by Walter Pater
There was, besides, a special moral or doctrinal significance in the
making of such conversation with one’s self at all. The Logos, the reasonable spark, in man, is common to him with the gods — koinos autô pros tous theous — cum diis communis. That might seem but the truism of a certain school of philosophy; but in Aurelius was clearly an original and lively apprehension. There could be no inward conversation with one’s self such as this, unless there were indeed some one else, aware of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or displeased at one’s disposition of one’s self. Cornelius Fronto too could enounce that theory of the reasonable community between men and God, in many different ways. But then, he was a cheerful man, and Aurelius a singularly sad one; and what to Fronto was but a doctrine, or a motive of mere rhetoric, was to the other a consolation. He walks and talks, for a spiritual refreshment lacking which he would faint by the way, with what to the learned professor is but matter of philosophic eloquence.
In performing his public religious functions Marcus Aurelius had ever seemed like one who took part in some great process, a great thing really done, with more than the actually visible assistants about him. Here, in these manuscripts, in a hundred marginal flowers of thought or language, in happy new phrases of his own like the impromptus of an actual conversation, in quotations from other older masters of the inward life, taking new significance from the chances of such intercourse, was the record of his communion with that eternal reason, which was also his own proper self, with the divine companion, whose tabernacle was in the intelligence of men — the journal of his daily commerce with that.
Chance: or Providence! Chance: or Wisdom, one with nature and man, reaching from end to end, through all time and all existence, orderly disposing all things, according to fixed periods, as he describes it, in terms very like certain well-known words of the book of Wisdom: — those are the “fenced opposites” of the speculative dilemma, the tragic embarras, of which Aurelius cannot too often remind himself as the summary of man’s situation in the world. If there be, however, a provident soul like this “behind the veil,” truly, even to him, even in the most intimate of those conversations, it has never yet spoken with any quite irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet one’s choice in that speculative dilemma, as he has found it, is on the whole a matter of will.—”’Tis in thy power,” here too, again, “to think as thou wilt.” For his part he has asserted his will, and has the courage of his opinion. “To the better of two things, if thou findest that, turn with thy whole heart: eat and drink ever of the best before thee.” “Wisdom,” says that other disciple of the Sapiential philosophy, “hath mingled Her wine, she hath also prepared Herself a table.” Tou aristou apolaue: “Partake ever of Her best!” And what Marius, peeping now very closely upon the intimacies of that singular mind, found a thing actually pathetic and affecting, was the manner of the writer’s bearing as in the presence of this supposed guest; so elusive, so jealous of any palpable manifestation of himself, so taxing to one’s faith, never allowing one to lean frankly upon him and feel wholly at rest. Only, he would do his part, at least, in maintaining the constant fitness, the sweetness and quiet, of the guest-chamber. Seeming to vary with the intellectual fortune of the hour, from the plainest account of experience, to a sheer fantasy, only “believed because it was impossible,” that one hope was, at all events, sufficient to make men’s common pleasures and their common ambition, above all their commonest vices, seem very petty indeed, too petty to know of. It bred in him a kind of magnificence of character, in the old Greek sense of the term; a temper incompatible with any merely plausible advocacy of his convictions, or merely superficial thoughts about anything whatever, or talk about other people, or speculation as to what was passing in their so visibly little souls, or much talking of any kind, however clever or graceful. A soul thus disposed had “already entered into the better life”: — was indeed in some sort “a priest, a minister of the gods.” Hence his constant “recollection”; a close watching of his soul, of a kind almost unique in the ancient world. — Before all things examine into thyself: strive to be at home with thyself! — Marius, a sympathetic witness of all this, might almost seem to have had a foresight of monasticism itself in the prophetic future. With this mystic companion he had gone a step onward out of the merely objective pagan existence. Here was already a master in that craft of self-direction, which was about to play so large a part in the forming of human mind, under the sanction of the Christian church.
Yet it was in truth a somewhat melancholy service, a service on which one must needs move about, solemn, serious, depressed, with the hushed footsteps of those who move about the house where a dead body is lying. Such was the impression which occurred to Marius again and again as he read, with a growing sense of some profound dissidence from his author. By certain quite traceable links of association he was reminded, in spite of the moral beauty of the philosophic emperor’s ideas, how he had sat, essentially unconcerned, at the public shows. For, actually, his contemplations had made him of a sad heart, inducing in him that melancholy — Tristitia — which even the monastic moralists have held to be of the nature of deadly sin, akin to the sin of Desidia or Inactivity. Resignation, a sombre resignation, a sad heart, patient bearing of the burden of a sad heart: — Yes! this belonged doubtless to the situation of an honest thinker upon the world. Only, in this case there seemed to be too much of a complacent acquiescence in the world as it is. And there could be no true Théodicé in that; no real accommodation of the world as it is, to the divine pattern of the Logos, the eternal reason, over against it. It amounted to a tolerance of evil.
The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little understand, yet prospereth on the journey:
If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be nought of evil with thee therein.
If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with thee — nothing to be afraid of:
Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every man according to his desert:
If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require?
Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits?
That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the whole.
The profit of the whole, — that was sufficient!
— Links, in a train of thought really generous! of which, nevertheless, the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man. “Let thine air be cheerful,” he had said; and, with an effort, did himself at times attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely ought to accompany, as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like those. Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable physiognomy. With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human faces from “the land which is very far off,” we may trace from Giotto onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael — the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed “blitheness “of the Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth. And yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching in the head or heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an enemy with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in a thousand forms — the apparent waste of men’s gifts in an early, or even in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of animals; the disease and pain of the body.
And there was another poin
t of dissidence between Aurelius and his reader. — The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body. Since it is “the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither sensation nor passion to break in upon her,” it follows that the true interest of the spirit must ever be to treat the body — Well! as a corpse attached thereto, rather than as a living companion — nay, actually to promote its dissolution. In counterpoise to the inhumanity of this, presenting itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin against nature, the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man. Such delight indeed had been but a natural consequence of the sensuous or materialistic character of the philosophy of his choice. Now to Cornelius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer terms it, the one true temple in the world; or rather itself the proper object of worship, of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold might have its seemliness and due symbolic use: — Ah! and of what awe-stricken pity also, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones of a poor man’s grave!
Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the philosopher’s contempt for it — some diseased point of thought, or moral dulness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all the emperor’s inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for which there was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world. “’Tis part of the business of life,” he read, “to lose it handsomely.” On due occasion, “one might give life the slip.” The moral or mental powers might fail one; and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the time for taking leave was not come:— “Thou canst leave this prison when thou wilt. Go forth boldly!” Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain such question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with. There, surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of apprehension. It was the attitude, the melancholy intellectual attitude, of one who might be greatly mistaken in things — who might make the greatest of mistakes.
A heart that could forget itself in the misfortune, or even in the weakness of others: — of this Marius had certainly found the trace, as a confidant of the emperor’s conversations with himself, in spite of those jarring inhumanities, of that pretension to a stoical indifference, and the many difficulties of his manner of writing. He found it again not long afterwards, in still stronger evidence, in this way. As he read one morning early, there slipped from the rolls of manuscript a sealed letter with the emperor’s superscription, which might well be of importance, and he felt bound to deliver it at once in person; Aurelius being then absent from Rome in one of his favourite retreats, at Praeneste, taking a few days of quiet with his young children, before his departure for the war. A whole day passed as Marius crossed the Campagna on horseback, pleased by the random autumn lights bringing out in the distance the sheep at pasture, the shepherds in their picturesque dress, the golden elms, tower and villa; and it was after dark that he mounted the steep street of the little hill-town to the imperial residence. He was struck by an odd mixture of stillness and excitement about the place. Lights burned at the windows. It seemed that numerous visitors were within, for the courtyard was crowded with litters and horses in waiting. For the moment, indeed, all larger cares, even the cares of war, of late so heavy a pressure, had been forgotten in what was passing with the little Annius Verus; who for his part had forgotten his toys, lying all day across the knees of his mother, as a mere child’s ear-ache grew rapidly to alarming sickness with great and manifest agony, only suspended a little, from time to time, when from very weariness he passed into a few moments of unconsciousness. The country surgeon called in, had removed the imposthume with the knife. There had been a great effort to bear this operation, for the terrified child, hardly persuaded to submit himself, when his pain was at its worst, and even more for the parents. At length, amid a company of pupils pressing in with him, as the custom was, to watch the proceedings in the sick-room, the eminent Galen had arrived, only to pronounce the thing done visibly useless, the patient falling now into longer intervals of delirium. And thus, thrust on one side by the crowd of departing visitors, Marius was forced into the privacy of a grief, the desolate face of which went deep into his memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away — quite conscious at last, but with a touching expression upon it of weakness and defeat — pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress.
CHAPTER XIX: THE WILL AS VISION
Paratum cor meum deus! paratum cor meum!
THE emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of images in memory of the dead prince; that a golden one should be carried, together with the other images, in the great procession of the Circus, and the addition of the child’s name to the Hymn of the Salian Priests: and so, stifling private grief, without further delay set forth for the war.
True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius, had understood it, was essentially of the nature of a service. If so be, you can discover a mode of life more desirable than the being a king, for those who shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a possibility; but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific Vision be indeed possible, if philosophy really “concludes in an ecstasy,” affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been discovered more desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you might induce such persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon them the distasteful task of governing other men, or even of leading them to victory in battle. But, by the very conditions of its tenure, their dominion would be wholly a ministry to others: they would have taken upon them-”the form of a servant”: they would be reigning for the well-being of others rather than their own. The true king, the righteous king, would be Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the better land and its perfected company — so real a thing to him, definite and real as the pictured scenes of his psalter — to take part in or to arbitrate men’s quarrels, about the transitory appearances of things. In a lower degree (lower, in proportion as the highest Platonic dream is lower than any Christian vision) the true king would be Marcus Aurelius, drawn from the meditation of books, to be the ruler of the Roman people in peace, and still more, in war.
To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the visions, however dim, which this mood brought with it, were sufficiently pleasant to him, together with the endearments of his home, to make public rule nothing less than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato’s requirement, now consummated in his setting forth for the campaign on the Danube. That it was such a sacrifice was to Marius visible fact, as he saw him ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all the pageantry of an imperial departure, yet with the air less of a sanguine and self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other already defeated. Through the fortune of the subsequent years, passing and repassing so inexplicably from side to side, the rumour of which reached him amid his own quiet studies, Marius seemed always to see that central figure, with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive suffering, all the stranger from its contrast with the magnificent armour worn by the emperor on this occasion, as it had been worn by his predecessor Hadrian.
Totus et argento contextus et auro:
clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous lightsomeness — he looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere comfortless shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction of the labours of Hercules, through those northern, mist-laden confines of the civilised world. It was as if the familiar soul which had been so friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to Hades; and when he read the Conversations afterwards, though his judgment of them underwent no material change, it
was nevertheless with the allowance we make for the dead. The memory of that suffering image, while it certainly strengthened his adhesion to what he could accept at all in the philosophy of Aurelius, added a strange pathos to what must seem the writer’s mistakes. What, after all, had been the meaning of that incident, observed as so fortunate an omen long since, when the prince, then a little child much younger than was usual, had stood in ceremony among the priests of Mars and flung his crown of flowers with the rest at the sacred image reclining on the Pulvinar? The other crowns lodged themselves here or there; when, Lo! the crown thrown by Aurelius, the youngest of them all, alighted upon the very brows of the god, as if placed there by a careful hand! He was still young, also, when on the day of his adoption by Antoninus Pius he saw himself in a dream, with as it were shoulders of ivory, like the images of the gods, and found them more capable than shoulders of flesh. Yet he was now well-nigh fifty years of age, setting out with two-thirds of life behind him, upon a labour which would fill the remainder of it with anxious cares — a labour for which he had perhaps no capacity, and certainly no taste.