SUNT LACRIMAE RERUM+
It was become a habit with Marius—one of his modernisms—developed by
his assistance at the Emperor’s “conversations with himself,” to keep a
register of the movements of his own private thoughts and humours; not
continuously indeed, yet sometimes for lengthy intervals, during which
it was no idle self-indulgence, but a necessity of his intellectual
life, to “confess himself,” with an intimacy, seemingly rare among the
ancients; ancient writers, at all events, having been jealous, for the
most part, of affording us so much as a glimpse of that interior self,
which in many cases would have actually doubled the interest of their
objective informations.
“If a particular tutelary or genius,” writes Marius,—“according to old
belief, walks through life beside each one of us, mine is very
certainly a capricious creature. He fills one with wayward,
unaccountable, yet quite irresistible humours, and seems always to be
in collusion with some outward circumstance, often trivial enough in
itself—the condition of the weather, forsooth!—the people one meets by
chance—the things one happens to overhear them say, veritable enodioi
symboloi,+ or omens by the wayside, as the old Greeks fancied—to push
on the unreasonable prepossessions of the moment into weighty motives.
It was doubtless a quite explicable, physical fatigue that presented me
to myself, on awaking this morning, so lack-lustre and trite. But I
must needs take my petulance, contrasting it with my accustomed morning
hopefulness, as a sign of the ageing of appetite, of a decay in the
very capacity of enjoyment. We need some imaginative stimulus, some not
impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into
effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through
the routine-work which is so large a part of life. “Then, how if
appetite, be it for real or ideal, should itself fail one after awhile?
Ah, yes! is it of cold always that men die; and on some of us it creeps
very gradually. In truth, I can remember just such a lack-lustre
condition of feeling once or twice before. But I note, that it was
accompanied then by an odd indifference, as the thought of them
occurred to me, in regard to the sufferings of others—a kind of
callousness, so unusual with me, as at once to mark the humour it
accompanied as a palpably morbid one that could not last. Were those
sufferings, great or little, I asked myself then, of more real
consequence to them than mine to me, as I remind myself that ‘nothing
that will end is really long’—long enough to be thought of importance?
But to-day, my own sense of fatigue, the pity I conceive for myself,
disposed me strongly to a tenderness for others. For a moment the whole
world seemed to present itself as a hospital of sick persons; many of
them sick in mind; all of whom it would be a brutality not to humour,
not to indulge.
“Why, when I went out to walk off my wayward fancies, did I confront
the very sort of incident (my unfortunate genius had surely beckoned it
from afar to vex me) likely to irritate them further? A party of men
were coming down the street. They were leading a fine race-horse; a
handsome beast, but badly hurt somewhere, in the circus, and useless.
They were taking him to slaughter; and I think the animal knew it: he
cast such looks, as if of mad appeal, to those who passed him, as he
went among the strangers to whom his former owner had committed him, to
die, in his beauty and pride, for just that one mischance or fault;
although the morning air was still so animating, and pleasant to snuff.
I could have fancied a human soul in the creature, swelling against its
luck. And I had come across the incident just when it would figure to
me as the very symbol of our poor humanity, in its capacities for pain,
its wretched accidents, and those imperfect sympathies, which can never
quite identify us with one another; the very power of utterance and
appeal to others seeming to fail us, in proportion as our sorrows come
home to ourselves, are really our own. We are constructed for
suffering! What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we care to
note them, as we go—a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries! Sunt
lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.+
“Men’s fortunes touch us! The little children of one of those
institutions for the support of orphans, now become fashionable among
us by way of memorial of eminent persons deceased, are going, in long
file, along the street, on their way to a holiday in the country. They
halt, and count themselves with an air of triumph, to show that they
are all there. Their gay chatter has disturbed a little group of
peasants; a young woman and her husband, who have brought the old
mother, now past work and witless, to place her in a house provided for
such afflicted people. They are fairly affectionate, but anxious how
the thing they have to do may go—hope only she may permit them to leave
her there behind quietly. And the poor old soul is excited by the noise
made by the children, and partly aware of what is going to happen with
her. She too begins to count—one, two, three, five—on her trembling
fingers, misshapen by a life of toil.
‘Yes! yes! and twice five make ten’—they say, to pacify her. It is her
last appeal to be taken home again; her proof that all is not yet up
with her; that she is, at all events, still as capable as those joyous
children.
“At the baths, a party of labourers are at work upon one of the great
brick furnaces, in a cloud of black dust. A frail young child has
brought food for one of them, and sits apart, waiting till his father
comes—watching the labour, but with a sorrowful distaste for the din
and dirt. He is regarding wistfully his own place in the world, there
before him. His mind, as he watches, is grown up for a moment; and he
foresees, as it were, in that moment, all the long tale of days, of
early awakings, of his own coming life of drudgery at work like this.
“A man comes along carrying a boy whose rough work has already
begun—the only child—whose presence beside him sweetened the father’s
toil a little. The boy has been badly injured by a fall of brick-work,
yet, with an effort, he rides boldly on his father’s shoulders. It will
be the way of natural affection to keep him alive as long as possible,
though with that miserably shattered body.—‘Ah! with us still, and
feeling our care beside him!’—and yet surely not without a
heartbreaking sigh of relief, alike from him and them, when the end
comes.
“On the alert for incidents like these, yet of necessity passing them
by on the other side, I find it hard to get rid of a sense that I, for
one, have failed in love. I could yield to the humour till I seemed to
have had my share in those great public cruelties, the shocking legal
crimes which are on record, like that cold-blooded slaughter, according
to law, of the four hundred slaves in the reign of Nero, because one of
their number was thought to have murdered his master. The reproach of
that, together with the kind of facile apologies those who had no share
in the deed may have made for it, as they went about quietly on their
own affairs that day, seems to come very close to me, as I think upon
it. And to how many of those now actually around me, whose life is a
sore one, must I be indifferent, if I ever become aware of their
soreness at all? To some, perhaps, the necessary conditions of my own
life may cause me to be opposed, in a kind of natural conflict,
regarding those interests which actually determine the happiness of
theirs. I would that a stronger love might arise in my heart!
“Yet there is plenty of charity in the world. My patron, the Stoic
emperor, has made it even fashionable. To celebrate one of his brief
returns to Rome lately from the war, over and above a largess of gold
pieces to all who would, the public debts were forgiven. He made a nice
show of it: for once, the Romans entertained themselves with a
good-natured spectacle, and the whole town came to see the great
bonfire in the Forum, into which all bonds and evidence of debt were
thrown on delivery, by the emperor himself; many private creditors
following his example. That was done well enough! But still the feeling
returns to me, that no charity of ours can get at a certain natural
unkindness which I find in things themselves.
“When I first came to Rome, eager to observe its religion, especially
its antiquities of religious usage, I assisted at the most curious,
perhaps, of them all, the most distinctly marked with that immobility
which is a sort of ideal in the Roman religion. The ceremony took place
at a singular spot some miles distant from the city, among the low
hills on the bank of the Tiber, beyond the Aurelian Gate. There, in a
little wood of venerable trees, piously allowed their own way, age
after age—ilex and cypress remaining where they fell at last, one over
the other, and all caught, in that early May-time, under a riotous
tangle of wild clematis—was to be found a magnificent sanctuary, in
which the members of the Arval College assembled themselves on certain
days. The axe never touched those trees—Nay! it was forbidden to
introduce any iron thing whatsoever within the precincts; not only
because the deities of these quiet places hate to be disturbed by the
harsh noise of metal, but also in memory of that better age—the lost
Golden Age—the homely age of the potters, of which the central act of
the festival was a commemoration.
“The preliminary ceremonies were long and complicated, but of a
character familiar enough. Peculiar to the time and place was the
solemn exposition, after lavation of hands, processions backwards and
forwards, and certain changes of vestments, of the identical earthen
vessels—veritable relics of the old religion of Numa!—the vessels from
which the holy Numa himself had eaten and drunk, set forth above a kind
of altar, amid a cloud of flowers and incense, and many lights, for the
veneration of the credulous or the faithful.
“They were, in fact, cups or vases of burnt clay, rude in form: and the
religious veneration thus offered to them expressed men’s desire to
give honour to a simpler age, before iron had found place in human
life: the persuasion that that age was worth remembering: a hope that
it might come again.
“That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, has been the hope or
the dream of some, in every period. Yet if he did come back, or any
equivalent of his presence, he could but weaken, and by no means smite
through, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human
sense, in things, which one must carefully distinguish from all
preventible accidents. Death, and the little perpetual daily dyings,
which have something of its sting, he must necessarily leave untouched.
And, methinks, that were all the rest of man’s life framed entirely to
his liking, he would straightway begin to sadden himself, over the
fate—say, of the flowers! For there is, there has come to be since Numa
lived perhaps, a capacity for sorrow in his heart, which grows with all
the growth, alike of the individual and of the race, in intellectual
delicacy and power, and which will find its aliment.
“Of that sort of golden age, indeed, one discerns even now a trace,
here and there. Often have I maintained that, in this generous southern
country at least, Epicureanism is the special philosophy of the poor.
How little I myself really need, when people leave me alone, with the
intellectual powers at work serenely. The drops of falling water, a few
wild flowers with their priceless fragrance, a few tufts even of
half-dead leaves, changing colour in the quiet of a room that has but
light and shadow in it; these, for a susceptible mind, might well do
duty for all the glory of Augustus. I notice sometimes what I conceive
to be the precise character of the fondness of the roughest
working-people for their young children, a fine appreciation, not only
of their serviceable affection, but of their visible graces: and
indeed, in this country, the children are almost always worth looking
at. I see daily, in fine weather, a child like a delicate nosegay,
running to meet the rudest of brick- makers as he comes from work. She
is not at all afraid to hang upon his rough hand: and through her, he
reaches out to, he makes his own, something from that strange region,
so distant from him yet so real, of the world’s refinement. What is of
finer soul, of finer stuff in things, and demands delicate touching—to
him the delicacy of the little child represents that: it initiates him
into that. There, surely, is a touch of the secular gold, of a
perpetual age of gold. But then again, think for a moment, with what a
hard humour at the nature of things, his struggle for bare life will go
on, if the child should happen to die. I observed to-day, under one of
the archways of the baths, two children at play, a little seriously—a
fair girl and her crippled younger brother. Two toy chairs and a little
table, and sprigs of fir set upright in the sand for a garden! They
played at housekeeping. Well! the girl thinks her life a perfectly good
thing in the service of this crippled brother. But she will have a
jealous lover in time: and the boy, though his face is not altogether
unpleasant, is after all a hopeless cripple.
“For there is a certain grief in things as they are, in man as he has
come to be, as he certainly is, over and above those griefs of
circumstance which are in a measure removable—some inexplicable
shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself—death, and
old age as it must needs be, and that watching for their approach,
which makes every stage of life like a dying over and over again.
Almost all death is painful, and in every thing that comes to an end a
touch of death, and therefore of wretched coldness struck home to one,
of remorse, of loss and parting, of outraged attachments. Given
faultless men and women, given a perfect state of society which should
have no need to practise on men’s susceptibilities for its own selfish
ends, adding one turn more to the wheel of the great rack for its own
interest or amusement, there would still be this evil in the world, of
a certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in proportion to
the moral, or nervous perfection men have attained to. And what we need
in the world, over against that, is a certain permanent and general
power of compassion—humanity’s standing force of self-pity—as an
elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we are to live in it
at all. I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has cajoled himself into
the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how every step in the
capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him, from age to age,
must needs increase his dejection. It is as if the increase of
knowledge were but an increasing revelation of the radical hopelessness
of his position: and I would that there were one even as I, behind this
vain show of things!
“At all events, the actual conditions of our life being as they are,
and the capacity for suffering so large a principle in things—since the
only principle, perhaps, to which we may always safely trust is a ready
sympathy with the pain one actually sees—it follows that the practical
and effective difference between men will lie in their power of insight
into those conditions, their power of sympathy. The future will be with
those who have most of it; while for the present, as I persuade myself,
those who have much of it, have something to hold by, even in the
dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of self, which is, for
every one, no less than the dissolution of the world it represents for
him. Nearly all of us, I suppose, have had our moments, in which any
effective sympathy for us on the part of others has seemed impossible;
in which our pain has seemed a stupid outrage upon us, like some
overwhelming physical violence, from which we could take refuge, at
best, only in some mere general sense of goodwill—somewhere in the
world perhaps. And then, to one’s surprise, the discovery of that
goodwill, if it were only in a not unfriendly animal, may seem to have
explained, to have actually justified to us, the fact of our pain.
There have been occasions, certainly, when I have felt that if others
cared for me as I cared for them, it would be, not so much a
consolation, as an equivalent, for what one has lost or suffered: a
realised profit on the summing up of one’s accounts: a touching of that
absolute ground amid all the changes of phenomena, such as our
philosophers have of late confessed themselves quite unable to
discover. In the mere clinging of human creatures to each other, nay!
in one’s own solitary self-pity, amid the effects even of what might
appear irredeemable loss, I seem to touch the eternal. Something in
that pitiful contact, something new and true, fact or apprehension of
fact, is educed, which, on a review of all the perplexities of life,
satisfies our moral sense, and removes that appearance of unkindness in
the soul of things themselves, and assures us that not everything has
been in vain.
“And I know not how, but in the thought thus suggested, I seem to take
up, and re-knit myself to, a well-remembered hour, when by some
gracious accident—it was on a journey—all things about me fell into a
more perfect harmony than is their wont. Everything seemed to be, for a
moment, after all, almost for the best. Through the train of my
thoughts, one against another, it was as if I became aware of the
dominant power of another person in controversy, wrestling with me. I
seem to be come round to the point at which I left off then. The
antagonist has closed with me again. A protest comes, out of the very
depths of man’s radically hopeless condition in the world, with the
energy of one of those suffering yet prevailing deities, of which old
poetry tells. Dared one hope that there is a heart, even as ours, in
that divine ‘Assistant’ of one’s thoughts—a heart even as mine, behind
this vain show of things!”
NOTES
172. Virgil, Aeneid Book 1, line 462. “There are the tears of
things...” See also page 175 of this chapter, where the same text is
quoted in full.
173. +Transliteration: enodioi symboloi. Pater’s Definition: “omens by
the wayside.”
175. +Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Virgil, Aeneid
Book 1, line 462. Translation: “Here also there be tears for what men
bear, and mortal creatures feel each other’s sorrow,” from Vergil,
Aeneid, Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE MARTYRS
“Ah! voilà les âmes qu’il falloit à la mienne!”
Rousseau.
The charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections, wonderfully fresh
in the midst of a threadbare world, would have led Marius, if nothing
else had done so, again and again, to Cecilia’s house. He found a range
of intellectual pleasures, altogether new to him, in the sympathy of
that pure and elevated soul. Elevation of soul, generosity,
humanity—little by little it came to seem to him as if these existed
nowhere else. The sentiment of maternity, above all, as it might be
understood there,—its claims, with the claims of all natural feeling
everywhere, down to the sheep bleating on the hills, nay! even to the
mother-wolf, in her hungry cave—seemed to have been vindicated, to have
been enforced anew, by the sanction of some divine pattern thereof. He
saw its legitimate place in the world given at last to the bare
capacity for suffering in any creature, however feeble or apparently
useless. In this chivalry, seeming to leave the world’s heroism a mere
property of the stage, in this so scrupulous fidelity to what could not
help itself, could scarcely claim not to be forgotten, what a contrast
to the hard contempt of one’s own or other’s pain, of death, of glory
even, in those discourses of Aurelius!
But if Marius thought at times that some long-cherished desires were
now about to blossom for him, in the sort of home he had sometimes
pictured to himself, the very charm of which would lie in its contrast
to any random affections: that in this woman, to whom children
instinctively clung, he might find such a sister, at least, as he had
always longed for; there were also circumstances which reminded him
that a certain rule forbidding second marriages, was among these people
still in force; ominous incidents, moreover, warning a susceptible
conscience not to mix together the spirit and the flesh, nor make the
matter of a heavenly banquet serve for earthly meat and drink.
One day he found Cecilia occupied with the burial of one of the
children of her household. It was from the tiny brow of such a child,
as he now heard, that the new light had first shone forth upon
them—through the light of mere physical life, glowing there again, when
the child was dead, or supposed to be dead. The aged servant of Christ
had arrived in the midst of their noisy grief; and mounting to the
little chamber where it lay, had returned, not long afterwards, with
the child stirring in his arms as he descended the stair rapidly;
bursting open the closely-wound folds of the shroud and scattering the
funeral flowers from them, as the soul kindled once more through its
limbs.
Old Roman common-sense had taught people to occupy their thoughts as
little as might be with children who died young. Here, to-day, however,
in this curious house, all thoughts were tenderly bent on the little
waxen figure, yet with a kind of exultation and joy, notwithstanding
the loud weeping of the mother. The other children, its late
companions, broke with it, suddenly, into the place where the deep
black bed lay open to receive it. Pushing away the grim fossores, the
grave-diggers, they ranged themselves around it in order, and chanted
that old psalm of theirs—Laudate pueri dominum! Dead children,
children’s graves—Marius had been always half aware of an old
superstitious fancy in his mind concerning them; as if in coming near
them he came near the failure of some lately-born hope or purpose of
his own. And now, perusing intently the expression with which Cecilia
assisted, directed, returned afterwards to her house, he felt that he
too had had to-day his funeral of a little child. But it had always
been his policy, through all his pursuit of “experience,” to take
flight in time from any too disturbing passion, from any sort of
affection likely to quicken his pulses beyond the point at which the
quiet work of life was practicable. Had he, after all, been taken
unawares, so that it was no longer possible for him to fly? At least,
during the journey he took, by way of testing the existence of any
chain about him, he found a certain disappointment at his heart,
greater than he could have anticipated; and as he passed over the crisp
leaves, nipped off in multitudes by the first sudden cold of winter, he
felt that the mental atmosphere within himself was perceptibly colder.
Yet it was, finally, a quite successful resignation which he achieved,
on a review, after his manner, during that absence, of loss or gain.
The image of Cecilia, it would seem, was already become for him like
some matter of poetry, or of another man’s story, or a picture on the
wall. And on his return to Rome there had been a rumour in that
singular company, of things which spoke certainly not of any merely
tranquil loving: hinted rather that he had come across a world, the
lightest contact with which might make appropriate to himself also the
precept that “They which have wives be as they that have none.”
This was brought home to him, when, in early spring, he ventured once
more to listen to the sweet singing of the Eucharist. It breathed more
than ever the spirit of a wonderful hope—of hopes more daring than
poor, labouring humanity had ever seriously entertained before, though
it was plain that a great calamity was befallen. Amid stifled sobbing,
even as the pathetic words of the psalter relieved the tension of their
hearts, the people around him still wore upon their faces their
habitual gleam of joy, of placid satisfaction. They were still under
the influence of an immense gratitude in thinking, even amid their
present distress, of the hour of a great deliverance. As he followed
again that mystical dialogue, he felt also again, like a mighty spirit
about him, the potency, the half-realised presence, of a great
multitude, as if thronging along those awful passages, to hear the
sentence of its release from prison; a company which represented
nothing less than—orbis terrarum—the whole company of mankind. And the
special note of the day expressed that relief—a sound new to him, drawn
deep from some old Hebrew source, as he conjectured, Alleluia! repeated
over and over again, Alleluia! Alleluia! at every pause and movement of
the long Easter ceremonies.
And then, in its place, by way of sacred lection, although in shocking
contrast with the peaceful dignity of all around, came the Epistle of
the churches of Lyons and Vienne, to “their sister,” the church of
Rome. For the “Peace” of the church had been broken—broken, as Marius
could not but acknowledge, on the responsibility of the emperor
Aurelius himself, following tamely, and as a matter of course, the
traces of his predecessors, gratuitously enlisting, against the good as
well as the evil of that great pagan world, the strange new heroism of
which this singular message was full. The greatness of it certainly
lifted away all merely private regret, inclining one, at last, actually
to draw sword for the oppressed, as if in some new order of knighthood—
“The pains which our brethren have endured we have no power fully to
tell, for the enemy came upon us with his whole strength. But the grace
of God fought for us, set free the weak, and made ready those who, like
pillars, were able to bear the weight. These, coming now into close
strife with the foe, bore every kind of pang and shame. At the time of
the fair which is held here with a great crowd, the governor led forth
the Martyrs as a show. Holding what was thought great but little, and
that the pains of to-day are not deserving to be measured against the
glory that shall be made known, these worthy wrestlers went joyfully on
their way; their delight and the sweet favour of God mingling in their
faces, so that their bonds seemed but a goodly array, or like the
golden bracelets of a bride. Filled with the fragrance of Christ, to
some they seemed to have been touched with earthly perfumes.
“Vettius Epagathus, though he was very young, because he would not
endure to see unjust judgment given against us, vented his anger, and
sought to be heard for the brethren, for he was a youth of high place.
Whereupon the governor asked him whether he also were a Christian. He
confessed in a clear voice, and was added to the number of the Martyrs.
But he had the Paraclete within him; as, in truth, he showed by the
fulness of his love; glorying in the defence of his brethren, and to
give his life for theirs.
“Then was fulfilled the saying of the Lord that the day should come,
When he that slayeth you will think that he doeth God service. Most
madly did the mob, the governor and the soldiers, rage against the
handmaiden Blandina, in whom Christ showed that what seems mean among
men is of price with Him. For whilst we all, and her earthly mistress,
who was herself one of the contending Martyrs, were fearful lest
through the weakness of the flesh she should be unable to profess the
faith, Blandina was filled with such power that her tormentors,
following upon each other from morning until night, owned that they
were overcome, and had no more that they could do to her; admiring that
she still breathed after her whole body was torn asunder.
“But this blessed one, in the very midst of her ‘witness,’ renewed her
strength; and to repeat, I am Christ’s! was to her rest, refreshment,
and relief from pain. As for Alexander, he neither uttered a groan nor
any sound at all, but in his heart talked with God. Sanctus, the
deacon, also, having borne beyond all measure pains devised by them,
hoping that they would get something from him, did not so much as tell
his name; but to all questions answered only, I am Christ’s! For this
he confessed instead of his name, his race, and everything beside.
Whence also a strife in torturing him arose between the governor and
those tormentors, so that when they had nothing else they could do they
set red-hot plates of brass to the most tender parts of his body. But
he stood firm in his profession, cooled and fortified by that stream of
living water which flows from Christ. His corpse, a single wound,
having wholly lost the form of man, was the measure of his pain. But
Christ, paining in him, set forth an ensample to the rest—that there is
nothing fearful, nothing painful, where the love of the Father
overcomes. And as all those cruelties were made null through the
patience of the Martyrs, they bethought them of other things; among
which was their imprisonment in a dark and most sorrowful place, where
many were privily strangled. But destitute of man’s aid, they were
filled with power from the Lord, both in body and mind, and
strengthened their brethren. Also, much joy was in our virgin mother,
the Church; for, by means of these, such as were fallen away retraced
their steps—were again conceived, were filled again with lively heat,
and hastened to make the profession of their faith.
“The holy bishop Pothinus, who was now past ninety years old and weak
in body, yet in his heat of soul and longing for martyrdom, roused what
strength he had, and was also cruelly dragged to judgment, and gave
witness. Thereupon he suffered many stripes, all thinking it would be a
wickedness if they fell short in cruelty towards him, for that thus
their own gods would be avenged. Hardly drawing breath, he was thrown
into prison, and after two days there died.
“After these things their martyrdom was parted into divers manners.
Plaiting as it were one crown of many colours and every sort of
flowers, they offered it to God. Maturus, therefore, Sanctus and
Blandina, were led to the wild beasts. And Maturus and Sanctus passed
through all the pains of the amphitheatre, as if they had suffered
nothing before: or rather, as having in many trials overcome, and now
contending for the prize itself, were at last dismissed.
“But Blandina was bound and hung upon a stake, and set forth as food
for the assault of the wild beasts. And as she thus seemed to be hung
upon the Cross, by her fiery prayers she imparted much alacrity to
those contending Witnesses. For as they looked upon her with the eye of
flesh, through her, they saw Him that was crucified. But as none of the
beasts would then touch her, she was taken down from the Cross, and
sent back to prison for another day: that, though weak and mean, yet
clothed with the mighty wrestler, Christ Jesus, she might by many
conquests give heart to her brethren.
“On the last day, therefore, of the shows, she was brought forth again,
together with Ponticus, a lad of about fifteen years old. They were
brought in day by day to behold the pains of the rest. And when they
wavered not, the mob was full of rage; pitying neither the youth of the
lad, nor the sex of the maiden. Hence, they drave them through the
whole round of pain. And Ponticus, taking heart from Blandina, having
borne well the whole of those torments, gave up his life. Last of all,
the blessed Blandina herself, as a mother that had given life to her
children, and sent them like conquerors to the great King, hastened to
them, with joy at the end, as to a marriage-feast; the enemy himself
confessing that no woman had ever borne pain so manifold and great as
hers.
“Nor even so was their anger appeased; some among them seeking for us
pains, if it might be, yet greater; that the saying might be fulfilled,
He that is unjust, let him be unjust still. And their rage against the
Martyrs took a new form, insomuch that we were in great sorrow for lack
of freedom to entrust their bodies to the earth.
“Neither did the night-time, nor the offer of money, avail us for this
matter; but they set watch with much carefulness, as though it were a
great gain to hinder their burial. Therefore, after the bodies had been
displayed to view for many days, they were at last burned to ashes, and
cast into the river Rhone, which flows by this place, that not a
vestige of them might be left upon the earth. For they said, Now shall
we see whether they will rise again, and whether their God can save
them out of our hands.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE TRIUMPH OF MARCUS AURELIUS
Not many months after the date of that epistle, Marius, then expecting
to leave Rome for a long time, and in fact about to leave it for ever,
stood to witness the triumphal entry of Marcus Aurelius, almost at the
exact spot from which he had watched the emperor’s solemn return to the
capital on his own first coming thither. His triumph was now a “full”
one—Justus Triumphus justified, by far more than the due amount of
bloodshed in those Northern wars, at length, it might seem, happily at
an end. Among the captives, amid the laughter of the crowds at his
blowsy upper garment, his trousered legs and conical wolf-skin cap,
walked our own ancestor, representative of subject Germany, under a
figure very familiar in later Roman sculpture; and, though certainly
with none of the grace of the Dying Gaul, yet with plenty of uncouth
pathos in his misshapen features, and the pale, servile, yet angry
eyes. His children, white-skinned and golden-haired “as angels,”
trudged beside him. His brothers, of the animal world, the ibex, the
wild-cat, and the reindeer, stalking and trumpeting grandly, found
their due place in the procession; and among the spoil, set forth on a
portable frame that it might be distinctly seen (no mere model, but the
very house he had lived in), a wattled cottage, in all the simplicity
of its snug contrivances against the cold, and well-calculated to give
a moment’s delight to his new, sophisticated masters.
Andrea Mantegna, working at the end of the fifteenth century, for a
society full of antiquarian fervour at the sight of the earthy relics
of the old Roman people, day by day returning to light out of the
clay—childish still, moreover, and with no more suspicion of pasteboard
than the old Romans themselves, in its unabashed love of open-air
pageantries, has invested this, the greatest, and alas! the most
characteristic, of the splendours of imperial Rome, with a reality
livelier than any description. The homely sentiments for which he has
found place in his learned paintings are hardly more lifelike than the
great public incidents of the show, there depicted. And then, with all
that vivid realism, how refined, how dignified, how select in type, is
this reflection of the old Roman world!—now especially, in its
time-mellowed red and gold, for the modern visitor to the old English
palace.
It was under no such selected types that the great procession presented
itself to Marius; though, in effect, he found something there
prophetic, so to speak, and evocative of ghosts, as susceptible minds
will do, upon a repetition after long interval of some notable
incident, which may yet perhaps have no direct concern for themselves.
In truth, he had been so closely bent of late on certain very personal
interests that the broad current of the world’s doings seemed to have
withdrawn into the distance, but now, as he witnessed this procession,
to return once more into evidence for him. The world, certainly, had
been holding on its old way, and was all its old self, as it thus
passed by dramatically, accentuating, in this favourite spectacle, its
mode of viewing things. And even apart from the contrast of a very
different scene, he would have found it, just now, a somewhat vulgar
spectacle. The temples, wide open, with their ropes of roses flapping
in the wind against the rich, reflecting marble, their startling
draperies and heavy cloud of incense, were but the centres of a great
banquet spread through all the gaudily coloured streets of Rome, for
which the carnivorous appetite of those who thronged them in the glare
of the mid-day sun was frankly enough asserted. At best, they were but
calling their gods to share with them the cooked, sacrificial, and
other meats, reeking to the sky. The child, who was concerned for the
sorrows of one of those Northern captives as he passed by, and
explained to his comrade—“There’s feeling in that hand, you know!”
benumbed and lifeless as it looked in the chain, seemed, in a moment,
to transform the entire show into its own proper tinsel. Yes! these
Romans were a coarse, a vulgar people; and their vulgarities of soul in
full evidence here. And Aurelius himself seemed to have undergone the
world’s coinage, and fallen to the level of his reward, in a mediocrity
no longer golden.
Yet if, as he passed by, almost filling the quaint old circular chariot
with his magnificent golden-flowered attire, he presented himself to
Marius, chiefly as one who had made the great mistake; to the multitude
he came as a more than magnanimous conqueror. That he had “forgiven”
the innocent wife and children of the dashing and almost successful
rebel Avidius Cassius, now no more, was a recent circumstance still in
memory. As the children went past—not among those who, ere the emperor
ascended the steps of the Capitol, would be detached from the great
progress for execution, happy rather, and radiant, as adopted members
of the imperial family—the crowd actually enjoyed an exhibition of the
moral order, such as might become perhaps the fashion. And it was in
consideration of some possible touch of a heroism herein that might
really have cost him something, that Marius resolved to seek the
emperor once more, with an appeal for common-sense, for reason and
justice.
He had set out at last to revisit his old home; and knowing that
Aurelius was then in retreat at a favourite villa, which lay almost on
his way thither, determined there to present himself. Although the
great plain was dying steadily, a new race of wild birds establishing
itself there, as he knew enough of their habits to understand, and the
idle contadino, with his never-ending ditty of decay and death,
replacing the lusty Roman labourer, never had that poetic region
between Rome and the sea more deeply impressed him than on this sunless
day of early autumn, under which all that fell within the immense
horizon was presented in one uniform tone of a clear, penitential blue.
Stimulating to the fancy as was that range of low hills to the
northwards, already troubled with the upbreaking of the Apennines, yet
a want of quiet in their outline, the record of wild fracture there, of
sudden upheaval and depression, marked them as but the ruins of nature;
while at every little descent and ascent of the road might be noted
traces of the abandoned work of man. From time to time, the way was
still redolent of the floral relics of summer, daphne and
myrtle-blossom, sheltered in the little hollows and ravines. At last,
amid rocks here and there piercing the soil, as those descents became
steeper, and the main line of the Apennines, now visible, gave a higher
accent to the scene, he espied over the plateau, almost like one of
those broken hills, cutting the horizon towards the sea, the old brown
villa itself, rich in memories of one after another of the family of
the Antonines. As he approached it, such reminiscences crowded upon
him, above all of the life there of the aged Antoninus Pius, in its
wonderful mansuetude and calm. Death had overtaken him here at the
precise moment when the tribune of the watch had received from his lips
the word Aequanimitas! as the watchword of the night. To see their
emperor living there like one of his simplest subjects, his hands red
at vintage-time with the juice of the grapes, hunting, teaching his
children, starting betimes, with all who cared to join him, for long
days of antiquarian research in the country around:—this, and the like
of this, had seemed to mean the peace of mankind.
Upon that had come—like a stain! it seemed to Marius just then—the more
intimate life of Faustina, the life of Faustina at home. Surely, that
marvellous but malign beauty must still haunt those rooms, like an
unquiet, dead goddess, who might have perhaps, after all, something
reassuring to tell surviving mortals about her ambiguous self. When,
two years since, the news had reached Rome that those eyes, always so
persistently turned to vanity, had suddenly closed for ever, a strong
desire to pray had come over Marius, as he followed in fancy on its
wild way the soul of one he had spoken with now and again, and whose
presence in it for a time the world of art could so ill have spared.
Certainly, the honours freely accorded to embalm her memory were poetic
enough—the rich temple left among those wild villagers at the spot, now
it was hoped sacred for ever, where she had breathed her last; the
golden image, in her old place at the amphitheatre; the altar at which
the newly married might make their sacrifice; above all, the great
foundation for orphan girls, to be called after her name.
The latter, precisely, was the cause why Marius failed in fact to see
Aurelius again, and make the chivalrous effort at enlightenment he had
proposed to himself. Entering the villa, he learned from an usher, at
the door of the long gallery, famous still for its grand prospect in
the memory of many a visitor, and then leading to the imperial
apartments, that the emperor was already in audience: Marius must wait
his turn—he knew not how long it might be. An odd audience it seemed;
for at that moment, through the closed door, came shouts of laughter,
the laughter of a great crowd of children—the “Faustinian Children”
themselves, as he afterwards learned—happy and at their ease, in the
imperial presence. Uncertain, then, of the time for which so pleasant a
reception might last, so pleasant that he would hardly have wished to
shorten it, Marius finally determined to proceed, as it was necessary
that he should accomplish the first stage of his journey on this day.
The thing was not to be—Vale! anima infelicissima!—He might at least
carry away that sound of the laughing orphan children, as a not
unamiable last impression of kings and their houses.
The place he was now about to visit, especially as the resting-place of
his dead, had never been forgotten. Only, the first eager period of his
life in Rome had slipped on rapidly; and, almost on a sudden, that old
time had come to seem very long ago. An almost burdensome solemnity had
grown about his memory of the place, so that to revisit it seemed a
thing that needed preparation: it was what he could not have done
hastily. He half feared to lessen, or disturb, its value for himself.
And then, as he travelled leisurely towards it, and so far with quite
tranquil mind, interested also in many another place by the way, he
discovered a shorter road to the end of his journey, and found himself
indeed approaching the spot that was to him like no other. Dreaming now
only of the dead before him, he journeyed on rapidly through the night;
the thought of them increasing on him, in the darkness. It was as if
they had been waiting for him there through all those years, and felt
his footsteps approaching now, and understood his devotion, quite
gratefully, in that lowliness of theirs, in spite of its tardy
fulfilment. As morning came, his late tranquillity of mind had given
way to a grief which surprised him by its freshness. He was moved more
than he could have thought possible by so distant a sorrow.
“To-day!”—they seemed to be saying as the hard dawn broke,—“To-day, he
will come!” At last, amid all his distractions, they were become the
main purpose of what he was then doing. The world around it, when he
actually reached the place later in the day, was in a mood very
different from his:—so work-a-day, it seemed, on that fine afternoon,
and the villages he passed through so silent; the inhabitants being,
for the most part, at their labour in the country. Then, at length,
above the tiled outbuildings, were the walls of the old villa itself,
with the tower for the pigeons; and, not among cypresses, but
half-hidden by aged poplar-trees, their leaves like golden fruit, the
birds floating around it, the conical roof of the tomb itself. In the
presence of an old servant who remembered him, the great seals were
broken, the rusty key turned at last in the lock, the door was forced
out among the weeds grown thickly about it, and Marius was actually in
the place which had been so often in his thoughts.
He was struck, not however without a touch of remorse thereupon,
chiefly by an odd air of neglect, the neglect of a place allowed to
remain as when it was last used, and left in a hurry, till long years
had covered all alike with thick dust —the faded flowers, the burnt-out
lamps, the tools and hardened mortar of the workmen who had had
something to do there. A heavy fragment of woodwork had fallen and
chipped open one of the oldest of the mortuary urns, many hundreds in
number ranged around the walls. It was not properly an urn, but a
minute coffin of stone, and the fracture had revealed a piteous
spectacle of the mouldering, unburned remains within; the bones of a
child, as he understood, which might have died, in ripe age, three
times over, since it slipped away from among his great-grandfathers, so
far up in the line. Yet the protruding baby hand seemed to stir up in
him feelings vivid enough, bringing him intimately within the scope of
dead people’s grievances. He noticed, side by side with the urn of his
mother, that of a boy of about his own age—one of the serving-boys of
the household—who had descended hither, from the lightsome world of
childhood, almost at the same time with her. It seemed as if this boy
of his own age had taken filial place beside her there, in his stead.
That hard feeling, again, which had always lingered in his mind with
the thought of the father he had scarcely known, melted wholly away, as
he read the precise number of his years, and reflected suddenly—He was
of my own present age; no hard old man, but with interests, as he
looked round him on the world for the last time, even as mine to-day!
And with that came a blinding rush of kindness, as if two alienated
friends had come to understand each other at last. There was weakness
in all this; as there is in all care for dead persons, to which
nevertheless people will always yield in proportion as they really care
for one another. With a vain yearning, as he stood there, still to be
able to do something for them, he reflected that such doing must be,
after all, in the nature of things, mainly for himself. His own epitaph
might be that old one eskhatos tou idiou genous+ —He was the last of
his race! Of those who might come hither after himself probably no one
would ever again come quite as he had done to-day; and it was under the
influence of this thought that he determined to bury all that, deep
below the surface, to be remembered only by him, and in a way which
would claim no sentiment from the indifferent. That took many days—was
like a renewal of lengthy old burial rites—as he himself watched the
work, early and late; coming on the last day very early, and
anticipating, by stealth, the last touches, while the workmen were
absent; one young lad only, finally smoothing down the earthy bed,
greatly surprised at the seriousness with which Marius flung in his
flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould.
NOTES
207. +Transliteration: eskhatos tou idiou genous. Translation: “[he
was] the last of his race.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
ANIMA NATURALITER CHRISTIANA
Those eight days at his old home, so mournfully occupied, had been for
Marius in some sort a forcible disruption from the world and the roots
of his life in it. He had been carried out of himself as never before;
and when the time was over, it was as if the claim over him of the
earth below had been vindicated, over against the interests of that
living world around. Dead, yet sentient and caressing hands seemed to
reach out of the ground and to be clinging about him. Looking back
sometimes now, from about the midway of life—the age, as he conceived,
at which one begins to redescend one’s life—though antedating it a
little, in his sad humour, he would note, almost with surprise, the
unbroken placidity of the contemplation in which it had been passed.
His own temper, his early theoretic scheme of things, would have pushed
him on to movement and adventure. Actually, as circumstances had
determined, all its movement had been inward; movement of observation
only, or even of pure meditation; in part, perhaps, because throughout
it had been something of a meditatio mortis, ever facing towards the
act of final detachment. Death, however, as he reflected, must be for
every one nothing less than the fifth or last act of a drama, and, as
such, was likely to have something of the stirring character of a
dénouement. And, in fact, it was in form tragic enough that his end not
long afterwards came to him.
In the midst of the extreme weariness and depression which had followed
those last days, Cornelius, then, as it happened, on a journey and
travelling near the place, finding traces of him, had become his guest
at White-nights. It was just then that Marius felt, as he had never
done before, the value to himself, the overpowering charm, of his
friendship. “More than brother!”—he felt—like a son also!” contrasting
the fatigue of soul which made himself in effect an older man, with the
irrepressible youth of his companion. For it was still the marvellous
hopefulness of Cornelius, his seeming prerogative over the future, that
determined, and kept alive, all other sentiment concerning him. A new
hope had sprung up in the world of which he, Cornelius, was a
depositary, which he was to bear onward in it. Identifying himself with
Cornelius in so dear a friendship, through him, Marius seemed to touch,
to ally himself to, actually to become a possessor of the coming world;
even as happy parents reach out, and take possession of it, in and
through the survival of their children. For in these days their
intimacy had grown very close, as they moved hither and thither,
leisurely, among the country-places thereabout, Cornelius being on his
way back to Rome, till they came one evening to a little town (Marius
remembered that he had been there on his first journey to Rome) which
had even then its church and legend—the legend and holy relics of the
martyr Hyacinthus, a young Roman soldier, whose blood had stained the
soil of this place in the reign of the emperor Trajan.
The thought of that so recent death, haunted Marius through the night,
as if with audible crying and sighs above the restless wind, which came
and went around their lodging. But towards dawn he slept heavily; and
awaking in broad daylight, and finding Cornelius absent, set forth to
seek him. The plague was still in the place—had indeed just broken out
afresh; with an outbreak also of cruel superstition among its wild and
miserable inhabitants. Surely, the old gods were wroth at the presence
of this new enemy among them! And it was no ordinary morning into which
Marius stepped forth. There was a menace in the dark masses of hill,
and motionless wood, against the gray, although apparently unclouded
sky. Under this sunless heaven the earth itself seemed to fret and fume
with a heat of its own, in spite of the strong night-wind. And now the
wind had fallen.
Marius felt that he breathed some strange heavy fluid, denser than any
common air. He could have fancied that the world had sunken in the
night, far below its proper level, into some close, thick abysm of its
own atmosphere. The Christian people of the town, hardly less terrified
and overwrought by the haunting sickness about them than their pagan
neighbours, were at prayer before the tomb of the martyr; and even as
Marius pressed among them to a place beside Cornelius, on a sudden the
hills seemed to roll like a sea in motion, around the whole compass of
the horizon. For a moment Marius supposed himself attacked with some
sudden sickness of brain, till the fall of a great mass of building
convinced him that not himself but the earth under his feet was giddy.
A few moments later the little marketplace was alive with the rush of
the distracted inhabitants from their tottering houses; and as they
waited anxiously for the second shock of earthquake, a long-smouldering
suspicion leapt precipitately into well-defined purpose, and the whole
body of people was carried forward towards the band of worshippers
below. An hour later, in the wild tumult which followed, the earth had
been stained afresh with the blood of the martyrs Felix and
Faustinus—Flores apparuerunt in terra nostra!—and their brethren,
together with Cornelius and Marius, thus, as it had happened, taken
among them, were prisoners, reserved for the action of the law. Marius
and his friend, with certain others, exercising the privilege of their
rank, made claim to be tried in Rome, or at least in the chief town of
the district; where, indeed, in the troublous days that had now begun,
a legal process had been already instituted. Under the care of a
military guard the captives were removed on the same day, one stage of
their journey; sleeping, for security, during the night, side by side
with their keepers, in the rooms of a shepherd’s deserted house by the
wayside.
It was surmised that one of the prisoners was not a Christian: the
guards were forward to make the utmost pecuniary profit of this
circumstance, and in the night, Marius, taking advantage of the loose
charge kept over them, and by means partly of a large bribe, had
contrived that Cornelius, as the really innocent person, should be
dismissed in safety on his way, to procure, as Marius explained, the
proper means of defence for himself, when the time of trial came.
And in the morning Cornelius in fact set forth alone, from their
miserable place of detention. Marius believed that Cornelius was to be
the husband of Cecilia; and that, perhaps strangely, had but added to
the desire to get him away safely.—We wait for the great crisis which
is to try what is in us: we can hardly bear the pressure of our hearts,
as we think of it: the lonely wrestler, or victim, which imagination
foreshadows to us, can hardly be one’s self; it seems an outrage of our
destiny that we should be led along so gently and imperceptibly, to so
terrible a leaping-place in the dark, for more perhaps than life or
death. At last, the great act, the critical moment itself comes,
easily, almost unconsciously. Another motion of the clock, and our
fatal line—the “great climacteric point”—has been passed, which changes
ourselves or our lives. In one quarter of an hour, under a sudden,
uncontrollable impulse, hardly weighing what he did, almost as a matter
of course and as lightly as one hires a bed for one’s night’s rest on a
journey, Marius had taken upon himself all the heavy risk of the
position in which Cornelius had then been—the long and wearisome delays
of judgment, which were possible; the danger and wretchedness of a long
journey in this manner; possibly the danger of death. He had delivered
his brother, after the manner he had sometimes vaguely anticipated as a
kind of distinction in his destiny; though indeed always with wistful
calculation as to what it might cost him: and in the first moment after
the thing was actually done, he felt only satisfaction at his courage,
at the discovery of his possession of “nerve.”
Yet he was, as we know, no hero, no heroic martyr—had indeed no right
to be; and when he had seen Cornelius depart, on his blithe and hopeful
way, as he believed, to become the husband of Cecilia; actually, as it
had happened, without a word of farewell, supposing Marius was almost
immediately afterwards to follow (Marius indeed having avoided the
moment of leave-taking with its possible call for an explanation of the
circumstances), the reaction came. He could only guess, of course, at
what might really happen. So far, he had but taken upon himself, in the
stead of Cornelius, a certain amount of personal risk; though he hardly
supposed himself to be facing the danger of death. Still, especially
for one such as he, with all the sensibilities of which his whole
manner of life had been but a promotion, the situation of a person
under trial on a criminal charge was actually full of distress. To him,
in truth, a death such as the recent death of those saintly brothers,
seemed no glorious end. In his case, at least, the Martyrdom, as it was
called—the overpowering act of testimony that Heaven had come down
among men—would be but a common execution: from the drops of his blood
there would spring no miraculous, poetic flowers; no eternal aroma
would indicate the place of his burial; no plenary grace, overflowing
for ever upon those who might stand around it. Had there been one to
listen just then, there would have come, from the very depth of his
desolation, an eloquent utterance at last, on the irony of men’s fates,
on the singular accidents of life and death.
The guards, now safely in possession of whatever money and other
valuables the prisoners had had on them, pressed them forward, over the
rough mountain paths, altogether careless of their sufferings. The
great autumn rains were falling. At night the soldiers lighted a fire;
but it was impossible to keep warm. From time to time they stopped to
roast portions of the meat they carried with them, making their
captives sit round the fire, and pressing it upon them. But weariness
and depression of spirits had deprived Marius of appetite, even if the
food had been more attractive, and for some days he partook of nothing
but bad bread and water. All through the dark mornings they dragged
over boggy plains, up and down hills, wet through sometimes with the
heavy rain. Even in those deplorable circumstances, he could but notice
the wild, dark beauty of those regions—the stormy sunrise, and placid
spaces of evening. One of the keepers, a very young soldier, won him at
times, by his simple kindness, to talk a little, with wonder at the
lad’s half-conscious, poetic delight in the adventures of the journey.
At times, the whole company would lie down for rest at the roadside,
hardly sheltered from the storm; and in the deep fatigue of his spirit,
his old longing for inopportune sleep overpowered him.—Sleep anywhere,
and under any conditions, seemed just then a thing one might well
exchange the remnants of one’s life for.
It must have been about the fifth night, as he afterwards conjectured,
that the soldiers, believing him likely to die, had finally left him
unable to proceed further, under the care of some country people, who
to the extent of their power certainly treated him kindly in his
sickness. He awoke to consciousness after a severe attack of fever,
lying alone on a rough bed, in a kind of hut. It seemed a remote,
mysterious place, as he looked around in the silence; but so
fresh—lying, in fact, in a high pasture-land among the mountains—that
he felt he should recover, if he might but just lie there in quiet long
enough. Even during those nights of delirium he had felt the scent of
the new-mown hay pleasantly, with a dim sense for a moment that he was
lying safe in his old home. The sunlight lay clear beyond the open
door; and the sounds of the cattle reached him softly from the green
places around. Recalling confusedly the torturing hurry of his late
journeys, he dreaded, as his consciousness of the whole situation
returned, the coming of the guards. But the place remained in absolute
stillness. He was, in fact, at liberty, but for his own disabled
condition. And it was certainly a genuine clinging to life that he felt
just then, at the very bottom of his mind. So it had been, obscurely,
even through all the wild fancies of his delirium, from the moment
which followed his decision against himself, in favour of Cornelius.
The occupants of the place were to be heard presently, coming and going
about him on their business: and it was as if the approach of death
brought out in all their force the merely human sentiments. There is
that in death which certainly makes indifferent persons anxious to
forget the dead: to put them—those aliens—away out of their thoughts
altogether, as soon as may be. Conversely, in the deep isolation of
spirit which was now creeping upon Marius, the faces of these people,
casually visible, took a strange hold on his affections; the link of
general brotherhood, the feeling of human kinship, asserting itself
most strongly when it was about to be severed for ever. At nights he
would find this face or that impressed deeply on his fancy; and, in a
troubled sort of manner, his mind would follow them onwards, on the
ways of their simple, humdrum, everyday life, with a peculiar yearning
to share it with them, envying the calm, earthy cheerfulness of all
their days to be, still under the sun, though so indifferent, of
course, to him!—as if these rude people had been suddenly lifted into
some height of earthly good-fortune, which must needs isolate them from
himself.
Tristem neminen fecit+—he repeated to himself; his old prayer shaping
itself now almost as his epitaph. Yes! so much the very hardest judge
must concede to him. And the sense of satisfaction which that thought
left with him disposed him to a conscious effort of recollection, while
he lay there, unable now even to raise his head, as he discovered on
attempting to reach a pitcher of water which stood near. Revelation,
vision, the discovery of a vision, the seeing of a perfect humanity, in
a perfect world—through all his alternations of mind, by some dominant
instinct, determined by the original necessities of his own nature and
character, he had always set that above the having, or even the doing,
of anything. For, such vision, if received with due attitude on his
part, was, in reality, the being something, and as such was surely a
pleasant offering or sacrifice to whatever gods there might be,
observant of him. And how goodly had the vision been!—one long
unfolding of beauty and energy in things, upon the closing of which he
might gratefully utter his “Vixi!”+ Even then, just ere his eyes were
to be shut for ever, the things they had seen seemed a veritable
possession in hand; the persons, the places, above all, the touching
image of Jesus, apprehended dimly through the expressive faces, the
crying of the children, in that mysterious drama, with a sudden sense
of peace and satisfaction now, which he could not explain to himself.
Surely, he had prospered in life! And again, as of old, the sense of
gratitude seemed to bring with it the sense also of a living person at
his side.
For still, in a shadowy world, his deeper wisdom had ever been, with a
sense of economy, with a jealous estimate of gain and loss, to use
life, not as the means to some problematic end, but, as far as might
be, from dying hour to dying hour, an end in itself—a kind of music,
all-sufficing to the duly trained ear, even as it died out on the air.
Yet now, aware still in that suffering body of such vivid powers of
mind and sense, as he anticipated from time to time how his sickness,
practically without aid as he must be in this rude place, was likely to
end, and that the moment of taking final account was drawing very near,
a consciousness of waste would come, with half-angry tears of
self-pity, in his great weakness—a blind, outraged, angry feeling of
wasted power, such as he might have experienced himself standing by the
deathbed of another, in condition like his own.
And yet it was the fact, again, that the vision of men and things,
actually revealed to him on his way through the world, had developed,
with a wonderful largeness, the faculties to which it addressed itself,
his general capacity of vision; and in that too was a success, in the
view of certain, very definite, well-considered, undeniable
possibilities. Throughout that elaborate and lifelong education of his
receptive powers, he had ever kept in view the purpose of preparing
himself towards possible further revelation some day—towards some
ampler vision, which should take up into itself and explain this
world’s delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till
then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost
epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of
soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to
experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest;
the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers
might choose to write there. And was not this precisely the condition,
the attitude of mind, to which something higher than he, yet akin to
him, would be likely to reveal itself; to which that influence he had
felt now and again like a friendly hand upon his shoulder, amid the
actual obscurities of the world, would be likely to make a further
explanation? Surely, the aim of a true philosophy must lie, not in
futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to the
circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the
maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very
highest achievement; the unclouded and receptive soul quitting the
world finally, with the same fresh wonder with which it had entered the
world still unimpaired, and going on its blind way at last with the
consciousness of some profound enigma in things, as but a pledge of
something further to come. Marius seemed to understand how one might
look back upon life here, and its excellent visions, as but the portion
of a race-course left behind him by a runner still swift of foot: for a
moment he experienced a singular curiosity, almost an ardent desire to
enter upon a future, the possibilities of which seemed so large.
And just then, again amid the memory of certain touching actual words
and images, came the thought of the great hope, that hope against hope,
which, as he conceived, had arisen—Lux sedentibus in tenebris+—upon the
aged world; the hope Cornelius had seemed to bear away upon him in his
strength, with a buoyancy which had caused Marius to feel, not so much
that by a caprice of destiny, he had been left to die in his place, as
that Cornelius was gone on a mission to deliver him also from death.
There had been a permanent protest established in the world, a plea, a
perpetual after-thought, which humanity henceforth would ever possess
in reserve, against any wholly mechanical and disheartening theory of
itself and its conditions. That was a thought which relieved for him
the iron outline of the horizon about him, touching it as if with soft
light from beyond; filling the shadowy, hollow places to which he was
on his way with the warmth of definite affections; confirming also
certain considerations by which he seemed to link himself to the
generations to come in the world he was leaving. Yes! through the
survival of their children, happy parents are able to think calmly, and
with a very practical affection, of a world in which they are to have
no direct share; planting with a cheerful good-humour, the acorns they
carry about with them, that their grand-children may be shaded from the
sun by the broad oak-trees of the future. That is nature’s way of
easing death to us. It was thus too, surprised, delighted, that Marius,
under the power of that new hope among men, could think of the
generations to come after him. Without it, dim in truth as it was, he
could hardly have dared to ponder the world which limited all he really
knew, as it would be when he should have departed from it. A strange
lonesomeness, like physical darkness, seemed to settle upon the thought
of it; as if its business hereafter must be, as far as he was
concerned, carried on in some inhabited, but distant and alien, star.
Contrariwise, with the sense of that hope warm about him, he seemed to
anticipate some kindly care for himself; never to fail even on earth, a
care for his very body—that dear sister and companion of his soul,
outworn, suffering, and in the very article of death, as it was now.
For the weariness came back tenfold; and he had finally to abstain from
thoughts like these, as from what caused physical pain. And then, as
before in the wretched, sleepless nights of those forced marches, he
would try to fix his mind, as it were impassively, and like a child
thinking over the toys it loves, one after another, that it may fall
asleep thus, and forget all about them the sooner, on all the persons
he had loved in life—on his love for them, dead or living, grateful for
his love or not, rather than on theirs for him—letting their images
pass away again, or rest with him, as they would. In the bare sense of
having loved he seemed to find, even amid this foundering of the ship,
that on which his soul might “assuredly rest and depend.” One after
another, he suffered those faces and voices to come and go, as in some
mechanical exercise, as he might have repeated all the verses he knew
by heart, or like the telling of beads one by one, with many a sleepy
nod between-whiles.
For there remained also, for the old earthy creature still within him,
that great blessedness of physical slumber. To sleep, to lose one’s
self in sleep—that, as he had always recognised, was a good thing. And
it was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke amid the murmuring
voices of the people who had kept and tended him so carefully through
his sickness, now kneeling around his bed: and what he heard confirmed,
in the then perfect clearness of his soul, the inevitable suggestion of
his own bodily feelings. He had often dreamt he was condemned to die,
that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape, was arrived; and waking,
with the sun all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been full
of gratitude for his place there, alive still, in the land of the
living. He read surely, now, in the manner, the doings, of these
people, some of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the
heavy sunlight in very deed lay, that his last morning was come, and
turned to think once more of the beloved. Often had he fancied of old
that not to die on a dark or rainy day might itself have a little
alleviating grace or favour about it. The people around his bed were
praying fervently—Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana!+ In the moments of his
extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended
like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had
applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses,
through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and
obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the same people who, in the gray,
austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them
secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his
death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of
the nature of martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said,
a kind of sacrament with plenary grace.
1881-1884.
THE END
NOTES
217. +“He made no one unhappy.”
218. +“I have lived!”
221. +From the Latin Vulgate Bible, Matthew 4:16: “populus qui sedebat
in tenebris lucem vidit magnam et sedentibus in regione et umbra mortis
lux orta est eis.” King James Bible translation: “The people which sat
in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and
shadow of death light is sprung up.”
224. “Depart! Depart! Christian Soul!” The thought is from the Catholic
prayer for the departing.