Marius the Epicurean, Volume One by Walter Horatio Pater
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Walter Horatio Pater >> Marius the Epicurean, Volume One
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MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE
WALTER HORATIO PATER
London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a
style inconvenient in an electronic edition. I have therefore
placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater's footnotes
and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each chapter's
notes at that chapter's end.
Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy,
I have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed
numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately
following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I
have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an
e-text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it
can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other
nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE
WALTER PATER
Cheimerinos oneiros, hote mekistai hai vyktes.+
+"A winter's dream, when nights are longest."
Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.
CONTENTS
PART THE FIRST
1. "The Religion of Numa": 3-12
2. White-Nights: 13-26
3. Change of Air: 27-42
4. The Tree of Knowledge: 43-54
5. The Golden Book: 55-91
6. Euphuism: 92-110
7. A Pagan End: 111-120
PART THE SECOND
8. Animula Vagula: 123-143
9. New Cyrenaicism: 144-157
10. On the Way: 158-171
11. "The Most Religious City in the World": 172-187
12. "The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King": 188-211
13. The "Mistress and Mother" of Palaces: 212-229
14. Manly Amusement: 230-243
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE
PART THE FIRST
CHAPTER I: "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"
[3] 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," 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:
[4] --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 [5] 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 [6] 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 [7] 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 [8] 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 [9] 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.
[10] 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 [11] 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 [12] 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
[13] 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.*
"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 [14] 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 [15] 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--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 [16] 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.
[17] 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. 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
[18] 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 [19] 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 [20] 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.
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