CHAPTER II - WHITE-NIGHTS

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER II - WHITE-NIGHTS, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

[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.

Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something
cloistral or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite
order, made the whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the
peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood,
provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of
life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory
of them--the "subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for
which many a Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister
or daughter, still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any [21]
such considerations regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he
enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place still left, in
thought at least, beside the living, the desire for which is
actually, in various forms, so great a motive with most of us. And
Marius the younger, even thus early, came to think of women's tears,
of women's hands to lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of
childhood, as a sort of natural want. The soft lines of the white
hands and face, set among the many folds of the veil and stole of the
Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music sometimes,
defined themselves for him as the typical expression of maternity.
Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for her
musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such things,
an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying duly his country-grown
habits--the sense of a certain delicate blandness, which he relished,
above all, on returning to the "chapel" of his mother, after long
days of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For poetic
souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the
pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its
generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail
is beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit
afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed
deeply in him; in the winters especially, when the sufferings of [22]
the animal world became so palpable even to the least observant. It
fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the almost human
troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It was a
feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for life as
such--for that mysterious essence which man is powerless to create in
even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of his mother,
the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for the hungry
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
across a crowded public place--his own soul was like that! Would it
reach the hands 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 central type of all love;--so, that beautiful
dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar
ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid
many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.

And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced
still further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security.
His religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the really
light-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 the prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as
his accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in
it; and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his
footsteps, made him oddly suspicious of particular places and
persons. Though his liking 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, and ever afterwards avoided that place and its
ugly associations, for there was something in the incident which made
food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards. The
memory of it however had almost passed away, when at the corner of a
street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman exhibiting a great
serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former painful
impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the
real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and
sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the
secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's
bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into 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 have killed
or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the very
circumstance of their life, being what they [24] were. It was
something like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral
feeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or
feathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity
of aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a
humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the
sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure
enmity against him. Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome
he saw, a second time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered the
night which had then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein,
on the real greatness of those little troubles of children, of which
older people make light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he
reflected how richly possessed his life had actually been by
beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing how greatly what was
repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace.

Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to
contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an
earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his
solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions
of the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination,
and became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something
of an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure
from within, by the exercise [25] of meditative power. A vein of
subjective philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all
things, there would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world
and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other
men's valuations. And the generation of this peculiar element in his
temper he could trace up to the days when his life had been so like
the reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a word for
unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to
it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the spirit in which
he prepared himself for the sacerdotal function hereditary in his
family--the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the
strenuous self-control and ascęsis, which such preparation involved.
Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of the play of Euripides,
who every morning sweeps the temple floor with such a fund of
cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in sacred places,
with a susceptibility to their peculiar influences which he never
outgrew; so that often in after-times, quite unexpectedly, this
feeling would revive in him with undiminished freshness. That first,
early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication, survived
through all the distractions of the world, and when all thought of
such vocation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in spirit
at least, towards a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct
of life.

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

NOTES

13. *Ad Vigilias Albas.