, in a fancied convalescence; and would, at intervals, return to
labour at his verses, with a great eagerness to complete and transcribe
the work, while Marius sat and wrote at his dictation, one of the
latest but not the poorest specimens of genuine Latin poetry.
It was in fact a kind of nuptial hymn, which, taking its start from the
thought of nature as the universal mother, celebrated the preliminary
pairing and mating together of all fresh things, in the hot and genial
spring-time—the immemorial nuptials of the soul of spring itself and
the brown earth; and was full of a delighted, mystic sense of what
passed between them in that fantastic marriage. That mystic burden was
relieved, at intervals, by the familiar playfulness of the Latin
verse-writer in dealing with mythology, which, though coming at so late
a day, had still a wonderful freshness in its old age.—“Amor has put
his weapons by and will keep holiday. He was bidden go without apparel,
that none might be wounded by his bow and arrows. But take care! In
truth he is none the less armed than usual, though he be all unclad.”
In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while making it his chief
aim to retain the opulent, many-syllabled vocabulary of the Latin
genius, at some points even to have advanced beyond it, in anticipation
of wholly new laws of taste as regards sound, a new range of sound
itself. The peculiar resultant note, associating itself with certain
other experiences of his, was to Marius like the foretaste of an
entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come. Flavian had caught,
indeed, something of the rhyming cadence, the sonorous organ-music of
the medieval Latin, and therewithal something of its unction and
mysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along with the last
splendour of the classical language, a touch, almost prophetic, of that
transformed life it was to have in the rhyming middle age, just about
to dawn. The impression thus forced upon Marius connected itself with a
feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seems to
say, You have been just here, just thus, before!—a feeling, in his
case, not reminiscent but prescient of the future, which passed over
him afterwards many times, as he came across certain places and people.
It was as if he detected there the process of actual change to a wholly
undreamed-of and renewed condition of human body and soul: as if he saw
the heavy yet decrepit old Roman architecture about him, rebuilding on
an intrinsically better pattern. Could it have been actually on a new
musical instrument that Flavian had first heard the novel accents of
his verse? And still Marius noticed there, amid all its richness of
expression and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always relished
so much in the composition of Flavian. Yes! a firmness like that of
some master of noble metal-work, manipulating tenacious bronze or gold.
Even now that haunting refrain, with its impromptu variations, from the
throats of those strong young men, came floating through the window.
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit,
Quique amavit cras amet!
—repeated Flavian, tremulously, dictating yet one stanza more.
What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and body so fortunately
endowed, the mere liberty of life above-ground, “those sunny mornings
in the cornfields by the sea,” as he recollected them one day, when the
window was thrown open upon the early freshness—his sense of all this,
was from the first singularly near and distinct, yet rather as of
something he was but debarred the use of for a time than finally
bidding farewell to. That was while he was still with no very grave
misgivings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources of
life still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time to
time, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at the poem from his dictation,
was haunted by a feeling of the triviality of such work just then. The
recurrent sense of some obscure danger beyond the mere danger of death,
vaguer than that and by so much the more terrible, like the menace of
some shadowy adversary in the dark with whose mode of attack they had
no acquaintance, disturbed him now and again through those hours of
excited attention to his manuscript, and to the purely physical wants
of Flavian. Still, during these three days there was much hope and
cheerfulness, and even jesting. Half-consciously Marius tried to
prolong one or another relieving circumstance of the day, the
preparations for rest and morning refreshment, for instance; sadly
making the most of the little luxury of this or that, with something of
the feigned cheer of the mother who sets her last morsels before her
famished child as for a feast, but really that he “may eat it and die.”
On the afternoon of the seventh day he allowed Marius finally to put
aside the unfinished manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the chest quiet
at length though much exhausted, had made itself felt with full power
again in a painful vomiting, which seemed to shake his body asunder,
with great consequent prostration. From that time the distress
increased rapidly downwards. Omnia tum vero vitai claustra lababant;+
and soon the cold was mounting with sure pace from the dead feet to the
head.
And now Marius began more than to suspect what the issue must be, and
henceforward could but watch with a sort of agonised fascination the
rapid but systematic work of the destroyer, faintly relieving a little
the mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering. Flavian himself
appeared, in full consciousness at last—in clear-sighted, deliberate
estimate of the actual crisis—to be doing battle with his adversary.
His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the various suggested modes
of relief. He must without fail get better, he would fancy, might he be
removed to a certain place on the hills where as a child he had once
recovered from sickness, but found that he could scarcely raise his
head from the pillow without giddiness. As if now surely foreseeing the
end, he would set himself, with an eager effort, and with that eager
and angry look, which is noted as one of the premonitions of death in
this disease, to fashion out, without formal dictation, still a few
more broken verses of his unfinished work, in hard-set determination,
defiant of pain, to arrest this or that little drop at least from the
river of sensuous imagery rushing so quickly past him.
But at length delirium—symptom that the work of the plague was done,
and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy—broke the coherent
order of words and thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony,
found his best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient’s mind. In
intervals of clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of sorrow
and desolation, were very painful. No longer battling with the disease,
he seemed as it were to place himself at the disposal of the victorious
foe, dying passively, like some dumb creature, in hopeless acquiescence
at last. That old, half-pleading petulance, unamiable, yet, as it might
seem, only needing conditions of life a little happier than they had
actually been, to become refinement of affection, a delicate grace in
its demand on the sympathy of others, had changed in those moments of
full intelligence to a clinging and tremulous gentleness, as he lay—“on
the very threshold of death”—with a sharply contracted hand in the hand
of Marius, to his almost surprised joy, winning him now to an
absolutely self-forgetful devotion. There was a new sort of pleading in
the misty eyes, just because they took such unsteady note of him, which
made Marius feel as if guilty; anticipating thus a form of
self-reproach with which even the tenderest ministrant may be sometimes
surprised, when, at death, affectionate labour suddenly ceasing leaves
room for the suspicion of some failure of love perhaps, at one or
another minute point in it. Marius almost longed to take his share in
the suffering, that he might understand so the better how to relieve
it.
It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the patient, and Marius
extinguished it. The thunder which had sounded all day among the hills,
with a heat not unwelcome to Flavian, had given way at nightfall to
steady rain; and in the darkness Marius lay down beside him, faintly
shivering now in the sudden cold, to lend him his own warmth,
undeterred by the fear of contagion which had kept other people from
passing near the house. At length about day-break he perceived that the
last effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as Marius
understood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of him
there. “Is it a comfort,” he whispered then, “that I shall often come
and weep over you?”—“Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!”
The sun shone out on the people going to work for a long hot day, and
Marius was standing by the dead, watching, with deliberate purpose to
fix in his memory every detail, that he might have this picture in
reserve, should any hour of forgetfulness hereafter come to him with
the temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage, of
resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity, as he
noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility, almost
abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one,
fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a
merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he would not forget
one circumstance in all that; as a man might piously stamp on his
memory the death-scene of a brother wrongfully condemned to die,
against a time that may come.
The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort to watch by
it through the darkness, was a hint of his own failing strength, just
in time. The first night after the washing of the body, he bore stoutly
enough the tax which affection seemed to demand, throwing the incense
from time to time on the little altar placed beside the bier. It was
the recurrence of the thing—that unchanged outline below the coverlet,
amid a silence in which the faintest rustle seemed to speak—that
finally overcame his determination. Surely, here, in this alienation,
this sense of distance between them, which had come over him before
though in minor degree when the mind of Flavian had wandered in his
sickness, was another of the pains of death. Yet he was able to make
all due preparations, and go through the ceremonies, shortened a little
because of the infection, when, on a cloudless evening, the funeral
procession went forth; himself, the flames of the pyre having done
their work, carrying away the urn of the deceased, in the folds of his
toga, to its last resting-place in the cemetery beside the highway, and
so turning home to sleep in his own desolate lodging.
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis?—+
What thought of others’ thoughts about one could there be with the
regret for “so dear a head” fresh at one’s heart?
NOTES
116. +Lucretius, Book VI.1153.
120. +Horace, Odes I.xxiv.1-2.
PART THE SECOND