Page images
PDF
EPUB

PROSE

APULEIUS.

fictions occupy but a very insignificant place in ancient literature as compared with modern. The Greeks and Romans, although they were great raconteurs, had no equivalent term for our word 'novel.' The Decameron, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Heart of Mid Lothian, and many more, will charm readers of all times and all nations, as long as the languages are known in which they were respectively written. There are no such books to take rank with the great remains of ancient song and thought. In fact the novelreading lady does not appear to have been known to the households of the old world, or at all events we cannot trace her. We are afraid that these stately dames, when they did handle a parchment roll, encountered worse 'sensations' than our modern novelists would have supplied to them; at least, if Martial's boast be well founded, that there were ladies who read his works in the absence of their husbands

Erubuit posuitque meum Lucretia librum

Sed coram Bruto: Brute recede, leget. There were reading women of better mind who delighted in Virgil's Eneid, and even bored their more ignorant husbands and friends (if Juvenal may be spokesman for these) with the eager interest which they took in the fate of the deserted Dido. Whether at this time they had any prose fictions to read, either in Greek or Latin, we do not know. We may guess that there existed somewhere written copies of that wild tale of Abaris and his adventures which Herodotus seems to have heard, although we must needs admit the spuriousness of that text of it which was attributed to Phalaris, and which brought down such a storm of Dr. Bentley's scholastic wrath on the head of

the unfortunate editor of the apocryphal work. However, it is only in later times that we can trace such romances to Greek and Roman homes, although they belong to a class of literature which was the first to attract the 'reading public' when such a community began to exist in medieval times: witness the Morte d'Arthur, The History of Amadis of Gaul, and other books, which charmed the solitude of Don Quixote, or which might be supposed to have constituted the studies of Marmion's Squire Eustace, who -much had pored

Upon a huge romantic tɔme In the hall-window of his home. This lack of the Novel to the ancient book-world cannot assuredly be attributed to any depreciation of the place of such works in the scale of literary dignity. When the novelist began to write, he was well received, and his calling was looked upon as one befitting the best rank of authors. It does not appear to have been any bar to the acceptance of Heliodorus as a Bishop of the Church that he had written a loveromance. It is true that the ecclesiastical historian Nicephorus gives it as areport that certain persons in his diocese were scandalised at having a novelist for a bishop, and insisted that Heliodorus should either resign his see or consent to his Ethiopica being publicly burnt. It was further reported that the Bishop adopted the formeralternative rather than disown his novel or condemn himself as a novelist. But the whole story is discreditable resting on no trustworthy foundation; and it probably grew up in subsequent times, when more strict notions came to be entertained as to the outward surroundings of the chief pastors of the Church. So in the case of Apuleius, who was a man of mark both as a philosopher

as

and a theologian, and who was not deemed to have compromised his character in either respect by writing the Metamorphoses. It seems strange that the author of a book revelling at times in descriptions compared with which the fleshliest pages of Mr. Swinburne smack but of lustand-water, should still have preserved his reputation as an earnest seeker after truth and a moral and religious teacher. Such, however, was the force with which the depraved tastes of the age pressed on the writers who strove to address it. The purifying influence of Christianity on human society is strikingly illustrated by a comparison of the heathen philosopher's romance with that of the Christian Bishop. If the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea have no great interest for us in these days, at least they are innocent enough in the narrative of the episcopal novelist.

But although, as we have said, works of this class occupy such a subordinate place in our view of classical literature, both Apuleius and Heliodorus have had many admiring readers not only in their own generation, but in the earlier centuries which witnessed the modern revival of letters. Boccaccio, we may presume, borrowed one of his stories from Apuleius. The scene laid in the robbers' cave in Gil Blas is generally supposed to have been derived from the same source; although Le Sage may also have been indebted for this to Lucian, and he certainly seems to have taken the idea of Le Diable boiteux from Lucian's tale about Micyllus and the cock. Possibly, too, Cervantes may have taken from a scene in the Metamorphoses the hint for Don Quixote's adventure with the wineskins. And the well-known episode of Cupid and Psyche has delighted readers and attracted imitators down to our own time. Mrs. Tighe's graceful poem of Psyche was a great favourite in its day; and a ballad

version of the same story, attributed to Mr. Hudson Gurney, appears to have had a charm for Byron, and to have prompted him with that picture of Haidée in Don Juan :

-rife

With all we can imagine of the skies, And pure as Psyche ere she grew a wifeToo pure even for the purest human ties. Verses which may convince us that Byron, whether he had ever read Apuleius or not, thoroughly realised the more imaginative side of this beautiful mythus.

It was not, however, merely by such influence on the fancy of his readers that Apuleius secured for himself the place which he holds in the history of Latin literature. True, the Emperor Severus, almost a contemporary of his, could see in him nothing but a babbler of old wives' fables(næenias quasdam aniles), and lamented in a formal despatch to the Senate that his deceased colleague Clodius Albinus should have suffered himself to grow old in the study of such rubbish as the Milesian-Punic stories of his favourite author Apuleius. The Delphin editor of Apuleius, Julianus Floridus (Jules Fleury), was, perhaps, too good a courtier to question the accuracy of this imperial judgment under the rule of the Grand Monarque. He is therefore somewhat apologetic in offering his work to the Most Serene Dauphin:

6

Among the chosen array of authors that will be set before you, both modern and ancient, with their works of wisdom and humane culture, our Apuleius asks for some station; not that he is presumptuous enough to desire that young princes should now incur the reproach which the Emperor Severus cast on Clodius Albinus; but because, knowing that, more especially for the boys of a royal house, it is well to blend the useful with the agreeable, he does not despair that the abounding nourishment of his learning, obsolete and rugged

though that learning be, conveyed in attractive fictions, may be neither unprofitable nor unpleasant to such august pupils.' The obsolete and rugged diction which the Delphin editor here reprehends was perhaps one reason of the comparative neglect with which the writings of Apuleius have been treated in later times. He and Aulus Gellius laboured to introduce among the Romans a sort of Euphuism, abounding, like its Elizabethan antitype in English English literature, with forced conceits and antiquated phraseology, but which they professed to draw from the older Roman authors, the men who wrote before Cicero, and whose works they lauded as the 'well of Latin undefiled' by any admixture of Greek cultivation. About the close of the sixteenth century it became fashionable among scholars and critics (principally through the influence of some of those learned societies which were constituted in Italy under the name of Academies) to insist strenuously on the merits of Ciceronian Latin as the necessary and especial model to be followed by all who would acquire a cultivated style. And in the same proportion these zealous partisans set themselves to decry all the writers who seemed to depart from the exemplar found in the great sage and statesman of Rome. Among such Apuleius, as expressly setting up for himself a different standard, came in for their severest reprehension, which was soon extended from his style to the matter of his writings. That great luminary among the scholars of the Low Countries, Justus Lipsius, took up the cudgels against these intolerant champions, and endeavoured to inculcate a more catholic spirit of criticism. He says in one of his letters, 'I cannot join in denouncing the reading of Apuleius, whatever those ungoverned boys of the Arpinum school may say on the subject.

They set up Cicero for admiration, So far I praise them. I allow, too, that we have diverged from the exact model of Cicero's language; which indeed we could not now imitate even if it answered our purpose to do so. But this is not the question. Granting to them that Cicero stands alone as a model of eloquence, yet thought and enlightenment are contributed from many different quarters. Even as respects the style of Apuleius, the contempt which they express might in a great measure be spared. Let us turn from these youngsters to qualified judges, who ought by the Pompeian law, you know, to be at least thirty years old. The author in question is perhaps turgid, pompous, given to refinements of affectation. But surely he is full of curious knowledge of literature and ancient manners; and his language is more particularly copied from that of Plautus. Some rhetorician or other, who says that he brays rather than speaks, had better make good his criticism against Plautus, and then I will accept it in the case of Apuleius. But the unfortunate man was an African, and the old hatred of the Carthaginians is even now unforgotten in Italy.' Elsewhere, in his Electa, the same critic points to the African nationality of Apuleius as an excuse for his vicious style. There is,' he says, 'in the nature of that race an engrained acuteness of thought and invention, but accompanied by an uncouth carelessness of expression.'

Perhaps the most interesting feature in the works of Apuleius is the illustration of that eager spirit of enquiry which was at work within the heathen mind in his age, seeking to settle in its own way those great problems of human life and theology of which Christianity was now offering its solution. Our ecclesiastical historians have too much neglected to study that curious parallel which exists between

the development of dogmatic Christianity in the earlier centuries, and the efforts which the heathen mind made during the same period to define corresponding difficulties in its theology, and to ascertain a verbal formula which should satisfy them. The doctrine of the unity and perfection of the Godhead, always present to Jewish theology (at least from the time when the worship of Jehovah succeeded that of Elohim), was no less instinctive to the devout minds of the heathen world in all ages, rising above their polytheism to the apprehension of a supreme Zeus, such as we may trace in the works of Pindar and Eschylus, combining in himself all the truer attributes of divinity. But as philosophy took up this conception from religion, a discrepancy soon suggested itself between the incomprehensibility of the Deity as shown by the former, and the need of a personal God as present to the latter. This discrepancy was, evidently, never forgotten in the theosophical speculations of Plato, and was, perhaps, one reason for the tenacity with which he clung to the objective reality of his iceat. And when the philosophy of Plato had become widely spread among the educated classes throughout the world, more especially when it had begun to develop that influence on the Christian faith which we first trace in the Gospel of St. John, then, as might be expected, the acute and subtle thinkers within the pale of Christianity set themselves to formulate the relations between the Father and Son in such a manner as should satisfy both the conclusions of philosophy and the requirements of religion. Hence we had Ebionites, Docetæ, Patripassians, Sabellians, Arians, and the rest of them offering each their several theories on the subject, till the Church adjudicated among them all by pronouncing the Symbolum of Nicæa. But this same Platonic

philosophy suggested to thinkers in the heathen world the like difficulty and the search for a solution. They thought that the fading forms of pagan religion might receive new life, and might satisfy the needs of devout minds, through the development, side by side with them, of those suggestions of absoluteness and infinity in the Deity which philosophy dictates. Julian, no doubt, had the Christian doctrine of the Trinity distinctly present to his mind when he dwelt on the absolute conception of God by the mind as compared with His manifestation in material and personal forms, such as the sun and other objects of pagan worship. It was also, probably, in direct rivalry with the Gospel narrative of Christ's life, that Philostratus undertook, at the request of Julia, the wife of the Emperor Severus, to write the life of Apollonius of Tyana, and attributed to that alleged sorcerer and his wonder-working powers a character closely approaching to an avatar of Deity. And it is likely enough that the same hope of encountering the advancing creed of Christianity on ground resembling its own may have prompted this politic princess and her sister, the grandmother of Elagabalus, to keep that wretched emperor in a mysterious state of seclusion, and to dignify him with the name of the Oriental god worshipped at Emesa.

In connection with such endeavours the religious 'guesses at truth' which we find in Apuleius acquire a considerable amount of interest and importance. He recollected the boast of the Socratic school that their founder had called Philosophy from the heavens and set her within every man's home. He discerned, however, the need of an authoritative guide which should place the glori ous thoughts of Plato in a shape capable of being practically available for the spiritual life of the way

faring man. Hence he set himself, with other followers of Plato in his day, to place these truths before the world in a popular and dogmatic form-the same task which had been undertaken probably somewhat earlier by Plutarch, whose fame as a philosopher has paled before that which he acquired through those biographies which Shakespeare loved so well. Among the more immediate contemporaries of Apuleius, this same purpose animated also Alcinous, whose treatise was selected by the Platonic Academy, founded by Cosmo de' Medici, as the best popular exposition of Plato's principles; and Galen, who strove to draw from the same source authority for his propositions on life and psychology. These studies of Apuleius are found in his treatises De Mundo and De Deo Socratis. In the former of these, after describing the system of the Mundus or ordered universe, he goes on to speak of God as the Creator and Sustainer of all things much in the same terms as those in which St. Paul opened his declaration of Christianity to the Athenians. Our argument,' he says, 'would lack something, if when we are discoursing on the universe-in an unscientific fashion, but still the best in our power-we did not speak of its Ruler. it is not better to be wholly silent, as has been asserted, on this subject, but rather to speak, though it be imperfectly. It is an old opinion, and has fixed itself deeply within the consciousness of all men, that God is and must be accounted the Author of all creation, and that He is the principle which preserves and sustains all those things which He has created. Nor is there any material object of such surpassing strength as to be sustained by its own nature without the help of God. This opinion the poets followed when they ventured to say of Jupiter,

[ocr errors]

All things are filled with Him,

For

whose presence is apprehended not only by our mental consciousness, but by our eyes and ears and the system of our senses. This conclusion bears merely on the question of the power, not of the nature of God. He is the preserver and procreator of all things which are born and made to occupy the universe: not that He has framed that vast sphere by the work of His hands in the manner of bodily labour; but as one who by a certain unwearied providence has a hold on things however remote, and embraces things sundered by the widest interspace.' The whole of this treatise De Mundo is merely a paraphrase of Aristotle's work Περὶ Κόσμου, but it is easy to trace in the language of Apuleius his yearning towards the more spiritual tone of Plato's specu lations on the same subject. He was desirous, however, to present the apprehension of God resulting from the observation of physical laws-the 'comprehensive Cause of all things,' as Aristotle says-the 'Great First Cause' of later schoolmen and of Bolingbroke and Popeand to make this apprehension the groundwork of his enquiries into the moral and spiritual relations between God and man. He is free to follow out this theme when he undertakes in his own person to interpret the thoughts of Plato. The conception of God according to the Aristotelian philosophy-that of a power dwelling in all things and operating on all things-was felt by Apuleius to be too pantheistic a doctrine to satisfy by itself the cravings of a devout mind, and it seemed to impugn the popular theology which he wished to confirm and exalt. The first step towards realising the idea of a personal God -a God who should have relations to man through a' taking of the manhood into God'-was in Apuleius' view the form of thought and language by which the Deity should be especially associated with

« PreviousContinue »