Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

  CHAPTER VI: EUPHUISM

  [92] So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius, withan expression changed in some ways from the original and on the wholegraver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more likethat "Lord, of terrible aspect," who stood at Dante's bedside and wept,or had at least grown to the manly earnestness of the Eros ofPraxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, thisepisode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation,already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginativelove, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean--anideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued itat various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty,as the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed tohim just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken celestial fire,to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, [93] soul orspirit in things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the purebrilliancy, and as it were in the happy light, of youth and morning andthe springtide, men's actual loves, with which at many points the bookbrings one into close contact, might appear to him, like the generaltenor of their lives, to be somewhat mean and sordid. The hiddennessof perfect things: a shrinking mysticism, a sentiment of diffidencelike that expressed in Psyche's so tremulous hope concerning the childto be born of the husband she had never yet seen--"in the face of thislittle child, at the least, shall I apprehend thine"--in hoc saltemparvulo cognoscam faciem tuam: the fatality which seems to haunt anysignal+ beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itselfsomething illicit and isolating: the suspicion and hatred it so oftenexcites in the vulgar:--these were some of the impressions, forming, asthey do, a constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience,from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old story enforced on him. Abook, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky inthe precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happyaccident counts with us for something more than its independent value.The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured forhim as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal gratitude toits writer, and saw in it doubtless [94] far more than was really therefor any other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in hisremembrance, never quite losing its power in frequent return to it forthe revival of that first glowing impression.

  Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical one: it stimulatedthe literary ambition, already so strong a motive with him, by a signalexample of success, and made him more than ever an ardent,indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of theliterary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of thatthrough which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one canactually take effect upon others, to over-awe or charm them to one'sside, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connexionwith that desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of whichanother might have relied on the acquisition and display of brilliantmilitary qualities. In him, a fine instinctive sentiment of the exactvalue and power of words was connate with the eager longing for swayover his fellows. He saw himself already a gallant and effectiveleader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in therehabilitation of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished andlanguid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the onlysort of patriotic feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves.The popular speech was gradually departing from the form [95] and ruleof literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial.While the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarouslypedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousandchance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or atleast ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time wascoming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understandCicero; though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius,who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been afashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days ofHadrian, had written in the vernacular.

  The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himselfwould be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in itsdealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular andrevolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of theproletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the youngerPliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the Latintongue, had said,--"I am one of those who admire the ancients, yet I donot, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius which ourown times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if weary andeffete, no longer produces what is admirable." And he, Flavian, wouldprove himself the true master of the opportunity thus indicated. In[96] his eagerness for a not too distant fame, he dreamed over allthat, as the young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns. Others mightbrutalise or neglect the native speech, that true "open field" forcharm and sway over men. He would make of it a serious study, weighingthe precise power of every phrase and word, as though it were preciousmetal, disentangling the later associations and going back to theoriginal and native sense of each,--restoring to full significance allits wealth of latent figurative expression, reviving or replacing itsoutworn or tarnished images. Latin literature and the Latin tonguewere dying of routine and languor; and what was necessary, first ofall, was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship betweenthought and expression, between the sensation and the term, and restoreto words their primitive power.

  For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force,were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forciblyimpressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means ofmaking visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful,of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was butmiddling, tame, or only half-true even to him--this scrupulousness ofliterary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort ofchivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience ofexecution! what research for the significant [97] tones of ancientidiom--sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regularword-building--gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaningof the sceptical Pliny's somewhat melancholy advice to one of hisfriends, that he should seek in literature deliverance frommortality--ut studiis se literarum a mortalitate vindicet. And therewas everything in the nature and the training of Marius to make him afull participator in the hopes of such a new literary school, withFlavian for its leader. In the refinements of that curious spirit, inits horror of profanities, its fastidious sense of a correctness inexternal form, there was something which ministered to the old ritualinterest, still surviving in him; as if here indeed were involved akind of sacred service to the mother-tongue.

  Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age inwhich the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten dutiestowards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it doesbut modify a little the principles of all effective expression at alltimes. 'Tis art's function to conceal itself: ars est celareartem:--is a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, hasperhaps been oftenest and most confidently quoted by those who have hadlittle literary or other art to conceal; and from the very beginning ofprofessional literature, the "labour of the file"--a labour in the caseof Plato, for instance, or Virgil, like [98] that of the oldest ofgoldsmiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the work by far morethan the weight of precious metal it removed--has always had itsfunction. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples of it, this RomanEuphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty in writing--es kallosgraphein+--might lapse into its characteristic fopperies or mannerisms,into the "defects of its qualities," in truth, not wholly unpleasingperhaps, or at least excusable, when looked at as but the toys (soCicero calls them), the strictly congenial and appropriate toys, of anassiduously cultivated age, which could not help being polite,critical, self-conscious. The mere love of novelty also had, ofcourse, its part there: as with the Euphuism of the Elizabethan age,and
of the modern French romanticists, its neologies were the ground ofone of the favourite charges against it; though indeed, as regardsthese tricks of taste also, there is nothing new, but a quaint familylikeness rather, between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here, aselsewhere, the power of "fashion," as it is called, is but one minorform, slight enough, it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of thatdeeper yearning of human nature towards ideal perfection, which is acontinuous force in it; and since in this direction too human nature islimited, such fashions must necessarily reproduce themselves. Amongother resemblances to later growths of Euphuism, its archaisms on theone hand, and [99] its neologies on the other, the Euphuism of thedays of Marcus Aurelius had, in the composition of verse, its fancy forthe refrain. It was a snatch from a popular chorus, something he hadheard sounding all over the town of Pisa one April night, one of thefirst bland and summer-like nights of the year, that Flavian had chosenfor the refrain of a poem he was then pondering--the PervigiliumVeneris--the vigil, or "nocturn," of Venus.

  Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a constantpart in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries areplaying in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation orunreality in that minute culture of form:--Cannot those who have athing to say, say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like theold writers of Greece? And this challenge had at least the effect ofsetting his thoughts at work on the intellectual situation as it laybetween the children of the present and those earliest masters.Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greekgenius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence ofimitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent, laidupon every artist, increased since then! It was all around one:--thatsmoothly built world of old classical taste, an accomplished fact, withoverwhelming authority on every detail of the conduct of one's [100]work. With no fardel on its own back, yet so imperious towards thosewho came labouring after it, Hellas, in its early freshness, looked asdistant from him even then as it does from ourselves. There might seemto be no place left for novelty or originality,--place only for apatient, an infinite, faultlessness. On this question too Flavianpassed through a world of curious art-casuistries, of self-tormenting,at the threshold of his work. Was poetic beauty a thing ever one andthe same, a type absolute; or, changing always with the soul of timeitself, did it depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick ofapprehension, the fashion, as we say, of each successive age? Mightone recover that old, earlier sense of it, that earlier manner, in amasterly effort to recall all the complexities of the life, moral andintellectual, of the earlier age to which it had belonged? Had therebeen really bad ages in art or literature? Were all ages, even thoseearliest, adventurous, matutinal days, in themselves equally poeticalor unpoetical; and poetry, the literary beauty, the poetic ideal,always but a borrowed light upon men's actual life?

  Homer had said--

  Hoi d' hote de limenos polybentheos entos hikonto, Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nei melaine... Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phegmini thalasses.+

  And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer wasalways telling [101] things after this manner. And one might thinkthere had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanicaltranscript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in whichone could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, thesailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in "the greatstyle," against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose ofan age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer'spoetry? Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer,the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader andthe actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, inan age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on hisopportunity for the touch of "golden alchemy," or at least for thepleasantly lighted side of things themselves? Might not another, inone's own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had beenthrough the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in like manner,discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it? Would not a futuregeneration, looking back upon this, under the power of theenchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with itsown languor--the languor that for some reason (concerning whichAugustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt men always? HadHomer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to someof the people of his own age, [102] as seemed to happen with every newliterature in turn? In any case, the intellectual conditions of earlyGreece had been--how different from these! And a true literary tactwould accept that difference in forming the primary conception of theliterary function at a later time. Perhaps the utmost one could get byconscious effort, in the way of a reaction or return to the conditionsof an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas, artificialartlessness, naivete; and this quality too might have its measure ofeuphuistic charm, direct and sensible enough, though it must count, incomparison with that genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, notas the freshness of the open fields, but only of a bunch offield-flowers in a heated room.

  There was, meantime, all this:--on one side, the old pagan culture, forus but a fragment, for him an accomplished yet present fact, still aliving, united, organic whole, in the entirety of its art, its thought,its religions, its sagacious forms of polity, that so weighty authorityit exercised on every point, being in reality only the measure of itscharm for every one: on the other side, the actual world in all itseager self-assertion, with Flavian himself, in his boundless animation,there, at the centre of the situation. From the natural defects, fromthe pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, hewas saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to present, veryreal, [103] at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante withwhat might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve thepurpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity,certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension ofthings as really being, with important results, thus, rather thanthus,--intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was calledupon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the modelwithin. Flavian too, with his fine clear mastery of the practicallyeffective, had early laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic inliterature: that to know when one's self is interested, is the firstcondition of interesting other people. It was a principle, theforcible apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in theselection of his intellectual food; often listless while others read orgazed diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere complaisanceto people's emotions: it served to foster in him a very scrupulousliterary sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demandfor a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personalintuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved hiseuphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice.

  Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddessVenus, the work of [104] his earlier manhood, and designed originallyto open an argument less persistently sombre than that protest againstthe whole pagan heaven which actually follows it? It is certainly themost typical expression of a mood, still incident to the young poet, asa thing peculiar to his youth, when he feels the sentimental currentsetting forcibly along his veins, and so much as a matter of purelyphysical excitement, that he can hardly distinguish it from theanimation of external nature, the upswelling of the seed in the earth,and of the sap through the trees. Flavian, to whom, again, as to hislater euphuistic kinsmen, old mythology seemed as full of untried,unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself, had long beenoccupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the vernal principle of life inthings; a composition shaping itself, little by little, out of athousand dim perceptions, into singularly definite form (definite andfirm as fine-art in metal, thought Marius) for which, as I said, he hadcaught his "refrain," from the lips of the young men, singing becausethey could not help it, in the streets of Pisa. And as oftenesthappens also,
with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemealbeginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunateincidents, the physical heat and light, of one singularly happy day.

  It was one of the first hot days of March--"the sacred day"--on which,from Pisa, as from [105] many another harbour on the Mediterranean, theShip of Isis went to sea, and every one walked down to the shore-sideto witness the freighting of the vessel, its launching and finalabandonment among the waves, as an object really devoted to the GreatGoddess, that new rival, or "double," of ancient Venus, and like her afavourite patroness of sailors. On the evening next before, all theworld had been abroad to view the illumination of the river; thestately lines of building being wreathed with hundreds of many-colouredlamps. The young men had poured forth their chorus--

  Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, Quique amavit cras amet--

  as they bore their torches through the yielding crowd, or rowed theirlanterned boats up and down the stream, till far into the night, whenheavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home. Morning broke,however, smiling and serene; and the long procession started betimes.The river, curving slightly, with the smoothly paved streets on eitherside, between its low marble parapet and the fair dwelling-houses,formed the main highway of the city; and the pageant, accompaniedthroughout by innumerable lanterns and wax tapers, took its course upone of these streets, crossing the water by a bridge up-stream, anddown the other, to the haven, every possible standing-place, out ofdoors [106] and within, being crowded with sight-seers, of whom Mariuswas one of the most eager, deeply interested in finding the spectaclemuch as Apuleius had described it in his famous book.

  At the head of the procession, the master of ceremonies, quietly wavingback the assistants, made way for a number of women, scatteringperfumes. They were succeeded by a company of musicians, piping andtwanging, on instruments the strangest Marius had ever beheld, thenotes of a hymn, narrating the first origin of this votive rite to achoir of youths, who marched behind them singing it. The tire-women andother personal attendants of the great goddess came next, bearing theinstruments of their ministry, and various articles from the sacredwardrobe, wrought of the most precious material; some of them with longivory combs, plying their hands in wild yet graceful concert ofmovement as they went, in devout mimicry of the toilet. Placed intheir rear were the mirror-bearers of the goddess, carrying largemirrors of beaten brass or silver, turned in such a way as to reflectto the great body of worshippers who followed, the face of themysterious image, as it moved on its way, and their faces to it, asthough they were in fact advancing to meet the heavenly visitor. Theycomprehended a multitude of both sexes and of all ages, alreadyinitiated into the divine secret, clad in fair linen, the femalesveiled, the males with shining [107] tonsures, and every one carrying asistrum--the richer sort of silver, a few very dainty persons of finegold--rattling the reeds, with a noise like the jargon of innumerablebirds and insects awakened from torpor and abroad in the spring sun.Then, borne upon a kind of platform, came the goddess herself,undulating above the heads of the multitude as the bearers walked, inmystic robe embroidered with the moon and stars, bordered gracefullywith a fringe of real fruit and flowers, and with a glittering crownupon the head. The train of the procession consisted of the priests inlong white vestments, close from head to foot, distributed into variousgroups, each bearing, exposed aloft, one of the sacred symbols ofIsis--the corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand of equity, and amongthem the votive ship itself, carved and gilt, and adorned bravely withflags flying. Last of all walked the high priest; the people kneelingas he passed to kiss his hand, in which were those well-rememberedroses.

  Marius followed with the rest to the harbour, where the mystic ship,lowered from the shoulders of the priests, was loaded with as much asit could carry of the rich spices and other costly gifts, offered ingreat profusion by the worshippers, and thus, launched at last upon thewater, left the shore, crossing the harbour-bar in the wake of a muchstouter vessel than itself with a crew of white-robed mariners, whose[108] function it was, at the appointed moment, finally to desert it onthe open sea.

  The remainder of the day was spent by most in parties on the water.Flavian and Marius sailed further than they had ever done before to awild spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony,which, having had its eager, stirring life at the time when Etruria wasstill a power in Italy, had perished in the age of the civil wars. Inthe absolute transparency of the air on this gracious day, aninfinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with sparklingclearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves--Flavian at worksuddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land atlast. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with atumble-down of quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine ofVenus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and napkins and gildedshells which these people had offered to the image. Flavian and Mariussat down under the shadow of a mass of gray rock or ruin, where thesea-gate of the Greek town had been, and talked of life in those oldGreek colonies. Of this place, all that remained, besides those rudestones, was--a handful of silver coins, each with a head of pure andarchaic beauty, though a little cruel perhaps, supposed to representthe Siren Ligeia, whose tomb was formerly shown here--only these, andan ancient song, the very strain which Flavian [109] had recovered inthose last months. They were records which spoke, certainly, of thecharm of life within those walls. How strong must have been the tideof men's existence in that little republican town, so small that thiscircle of gray stones, of service now only by the moisture theygathered for the blue-flowering gentians among them, had been the lineof its rampart! An epitome of all that was liveliest, most animatedand adventurous, in the old Greek people of which it was an offshoot,it had enhanced the effect of these gifts by concentration withinnarrow limits. The band of "devoted youth,"--hiera neotes.+--of theyounger brothers, devoted to the gods and whatever luck the gods mightafford, because there was no room for them at home--went forth, bearingthe sacred flame from the mother hearth; itself a flame, of power toconsume the whole material of existence in clear light and heat, withno smouldering residue. The life of those vanished townsmen, sobrilliant and revolutionary, applying so abundantly the personalqualities which alone just then Marius seemed to value, associateditself with the actual figure of his companion, standing there beforehim, his face enthusiastic with the sudden thought of all that; andstruck him vividly as precisely the fitting opportunity for a naturelike his, so hungry for control, for ascendency over men.

  Marius noticed also, however, as high spirits [110] flagged at last, onthe way home through the heavy dew of the evening, more than physicalfatigue in Flavian, who seemed to find no refreshment in the coolness.There had been something feverish, perhaps, and like the beginning ofsickness, about his almost forced gaiety, in this sudden spasm ofspring; and by the evening of the next day he was lying with a burningspot on his forehead, stricken, as was thought from the first, by theterrible new disease.

  NOTES

  93. +Corrected from the Macmillan edition misprint "singal."

  98. +Transliteration: es kallos graphein. Translation: "To writebeautifully."

  100. +Iliad 1.432-33, 437. Transliteration:

  Hoi d' hote de limenos polybentheos entos hikonto, Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nei melaine... Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phegmini thalasses.

  Etext editor's translation:

  When they had safely made deep harbor They took in the sail, laid it in their black ship... And went ashore just past the breakers.

  109. +Transliteration: hiera neotes. Pater translates the phrase,"devoted youth."