“THE CEREMONY OF THE DART”
The ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aurelius, ideas of large
generalisation, have sometimes induced, in those over whose intellects
they have had real power, a coldness of heart. It was the distinction
of Aurelius that he was able to harmonise them with the kindness, one
might almost say the amenities, of a humourist, as also with the
popular religion and its many gods. Those vasty conceptions of the
later Greek philosophy had in them, in truth, the germ of a sort of
austerely opinionative “natural theology,” and how often has that led
to religious dryness—a hard contempt of everything in religion, which
touches the senses, or charms the fancy, or really concerns the
affections. Aurelius had made his own the secret of passing, naturally,
and with no violence to his thought, to and fro, between the richly
coloured and romantic religion of those old gods who had still been
human beings, and a very abstract speculation upon the impassive,
universal soul—that circle whose centre is everywhere, the
circumference nowhere—of which a series of purely logical necessities
had evolved the formula. As in many another instance, those traditional
pieties of the place and the hour had been derived by him from his
mother:—para tês mêtros to theosebes.+ Purified, as all such religion
of concrete time and place needs to be, by frequent confronting with
the ideal of godhead as revealed to that innate religious sense in the
possession of which Aurelius differed from the people around him, it
was the ground of many a sociability with their simpler souls, and for
himself, certainly, a consolation, whenever the wings of his own soul
flagged in the trying atmosphere of purely intellectual vision. A host
of companions, guides, helpers, about him from of old time, “the very
court and company of heaven,” objects for him of personal reverence and
affection—the supposed presence of the ancient popular gods determined
the character of much of his daily life, and might prove the last stay
of human nature at its weakest. “In every time and place,” he had said,
“it rests with thyself to use the event of the hour religiously: at all
seasons worship the gods.” And when he said “Worship the gods!” he did
it, as strenuously as everything else.
Yet here again, how often must he have experienced disillusion, or even
some revolt of feeling, at that contact with coarser natures to which
his religious conclusions exposed him. At the beginning of the year one
hundred and seventy-three public anxiety was as great as ever; and as
before it brought people’s superstition into unreserved play. For seven
days the images of the old gods, and some of the graver new ones, lay
solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their ornaments, each
in his separate resting-place, amid lights and burning incense, while
the crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited them, with
offerings of flowers to this or that particular divinity, according to
the devotion of each.
But supplementing these older official observances, the very wildest
gods had their share of worship,—strange creatures with strange secrets
startled abroad into open daylight. The delirious sort of religion of
which Marius was a spectator in the streets of Rome, during the seven
days of the Lectisternium, reminded him now and again of an observation
of Apuleius: it was “as if the presence of the gods did not do men
good, but disordered or weakened them.” Some jaded women of fashion,
especially, found in certain oriental devotions, at once relief for
their religiously tearful souls and an opportunity for personal
display; preferring this or that “mystery,” chiefly because the attire
required in it was suitable to their peculiar manner of beauty. And one
morning Marius encountered an extraordinary crimson object, borne in a
litter through an excited crowd—the famous courtesan Benedicta, still
fresh from the bath of blood, to which she had submitted herself,
sitting below the scaffold where the victims provided for that purpose
were slaughtered by the priests. Even on the last day of the solemnity,
when the emperor himself performed one of the oldest ceremonies of the
Roman religion, this fantastic piety had asserted itself. There were
victims enough certainly, brought from the choice pastures of the
Sabine mountains, and conducted around the city they were to die for,
in almost continuous procession, covered with flowers and well-nigh
worried to death before the time by the crowds of people
superstitiously pressing to touch them. But certain old-fashioned
Romans, in these exceptional circumstances, demanded something more
than this, in the way of a human sacrifice after the ancient pattern;
as when, not so long since, some Greeks or Gauls had been buried alive
in the Forum. At least, human blood should be shed; and it was through
a wild multitude of fanatics, cutting their flesh with knives and whips
and licking up ardently the crimson stream, that the emperor repaired
to the temple of Bellona, and in solemn symbolic act cast the
bloodstained spear, or “dart,” carefully preserved there, towards the
enemy’s country— towards that unknown world of German homes, still
warm, as some believed under the faint northern twilight, with those
innocent affections of which Romans had lost the sense. And this at
least was clear, amid all doubts of abstract right or wrong on either
side, that the ruin of those homes was involved in what Aurelius was
then preparing for, with,—Yes! the gods be thanked for that achievement
of an invigorating philosophy!—almost with a light heart.
For, in truth, that departure, really so difficult to him, for which
Marcus Aurelius had needed to brace himself so strenuously, came to
test the power of a long-studied theory of practice; and it was the
development of this theory—a theôria, literally—a view, an intuition,
of the most important facts, and still more important possibilities,
concerning man in the world, that Marius now discovered, almost as if
by accident, below the dry surface of the manuscripts entrusted to him.
The great purple rolls contained, first of all, statistics, a general
historical account of the writer’s own time, and an exact diary; all
alike, though in three different degrees of nearness to the writer’s
own personal experience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing. This was
for the instruction of the public; and part of it has, perhaps, found
its way into the Augustan Histories. But it was for the especial
guidance of his son Commodus that he had permitted himself to break
out, here and there, into reflections upon what was passing, into
conversations with the reader. And then, as though he were put off his
guard in this way, there had escaped into the heavy matter-of-fact, of
which the main portion was composed, morsels of his conversation with
himself. It was the romance of a soul (to be traced only in hints,
wayside notes, quotations from older masters), as it were in lifelong,
and often baffled search after some vanished or elusive golden fleece,
or Hesperidean fruit-trees, or some mysterious light of doctrine, ever
retreating before him. A man, he had seemed to Marius from the first,
of two lives, as we say. Of what nature, he had sometimes wondered, on
the day, for instance, when he had interrupted the emperor’s musings in
the empty palace, might be that placid inward guest or inhabitant, who
from amid the pre-occupations of the man of practical affairs looked
out, as if surprised, at the things and faces around. Here, then, under
the tame surface of what was meant for a life of business, Marius
discovered, welcoming a brother, the spontaneous self-revelation of a
soul as delicate as his own,—a soul for which conversation with itself
was a necessity of existence. Marius, indeed, had always suspected that
the sense of such necessity was a peculiarity of his. But here,
certainly, was another, in this respect like himself; and again he
seemed to detect the advent of some new or changed spirit into the
world, mystic, inward, hardly to be satisfied with that wholly external
and objective habit of life, which had been sufficient for the old
classic soul. His purely literary curiosity was greatly stimulated by
this example of a book of self-portraiture. It was in fact the position
of the modern essayist,—creature of efforts rather than of
achievements, in the matter of apprehending truth, but at least
conscious of lights by the way, which he must needs record,
acknowledge. What seemed to underlie that position was the desire to
make the most of every experience that might come, outwardly or from
within: to perpetuate, to display, what was so fleeting, in a kind of
instinctive, pathetic protest against the imperial writer’s own
theory—that theory of the “perpetual flux” of all things—to Marius
himself, so plausible from of old.
There was, besides, a special moral or doctrinal significance in the
making of such conversation with one’s self at all. The Logos, the
reasonable spark, in man, is common to him with the gods—koinos autô
pros tous theous+—cum diis communis. That might seem but the truism of
a certain school of philosophy; but in Aurelius was clearly an original
and lively apprehension. There could be no inward conversation with
one’s self such as this, unless there were indeed some one else, aware
of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or displeased at one’s
disposition of one’s self. Cornelius Fronto too could enounce that
theory of the reasonable community between men and God, in many
different ways. But then, he was a cheerful man, and Aurelius a
singularly sad one; and what to Fronto was but a doctrine, or a motive
of mere rhetoric, was to the other a consolation. He walks and talks,
for a spiritual refreshment lacking which he would faint by the way,
with what to the learned professor is but matter of philosophic
eloquence.
In performing his public religious functions Marcus Aurelius had ever
seemed like one who took part in some great process, a great thing
really done, with more than the actually visible assistants about him.
Here, in these manuscripts, in a hundred marginal flowers of thought or
language, in happy new phrases of his own like the impromptus of an
actual conversation, in quotations from other older masters of the
inward life, taking new significance from the chances of such
intercourse, was the record of his communion with that eternal reason,
which was also his own proper self, with the divine companion, whose
tabernacle was in the intelligence of men—the journal of his daily
commerce with that.
Chance: or Providence! Chance: or Wisdom, one with nature and man,
reaching from end to end, through all time and all existence, orderly
disposing all things, according to fixed periods, as he describes it,
in terms very like certain well-known words of the book of
Wisdom:—those are the “fenced opposites” of the speculative dilemma,
the tragic embarras, of which Aurelius cannot too often remind himself
as the summary of man’s situation in the world. If there be, however, a
provident soul like this “behind the veil,” truly, even to him, even in
the most intimate of those conversations, it has never yet spoken with
any quite irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet one’s choice in
that speculative dilemma, as he has found it, is on the whole a matter
of will.—“’Tis in thy power,” here too, again, “to think as thou wilt.”
For his part he has asserted his will, and has the courage of his
opinion. “To the better of two things, if thou findest that, turn with
thy whole heart: eat and drink ever of the best before thee.” “Wisdom,”
says that other disciple of the Sapiential philosophy, “hath mingled
Her wine, she hath also prepared Herself a table.” Tou aristou
apolaue:+ “Partake ever of Her best!” And what Marius, peeping now very
closely upon the intimacies of that singular mind, found a thing
actually pathetic and affecting, was the manner of the writer’s bearing
as in the presence of this supposed guest; so elusive, so jealous of
any palpable manifestation of himself, so taxing to one’s faith, never
allowing one to lean frankly upon him and feel wholly at rest. Only, he
would do his part, at least, in maintaining the constant fitness, the
sweetness and quiet, of the guest-chamber. Seeming to vary with the
intellectual fortune of the hour, from the plainest account of
experience, to a sheer fantasy, only “believed because it was
impossible,” that one hope was, at all events, sufficient to make men’s
common pleasures and their common ambition, above all their commonest
vices, seem very petty indeed, too petty to know of. It bred in him a
kind of magnificence of character, in the old Greek sense of the term;
a temper incompatible with any merely plausible advocacy of his
convictions, or merely superficial thoughts about anything whatever, or
talk about other people, or speculation as to what was passing in their
so visibly little souls, or much talking of any kind, however clever or
graceful. A soul thus disposed had “already entered into the better
life”:—was indeed in some sort “a priest, a minister of the gods.”
Hence his constant “recollection”; a close watching of his soul, of a
kind almost unique in the ancient world.—Before all things examine into
thyself: strive to be at home with thyself!—Marius, a sympathetic
witness of all this, might almost seem to have had a foresight of
monasticism itself in the prophetic future. With this mystic companion
he had gone a step onward out of the merely objective pagan existence.
Here was already a master in that craft of self-direction, which was
about to play so large a part in the forming of human mind, under the
sanction of the Christian church.
Yet it was in truth a somewhat melancholy service, a service on which
one must needs move about, solemn, serious, depressed, with the hushed
footsteps of those who move about the house where a dead body is lying.
Such was the impression which occurred to Marius again and again as he
read, with a growing sense of some profound dissidence from his author.
By certain quite traceable links of association he was reminded, in
spite of the moral beauty of the philosophic emperor’s ideas, how he
had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the public shows. For, actually,
his contemplations had made him of a sad heart, inducing in him that
melancholy—Tristitia—which even the monastic moralists have held to be
of the nature of deadly sin, akin to the sin of Desidia or Inactivity.
Resignation, a sombre resignation, a sad heart, patient bearing of the
burden of a sad heart:—Yes! this belonged doubtless to the situation of
an honest thinker upon the world. Only, in this case there seemed to be
too much of a complacent acquiescence in the world as it is. And there
could be no true Théodicé in that; no real accommodation of the world
as it is, to the divine pattern of the Logos, the eternal reason, over
against it. It amounted to a tolerance of evil.
The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little
understand, yet prospereth on the journey:
If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be nought of
evil with thee therein.
If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are
communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with
thee—nothing to be afraid of:
Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every man
according to his desert:
If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require?
Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits?
That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the whole.
The profit of the whole,—that was sufficient!+
—Links, in a train of thought really generous! of which, nevertheless,
the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere,
might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in
truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there
could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man. “Let thine
air be cheerful,” he had said; and, with an effort, did himself at
times attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely ought to
accompany, as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like
those. Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with
Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable
physiognomy. With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy
which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the
outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human
faces from “the land which is very far off,” we may trace from Giotto
onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael—the serenity, the
durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from
death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed “blitheness” of the
Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly
superficial youth. And yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with
the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching
in the head or heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an
enemy with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in
a thousand forms—the apparent waste of men’s gifts in an early, or even
in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of animals; the
disease and pain of the body.
And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius and his
reader.—The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body. Since it is
“the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be
proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither sensation nor
passion to break in upon her,” it follows that the true interest of the
spirit must ever be to treat the body—Well! as a corpse attached
thereto, rather than as a living companion—nay, actually to promote its
dissolution. In counterpoise to the inhumanity of this, presenting
itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin against nature,
the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that
reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man. Such
delight indeed had been but a natural consequence of the sensuous or
materialistic character of the philosophy of his choice. Now to
Cornelius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer terms it,
the one true temple in the world; or rather itself the proper object of
worship, of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold might have
its seemliness and due symbolic use:—Ah! and of what awe-stricken pity
also, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones of a poor man’s
grave!
Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the
philosopher’s contempt for it—some diseased point of thought, or moral
dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all
the emperor’s inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for which there
was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world. “’Tis part of the
business of life,” he read, “to lose it handsomely.” On due occasion,
“one might give life the slip.” The moral or mental powers might fail
one; and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the time for
taking leave was not come:—“Thou canst leave this prison when thou
wilt. Go forth boldly!” Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain
such question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must
always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching
him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with. There,
surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of
apprehension. It was the attitude, the melancholy intellectual
attitude, of one who might be greatly mistaken in things—who might make
the greatest of mistakes.
A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, or even in the
weakness of others:—of this Marius had certainly found the trace, as a
confidant of the emperor’s conversations with himself, in spite of
those jarring inhumanities, of that pretension to a stoical
indifference, and the many difficulties of his manner of writing. He
found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger evidence, in this
way. As he read one morning early, there slipped from the rolls of
manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor’s superscription, which
might well be of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at once in
person; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one of his favourite
retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with his young
children, before his departure for the war. A whole day passed as
Marius crossed the Campagna on horseback, pleased by the random autumn
lights bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture, the shepherds
in their picturesque dress, the golden elms, tower and villa; and it
was after dark that he mounted the steep street of the little hill-town
to the imperial residence. He was struck by an odd mixture of stillness
and excitement about the place. Lights burned at the windows. It seemed
that numerous visitors were within, for the courtyard was crowded with
litters and horses in waiting. For the moment, indeed, all larger
cares, even the cares of war, of late so heavy a pressure, had been
forgotten in what was passing with the little Annius Verus; who for his
part had forgotten his toys, lying all day across the knees of his
mother, as a mere child’s ear-ache grew rapidly to alarming sickness
with great and manifest agony, only suspended a little, from time to
time, when from very weariness he passed into a few moments of
unconsciousness. The country surgeon called in, had removed the
imposthume with the knife. There had been a great effort to bear this
operation, for the terrified child, hardly persuaded to submit himself,
when his pain was at its worst, and even more for the parents. At
length, amid a company of pupils pressing in with him, as the custom
was, to watch the proceedings in the sick-room, the eminent Galen had
arrived, only to pronounce the thing done visibly useless, the patient
falling now into longer intervals of delirium. And thus, thrust on one
side by the crowd of departing visitors, Marius was forced into the
privacy of a grief, the desolate face of which went deep into his
memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away—quite conscious at
last, but with a touching expression upon it of weakness and
defeat—pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one
thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure
distress.
NOTES
42. +Transliteration: para tês mêtros to theosebes. Translation: “rites
deriving from [his] mother.”
47. +Transliteration: koinos autô pros tous theous. Translation:
“common to him together with the gods.”
49. +Transliteration: Tou aristou apolaue. Translation: “[Always] take
the best.”
52. +Not indented in the original.