The soul of good, though it moveth upon a way thou canst but little understand, yet prospereth on the journey:
If thou sufferest nothing contrary to nature, there can be nought of evil with thee therein.
If thou hast done aught in harmony with that reason in which men are communicant with the gods, there also can be nothing of evil with thee—nothing to be afraid of:
Whatever is, is right; as from the hand of one dispensing to every man according to his desert:
If reason fulfil its part in things, what more dost thou require?
Dost thou take it ill that thy stature is but of four cubits?
That which happeneth to each of us is for the profit of the whole.
The profit of the whole—that was sufficient!
—Links, in a train of thought really generous! of which, nevertheless, the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man. “Let thine air be cheerful,” he had said; and, with an effort, did himself at times attain to that serenity of aspect, which surely ought to accompany, as their outward flower and favour, hopeful assumptions like those. Still, what in Aurelius was but a passing expression, was with Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable physiognomy. With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human faces from “the land which is very far off,” we may trace from Giotto onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael—the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed “blitheness” of the Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth. And yet, in Cornelius, it was certainly united with the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world; real as an aching in the head or heart, which one instinctively desires to have cured; an enemy with whom no terms could be made, visible, hatefully visible, in a thousand forms—the apparent waste of men’s gifts in an early, or even in a late grave; the death, as such, of men, and even of animals; the disease and pain of the body.
And there was another point of dissidence between Aurelius and his reader.—The philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body. Since it is “the peculiar privilege of reason to move within herself, and to be proof against corporeal impressions, suffering neither sensation nor passion to break in upon her,” it follows that the true interest of the spirit must ever be to treat the body—Well! as a corpse attached thereto, rather than as a living companion—nay, actually to promote its dissolution. In counterpoise to the inhumanity of this, presenting itself to the young reader as nothing less than a sin against nature, the very person of Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man. Such delight indeed had been but a natural consequence of the sensuous or materialistic character of the philosophy of his choice. Now to Cornelius the body of man was unmistakeably, as a later seer terms it, the one true temple in the world; or rather itself the proper object of worship, of a sacred service, in which the very finest gold might have its seemliness and due symbolic use:—Ah! and of what awestricken pity also, in its dejection, in the perishing gray bones of a poor man’s grave!
Some flaw of vision, thought Marius, must be involved in the philosopher’s contempt for it—some diseased point of thought, or moral dullness, leading logically to what seemed to him the strangest of all the emperor’s inhumanities, the temper of the suicide; for which there was just then, indeed, a sort of mania in the world. “ ’Tis part of the business of life,” he read, “to lose it handsomely.” On due occasion, “one might give life the slip.” The moral or mental powers might fail one; and then it were a fair question, precisely, whether the time for taking leave was not come:—“Thou canst leave this prison when thou wilt. Go forth boldly!” Just there, in the bare capacity to entertain such question at all, there was what Marius, with a soul which must always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with. There, surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of
