Now Rome was very old; and, since Augustus" day, the detritus had grown and grown. Diocletian had devoted a political sagacity amounting in some respects to genius to setting things right, and had accomplished something. He had moved out of Rome itself, where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly enc.u.mbered; had gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer; had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be kneeled to, addressed as _Dominus,_ and so forth:--all outward expedients, and Brummagem subst.i.tutes for that inner adjustment which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone, nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress, self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone; but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desire to enter it. Diocletian knew nothing of this; so, great statesman as he was, his methods were effective only while he sat on the throne; in his old age and retirement he had to watch, from his palace at Spalato, the empire he had piloted banging about in a thousand storms again; and to plead in vain to those to whom he had given their thrones for the safety and life of his own wife and daughter;--the total failure of his life and labors thus miserably brought home to him before he died.
"Where there is no vision the people perish," said that learned Hebrew of old, King Solomon; and by that one saying proclaimed his right to his t.i.tle of "the Wise." Look into it, and you have almost the whole philosophy of history. The incessant need of humanity is this thing _Vision:_ men and nations go mad for lack of it: they seek in h.e.l.l the joys of heaven which should be theirs, and which they cannot see. It means vision of the Inner Worlds, of the heaven that lies around us. Oh, nothing spooky or foolish; one is far from meaning the Astral Light. People who go burrowing into that are again seeking a subst.i.tute for Vision, and a very poisonous one.--If I may speak of a personal experience: coming to Point Loma from London was like coming from the bottom of the sea into the upper ether. There, in the heart of that old civilization, the air is thick with detritus; here--if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made the land new,--the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have glimpses of the Way. Result: the mental outlook that extended there, in visionary moments, to some six inches, before one"s nose, here has broadened out to take in some seas and mountains; in comparison, it runs to far horizons. I take it that this is the experience of us all. So this is what that wise Solomon meant: "When the detritus has acc.u.mulated to the point where, like a thick fog, it shuts away all vision of the True, then the nation must go into abeyance; it must fall."--Rome was very near that point.
One wishes one could say something about those Inner Worlds of Beauty. When the voices of self are silenced, and desires abashed and at peace,--how they shine through! This outer world, truly, reflects them; but another and ugly world of our own making.
.....is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers,-- For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
Sometimes; not always, thank G.o.d! Look again: there are the mountains, and above them the mournful glories of the anti-sunset; the mute and golden trumpetings of the dawn; --there is the sea, and over it the wistfulness and pomp and pageantry of the setting sun, and the gentleness of heaven at evening;--there is the whole drama of Day with its tremendous glories; and the huge mystery of Night-time: Niobe Night, silent in the heavens,
"Glittering magnificently unperturbed;"
--and there are the flowers in the garden, those _Praelarissimi_ and _n.o.bilisimi_ in the Court of G.o.d, the Pansy, the Blue Larkspur, the Purple Anemone;--and what are all these things?-- Just symbols; just mirrorings of a beauty in the World of Ideas within; just places where the Spirit has touched matter, and matter, at that fiery and creative touch, has flamed up into the likeness of G.o.d, which is Beauty.--What is Vision?--It is to have luminous forms rising in the imagination, like Wordsworth had, like Sh.e.l.ley; it is with shut eyes to see the beauty and wonder of the G.o.ds; it is to have no grayness or dearth or darkness within; but to have the "bliss of solitude" crowded with beautiful squadrons of deities, trembling with the light of legions on legions of suns. For:
Not all we are here Where this darkness oppresses us; Not this oblivion Of Beauty expresses us.
Gaze not on it, To be stained with its stain; The Lonely All-Beautiful Calls us again.
In galleried palaces, Turquoise blue, With the sweetness of many suns Filtering through,--
In the Suns"s own garden, Where galaxies flame For lilac and daffodil, Each on his stem,--
Where apple-bloom Capricorn Hangs from his tree, Glittering dim o"er The dim blue sea,--
And billowing dim o"er The dim blue lawns Of heaven come the nebular Sunsets and dawns,--
We too have the regallest Part of our being, Far beyond dreaming of, Hearing of, seeing.
And the Lonely All-Beautiful Calls to us here:-- "My knights, my commissioned, My children dear!
"The h.e.l.l where affrighted, Enchanted, ye roam,-- Ye set forth to make it A heaven for my home!"
--And it is Vision, not to mistake mankind for less or other than Deific Essence cruelly enc.u.mbered over with oblivion; it is to see the flame of Eternal Beauty and valiant G.o.dhood in all men; and not to rest or sit content without doing something to uncover that Beauty, to rescue that G.o.dhood.--You go into the slums of a great city; and you do not wonder that the G.o.d-essence, inmingling and involved in the clay which is (the lower) man, goes there quite distraught and unrecognizable; where life is so far from the great reflexion of the Worlds of Beauty; where the Sun is no bright brother and confidential friend, but a breeder up of pestilences; where the sky is shut away and there are no flowers to bloom;--whether we like it or no, these things, the unperverted manifestations of the formative pressure of the Spirit, are needed to keep men sane. Beauty you must have, to nourish the Divine within you; alas for him that thinks he may attain to the Good or the True, and in a thin meager or Puritan spirit, strives to shut out their divine sister from his needs and aspirations!--But there, in our hideous modern conditions, there is no vision, without or within; so men go mad with fearful l.u.s.ts and despairs; and it is the van of the Battle, in one sense, between G.o.dhood and Chaos; and reeks with the slaughter and bloodshed and the madness of that conflict; there too the Holy Spirit of Man is incarnate; there the Host of Souls;--but in the shock and din and the carnage, there on the slippery brink of yet unconquered h.e.l.l,--all the divine descent and ancient glory of the Host is forgotten:--_there is no Vision, and the people perish._
(It may seem I go a long way round to come to him; but in reality I am already trying to draw you a character-sketch of the subject of this evening"s lecture: to present you the permanent part and significance of a strange incarnation of Vision that appeared in Rome"s dark and dying days: the man to whom Saint Gregory n.a.z.ianzen, in his grand attack, applied that ringing triplet of epithets I have taken for the t.i.tle of the lecture: "The Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind." Know him first in his impersonality thus: a great white flame of Vision; a tremendous Poet of the G.o.ds in action;--and then, when you come to his personality, with what it might have retained of personality, of hereditary impairments, perhaps, that should have vanished had he lived past his young manhood, these will not hinder you from understanding the greatness and beauty and tragedy of that life apparently wasted. But we shall come to him in our time.)
Back in the sixth century B. C., when all those Great Teachers came: when the forces that until then had been pent up in the Mysteries were suddenly let loose upon the world,--and the more vehement for their having been so pent up, and their now being so let loose;--what a flood of vision they brought with them! In Greece, to rouse up almost at once that wonderful wave of artistic creation; in Persia, to create quickly a splendid and chivalrous empire; in India, (so far as we know) to pervade as an ethical illumination the life of the people for some centuries before manifesting in art or empire; in China, to work in a twofold current, on one side upon the imagination, on the other upon the moral conceptions of the race, until the Chinese manvantara began. Its effect in each case was according to the cyclic position of the country at the time: those, seemingly, being the most fortunate, that had to wait longest for the full fruition. Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had pa.s.sed; then, appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least;--India, I imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and under a minor shadow; which shadow once pa.s.sed, it produced its splendors in the Maurya time; and was in all effective for a thousand years. But it came to Persia in the autumn of the great cycle, when the forces it brought had to ripen quickly, and descend at once on to the military (the lowest) plane;--and to Greece just at noon or early summer,--just before the most intellectual moment,--and so there, too, had no time to ripen, but must burst out at once in artistic creation without ever a chance first to work in and affect the moral life of the race.
This last is what Pythagoras at Croton had in mind to do: had Croton endured, there would have been a stable moral basis for the intellectual spendors.--I believe that you have here the very archeus and central clue to history. In China, it was enough for Laotse to float his magical ideas, and for confucius to give out his extremely simple (but highly efficient) philosophy, and to provide his grand Example; in India it was enough for the Lord Buddha to teach his wisdom and to found his Order; he might trust the future to them;--For Persia, one cannot say: the facts as to Zoroaster are not enough known; there might seem to have been some failure there too;--but in Greece, it was imperative that Pythagoras should establish his Lomaland; nothing else could save the forces from squandering themselves at once, in that momentous time, on the intellectual and artistic planes, and leaving life unredeemed and unaffected.
Which indeed they did; and thence on it Europe we see century by century vision waning and the world on a downward path, until the moment comes when a new effort may be made. Augustus calls a halt then; moves heaven and earth; works like ten Herculeses, along all lines, to bring about an equilibrium in outer affairs; and so far succeeds that in his time one or two men may have the Vision, at any rate:--Virgil may catch more than glimpses of the Inner Beauty, and leave the outer world a litle less forlorn.
But in place of the rush and fine flow of the Grecian Age, what painful strivings we find in the Augustan!--When too, Teachers labor to illumine the vastnesses within; Apollonius; Moderatus; shall we add, the Nazarene?--So the downward tendency is checked; in the following centuries we see a slow pushing upward,--in the heroic effort of the Stoics, not after Vision--that was beyond their scope and ken,--but after at least that which should bring it back,--a n.o.ble method of life.
And then, at last, a dawn eastward: and the bugles of the Spirits of the Dawn heard above the Pyramids, heard over the shadowy plains where Babylon was of old;--and out of that yellow glow in the sky come, now that the cycle permits them, masters of the Splendid vision. They come with something of light from the ancient Mysteries of Egypt; with some shining from Star Plato, and from Pythagoras; and at their coming light up the dark worlds and the intense blue deeps of the sky,--wherein you can see now, under their guidance, immeasurable and beautiful things to satisfy the highest cravings of your heart: winged Aeons on Aeons, ring above ring,--mystery emanating mystery, beauty, beauty, from here up to the Throne of the Lonely All-Beautiful.-- What growth there had been in Roman Europe, to prepare the way for the spread of Neo-Platonism, I cannot say; but imagine Gnosticism had something to do with it; and that Gnosticism was a graft on the parent stem of Christianity set there by some real Teacher who came later than Jesus. If we knew more of the realities about Simon Magus on the one hand, and Paul of Tarsus on the other, we might have clearer light on the whole problem; at present must be content with saying this much:--that Gnosticism, with its deep mystical truths, emerges into the light of well-founded history about neck and neck with orthodox Christianity; was considered a branch of the same movement, equally Christian; but was at least tinged with esoteric truth, and deeply h.e.l.lenized, and perhaps Persianized;--whereas the orthodox branch was the legitimate heir of exoteric Judaism. How much of real vision there may have been in Gnosticism; how much of mere speculation, which is but a step towards vision,--I am not prepared to guess; but have little doubt that Gnostic activities made ready the ground for Neo-Platonism; so that when the latter"s Manasaputric light incarnated, it found fit rupas to inhabit.
This was the Lodge"s most important effort to sow truth in Europe since Pythagoras. Says even the _Enyclopaedia Britannica_ (without help from Esotericism):
"Neo-Platonism is in one aspect ... the consummation of ancient philosophy. Never before in Greek or Roman speculation had the consciousness of man"s dignity and superiority to Nature received such adequate expression.... From the religious and moral point of view, it must be admitted that the ethical "mood" which Neo-Platonisni endeavored to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity.... It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated not in materialism but in the highest idealism."
It a.s.serted the G.o.ds, the great stars and luminaries of the Inner World; it a.s.serted the Divinity of Man,--superior, truly, as the _Encyclopaedia_ says to (the lower) Nature, but of the Higher, one part or factor in the whole. It came into Europe trailing clouds of splendor and opening the heavens of Vision. The huge menace and perils of the age, the multiplying disasters, were driving men to seek spiritual refuge of some kind; and there were, in the main, two camps that offered it:--this of Neo-Platonism, proclaiming Human Divinity and strong effort upward in the name of that; and that other which proclaimed human helplessness, and that man is a poor worm and weakling, originally sinful, and with nothing to hope from his own efforts, but all from the grace, help, or mercy of Extracosmic Intervention. It was a terribly comfortable doctrine, this last, for a race staggering towards the end of its manvantara under a fearful load of detritus, a culture old and thoroughly tired. No wonder Europe chose this path, and not the Neo-Platonist path of flaming idealism and endeavor. Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus,--they had worked wonders; but not the crowning wonder of that which could save the age and the age to come: Plotinus had failed of that, because there no tool at hand for the G.o.ds, but a silly, weak Gallienus.--So now Constantine has made the great change; and the empire that was Roman is now Roman no longer: You owe your first allegiance now, not to the state or to the emperor at its head, but to an _imperium_ within the state which claims immunity from laws and duties: the kingdom is divided within itself, and must look for the fate of divided kingdoms. Zeus on Olympus now weighs the Roman empire in his scales,--and finds the fate is death, and no help for it: there are to be thirteen decades of moribundity, and then Christian burial, with Odoacer and sundry other the like barbarians to be mourners and heirs; and then,--blackest night over the western world for G.o.d knows how long: night, with nightmare and horror, and no Vision, no beautiful dreams, no refreshment, no peace. For the party that Constantine has now made dominant despises cordially all the ancient light of h.e.l.lenism; Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides,-- everyone you could in any sense a light-bearer that came of old, to bring mankind even the merest brain-mind culture,--these people condemn and abhor for heathen, and take pleasure in the thought that they are now, and have been since they died, and shall be forever, frizzling in the nether fires: they condemn the substance of their writings, and will draw no ideas, no saving grace, from them whatever;--will learn from them nothing in the world but grammar and eloquence with which to thunder at them and all their like from barren raucous pulpits. So, Vision having gone, culture is to go too, and all you can call civilization; and therewith law and order, and the decencies of life: all that _soap_ stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha; all that the Soul stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha;--a pretty prospect! Zeus sighs in heaven, and his sigh is a doleful thunder prophetic of the gloom that is to overspread all the western skies for many centuries to come.
--And then comes Helios, the Unconquered Sun, and lays a hand on his arm, and says: "Not so fast!; Never despair yet; look down--_there!_"
And the G.o.ds look down: to a gloomy castle upon a crag in the wild mountains of Cappadocia; and they see there a youth, a captive banished to that desolate grand region: well-attended, as befits a prince of the royal blood, but lonely and overshadowed; --not under fear, because fear is no part of his nature; but yet never knowing when the order for his death may come. They read all this in his mind, his atmosphere. They see him deep in his books: a soul burning with earnestness, but discontented, and waiting for something: all the images of Homer rising about him beckoning on the one hand, and on the other a grim something that whispers, These are false; I alone am true!
--"What of him?" says Zeus; "he too is a Christian."--"Watch!"
says Sol Invictus; "I have sent my man to him."--And they watch; and sure enough, presently they see a man coming into this youth"s presence, and pointing upwards towards themselves; and they see the youth look up, and the shadow pa.s.s from his eyes as a great blaze of light and splendor breaks before him,--as he catches sight of them, the G.o.ds, and his eye meets theirs, and he rises, illumined and smiling;--and they know that in the Roman world there is this one man with the Grand Vision; this man who may yet (if they play their cards well) wear the Roman diadem;-- that there is vision in the Roman world again, and it may be the people shall not perish.
It was Julian, "the Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind"; I thank thee, Gregory of n.a.z.ianzus, for teaching me that word!--and the one that came to him there in Cappadocia was Maximus of Smyrna, Iamblichus" disciple. His story has been told and re-told; I expect you know it fairly well. How he was a son of Julius Constantius, son of Constantius Chlorus,--and thus a nephew of Constantine the Great, and a first cousin to the Octopus-Spider-Maiden Aunt Constantius then on the throne;--how he because of his infancy, and his half-brother Gallus because of a delicate const.i.tution which made it seem impossible he should grow up, were spared when Constantius had the rest of the family ma.s.sacred;--how he was banished and confined in that Cappadocian castle;--of Gallus" short and evil reign that ended, poor fool that he was, in his being lured into the spider-web of Constantius and beheaded;--how Julian was called then to the court at Milan, expecting a like fate;--how he spent seven months there, spied on at every moment, and looking for each to be his last;--how he was saved and befriended by the n.o.ble Empress Eusebia (a strangely beautiful figure to find in those sinister surroundings);--and sent presently to the University of Athens, there to spend the happiest moments of his life;--then called back to be made Caesar: he who had never been anything but a student and a dreamer, called from his books and dreams at twenty-four, and set to learn (as Caesar) his elementary drill,-- which he found very difficult to learn indeed;--and then sent to fight the Germans in Gaul. How Constantius tried always to thwart him while he was there: setting underlings over him with power to undo or prevent all he might attempt or do;--how in spite of it all he fought the Germans, and drove them across the Rhine, and followed them up, and taught them new lessons in their own remote forests; and took the gorgeous Chnodomar, their king, prisoner; and sent for him, prepared to greet friendlily one so great in stature and splendid in bearing; but was disgusted when the gentleman, on coming into his presence, groveled on the floor and whined for his life,--whereupon Julian, instead of treating him like a gentleman as he had intended, packed him off to his (Chnodomar"s) old ally the Maiden Aunt at Milan to see what they would make of each other;--how he fought three campaigns victoriously beyond the Rhine; restored the desolated Cisrhenish No-man"s land, and brought in from Britain, in six hundred corn-ships, an amount Gibbon calculates at 120,000 quarters of wheat to feed its dest.i.tute population.--And this fact is worth nothing: if Britain could export all that wheat, it surface was not, as some folks hold, mainly under forest: it was a well-cultivated country, you may depend, with agriculture in a very flourishing condition,--as Gibbon does not fail to point out.
--And you know, probably, how Julian loved his Paris, and governed Gaul thence in civil affairs in such a manner that Paris and Gaul loved him;--how his own special legions, his pets, his Tenth, so to say, were the _Celts_ and _Petulants,_ and after these, the _Herulians_ and _Batavians_ (or shall I say _Dutchmen?_);--how Constantius tried to deprive him of these, ordering him to send them off to him for wars with Sapor in the east;--how Julian sorrowfully bade them go, judging well by Gallus his brother"s experience (whom Constantius had treated in the same way as a first step towards cutting off his head) what the next thing should be;--but how they, (bless their Celtic and Petulant and Herulian and Dutch hearts!) told him very plainly that that kind of thing would not wash with them: "Come!" said they; "no nonsense of this sort; be you our emperor, and _condemn_ that old lady your cousin Constantius!--or we kill you right now." Into his bed-room in Paris they poured by night with those terms,--an ultimatum; whether or not with a twinkle in their eyes when they proposed the alternative, who can say?--What was a young hero to do, whom the G.o.ds had commissioned to strike the grand blow for them; and who never should strike it, that was certain, if Constantius should have leave to take away from him, first his Celts and Petulants, and then his head? So he accepts; and writes kindly and respectfully to his Maiden Aunt-- Spidership the Emperor telling him he must manage _without_ the legions, and _with_ a Co-Augustus to share the empire with him,-- ruling (it was to be hoped in perfect harmony with himself) the west and leaving the east to Constantius. However, all will not do: Constantius writes severe and haughtily, Send the men, and let"s hear no more of that presumptuous fooling about the second Augustus!--So Julian marches east; whither, accompanying him, the lately rebellious Celts and Petulants are ready enough to go now; and Constantius might after all have fallen in battle, and so missed his saving baptism; but his plans had gone agley, and the whole situation was extremely disturbing; and you never knew what might happen: and really, when you thought how you had treated this Julian"s father, and his two brothers, and numberless uncles and cousins, you might fear the very worst;-- and so, good maiden-auntish soul, he fell into a sadness, and thence into a decline; and while Julian and his Petulants were yet a long way off, got baptized respectably, and slipped off to heaven.
And you know, too, probably, how Julian, being now sole emperor, reigned: working night and day; wearing out relays of secretaries, but never worn out himself; making the three years of his reign, as I think Gibbon says, read like thirty; disestablishing Christianity, and refounding Paganism,--not the Paganism that had been of old, but a new kind, based upon compa.s.sion, human brotherhood, and Theosophical ethics, and illumined by his own ever-present vision of the G.o.ds;--how he reformed the laws; governed; made his life-giving hand felt from the Scottish Wall to the Nile Cataracts;--instilled new vigor into everything; forced toleration upon the Christians, stopping dead their mutual persecutions, and recalling from banishment those who had been banished by their co-religionists of other sects;--made them rebuild temples they had torn down, and disgorge temple properties they had plundered;--and amidst all this, and much more also, found time in the wee small hours of the nights to do a good deal of literary work: Theosophical treatises, correspondence, sketches....--And you will know of the spotless purity, the asceticism, of his life; and how he stedfastly refused to persecute;--whereby his opponents complained that, son of Satan as he was, he denied them the glory of the martyr"s crown;--and of his plan to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, and to re-establish Jews and Judaism in their native land:--of his letter to the Jewish high priest or chief Rabbi, beginning "My brother";--of the charitable inst.i.tutions he raised, and dedicated to the Lord of Vision, his G.o.d the Unconquered Sun;--of his contests with frivolity and corruption at Antioch, and his friendship with the philosophers;--and then, of his Persian expedition, with its rashness,--its brilliant victories,--its over-rashness and head-strong advance;--of the burning of the fleet, and march into the desert; and retreat; and that sudden attack,--the Persian squadrons rising up like afreets out of the sands, from nowhere; and Julian rushing unarmed through the thickest of the fight, turning, first here, then there, confusion into firmness, defeat into victory;--and of the arrow, Persian or Christian, that cut across his fingers and pierced his side; and how he fainted as he tried to draw it out; and recovered, and called for his horse and armor; and fainted again; and was carried into a tent hastily run up for him:--and of the scene there in the night, that made those who were with him think of the last scene in the life of Socrates; Julian dying, comforting his mourning officers; cheering them; talking to them quietly about the beauty and dignity of death, and the divinity of the Soul; then suddenly inquiring why Anatolius was not present,--and learning that Anatolius had fallen,--and (strange inconsistency!) the dying man breaking into tears of the death of his friend.--And you will know of the hopeless march of the army back under ignominious Jovian, all Shah Sapor"s hard terms accepted;--and the doom of the Roman Empire sealed.
That was the Man: that is the record, outwardly, of a Soul fed upon the immensities of Vision. Vision is the keynote of him: the intense reality to him of the ever-beautiful compa.s.sionate G.o.ds.... It is true there was a personality attached; and all his defenders since have found much in it that they wished had not been there. A lack of dignity, it is said; a certain self-consciousness... Well; he was very young; he died a very boy at thirty-two; he never attained to years of discretion:--in a sense we may allow that much. You say, he might very well have followd the reaonable conventions of life; and condescended, when emperor, not to dress as a philosopher of the schools. So he might. They laughed at his ways, at his garb, at his beard;-- and he went the length of sitting up one night to write the _Misopogon,_ a skit upon his personality. Only philosophers wore beards in those days; it was thought most unsuitable in an emperor. I do not know what the men of Antioch said about it; but he speaks of it as unkempt and,--in the Gibbonistic euphemism,--_populous;_ indeed, names the loathsome cootie outright, which Gibbon was much too Gibbonish to do. In the nature of things, this was a libel.
I read lately an article, I think by an Irish writer, on the eccentricities of youthful genius. It often happens that a soul of really fine caliber, with a great work to do in the world, will waste a portion of his forces, at the outset, in fighting the harmless conventions. But as his real self grows into mastery, all this disappears, and he comes to see where his battle truly lies. Julian died before he had had time quite to outgow the eccentricities; but for all that, not before he had shown the world what the Soul in action is like.
Every great soul, incarnating, has still this labor to carry through as prolog to his life"s work:--he must conquer the new personality, with all its hereditary tendencies; he must mold it difficultly to the perfect expression of the glory and dignity of himself. Julian had to take up a body in which on the one side ran the warrior blood of Claudius Gothicus and Constantius Chlorus, on the other, the refinement and culture of the senatorial house of the Anicii. Two such streams, coming together, might well need some harmonizing: might well produce, for example, an acute self-consciousness,--to be mastered. What he got from them, for world-service, was on the one hand his superb military leadership and mastery of affairs; on the other, his intense devotion to learning and culture. Thus the two streams of heredity appeared, dominated by his own quality of Vision. The paternal stream, by his generation, had grown much vitiated: it was pure warriorism in Claudius Gothicus, and even in Constantius Chlorus; it was warriorism refined with subtlety and cruelty in Constantine I; it was mere fussy treacherous cruelty in the Spider-Octopus,--and sensual brutality in Julian"s brother Gallus. The vices of the latter may indicate how great a self-conqueror the unstained Julian was.
He was a Keats in imperial affairs, dying when he had given no more than a promise of what he should become. He laws, his valor, his victories, his writings, are no more than _juvenilia:_ they are equal to the grand performance, not the promise, of many who are counted great. He came out from his overshadowment and long seclusion, from him books and dreams; was thrown into conditions that would have been difficult for an experienced statesman, and won through them all triumphantly; was set to conduct a war that would have taxed the genius of a Caesar, a Tiberius, or an Aurelius,--and swept through to as signal victories as any of theirs. He learnt the elements of drill, and was straight sent to conquer the conquering Germans; and did it brilliantly. He came to a Gaul as broken and hopeless as Joan of Arc"s France; and found within himself every quality needed to heal it and make it whole.
Joan conquered with her Vision; Julian conquered with his. He set out with this before his eyes and in his soul:--The G.o.ds are there; the beautiful G.o.ds; uttermost splendor of divinity is at the heart of things. The glory of the G.o.ds and of their world filled his eyes; and the determination filled his soul to make this outer world conform to the beauty of his vision. The thing he did not care about,--did not notice, except in a humourous way,--was that queer thing of a personality that had been allotted to himself. How could he have succeeded, in the world that then was?--And yet even a Christian poet was constrained to say,--and to rise, says Gibbon, above his customary mediocrity in saying it,--that though Julian was hateful to G.o.d, he was altogether beneficent to mankind.
I do not know how to explain the Persian expedition. He himself said, when dying, that he had loved and sought peace, and had but gone to war when driven to it. We cannot see now what were the driving factors. Did he go to reap glory that he might have used, or thought he might have used, in his grand design? Did he go to break a way into India, perhaps there to find a light beyond any that was in Rome? ... Or was it the supreme mistake of his life.... one would say the only mistake?
It failed, and he died, and his grand designs came to nothing; and Rome went out in utter darkness. And men sneered at him then, and have been sneering at him ever since, for his failure.
Perhaps we must call it that; it was a forlorn hope at the best of times. But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it: a man for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty;--unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water, without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam of aspiration,--with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and from ruin.
XXIV. FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA
When the news came drifting back over the Roman world that the Emperor had been killed in Persia, and that an unknown insignificant Jovian reigned in his stead;--and while three parts of the population were rejoicing that there was an end of the Apostate and his apostasy; and half the rest, that there was an end of this terrible strenuosity, this taking of the G.o.ds (good harmless useful fictions--probably fictions) so fearfully in earnest: I wonder how many there were to guess how near the end of the world had come? The cataclysm was much more sudden and over-whelming than we commonly think; and to have prophesied, in Roman society, in the year 363, that in a century"s time the empire and all its culture would be things of the past (in the West), would have sounded just as ridiculous, probably, as such a prophesy concerning Europe and its culture would have sounded in a London drawing-room fifteen years ago. There were signs and portents, of course, for the thoughtful; and no doubt some few Matthew Arnolds in their degree to be troubled by them. And of course (as in our own day, but perhaps rather more), an idea with cranks that at any moment Doomsday might come. But while the world endured, and the Last Trump had not sounded, of course the Roman empire would stand.--Christianity? Well, yes; it had grown very strong; and the extremists among the Christians were rabid enough against culture of any sort. But there were also Christians who, while they hated the olden culture of Paganism, were ambitious to supply a Christian literature in prose and verse to take the place of the Cla.s.sical. There had been an awful devastation of Gaul; the barbarians of the north had been, now and again, uneasy and troublesome; but see how Julian--even he, with the Grace of G.o.d all against him--had chastised them!
The head of the Roman State would always be the Master of the World.
And strangely enough, this was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante"s time did men guess that the Roman empire and its civilization were gone.
Life, when Julian died, was still capable of being a very graceful and dignified affair,--outwardly, at any rate. On their great estates in Gaul, in Britain, in Italy, great and polished gentlemen still enjoyed their _otium c.u.m dignitate._ The culture of the great past still maintained itself amongst them; although thought and all mental vigor were buried deep under the detritus.
In fourth century Gaul there was quite a little literary renaissance; centering, as you might expect, in the parts furthest from German invasion. Its leading light was born in Bordeaux in the three-thirties; and was thus (to link things up a little) a younger contemporary of the Indian Samudragupta. He was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian, consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet. Also a convert to Christianity, but unenthusiastic:--altogether, a dignified and polished figure; such as you might find in England now, in the country squire who has held important offices in India in his time, hunts and shoots in season, manages his estates with something between amateur and professional interest, reads Horace for his pleasure, and even has a turn for writing Latin verses.
Ausonius leaves us a picture of the life of his cla.s.s: a placid, cultured life, with quite a strong ethical side to it; sterile of any deep thought or speculation; far removed from unrest.-- Another respresentative man was his friend Symmachus at Rome: also highly cultured and of dignified leisure; a very upright and capable gentleman widely respected for his sterling honesty; a pagan, not for any stirring of life within his heart or mind, but simply for love of the ancient Roman idea,--sheer conservatism;--for much the same reasons, in fact, as make the Englishman above-mentioned a staunch member of the English Church.
There were many such men about: admirable men; but unluckily without the great constructive energies that might, under Julian"s guidance for example, have saved the empire. But the empire! In that crisis,--in that narrow pa.s.s in time! It is not excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business; but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it, to link this world with the G.o.d-world, and hold fast through thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through,--what shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over,-- shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer the Spirit. . . . . No; it is not to be done by amiable gentlemen, or excellent administrators, or clever politicians. .
. . Julian had come flaming down into the world, to see if he could rouse up and call together those who should do it; but his bugles had sounded in the empty desert, and died away over the sands.
There were tremendous energies abroad; but they were all with the Destroyers, and were to be, ever increasingly: with such men as, at this time, Saint Martin of Tours, that great tearer-down of temples; or in the next century, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and Peter the Reader, the tearers-to-pieces of Hypatia. Perhaps the greatest energies of all you should have found, now and later, in the Christian mob of Alexandria,--wild beasts innocent of nothing but soap and water.