Joan conquered with her Vision; Julian conquered with his. He set out with this before his eyes and in his soul:—The Gods are there; the beautiful Gods; uttermost splendor of divinity is at the heart of things. The glory of the Gods and of their world filled his eyes; and the determination filled his soul to make this outer world conform to the beauty of his vision. The thing he did not care about,—did not notice, except in a humourous way,—was that queer thing of a personality that had been allotted to himself. How could he have succeeded, in the world that then was?—And yet even a Christian poet was constrained to say,—and to rise, says Gibbon, above his customary mediocrity in saying it,—that though Julian was hateful to God, he was altogether beneficent to mankind.
I do not know how to explain the Persian expedition. He himself said, when dying, that he had loved and sought peace, and had but gone to war when driven to it. We cannot see now what were the driving factors. Did he go to reap glory that he might have used, or thought he might have used, in his grand design? Did he go to break a way into India, perhaps there to find a light beyond any that was in Rome? … Or was it the supreme mistake of his life…. one would say the only mistake?
It failed, and he died, and his grand designs came to nothing; and Rome went out in utter darkness. And men sneered at him then, and have been sneering at him ever since, for his failure. Perhaps we must call it that; it was a forlorn hope at the best of times. But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it: a man for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty;—unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water, without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam of aspiration,—with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and from ruin.
XXIV. FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA
When the news came drifting back over the Roman world that the Emperor had been killed in Persia, and that an unknown insignificant Jovian reigned in his stead;—and while three parts of the population were rejoicing that there was an end of the Apostate and his apostasy; and half the rest, that there was an end of this terrible strenuosity, this taking of the Gods (good harmless useful fictions—probably fictions) so fearfully in earnest: I wonder how many there were to guess how near the end of the world had come? The cataclysm was much more sudden and over-whelming than we commonly think; and to have prophesied, in Roman society, in the year 363, that in a century's time the empire and all its culture would be things of the past (in the West), would have sounded just as ridiculous, probably, as such a prophesy concerning Europe and its culture would have sounded in a London drawing-room fifteen years ago. There were signs and portents, of course, for the thoughtful; and no doubt some few Matthew Arnolds in their degree to be troubled by them. And of course (as in our own day, but perhaps rather more), an idea with cranks that at any moment Doomsday might come. But while the world endured, and the Last Trump had not sounded, of course the Roman empire would stand.—Christianity? Well, yes; it had grown very strong; and the extremists among the Christians were rabid enough against culture of any sort. But there were also Christians who, while they hated the olden culture of Paganism, were ambitious to supply a Christian literature in prose and verse to take the place of the Classical. There had been an awful devastation of Gaul; the barbarians of the north had been, now and again, uneasy and troublesome; but see how Julian—even he, with the Grace of God all against him—had chastised them! The head of the Roman State would always be the Master of the World.
And strangely enough, this was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire and its civilization were gone.
Life, when Julian died, was still capable of being a very graceful and dignified affair,—outwardly, at any rate. On their great estates in Gaul, in Britain, in Italy, great and polished gentlemen still enjoyed their otium cum dignitate. The culture of the great past still maintained itself amongst them; although thought and all mental vigor were buried deep under the detritus. In fourth century Gaul there was quite a little literary renaissance; centering, as you might expect, in the parts furthest from German invasion. Its leading light was born in Bordeaux in the three-thirties; and was thus (to link things up a little) a younger contemporary of the Indian Samudragupta. He was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian, consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet. Also a convert to Christianity, but unenthusiastic:—altogether, a dignified and polished figure; such as you might find in England now, in the country squire who has held important offices in India in his time, hunts and shoots in season, manages his estates with something between amateur and professional interest, reads Horace for his pleasure, and even has a turn for writing Latin verses. Ausonius leaves us a picture of the life of his class: a placid, cultured life, with quite a strong ethical side to it; sterile of any deep thought or speculation; far removed from unrest.— Another respresentative man was his friend Symmachus at Rome: also highly cultured and of dignified leisure; a very upright and capable gentleman widely respected for his sterling honesty; a pagan, not for any stirring of life within his heart or mind, but simply for love of the ancient Roman idea,—sheer conservatism;—for much the same reasons, in fact, as make the Englishman above-mentioned a staunch member of the English Church.
There were many such men about: admirable men; but unluckily without the great constructive energies that might, under Julian's guidance for example, have saved the empire. But the empire! In that crisis,—in that narrow pass in time! It is not excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business; but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it, to link this world with the God-world, and hold fast through thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through,—what shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over,— shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer the Spirit. . . . . No; it is not to be done by amiable gentlemen, or excellent administrators, or clever politicians. . . . Julian had come flaming down into the world, to see if he could rouse up and call together those who should do it; but his bugles had sounded in the empty desert, and died away over the sands.
There were tremendous energies abroad; but they were all with the Destroyers, and were to be, ever increasingly: with such men as, at this time, Saint Martin of Tours, that great tearer-down of temples; or in the next century, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and Peter the Reader, the tearers-to-pieces of Hypatia. Perhaps the greatest energies of all you should have found, now and later, in the Christian mob of Alexandria,—wild beasts innocent of nothing but soap and water.
It was Symmachus who was chosen by the Roman Senate to remonstrate with the emperor Valentinian against the removal of the altar and statue of Victory,—the Pagan symbols,—from the senate house. I quote you Gibbon's summary of a part of his petition: