CHAPTER VIII - ANIMULA VAGULA

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER VIII - ANIMULA VAGULA, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater


Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Pallidula, rigida, nudula.

The Emperor Hadrian to his Soul

[123] FLAVIAN was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and
tears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actual
spectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for the
imagination, whatever confidence they may entertain of the soul's
survival in another life. To Marius, greatly agitated by that event,
the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing
less than the soul's extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as
the fire among those still beloved ashes. Even that wistful suspense
of judgment expressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages
of being still possible for the soul in some dim journey hence,
seemed wholly untenable, and, with it, almost all that remained of
the religion of his childhood. Future extinction seemed just then
[124] to be what the unforced witness of his own nature pointed to.
On the other hand, there came a novel curiosity as to what the
various schools of ancient philosophy had had to say concerning that
strange, fluttering creature; and that curiosity impelled him to
certain severe studies, in which his earlier religious conscience
seemed still to survive, as a principle of hieratic scrupulousness or
integrity of thought, regarding this new service to intellectual
light.

At this time, by his poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen a
prey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in
many a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all
this, fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his
character, he was kept by a genuine virility there, effective in him,
among other results, as a hatred of what was theatrical, and the
instinctive recognition that in vigorous intelligence, after all,
divinity was most likely to be found a resident. With this was
connected the feeling, increasing with his advance to manhood, of a
poetic beauty in mere clearness of thought, the actually aesthetic
charm of a cold austerity of mind; as if the kinship of that to the
clearness of physical light were something more than a figure of
speech. Of all those various religious fantasies, as so many forms
of enthusiasm, he could well appreciate the picturesque; that was
made easy by his natural Epicureanism, already prompting [125] him to
conceive of himself as but the passive spectator of the world around
him. But it was to the severer reasoning, of which such matters as
Epicurean theory are born, that, in effect, he now betook himself.
Instinctively suspicious of those mechanical arcana, those pretended
"secrets unveiled" of the professional mystic, which really bring
great and little souls to one level, for Marius the only possible
dilemma lay between that old, ancestral Roman religion, now become so
incredible to him and the honest action of his own untroubled,
unassisted intelligence. Even the Arcana Celestia of Platonism--what
the sons of Plato had had to say regarding the essential indifference
of pure soul to its bodily house and merely occasional dwelling-
place--seemed to him while his heart was there in the urn with the
material ashes of Flavian, or still lingering in memory over his last
agony, wholly inhuman or morose, as tending to alleviate his
resentment at nature's wrong. It was to the sentiment of the body,
and the affections it defined--the flesh, of whose force and colour
that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or abstract--
he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved,
suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him
a materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee.

As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for
poetry had passed away, [126] to be replaced by the literature of
thought. His much-pondered manuscript verses were laid aside; and
what happened now to one, who was certainly to be something of a poet
from first to last, looked at the moment like a change from poetry to
prose. He came of age about this time, his own master though with
beardless face; and at eighteen, an age at which, then as now, many
youths of capacity, who fancied themselves poets, secluded themselves
from others chiefly in affectation and vague dreaming, he secluded
himself indeed from others, but in a severe intellectual meditation,
that salt of poetry, without which all the more serious charm is
lacking to the imaginative world. Still with something of the old
religious earnestness of his childhood, he set himself--Sich im
Denken zu orientiren--to determine his bearings, as by compass, in
the world of thought--to get that precise acquaintance with the
creative intelligence itself, its structure and capacities, its
relation to other parts of himself and to other things, without
which, certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young man rich
in this world's goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, and
ascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact
estimate of realities, as towards himself, he must have--a delicately
measured gradation of certainty in things--from the distant, haunted
horizon of mere surmise or imagination, to the actual [127] feeling
of sorrow in his heart, as he reclined one morning, alone instead of
in pleasant company, to ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old
Greek manuscript, unrolled beside him. His former gay companions,
meeting him in the streets of the old Italian town, and noting the
graver lines coming into the face of the sombre but enthusiastic
student of intellectual structure, who could hold his own so well in
the society of accomplished older men, were half afraid of him,
though proud to have him of their company. Why this reserve?--they
asked, concerning the orderly, self-possessed youth, whose speech and
carriage seemed so carefully measured, who was surely no poet like
the rapt, dishevelled Lupus. Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose
toga was so daintily folded, and who was always as fresh as the
flowers he wore; or bent on his own line of ambition: or even on
riches?

Marius, meantime, was reading freely, in early morning for the most
part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know
what might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal
essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the
funeral fires. And the old Greek who more than any other was now
giving form to his thoughts was a very hard master. From Epicurus,
from the thunder and lightning of Lucretius--like thunder and
lightning some distance off, one might recline to enjoy, in a garden
of roses--he had gone back to [128] the writer who was in a certain
sense the teacher of both, Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult book
"Concerning Nature" was even then rare, for people had long since
satisfied themselves by the quotation of certain brilliant, isolated,
oracles only, out of what was at best a taxing kind of lore. But the
difficulty of the early Greek prose did but spur the curiosity of
Marius; the writer, the superior clearness of whose intellectual view
had so sequestered him from other men, who had had so little joy of
that superiority, being avowedly exacting as to the amount of devout
attention he required from the student. "The many," he said, always
thus emphasising the difference between the many and the few, are
"like people heavy with wine," "led by children," "knowing not
whither they go;" and yet, "much learning doth not make wise;" and
again, "the ass, after all, would have his thistles rather than fine
gold."

Heraclitus, indeed, had not under-rated the difficulty for "the many"
of the paradox with which his doctrine begins, and the due reception
of which must involve a denial of habitual impressions, as the
necessary first step in the way of truth. His philosophy had been
developed in conscious, outspoken opposition to the current mode of
thought, as a matter requiring some exceptional loyalty to pure
reason and its "dry light." Men are subject to an illusion, he
protests, regarding matters apparent to sense. [129] What the
uncorrected sense gives was a false impression of permanence or
fixity in things, which have really changed their nature in the very
moment in which we see and touch them. And the radical flaw in the
current mode of thinking would lie herein: that, reflecting this
false or uncorrected sensation, it attributes to the phenomena of
experience a durability which does not really belong to them.
Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world of firmly out-
lined objects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and dead what
is in reality full of animation, of vigour, of the fire of life--that
eternal process of nature, of which at a later time Goethe spoke as
the "Living Garment," whereby God is seen of us, ever in weaving at
the "Loom of Time."

And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made was, in the first
instance, from confused to unconfused sensation; with a sort of
prophetic seriousness, a great claim and assumption, such as we may
understand, if we anticipate in this preliminary scepticism the
ulterior scope of his speculation, according to which the universal
movement of all natural things is but one particular stage, or
measure, of that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason
consists. The one true being--that constant subject of all early
thought--it was his merit to have conceived, not as sterile and
stagnant inaction, but as a perpetual energy, from the restless
stream of which, [130] at certain points, some elements detach
themselves, and harden into non-entity and death, corresponding, as
outward objects, to man's inward condition of ignorance: that is, to
the slowness of his faculties. It is with this paradox of a subtle,
perpetual change in all visible things, that the high speculation of
Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expresses for anything like a
careless, half-conscious, "use-and-wont" reception of our experience,
which took so strong a hold on men's memories! Hence those many
precepts towards a strenuous self-consciousness in all we think and
do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason, which makes strict
attentiveness of mind a kind of religious duty and service.

The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our ordinary
experience, fixed as they seem, are really in perpetual change, had
been, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a
large positive system of almost religious philosophy. Then as now,
the illuminated philosophic mind might apprehend, in what seemed a
mass of lifeless matter, the movement of that universal life, in
which things, and men's impressions of them, were ever "coming to
be," alternately consumed and renewed. That continual change, to be
discovered by the attentive understanding where common opinion found
fixed objects, was but the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading
motion--the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the
divine [131] reason itself, proceeding always by its own rhythmical
logic, and lending to all mind and matter, in turn, what life they
had. In this "perpetual flux" of things and of souls, there was, as
Heraclitus conceived, a continuance, if not of their material or
spiritual elements, yet of orderly intelligible relationships, like
the harmony of musical notes, wrought out in and through the series
of their mutations--ordinances of the divine reason, maintained
throughout the changes of the phenomenal world; and this harmony in
their mutation and opposition, was, after all, a principle of sanity,
of reality, there. But it happened, that, of all this, the first,
merely sceptical or negative step, that easiest step on the
threshold, had alone remained in general memory; and the "doctrine of
motion" seemed to those who had felt its seduction to make all fixed
knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the still swifter
passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed to reflect
them, might indeed be the burning of the divine fire: but what was
ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring flame, or
like the race of water in the mid-stream--too swiftly for any real
knowledge of them to be attainable. Heracliteanism had grown to be
almost identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras,
that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was the
only standard of what is or is [132] not, and each one the measure of
all things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had become
but an authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge.

And as it had been with his original followers in Greece, so it
happened now with the later Roman disciple. He, too, paused at the
apprehension of that constant motion of things--the drift of flowers,
of little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream around
him, the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out
of sight, must count with him as but a dim problem. The bold mental
flight of the old Greek master from the fleeting, competing objects
of experience to that one universal life, in which the whole sphere
of physical change might be reckoned as but a single pulsation,
remained by him as hypothesis only--the hypothesis he actually
preferred, as in itself most credible, however scantily realisable
even by the imagination--yet still as but one unverified hypothesis,
among many others, concerning the first principle of things. He
might reserve it as a fine, high, visionary consideration, very
remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where
that ladder seemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was
certainly no time left just now by his eager interest in the real
objects so close to him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the
ground. And those childish days of reverie, [133] when he played at
priests, played in many another day-dream, working his way from the
actual present, as far as he might, with a delightful sense of escape
in replacing the outer world of other people by an inward world as
himself really cared to have it, had made him a kind of "idealist."
He was become aware of the possibility of a large dissidence between
an inward and somewhat exclusive world of vivid personal
apprehension, and the unimproved, unheightened reality of the life of
those about him. As a consequence, he was ready now to concede,
somewhat more easily than others, the first point of his new lesson,
that the individual is to himself the measure of all things, and to
rely on the exclusive certainty to himself of his own impressions.
To move afterwards in that outer world of other people, as though
taking it at their estimate, would be possible henceforth only as a
kind of irony. And as with the Vicaire Savoyard, after reflecting on
the variations of philosophy, "the first fruit he drew from that
reflection was the lesson of a limitation of his researches to what
immediately interested him; to rest peacefully in a profound
ignorance as to all beside; to disquiet himself only concerning those
things which it was of import for him to know." At least he would
entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow its due weight to
this primary element of incertitude or negation, in the conditions of
man's life. [134] Just here he joined company, retracing in his
individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of human thought,
with another wayfarer on the journey, another ancient Greek master,
the founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weighty traditional
utterances (for he had left no writing) served in turn to give
effective outline to the contemplations of Marius. There was
something in the doctrine itself congruous with the place wherein it
had its birth; and for a time Marius lived much, mentally, in the
brilliant Greek colony which had given a dubious name to the
philosophy of pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the
mountains and the sea, among richer than Italian gardens, on a
certain breezy table-land projecting from the African coast, some
hundreds of miles southward from Greece. There, in a delightful
climate, with something of transalpine temperance amid its luxury,
and withal in an inward atmosphere of temperance which did but
further enhance the brilliancy of human life, the school of Cyrene
had maintained itself as almost one with the family of its founder;
certainly as nothing coarse or unclean, and under the influence of
accomplished women.

Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of judgment as to
what might really lie behind--flammantia moenia mundi: the flaming
ramparts of the world. Those strange, bold, sceptical surmises,
which had haunted the minds [135] of the first Greek enquirers as
merely abstract doubt, which had been present to the mind of
Heraclitus as one element only in a system of abstract philosophy,
became with Aristippus a very subtly practical worldly-wisdom. The
difference between him and those obscure earlier thinkers is almost
like that between an ancient thinker generally, and a modern man of
the world: it was the difference between the mystic in his cell, or
the prophet in the desert, and the expert, cosmopolitan,
administrator of his dark sayings, translating the abstract thoughts
of the master into terms, first of all, of sentiment. It has been
sometimes seen, in the history of the human mind, that when thus
translated into terms of sentiment--of sentiment, as lying already
half-way towards practice--the abstract ideas of metaphysics for the
first time reveal their true significance. The metaphysical
principle, in itself, as it were, without hands or feet, becomes
impressive, fascinating, of effect, when translated into a precept as
to how it were best to feel and act; in other words, under its
sentimental or ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the great
master of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows, and that
we, even as they, never continue in one stay, might indeed have taken
effect as a languid, enervating, consumptive nihilism, as a precept
of "renunciation," which would touch and handle and busy itself with
nothing. But in the reception of [136] metaphysical formulae, all
depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-
existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall-
-the company they find already present there, on their admission into
the house of thought; there being at least so much truth as this
involves in the theological maxim, that the reception of this or that
speculative conclusion is really a matter of will. The persuasion
that all is vanity, with this happily constituted Greek, who had been
a genuine disciple of Socrates and reflected, presumably, something
of his blitheness in the face of the world, his happy way of taking
all chances, generated neither frivolity nor sourness, but induced,
rather, an impression, just serious enough, of the call upon men's
attention of the crisis in which they find themselves. It became the
stimulus towards every kind of activity, and prompted a perpetual,
inextinguishable thirst after experience.

With Marius, then, the influence of the philosopher of pleasure
depended on this, that in him an abstract doctrine, originally
somewhat acrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial nature, well fitted
to transform it into a theory of practice, of considerable
stimulative power towards a fair life. What Marius saw in him was
the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, so to
speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories;
accepting the [137] results of a metaphysical system which seemed to
concentrate into itself all the weakening trains of thought in
earlier Greek speculation, and making the best of it; turning its
hard, bare truths, with wonderful tact, into precepts of grace, and
delicate wisdom, and a delicate sense of honour. Given the hardest
terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, even so, we may
well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and
whatever our souls touch upon--these wonderful bodies, these material
dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together for a while,
the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the intercourse of
society. The most discerning judges saw in him something like the
graceful "humanities" of the later Roman, and our modern "culture,"
as it is termed; while Horace recalled his sayings as expressing best
his own consummate amenity in the reception of life.

In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of that old master of
decorous living, those eternal doubts as to the criteria of truth
reduced themselves to a scepticism almost drily practical, a
scepticism which developed the opposition between things as they are
and our impressions and thoughts concerning them--the possibility, if
an outward world does really exist, of some faultiness in our
apprehension of it--the doctrine, in short, of what is termed "the
subjectivity of knowledge." That is a consideration, indeed, [138]
which lies as an element of weakness, like some admitted fault or
flaw, at the very foundation of every philosophical account of the
universe; which confronts all philosophies at their starting, but
with which none have really dealt conclusively, some perhaps not
quite sincerely; which those who are not philosophers dissipate by
"common," but unphilosophical, sense, or by religious faith. The
peculiar strength of Marius was, to have apprehended this weakness on
the threshold of human knowledge, in the whole range of its
consequences. Our knowledge is limited to what we feel, he
reflected: we need no proof that we feel. But can we be sure that
things are at all like our feelings? Mere peculiarities in the
instruments of our cognition, like the little knots and waves on the
surface of a mirror, may distort the matter they seem but to
represent. Of other people we cannot truly know even the feelings,
nor how far they would indicate the same modifications, each one of a
personality really unique, in using the same terms as ourselves; that
"common experience," which is sometimes proposed as a satisfactory
basis of certainty, being after all only a fixity of language. But
our own impressions!--The light and heat of that blue veil over our
heads, the heavens spread out, perhaps not like a curtain over
anything!--How reassuring, after so long a debate about the rival
criteria of truth, to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one's
[139] aspirations after knowledge to that! In an age still
materially so brilliant, so expert in the artistic handling of
material things, with sensible capacities still in undiminished
vigour, with the whole world of classic art and poetry outspread
before it, and where there was more than eye or ear could well take
in--how natural the determination to rely exclusively upon the
phenomena of the senses, which certainly never deceive us about
themselves, about which alone we can never deceive ourselves!

And so the abstract apprehension that the little point of this
present moment alone really is, between a past which has just ceased
to be and a future which may never come, became practical with
Marius, under the form of a resolve, as far as possible, to exclude
regret and desire, and yield himself to the improvement of the
present with an absolutely disengaged mind. America is here and now-
-here, or nowhere: as Wilhelm Meister finds out one day, just not too
late, after so long looking vaguely across the ocean for the
opportunity of the development of his capacities. It was as if,
recognising in perpetual motion the law of nature, Marius identified
his own way of life cordially with it, "throwing himself into the
stream," so to speak. He too must maintain a harmony with that soul
of motion in things, by constantly renewed mobility of character.

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res.--

[140] Thus Horace had summed up that perfect manner in the reception
of life attained by his old Cyrenaic master; and the first practical
consequence of the metaphysic which lay behind that perfect manner,
had been a strict limitation, almost the renunciation, of
metaphysical enquiry itself. Metaphysic--that art, as it has so
often proved, in the words of Michelet, de s'égarer avec méthode, of
bewildering oneself methodically:--one must spend little time upon
that! In the school of Cyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness,
logical and physical speculation, theoretic interests generally, had
been valued only so far as they served to give a groundwork, an
intellectual justification, to that exclusive concern with practical
ethics which was a note of the Cyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and
enthusiastic, how true to itself, under how many varieties of
character, had been the effort of the Greeks after Theory--Theôria--
that vision of a wholly reasonable world, which, according to the
greatest of them, literally makes man like God: how loyally they had
still persisted in the quest after that, in spite of how many
disappointments! In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps, some of them
might have found the kind of vision they were seeking for; but not in
"doubtful disputations" concerning "being" and "not being," knowledge
and appearance. Men's minds, even young men's minds, at that late
day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which
[141] had so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind of
Marius, as in that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui,
combined with appetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about
reaction, a sort of suicide (instances of the like have been seen
since) by which a great metaphysical acumen was devoted to the
function of proving metaphysical speculation impossible, or useless.
Abstract theory was to be valued only just so far as it might serve
to clear the tablet of the mind from suppositions no more than half
realisable, or wholly visionary, leaving it in flawless evenness of
surface to the impressions of an experience, concrete and direct.

To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding ourselves
of such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions--to
be rid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often
only misrepresent the experience of which they profess to be the
representation--idola, idols, false appearances, as Bacon calls them
later--to neutralise the distorting influence of metaphysical system
by an all-accomplished metaphysic skill: it is this bold, hard, sober
recognition, under a very "dry light," of its own proper aim, in
union with a habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps
open a wide doorway to human weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic
doctrine, to reproductions of this doctrine in the time of Marius or
in our own, their gravity and importance. It was a [142] school to
which the young man might come, eager for truth, expecting much from
philosophy, in no ignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than
an "initiation." He would be sent back, sooner or later, to
experience, to the world of concrete impressions, to things as they
may be seen, heard, felt by him; but with a wonderful machinery of
observation, and free from the tyranny of mere theories.

So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed the
death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself
as if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant
school of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek
colony, on its fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general
completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-
metaphysical metaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or
complete life, a life of various yet select sensation, the most
direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty
of soul, freedom from all partial and misrepresentative doctrine
which does but relieve one element in our experience at the cost of
another, freedom from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past
and of calculation on the future: this would be but preliminary to
the real business of education--insight, insight through culture,
into all that the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand
so briefly in its presence. From that maxim of [143] Life as the end
of life, followed, as a practical consequence, the desirableness of
refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition, of
developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising one's self
in them, till one's whole nature became one complex medium of
reception, towards the vision--the "beatific vision," if we really
cared to make it such--of our actual experience in the world. Not
the conveyance of an abstract body of truths or principles, would be
the aim of the right education of one's self, or of another, but the
conveyance of an art--an art in some degree peculiar to each
individual character; with the modifications, that is, due to its
special constitution, and the peculiar circumstances of its growth,
inasmuch as no one of us is "like another, all in all."