Look at the "Fulminati"--so the group of wicked men are called whose death precedes the Judgment. Huge naked angels, sailing upon vanlike wings, breathe columns of red flame upon a crowd of wicked men and women. In vain these sinners avoid the descending fire. It pursues and fells them to the earth. As they fly, their eyes are turned towards the dreadful faces in the air. Some hurry through a portico, huddled together, falling men, and women clasping to their arms dead babies scorched with flame. One old man stares straightforward, doggedly awaiting death. One woman scowls defiance as she dies. A youth has twisted both hands in his hair, and presses them against his ears to drown the screams and groans and roaring thunder. They trample upon prostrate forms already stiff. Every shape and att.i.tude of sudden terror and despairing guilt are here. Next comes the Resurrection. Two angels of the Judgment--gigantic figures, with the plumeless wings that Signorelli loves--are seen upon the clouds.
They blow trumpets with all their might, so that each naked muscle seems strained to make the blast, which bellows through the air and shakes the sepulchres beneath the earth. Thence rise the dead. All are naked, and a few are seen like skeletons. With painful effort they struggle from the soil that clasps them round, as if obeying an irresistible command. Some have their heads alone above the ground.
Others wrench their limbs from the clinging earth; and as each man rises, it closes under him. One would think that they were being born again from solid clay, and growing into form with labour. The fully risen spirits stand and walk about, all occupied with the expectation of the Judgment; but those that are yet in the act of rising, have no thought but for the strange and toilsome process of this second birth. Signorelli here, as elsewhere, proves himself one of the greatest painters by the simple means with which he produces the most marvellous effects. His composition sways our souls with all the pa.s.sion of the terrible scenes that he depicts. Yet what does it contain? Two stern angels on the clouds, a blank grey plain, and a mult.i.tude of naked men and women. In the next compartment h.e.l.l is painted. This is a complicated picture, consisting of a ma.s.s of human beings entangled with torturing fiends. Above hover demons bearing d.a.m.ned spirits, and three angels see that justice takes its course. Signorelli here degenerates into no mediaeval ugliness and mere barbarity of form. His fiends are not the b.e.s.t.i.a.l creatures of Pisano"s basreliefs, but models of those monsters which Duppa has engraved from Michel Angelo"s "Last Judgment"--lean naked men, in whose hollow eyes glow the fires of hate and despair, whose nails have grown to claws, and from whose ears have started horns. They sail upon bats" wings; and only by their livid hue, which changes from yellow to the ghastliest green, and by the cruelty of their remorseless eyes, can you know them from the souls they torture. In h.e.l.l ugliness and power of mischief come with length of years.
Continual growth in crime distorts the form which once was human; and the interchange of everlasting hatred degrades the tormentor and his victim to the same demoniac ferocity. To this design the science of foreshortening, and the profound knowledge of the human form in every posture, give its chief interest. Paradise is not less wonderful. Signorelli has contrived to throw variety and grace into the somewhat monotonous groups which this subject requires. Above are choirs of angels, not like Fra Angelico"s, but tall male creatures clothed in voluminous drapery, with grave features and still, solemn eyes. Some are dancing, some are singing to the lute, and one, the most gracious of them all, bends down to aid a suppliant soul. The men beneath, who listen in a state of bliss, are all undraped. Signorelli, in this difficult composition, remains temperate, serene, and simple; a Miltonic harmony pervades the movement of his angelic choirs. Their beauty is the product of their strength and virtue. No floral ornaments or cherubs, or soft clouds, are found in his Paradise; yet it is fair and full of grace. Here Luca seems to have antic.i.p.ated Raphael.
It may be parenthetically observed, that Signorelli has introduced himself and Niccolo Angeli, treasurer of the cathedral building fund, in the corner of the fresco representing Antichrist, with the date 1503. They stand as spectators and solemn witnesses of the tragedy, set forth in all its acts by the great master.
After viewing these frescoes, we muse and ask ourselves why Signorelli"s fame is so inadequate to his deserts? Partly, no doubt, because he painted in obscure Italian towns, and left few easel-pictures.[1] Besides, the artists of the sixteenth century eclipsed all their predecessors, and the name of Signorelli has been swallowed up in that of Michel Angelo. Vasari said that "esso Michel Angelo imit l"andar di Luca, come pu vedere ognuno." Nor is it hard to see that what the one began at Orvieto the other completed in the Vatican. These great men had truly kindred spirits. Both struggled to express their intellectual conceptions in the simplest and most abstract forms. The works of both are distinguished by contempt for advent.i.tious ornaments and for the grace of positive colour. Both chose to work in fresco, and selected subjects of the gravest and most elevated character. The study of anatomy, and the scientific drawing of the naked body, which Luca practised, were carried to perfection by Michel Angelo. Sublimity of thought and self-restraint pervade their compositions. He who would understand Buonarroti must first appreciate Signorelli. The latter, it is true, was confined to a narrower circle in his study of the beautiful and the sublime. He had not ascended to that pure idealism, superior to all the accidents of place and time, which is the chief distinction of Michel Angelo"s work. At the same time, his manner had not suffered from too fervid an enthusiasm for the imperfectly comprehended antique. He painted the life he saw around him, and clothed his men and women in the dress of Italy.
[1] The Uffizzi and Pitti Galleries at Florence contain one or two fine specimens of Luca Signorelli"s Holy Families, which show his influence over the early manner of Michel Angelo. Into the background of one circular picture he has introduced a group of naked figures, which was imitated by Buonarroti in the Holy Family of the Tribune. The Accademia has also a picture of saints and angels ill.u.s.trative of his large style and crowded composition. The Brera at Milan can boast of a very characteristic Flagellation, where the nude has been carefully studied, and the brutality of an insolent officer is forcibly represented. But perhaps the most interesting of his works out of Orvieto are those in his native place, Cortona. In the Church of the Gesu in that town there is an altar-piece representing Madonna in glory with saints, which also contains on a smaller scale than the princ.i.p.al figures a little design of the Temptation in Eden. You recognise the master"s individuality in the muscular and energetic Adam. The Duomo has a Communion of the Apostles which shows Signorelli"s independence of tradition. It is the Cenacolo treated with freedom. Christ stands in the midst of the twelve, who are gathered around him, some kneeling and some upright, upon a marble pavement. The whole scene is conceived in a truly grand style--n.o.ble att.i.tudes, broad draperies, sombre and rich colouring, masculine ma.s.sing of the figures in effective groups. The Christ is especially n.o.ble. Swaying a little to the right, he gives the bread to a kneeling apostle.
The composition is marked by a dignity and self-restraint which Raphael might have envied. San Niccolo, again, has a fine picture by this master. It is a Deposition with saints and angels--those large-limbed and wide-winged messengers of G.o.d whom none but Signorelli realised. The composition of this picture is hazardous, and at first sight it is even displeasing. The figures seem roughly scattered in a vacant s.p.a.ce. The dead Christ has but little dignity, and the pa.s.sion of S. Jerome in the foreground is stiff in spite of its exaggeration. But long study only serves to render this strange picture more and more attractive. Especially noticeable is the youthful angel clad in dark green who sustains Christ. He is a young man in the bloom of strength and beauty, whose long golden hair falls on each side of a sublimely lovely face.
Nothing in painting surpa.s.ses the modelling of the vigorous but delicate left arm stretched forward to support the heavy corpse. This figure is conceived and executed in a style worthy of the Orvietan frescoes.
Signorelli, for whose imagination angels had a special charm, has shown here that his too frequent contempt for grace was not the result of insensibility to beauty.
Strength is the parent of sweetness in this wonderful winged youth. But not a single sacrifice is made in the whole picture to mere elegance.--Cortona is a place which, independently of Signorelli, well deserves a visit. Like all Etruscan towns, it is perched on the top of a high hill, whence it commands a wonderful stretch of landscape--Monte Amiata and Montepulciano to the south, Chiusi with its lake, the lake of Thrasymene, and the whole broad Tuscan plain. The city itself is built on a projecting b.u.t.tress of the mountain, to which it clings so closely that, in climbing to the terrace of S. Margarita, you lose sight of all but a few towers and house-roofs.
One can almost fancy that Signorelli gained his broad and austere style from the habitual contemplation of a view so severe in outline, and so vacant in its width. This landscape has none of the variety which distinguishes the prospect from Perugia, none of the suavity of Siena. It is truly sympathetic in its bare simplicity to the style of the great painter of Cortona. Try to see it on a winter morning, when the mists are lying white and low and thin upon the plain, when distant hills rise islanded into the air, and the outlines of lakes are just discernible through fleecy haze.--Next to Cortona in importance is the Convent of Monte Oliveto in the neighbourhood of Siena, where Signorelli painted eight frescoes from the story of S. Benedict, distinguished by his customary vigour of conception, masculine force of design, and martial splendour in athletic disdainful young men. One scene in this series, representing the interior of a country inn, is specially interesting for a realism not usual in the work of Signorelli. The frescoes painted for Petruccio at Siena, one of which is now in the National Gallery, the fresco in the Sistine Chapel, which has suffered sadly from retouching, and the magnificent cla.s.sical picture called the "School of Pan," executed for Lorenzo de"
Medici, and now at Berlin, must not be forgotten, nor yet the church-pictures scattered over Loreto, Arcevia, Citta di Castello, Borgo San Sepolcro, Volterra, and other cities of the Tuscan-Umbrian district. Arezzo, it may be added in conclusion, has two altar-pieces of Signorelli"s in its Pinacoteca, neither of which adds much to our conception of this painter"s style. Noticeable as they may be among the works of that period, they prove that his genius was hampered by the narrow and traditional treatment imposed on him in pictures of this kind.
Students may be referred to Robert Vischer"s _Luca Signorelli_ (Leipzig, 1879) for a complete list of the master"s works and an exhaustive biography. I have tried to estimate his place in the history of Italian art in my volume on the "Fine Arts," _Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. I may also mention two able articles by Professor Colvin published a few years since in the _Cornhill Magazine_.
Such reflections, and many more, pa.s.s through our mind as we sit and ponder in the chapel, which the daylight has deserted. The country people are still on their knees, still careless of the frescoed forms around them, still praying to Madonna of the Miracles. The service is well-nigh done. The benediction has been given, the organist strikes up his air of Verdi, and the congregation shuffles off, leaving the dimly lighted chapel for the vast sonorous dusky nave. How strange it is to hear that faint strain of a feeble opera sounding where, a short while since, the trumpet-blast of Signorelli"s angels seemed to thrill our ears!
_LUCRETIUS_
In seeking to distinguish the Roman from the Greek genius we can find no surer guide than Virgil"s famous lines in the Sixth aeneid.
Virgil lived to combine the traditions of both races in a work of profoundly meditated art, and to their points of divergence he was sensitive as none but a poet bent upon resolving them could be. The real greatness of the Romans consisted in their capacity for government, law, practical administration. What they willed, they carried into effect with an iron indifference to everything but the object in view. What they acquired, they held with the firm grasp of force, and by the might of organised authority. Their architecture, in so far as it was original, subserved purposes of public utility.
Philosophy with them ceased to be speculative, and applied itself to the ethics of conduct. Their religious conceptions--in so far as these were not adopted together with general culture from the Greeks, or together with sensual mysticism from the East--were practical abstractions. The Latin ideal was to give form to the state by legislation, and to mould the citizen by moral discipline.
The Greek ideal was contained in the poetry of Homer, the sculpture of Pheidias, the heroism of Harmodius, the philosophy of Socrates.
h.e.l.las was held together by no system, but by the Delphic oracle and the Olympian games. The Greeks depended upon culture, as the Romans upon law. The national character determined by culture, and that determined by discipline, eventually broke down: but the ruin in either case was different. The Greek became servile, indolent, and slippery; the Roman became arrogant, bloodthirsty, tyrannous, and brutal. The Greeks in their best days attained to [Greek: sophrosyne], their regulative virtue, by a kind of instinct; and even in their worst debas.e.m.e.nt they never exhibited the extravagance of l.u.s.t and cruelty and pompous prodigality displayed by Rome. The Romans, deficient in the aesthetic instinct, whether applied to morals or to art, were temperate upon compulsion; and when the strain of law relaxed, they gave themselves unchecked to profligacy.
The bad taste of the Romans made them aspire to the huge and monstrous. Nero"s whim to cut through the isthmus, Caligula"s villa built upon the sea at Baiae, the acres covered by imperial palaces in Rome, are as Latin as the small scale of the Parthenon is Greek.
Athens annihilates our notions of mere magnitude by the predominance of harmony and beauty, to which size is irrelevant. Rome dilates them to the full: it is the colossal greatness, the mechanical pride, of her monuments that win our admiration. By comparing the Dionysian theatre at Athens, during a representation of the "Antigone," with the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome, while the gladiators sang their _Ave Caesar!_ we gain at once a measure for the differences between Greek and Latin taste. In spiritual matters, again, Rome, as distinguished from h.e.l.las, was omnivorous. The cosmopolitan receptivity of Roman sympathies, absorbing Egypt and the Orient wholesale, is as characteristic as the exclusiveness of the Greeks, their sensitive anxiety about the [Greek: ethos]. We feel that it was in a Roman rather than a Greek atmosphere, where no middle term of art existed like a neutral ground between the moral law and sin, where no delicate intellectual sensibilities interfered with the a.s.similation of new creeds, that Christianity was destined to strike root and flourish.
These remarks, familiar to students, form a proper prelude to the criticism of Lucretius: for in Lucretius the Roman character found its most perfect literary incarnation. He is at all points a true Roman, gifted with the strength, the conquering temper, the uncompromising haughtiness, and the large scale of his race.
Holding, as it were, the thought of Greece in fee, he administers the Epicurean philosophy as though it were a province, marshalling his arguments like legionaries, and spanning the chasms of speculative insecurity with the masonry of hypotheses. As the arches of the Pont du Gard, suspended in their power amid that solitude, produce an overmastering feeling of awe; so the huge fabric of the Lucretian system, hung across the void of Nihilism, inspires a sense of terror, not so much on its own account as for the Roman sternness of the mind that made it. "Le retentiss.e.m.e.nt de mes pas dans ces immenses voutes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux qui les avait baties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cette immensite." This is what Rousseau wrote about the aqueduct of Nismes. This is what we feel in pacing the corridors of the Lucretian poem. Sometimes it seems like walking through resounding caves of night and death, where unseen cataracts keep plunging down uncertain depths, and winds "thwarted and forlorn" swell from an unknown distance, and rush by, and wail themselves to silence in the unexplored beyond. At another time the impression left upon the memory is different. We have been following a Roman road from the gate of the Eternal City, through field and vineyard, by lake and river-bed, across the broad intolerable plain and the barren tops of Alps, down into forests where wild beasts and barbarian tribes wander, along the marge of Rhine or Elbe, and over frozen fens, in one perpetual straight line, until the sea is reached and the road ends because it can go no further. All the while, the iron wheel-rims of our chariot have jarred upon imperishable paved work; there has been no stop nor stay; the visions of things beautiful and strange and tedious have flown past; at the climax we look forth across a waste of waves and tumbling wilderness of surf and foam, where the storm sweeps and hurrying mists drive eastward close above our heads. The want of any respite, breathing-s.p.a.ce, or intermission in the poem, helps to force this image of a Roman journey on our mind. From the first line to the last there is no turning-point, no pause of thought, scarcely a comma, and the whole breaks off:--
rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur:
as though a scythe-sweep from the arm of Death had cut the thread of singing short.
Is, then, this poem truly song? Indeed it is. The brazen voice of Rome becomes tunable; a majestic rhythm sustains the progress of the singer, who, like Milton"s Satan,
O"er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
It is only because, being so much a Roman, he insists on moving ever onward with unwavering march, that Lucretius is often wearisome and rough. He is too disdainful to care to mould the whole stuff of his poem to one quality. He is too truth-loving to condescend to rhetoric. The scoriae, the grit, the dross, the quartz, the gold, the jewels of his thought are hurried onward in one mighty lava-flood, that has the force to bear them all with equal ease--not altogether unlike that hurling torrent of the world painted by Tintoretto in his picture of the Last Day, which carries on its breast cities and forests and men with all their works, to plunge them in a bottomless abyss.
Poems of the perfect h.e.l.lenic type may be compared to bronze statues, in the material of which many divers metals have been fused. Silver and tin and copper and lead and gold are there: each substance adds a quality to the ma.s.s; yet the whole is bronze. The furnace of the poet"s will has so melted and mingled all these ores, that they have run together and filled the mould of his imagination.
It is thus that Virgil chose to work. He made it his glory to realise artistic harmony, and to preserve a Greek balance in his style. Not so Lucretius. In him the Roman spirit, disdainful, uncompromising, and forceful, had full sway. We can fancy him accosting the Greek masters of the lyre upon Parna.s.sus, deferring to none, conceding nought, and meeting their arguments with proud indifference:--
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento.
The Roman poet, swaying the people of his thoughts, will stoop to no persuasion, adopt no middle course. It is not his business to please, but to command; he will not wait upon the [Greek: kairos], or court opportunity; Greeks may surprise the Muses in relenting moods, and seek out "mollia tempora fandi;" all times and seasons must serve him; the terrible, the discordant, the sublime, and the magnificent shall drag his thundering car-wheels, as he lists, along the road of thought.
At the very outset of the poem we feel ourselves within the grasp of the Roman imagination. It is no Aphrodite, risen from the waves and white as the sea-foam, that he invokes:--
aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas, alma Venus.
This Venus is the mother of the brood of Rome, and at the same time an abstraction as wide as the universe. See her in the arms of Mavors:--
in gremium qui saepe tuum se reicit aeterno devictus volnere amoris, atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus, eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore.
hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto circ.u.mfusa super, suavis ex ore loquelas funde petens placidam Romanis, incluta, pacem.
In the whole Lucretian treatment of love there is nothing really Greek. We do not hear of Eros, either as the mystic mania of Plato, or as the winged boy of Meleager. Love in Lucretius is something deeper, larger, and more elemental than the Greeks conceived; a fierce and overmastering force, a natural impulse which men share in common with the world of things.[1] Both the pleasures and the pains of love are conceived on a gigantic scale, and described with an irony that has the growl of a roused lion mingled with its laughter:--
ulcus enim vivescit et inveterascit alendo inque dies gliscit furor atque aerumna gravescit.
The acts of love and the insanities of pa.s.sion are viewed from no standpoint of sentiment or soft emotion, but always in relation to philosophical ideas, or as the manifestation of something terrible in human life. Yet they lose nothing thereby in the voluptuous impression left upon the fancy:--
sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis, nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris possunt errantes incerti corpore toto.
denique c.u.m membris conlatis flore fruuntur aetatis, iam c.u.m praesagit gaudia corpus atque in eost Venus ut muliebria conserat arva, adfigunt avide corpus iunguntque salivas oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora, nequiquam, quoniam nil inde abradere possunt nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto.
The master-word in this pa.s.sage is _nequiquam_. "To desire the impossible," says the Greek proverb, "is a disease of the soul."
Lucretius, who treats of physical desire as a torment, a.s.serts the impossibility of its perfect satisfaction. There is something almost tragic in these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, and incomplete fruitions of souls pent up within their frames of flesh.
We seem to see a race of men and women such as have never lived, except perhaps in Rome or in the thought of Michel Angelo,[2]
meeting in leonine embracements that yield pain, whereof the climax is, at best, relief from rage and respite for a moment from consuming fire. There is a life daemonic rather than human in those mighty limbs; and the pa.s.sion that bends them on the marriage bed has in it the stress of storms, the rampings and the roarings of leopards at play. Or, take again this single line:--
et Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum.
What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The _vice egrillard_ of Voltaire, the coa.r.s.e animalism of Rabelais, even the large comic s.e.xuality of Aristophanes, are in another region: for the forest is the world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed, and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in spring. Only a Roman poet could have conceived of pa.s.sion so mightily and so impersonally, expanding its sensuality to suit the scale of t.i.tanic existences, and purging from it both sentiment and spirituality as well as all that makes it mean.
[1] A fragment preserved from the _Danaides_ of aeschylus has the thought of Aphrodite as the mistress of love in earth and sky and sea and cloud; and this idea finds a philosophical expression in Empedocles. But the tone of these Greek poets is as different from that of Lucretius as a Greek Hera is from a Roman Juno.
[2] See, for instance, his meeting of Ixion with the phantom of Juno, or his design for Leda and the Swan.
In like manner, the Lucretian conception of Ennui is wholly Roman:--
Si possent homines, proinde ac sentire videntur pondus inesse animo quod se gravitate fatiget, e quibus id fiat causis quoque noscere et unde tanta mali tamquam moles in pectore constet, haut ita vitam agerent, ut nunc plerumque videmus quid sibi quisque velit nescire et quaerere semper commutare loc.u.m quasi onus deponere possit.
exit saepe foras magnis ex aedibus ille, esse domi quem pertaesumst, subitoque revert.i.t, quippe foris nilo melius qui sentiat esse.
currit agens mannos ad villam praecipitanter, auxilium tectis quasi ferre ardentibus instans; oscitat extemplo, tetigit c.u.m limina villae, aut abit in somnum gravis atque oblivia quaerit, aut etiam properans urbem pet.i.t atque revisit, hoc se quisque modo fugit (at quem scilicet, ut fit, effugere haut potis est, ingratis haeret) et odit propterea, morbi quia causam non tenet aeger; quam bene si videat, iam rebus quisque relictis naturam primum studeat cognoscere rerum, temporis aeterni quoniam, non unius horae, ambigitur status, in quo sit mortalibus omnis aetas, post mortem quae restat c.u.mque manenda.
Virgil would not have written these lines. A Greek poet could not have conceived them: unless we imagine to ourselves what aeschylus or Pindar, oppressed by long illness, and forgetful of the G.o.ds, might possibly have felt. In its sense of spiritual vacancy, when the world and all its uses have become flat, stale, unprofitable, and the sentient soul oscillates like a pendulum between weariful extremes, seeking repose in restless movement, and hurling the ruins of a life into the gulf of its exhausted cravings, we perceive already the symptoms of that unnamed malady which was the plague of imperial Rome. The tyrants and the suicides of the Empire expand before our eyes a pageant of their la.s.situde, relieved in vain by festivals of blood and orgies of unutterable l.u.s.t. It is not that _ennui_ was a specially Roman disease. Under certain conditions it is sure to afflict all overtaxed civilisation; and for the modern world no one has expressed its nature better than the slight and feminine De Musset.[1] Indeed, the Latin language has no one phrase denoting Ennui;--_livor_ and _fastidium_, and even _taedium vitae_, meaning something more specific and less all-pervasive as a moral agency. This in itself is significant, since it shows the unconsciousness of the race at large, and renders the intuition of Lucretius all the more remarkable. But in Rome there were the conditions favourable to its development--imperfect culture, vehement pa.s.sions unabsorbed by commerce or by political life, the habituation to extravagant excitement in war and in the circus, and the fermentation of an age foredestined to give birth to new religious creeds. When the infinite but ill-a.s.sured power of the Empire was conferred on semi-madmen, Ennui in Rome a.s.sumed colossal proportions. Its victims sought for palliatives in cruelty and crime elsewhere unknown, except perhaps in Oriental courts. Lucretius, in the last days of the Republic, had discovered its deep significance for human nature. To all the pictures of Tacitus it forms a solemn tragic background, enhancing, as it were, by spiritual gloom the carnival of pa.s.sions which gleam so brilliantly upon his canvas. In the person of Caligula, Ennui sat supreme upon the throne of the terraqueous globe. The insane desires and the fantastic deeds of the autocrat who wished one head for humanity that he might cut it off, sufficiently reveal the extent to which his spirit had been gangrened by this ulcer. There is a simple paragraph in Suetonius which lifts the veil from his imperial unrest more ruthlessly than any legend:--"Incitabatur insomniis maxime; neque enim plus tribus horis nocturnis quiescebat, ac ne his quidem placida quiete, at pavida, miris rerum imaginibus ... ideoque magna parte noctis, vigiliae cubandique taedio, nunc toro residens, nunc per longissimas porticus vagus, invocare identidem atque expectare lucem consueverat." This is the very picture of Ennui that has become mortal disease. Nor was Nero different. "Neron," says Victor Hugo, "cherche tout simplement une distraction. Poete, comedien, chanteur, cocher, epuisant la ferocite pour trouver la volupte, essayant le changement de s.e.xe, epoux de l"eunuque Sporus et epouse de l"esclave Pythagore, et se promenant dans les rues de Rome entre sa femme et son mari; ayant deux plaisirs: voir le peuple se jeter sur les pieces d"or, les diamants et les perles, et voir les lions se jeter sur le peuple; incendiaire par curiosite et parricide par desoeuvrement." Nor need we stop at Nero. Over Vitellius at his banquets, over Hadrian in his Tiburtine villa calling in vain on Death, over Commodus in the arena, and Heliogabalus among the rose-leaves, the same livid shadow of imperial Ennui hangs. We can even see it looming behind the n.o.ble form of Marcus Aurelius, who, amid the ruins of empire and the revolutions of belief, penned in his tent among the Quadi those maxims of endurance which were powerless to regenerate the world.
[1] See the prelude to _Les Confessions d"un Enfant du Siecle_ and _Les Nuits_.
Roman again, in the true sense of the word, is the Lucretian philosophy of Conscience. Christianity has claimed the celebrated imprecation of Persius upon tyrants for her own, as though to her alone belonged the secret of the soul-tormenting sense of guilt. Yet it is certain that we owe to the Romans that conception of sin bearing its own fruit of torment which the Latin Fathers--Augustine and Tertullian--imposed with such terrific force upon the mediaeval consciousness. There is no need to conclude that Persius was a Christian because he wrote--
Magne pater divum, saevos punire tyrannos, etc.,
when we know that he had before his eyes that pa.s.sage in the third book of the "De Rerum Natura," (978-1023) which reduces the myths of t.i.tyos and Sisyphus and Cerberus and the Furies to facts of the human soul:--