Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

  PART THE SECOND

  CHAPTER VIII: ANIMULA VAGULA

  Animula, vagula, blandula Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula.

  The Emperor Hadrian to his Soul

  [123] FLAVIAN was no more. The little marble chest with its dust andtears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actualspectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for theimagination, whatever confidence they may entertain of the soul'ssurvival in another life. To Marius, greatly agitated by that event,the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing lessthan the soul's extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as thefire among those still beloved ashes. Even that wistful suspense ofjudgment expressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages ofbeing still possible for the soul in some dim journey hence, seemedwholly untenable, and, with it, almost all that remained of thereligion of his childhood. Future extinction seemed just then [124] tobe what the unforced witness of his own nature pointed to. On the otherhand, there came a novel curiosity as to what the various schools ofancient philosophy had had to say concerning that strange, flutteringcreature; and that curiosity impelled him to certain severe studies, inwhich his earlier religious conscience seemed still to survive, as aprinciple of hieratic scrupulousness or integrity of thought, regardingthis new service to intellectual light.

  At this time, by his poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen aprey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in manya melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this,fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, hewas kept by a genuine virility there, effective in him, among otherresults, as a hatred of what was theatrical, and the instinctiverecognition that in vigorous intelligence, after all, divinity was mostlikely to be found a resident. With this was connected the feeling,increasing with his advance to manhood, of a poetic beauty in mereclearness of thought, the actually aesthetic charm of a cold austerityof mind; as if the kinship of that to the clearness of physical lightwere something more than a figure of speech. Of all those variousreligious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could wellappreciate the picturesque; that was made easy by his naturalEpicureanism, already prompting [125] him to conceive of himself as butthe passive spectator of the world around him. But it was to theseverer reasoning, of which such matters as Epicurean theory are born,that, in effect, he now betook himself. Instinctively suspicious ofthose mechanical arcana, those pretended "secrets unveiled" of theprofessional mystic, which really bring great and little souls to onelevel, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old,ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and thehonest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even theArcana Celestia of Platonism--what the sons of Plato had had to sayregarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily houseand merely occasional dwelling-place--seemed to him while his heart wasthere in the urn with the material ashes of Flavian, or still lingeringin memory over his last agony, wholly inhuman or morose, as tending toalleviate his resentment at nature's wrong. It was to the sentiment ofthe body, and the affections it defined--the flesh, of whose force andcolour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue orabstract--he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved,suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him amaterialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee.

  As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetryhad passed away, [126] to be replaced by the literature of thought. Hismuch-pondered manuscript verses were laid aside; and what happened nowto one, who was certainly to be something of a poet from first to last,looked at the moment like a change from poetry to prose. He came ofage about this time, his own master though with beardless face; and ateighteen, an age at which, then as now, many youths of capacity, whofancied themselves poets, secluded themselves from others chiefly inaffectation and vague dreaming, he secluded himself indeed from others,but in a severe intellectual meditation, that salt of poetry, withoutwhich all the more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative world.Still with something of the old religious earnestness of his childhood,he set himself--Sich im Denken zu orientiren--to determine hisbearings, as by compass, in the world of thought--to get that preciseacquaintance with the creative intelligence itself, its structure andcapacities, its relation to other parts of himself and to other things,without which, certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young manrich in this world's goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, andascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact estimateof realities, as towards himself, he must have--a delicately measuredgradation of certainty in things--from the distant, haunted horizon ofmere surmise or imagination, to the actual [127] feeling of sorrow inhis heart, as he reclined one morning, alone instead of in pleasantcompany, to ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old Greekmanuscript, unrolled beside him. His former gay companions, meetinghim in the streets of the old Italian town, and noting the graver linescoming into the face of the sombre but enthusiastic student ofintellectual structure, who could hold his own so well in the societyof accomplished older men, were half afraid of him, though proud tohave him of their company. Why this reserve?--they asked, concerningthe orderly, self-possessed youth, whose speech and carriage seemed socarefully measured, who was surely no poet like the rapt, dishevelledLupus. Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was so daintilyfolded, and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent onhis own line of ambition: or even on riches?

  Marius, meantime, was reading freely, in early morning for the mostpart, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know whatmight be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence,which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.And the old Greek who more than any other was now giving form to histhoughts was a very hard master. From Epicurus, from the thunder andlightning of Lucretius--like thunder and lightning some distance off,one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses--he had gone back to[128] the writer who was in a certain sense the teacher of both,Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult book "Concerning Nature" was eventhen rare, for people had long since satisfied themselves by thequotation of certain brilliant, isolated, oracles only, out of what wasat best a taxing kind of lore. But the difficulty of the early Greekprose did but spur the curiosity of Marius; the writer, the superiorclearness of whose intellectual view had so sequestered him from othermen, who had had so little joy of that superiority, being avowedlyexacting as to the amount of devout attention he required from thestudent. "The many," he said, always thus emphasising the differencebetween the many and the few, are "like people heavy with wine," "ledby children," "knowing not whither they go;" and yet, "much learningdoth not make wise;" and again, "the ass, after all, would have histhistles rather than fine gold."

  Heraclitus, indeed, had not under-rated the difficulty for "the many"of the paradox with which his doctrine begins, and the due reception ofwhich must involve a denial of habitual impressions, as the necessaryfirst step in the way of truth. His philosophy had been developed inconscious, outspoken opposition to the current mode of thought, as amatter requiring some exceptional loyalty to pure reason and its "drylight." Men are subject to an illusion, he protests, regarding mattersapparent to sense. [129] What the uncorrected sense gives was a falseimpression of permanence or fixity in things, which have really changedtheir nature in the very moment in which we see and touch them. Andthe radical flaw in the current mode of thinking would lie herein:that, reflecting this false or uncorrected sensation, it attributes tothe phenomena of experience a durability which does not really belongto them. Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world of firmlyout-lined objects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and deadwhat is in reality full of animation, of vigour, of the fire oflife--that eternal process of nature, of which at a later time Goethespoke as the "Living Garme
nt," whereby God is seen of us, ever inweaving at the "Loom of Time."

  And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made was, in the firstinstance, from confused to unconfused sensation; with a sort ofprophetic seriousness, a great claim and assumption, such as we mayunderstand, if we anticipate in this preliminary scepticism theulterior scope of his speculation, according to which the universalmovement of all natural things is but one particular stage, or measure,of that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason consists. The onetrue being--that constant subject of all early thought--it was hismerit to have conceived, not as sterile and stagnant inaction, but as aperpetual energy, from the restless stream of which, [130] at certainpoints, some elements detach themselves, and harden into non-entity anddeath, corresponding, as outward objects, to man's inward condition ofignorance: that is, to the slowness of his faculties. It is with thisparadox of a subtle, perpetual change in all visible things, that thehigh speculation of Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expressesfor anything like a careless, half-conscious, "use-and-wont" receptionof our experience, which took so strong a hold on men's memories! Hencethose many precepts towards a strenuous self-consciousness in all wethink and do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason, which makesstrict attentiveness of mind a kind of religious duty and service.

  The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our ordinaryexperience, fixed as they seem, are really in perpetual change, hadbeen, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a largepositive system of almost religious philosophy. Then as now, theilluminated philosophic mind might apprehend, in what seemed a mass oflifeless matter, the movement of that universal life, in which things,and men's impressions of them, were ever "coming to be," alternatelyconsumed and renewed. That continual change, to be discovered by theattentive understanding where common opinion found fixed objects, wasbut the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading motion--the sleepless,ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine [131] reason itself,proceeding always by its own rhythmical logic, and lending to all mindand matter, in turn, what life they had. In this "perpetual flux" ofthings and of souls, there was, as Heraclitus conceived, a continuance,if not of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderlyintelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wroughtout in and through the series of their mutations--ordinances of thedivine reason, maintained throughout the changes of the phenomenalworld; and this harmony in their mutation and opposition, was, afterall, a principle of sanity, of reality, there. But it happened, that,of all this, the first, merely sceptical or negative step, that easieststep on the threshold, had alone remained in general memory; and the"doctrine of motion" seemed to those who had felt its seduction to makeall fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the stillswifter passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed toreflect them, might indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but whatwas ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring flame, orlike the race of water in the mid-stream--too swiftly for any realknowledge of them to be attainable. Heracliteanism had grown to bealmost identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras,that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was theonly standard of what is or is [132] not, and each one the measure ofall things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had becomebut an authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge.

  And as it had been with his original followers in Greece, so ithappened now with the later Roman disciple. He, too, paused at theapprehension of that constant motion of things--the drift of flowers,of little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream aroundhim, the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out ofsight, must count with him as but a dim problem. The bold mentalflight of the old Greek master from the fleeting, competing objects ofexperience to that one universal life, in which the whole sphere ofphysical change might be reckoned as but a single pulsation, remainedby him as hypothesis only--the hypothesis he actually preferred, as initself most credible, however scantily realisable even by theimagination--yet still as but one unverified hypothesis, among manyothers, concerning the first principle of things. He might reserve itas a fine, high, visionary consideration, very remote upon theintellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where that ladderseemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly notime left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so closeto him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground. And thosechildish days of reverie, [133] when he played at priests, played inmany another day-dream, working his way from the actual present, as faras he might, with a delightful sense of escape in replacing the outerworld of other people by an inward world as himself really cared tohave it, had made him a kind of "idealist." He was become aware of thepossibility of a large dissidence between an inward and somewhatexclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved,unheightened reality of the life of those about him. As a consequence,he was ready now to concede, somewhat more easily than others, thefirst point of his new lesson, that the individual is to himself themeasure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive certainty tohimself of his own impressions. To move afterwards in that outer worldof other people, as though taking it at their estimate, would bepossible henceforth only as a kind of irony. And as with the VicaireSavoyard, after reflecting on the variations of philosophy, "the firstfruit he drew from that reflection was the lesson of a limitation ofhis researches to what immediately interested him; to rest peacefullyin a profound ignorance as to all beside; to disquiet himself onlyconcerning those things which it was of import for him to know." Atleast he would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow itsdue weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in theconditions of man's life. [134] Just here he joined company, retracingin his individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of humanthought, with another wayfarer on the journey, another ancient Greekmaster, the founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weightytraditional utterances (for he had left no writing) served in turn togive effective outline to the contemplations of Marius. There wassomething in the doctrine itself congruous with the place wherein ithad its birth; and for a time Marius lived much, mentally, in thebrilliant Greek colony which had given a dubious name to the philosophyof pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the mountains and thesea, among richer than Italian gardens, on a certain breezy table-landprojecting from the African coast, some hundreds of miles southwardfrom Greece. There, in a delightful climate, with something oftransalpine temperance amid its luxury, and withal in an inwardatmosphere of temperance which did but further enhance the brilliancyof human life, the school of Cyrene had maintained itself as almost onewith the family of its founder; certainly as nothing coarse or unclean,and under the influence of accomplished women.

  Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of judgment as towhat might really lie behind--flammantia moenia mundi: the flamingramparts of the world. Those strange, bold, sceptical surmises, whichhad haunted the minds [135] of the first Greek enquirers as merelyabstract doubt, which had been present to the mind of Heraclitus as oneelement only in a system of abstract philosophy, became with Aristippusa very subtly practical worldly-wisdom. The difference between him andthose obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that between an ancientthinker generally, and a modern man of the world: it was the differencebetween the mystic in his cell, or the prophet in the desert, and theexpert, cosmopolitan, administrator of his dark sayings, translatingthe abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first of all, ofsentiment. It has been sometimes seen, in the history of the humanmind, that when thus translated into terms of sentiment--of sentiment,as lying already half-way towards practice--the abstract ideas ofmetaphysics for the first time reveal their true significance. Themetaphysical principle, in itself, as it were, without hands or feet,becomes impressive, fascinating, of effect, when translated into aprecept as to how it were best to feel and act; in other words, underits sentimental or ethical equivalent. The leading
idea of the greatmaster of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows, and that we,even as they, never continue in one stay, might indeed have takeneffect as a languid, enervating, consumptive nihilism, as a precept of"renunciation," which would touch and handle and busy itself withnothing. But in the reception of [136] metaphysical formulae, alldepends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on thepre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which theyfall--the company they find already present there, on their admissioninto the house of thought; there being at least so much truth as thisinvolves in the theological maxim, that the reception of this or thatspeculative conclusion is really a matter of will. The persuasion thatall is vanity, with this happily constituted Greek, who had been agenuine disciple of Socrates and reflected, presumably, something ofhis blitheness in the face of the world, his happy way of taking allchances, generated neither frivolity nor sourness, but induced, rather,an impression, just serious enough, of the call upon men's attention ofthe crisis in which they find themselves. It became the stimulustowards every kind of activity, and prompted a perpetual,inextinguishable thirst after experience.

  With Marius, then, the influence of the philosopher of pleasuredepended on this, that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhatacrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial nature, well fitted totransform it into a theory of practice, of considerable stimulativepower towards a fair life. What Marius saw in him was the spectacle ofone of the happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to anunderstanding with the most depressing of theories; accepting the [137]results of a metaphysical system which seemed to concentrate intoitself all the weakening trains of thought in earlier Greekspeculation, and making the best of it; turning its hard, bare truths,with wonderful tact, into precepts of grace, and delicate wisdom, and adelicate sense of honour. Given the hardest terms, supposing our daysare indeed but a shadow, even so, we may well adorn and beautify, inscrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touchupon--these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling-places throughwhich the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment we wear,our very pastimes and the intercourse of society. The most discerningjudges saw in him something like the graceful "humanities" of the laterRoman, and our modern "culture," as it is termed; while Horace recalledhis sayings as expressing best his own consummate amenity in thereception of life.

  In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of that old master ofdecorous living, those eternal doubts as to the criteria of truthreduced themselves to a scepticism almost drily practical, a scepticismwhich developed the opposition between things as they are and ourimpressions and thoughts concerning them--the possibility, if anoutward world does really exist, of some faultiness in our apprehensionof it--the doctrine, in short, of what is termed "the subjectivity ofknowledge." That is a consideration, indeed, [138] which lies as anelement of weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw, at the veryfoundation of every philosophical account of the universe; whichconfronts all philosophies at their starting, but with which none havereally dealt conclusively, some perhaps not quite sincerely; whichthose who are not philosophers dissipate by "common," butunphilosophical, sense, or by religious faith. The peculiar strengthof Marius was, to have apprehended this weakness on the threshold ofhuman knowledge, in the whole range of its consequences. Our knowledgeis limited to what we feel, he reflected: we need no proof that wefeel. But can we be sure that things are at all like our feelings?Mere peculiarities in the instruments of our cognition, like the littleknots and waves on the surface of a mirror, may distort the matter theyseem but to represent. Of other people we cannot truly know even thefeelings, nor how far they would indicate the same modifications, eachone of a personality really unique, in using the same terms asourselves; that "common experience," which is sometimes proposed as asatisfactory basis of certainty, being after all only a fixity oflanguage. But our own impressions!--The light and heat of that blueveil over our heads, the heavens spread out, perhaps not like a curtainover anything!--How reassuring, after so long a debate about the rivalcriteria of truth, to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one's[139] aspirations after knowledge to that! In an age still materiallyso brilliant, so expert in the artistic handling of material things,with sensible capacities still in undiminished vigour, with the wholeworld of classic art and poetry outspread before it, and where therewas more than eye or ear could well take in--how natural thedetermination to rely exclusively upon the phenomena of the senses,which certainly never deceive us about themselves, about which alone wecan never deceive ourselves!

  And so the abstract apprehension that the little point of this presentmoment alone really is, between a past which has just ceased to be anda future which may never come, became practical with Marius, under theform of a resolve, as far as possible, to exclude regret and desire,and yield himself to the improvement of the present with an absolutelydisengaged mind. America is here and now--here, or nowhere: as WilhelmMeister finds out one day, just not too late, after so long lookingvaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the development of hiscapacities. It was as if, recognising in perpetual motion the law ofnature, Marius identified his own way of life cordially with it,"throwing himself into the stream," so to speak. He too must maintaina harmony with that soul of motion in things, by constantly renewedmobility of character.

  Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res.--

  [140] Thus Horace had summed up that perfect manner in the reception oflife attained by his old Cyrenaic master; and the first practicalconsequence of the metaphysic which lay behind that perfect manner, hadbeen a strict limitation, almost the renunciation, of metaphysicalenquiry itself. Metaphysic--that art, as it has so often proved, inthe words of Michelet, de s'egarer avec methode, of bewildering oneselfmethodically:--one must spend little time upon that! In the school ofCyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness, logical and physicalspeculation, theoretic interests generally, had been valued only so faras they served to give a groundwork, an intellectual justification, tothat exclusive concern with practical ethics which was a note of theCyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic, how true to itself,under how many varieties of character, had been the effort of theGreeks after Theory--Theoria--that vision of a wholly reasonable world,which, according to the greatest of them, literally makes man like God:how loyally they had still persisted in the quest after that, in spiteof how many disappointments! In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps,some of them might have found the kind of vision they were seeking for;but not in "doubtful disputations" concerning "being" and "not being,"knowledge and appearance. Men's minds, even young men's minds, at thatlate day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which[141] had so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind of Marius,as in that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui, combined withappetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort ofsuicide (instances of the like have been seen since) by which a greatmetaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving metaphysicalspeculation impossible, or useless. Abstract theory was to be valuedonly just so far as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind fromsuppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly visionary, leavingit in flawless evenness of surface to the impressions of an experience,concrete and direct.

  To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding ourselvesof such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions--to berid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often onlymisrepresent the experience of which they profess to be therepresentation--idola, idols, false appearances, as Bacon calls themlater--to neutralise the distorting influence of metaphysical system byan all-accomplished metaphysic skill: it is this bold, hard, soberrecognition, under a very "dry light," of its own proper aim, in unionwith a habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps open awide doorway to human weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic doctrine, toreproductions of this doctrine in the time of Marius or in our own,their gravity and importance. It was a [142]
school to which the youngman might come, eager for truth, expecting much from philosophy, in noignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than an "initiation." Hewould be sent back, sooner or later, to experience, to the world ofconcrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt byhim; but with a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from thetyranny of mere theories.

  So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed thedeath of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself asif returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant schoolof healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, onits fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general completenessof life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysicalmetaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, alife of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effectiveauxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, freedom fromall partial and misrepresentative doctrine which does but relieve oneelement in our experience at the cost of another, freedom from allembarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on thefuture: this would be but preliminary to the real business ofeducation--insight, insight through culture, into all that the presentmoment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.From that maxim of [143] Life as the end of life, followed, as apractical consequence, the desirableness of refining all theinstruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all theircapacities, of testing and exercising one's self in them, till one'swhole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards thevision--the "beatific vision," if we really cared to make it such--ofour actual experience in the world. Not the conveyance of an abstractbody of truths or principles, would be the aim of the right educationof one's self, or of another, but the conveyance of an art--an art insome degree peculiar to each individual character; with themodifications, that is, due to its special constitution, and thepeculiar circumstances of its growth, inasmuch as no one of us is "likeanother, all in all."