Part 27 (1/2)
Among the Christians too there was increased literary activity, but Tertullian and Clement will suffice for our purpose.
Though not in his day regarded as a man of letters, it is yet in virtue of his writing that Marcus Aurelius survives. His journal, with the t.i.tle that tells its nature--”To Himself,” is to-day perhaps the most popular book of antiquity with those whose first concern is not literature. It is translated again and again, and it is studied. The peculiar mind of the solitary Emperor has made him, as Mr F. W. H.
Myers put it, ”the saint and exemplar of Agnosticism.” Meditative, tender and candid, yet hesitant and so far ineffectual, he is sensitive to so much that is positive and to so much that is negative, that the diary, in which his character is most intimately revealed, gives him a place of his own in the hearts of men perplext in the extreme. He is a man who neither believes, nor disbelieves,--”either G.o.ds or atoms”[3]
seems to be the necessary ant.i.thesis, and there is so much to be said both for {198} and against each of the alternatives that decision is impossible. He is attracted by the conception of Providence, but he hesitates to commit himself. There are arguments--at least of the kind that rest on probability--in favour of immortality, but they are insufficient to determine the matter. In his public capacity he became famous for the number and magnificence of his sacrifices to the G.o.ds of the state; he owns in his journal his debt to the G.o.ds for warnings given in dreams, but he suspects at times that they may not exist.
Meanwhile he persecutes the Christians for their disloyalty to the state. Their stubborn convictions were so markedly in contrast with his own wavering mind that he could not understand them--perhaps their motive was bravado, he thought; they were too theatrical altogether; their pose recalled the tragedies composed by the pupils of the rhetoricians--large language with nothing behind it.[4]
In the absence of any possibility of intellectual certainty, Marcus fell back upon conduct. Here his want of originality and of spiritual force was less felt, for conduct has tolerably well-established rules of neighbourliness, purity, good temper, public duty and the like. His Stoic guides, too, might in this region help him to follow with more confidence the voice of his own pure and delicate conscience--the conscience of a saint and a quietist rather than that of a man of action. Yet even in the realm of conduct he is on the whole ineffectual. Pure, truthful, kind, and brave he is, but he does not believe enough to be great. He is called to be a statesman and an administrator; he does not expect much outcome from all his energies, and he preaches to himself the necessity of patience with his prospective failure to achieve anything beyond the infinitesimal.
”Ever the same are the cycles of the universe, up and down, for ever and for ever. Either the intelligence of the Whole puts itself in motion for each separate effect--in which case accept the result it gives; or else it did so once for all, and everything is sequence, one thing in another ... [The text is doubtful for a line] ... In a word, either G.o.d, and all goes well; or all at random--live not thou at random.
”A moment, and earth will cover us all; then it too in its turn will change; and what it changes to, will change again {199} and again for ever; and again change after change to infinity. The waves of change and transformation--if a man think of them and of their speed, he will despise everything mortal.
”The universal cause is like a winter torrent; it carries all before it. How cheap then these poor statesmen, these who carry philosophy into practical affairs, as they fancy--poor diminutive creatures.
Drivellers. Man, what then? Do what now Nature demands. Start, if it be given thee, and look not round to see if any will know. Hope not for Plato's Republic;[5] but be content if the smallest thing advance; to compa.s.s that one issue count no little feat.
”Who shall change one of their dogmata [the regular word of Epictetus]?
And without a change of dogmata, what is there but the slavery of men groaning and pretending to obey? Go now, and talk of Alexander, and Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum; whether they saw the will of Nature and schooled themselves, is their affair; if they played the tragic actor, no one has condemned me to copy them. Simplicity and modesty are the work of philosophy; do not lead me astray into vanity.
”Look down from above on the countless swarms of men, their countless initiations, and their varied voyage in storm and calm, their changing combinations, as they come into being, meet, and pa.s.s out of being.
Think too of the life lived by others of old, of the life that shall be lived by others after thee, of the life now lived among the barbarian nations; and, of how many have never heard thy name, and how many will at once forget it, and how many may praise thee now perhaps but will very soon blame thee; and how neither memory is of any account, nor glory, nor anything else at all....
”The rottenness of the material substance of every individual thing--water, dust, bones, stench.... And this breathing element is another of the same, changing from this to that....
”Either the G.o.ds have no power, or they have power. If they have not, why pray? If they have, why not pray for deliverance from the fear, or the desire, or the pain, which the thing causes, rather than for the withholding or the giving of the particular thing? For certainly, if they can co-operate with men, it is for these purposes they can co-operate. But perhaps {200} thou wilt say, The G.o.ds have put all these in my own power. Then is it not better to use what is in thine own power and be free, than to be set on what is not in thy power--a slave and contemptible? And who told thee that the G.o.ds do not help us even to what is in our own power?”[6]
This handful of short pa.s.sages all from the same place, with a few omitted, may be taken as representing very fairly the mind of Marcus Aurelius. The world was his to rule, and he felt it a duty to remember how slight a thing it was. This was not the temper of Alexander or of Caesar,--of men who make mankind, and who, by their belief in men and in the power of their own ideas to lift men to higher planes of life, actually do secure that advance is made,--and that advance not the smallest. Yet he speaks of Alexander as a ”tragic actor.”[7] For a statesman, the att.i.tude of Marcus is little short of betrayal. He worked, he ruled, he endowed, he fought--he was pure, he was conscientious, he was unselfish--but he did not believe, and he was ineffectual. The Germans it might have been beyond any man's power to repel at that day, but even at home Marcus was ineffectual. His wife and his son were by-words. He had almost a morbid horror of defilement from men and women of coa.r.s.e minds,--a craving too for peace and sympathy; he shrank into himself, condoned, ignored. Among his benefactors he does not mention Hadrian, who really gave him the Empire--and it is easy to see why. In everything the two are a contrast. Hadrian's personal vices and his greatness as a ruler, as a man handling men and moving among ideas[8]--these were impossible for Marcus.
Nor was the personal religion of this pure and candid spirit a possible one for mankind. ”A genuine eternal Gospel,” wrote Renan of this diary of Marcus, ”the book of the _Thoughts_ will never grow old, for it affirms no dogma. The Gospel has grown old in certain parts; Science no longer allows us to admit the nave conception of the supernatural which is its base.... Yet Science might destroy G.o.d and the soul, and the book of the _Thoughts_ would remain young in its life and truth.”
{201} Renan is right; when Science, or anything else, ”destroys G.o.d and the soul,” there is no Gospel but that of Marcus; and yet for men it is impossible; and it is not young--it is senile. Duty without enthusiasm, hope or belief--belief in man, of course, for ”G.o.d and the soul” are by hypothesis ”destroyed”--duty, that is, without object, reason or result, it is a magnificent fancy, and yet one recurs to the criticism that Marcus pa.s.sed upon the Christians. Is there not a hint of the school about this? Is it not possible that the simpler instincts of men,--instincts with a history as ludicrous as Anthropologists sometimes sketch for us,--may after all come nearer the truth of things than semi-Stoic reflexion? At all events the instincts have ruled the world so far with the co-operation of Reason, and are as yet little inclined to yield their rights to their colleague. They have never done so without disaster.
The world did not accept Marcus as a teacher. Men readily recognized his high character, but for a thousand years and more n.o.body dreamed of taking him as a guide--n.o.body, that is, outside the schools. For the world it was faith or unbelief, and the two contemporaries already mentioned represent the two poles to which the thoughts of men gravitated, who were not yet ready for a cleavage with the past.
[Sidenote: Lucian]
”I am a Syrian from the Euphrates,”[9] wrote Lucian of himself; and elsewhere he has a playful protest against a historian of his day, magnificently ignorant of Eastern geography, who ”has taken up my native Samosata, and s.h.i.+fted it, citadel, walls and all, into Mesopotamia,” and by this new feat of colonization has apparently turned him into a Parthian or Mesopotamian.[10] Samosata lay actually in Commagene, and there Lucian spent his boyhood talking Syriac, his native language.[11] He was born about 125 A.D. His family were poor, and as soon as he left school, the question of a trade was at once raised, for even a boy's earnings would be welcome. At school he had had a trick of sc.r.a.ping the wax from his tablets and making little figures of animals and men, so his father handed him over to his mother's brother, who was one of a family of statuaries. But a blunder and a breakage resulted in his uncle thras.h.i.+ng him, and he ran home to his mother. It was his first and last day in the sculptor's shop, and he went to {202} bed with tears upon his face. In later life he told the story of a dream which he had that night--a long and somewhat literary dream modelled on Prodicus' fable of the _Choice of Herakles_.
He dreamed that two women appeared to him, one dusty and workmanlike, the other neat, charming and n.o.ble. They were Sculpture and Culture, and he chose the latter. He tells the dream, he says, that the young may be helped by his example to pursue the best and devote themselves to Culture, regardless of immediate poverty.[12] He was launched somehow on the career of his choice and became a rhetorician. It may be noted however that an instinctive interest in art remained with him, and he is reckoned one of the best art-critics of antiquity.
Rhetoric, he says, ”made a Greek of him,” went with him from city to city in Greece and Ionia, ”sailed the Ionian sea with him and attended him even as far as Gaul, scattering plenty in his path.”[13] For, as he explains elsewhere, he was among the teachers who could command high fees, and he made a good income in Gaul.[14] But, about the age of forty, he resolved ”to let the gentlemen of the jury rest in peace--tyrants enough having been arraigned and princes enough eulogized.”[15] From now onward he wrote dialogues--he had at last found his proper work.
[Sidenote: Lucian's Dialogues]
Dialogue in former days had been the vehicle of speculation--”had trodden those aerial plains on high above the clouds, where the great Zeus in heaven is borne along on winged car.” But it was to do so no more, and in an amusing piece Lucian represents Dialogue personified as bringing a suit against him for outrage. Had Lucian debased Dialogue, by reducing him to the common level of humanity and making him a.s.sociate with such persons as Aristophanes and Menippus, one a light-hearted mocker at things sacred, the other a barking, snarling dog of a Cynic,--thus turning Dialogue into a literary Centaur, neither fit to walk nor able to soar? Or was Dialogue really a musty, fusty, superannuated creature, and greatly improved now for having a bath and being taught to smile and to go genially in the company of Comedy?
Between the attack and the defence, the case is fairly stated.[16]
Lucian created a new {203} mode in writing--or perhaps he revived it, for it is not very clear how much he owes to his favourite Menippus, the Gadarene Cynic and satirist of four centuries before.
Menippus however has perished and Lucian remains and is read; for, whatever else is to be said of him, he is readable. He has not lost all the traces of the years during which he consorted with Rhetoric; at times he amplifies and exaggerates, and will strain for more point and piquancy than a taste more sure would approve. Yet he has the instinct to avoid travesty, and his style is in general natural and simple, despite occasional literary reminiscences. His characters talk,--as men may talk of their affairs, when they are not conscious of being overheard,--with a nave frankness not always very wise, with a freedom and common sense, and sometimes with a folly, that together reveal the speaker. They rarely declaim, and they certainly never reach any high level of thought or feeling. The talk is slight and easy--it flickers about from one idea to another, and gives a strong impression of being real. If it is G.o.ds who are talking, they become surprisingly human--and even _bourgeois_, they are so very much at home among themselves. Lucian's skill is amazing. He will take some episode from Homer and change no single detail, and yet, as we listen to the off-hand talk of the G.o.ds as they recount the occurrence, we are startled at the effect--the irony is everywhere and nowhere; the surprises are irresistible. Zeus, for instance, turns out to have more literary interests than we suppose; he will quote Homer and make a Demosthenic oration to the G.o.ds, though alas! his memory fails him in the middle of a sentence;[17] he laments that his altars are as cold as Plato's _Laws_ or the syllogisms of Chrysippus. He is the frankest gentleman of heaven, and so infinitely obliging!
In short, for sheer cleverness Lucian has no rival but Aristophanes in extant Greek literature. His originality, his wit, his humour (not at all equal, it may be said, to his wit), his gifts of invention and fancy, his light touch, and his genius for lively narrative, mark him out distinctively in an age when literature was all rhetoric, length and reminiscence. But as we read him, we become sensible of defects as extraordinary as his gifts. For all his Attic style, he belongs to his age. He {204} may renounce Rhetoric, but no man can easily escape from his past. The education had intensified the cardinal faults of his character, impatience, superficiality, a great lack of sympathy for the more tender attachments and the more profound interests of men--essential unbelief in human grandeur. An expatriated adventurer, living for twenty years on his eloquence, with the merest smattering of philosophy and no interest whatever in nature and natural science or mathematics, with little feeling and no poetry,--it was hardly to be expected that he should understand the depths of the human soul, lynx-eyed as he is for the surface of things. He had a very frank admiration for his own character, and he drew himself over and over again under various names. Lykinos, for example, is hardly a disguise at all. ”Free-Speech, son of True-man, son of Examiner,” he calls himself in one of his mock trials, ”hater of shams, hater of impostors, hater of liars, hater of the pompous, hater of every such variety of hateful men--and there are plenty of them”; conversely, he loves the opposites, when he meets them, which, he owns, is not very often.[18]
[Sidenote: Lucian and philosophy]