THE WILL AS VISION
Paratum cor meum deus! paratum cor meum!
The emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of images in
memory of the dead prince; that a golden one should be carried,
together with the other images, in the great procession of the Circus,
and the addition of the child’s name to the Hymn of the Salian Priests:
and so, stifling private grief, without further delay set forth for the
war.
True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius, had understood it,
was essentially of the nature of a service. If so be, you can discover
a mode of life more desirable than the being a king, for those who
shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a
possibility; but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific Vision be
indeed possible, if philosophy really “concludes in an ecstasy,”
affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain
elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been discovered more
desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you might induce such
persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon them the distasteful
task of governing other men, or even of leading them to victory in
battle. But, by the very conditions of its tenure, their dominion would
be wholly a ministry to others: they would have taken upon them “the
form of a servant”: they would be reigning for the well-being of others
rather than their own. The true king, the righteous king, would be
Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the better land and its perfected
company—so real a thing to him, definite and real as the pictured
scenes of his psalter—to take part in or to arbitrate men’s quarrels,
about the transitory appearances of things. In a lower degree (lower,
in proportion as the highest Platonic dream is lower than any Christian
vision) the true king would be Marcus Aurelius, drawn from the
meditation of books, to be the ruler of the Roman people in peace, and
still more, in war.
To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the visions, however dim,
which this mood brought with it, were sufficiently pleasant to him,
together with the endearments of his home, to make public rule nothing
less than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato’s requirement, now
consummated in his setting forth for the campaign on the Danube. That
it was such a sacrifice was to Marius visible fact, as he saw him
ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all the pageantry of an
imperial departure, yet with the air less of a sanguine and
self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other already defeated.
Through the fortune of the subsequent years, passing and repassing so
inexplicably from side to side, the rumour of which reached him amid
his own quiet studies, Marius seemed always to see that central figure,
with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive
suffering, all the stranger from its contrast with the magnificent
armour worn by the emperor on this occasion, as it had been worn by his
predecessor Hadrian.
Totus et argento contextus et auro:
clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed
armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous
lightsomeness—he looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere
comfortless shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction of the
labours of Hercules, through those northern, mist-laden confines of the
civilised world. It was as if the familiar soul which had been so
friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to Hades; and when
he read the Conversations afterwards, though his judgment of them
underwent no material change, it was nevertheless with the allowance we
make for the dead. The memory of that suffering image, while it
certainly strengthened his adhesion to what he could accept at all in
the philosophy of Aurelius, added a strange pathos to what must seem
the writer’s mistakes. What, after all, had been the meaning of that
incident, observed as so fortunate an omen long since, when the prince,
then a little child much younger than was usual, had stood in ceremony
among the priests of Mars and flung his crown of flowers with the rest
at the sacred image reclining on the Pulvinar? The other crowns lodged
themselves here or there; when, Lo! the crown thrown by Aurelius, the
youngest of them all, alighted upon the very brows of the god, as if
placed there by a careful hand! He was still young, also, when on the
day of his adoption by Antoninus Pius he saw himself in a dream, with
as it were shoulders of ivory, like the images of the gods, and found
them more capable than shoulders of flesh. Yet he was now well-nigh
fifty years of age, setting out with two-thirds of life behind him,
upon a labour which would fill the remainder of it with anxious cares—a
labour for which he had perhaps no capacity, and certainly no taste.
That ancient suit of armour was almost the only object Aurelius now
possessed from all those much cherished articles of vertu collected by
the Caesars, making the imperial residence like a magnificent museum.
Not men alone were needed for the war, so that it became necessary, to
the great disgust alike of timid persons and of the lovers of sport, to
arm the gladiators, but money also was lacking. Accordingly, at the
sole motion of Aurelius himself, unwilling that the public burden
should be further increased, especially on the part of the poor, the
whole of the imperial ornaments and furniture, a sumptuous collection
of gems formed by Hadrian, with many works of the most famous painters
and sculptors, even the precious ornaments of the emperor’s chapel or
Lararium, and the wardrobe of the empress Faustina, who seems to have
borne the loss without a murmur, were exposed for public auction.
“These treasures,” said Aurelius, “like all else that I possess, belong
by right to the Senate and People.” Was it not a characteristic of the
true kings in Plato that they had in their houses nothing they could
call their own? Connoisseurs had a keen delight in the mere reading of
the Praetor’s list of the property for sale. For two months the learned
in these matters were daily occupied in the appraising of the
embroidered hangings, the choice articles of personal use selected for
preservation by each succeeding age, the great outlandish pearls from
Hadrian’s favourite cabinet, the marvellous plate lying safe behind the
pretty iron wicker-work of the shops in the goldsmiths’ quarter.
Meantime ordinary persons might have an interest in the inspection of
objects which had been as daily companions to people so far above and
remote from them—things so fine also in workmanship and material as to
seem, with their antique and delicate air, a worthy survival of the
grand bygone eras, like select thoughts or utterances embodying the
very spirit of the vanished past. The town became more pensive than
ever over old fashions.
The welcome amusement of this last act of preparation for the great war
being now over, all Rome seemed to settle down into a singular quiet,
likely to last long, as though bent only on watching from afar the
languid, somewhat uneventful course of the contest itself. Marius took
advantage of it as an opportunity for still closer study than of old,
only now and then going out to one of his favourite spots on the Sabine
or Alban hills for a quiet even greater than that of Rome in the
country air. On one of these occasions, as if by favour of an invisible
power withdrawing some unknown cause of dejection from around him, he
enjoyed a quite unusual sense of self-possession—the possession of his
own best and happiest self. After some gloomy thoughts over-night, he
awoke under the full tide of the rising sun, himself full, in his
entire refreshment, of that almost religious appreciation of sleep, the
graciousness of its influence on men’s spirits, which had made the old
Greeks conceive of it as a god. It was like one of those old joyful
wakings of childhood, now becoming rarer and rarer with him, and looked
back upon with much regret as a measure of advancing age. In fact, the
last bequest of this serene sleep had been a dream, in which, as once
before, he overheard those he loved best pronouncing his name very
pleasantly, as they passed through the rich light and shadow of a
summer morning, along the pavement of a city—Ah! fairer far than Rome!
In a moment, as he arose, a certain oppression of late setting very
heavily upon him was lifted away, as though by some physical motion in
the air.
That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasurable excitement,
yet so easily ruffled by chance collision even with the things and
persons he had come to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to
be wholly his to-day, he thought, as he rode towards Tibur, under the
early sunshine; the marble of its villas glistening all the way before
him on the hillside. And why could he not hold such serenity of spirit
ever at command? he asked, expert as he was at last become in the art
of setting the house of his thoughts in order. “’Tis in thy power to
think as thou wilt:” he repeated to himself: it was the most
serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him by those imperial
conversations.—“’Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt.” And were the
cheerful, sociable, restorative beliefs, of which he had there read so
much, that bold adhesion, for instance, to the hypothesis of an eternal
friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and material
order, but only just behind it, ready perhaps even now to break
through:—were they, after all, really a matter of choice, dependent on
some deliberate act of volition on his part? Were they doctrines one
might take for granted, generously take for granted, and led on by
them, at first as but well-defined objects of hope, come at last into
the region of a corresponding certitude of the intellect? “It is the
truth I seek,” he had read, “the truth, by which no one,” gray and
depressing though it might seem, “was ever really injured.” And yet, on
the other hand, the imperial wayfarer, he had been able to go along
with so far on his intellectual pilgrimage, let fall many things
concerning the practicability of a methodical and self-forced assent to
certain principles or presuppositions “one could not do without.” Were
there, as the expression “one could not do without” seemed to hint,
beliefs, without which life itself must be almost impossible,
principles which had their sufficient ground of evidence in that very
fact? Experience certainly taught that, as regarding the sensible world
he could attend or not, almost at will, to this or that colour, this or
that train of sounds, in the whole tumultuous concourse of colour and
sound, so it was also, for the well-trained intelligence, in regard to
that hum of voices which besiege the inward no less than the outward
ear. Might it be not otherwise with those various and competing
hypotheses, the permissible hypotheses, which, in that open field for
hypothesis—one’s own actual ignorance of the origin and tendency of our
being—present themselves so importunately, some of them with so
emphatic a reiteration, through all the mental changes of successive
ages? Might the will itself be an organ of knowledge, of vision?
On this day truly no mysterious light, no irresistibly leading hand
from afar reached him; only the peculiarly tranquil influence of its
first hour increased steadily upon him, in a manner with which, as he
conceived, the aspects of the place he was then visiting had something
to do. The air there, air supposed to possess the singular property of
restoring the whiteness of ivory, was pure and thin. An even veil of
lawn-like white cloud had now drawn over the sky; and under its broad,
shadowless light every hue and tone of time came out upon the yellow
old temples, the elegant pillared circle of the shrine of the patronal
Sibyl, the houses seemingly of a piece with the ancient fundamental
rock. Some half-conscious motive of poetic grace would appear to have
determined their grouping; in part resisting, partly going along with
the natural wildness and harshness of the place, its floods and
precipices. An air of immense age possessed, above all, the vegetation
around—a world of evergreen trees—the olives especially, older than how
many generations of men’s lives! fretted and twisted by the combining
forces of life and death, into every conceivable caprice of form. In
the windless weather all seemed to be listening to the roar of the
immemorial waterfall, plunging down so unassociably among these human
habitations, and with a motion so unchanging from age to age as to
count, even in this time-worn place, as an image of unalterable rest.
Yet the clear sky all but broke to let through the ray which was
silently quickening everything in the late February afternoon, and the
unseen violet refined itself through the air. It was as if the spirit
of life in nature were but withholding any too precipitate revelation
of itself, in its slow, wise, maturing work.
Through some accident to the trappings of his horse at the inn where he
rested, Marius had an unexpected delay. He sat down in an olive-garden,
and, all around him and within still turning to reverie, the course of
his own life hitherto seemed to withdraw itself into some other world,
disparted from this spectacular point where he was now placed to survey
it, like that distant road below, along which he had travelled this
morning across the Campagna. Through a dreamy land he could see himself
moving, as if in another life, and like another person, through all his
fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point, weeping,
delighted, escaping from various dangers. That prospect brought him,
first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude: it was as if he must look
round for some one else to share his joy with: for some one to whom he
might tell the thing, for his own relief. Companionship, indeed,
familiarity with others, gifted in this way or that, or at least
pleasant to him, had been, through one or another long span of it, the
chief delight of the journey. And was it only the resultant general
sense of such familiarity, diffused through his memory, that in a while
suggested the question whether there had not been—besides Flavian,
besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude he had which in spite of
ardent friendship perhaps loved best of all things—some other
companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side throughout;
doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of his
peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful
recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was
there at all? Must not the whole world around have faded away for him
altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it? In his
deepest apparent solitude there had been rich entertainment. It was as
if there were not one only, but two wayfarers, side by side, visible
there across the plain, as he indulged his fancy. A bird came and sang
among the wattled hedge-roses: an animal feeding crept nearer: the
child who kept it was gazing quietly: and the scene and the hours still
conspiring, he passed from that mere fantasy of a self not himself,
beside him in his coming and going, to those divinations of a living
and companionable spirit at work in all things, of which he had become
aware from time to time in his old philosophic readings—in Plato and
others, last but not least, in Aurelius. Through one reflection upon
another, he passed from such instinctive divinations, to the thoughts
which give them logical consistency, formulating at last, as the
necessary exponent of our own and the world’s life, that reasonable
Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator, which for
the philosophers of Greece is the Eternal Reason, and in the New
Testament the Father of Men—even as one builds up from act and word and
expression of the friend actually visible at one’s side, an ideal of
the spirit within him.
In this peculiar and privileged hour, his bodily frame, as he could
recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of its capacities, so
entirely possessed by him—Nay! actually his very self—was yet
determined by a far-reaching system of material forces external to it,
a thousand combining currents from earth and sky. Its seemingly active
powers of apprehension were, in fact, but susceptibilities to
influence. The perfection of its capacity might be said to depend on
its passive surrender, as of a leaf on the wind, to the motions of the
great stream of physical energy without it. And might not the
intellectual frame also, still more intimately himself as in truth it
was, after the analogy of the bodily life, be a moment only, an impulse
or series of impulses, a single process, in an intellectual or
spiritual system external to it, diffused through all time and
place—that great stream of spiritual energy, of which his own imperfect
thoughts, yesterday or to-day, would be but the remote, and therefore
imperfect pulsations? It was the hypothesis (boldest, though in reality
the most conceivable of all hypotheses) which had dawned on the
contemplations of the two opposed great masters of the old Greek
thought, alike:—the “World of Ideas,” existent only because, and in so
far as, they are known, as Plato conceived; the “creative,
incorruptible, informing mind,” supposed by Aristotle, so sober-minded,
yet as regards this matter left something of a mystic after all. Might
not this entire material world, the very scene around him, the
immemorial rocks, the firm marble, the olive-gardens, the falling
water, be themselves but reflections in, or a creation of, that one
indefectible mind, wherein he too became conscious, for an hour, a day,
for so many years? Upon what other hypothesis could he so well
understand the persistency of all these things for his own intermittent
consciousness of them, for the intermittent consciousness of so many
generations, fleeting away one after another? It was easier to conceive
of the material fabric of things as but an element in a world of
thought—as a thought in a mind, than of mind as an element, or
accident, or passing condition in a world of matter, because mind was
really nearer to himself: it was an explanation of what was less known
by what was known better. The purely material world, that close,
impassable prison-wall, seemed just then the unreal thing, to be
actually dissolving away all around him: and he felt a quiet hope, a
quiet joy dawning faintly, in the dawning of this doctrine upon him as
a really credible opinion. It was like the break of day over some vast
prospect with the “new city,” as it were some celestial New Rome, in
the midst of it. That divine companion figured no longer as but an
occasional wayfarer beside him; but rather as the unfailing
“assistant,” without whose inspiration and concurrence he could not
breathe or see, instrumenting his bodily senses, rounding, supporting
his imperfect thoughts. How often had the thought of their brevity
spoiled for him the most natural pleasures of life, confusing even his
present sense of them by the suggestion of disease, of death, of a
coming end, in everything! How had he longed, sometimes, that there
were indeed one to whose boundless power of memory he could commit his
own most fortunate moments, his admiration, his love, Ay! the very
sorrows of which he could not bear quite to lose the sense:—one strong
to retain them even though he forgot, in whose more vigorous
consciousness they might subsist for ever, beyond that mere quickening
of capacity which was all that remained of them in himself! “Oh! that
they might live before Thee”—To-day at least, in the peculiar clearness
of one privileged hour, he seemed to have apprehended that in which the
experiences he valued most might find, one by one, an abiding-place.
And again, the resultant sense of companionship, of a person beside
him, evoked the faculty of conscience—of conscience, as of old and when
he had been at his best, in the form, not of fear, nor of self-reproach
even, but of a certain lively gratitude.
Himself—his sensations and ideas—never fell again precisely into focus
as on that day, yet he was the richer by its experience. But for once
only to have come under the power of that peculiar mood, to have felt
the train of reflections which belong to it really forcible and
conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion, to have
apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal
gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the
shadows of the world, left this one particular hour a marked point in
life never to be forgotten. It gave him a definitely ascertained
measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul must
make upon the powers, whatsoever they might be, which had brought him,
as he was, into the world at all. And again, would he be faithful to
himself, to his own habits of mind, his leading suppositions, if he did
but remain just there? Must not all that remained of life be but a
search for the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual
things—a gathering together of every trace or token of it, which his
actual experience might present?
PART THE FOURTH