Marius the Epicurean
HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS
by WALTER PATER
VOLUME TWO
London: 1910.
(The Library Edition.)
Contents
PART THE THIRD
15. Stoicism at Court
16. Second Thoughts
17. Beata Urbs
18. “The Ceremony of the Dart”
19. The Will as Vision
PART THE FOURTH
20. Two Curious Houses—1. Guests
21. Two Curious Houses—2. The Church in Cecilia’s House
22. “The Minor Peace of the Church”
23. Divine Service
24. A Conversation Not Imaginary
25. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
26. The Martyrs
27. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius
28. Anima Naturaliter Christiana
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
Notes: I have placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater’s
footnotes and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each of my
notes at that chapter’s end.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater’s Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it
can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other
nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
Χειμερινὸς ὄνειρος, ὅτε μήκισται αἱ νύκτες+
+“A winter’s dream, when nights are longest.”
Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.
PART THE THIRD
CHAPTER XV.
STOICISM AT COURT
The very finest flower of the same company—Aurelius with the gilded
fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina
herself, and all the elegant blue-stockings of the day, who maintained,
people said, their private “sophists” to whisper philosophy into their
ears winsomely as they performed the duties of the toilet—was assembled
again a few months later, in a different place and for a very different
purpose. The temple of Peace, a “modernising” foundation of Hadrian,
enlarged by a library and lecture-rooms, had grown into an institution
like something between a college and a literary club; and here
Cornelius Fronto was to pronounce a discourse on the Nature of Morals.
There were some, indeed, who had desired the emperor Aurelius himself
to declare his whole mind on this matter. Rhetoric was become almost a
function of the state: philosophy was upon the throne; and had from
time to time, by request, delivered an official utterance with
well-nigh divine authority. And it was as the delegate of this
authority, under the full sanction of the philosophic emperor—emperor
and pontiff, that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to expound some parts
of the Stoic doctrine, with the view of recommending morals to that
refined but perhaps prejudiced company, as being, in effect, one mode
of comeliness in things—as it were music, or a kind of artistic order,
in life. And he did this earnestly, with an outlay of all his science
of mind, and that eloquence of which he was known to be a master. For
Stoicism was no longer a rude and unkempt thing. Received at court, it
had largely decorated itself: it was grown persuasive and insinuating,
and sought not only to convince men’s intelligence but to allure their
souls. Associated with the beautiful old age of the great rhetorician,
and his winning voice, it was almost Epicurean. And the old man was at
his best on the occasion; the last on which he ever appeared in this
way. To-day was his own birthday. Early in the morning the imperial
letter of congratulation had reached him; and all the pleasant
animation it had caused was in his face, when assisted by his daughter
Gratia he took his place on the ivory chair, as president of the
Athenaeum of Rome, wearing with a wonderful grace the philosophic
pall,—in reality neither more nor less than the loose woollen cloak of
the common soldier, but fastened on his right shoulder with a
magnificent clasp, the emperor’s birthday gift.
It was an age, as abundant evidence shows, whose delight in rhetoric
was but one result of a general susceptibility—an age not merely taking
pleasure in words, but experiencing a great moral power in them.
Fronto’s quaintly fashionable audience would have wept, and also
assisted with their purses, had his present purpose been, as sometimes
happened, the recommendation of an object of charity. As it was,
arranging themselves at their ease among the images and flowers, these
amateurs of exquisite language, with their tablets open for careful
record of felicitous word or phrase, were ready to give themselves
wholly to the intellectual treat prepared for them, applauding, blowing
loud kisses through the air sometimes, at the speaker’s triumphant exit
from one of his long, skilfully modulated sentences; while the younger
of them meant to imitate everything about him, down to the inflections
of his voice and the very folds of his mantle. Certainly there was
rhetoric enough:—a wealth of imagery; illustrations from painting,
music, mythology, the experiences of love; a management, by which
subtle, unexpected meaning was brought out of familiar terms, like
flies from morsels of amber, to use Fronto’s own figure. But with all
its richness, the higher claim of his style was rightly understood to
lie in gravity and self-command, and an especial care for the purities
of a vocabulary which rejected every expression unsanctioned by the
authority of approved ancient models.
And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes happen, that this
general discourse to a general audience had the effect of an utterance
adroitly designed for him. His conscience still vibrating painfully
under the shock of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full of the
ethical charm of Cornelius, he was questioning himself with much
impatience as to the possibility of an adjustment between his own
elaborately thought-out intellectual scheme and the “old morality.” In
that intellectual scheme indeed the old morality had so far been
allowed no place, as seeming to demand from him the admission of
certain first principles such as might misdirect or retard him in his
efforts towards a complete, many-sided existence; or distort the
revelations of the experience of life; or curtail his natural liberty
of heart and mind. But now (his imagination being occupied for the
moment with the noble and resolute air, the gallantry, so to call it,
which composed the outward mien and presentment of his strange friend’s
inflexible ethics) he felt already some nascent suspicion of his
philosophic programme, in regard, precisely, to the question of good
taste. There was the taint of a graceless “antinomianism” perceptible
in it, a dissidence, a revolt against accustomed modes, the actual
impression of which on other men might rebound upon himself in some
loss of that personal pride to which it was part of his theory of life
to allow so much. And it was exactly a moral situation such as this
that Fronto appeared to be contemplating. He seemed to have before his
mind the case of one—Cyrenaic or Epicurean, as the courtier tends to
be, by habit and instinct, if not on principle—who yet experiences,
actually, a strong tendency to moral assents, and a desire, with as
little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place for duty and
righteousness in his house of thought.
And the Stoic professor found the key to this problem in the purely
æsthetic beauty of the old morality, as an element in things,
fascinating to the imagination, to good taste in its most highly
developed form, through association—a system or order, as a matter of
fact, in possession, not only of the larger world, but of the rare
minority of _élite_ intelligences; from which, therefore, least of all
would the sort of Epicurean he had in view endure to become, so to
speak, an outlaw. He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in
search after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he seemed
to Marius to be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of
motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life,
determined partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened
self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere
fear of penalties; no element of which, however, was distinctively
moral in the agent himself as such, and providing him, therefore, no
common ground with a really moral being like Cornelius, or even like
the philosophic emperor. Performing the same offices; actually
satisfying, even as they, the external claims of others; rendering to
all their dues—one thus circumstanced would be wanting, nevertheless,
in the secret of inward adjustment to the moral agents around him. How
tenderly—more tenderly than many stricter souls—he might yield himself
to kindly instinct! what fineness of charity in passing judgment on
others! what an exquisite conscience of other men’s susceptibilities!
He knows for how much the manner, because the heart itself, counts, in
doing a kindness. He goes beyond most people in his care for all weakly
creatures; judging, instinctively, that to be but sentient is to
possess rights. He conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call
them by that name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may
have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in a
way of his own. Sometimes, he may think that those men of line and rule
do not really understand their own business. How narrow, inflexible,
unintelligent! what poor guardians (he may reason) of the inward spirit
of righteousness, are some supposed careful walkers according to its
letter and form. And yet all the while he admits, as such, no moral
world at all: no theoretic equivalent to so large a proportion of the
facts of life.
But, over and above such practical rectitude, thus determined by
natural affection or self-love or fear, he may notice that there is a
remnant of right conduct, what he does, still more what he abstains
from doing, not so much through his own free election, as from a
deference, an “assent,” entire, habitual, unconscious, to custom—to the
actual habit or fashion of others, from whom he could not endure to
break away, any more than he would care to be out of agreement with
them on questions of mere manner, or, say, even, of dress. Yes! there
were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a failure
in good taste. An assent, such as this, to the preferences of others,
might seem to be the weakest of motives, and the rectitude it could
determine the least considerable element in a moral life. Yet here,
according to Cornelius Fronto, was in truth the revealing example,
albeit operating upon comparative trifles, of the general principle
required. There was one great idea associated with which that
determination to conform to precedent was elevated into the clearest,
the fullest, the weightiest principle of moral action; a principle
under which one might subsume men’s most strenuous efforts after
righteousness. And he proceeded to expound the idea of Humanity—of a
universal commonwealth of mind, which becomes explicit, and as if
incarnate, in a select communion of just men made perfect.
Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin+—the world is as it were a commonwealth,
a city: and there are observances, customs, usages, actually current in
it, things our friends and companions will expect of us, as the
condition of our living there with them at all, as really their peers
or fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed, the creation of a
visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose actual manners, whose
preferences from of old, become now a weighty tradition as to the way
in which things should or should not be done, are like a music, to
which the intercourse of life proceeds—such a music as no one who had
once caught its harmonies would willingly jar. In this way, the
becoming, as in Greek—to prepon: or ta êthê+ mores, manners, as both
Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a comprehensive term for duty.
Righteousness would be, in the words of “Caesar” himself, of the
philosophic Aurelius, but a “following of the reasonable will of the
oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities—of the royal, the
law-giving element, therein—forasmuch as we are citizens also in that
supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but as
single habitations.” But as the old man spoke with animation of this
supreme city, this invisible society, whose conscience was become
explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose common spirit,
the trusted leaders of human conscience had been but the mouthpiece, of
whose successive personal preferences in the conduct of life, the “old
morality” was the sum,—Marius felt that his own thoughts were passing
beyond the actual intention of the speaker; not in the direction of any
clearer theoretic or abstract definition of that ideal commonwealth,
but rather as if in search of its visible locality and abiding-place,
the walls and towers of which, so to speak, he might really trace and
tell, according to his own old, natural habit of mind. It would be the
fabric, the outward fabric, of a system reaching, certainly, far beyond
the great city around him, even if conceived in all the machinery of
its visible and invisible influences at their grandest—as Augustus or
Trajan might have conceived of them—however well the visible Rome might
pass for a figure of that new, unseen, Rome on high. At moments, Marius
even asked himself with surprise, whether it might be some vast secret
society the speaker had in view:—that august community, to be an outlaw
from which, to be foreign to the manners of which, was a loss so much
greater than to be excluded, into the ends of the earth, from the
sovereign Roman commonwealth. Humanity, a universal order, the great
polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their example
over their successors—these were the ideas, stimulating enough in their
way, by association with which the Stoic professor had attempted to
elevate, to unite under a single principle, men’s moral efforts,
himself lifted up with so genuine an enthusiasm. But where might Marius
search for all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction? Where
were those elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable,
winning, persuasive—whose footsteps through the world were so beautiful
in the actual order he saw—whose faces averted from him, would be more
than he could bear? Where was that comely order, to which as a great
fact of experience he must give its due; to which, as to all other
beautiful “phenomena” in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust
himself?
Rome did well to be serious. The discourse ended somewhat abruptly, as
the noise of a great crowd in motion was heard below the walls;
whereupon, the audience, following the humour of the younger element in
it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which the famous
procession, or transvectio, of the military knights was to be seen
passing over the Forum, from their trysting-place at the temple of
Mars, to the temple of the Dioscuri. The ceremony took place this year,
not on the day accustomed—anniversary of the victory of Lake Regillus,
with its pair of celestial assistants—and amid the heat and roses of a
Roman July, but, by anticipation, some months earlier, the almond-trees
along the way being still in leafless flower. Through that light
trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, arrayed in all their gleaming
ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive around their helmets, the faces
below which, what with battle and the plague, were almost all youthful.
It was a flowery scene enough, but had to-day its fulness of war-like
meaning; the return of the army to the North, where the enemy was again
upon the move, being now imminent. Cornelius had ridden along in his
place, and, on the dismissal of the company, passed below the steps
where Marius stood, with that new song he had heard once before
floating from his lips.
NOTES
10. +Transliteration: Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin. Translation: “The
world is like a city.”
10. +Transliteration: to prepon ... ta êthê. Translation: “That which
is seemly ... mores.”