Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1 Read online

  CHAPTER II: WHITE-NIGHTS

  [13] To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which thechildhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt,as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,--surely nothingcould happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought orreverie. 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 anafter-thought--the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselvesbut half-real, half-material--the white queen, the white witch, thewhite mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true massturned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by youngcandidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way ofrehearsal." So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the sameanalogy, should be [14] nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, butpassed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainlythe place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in this, thatyou might very well conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in thedaytime might come to much there.

  The young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had comedown to him much curtailed through the extravagance of a certainMarcellus two generations before, a favourite in his day of thefashionable world at Rome, where he had at least spent his substancewith a correctness of taste Marius might seem to have inherited fromhim; as he was believed also to resemble him in a singularly pleasantsmile, consistent however, in the younger face, with some degree ofsombre expression when the mind within was but slightly moved.

  As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and nearer tothe dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a trace of workdaynegligence or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some,for the young master himself among them. The more observant passer-bywould note, curious as to the inmates, a certain amount of dainty careamid that neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance todisturb old associations. It was significant of the nationalcharacter, that a sort of elegant gentleman farming, as we say, hadbeen much affected by some of the most cultivated [15] Romans. But itbecame something more than an elegant diversion, something of a seriousbusiness, with the household of Marius; and his actual interest in thecultivation of the earth and the care of flocks had brought him, atleast, intimately near to those elementary conditions of life, areverence for which, the great Roman poet, as he has shown by his ownhalf-mystic pre-occupation with them, held to be the ground ofprimitive Roman religion, as of primitive morals. But then, farm-lifein Italy, including the culture of the olive and the vine, has a graceof its own, and might well contribute to the production of an idealdignity of character, like that of nature itself in this gifted region.Vulgarity seemed impossible. The place, though impoverished, was stilldeservedly dear, full of venerable memories, and with a livingsweetness of its own for to-day.

  To hold by such ceremonial traditions had been a part of the strugglingfamily pride of the lad's father, to which the example of the head ofthe state, old Antoninus Pius--an example to be still further enforcedby his successor--had given a fresh though perhaps somewhat artificialpopularity. It had been consistent with many another homely andold-fashioned trait in him, not to undervalue the charm ofexclusiveness and immemorial authority, which membership in a localpriestly college, hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To seta real value on [16] these things was but one element in that piousconcern for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as Mariusafterwards discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. Theancient hymn--Fana Novella!--was still sung by his people, as the newmoon grew bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leapingthrough heaps of blazing straw on a certain night in summer was notdiscouraged. The privilege of augury itself, according to tradition,had at one time belonged to his race; and if you can imagine how, oncein a way, an impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mysticintimation, of the meaning and consequences of all that, what wasimplied in it becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the mindof Marius, in whose house the auspices were still carefully consultedbefore every undertaking of moment.

  The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally--and that is allmany not unimportant persons ever find to do--a certain tradition oflife, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling withwhich he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that of awe;though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as hecould but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of soweighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Romanreligion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. [17] On thepart of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband'smemory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with therecognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice to becredited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowyenough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long serviceto the departed soul; its many annual observances centering about thefuneral urn--a tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white andfair, in the family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowersfrom the garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places asomewhat closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought stillto protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself--acloseness which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of ourhuman sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in thecountry, might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with adevout interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow.After the deification of the emperors, we are told, it was consideredimpious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence oftheir images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacredpresences, demanding of him a similar collectedness. The severe andarchaic religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sortof devout circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of thedemand upon him of anything [18] in which deity was concerned. He mustsatisfy with a kind of sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest hebe found wanting to, the claims of others, in their joys andcalamities--the happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in whichit made itself felt. And from habit, this feeling of a responsibilitytowards the world of men and things, towards a claim for due sentimentconcerning them on his side, came to be a part of his nature not to beput off. It kept him serious and dignified amid the Epicureanspeculations which in after years much engrossed him, and when he hadlearned to think of all religions as indifferent, serious amid manyfopperies and through many languid days, and made him anticipate allhis life long as a thing towards which he must carefully train himself,some great occasion of self-devotion, such as really came, that shouldconsecrate his life, and, it might be, its memory with others, as theearly 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 hisfirst view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read theface, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from thewhite road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply tothe marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble,mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but theexquisite [19] fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Twocenturies of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosseswhich lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there themarble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weedshad forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in gardenand farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation,and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. Theold Roman architects seem to have well understood the decorative valueof the floor--the real economy there was, in the production of richinterior effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface theytrod 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 apiece of silver, looked,
as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in oldage. Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its littlecedarn chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegantMarcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features toMarius, 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 ofMedusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the oldGreek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the [20] thing, as itseemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands ofwhich it was drawn up in a fisherman's net, with the fine goldenlaminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellusalso who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the whitepigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazedwindows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape--thepallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above thepurple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marblegoing to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its darkheadland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summernights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent ofthe new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.

  Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistralor monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made thewhole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiarsanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided thedeceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we cangive to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them--the"subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for which many aRoman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter,still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any [21] suchconsiderations regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyedthat secondary existence, that warm place still left, in thought atleast, beside the living, the desire for which is actually, in variousforms, so great a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, eventhus early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands to lay oneto rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of naturalwant. The soft lines of the white hands and face, set among the manyfolds of the veil and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon herneedlework, or with music sometimes, defined themselves for him as thetypical expression of maternity. Helping her with her white and purplewools, and caring for her musical instruments, he won, as if from thehandling of such things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifyingduly his country-grown habits--the sense of a certain delicateblandness, which he relished, above all, on returning to the "chapel"of his mother, after long days of open-air exercise, in winter orstormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly lessstrongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, withthe very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles inflower, though the hail is beating hard without. One importantprinciple, of fruit afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for thecountry fixed deeply in him; in the winters especially, when thesufferings of [22] the animal world became so palpable even to theleast observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for thealmost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. Itwas a feeling which had in it something of religious veneration forlife as such--for that mysterious essence which man is powerless tocreate in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of hismother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for thehungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told him once,looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom acrossa crowded public place--his own soul was like that! Would it reach thehands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled?And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things,its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the centraltype of all love;--so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the realityof concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout therest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to beever seeking to regain.

  And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced stillfurther this sentiment of home as a place of tried security. Hisreligion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the reallylight-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom,its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls [23]of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always as theprompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as hisaccuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it;and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, madehim oddly suspicious of particular places and persons. Though hisliking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer,as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, andever afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for therewas something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleepuneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almostpassed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon anAfrican showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptilewrithed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep intothe lower side of the real world, and again for many days took allsweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, tryingto puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dreadof a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his handinto the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper.A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly havekilled or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by thevery circumstance of their life, being what they [24] were. It wassomething like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moralfeeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur orfeathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanityof aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity,dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggishcoil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmityagainst him. Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, asecond time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered the night whichhad then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein, on the realgreatness of those little troubles of children, of which older peoplemake light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected howrichly possessed his life had actually been by beautiful aspects andimageries, seeing how greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbedhis peace.

  Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given tocontemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at anearlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating hissolitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions ofthe past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, andbecame betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of anidealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure fromwithin, by the exercise [25] of meditative power. A vein of subjectivephilosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, therewould be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct,with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men's valuations. Andthe generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace upto the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance tohim. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful wordumbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense,might describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for thesacerdotal function hereditary in his family--the sort of mysticenjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control andascesis, which such preparation involved. Like the young Ion in thebeautiful opening of the play of Euripides, who every morning sweepsthe temple floor with such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, hewas apt to be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to theirpeculiar influences which he never outgrew; so that often inafter-times, quite unexpectedly, this feeling would revive in him withundiminished freshness. That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood,the sense of dedication, survi
ved through all the distractions of theworld, and when all thought of such vocation had finally passed fromhim, as a ministry, in spirit at least, towards a sort of hieraticbeauty and order in the conduct of life.

  [26] And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was thelad's pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the rambleto the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender,and delightful signs, one after another--the abandoned boat, the ruinedflood-gates, the flock of wild birds--that one was approaching the sea;the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds. Andit was characteristic of him that he relished especially the grave,subdued, northern notes in all that--the charm of the French or Englishnotes, as we might term them--in the luxuriant Italian landscape.

  NOTES

  13. *Ad Vigilias Albas.