CHAPTER VII - A PAGAN END

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER VII - A PAGAN END, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

[111] FOR the fantastical colleague of the philosophic emperor
Marcus Aurelius, returning in triumph from the East, had brought in
his train, among the enemies of Rome, one by no means a captive.
People actually sickened at a sudden touch of the unsuspected foe, as
they watched in dense crowds the pathetic or grotesque imagery of
failure or success in the triumphal procession. And, as usual, the
plague brought with it a power to develop all pre-existent germs of
superstition. It was by dishonour done to Apollo himself, said
popular rumour--to Apollo, the old titular divinity of pestilence,
that the poisonous thing had come abroad. Pent up in a golden coffer
consecrated to the god, it had escaped in the sacrilegious plundering
of his temple at Seleucia by the soldiers of Lucius Verus, after a
traitorous surprise of that town and a cruel massacre. Certainly
there was something which baffled all imaginable precautions and all
medical science, in the suddenness [112] with which the disease broke
out simultaneously, here and there, among both soldiers and citizens,
even in places far remote from the main line of its march in the rear
of the victorious army. It seemed to have invaded the whole empire,
and some have even thought that, in a mitigated form, it permanently
remained there. In Rome itself many thousands perished; and old
authorities tell of farmsteads, whole towns, and even entire
neighbourhoods, which from that time continued without inhabitants
and lapsed into wildness or ruin.

Flavian lay at the open window of his lodging, with a fiery pang in
the brain, fancying no covering thin or light enough to be applied to
his body. His head being relieved after a while, there was distress
at the chest. It was but the fatal course of the strange new
sickness, under many disguises; travelling from the brain to the
feet, like a material resident, weakening one after another of the
organic centres; often, when it did not kill, depositing various
degrees of lifelong infirmity in this member or that; and after such
descent, returning upwards again, now as a mortal coldness, leaving
the entrenchments of the fortress of life overturned, one by one,
behind it.

Flavian lay there, with the enemy at his breast now in a painful
cough, but relieved from that burning fever in the head, amid the
rich-scented flowers--rare Paestum roses, and the like [113] --
procured by Marius for his solace, in a fancied convalescence; and
would, at intervals, return to labour at his verses, with a great
eagerness to complete and transcribe the work, while Marius sat and
wrote at his dictation, one of the latest but not the poorest
specimens of genuine Latin poetry.

It was in fact a kind of nuptial hymn, which, taking its start from
the thought of nature as the universal mother, celebrated the
preliminary pairing and mating together of all fresh things, in the
hot and genial spring-time--the immemorial nuptials of the soul of
spring itself and the brown earth; and was full of a delighted,
mystic sense of what passed between them in that fantastic marriage.
That mystic burden was relieved, at intervals, by the familiar
playfulness of the Latin verse-writer in dealing with mythology,
which, though coming at so late a day, had still a wonderful
freshness in its old age.--"Amor has put his weapons by and will keep
holiday. He was bidden go without apparel, that none might be
wounded by his bow and arrows. But take care! In truth he is none
the less armed than usual, though he be all unclad."

In the expression of all this Flavian seemed, while making it his
chief aim to retain the opulent, many-syllabled vocabulary of the
Latin genius, at some points even to have advanced beyond it, in
anticipation of wholly new laws of [114] taste as regards sound, a
new range of sound itself. The peculiar resultant note, associating
itself with certain other experiences of his, was to Marius like the
foretaste of an entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come.
Flavian had caught, indeed, something of the rhyming cadence, the
sonorous organ-music of the medieval Latin, and therewithal something
of its unction and mysticity of spirit. There was in his work, along
with the last splendour of the classical language, a touch, almost
prophetic, of that transformed life it was to have in the rhyming
middle age, just about to dawn. The impression thus forced upon
Marius connected itself with a feeling, the exact inverse of that,
known to every one, which seems to say, You have been just here, just
thus, before!--a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent but prescient
of the future, which passed over him afterwards many times, as he
came across certain places and people. It was as if he detected
there the process of actual change to a wholly undreamed-of and
renewed condition of human body and soul: as if he saw the heavy yet
decrepit old Roman architecture about him, rebuilding on an
intrinsically better pattern. Could it have been actually on a new
musical instrument that Flavian had first heard the novel accents of
his verse? And still Marius noticed there, amid all its richness of
expression and imagery, that firmness of outline he had always
relished so much in the composition of [115] Flavian. Yes! a
firmness like that of some master of noble metal-work, manipulating
tenacious bronze or gold. Even now that haunting refrain, with its
impromptu variations, from the throats of those strong young men,
came floating through the window.

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit,
Quique amavit cras amet!

--repeated Flavian, tremulously, dictating yet one stanza more.

What he was losing, his freehold of a soul and body so fortunately
endowed, the mere liberty of life above-ground, "those sunny mornings
in the cornfields by the sea," as he recollected them one day, when
the window was thrown open upon the early freshness--his sense of all
this, was from the first singularly near and distinct, yet rather as
of something he was but debarred the use of for a time than finally
bidding farewell to. That was while he was still with no very grave
misgivings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources of
life still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time
to time, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at the poem from his
dictation, was haunted by a feeling of the triviality of such work
just then. The recurrent sense of some obscure danger beyond the
mere danger of death, vaguer than that and by so much the more
terrible, like the menace of some shadowy [116] adversary in the dark
with whose mode of attack they had no acquaintance, disturbed him now
and again through those hours of excited attention to his manuscript,
and to the purely physical wants of Flavian. Still, during these
three days there was much hope and cheerfulness, and even jesting.
Half-consciously Marius tried to prolong one or another relieving
circumstance of the day, the preparations for rest and morning
refreshment, for instance; sadly making the most of the little luxury
of this or that, with something of the feigned cheer of the mother
who sets her last morsels before her famished child as for a feast,
but really that he "may eat it and die."

On the afternoon of the seventh day he allowed Marius finally to put
aside the unfinished manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the chest
quiet at length though much exhausted, had made itself felt with full
power again in a painful vomiting, which seemed to shake his body
asunder, with great consequent prostration. From that time the
distress increased rapidly downwards. Omnia tum vero vitai claustra
lababant;+ and soon the cold was mounting with sure pace from the
dead feet to the head.

And now Marius began more than to suspect what the issue must be, and
henceforward could but watch with a sort of agonised fascination the
rapid but systematic work of the destroyer, [117] faintly relieving a
little the mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering. Flavian
himself appeared, in full consciousness at last--in clear-sighted,
deliberate estimate of the actual crisis--to be doing battle with his
adversary. His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the various
suggested modes of relief. He must without fail get better, he would
fancy, might he be removed to a certain place on the hills where as a
child he had once recovered from sickness, but found that he could
scarcely raise his head from the pillow without giddiness. As if now
surely foreseeing the end, he would set himself, with an eager
effort, and with that eager and angry look, which is noted as one of
the premonitions of death in this disease, to fashion out, without
formal dictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished
work, in hard-set determination, defiant of pain, to arrest this or
that little drop at least from the river of sensuous imagery rushing
so quickly past him.

But at length delirium--symptom that the work of the plague was done,
and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy--broke the coherent
order of words and thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony,
found his best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient's mind.
In intervals of clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of
sorrow and desolation, were very painful. No longer battling with
the disease, he seemed as it were to place himself [118] at the
disposal of the victorious foe, dying passively, like some dumb
creature, in hopeless acquiescence at last. That old, half-pleading
petulance, unamiable, yet, as it might seem, only needing conditions
of life a little happier than they had actually been, to become
refinement of affection, a delicate grace in its demand on the
sympathy of others, had changed in those moments of full intelligence
to a clinging and tremulous gentleness, as he lay--"on the very
threshold of death"--with a sharply contracted hand in the hand of
Marius, to his almost surprised joy, winning him now to an absolutely
self-forgetful devotion. There was a new sort of pleading in the
misty eyes, just because they took such unsteady note of him, which
made Marius feel as if guilty; anticipating thus a form of self-
reproach with which even the tenderest ministrant may be sometimes
surprised, when, at death, affectionate labour suddenly ceasing
leaves room for the suspicion of some failure of love perhaps, at one
or another minute point in it. Marius almost longed to take his
share in the suffering, that he might understand so the better how to
relieve it.

It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the patient, and
Marius extinguished it. The thunder which had sounded all day among
the hills, with a heat not unwelcome to Flavian, had given way at
nightfall to steady rain; and [119] in the darkness Marius lay down
beside him, faintly shivering now in the sudden cold, to lend him his
own warmth, undeterred by the fear of contagion which had kept other
people from passing near the house. At length about day-break he
perceived that the last effort had come with a revival of mental
clearness, as Marius understood by the contact, light as it was, in
recognition of him there. "Is it a comfort," he whispered then, "that
I shall often come and weep over you?"--"Not unless I be aware, and
hear you weeping!"

The sun shone out on the people going to work for a long hot day, and
Marius was standing by the dead, watching, with deliberate purpose to
fix in his memory every detail, that he might have this picture in
reserve, should any hour of forgetfulness hereafter come to him with
the temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage,
of resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity,
as he noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility,
almost abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as
of one, fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the
power of a merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he
would not forget one circumstance in all that; as a man might piously
stamp on his memory the death-scene of a brother wrongfully condemned
to die, against a time that may come.

[120] The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort to
watch by it through the darkness, was a hint of his own failing
strength, just in time. The first night after the washing of the
body, he bore stoutly enough the tax which affection seemed to
demand, throwing the incense from time to time on the little altar
placed beside the bier. It was the recurrence of the thing--that
unchanged outline below the coverlet, amid a silence in which the
faintest rustle seemed to speak--that finally overcame his
determination. Surely, here, in this alienation, this sense of
distance between them, which had come over him before though in minor
degree when the mind of Flavian had wandered in his sickness, was
another of the pains of death. Yet he was able to make all due
preparations, and go through the ceremonies, shortened a little
because of the infection, when, on a cloudless evening, the funeral
procession went forth; himself, the flames of the pyre having done
their work, carrying away the urn of the deceased, in the folds of
his toga, to its last resting-place in the cemetery beside the
highway, and so turning home to sleep in his own desolate lodging.

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis?--+

What thought of others' thoughts about one could there be with the
regret for "so dear a head" fresh at one's heart?

NOTES

116. +Lucretius, Book VI.1153.

120. +Horace, Odes I.xxiv.1-2.



PART THE SECOND