The play began. Moods of tragedy were forgotten. Only Paulus found
himself unable to listen. His host's appeal, made apparently with
such ready emotion, and so easily forgotten by the other men--he was
the youngest of the company--had shaken his soul as a young tree on
a mountain is shaken by the night wind. The comedy went on, punctuated
by applause. In his mind met and struggled high desires. When Atticus
had talked of Athens and of Rome he had remembered Virgil's great
defence of his own people, the weapon of all patriots after him:
Others, I well believe, shall mould the bronze to breathe in softer
form, from marble shall unveil the living countenance, shall plead
with greater eloquence, and heaven's paths map out with rod in hand
and tell the rising of the stars. Upon the tablets of thy memory,
O Roman, it is laid to hold the peoples in thy sway. These are thy
arts and shall be: To impose the ways of peace; to spare the
vanquished and subject the proud.
Now there leaped into life within him a realisation of Rome's
incommunicable greatness. He perceived at last the nature of the _pax
romana_, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the
continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and
held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice. Was it
possible that a nation which had given birth to a force like this
could also bring forth in due season a love of beauty, a thirst for
truth? Could tameless genius and conquering will, could a passion
for ideas and a passion for deeds dwell together until side by side
men of one blood should add to the glory of worldly power the glory
of spiritual conquest, should superimpose upon the beauty of just
laws the beauty of wrought bronze and woven language?
And if this could be, what was the duty of each Roman whose pure
desires lay with Poetry and her sisters? Paulus shuddered as he felt
the question tearing its way through the peaceful plans he had been
making for his life. He remembered the story of Menander refusing
to leave the intellectual life of Athens for the luxuries of
Ptolemy's court. Must he, on the contrary, for the sake of an idea,
renounce this life, with its cherished poverty and philosophy, its
peace and learned leisure, its freedom and candour and regard for
beauty, to go back to Rome where, in terrifying coalition, power and
pleasure, wealth and display, passion and brutality were forever
crowding in upon the city's honour? The irresponsibility of the
insignificant assailed him. A Virgil, he supposed, might know that
his presence would affect his country for good or evil. But what could
he, Paulus, do? In Rome, in Athens, he was one of the little men.
Was he not, then, justified in living his own life in the best
possible way, atoning for the meagreness of his talent by the
honourableness of his quest?
But even as he said this to himself he remembered why Athens had
achieved perfection. In the age of Pericles, geniuses, like flawless
jewels cut out of a proper matrix, had been fashioned out of a large
body of men, themselves not gifted, but able to understand and
safeguard those who were. He had left Rome because she was no matrix
for poets and artists and thinkers. Ought he now to return to her
and live and work and die unknown, serving only as one more citizen
ready to welcome the poets to be?
His panting desires put up one last defence. Was he not narrowing
art within the borders of nationality? In the service of beauty was
there either Greek or Roman? Alas! Atticus had beaten that down
already. Art was no fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national
life. Greeks had been artists only when they had been conquerors,
soldiers, traders, rulers. The Romans now held the world. In them,
the eagle's brood, lay the hope of a new birth of the spirit. With
a certain noble unreason, he dismissed the idea that by living in
Athens he might fight the battle for Rome. If he was to fight at all,
it was to be where the enemy was fiercest and the hope of victory
least. Upon any easier choice his ancestors within him laid their
iron grasp. His ears caught the words of one of the actors:
"Well, do not then the gods look out for us?" you'll say.
To each of us they have allotted Character
As garrison commander.
Gathering his forces in obedience to his garrison commander Paulus
tried to decide to go back to Rome. Greece called to him insistently.
Confused and exhausted, he joined perfunctorily in the loud applause
that closed the comedy, and in the speeches of gratitude and farewell
to the host.
The play had been long, and the autumn night, he found to his surprise,
had passed. Emerging from the house, he breasted the dawn. With
curious suddenness the sense of conflict left him. The beauty of the
Attic plain, born, unlike the beauty of the Roman Campagna, of light
rather than of unshed tears, had often seemed to him to quicken the
perception of truth. Certainly the dullest eyes must see at this hour,
when, at the behest of the approaching sun, outlines were cleared
of all that was shadowy and fanciful, and colours were touched to
buoyant life. Greece called to him, but with what a message!
Imaginings, vain desires, regrets, were swept away from his mind,
even as the receding shadows left bare the contours of the mountains.
He saw that his concern was with the battle, not with its issue. In
this enlightening hour he understood that Rome would never become
mother of the arts, until, in some unimagined future, through
transforming national experiences, she should be made pregnant with
ideas beyond the ken of his generation. Poets might again be born
of her, but he and his like would long since have been lying among
her forgotten children. And yet, the life of the future, however
distant, would not be unaffected by the obscure work and faith of
the present age. He himself would never see victory, but the struggle
was his inalienable heritage. Revealed in light and joy he knew his
purpose. Down from the crags of Parnes, great wings strong with the
morning, swept an eagle--as if homeward--toward the western sea.
With it, like an arrow to its goal, alert with the vigour of dawn,
aflame with the ardour of life, sped the heart of the young Roman.