--but time and again in Chaucer"s lines we find that if we allow the words their natural English stresses, we break up the music altogether; whereas if we read them like French, without syllabic accent, they make a very reasonable music indeed. Now French had been in England the language of court and culture; it was still spoken in polite circles at Stratforde-at-le-Bowe; and Chaucer was a courtier, Anglo-French, not Anglo-Saxon; and he had gone to France for his first models, and had translated a great French poem; and Anglo-Saxon verse-methods were hardly usable any longer. So it may well have appeared to him that serious poetry was naturally French in meter and method. There was no model for what he wanted to do in English; the English five-iambic line had not been invented, and only the popular lyricists, of the proletariat, sang in stresses. And anyhow, as the upper cla.s.ses, to which he belonged more or less, were only growing out of French into English, very likely they p.r.o.nounced their English with a good deal of French accent.
Now it seems to me that something of the same kind, with a difference, is what happened with Ennius. You are to understand him as, though Greek by birth, _Romanior ipsis Romanis:_ Greek body, but ultra-Roman ego. One may see the like thing happen with one"s own eyes at any time: men European-born, who are quite the extremest Americans. In his case, the spark of his Greek heredity set alight the Roman conflagration of his nature.
He was born in Calabria, a Roman subject, in 239; and had fought for Rome before Cato, then quaestor, brought him in his train from Sardinia in 204.
A glance at the cycles, and a measuring-up of things with our thirteen-decade yardstick, will suggest the importance of the time he lived in. The _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ gives A.D. 42 as the date for the end of the golden Age of Latin Literature.
Its first great names are those of Cicero, Caesar, and Lucretius.
Thirteen decades before 42 A.D., or in 88 B.C., these three were respectively eighteen, fourteen, and eight years old; so we may fairly call that Golden Age thirteen decades long, and beginning in 88. Thirteen decades back from that bring us to 218; and as much more from that, to 348. You will remember 348 as the year of the death of Plato, which we took as marking the end of the Golden Age of Greek. In 218 Ennius was twenty-one. He was the Father of Latin Poetry; as Cato the Censor, seven years his junior, was the Father of Latin Prose. So you see, he came right upon a Greek cycle; right upon the dawn of what should have been a new Greek day, with the night of h.e.l.lenisticism in between.
And he took, how shall I put it?--the forces of that new day, and trans.m.u.ted them, in himself as crucible, from Greek to Roman... A sort of Channel through which the impulse was deflected from Greek to Latin...
I think that, thtilled with a patriotism the keener-edged because it was acquired, he went to work in this way:--He was going to make one of these long poems, like those (inferior) Greek fellows had; and he was going to make it in Latin. (I do not know which was his native language, or which tradition he grew up in.) He didn"t see why we Romans should not have our ancient greatness sung in epic; weren"t we as good as Homer"s people, anyhow?
Certainly we were; and a deal better! Well, of course there was our old Saturnian meter; but that wasn"t the kind of way serious poetry was written. Serious poetry was written in hexameters. If Greek was his native tongue, he may have spoken Latin all his life, of course, with a Greek accent; and the fact that he was sitting down to make up his "poem" in a meter which no native-born Latin speaker could hear as a meter at all, may have been something of which he was profoundly unconscious. But that is what he did. He ignored (mostly) the stresses and accents natural to Latin, and with sweet naivete made a composition that would have scanned if it had been Greek, and that you could make scan by reading with a Greek rhythm or accent. The Romans accepted it. That perhaps is to say, that he had no conception at all of poetry as words framed upon an inner music. I think he was capable of it; that most Romans of the time, supposing they had had the conviction of poethood, would have been capable of it. It was the kind of people they were.
But that was not all there was to Ennius, by any means. A poet-soul had incarnated there; he had the root of the matter in him; it was only the racial vehicle that was funny, as you may say. He was filled with a high conception of the stern grandeur Romans admired; and somehow or other, his lines carry the impress of that grandeur at times: there is inspiration in them.
And now comes the point I have fetched all this compa.s.s to arrive at. By Spenser"s time, or earlier, in England, all traces of Chaucer"s French accent had gone; the language and the poetry had developed on lines of their own, as true expressions of the national soul. But in Rome, not so. Two centuries later great Roman poetry was being written: a major poet was on the scenes, --Virgil. He, I am certain, wrote with genuine music and inspiration. We have accounts of his reading of his own poems; how he was carried along by the music, chanting the lines in a grand voice that thrilled all who heard. He chanted, not spoke, them; poets always do. They formed themselves, grew in his mind, to a natural music already heard there, and existent before the words arose and took shape to it. That music is the creative force at work, the whirr of the loom of the Eternal; it is the golden-snooded Muses at song. And therefore he was not, like Ennius, making up his lines on an artificial foreign plan; to my mind that is unthinkable;--he was writing in the Latin spoken by the cultured; in Latin as all cultured Romans spoke it. But, _mirabile dictu,_ it was Latin as Ennius had composed it: he was writing in Ennius" meter. I can only understand that Greek had so swamped the Latin soul, that for a century or more cultured Latin had been spoken in quant.i.ty, not in accent; in the Greek manner, and with the Greek rhythm. Ennius had come to be appreciable as meter and music to Roman ears; which he certainly could not have been in his own day.
So we may say that there is in a sense no Roman literature at all. Nothing grew out of the old Saturnian ballad-meter,--except perhaps Catullus, who certainly had no high inspiring impersonal song to sing. The Roman soul never grew up, never learned to express itself in its own way; before it had had time to do so, the Greek impulse that should have quickened it, swamped it. You may think of j.a.pan, swamped by Chinese culture in the sixth century A.D., as a parallel case; but no; there Buddhism, under real spiritual Teachers, came in at the same time, and fostered all that was n.o.blest in the j.a.panese soul, so that the result was fair and splendid. A more cognate case is that of the Turks, who suffered through suddenly conquering Persia while they were still barbarous, and taking on, outwardly, Persian culture wholesale; Turkish and Latin literature are perhaps on a par for originality.
But if the Greek impulse had touched and wakened Rome under the aegis of Pythagoreanism,--Rome might have become, possibly, as fine a thing as j.a.pan. True, the Crest-Wave had to roll in to Rome presently, and to raise up a great literature there. But whose is the greatest name in it? A Gaul"s, who imitated Greek models. There is something artificial in the combination; and you guess that whatever most splendid effort may be here, the result cannot be supreme. The greatest name in Latin prose, too,--Livy"s--was that of a Gaul.
And herefrom we may gather what mingling of forces is needed to produce the great ages and results in literature. You have a country; a tract of earth with the Earth-breath playing up through the soil of it; you have the components or elements of a race mixed together on that soil, and molded by that play of the Earth-breath into h.o.m.ogeneity, and among them, from smallest beginnings in folk-verse, the body of a literature must grow up.
Then in due season it must be quickened: on the outer plane by an impulse from abroad,--intercourse with allies, or resistance to an invader; and on the inner, by an inrush of Crest-Wave egos. There must be that foreign torch applied,--that spark of inter-nationalism; and there must be the entry of the vanguard of the Host of Souls with its great captains and marshals, bringing with them, to exhibit once more in this world, the loot of many lands and ages and old incarnations; which thing they shall do through a sudden efflorescence of the literature that has grown up slowly to the point of being ready for them. Such natural growth happened in Greece, in China; in our own cycle, in France, Italy, England: where the trees of the nation literatures received buddings and manurings from abroad, but produced always their own natural national fruit:--Shakespeare was your true English apple, grown from the Chaucer stock; although in him flower for juices the sweetness and elixir of all the world and the ancient ages. But in Rome, before the stock was more than a tiny seedling, a great branch of Greece was grafted on it,--and a degenerate Greece at that--and now we do not know even what kind of fruit-tree that Roman stock should have grown to be.
How, then, did this submersion and obliteration of the Roman soul come to pa.s.s? It is not difficult to guess. Greek meant culture: if you wanted culture you learnt Greek. All education was in Greek hands. The Greek master spoke Latin to his boys; no doubt with a Greek accent. So cultured speech, cultured Latin, came to mean Latin without its syllabic stresses; spoken, as nearly as might be, with Greek evenness and quant.i.ty.--As if French should so submerge us, that we spoke our United States dapping out syllable by syllable like Frenchmen. But it is a fearful thing for a nation to forgo the rhythm evolved under the stress of its own Soul,--especially when what it takes on instead is the degenerate leavings of another: Alexandria, not Athens.
This Rome did. She gained the world, and lost her own soul; and the exchange profited her as little as you might expect.
Imitation of culture is often the last touch that makes the parvenu unbearable; it was so in Rome. One likes better in some ways Cato"s stult old Roman att.i.tude: who scorned Greek all his life for sheer foppery, while he knew of nothing better written in it than such trash as poetry and philosophy; but at eighty came on a Greek treatise on manure and straightway learned the language that he might read and enjoy something profitable and thoroughly Roman in spirit.--Greek artists flocked to Rome; and doubtless the more fifth-rate they were the better a thing they made of it: but it was risky for good men to rely on Roman appreciations. Two flute-players are contending at a concert; Greek and perhaps rather good. Their music is soon drowned in catcalls: What the d.i.c.kens do we Romans want with such _footling tootlings?_ Then the presiding magistrate has an idea. He calls on them to quit that fooler and get down to business:--Give us our money"s worth, condemn you to it, ye naughty knaves: _fight!_--And fight they must, poor things, while the audience, that but now was bored to death, howls with rapture.
So Rome pa.s.sed away. Where now is the simple soul who, while his feet were on his native soil and he asked nothing better than to hoe his cabbages and turn out yearly for patriotic throat-cuttings, was reputable--nay, respect-worthy,--and above all, not a little picturesque? Alas! he is no more.--You remember Kelly,--lovable Kelly, who in his youth, trotting the swate ould bogs of Cohhacht, heard poetry in every sigh of the wind,--saw the hosts of the Danaan Sidhe riding their flamey steeds through the twilight,--listened, by the cabin peat-fire in the evenings, to tales of Finn MacCool and Cuculain and the ancient heroes and G.o.ds of Ireland?--Behold this very Kelly now!--What! is this he?--this raucous, pushing, red-haired, huge-handed, green-necktied vulgarian who has made his pile bricklaying in Chicago;--this ward-politician; this--Well, well; _Sic transit gloria mundi!_ And the Roman cad of the second century B.C. was worse than a thousand Kellys. He had learned vice from past-masters in the Levant; and added to their lessons a native brutality of his own. His feet were no longer on the Italian soil; _that_ was nothing sacred to him now. His moral went as his power grew. His old tough political straightforwardness withered at the touch of Levantine trickery; his subjects could no longer expect a square deal from him. He sent out his gilded youth to govern the provinces, which they simply fleeced and robbed shamelessly; worse than Athens of old, and by much. The old predatory instinct was there still: h.e.l.lenisticism had supplied no civilizing influence to modify that. But it was there minus whatever of manliness and decency had once gone with it.
Karma travels by subtle and manifold links from the moral cause to the physical effect. There are historians who will prove to you that the ruin of Rome came of economic causes: which were, in fact, merely some of the channels through which Karma flowed.
They were there, of course; but we need not enlarge on them too much. The secret of it all is this: a people without the Balance of the Faculties, without the saving doctrine of the Mean, with but one side of their character developed, was called by cyclic law, while still semi-barbarian, to a.s.sume huge responsibilities in the world. Their qualities were not equal to the task. The sense of the Beautiful, their feeling for Art and Poetry, had not grown up with their mateial strength. Why should it? some may ask; are not strength and moral enough?--No; they are not: because it is only the Balance which can keep you on the right path; strength without the beauty sense,--yes, even fort.i.tude, strength of will,--turns at the touch of quickening time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion, brutality; ay, it is not strength:--the saving quality of strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it: only the Balance is true strength. The empires that were founded upon uncompa.s.sion, through they swept the world in a decade, within a poor century or so were themselves swept away. Rome, because she was only strong, was weak; her virtues found no exit into life except in things military; the most material plane, the farthest from the Spirit. Her people were not called, like the Huns or Mongols, to be a destroyer race: the Law designed them for builders. But to build you must have the Balance, the proportionate development spiritual, moral, mental, and physical: it is the one foundation. Rome"s grand a.s.sets at the start were a sense of duty, a natural turn for law and order: grand a.s.sets indeed, if the rest of the nature be not neglected or atrophied.
In Rome it was, largely.
To be strong-willed and devoted to duty, and without compa.s.sion: --that means that you are in train to grow a gigantic selfhood, which Nature abhors; emptiness of compa.s.sion is the vacuum nature most abhors. You see a strong man with his ambitions: scorning vices, scorning weakness; scorning too, and lashing with his scorn, the weak and vicious; bending men to his will and purposes. Prophesy direst sorrow for that man! Nature will not be content that he shall travel his chosen path till a master of selfishness and a great scourge for mankind has been evolved in him. She will give him rope; let him multiply his wrong-doings; because, paradoxically, in wrong-doing is its own punishment and cure. His selfishness sinks by its own weight to the lowest levels; prophesy for him that in a near life he shall be the slave of his body and pa.s.sions, yet keeping the old desire to excel;--that common vice shall bring him down to the level of those he scorned, while yet he forgets not the mountain-tops he believed his place of old. Then he shall be scourged with self-contempt, the bitterest of tortures; and the quick natural punishments of indulgence shall be busy with him, snake-locked Erinyes with whips of wire. In that horrible school, struggling to rise from it, he shall suffer all that a human being can in ignominy, sorrow and shame;--and at last shall count it all well worth the while, if it has but taught him That which is no atribute, but Alaya"s self,--Compa.s.sion. So Karma has its ministrants within ourselves; and the dreadful tyrants within are to be disthroned by working and living, not for self, but for man. This is why Brotherhood is the doctrine and practice that could put a stop to the awful degeneratioin of mankind.
Rome was strong without compa.s.sion; so her strength led her on to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to hideous ruin and combustion. She loved her _gravitas,_--which implied great things;--but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of things--she lost her morale and became utterly vulgarian. But think of China, taking it as a matter of course that music was an essential part of government; or of France, with her _Ministre des Beaux Arts_ in every cabinet. Perhaps; these two, of all historical nations, have made the greatest achievements; for you must say that neither India nor Greece was a nation.--As for Rome, with all her initial grandeur, it would be hard to find another nation of her standing that made such an awful mess of it as she did; one refers, of course, to Republican Rome; when Augustus had had his way with her, it was another matter.
She took the Gadarene slope at a hand-gallop; and there you have her history during the second century B.C. Not till near the end of that century did the egos of the Crest-Wave begin to come in in any numbers. From the dawn of the last quarter, there or thereabouts, all was an ever-growing rout and riot; the hideous toppling of the herd over the cliff-edge. It was a time of wars civil and the reverse; of huge b.l.o.o.d.y conscriptions and ma.s.sacre; reforms and demagogism and murder of the Gracchi:-- Marius and Sulla cat and dog;--the original Spartican movement, that wrecked Italy and ended with six thousand crucifixions along the road to Capua;--ended so, and not with a slave conquest and wiping-out of Rome, simply because Spartacus"s revolted slave-army was even less disciplined than the legions that Beast-Cra.s.sus decimated into a kind of order and finally conquered them with. It was decade after decade of brutal devasting wars, --wars chronic and incurable, you would say: the untimely wreck and ruin of the world.
It is a strange gallery of portraits that comes down to us from this time: man after notable man arising without the qualities that could save Rome. Here are a few of the likenesses, as they are given Dr. Stobart: there were the Gracchi, with so much that was fine in them, but a ruining dash of the demagog,--an idea that socialism could accomplish anything real;--and no wisdom to see through to ultimite causes. There was Marius, simple peasant with huge military genius: a wolf of a soldier and foolish lamb of a politician; a law-maker who, captured by the insinuations and flatteries of the opposite side, swears to obey his own laws "so far as they may be legal." There was Sulla, of the cla.s.s of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belonged, but an inferior specimen of the cla.s.s and unscrupulous rip, and a brave successful commander; personally beautiful, till his way of living made his face "like a mulberry sprinkled with flour";-- with many elements of greatness always negatived by sudden fatuities; much of genius, more of fool, and most of rake-h.e.l.ly demirep; highly cultured, and plunderer of Athens and Delphi; great general, who maintained his hold on his troops by unlimited tolerance of undiscipline. There was Cra.s.sus the millionaire, and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many n.o.ble and Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator with more than a _soupcon_ of the vaudeville favorite in him: a Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he came to die.
And there was Pompey;--real honesty in Pompey, perhaps the one true-hearted gentleman of the age: a man of morale, and a great soldier,--who might have done something if his general intelligence had been as great as his military genius and his sense of honor:--surely Pompey was the best of the lot of them; only the cursed spite was that the world was out of joint, and it needed something more than a fine soldier and gentleman to set it right.--And then Caesar--could he not do it? Caesar, the Superman,--the brilliant all-round genius at last,--the man of scandalous life--scandalous even in that cesspool Rome,--the epileptic who dreamed of world-dominion,--the conqueror of Gaul, says H.P. Blavatsky, because in Gaul alone the Sacred Mysteries survived in their integrity, and it was his business, on behalf of the dark forces against mankind, to quench their life and light for ever;--could not this Caesar do it? No; he had the genius; but not that little quality which all greatest personalities,--all who have not pa.s.sed beyond the limits of personality: tact, impersonality, the power that the disciple shall covet, to make himself as nothing in the eyes of men:-- and because he lacked that for armor, there were knives sharpened which should reach his heart before long.--And then, in literature, two figures mentionable: Lucretius, thinker and philosopher in poetry: a high Roman type, and a kind of materialist, and a kind of G.o.d"s warrior, and a suicide. And Catullus: no n.o.ble type; neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian perhaps; singing in the old Saturnian meters with a real lyrical fervor, but with nothing better to sing than his loves.--And then, in politics again, Brutus: type, in sentimental history of the Republican School, of the high old roman and republican virtues; Brutus of the "blood-bright splendor," the tyrant-slayer and Roman Harmodios-Aristogeiton; the adored of philosophic French liberty-equality-fraternity adorers; Shakespeare"s "n.o.blest Roman of them all";--O how featly Ca.s.sius might have answered, when Brutus accused him of the "itching palm,"
if he had only been keeping _au fait_ with the newspapers through the preceding years! _"Et tu, Brute,"_ I hear him say, quoting words that should have reminded his dear friend of the sacrd ties of friendship,--
"Art thou the man will rate thy Ca.s.sius thus?
This is the most unkindest cut of all; For truly I have filched a coin or two:-- Have been, say, _thrifty;_ gathered here and there _Pickings,_ we"ll call them; but, my Brutus, thou-- Didst thou not shut the senators of Rhodes (I think "twas Rhodes) up in their senate-house, And keep them there unfoddered day by day.
Until starvation forced them to disgorge All of their million to thee? Didst not thou--"
Brutus is much too philosophical, much to studious, to listen to qualities of that kind, and cuts the conversation short right there. Ca.s.sius was right: that about starving the senators of his province that surrendered their wealth was precisely what our Brutus did.--Then there was Anthony, the rough brave soldier,--a kind of man of the unfittest when the giants Pompey and Caesar had been in; Anthony, master of Rome for awhile,--and truly, G.o.d knows Rome will do with bluff Mark Anthony for her master!--It is a very interesting list; most of them queer lobsided creatures, fighting with own hands or for nothing in particular; most with some virtues: Then that might have saved Rome, if, as Mrs Poyser said, "they are hatched again, and hatched different."
XVIII. AUGUSTUS
We left Rome galloping down the Gadarene slope, and scrimmaging for a vantage point whence to hurl herself headlong. Down she came; a riot and roaring ruin: doing those things she ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things she ought to have done, and with no semblance of health in her. There was nothing for it but the downfall of the world; good-bye civilization and all that was ever upbuilded of old. Come now; we should become good Congo forester in our time, with what they call "long pig"
for our daintiest diet. It is a euphemism for your brother man.
But supposing this mist-filled Gadarene gulf were really bridgable: supposing there were another side beyond the roar of hungry waters and the horror; and that mankind,--European mankind,--might pa.s.s over, and be saved, were there but staying the rout for a moment, and affording a means to cross?
There is a bardic proverb in the Welsh: _A fo Ben, bydded Bont:_--"He who is Chief, let him be the bridge": Bran the Blessed said it, when he threw down his giant body over the gulf, so that the men of the Island of the Mighty might pa.s.s over into Ireland. And the end of an old cycle, and the beginning of a new, when there is--as in our Rome at that time--a sort of psychic and cyclic impa.s.se, a break-down and terrible chasm in history, if civilization is to pa.s.s over from the old conditions to the new, a man must be found who can be the bridge. He must solve the problems within himself; he must care so little for, and have such control of, his personality, that he can lay it down, so to speak, and let humanity cross over upon it. History may get no news of him at all; although he is then the Chief of Men, and the greatest living;--or it may get news, only to belittle him. His own and the after ages may think very little of him; he may possess no single quality to dazzle the imagination:--he may seem cold and uninteresting, a crafty tyrant;--or an uncouth old ex-rail-splitter to have in the White House;--or an illiterate peasant-girl to lead your armies; yet because he is the bridge, he is the Chief; and you may suspect someone out of the Pantheons incarnate in him.
For the truth of all which, humanity has a sure instinct. When there is a crisis we say, _Look for the Man._ Rome thought (for the most part) that she had found him when Caesar, having conquered Pompey, came home master of the world. If this phoenix and phenomenon in time, now with no compet.i.tor above the horizons, could not settle affairs, only Omnipotence could.
Every thinking (or sane) Roman knew that what Rome needed was a head; and now at last she had got one. Pompey, the only possible alternative, was dead; Caesar was lord of all things.
Pharsalus, the deciding battle, was fought in 48; he returned home in 46. From the year between, in which he put the finishing touches to his supremacy, you may count the full manvantara of Imperial Rome: fifteen centuries until 1453 and the fall of the Eastern Empire.
All opinion since has been divided as to the character of Caesar.
To those whose religion is democracy, he is the grand Destroyer of Freedom; to the worshipers of the Superman, he is the chief avatar of their G.o.d. Mr. Stobart,* who deals with him sanely, but leaning to the favorable view, says he was "not a bad man, for he preferred justice and mercy to tyranny and cruelty, and had a pa.s.sion for logic and order"; and adds, "he was a man without beliefs or illusions or scruples." He began by being a fop and ultra-extravagant; and was always, if we may believe accounts, a libertine of the first water. He was, of course, an epileptic. In short, there is nothing in history to give an absolutely sure clue to his real self. But there is that pa.s.sage in Madame Blavatsky, which I have quoted before, to the effect that he was an agent of the dark forces, and conquered Gaul for them, to abolish the last effective Mysteries; and I think in the light of that, his character, and a great deal of history besides, becomes intelligible enough.--I will be remembered that he stood at the head of the Roman religion, as Potifex Maximus.
------ * On whose book, _The Grandeur that was Rome,_ this paper also largely leans.
But it was not the evil that he did that (obviously) brought about his downfall. Caesar was fortified against Karma by the immensity of his genius. Whom should he fear, who had conquered Pompeius Magnus? None in the roman world could reach so high as to his elbow;--for sheer largeness of mind, quickness and daring, he stoood absolutely the Superman among pygmies. He knew his aim, and could make or wait for it; and it was big and real.
Other men crowed or fumbled after petty and pinch-beck ends; impossible rhetorical republicanisms; vain senatorial prestiges; --or pleasure pure and simple--say rather, very complex and impure. Let them clack, let them fumble! Caesar would do things and get things done. He wore the whole armor of his greatness, and could see no c.h.i.n.k or joint in it through which a hostile dagger might pierce. Even his military victories were won by some greater than mere military greatness.--Karma, perhaps, remembering the Mysteries at Gaulish Bibracte, and the world left now quite lightless, might have a word to say; might even be looking round for shafts to speed. But what, against a man so golden-panoplied? "Tush!" saith Caesar, "there are no arrows now but straws."
One such straw was this: (a foolish one, but it may serve)--
Rome for centuries has been amusing herself on all public occasions with Fourth of July rhetoric against kings, and in praise of tyrannicides. Rome for centuries has been cherishing in her heart what she calls a love of Freedom,--to scourge your slaves, steal from your provincials, and waste your substance in riotous living. All of which Julius Caesar,--being a real man, mind you,--holds in profoundest contempt for driveling unreality; which it certainly is. But unrealities are awfully real at times.
Unluckily, with all his supermannism, he retained some traces of personality. He was bald, and sensitive about it; he always had been a trifle foppish. So when they gave him a nice laurel wreath for his triumph over Pompey, he continued, against all precedent, to wear it indefinitely,--as hiding certain shining surfaces from the vulgar gaze.... "H"m," said Rome, "he goes about the next thing to crowned!" And here is his statue, set up with those of the Seven Kings of antiquity; he allowing it, or not protesting.--They remembered their schoolboy exercises, their spoutings on many Latins for Glorious Fourth; and felt very badly indeed. Then it was unlucky that, being too intent on realities, he could not bother to rise when those absurd old Piccadilly pterodactyls the Senators came into his presence; that he filled up their ridiculous house promiscuously with low-born soldiers and creatures of his own. And that there was a crowd of foolish prigs and pedants in Rome to take note of these so trivial things, and to be more irked by them than by all the realities of his power:--a lean hungry Ca.s.sius; an envious brusque detractor Casca; a Brutus with a penchant for being considered a philosopher, after a rather maiden-auntish sort of conception of the part,--and for being considered a true descendant of his well-known ancestor: a cold soul much fired with the _ignis fatuus_ of Republican slave-scourging province-fleecing freedom. An unreal lot, with not the ghost of a Man between them;--what should the one Great Man of the age find in them to disturb the least ofhis dreams?
Came, however, the Ides of March in B.C. 44; and the laugh once more was with Karma,--the one great final laugher of the world.
Caesar essayed to be Chief of the Romans: he who is chief, let him be the bridge;--this one, because of a few ludicrous personal foibles, has broken down now under the hurry and thunder of the marching cycles. The fact being that your true Chief aspires only to the bridgehood; whereas this one overlooked that part of it, intent on the chieftaincy.--And now, G.o.d have mercy on us!
there is to be all the round of wars and proscriptions and ma.s.sacres over again: _Roma caput mundi_ herself piteously decapitate; and with every b.o.o.by and popinjay rising in turn to kick her about at his pleasure;--and here first comes Mark Anthony to start the game, it seems.
Well; Mark Anthony managed wisely enough at that crisis; you would almost have said, hearing him speak at Caesar"s funeral, that there was at least a ha"porth of brains hidden somewhere within that particularly thick skull of his. Half an hour changes him from a mere thing alive on sufferance--too foolish to be worth bothering to kill--into the master of Rome. And yet probably it was not brains that did it, but the force of genuine feeling: he loved dead Caesar; he was trying now to be cautious, for his own skin"s sake: was repressing himself;--but his feelings got the better of him,--and were catching,-- and set the mob on fire. Your lean and hungry ones; your envious detractors; your thin maiden-auntish prig republican philosophers:--all very wisely sheer off. Your grand resounding Cicero,--_vox et praeterea almost nihil_ (he had yet to die and show that it was _almost,_ not _quite,_) sheers off too, into the country, there to busy himself with an essay on the _Nature of the G.o.ds_ (to contain, be sure, some fine eloquence), and with making up his mind to attack Anthony on behalf of Republican Freedom.--Anthony"s next step is wise too: he appoints himself Caesar"s executor, gets hold of the estate, and proceeds to squander it right and left buying up for himself doubtful support.--All you can depend on is the quick coming-on of final ruin and dismay: of all impossibilities, the most impossible is to imagine Mark Anthony capable of averting it. As to Caesar"s heir, so nominated in the will--the persona from whom busy Anthony has virtually stolen the estate,--no one gives him a thought. Seeing who he was, it would be absurd to do so.
And then he turned up in Rome, a sickly youth of eighteen; demanded his moneys from Anthony; dunned him till he got some fragment of them;--then borrowed largely on his own securities, and proceeded to pay--what prodigal Anthony had been much too thrifty to think of doing--Ceasar"s debts. Rome was surprised.
This was Caesar"s grand-nephew, Octavius; who had been in camp at Apollonia in Illyric.u.m since he had coolly proposed to his great-uncle that the latter, being Dictator, and about to start on his Parthian campaign, should make him his Master of the Horse. He had been exempted from military service on account of ill-health; and Julius had a sense of humor; so he packed him off to Apollonia to "finish" a military training that had never begun. There he had made a close friend of a rising young officer by the name of Vipsanius Agrippa; a man of high capacities who, when the news came of Caesar"s death, urged him to lose no time, but rouse the legions in their master"s name, and march on Rome to avenge his murder.--"No," says Octavius, "I shall go there alone."
Landing in Italy, he heard of the publication of the will, in which he himself had been named heir. That meant, to a very vast fortune, and to the duty of revenge. Of the fortune, since it was now in Mark Anthony"s hands, you could predict nothing too surely but its vanishment; as to the duty, it might also imply a labor for which the Mariuses and Sullas, the Caesars and Pompeys, albeit with strong parties at their backs, had been too small men. And Octavius had no party, and he was no soldier, and he had no friends except that Vipsanius back in Apollonia.
His mother and step-father, with whom he stayed awhile on his journey, urged him to throw the whole matter up: forgo the improbably fortune and very certain peril, and not rush in where the strongest living might fear to tread. Why, there was Mark Anthony, Caesar"s lieutenant--the Hercules, mailed Bacchus, Roman Anthony--the great dashing captain whom his soldiers so adored-- even he was shilly-shallying with the situation, and not daring to say _Caesar shall be avenged._ And Anthony, you might be sure, would want no compet.i.tor--least of all in the boy named heir in Caesar"s will.--"Oh, I shall go on and take it up," said Octavius; and went. And paid Caesar"s debts, as we have seen, presently: thereby advertising his a.s.sumption of all responsibilities. Anthony began to be uneasy about him; the Senatorial Party to make advances to him; people began to suspect that, possibly, this sickly boy might grow into a man to be reckoned with.
I am not going to follow him in detail through the next thirteen years. It is a tortuous difficult story; to which we lack the true clues, unless they are to be found in the series of protrait-busts of him taken during this period. The makers of such busts were the photographers of the age; and, you may say, as good as the best photographers. Every prominent Roman availed himself of their services. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his _Tragedy of the Caesars,_ arranges, examines, and interprets these portraits of Augustus; I shall give you the gist of his conclusions, which are illuminating.--First we see a boy with delicate and exceedingly beautiful features, impa.s.sive and unawakend: Octavius when he came to Rome. A cloud gathers on his face, deepening into a look of intense anguish; and with the anguish grows firmness and the clenched expression of an iron will: this is Octavian in the dark days of the thirties.--the anguish pa.s.ses, but leaves the firmness behind: the strength remains, the beauty remains, and a light of high serenity has taken the place of the aspect of pain: this is Augustus the Emperor. The same writer contrasts this story with that revealed by the busts of Julius: wherein we see first a gay insouciant dare-devil youth, and at last a man old before his time; a face sinister (I should say) and haunted with ugly sorrow.