Letters on Literature Part 5

comes the kind sentinel to warn them of a danger. And Nicolette flees, and leaps into the fosse, and thence escapes into a great forest and lonely. In the morning she met shepherds merry over their meat, and bade them tell Auca.s.sin to hunt in that forest, where he should find a deer whereof one glance would cure him of his malady. The shepherds are happy, laughing people, who half mock Nicolette, and quite mock Auca.s.sin, when he comes that way. But at first they took Nicolette for a _fee_, such a beauty shone so brightly from her, and lit up all the forest.

Auca.s.sin they banter; and indeed the free talk of the peasants to their lord's son in that feudal age sounds curiously, and may well make us reconsider our notions of early feudalism.

But Auca.s.sin learns at least that Nicolette is in the wood, and he rides at adventure after her, till the thorns have ruined his silken surcoat, and the blood, dripping from his torn body, makes a visible track in the gra.s.s. So, as he wept, he met a monstrous man of the wood, that asked him why he lamented. And he said he was sorrowing for a lily-white hound that he had lost. Then the wild man mocked him, and told his own tale.

He was in that estate which Achilles, among the ghosts, preferred to all the kingship of the dead outworn. He was hind and hireling to a villein, and he had lost one of the villein's oxen. For that he dared not go into the town, where a prison awaited him. Moreover, they had dragged the very bed from under his old mother, to pay the price of the ox, and she lay on straw; and at that the woodman wept.

A curious touch, is it not, of pity for the people? The old poet is serious for one moment. "Compare," he says, "the sorrows of sentiment, of ladies and lovers, praised in song, with the sorrows of the poor, with troubles that are real and not of the heart!" Even Auca.s.sin the lovelorn feels it, and gives the hind money to pay for his ox, and so riding on comes to a lodge that Nicolette has built with blossoms and boughs. And Auca.s.sin crept in and looked through a gap in the fragrant walls of the lodge, and saw the stars in heaven, and one that was brighter than the rest.

Does one not feel it, the cool of that old summer night, the sweet smell of broken boughs and trodden gra.s.s and deep dew, and the shining of the star?

"Star that I from far behold That the moon draws to her fold, Nicolette with thee doth dwell, My sweet love with locks of gold,"

sings Auca.s.sin. "And when Nicolette heard Auca.s.sin, right so came she unto him, and pa.s.sed within the lodge, and cast her arms about his neck and kissed and embraced him:

"Fair sweet friend, welcome be thou!"

"And thou, fair sweet love, be thou welcome!"

There the story should end, in a dream of a summer's night. But the old minstrel did not end it so, or some one has continued his work with a heavier hand. Auca.s.sin rides, he cares not whither, if he has but his love with him. And they come to a fantastic land of burlesque, such as Pantagruel's crew touched at many a time. And Nicolette is taken by Carthaginian pirates, and proves to be daughter to the King of Carthage, and leaves his court and comes to Beaucaire in the disguise of a ministrel, and "journeys end in lovers' meeting."

That is all the tale, with its gaps, its careless pa.s.sages, its adventures that do not interest the poet. He only cares for youth, love, spring, flowers, and the song of the birds; the rest, except the pa.s.sage about the hind, is mere "business" done casually, because the audience expects broad jests, hard blows, misadventures, recognitions. What lives is the touch of poetry, of longing, of tender heart, of humorous resignation. It lives, and always must live, "while the nature of man is the same." The poet hopes his tale will gladden sad men. This service it did for M. Bida, he says, in the dreadful year of 1870-71, when he translated "Auca.s.sin." This, too, it has done for me in days not delightful. {6}

PLOTINUS (A.D. 200-262)

_To the Lady Violet Lebas_.

Dear Lady Violet,--You are discursive and desultory enough, as a reader, to have pleased even the late Lord Iddesleigh. It was "Auca.s.sin and Nicolette" only a month ago, and to-day you have been reading Lord Lytton's "Strange Story," I am sure, for you want information about Plotinus! He was born (about A.D. 200) in Wolf-town (Lycopolis), in Egypt, the town, you know, where the natives might not eat wolves, poor fellows, just as the people of Thebes might not eat sheep. Probably this prohibition caused Plotinus no regret, for he was a consistent vegetarian.

However, we are advancing too rapidly, and we must discuss Plotinus more in order. His name is very dear to mystic novelists, like the author of "Zanoni." They always describe their favourite hero as "deep in Plotinus or Iamblichus," and I venture to think that nearly represents the depth of their own explorations. We do not know exactly when Plotinus was born. Like many ladies he used to wrap up his age in a mystery, observing that these petty details about the body (a mere husk of flesh binding the soul) were of no importance. He was not weaned till he was eight years old, a singular circ.u.mstance. Having a turn for philosophy, he attended the schools of Alexandria, concerning which Kingsley's "Hypatia" is the most accessible authority.

All these anecdotes, I should have said, we learn from Porphyry, the Tyrian, who was a kind of Boswell to Plotinus. The philosopher himself often reminds me of Dr. Johnson, especially as Dr. Johnson is described by Mr. Carlyle. Just as the good doctor was a sound Churchman in the beginning of the age of new ideas, so Plotinus was a sound pagan in the beginning of the triumph of Christianity.

Like Johnson, Plotinus was lazy and energetic and short-sighted. He wrote a very large number of treatises, but he never took the trouble to read through them when once they were written, because his eyes were weak. He was superst.i.tious, like Dr. Johnson, yet he had lucid intervals of common sense, when he laughed at the superst.i.tions of his disciples.

Like Dr. Johnson, he was always begirt by disciples, men and women, Bozzys and Thrales. He was so full of honour and charity, that his house was crowded with persons in need of help and friendly care. Though he lived so much in the clouds and among philosophical abstractions, he was an excellent man of business. Though a philosopher he was pious, and was courageous, dreading the plague no more than the good doctor dreaded the tempest that fell on him when he was voyaging to Coll.

You will admit that the parallel is pretty close for an historical parallel, despite the differences between the ascetic of Wolf-town and the sage of Bolt Court, hard by Fleet Street!

To return to the education of Plotinus. He was twenty-eight when he went up to the University of Alexandria. For eleven years he diligently attended the lectures of Ammonius. Then he went on the Emperor Gordian's expedition to the East, hoping to learn the philosophy of the Hindus. The Upanishads would have puzzled Plotinus, had he reached India; but he never did. Gordian's army was defeated in Mesopotamia, no "blessed word"

to Gordian, and Plotinus hardly escaped with his life. He must have felt like Stendhal on the retreat from Moscow.

From Syria his friend and disciple Amelius led him to Rome, and here, as novelists say, "a curious thing happened." There was in Rome an Egyptian priest, who offered to raise up the Demon, or Guardian Angel, of Plotinus in visible form. But there was only one pure spot in all Rome, so said the priest, and this spot was the Temple of Isis. Here the _seance_ was held, and no demon appeared, but a regular G.o.d of one of the first circles. So terrified was an onlooker that he crushed to death the living birds which he held in his hands for some ritual or magical purpose.

It was a curious scene, a cosmopolitan confusion of Egypt, Rome, Isis, table-turning, the late Mr. Home, religion, and mummery, while Christian hymns of the early Church were being sung, perhaps in the garrets around, outside the Temple of Isis. The discovery that he had a G.o.d for his guardian angel gave Plotinus plenty of confidence in dealing with rival philosophers. For example, Alexandrinus Olympius, another mystic, tried magical arts against Plotinus. But Alexandrinus, suddenly doubling up during lecture with unaffected agony, cried, "Great virtue hath the soul of Plotinus, for my spells have returned against myself." As for Plotinus, he remarked among his disciples, "Now the body of Alexandrinus is collapsing like an empty purse."

How diverting it would be, Lady Violet, if our modern controversialists had those accomplishments, and if Mr. Max Muller could, literally, "double up" Professor Whitney, or if any one could cause Peppmuller to collapse with his queer Homeric theory! Plotinus had many such arts. A piece of jewellery was stolen from one of his _protegees_, a lady, and he detected the thief, a servant, by a glance. After being flogged within an inch of his life, the servant (perhaps to save the remaining inch) confessed all.

Once when Porphyry was at a distance, and was meditating suicide, Plotinus appeared at his side, saying, "This that thou schemest cometh not of the pure intellect, but of black humours," and so sent Porphyry for change of air to Sicily. This was thoroughly good advice, but during the absence of the disciple the master died.

Porphyry did not see the great snake that glided into the wall when Plotinus expired; he only heard of the circ.u.mstance. Plotinus's last words were: "I am striving to release that which is divine within us, and to merge it in the universally divine." It is a strange mixture of philosophy and savage survival. The Zulus still believe that the souls of the dead reappear, like the soul of Plotinus, in the form of serpents.

Plotinus wrote against the paganizing Christians, or Gnostics. Like all great men, he was accused of plagiarism. A defence of great men accused of literary theft would be as valuable as Naude's work of a like name about magic. On his death the Delphic Oracle, in very second-rate hexameters, declared that Plotinus had become a demon.

Such was the life of Plotinus, a man of sense and virtue, and so modest that he would not allow his portrait to be painted. His character drew good men round him, his repute for supernatural virtues brought "fools into a circle." What he meant by his belief that four times he had, "whether in the body or out of the body," been united with the Spirit of the world, who knows? What does Tennyson mean when he writes:

"So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch'd me from the past, And all at once it seem'd at last His living soul was flashed on mine.

And mine in his was wound and whirl'd About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world."

Mystery! We cannot fathom it; we know not the paths of the souls of Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinus and St. Paul. They are wise with a wisdom not of this world, or with a foolishness yet more wise.

In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least he was at war with pessimism.

"They that love G.o.d bear lightly the ways of the world--bear lightly whatsoever befalls them of necessity in the general movement of things."

He believed in a rest that remains for the people of G.o.d, "where they speak not one with the other; but, as we understand many things by the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven, where the spiritual body is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned." The arguments by which these opinions are b.u.t.tressed may be called metaphysical, and may be called worthless; the conviction, and the beauty of the language in which it is stated, remain immortal possessions.

Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while Christianity offered him a sympathetic refuge, who can tell? Probably natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson--conservatism and taste--caused his adherence to the forms at least of the older creeds.

There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and much to like. But if you read him in hopes of material for strange stories, you will be disappointed. Perhaps Lord Lytton and others who have invoked his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord Beaconsfield's tale) knew his name better than his doctrine. His "Enneads," even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not very light subjects of study.

LUCRETIUS

_To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford_.

Dear Martin,--"How individuals found religious consolation from the creeds of ancient Greece and Rome" is, as you quote C. O. Muller, "a very curious question." It is odd that while we have countless books on the philosophy and the mythology and the ritual of the cla.s.sic peoples, we hear about their religion in the modern sense scarcely anything from anybody. We know very well what G.o.ds they worshipped, and what sacrifices they offered to the Olympians, and what stories they told about their deities, and about the beginnings of things. We know, too, in a general way, that the G.o.ds were interested in morality. They would all punish offences in their own department, at least when it was a case of _numine laeso_, when the G.o.d who protected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality, or when the G.o.ds invoked to witness an oath were offended by perjury.

But how did a religiously minded man regard the G.o.ds? What hope or what fears did he entertain with regard to the future life? Had he any sense of _sin_, as more than a thing that could be expiated by purification with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing the prayers and "ma.s.ses," so to speak, of the mendicant clergy or charlatans, mentioned by Plato in the "Republic"? About these great questions of the religious life--the Future and man's fortunes in the future, the punishment or reward of justice or iniquity--we really know next to nothing.

That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to me. The _De Rerum Natura_ was written for no other purpose than to destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men's minds from all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all dread or desire for the interference of the G.o.ds in this mortal life of ours on earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to "know the causes of things," except that the knowledge would bring "emanc.i.p.ation," as people call it, from the G.o.ds, to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of the Roman son to the Roman sire, under the _patria potestas_ or _in manu patris_.

As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end, it follows that his fellow-countrymen _must_ have gone in a constant terror about spiritual penalties, which we seldom a.s.sociate in thought with the "blithe" and careless existence of the ancient peoples. In every line of Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the slave just escaped from an intolerable thraldom to fear. n.o.body could well have believed on any other evidence that the cla.s.sical people had a gloomy Calvinism of their own time. True, as early as Homer, we hear of the shadowy existence of the souls, and of the torments endured by the notably wicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical, like Sisyphus and Tantalus. But when we read the opening books of the "Republic," we find the educated friends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives' fables. They have heard, they say, that such notions circulate among the people, but they seem never for a moment to have themselves believed in a future of rewards and punishments.

The remains of ancient funereal art, in Etruria or Attica, usually show us the semblances of the dead lying at endless feasts, or receiving sacrifices of food and wine (as in Egypt) from their descendants, or, perhaps, welcoming the later dead, their friends who have just rejoined them. But it is only in the descriptions by Pausanias and others of certain old wall-paintings that we hear of the torments of the wicked, of the demons that torture them and, above all, of the great chief fiend, coloured like a carrion fly. To judge from Lucretius, although so little remains to us of this creed, yet it had a very strong hold of the minds of people, in the century before Christ. Perhaps the belief was reinforced by the teaching of Socrates, who, in the vision of Er, in the "Republic," brings back, in a myth, the old popular faith in a _Purgatorio_, if not in an _Inferno_.

In the "Phaedo," for certain, we come to the very definite account of a h.e.l.l, a place of eternal punishment, as well as of a Purgatory, whence souls are freed when their sins are expiated. "The spirits beyond redemption, for the mult.i.tude of their murders or sacrileges, Fate hurls into Tartarus, whence they never any more come forth." But souls of lighter guilt abide a year in Tartarus, and then drift out down the streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon. Thence they reach the marsh of Acheron, but are not released until they have received the pardon of the souls whom in life they had injured.

All this, and much more to the same purpose in other dialogues of Plato's, appears to have been derived by Socrates from the popular unphilosophic traditions, from Folk-lore in short, and to have been raised by him to the rank of "pious opinion," if not of dogma. Now, Lucretius represents nothing but the reaction against all this dread of future doom, whether that dread was inculcated by Platonic philosophy or by popular belief. The latter must have been much the more powerful and widely diffused. It follows that the Romans, at least, must have been haunted by a constant dread of judgment to come, from which, but for the testimony of Lucretius and his manifest sincerity, we might have believed them free.

Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it did its best to ruin a great poet. The sublimity of the language of Lucretius, when he can leave his attempts at scientific proof, the closeness of his observation, his enjoyment of life, of Nature, and his power of painting them, a certain largeness of touch, and n.o.ble amplitude of manner--these, with a burning sincerity, mark him above all others that smote the Latin lyre. Yet these great qualities are half-crushed by his task, by his attempt to turn the atomic theory into verse, by his unsympathetic effort to destroy all faith and hope, because these were united, in his mind, with dread of Styx and Acheron.

It is an almost intolerable philosophy, the philosophy of eternal sleep, without dreams and without awakening. This belief is wholly divorced from joy, which inspires all the best art. This negation of hope has "close-lipped Patience for its only friend."

In vain does Lucretius paint pictures of life and Nature so large, so glowing, so majestic that they remind us of nothing but the "Fete Champetre" of Giorgione, in the Louvre. All that life is a thing we must leave soon, and forever, and must be hopelessly lapped in an eternity of blind silence. "I shall let men see the certain end of all," he cries; "then will they resist religion, and the threats of priests and prophets." But this "certain end" is exactly what mortals do not desire to see. To this sleep they prefer even _tenebras Orci, vastasque lacunas_.

They will not be deprived of G.o.ds, "the friends of man, merciful G.o.ds, compa.s.sionate." They will not turn from even a faint hope in those to the Lucretian deities in their endless and indifferent repose and divine "delight in immortal and peaceful life, far, far away from us and ours--life painless and fearless, needing nothing we can give, replete with its own wealth, unmoved by prayer and promise, untouched by anger."