Indeed there is scarce a scene without its ghostly enchantment, its supernatural intervention. And herein you may detect the personal predilection of Apuleius. The infinite curiosity wherewith Lucius pries into witchcraft and sorcery was shared by his author. The hero transformed suffered his many and grievous buffetings because he always coveted an understanding of wizardry and spells; and Apuleius, in an age devoted to mysticism, was notorious for a magicmonger. Seriously it was debated, teste St. Augustine, whether Christ or he wrought the greater marvels: and though the shape wherein the romance is cast induced a confusion of author and hero, it is recorded that Apuleius was a zealous magician, and doubtless it is himself, not Lucius, he pictures in his last book among the initiate. In the admirable description of Isis and her visitation, as of the ceremonies wherein he was admitted to the secret worship of the goddess, he departs entirely from his Greek original. Here, indeed, we have a fragment of autobiography. When in 158 AD, at the dramatic moment of an adventurous career, Apuleius delivered his Apology—pro se de magia before Claudius Maximus, he confessed that he had been initiated into all the sacred rites of Greece, and had squandered the better part of a comfortable fortune in mysticism and the grand tour. The main accusation was that he had won his wife a respectable and wealthy widow by magic arts. He was also charged with other acts of witchcraft and enchantment. Thattus, it was said, and a freeborn woman had swooned in his presence: a piece of superstition which reminds you of Cotton Mather. But, replied Apuleius, with excellent humour and a scepticism worthy of Reginald Scot, they were epileptics, who could stand in the presence of none save a magician. In brief, we cannot appreciate The Golden Ass, until we realise the modern spirit of curiosity which possessed its author. The lecturer’s fame well-nigh outran the writer’s. Apuleius travelled the length of civilised Africa with his orations, as the popular lecturer of today invades America; and the majesty of Asclepius, a favourite subject, was an excellent occasion for his familiar mysticism. He had been as intimately at home in the nineteenth century as in the second. Were he alive today Paris would have been his field, and he the undisputed master of decadence and symbolism. The comparison is close at all points. Would he not have delighted in the Black Mass, as celebrated on the heights of Mont Paniasse? Like too many among the makers of modern French literature he was an alien writing an alien tongue. His curiosity of diction, his unfailing loyalty to speech, his eager search after the strange and living word, his love of an art which knows no concealment—these qualities proclaim the decadent. And that symbolist is wayward indeed who finds not matter for his fancy in the countless stories, which a perverse ingenuity has twisted a hundred times into allegory.
Such the author and his book. And when William Adlington, in the untried youth of English prose, undertook the translation of The Golden Ass, you would have thought no apter enterprise possible. Primitive and decadent approach art in the same temper. Each is of necessity inclined to euphuism. In the sixteenth century the slang, the proverb, the gutter phrase, which Apuleius brought back to the Latin tongue were not yet sifted from English by the pedantry of scholars. But William Adlington, though an Elizabethan, was something of a purist. To
