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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Walter Pater's "Marius the Epicurean" is a richly layered novel that intricately weaves philosophy, aesthetics, and historical narrative into a unique tapestry set in the Roman Empire. Through the life of Marius, a young Roman of considerable intellect and sensitivity, Pater explores the tension between sensory experience and the moral implications of indulgence. The novel is emblematic of the aesthetic movement, marked by its lyrical prose and deep philosophical underpinnings, inviting readers to ponder the complex interplay of pleasure, knowledge, and human existence in a rapidly changing world. Pater's use of vivid imagery and meticulous detail enriches the narrative, transforming Marius's journey into a profound meditation on the nature of beauty and the pursuit of a meaningful life amidst the ruins of Rome. Walter Pater, a prominent figure of the late 19th-century literary scene, was deeply influenced by his scholarly background and philosophical inquiries, particularly those focused on Platonic and hedonistic thought. His education at Oxford fostered a keen appreciation for culture and aesthetics, which profoundly informs "Marius the Epicurean". Pater's critique of Victorian norms and exploration of individualism significantly reflect the broader intellectual currents of his time, providing context to understand Marius's quest for a transcendent existence. For readers seeking an intellectual journey interwoven with artistic and philosophical themes, "Marius the Epicurean" is an essential read. It not only serves as a remarkable historical novel but also as a deep exploration of the human condition, the pursuit of joy, and the philosophical underpinnings that shape our understanding of life. Engaging with Pater's work encourages reflection on the enduring conflicts between pleasure and duty, making it particularly relevant for contemporary readers. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Marius the Epicurean
Table of Contents
Introduction
Poised between a longing to savor the finest impressions of experience and a scruple to live justly among shifting claims of philosophy, custom, and faith, Marius the Epicurean traces a soul’s attempt to reconcile the claims of beauty and conscience, finding along the way that the cultivation of perception, friendship, and inward sincerity must contend with impermanence, suffering, and the allure of certainty, so that the question of how to live becomes less an abstract doctrine than a careful practice of attention, restraint, and gratitude, pursued amid the pressures of history and the quiet urgencies of the heart.
First published in 1885 in two volumes, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean is a Victorian historical-philosophical novel set chiefly in the Roman Empire of the second century, during the age of the Antonines. It adopts the shape of a Bildungsroman while reflecting on ethics and aesthetics. The setting ranges from provincial estates to the intellectual circles of imperial Rome, evoked with learned precision but always in the service of an inner portrait. Without relying on dramatic incident, Pater structures the narrative as a sequence of formative encounters and ideas, letting historical distance clarify questions his contemporaries shared about culture, belief, and conduct.
At its center is a Roman youth of means who leaves the safety of a cultivated provincial home for the intellectual and ceremonial life of the capital, where he studies competing philosophies and observes new forms of worship taking root. The plot is deliberately quiet; the movement is inward, tracing how impressions become convictions. Pater writes in supple, cadenced prose, in a third-person voice close to Marius’s sensibility, alternating scene with reflective commentary. The tone is measured, lucid, and gently exploratory, inviting the reader to dwell on textures of thought, art, and ritual rather than on sudden reversals or sensational turns.
The novel’s declared Epicureanism is not license but discipline: attention to the exact quality of each moment and a resolve to choose what refines rather than coarsens the self. Against this, and often alongside it, stand Stoic duty, civic responsibility, and the persuasive ethics of emerging Christian charity. Pater stages these options as living temperaments more than abstract systems, so that Marius’s education involves friendship, service, art, and the witnessing of suffering. Memory, mortality, and the possibility of sanctity enter as tests of any theory of happiness. The question becomes how to join delicacy of perception with steadfast care for others.
Pater’s artistry lies as much in reconstruction as in argument. He conjures villas, streets, temples, and festivals with an eye for the symbolic weight of surfaces, letting architecture, landscape, and custom speak a quiet philosophy of their own. Episodes often pause for reflective digression, so that a painting, a prayer, or a sentence from a classic author becomes a lens for ethical choice. The prose is ceremonious yet clear, its rhythm nearer to meditation than to melodrama, and it sustains a continuous intimacy with Marius’s inward weather. The effect is a mosaic of scenes and thoughts that gradually cohere into character.
For contemporary readers, the book’s patience and pluralism feel newly pertinent. It offers a model of self-formation through attentive living at a time saturated with distractions, proposing that the senses can educate conscience when guided by honesty and sympathy. It also speaks to plural societies, where divergent beliefs meet without easy resolution, by showing charity and conversation as genuine intellectual methods. The novel explores whether a coherent ethics can emerge without dogmatic certainty, and how beauty might assist rather than evade responsibility. Its vision of friendship, civility, and care for the vulnerable remains quietly radical amid present debates.
Read as a continuous whole across both volumes, Marius the Epicurean is less a sequence of events than a sustained experiment in how a life acquires shape. Its satisfactions are cumulative: the slow layering of habit, counsel, and feeling until a moral temperament emerges. Pater asks the reader to move at the book’s contemplative pace, meeting arguments with experience and letting the ancient world clarify modern perplexities. Without forcing resolution, the novel leaves space for reflection and return, offering a companionship as much as a story. It endures because it treats ethics as a lived art, tender, exact, and humane.
Synopsis
Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (Vol. 1 & 2), first published in 1885, is a philosophical novel set in the Roman Empire during the second century. It follows Marius, a young aristocrat of Etrurian background, whose sensitive temperament leads him to examine how one might live well amid a changing moral landscape. The narrative traces his education, friendships, and public service as he tests competing ideals—pagan piety, Epicurean refinement, and the rising claims of Stoicism and Christianity. Pater uses Marius’s inward history to consider experience as a guide to ethics, shaping a reflective, historically grounded portrait of character formation without relying on dramatic incident.
Early chapters dwell on Marius’s childhood in the Italian countryside, where ancestral rites and the beauty of local shrines shape his imagination. Family traditions, domestic ceremonies, and the ordered rhythms of rural life foster a scrupulous attention to sensation and duty. Sent to study, he encounters the literature and philosophy of classical antiquity. His teachers and reading nurture an exacting, almost ritual regard for conduct, while awakening doubts about inherited belief. This mingling of reverence and questioning prepares him for the city, where he hopes to reconcile the claims of aesthetic enjoyment with the responsibilities expected of a Roman gentleman.
At school and in early adulthood, Marius forms an intense friendship with Flavian, a brilliant companion whose literary ambitions and cultivated tastes refine Marius’s own sensibility. Through their reading of Latin and Greek authors—especially the Golden Ass—Marius encounters the tale of Cupid and Psyche, emblematic of his attraction to beauty and inward meaning. Festivals, art, and eloquence animate their world, yet illness and the fragility of pleasure bring an astringent note. The episode’s aftermath deepens Marius’s resolve to live an exact, temperate Epicureanism, seeking measured delight and moral clarity rather than indulgence, and to test whether a disciplined attention to experience can sustain an enduring ethic.
Marius’s Epicurean turn remains austere and conscientious. He embraces a method of life that privileges clear perception, self-command, and humane restraint. The city’s ancient observances—the old “religion of Numa,” civic ritual, family devotion—retain a persuasive beauty for him, even as he questions their metaphysical claims. Pater follows Marius through refined social circles where taste and decorum serve as ethical guides. The young Roman disciplines feeling without denying it, asking whether a life devoted to lucidity, kindness, and proportion can answer the certainty of change and loss, and whether an art of living might substitute for a system of doctrine.
Service at the imperial court introduces Marius to Stoicism at its highest Roman expression. Under the rule of Antoninus Pius and then Marcus Aurelius, he witnesses a model of duty, self-government, and public care. The emperor’s philosophical temper impresses him, yet he also perceives limits in a creed that can seem impersonal. Court life, administrative responsibilities, and the spectacle of empire sharpen his moral inquiry: Can a rigorous devotion to duty coexist with the tenderness he values? Pater sets Stoic grandeur beside Marius’s disciplined Epicureanism, framing a dialogue about justice, sympathy, and the place of inwardness in public action.
Into this debate enters the example of emerging Christian communities, observed first through friendship and then through household scenes of prayer, charity, and mutual care. Marius studies their practices cautiously, comparing them with the older civic religion and with contemporary mystery cults. He notes their distinctive emphasis on compassion and shared life, without immediately assenting to their theology. The attraction is partly ethical, partly aesthetic—a new temper of feeling that promises warmth within a hard world. As public anxieties and private scruples intensify, these encounters press Marius to consider whether his measured ideal can accommodate—or must yield to—this different vision of goodness.
The closing movement gathers his trials—duties at court, loyalty to friends, the pressure of conscience—into a quiet test of character rather than spectacle. Marius’s reflections on mortality, responsibility, and the claims of affection refine his earlier creed, suggesting a life where sensibility and moral purpose mutually correct and enrich each other. Pater withholds grand resolution, emphasizing instead a tempered harmony of clarity, kindness, and restraint. The novel endures as a subtle meditation on how to live among rival ideals, its classical poise and psychological delicacy offering a lasting inquiry into the traffic between beauty, belief, and conduct.
Historical Context
Published in 1885 in two volumes, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean is a Victorian “philosophical romance” set mainly in second‑century Rome. Pater, an Oxford critic associated with the Aesthetic Movement, uses a meticulously researched classical backdrop to test ethical ideas through a cultivated protagonist’s education and travels. The narrative unfolds under the Antonine emperors and draws on contemporary classical scholarship, archaeology, and philology familiar to British readers trained in the Greats. Without relying on sensational incident, the book pursues a quiet history of sensibility, aligning literary form and historical reconstruction to examine how refined taste, duty, and belief could coexist in an imperial cosmopolis.
Historically, the story’s frame is the reigns of Antoninus Pius (138–161) and Marcus Aurelius (161–180), often cited as a high phase of the Pax Romana. Rome and Italy functioned as administrative and symbolic centers, with the imperial court, senatorial and equestrian orders, law courts, and priestly colleges shaping public life. Urban amenities—baths, libraries, temples, and circuses—structured sociability and spectacle. Education moved from the grammaticus to rhetorical schools, fostering polished bilingual elites. The cultural atmosphere of the Second Sophistic encouraged virtuoso display, archival curiosity, and moral essays, an environment in which carefully modulated style and ethical self-scrutiny naturally appeared inseparable.
The philosophical landscape Pater evokes matches well-attested currents of the age. Epicureanism, known through Epicurus and the Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, offered a disciplined pursuit of pleasure as tranquility. Stoicism, shaped by Seneca and Epictetus and exemplified by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, emphasized inner sovereignty, duty, and rational order. Middle Platonism bridged metaphysics and ethics for educated readers. Roman elites often browsed among these schools, collecting maxims rather than declaring strict allegiance. Pater’s protagonist navigates precisely this mix, allowing the book to stage debates about sensation, conscience, and civic responsibility prevalent in second-century intellectual life.
Religious life in the period was strikingly plural. Traditional civic cults and priesthoods coexisted with the imperial cult and with popular mysteries of Isis and Serapis, as well as the Mithraic rites that spread through the army in the second century. Household religion, omens, and ancestor veneration remained pervasive. Christian communities existed at Rome by the second century, with evidence of cemeteries and catacomb burials; local persecutions occurred episodically, notably at Lyon in 177. Contemporary legal practice tolerated private worship while punishing perceived illicit associations. Pater’s depiction attends to the aesthetic appeal and ethical temper of such ceremonies without doctrinal partisanship.
Literary culture furnished a living archive for Pater’s reconstruction. In Rome and the provinces, figures such as Aulus Gellius (author of Attic Nights), the orator Fronto, and Herodes Atticus typify the period’s erudite taste. Apuleius of Madauros, tried for magic in the 150s and famed for the Metamorphoses, offered the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche that Victorian readers cherished; Pater includes an English rendering of that story within his novel. The bilingual milieu fostered elegant pastiche, quotation, and moral anecdote. Marius’s world is therefore patterned on documented reading practices in which style, philology, and ethical reflection were mutually reinforcing.
Despite prosperity, the Antonine age faced strains that register in the novel’s background. The Antonine Plague, beginning around 165 and recurring for years, reduced populations and burdened the army and finances. Marcus Aurelius conducted the Marcomannic wars along the Danube, exemplifying the empire’s defensive posture. Slavery underpinned agriculture and domestic service; manumission and patronage structured advancement. Public spectacles, including gladiatorial games and executions, reflected civic ritual and contested moral standards. Benefaction by elites—building, endowments, relief—sustained urban life. These conditions sharpen the ethical stakes of self-culture and compassion that Pater explores, as refined sensibility meets disease, militarization, and institutional coercion.
Reading Marius also requires Victorian context. Pater’s earlier Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) sparked debate for its concluding advocacy of heightened perception; he altered that passage in later editions. At Oxford, he taught classics and influenced students such as Oscar Wilde. The Aesthetic Movement’s slogan “art for art’s sake,” debates over science after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Matthew Arnold’s contrast of Hellenism and Hebraism, and English Higher Criticism of scripture formed the book’s climate. Pater described Marius as “a study of the development of the religious sense,” framing an exacting Epicureanism responsive to duty and sympathy rather than mere indulgence.
Accordingly, the novel’s historical canvas doubles as a critique of Pater’s present. By staging a conscientious Roman amid Stoic governance, Epicurean analysis, and emergent Christian charity, Pater tests whether refined cultivation can answer modern anxieties about belief, morality, and social obligation. He avoids polemic, favoring a diaristic pace and carefully sourced detail to show how institutions, ritual, and reading shape character. The work mirrors Victorian efforts to reconcile culture with ethics, offering a measured alternative to dogma or skepticism. Its portrait of inward discipline, aesthetic piety, and sympathy reads as both a reconstruction of the Antonine age and a late nineteenth‑century ethical proposal.
Marius the Epicurean (Vol. 1&2)
Volume 1
PART THE FIRST
CHAPTER I: "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"
As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism—the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest. While, in Rome, new religions had arisen with bewildering complexity around the dying old one, the earlier and simpler patriarchal religion, "the religion of Numa[1]," as people loved to fancy, lingered on with little change amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and sentiment of which so much of it had grown. Glimpses of such a survival we may catch below the merely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry; in Tibullus especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman religious usage.
At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates, Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:
—he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar; and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of the young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of the hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines.
And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his golden image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (now about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the world would at last find itself happy, could it detach some reluctant philosophic student from the more desirable life of celestial contemplation, and compel him to rule it), there was a boy living in an old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for himself, recruited that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous force of religious veneration such as had originally called them into being. More than a century and a half had past since Tibullus had written; but the restoration of religious usages, and their retention where they still survived, was meantime come to be the fashion through the influence of imperial example; and what had been in the main a matter of family pride with his father, was sustained by a native instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily life—that conscience, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that system of symbolic usages, and they in turn developed in him further, a great seriousness—an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship; of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour on which they live, really understood by him as gifts—a sense of religious responsibility in the reception of them. It was a religion for the most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long burden of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, for instance) the thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome channel for the almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and relieved it as gratitude to the gods.
The day of the "little" or private Ambarvalia was come, to be celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belonging to it, as the great college of the Arval Brothers officiated at Rome in the interest of the whole state. At the appointed time all work ceases; the instruments of labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers, while masters and servants together go in solemn procession along the dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims whose blood is presently to be shed for the purification from all natural or supernatural taint of the lands they have "gone about." The old Latin words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved on its way, though their precise meaning was long since become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient illuminated roll, kept in the painted chest in the hall, together with the family records. Early on that day the girls of the farm had been busy in the great portico, filling large baskets with flowers plucked short from branches of apple and cherry, then in spacious bloom, to strew before the quaint images of the gods—Ceres and Bacchus and the yet more mysterious Dea Dia—as they passed through the fields, carried in their little houses on the shoulders of white-clad youths, who were understood to proceed to this office in perfect temperance, as pure in soul and body as the air they breathed in the firm weather of that early summer-time. The clean lustral water and the full incense-box were carried after them. The altars were gay with garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of blossom and green herbs to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered this morning from a particular plot in the old garden, set apart for the purpose. Just then the young leaves were almost as fragrant as flowers, and the scent of the bean-fields mingled pleasantly with the cloud of incense. But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the priests, clad in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and bearing ears of green corn upon their heads, secured by flowing bands of white, the procession moved in absolute stillness, all persons, even the children, abstaining from speech after the utterance of the pontifical formula, Favete linguis!—Silence! Propitious Silence!—lest any words save those proper to the occasion should hinder the religious efficacy of the rite.
With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a leading part in the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to complete this impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of mind, esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of these sacred functions. To him the sustained stillness without seemed really but to be waiting upon that interior, mental condition of preparation or expectancy, for which he was just then intently striving. The persons about him, certainly, had never been challenged by those prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine nature: they conceived them rather to be the appointed means of setting such troublesome movements at rest. By them, "the religion of Numa," so staid, ideal and comely, the object of so much jealous conservatism, though of direct service as lending sanction to a sort of high scrupulosity, especially in the chief points of domestic conduct, was mainly prized as being, through its hereditary character, something like a personal distinction—as contributing, among the other accessories of an ancient house, to the production of that aristocratic atmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But in the young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were like the passing of some mysterious influence over all the elements of his nature and experience. One thing only distracted him—a certain pity at the bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the sacrificial victims and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at the central act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher's work, such as we decorously hide out of sight; though some then present certainly displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted them on a religious pretext. The old sculptors of the great procession on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placid heads of the victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for animals in forcible contrast with any indifference as to their sufferings. It was this contrast that distracted Marius now in the blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption upon the scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the procession approached the altars.
The names of that great populace of "little gods," dear to the Roman home, which the pontiffs had placed on the sacred list of the Indigitamenta, to be invoked, because they can help, on special occasions, were not forgotten in the long litany—Vatican who causes the infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his first word, Cuba who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca especially, for whom Marius had through life a particular memory and devotion, the goddess who watches over one's safe coming home. The urns of the dead in the family chapel received their due service. They also were now become something divine, a goodly company of friendly and protecting spirits, encamped about the place of their former abode—above all others, the father, dead ten years before, of whom, remembering but a tall, grave figure above him in early childhood, Marius habitually thought as a genius a little cold and severe.
Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi, Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera.—
Perhaps!—but certainly needs his altar here below, and garlands to-day upon his urn. But the dead genii were satisfied with little—a few violets, a cake dipped in wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, from the time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had Marius taken them their portion of the family meal, at the second course, amidst the silence of the company. They loved those who brought them their sustenance; but, deprived of these services, would be heard wandering through the house, crying sorrowfully in the stillness of the night.
And those simple gifts, like other objects as trivial—bread, oil, wine, milk—had regained for him, by their use in such religious service, that poetic and as it were moral significance, which surely belongs to all the means of daily life, could we but break through the veil of our familiarity with things by no means vulgar in themselves. A hymn followed, while the whole assembly stood with veiled faces. The fire rose up readily from the altars, in clean, bright flame—a favourable omen, making it a duty to render the mirth of the evening complete. Old wine was poured out freely for the servants at supper in the great kitchen, where they had worked in the imperfect light through the long evenings of winter. The young Marius himself took but a very sober part in the noisy feasting. A devout, regretful after-taste of what had been really beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished took him early away, that he might the better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the influences of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be moving in procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That feeling was still upon him as he awoke amid the beating of violent rain on the shutters, in the first storm of the season. The thunder which startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of his chamber almost painfully complete, as if the nearness of those angry clouds shut him up in a close place alone in the world. Then he thought of the sort of protection which that day's ceremonies assured. To procure an agreement with the gods—Pacem deorum exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he would fain have those Powers at least not against him. His own nearer household gods were all around his bed. The spell of his religion as a part of the very essence of home, its intimacy, its dignity and security, was forcible at that moment; only, it seemed to involve certain heavy demands upon him.
CHAPTER II: WHITE-NIGHTS
To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place—surely nothing could happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.1 "The red rose came first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal." So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but passed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainly the place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in this, that you might very well conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in the daytime might come to much there.
The young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had come down to him much curtailed through the extravagance of a certain Marcellus two generations before, a favourite in his day of the fashionable world at Rome, where he had at least spent his substance with a correctness of taste Marius might seem to have inherited from him; as he was believed also to resemble him in a singularly pleasant smile, consistent however, in the younger face, with some degree of sombre expression when the mind within was but slightly moved.
As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and nearer to the dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a trace of workday negligence or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some, for the young master himself among them. The more observant passer-by would note, curious as to the inmates, a certain amount of dainty care amid that neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance to disturb old associations. It was significant of the national character, that a sort of elegant gentleman farming, as we say, had been much affected by some of the most cultivated Romans. But it became something more than an elegant diversion, something of a serious business, with the household of Marius; and his actual interest in the cultivation of the earth and the care of flocks had brought him, at least, intimately near to those elementary conditions of life, a reverence for which, the great Roman poet, as he has shown by his own half-mystic pre-occupation with them, held to be the ground of primitive Roman religion, as of primitive morals. But then, farm-life in Italy, including the culture of the olive and the vine, has a grace of its own, and might well contribute to the production of an ideal dignity of character, like that of nature itself in this gifted region. Vulgarity seemed impossible. The place, though impoverished, was still deservedly dear, full of venerable memories, and with a living sweetness of its own for to-day.
To hold by such ceremonial traditions had been a part of the struggling family pride of the lad's father, to which the example of the head of the state, old Antoninus Pius[3]—an example to be still further enforced by his successor—had given a fresh though perhaps somewhat artificial popularity. It had been consistent with many another homely and old-fashioned trait in him, not to undervalue the charm of exclusiveness and immemorial authority, which membership in a local priestly college, hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To set a real value on these things was but one element in that pious concern for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as Marius afterwards discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. The ancient hymn—Fana Novella!—was still sung by his people, as the new moon grew bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leaping through heaps of blazing straw on a certain night in summer was not discouraged. The privilege of augury itself, according to tradition, had at one time belonged to his race; and if you can imagine how, once in a way, an impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mystic intimation, of the meaning and consequences of all that, what was implied in it becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the mind of Marius, in whose house the auspices were still carefully consulted before every undertaking of moment.
The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally—and that is all many not unimportant persons ever find to do—a certain tradition of life, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling with which he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that of awe; though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. On the part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband's memory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the recognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice to be credited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowy enough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long service to the departed soul; its many annual observances centering about the funeral urn—a tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white and fair, in the family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowers from the garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a somewhat closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought still to protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself—a closeness which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our human sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country, might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow. After the deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar collectedness[1q]. The severe and archaic religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of the demand upon him of anything in which deity was concerned. He must satisfy with a kind of sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest he be found wanting to, the claims of others, in their joys and calamities—the happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself felt. And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world of men and things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side, came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept him serious and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in after years much engrossed him, and when he had learned to think of all religions as indifferent, serious amid many fopperies and through many languid days, and made him anticipate all his life long as a thing towards which he must carefully train himself, some great occasion of self-devotion, such as really came, that should consecrate his life, and, it might be, its memory with others, as the early Christian looked forward to martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon it.
The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds had forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. The old Roman architects seem to have well understood the decorative value of the floor—the real economy there was, in the production of rich interior effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface they trod on. The pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness; but, though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age. Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to Marius, just then so full of animation and country colour. A chamber, curved ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the mansion, still contained his collection of works of art; above all, that head of Medusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the old Greek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the thing, as it seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands of which it was drawn up in a fisherman's net, with the fine golden laminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellus also who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the white pigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape—the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summer nights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.
Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them—the "subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for which many a Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any such considerations regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place still left, in thought at least, beside the living, the desire for which is actually, in various forms, so great a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, even thus early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands to lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural want. The soft lines of the white hands and face, set among the many folds of the veil and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music sometimes, defined themselves for him as the typical expression of maternity. Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for her musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying duly his country-grown habits—the sense of a certain delicate blandness, which he relished, above all, on returning to the "chapel" of his mother, after long days of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the winters especially, when the sufferings of the animal world became so palpable even to the least observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the almost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for life as such—for that mysterious essence which man is powerless to create in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul was like that! Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled? And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;—so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.
And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced still further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security. His religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the really light-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom, its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always as the prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as his accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it; and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made him oddly suspicious of particular places and persons. Though his liking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and ever afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for there was something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almost passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have killed or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the very circumstance of their life, being what they were. It was something like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral feeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or feathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmity against him. Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, a second time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered the night which had then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein, on the real greatness of those little troubles of children, of which older people make light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected how richly possessed his life had actually been by beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing how greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace.
Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by the exercise of meditative power. A vein of subjective philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, there would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men's valuations. And the generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace up to the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal function hereditary in his family—the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such preparation involved. Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of the play of Euripides, who every morning sweeps the temple floor with such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to their peculiar influences which he never outgrew; so that often in after-times, quite unexpectedly, this feeling would revive in him with undiminished freshness. That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication, survived through all the distractions of the world, and when all thought of such vocation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in spirit at least, towards a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct of life.
And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the lad's pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble to the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and delightful signs, one after another—the abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild birds—that one was approaching the sea; the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds. And it was characteristic of him that he relished especially the grave, subdued, northern notes in all that—the charm of the French or English notes, as we might term them—in the luxuriant Italian landscape.
NOTE
1. Ad Vigilias Albas[2].
CHAPTER III: CHANGE OF AIR
Dilexi decorem domus tuae.
That almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of the country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of a journey, which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to a certain temple of Aesculapius[4], among the hills of Etruria, as was then usual in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. The religion of Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been naturalised in Rome in the old republican times; but had reached under the Antonines the height of its popularity throughout the Roman world. That was an age of valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginary ones; but below its various crazes concerning health and disease, largely multiplied a few years after the time of which I am speaking by the miseries of a great pestilence, lay a valuable, because partly practicable, belief that all the maladies of the soul might be reached through the subtle gateways of the body.
Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean bodily sanity[2q]. The religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator, as they called him absolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one religion; that mild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing, all other pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to have a kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly, in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthood or "family" of Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be in possession of certain precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps, of all the institutions of the pagan world, to the Christian priesthood; the temples of the god, rich in some instances with the accumulated thank-offerings of centuries of a tasteful devotion, being really also a kind of hospitals for the sick, administered in a full conviction of the religiousness, the refined and sacred happiness, of a life spent in the relieving of pain.
