CHAPTER VI - EUPHUISM

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER VI - EUPHUISM, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

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

Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical one: it
stimulated the literary ambition, already so strong a motive with
him, by a signal example of success, and made him more than ever an
ardent, indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of
the literary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of
that through which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within
one can actually take effect upon others, to over-awe or charm them
to one's side, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in
immediate connexion with that desire for predominance, for the
satisfaction of which another might have relied on the acquisition
and display of brilliant military qualities. In him, a fine
instinctive sentiment of the exact value and power of words was
connate with the eager longing for sway over his fellows. He saw
himself already a gallant and effective leader, innovating or
conservative as occasion might require, in the rehabilitation of the
mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished and languid; yet the sole
object, as he mused within himself, of the only sort of patriotic
feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves. The popular
speech was gradually departing from the form [95] and rule of literary
language, a language always and increasingly artificial. While the
learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously
pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand
chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at
least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was
coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really
understand Cicero; though there were some indeed, like this new
writer, Apuleius, who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek,
which had been a fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits
since the days of Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.

The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himself
would be a work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in its
dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and
revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of the
proletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the younger
Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the
Latin tongue, had said,--"I am one of those who admire the ancients,
yet I do not, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius
which our own times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if
weary and effete, no longer produces what is admirable." And he,
Flavian, would prove himself the true master of the opportunity thus
indicated. In [96] his eagerness for a not too distant fame, he
dreamed over all that, as the young Caesar may have dreamed of
campaigns. Others might brutalise or neglect the native speech, that
true "open field" for charm and sway over men. He would make of it a
serious study, weighing the precise power of every phrase and word,
as though it were precious metal, disentangling the later
associations and going back to the original and native sense of
each,--restoring to full significance all its wealth of latent
figurative expression, reviving or replacing its outworn or tarnished
images. Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of routine
and languor; and what was necessary, first of all, was to re-
establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and
expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words
their primitive power.

For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force,
were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forcibly
impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of
making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful,
of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but
middling, tame, or only half-true even to him--this scrupulousness of
literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of
chivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience of
execution! what research for the significant [97] tones of ancient
idiom--sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular word-
building--gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaning of
the sceptical Pliny's somewhat melancholy advice to one of his
friends, that he should seek in literature deliverance from
mortality--ut studiis se literarum a mortalitate vindicet. And there
was everything in the nature and the training of Marius to make him a
full participator in the hopes of such a new literary school, with
Flavian for its leader. In the refinements of that curious spirit,
in its horror of profanities, its fastidious sense of a correctness
in external form, there was something which ministered to the old
ritual interest, still surviving in him; as if here indeed were
involved a kind of sacred service to the mother-tongue.

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in
which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties
towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it
does but modify a little the principles of all effective expression
at all times. 'Tis art's function to conceal itself: ars est celare
artem:--is a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, has
perhaps been oftenest and most confidently quoted by those who have
had little literary or other art to conceal; and from the very
beginning of professional literature, the "labour of the file"--a
labour in the case of Plato, for instance, or Virgil, like [98] that
of the oldest of goldsmiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the
work by far more than the weight of precious metal it removed--has
always had its function. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples
of it, this Roman Euphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty
in writing--es kallos graphein+--might lapse into its characteristic
fopperies or mannerisms, into the "defects of its qualities," in
truth, not wholly unpleasing perhaps, or at least excusable, when
looked at as but the toys (so Cicero calls them), the strictly
congenial and appropriate toys, of an assiduously cultivated age,
which could not help being polite, critical, self-conscious. The
mere love of novelty also had, of course, its part there: as with the
Euphuism of the Elizabethan age, and of the modern French
romanticists, its neologies were the ground of one of the favourite
charges against it; though indeed, as regards these tricks of taste
also, there is nothing new, but a quaint family likeness rather,
between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here, as elsewhere, the
power of "fashion," as it is called, is but one minor form, slight
enough, it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper
yearning of human nature towards ideal perfection, which is a
continuous force in it; and since in this direction too human nature
is limited, such fashions must necessarily reproduce themselves.
Among other resemblances to later growths of Euphuism, its archaisms
on the one hand, and [99] its neologies on the other, the Euphuism
of the days of Marcus Aurelius had, in the composition of verse, its
fancy for the refrain. It was a snatch from a popular chorus,
something he had heard sounding all over the town of Pisa one April
night, one of the first bland and summer-like nights of the year,
that Flavian had chosen for the refrain of a poem he was then
pondering--the Pervigilium Veneris--the vigil, or "nocturn," of
Venus.

Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a constant
part in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries are
playing in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation or
unreality in that minute culture of form:--Cannot those who have a
thing to say, say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like the
old writers of Greece? And this challenge had at least the effect of
setting his thoughts at work on the intellectual situation as it lay
between the children of the present and those earliest masters.
Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greek
genius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence
of imitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent,
laid upon every artist, increased since then! It was all around
one:--that smoothly built world of old classical taste, an
accomplished fact, with overwhelming authority on every detail of the
conduct of one's [100] work. With no fardel on its own back, yet so
imperious towards those who came labouring after it, Hellas, in its
early freshness, looked as distant from him even then as it does from
ourselves. There might seem to be no place left for novelty or
originality,--place only for a patient, an infinite, faultlessness.
On this question too Flavian passed through a world of curious art-
casuistries, of self-tormenting, at the threshold of his work. Was
poetic beauty a thing ever one and the same, a type absolute; or,
changing always with the soul of time itself, did it depend upon the
taste, the peculiar trick of apprehension, the fashion, as we say, of
each successive age? Might one recover that old, earlier sense of
it, that earlier manner, in a masterly effort to recall all the
complexities of the life, moral and intellectual, of the earlier age
to which it had belonged? Had there been really bad ages in art or
literature? Were all ages, even those earliest, adventurous,
matutinal days, in themselves equally poetical or unpoetical; and
poetry, the literary beauty, the poetic ideal, always but a borrowed
light upon men's actual life?

Homer had said--

Hoi d' hote dę limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nęi melainę...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phęgmini thalassęs.+

And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was
always telling [101] things after this manner. And one might think
there had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost
mechanical transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a
time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal
effect, or, the sailors pulled down their boat without making a
picture in "the great style," against a sky charged with marvels.
Must not the mere prose of an age, itself thus ideal, have counted
for more than half of Homer's poetry? Or might the closer student
discover even here, even in Homer, the really mediatorial function of
the poet, as between the reader and the actual matter of his
experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, in an age which had felt
itself trite and commonplace enough, on his opportunity for the touch
of "golden alchemy," or at least for the pleasantly lighted side of
things themselves? Might not another, in one's own prosaic and used-
up time, so uneventful as it had been through the long reign of these
quiet Antonines, in like manner, discover his ideal, by a due waiting
upon it? Would not a future generation, looking back upon this,
under the power of the enchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to
view, in contrast with its own languor--the languor that for some
reason (concerning which Augustine will one day have his view) seemed
to haunt men always? Had Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected
in his poetic flight, to some of the people of his own age, [l02] as
seemed to happen with every new literature in turn? In any case, the
intellectual conditions of early Greece had been--how different from
these! And a true literary tact would accept that difference in
forming the primary conception of the literary function at a later
time. Perhaps the utmost one could get by conscious effort, in the
way of a reaction or return to the conditions of an earlier and
fresher age, would be but novitas, artificial artlessness, naīveté;
and this quality too might have its measure of euphuistic charm,
direct and sensible enough, though it must count, in comparison with
that genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, not as the
freshness of the open fields, but only of a bunch of field-flowers in
a heated room.

There was, meantime, all this:--on one side, the old pagan culture,
for us but a fragment, for him an accomplished yet present fact,
still a living, united, organic whole, in the entirety of its art,
its thought, its religions, its sagacious forms of polity, that so
weighty authority it exercised on every point, being in reality only
the measure of its charm for every one: on the other side, the actual
world in all its eager self-assertion, with Flavian himself, in his
boundless animation, there, at the centre of the situation. From the
natural defects, from the pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous
cultivation of manner, he was saved by the consciousness that he had
a matter to present, very real, [103] at least to him. That
preoccupation of the dilettante with what might seem mere details of
form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing to the
surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal
intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things as really
being, with important results, thus, rather than thus,--intuitions
which the artistic or literary faculty was called upon to follow,
with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the model within.
Flavian too, with his fine clear mastery of the practically
effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic in
literature: that to know when one's self is interested, is the first
condition of interesting other people. It was a principle, the
forcible apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in the
selection of his intellectual food; often listless while others read
or gazed diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere
complaisance to people's emotions: it served to foster in him a very
scrupulous literary sincerity with himself. And it was this
uncompromising demand for a matter, in all art, derived immediately
from lively personal intuition, this constant appeal to individual
judgment, which saved his euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing
into mere artifice.

Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddess
Venus, the work of [104] his earlier manhood, and designed
originally to open an argument less persistently sombre than that
protest against the whole pagan heaven which actually follows it? It
is certainly the most typical expression of a mood, still incident to
the young poet, as a thing peculiar to his youth, when he feels the
sentimental current setting forcibly along his veins, and so much as
a matter of purely physical excitement, that he can hardly
distinguish it from the animation of external nature, the upswelling
of the seed in the earth, and of the sap through the trees. Flavian,
to whom, again, as to his later euphuistic kinsmen, old mythology
seemed as full of untried, unexpressed motives and interest as human
life itself, had long been occupied with a kind of mystic hymn to the
vernal principle of life in things; a composition shaping itself,
little by little, out of a thousand dim perceptions, into singularly
definite form (definite and firm as fine-art in metal, thought
Marius) for which, as I said, he had caught his "refrain," from the
lips of the young men, singing because they could not help it, in the
streets of Pisa. And as oftenest happens also, with natures of
genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to
harmonious completeness among the fortunate incidents, the physical
heat and light, of one singularly happy day.

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

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

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

At the head of the procession, the master of ceremonies, quietly
waving back the assistants, made way for a number of women,
scattering perfumes. They were succeeded by a company of musicians,
piping and twanging, on instruments the strangest Marius had ever
beheld, the notes of a hymn, narrating the first origin of this
votive rite to a choir of youths, who marched behind them singing it.
The tire-women and other personal attendants of the great goddess
came next, bearing the instruments of their ministry, and various
articles from the sacred wardrobe, wrought of the most precious
material; some of them with long ivory combs, plying their hands in
wild yet graceful concert of movement as they went, in devout mimicry
of the toilet. Placed in their rear were the mirror-bearers of the
goddess, carrying large mirrors of beaten brass or silver, turned in
such a way as to reflect to the great body of worshippers who
followed, the face of the mysterious image, as it moved on its way,
and their faces to it, as though they were in fact advancing to meet
the heavenly visitor. They comprehended a multitude of both sexes
and of all ages, already initiated into the divine secret, clad in
fair linen, the females veiled, the males with shining [107]
tonsures, and every one carrying a sistrum--the richer sort of
silver, a few very dainty persons of fine gold--rattling the reeds,
with a noise like the jargon of innumerable birds and insects
awakened from torpor and abroad in the spring sun. Then, borne upon
a kind of platform, came the goddess herself, undulating above the
heads of the multitude as the bearers walked, in mystic robe
embroidered with the moon and stars, bordered gracefully with a
fringe of real fruit and flowers, and with a glittering crown upon
the head. The train of the procession consisted of the priests in
long white vestments, close from head to foot, distributed into
various groups, each bearing, exposed aloft, one of the sacred
symbols of Isis--the corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand of
equity, and among them the votive ship itself, carved and gilt, and
adorned bravely with flags flying. Last of all walked the high
priest; the people kneeling as he passed to kiss his hand, in which
were those well-remembered roses.

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

The remainder of the day was spent by most in parties on the water.
Flavian and Marius sailed further than they had ever done before to a
wild spot on the bay, the traditional site of a little Greek colony,
which, having had its eager, stirring life at the time when Etruria
was still a power in Italy, had perished in the age of the civil
wars. In the absolute transparency of the air on this gracious day,
an infinitude of detail from sea and shore reached the eye with
sparkling clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves--
Flavian at work suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They
reached land at last. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the
sands, with a tumble-down of quaint, many-hued treasures, below a
little shrine of Venus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and
napkins and gilded shells which these people had offered to the
image. Flavian and Marius sat down under the shadow of a mass of
gray rock or ruin, where the sea-gate of the Greek town had been, and
talked of life in those old Greek colonies. Of this place, all that
remained, besides those rude stones, was--a handful of silver coins,
each with a head of pure and archaic beauty, though a little cruel
perhaps, supposed to represent the Siren Ligeia, whose tomb was
formerly shown here--only these, and an ancient song, the very strain
which Flavian [109] had recovered in those last months. They were
records which spoke, certainly, of the charm of life within those
walls. How strong must have been the tide of men's existence in that
little republican town, so small that this circle of gray stones, of
service now only by the moisture they gathered for the blue-flowering
gentians among them, had been the line of its rampart! An epitome of
all that was liveliest, most animated and adventurous, in the old
Greek people of which it was an offshoot, it had enhanced the effect
of these gifts by concentration within narrow limits. The band of
"devoted youth,"--hiera neotęs.+--of the younger brothers, devoted to the
gods and whatever luck the gods might afford, because there was no
room for them at home--went forth, bearing the sacred flame from the
mother hearth; itself a flame, of power to consume the whole material
of existence in clear light and heat, with no smouldering residue.
The life of those vanished townsmen, so brilliant and revolutionary,
applying so abundantly the personal qualities which alone just then
Marius seemed to value, associated itself with the actual figure of
his companion, standing there before him, his face enthusiastic with
the sudden thought of all that; and struck him vividly as precisely
the fitting opportunity for a nature like his, so hungry for control,
for ascendency over men.

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

NOTES

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

98. +Transliteration: es kallos graphein. Translation: "To write
beautifully."

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

Hoi d' hote dę limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nęi melainę...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phęgmini thalassęs.

Etext editor's translation:

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

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