Marius the Epicurean, vol 1 | Page 7

day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow
road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and ever afterwards avoided that
place and its ugly associations, for there was something in the incident
which made food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days
afterwards. The memory of it however had almost passed away, when
at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman
exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former
painful impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the
real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and
sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of
that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one of
his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of an old
garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even
mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have killed or injured
the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the very circumstance
of their life, being what they [24] were. It was something like a fear of
the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral feeling, for the face of a
great serpent, with no grace of fur or feathers, so different from
quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect in its spotted and
clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and sordid and as if
far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into
one metallic spring of pure enmity against him. Long afterwards, when

it happened that at Rome he saw, a second time, a showman with his
serpents, he remembered the night which had then followed, thinking,
in Saint Augustine's vein, on the real greatness of those little troubles of
children, of which older people make light; but with a sudden gratitude
also, as he reflected how richly possessed his life had actually been by
beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing how greatly what was
repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace.
Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to
contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an
earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his solitude,
as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of the past,
already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and became
betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an idealist,
constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by the
exercise [25] of meditative power. A vein of subjective philosophy,
with the individual for its standard of all things, there would be always
in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain
incapacity wholly to accept other men's valuations. And the generation
of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace up to the days
when his life had been so like the reading of a romance to him. Had the
Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps
comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the
spirit in which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal function
hereditary in his family--the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the
abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such
preparation involved. Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of the
play of Euripides, who every morning sweeps the temple floor with
such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in
sacred places, with a susceptibility to their peculiar influences which he
never outgrew; so that often in after-times, quite unexpectedly, this
feeling would revive in him with undiminished freshness. That first,
early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication, survived
through all the distractions of the world, and when all thought of such
vocation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in spirit at least,
towards a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct of life.

[26] And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the
lad's pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble to
the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and
delightful signs, one after another--the abandoned boat, the ruined
flood-gates, the flock of wild birds--that one was approaching the sea;
the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds.
And it was characteristic of him that he relished especially the grave,
subdued, northern notes in all that--the charm of the French or English
notes, as we might term them--in the luxuriant Italian landscape.
NOTES
13. *Ad Vigilias Albas.
CHAPTER III
: CHANGE OF AIR
Dilexi decorem domus tuae.
[27]