Many things occurred to sadden his old age. His best friends were dead; Varus was lost with his legions; there had been the tragedy of Julia, whom he had loved well, and the deaths of the young princes, her sons. He was a man of extraordinarily keen affections, and all these losses came home to him sorely.
But against every sadness he had his own achievements to set. There was Rome in its marble visibly about him, that he had found in brick and in ruins; Rome now capable of centuries of life, that had been, when he came to it, a ghastly putridity.
XIX. AN IMPERIAL SACRIFICE
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"
This is the secret of writing: look at the external things until you see pulsating behind them the rhythm and beauty of the Eternal. Only look for it, and persist in your search, and presently the Universal will be revealed shining through the particular, the sweep of everlasting Law through the little object, and happenings of a day.
Come to history with the same intent and method, and at last things appear in their true light. Here, too, as in a landscape, is the rhythm of the Eternal; here are the Basic Forms. I doubt if the evidence of the annalists is ever worth much, unless they had an eye to penetrate to these. When one sees behind the supposed fact narrated and the judgments pronounced the glimmering up of a basic form, one guesses one is dealing with a true historian.
Recently I read a book called The Tragedy of the Caesars, by the novelist Baring-Gould; and in it the life of a certain man presented in a sense flatly contradictory to the views of nineteen centuries anent that man; but it seemed to me at last an account that had the rhythm, the basic form, showing through. So in this lecture what I shall try to give you will be Mr. Baring-Gould's version of this man's life, with efforts of my own to go further and make quite clear the basic form.
What does one mean by 'basic form'? In truth it is hard to define. Only, this world, that seems such a heterogeneous helter-skelter of mournful promiscuities, is in fact the pattern that flows from the loom of an Eternal Weaver: a beautiful pattern, with its rhythms and recurrences; there is no haphazard in it; it is not mechanical,—yet still flawless as the configuarations of a crystal or the petals of a perfect flower.
The name of the man we are to think of tonight has come down as a synonym for infamy: we imagine him a gloomy and bloodthirsty tyrant; a morose tiger enthroned; a gross sensualist;—well, I shall show you portraits of him, to see whether you can accept him for that. The truth is that aristocratic Rome, degenerate and frivolous, parrot-cried out against the supposed deneracy of the imperial, and for the glories of the old republican, regime; for the days when Romans were Romans, and 'virtuous.' One came to them in whom the (real) ancient Roman honor more appeared than in another man in Italy, perhaps before or since;—and they could not understand the honor, and hated the man. They captured his name in a great net of lies; they breathed a huge fog of lies about him, which come down to us as history. Now to see whether a plain tale may not put them down.
Once more take your stand, please, on the Mountain of the Gods: the time, in or about the year 39 B.C.:—and thence try to envisage the world as Those do who guide but are not involved in the heats and dusts of it. The Western World; in which Rome, caput mundi, was the only thing that counted. Caput mundi; but a kind of idiot head at that: inchoate, without co-ordination; maggots scampering through what might have been the brain; the life fled, and that great rebellion of the many lives which we call decay having taken its place. And yet, it was no true season for Rome to be dead; it was no natural death; not so much decent death at all as the death in life we call madness. For the Crest-Wave men were coming in; it was the place where they should be. The cycle of Italy had begun, shall we say, in 94 B.C., and would end in 36 A.D.; —for convenience one must give figures, though one means only approximations by them;—and not until after that latter date would souls of any caliber cease to be incarnate in Roman bodies. Before that time, then, the madness had to be cured and Rome's mission had to be fulfilled.