Marius the Epicurean, vol 1 | Page 9

was the only thing audible, as they waited till two
priestly figures, speaking Greek to one another, admitted them into a
large, white-walled and clearly lighted guest-chamber, in which, while
he partook of a simple but wholesomely prepared supper, Marius still
seemed to feel pleasantly the height they had attained to among the
hills.
The agreeable sense of all this was spoiled by one thing only, his old
fear of serpents; for it was under the form of a serpent that Aesculapius
[31] had come to Rome, and the last definite thought of his weary head
before he fell asleep had been a dread either that the god might appear,
as he was said sometimes to do, under this hideous aspect, or perhaps
one of those great sallow-hued snakes themselves, kept in the sacred
place, as he had also heard was usual.
And after an hour's feverish dreaming he awoke--with a cry, it would
seem, for some one had entered the room bearing a light. The footsteps
of the youthful figure which approached and sat by his bedside were
certainly real. Ever afterwards, when the thought arose in his mind of
some unhoped-for but entire relief from distress, like blue sky in a
storm at sea, would come back the memory of that gracious
countenance which, amid all the kindness of its gaze, had yet a certain

air of predominance over him, so that he seemed now for the first time
to have found the master of his spirit. It would have been sweet to be
the servant of him who now sat beside him speaking.
He caught a lesson from what was then said, still somewhat beyond his
years, a lesson in the skilled cultivation of life, of experience, of
opportunity, which seemed to be the aim of the young priest's
recommendations. The sum of them, through various forgotten
intervals of argument, as might really have happened in a [32] dream,
was the precept, repeated many times under slightly varied aspects, of a
diligent promotion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eye
would lie for him the determining influence of life: he was of the
number of those who, in the words of a poet who came long after, must
be "made perfect by the love of visible beauty." The discourse was
conceived from the point of view of a theory Marius found afterwards
in Plato's Phaedrus, which supposes men's spirits susceptible to certain
influences, diffused, after the manner of streams or currents, by fair
things or persons visibly present--green fields, for instance, or
children's faces--into the air around them, acting, in the case of some
peculiar natures, like potent material essences, and conforming the seer
to themselves as with some cunning physical necessity. This theory,* in
itself so fantastic, had however determined in a range of methodical
suggestions, altogether quaint here and there from their circumstantial
minuteness. And throughout, the possibility of some vision, as of a new
city coming down "like a bride out of heaven," a vision still indeed, it
might seem, a long way off, but to be granted perhaps one day to the
eyes thus trained, was presented as the motive of this laboriously
practical direction.
"If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some fresh
picture, in a clear [33] light," so the discourse recommenced after a
pause, "be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in all
things, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows." To keep the eye clear
by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending even
to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and more fastidiously,
select form and colour in things from what was less select; to meditate
much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially,

connected with the period of youth--on children at play in the morning,
the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the fashions and
amusements of young men; to keep ever by him if it were but a single
choice flower, a graceful animal or sea- shell, as a token and
representative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid jealously,
in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight; and,
should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse in the range
of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circumstance at any
cost of place, money, or opportunity; such were in brief outline the
duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula of life. And
it was delivered with conviction; as if the speaker verily saw into the
recesses of the mental and physical being of the listener, while his own
expression of perfect temperance had in it a fascinating power--the
merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom from taint or flaw,
in exercise [34]