Rome was strong without compassion; so her strength led her on to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to hideous ruin and combustion. She loved her gravitas,—which implied great things;—but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of things—she lost her morale and became utterly vulgarian. But think of China, taking it as a matter of course that music was an essential part of government; or of France, with her Ministre des Beaux Arts in every cabinet. Perhaps; these two, of all historical nations, have made the greatest achievements; for you must say that neither India nor Greece was a nation.—As for Rome, with all her initial grandeur, it would be hard to find another nation of her standing that made such an awful mess of it as she did; one refers, of course, to Republican Rome; when Augustus had had his way with her, it was another matter.
She took the Gadarene slope at a hand-gallop; and there you have her history during the second century B.C. Not till near the end of that century did the egos of the Crest-Wave begin to come in in any numbers. From the dawn of the last quarter, there or thereabouts, all was an ever-growing rout and riot; the hideous toppling of the herd over the cliff-edge. It was a time of wars civil and the reverse; of huge bloody conscriptions and massacre; reforms and demagogism and murder of the Gracchi:— Marius and Sulla cat and dog;—the original Spartican movement, that wrecked Italy and ended with six thousand crucifixions along the road to Capua;—ended so, and not with a slave conquest and wiping-out of Rome, simply because Spartacus's revolted slave-army was even less disciplined than the legions that Beast-Crassus decimated into a kind of order and finally conquered them with. It was decade after decade of brutal devasting wars, —wars chronic and incurable, you would say: the untimely wreck and ruin of the world.
It is a strange gallery of portraits that comes down to us from this time: man after notable man arising without the qualities that could save Rome. Here are a few of the likenesses, as they are given Dr. Stobart: there were the Gracchi, with so much that was fine in them, but a ruining dash of the demagog,—an idea that socialism could accomplish anything real;—and no wisdom to see through to ultimite causes. There was Marius, simple peasant with huge military genius: a wolf of a soldier and foolish lamb of a politician; a law-maker who, captured by the insinuations and flatteries of the opposite side, swears to obey his own laws "so far as they may be legal." There was Sulla, of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belonged, but an inferior specimen of the class and unscrupulous rip, and a brave successful commander; personally beautiful, till his way of living made his face "like a mulberry sprinkled with flour";— with many elements of greatness always negatived by sudden fatuities; much of genius, more of fool, and most of rake-helly demirep; highly cultured, and plunderer of Athens and Delphi; great general, who maintained his hold on his troops by unlimited tolerance of undiscipline. There was Crassus the millionaire, and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many noble and Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator with more than a soupcon of the vaudeville favorite in him: a Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he came to die.
And there was Pompey;—real honesty in Pompey, perhaps the one true-hearted gentleman of the age: a man of morale, and a great soldier,—who might have done something if his general intelligence had been as great as his military genius and his sense of honor:—surely Pompey was the best of the lot of them; only the cursed spite was that the world was out of joint, and it needed something more than a fine soldier and gentleman to set it right.—And then Caesar—could he not do it? Caesar, the Superman,—the brilliant all-round genius at last,—the man of scandalous life—scandalous even in that cesspool Rome,—the epileptic who dreamed of world-dominion,—the conqueror of Gaul, says H.P. Blavatsky, because in Gaul alone the Sacred Mysteries survived in their integrity, and it was his business, on behalf of the dark forces against mankind, to quench their life and light for ever;—could not this Caesar do it? No; he had the genius; but not that little quality which all greatest personalities,—all who have not passed beyond the limits of personality: tact, impersonality, the power that the disciple shall covet, to make himself as nothing in the eyes of men:— and because he lacked that for armor, there were knives sharpened which should reach his heart before long.—And then, in literature, two figures mentionable: Lucretius, thinker and philosopher in poetry: a high Roman type, and a kind of materialist, and a kind of God's warrior, and a suicide. And Catullus: no noble type; neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian perhaps; singing in the old Saturnian meters with a real lyrical fervor, but with nothing better to sing than his loves.—And then, in politics again, Brutus: type, in sentimental history of the Republican School, of the high old roman and republican virtues; Brutus of the "blood-bright splendor," the tyrant-slayer and Roman Harmodios-Aristogeiton; the adored of philosophic French liberty-equality-fraternity adorers; Shakespeare's "noblest Roman of them all";—O how featly Cassius might have answered, when Brutus accused him of the "itching palm," if he had only been keeping au fait with the newspapers through the preceding years! "Et tu, Brute," I hear him say, quoting words that should have reminded his dear friend of the sacrd ties of friendship,—
"Art thou the man will rate thy Cassius thus?
This is the most unkindest cut of all;
For truly I have filched a coin or two:—
Have been, say, thrifty; gathered here and there
Pickings, we'll call them; but, my Brutus, thou—
Didst thou not shut the senators of Rhodes
(I think 'twas Rhodes) up in their senate-house,
And keep them there unfoddered day by day.
Until starvation forced them to disgorge
All of their million to thee? Didst not thou—"
Brutus is much too philosophical, much to studious, to listen to qualities of that kind, and cuts the conversation short right there. Cassius was right: that about starving the senators of his province that surrendered their wealth was precisely what our Brutus did.—Then there was Anthony, the rough brave soldier,—a kind of man of the unfittest when the giants Pompey and Caesar had been in; Anthony, master of Rome for awhile,—and truly, God knows Rome will do with bluff Mark Anthony for her master!—It is a very interesting list; most of them queer lobsided creatures, fighting with own hands or for nothing in particular; most with some virtues: Then that might have saved Rome, if, as Mrs Poyser said, "they are hatched again, and hatched different."
XVIII. AUGUSTUS
We left Rome galloping down the Gadarene slope, and scrimmaging for a vantage point whence to hurl herself headlong. Down she came; a riot and roaring ruin: doing those things she ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things she ought to have done, and with no semblance of health in her. There was nothing for it but the downfall of the world; good-bye civilization and all that was ever upbuilded of old. Come now; we should become good Congo forester in our time, with what they call 'long pig' for our daintiest diet. It is a euphemism for your brother man.
But supposing this mist-filled Gadarene gulf were really bridgable: supposing there were another side beyond the roar of hungry waters and the horror; and that mankind,—European mankind,—might pass over, and be saved, were there but staying the rout for a moment, and affording a means to cross?
There is a bardic proverb in the Welsh: A fo Ben, bydded Bont:—'He who is Chief, let him be the bridge': Bran the Blessed said it, when he threw down his giant body over the gulf, so that the men of the Island of the Mighty might pass over into Ireland. And the end of an old cycle, and the beginning of a new, when there is—as in our Rome at that time—a sort of psychic and cyclic impasse, a break-down and terrible chasm in history, if civilization is to pass over from the old conditions to the new, a man must be found who can be the bridge. He must solve the problems within himself; he must care so little for, and have such control of, his personality, that he can lay it down, so to speak, and let humanity cross over upon it. History may get no news of him at all; although he is then the Chief of Men, and the greatest living;—or it may get news, only to belittle him. His own and the after ages may think very little of him; he may possess no single quality to dazzle the imagination:—he may seem cold and uninteresting, a crafty tyrant;—or an uncouth old ex-rail-splitter to have in the White House;—or an illiterate peasant-girl to lead your armies; yet because he is the bridge, he is the Chief; and you may suspect someone out of the Pantheons incarnate in him.