Now while the careless hero flees, beating the wave with his and casting to the gales of the open sea his idle promises,—there, standing among the shingle of the beach, the daughter of Minos follows him, alas! with her beautiful sad eyes: she stares, astonied, like to a Bacchante changed into a statue. She looks forth, and her heart floats upon the great waves of her grief. She lets slip from her head her fine-spun coif, she tears away the thin veils which cover her bosom, and the smooth cincture which supports her quivering breasts. All that slips from her body into the salt foam which ripples round her feet. But little she cares for her coif or for her apparel carried away by the tide! Lost, bewildered, with all her heart and all her soul, she is clinging to thee, O Theseus.
And if Augustin, when he had read these burning verses of Catullus, looked through the Anthologies which were popular in the African schools, he would come upon "The Vigil of Venus," that eclogue which ends with such a passionate cry:
O my springtime, when wilt thou come? When shall I be as the swallow? When shall I cease to be silent?… May he love to-morrow, he has not loved yet. And he who has already loved, may he love again to-morrow.
Imagine the effect of such exhortations on a youth of fifteen! Truly, this springtide of love, which the poet cries for in his distress, the son of Monnica knew well was come for him. How he must have listened to the musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phædra, formed and re-formed continually in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines are too far from us. These almost chimerical beings withdraw from us into outlying lands, to a vanished world which will never come again. But for Augustin, this was the world he was born into—it was his pagan Africa where pleasure was the whole of life, and one lived only for the lusts of the flesh. And the race of fabulous princesses—they were not dead, those ladies: they were ever waiting for the well-beloved in the palaces at Carthage. Yes, the scholar of Madaura lived wonderful hours, dreaming thus of love between the pages of the poets. These young dreams before love comes are more bewitching than love itself: a whole unknown world suddenly discovered and entered with a quivering joy of discovery at each step. The unused strength of illusion appears inexhaustible, space becomes deeper and the heart more strong….
A long time afterwards, when, recovered from all that, Augustin speaks to us of the Divine love, he will know fully the infinite value of it from having gone through all the painful entrancements of the other. And he will say to us, with the sureness of experience: "The pleasure of the human heart in the light of truth and the abundance of wisdom—yea, the pleasure of the human heart, of the faithful heart, and of the heart which is holy, stands alone. You will find nothing in any voluptuousness fit to be compared to it. I say not that this other pleasure is less, for that which is called less hath only to increase to become equal. No, I shall not say that all other pleasure is less. No comparison can be made. It is another kind, it is another reality."
VI
THE HOLIDAYS AT THAGASTE
In the city of Apuleius, the Christian Monnica's son became simply a pagan. He was near his sixteenth year: the awkward time of early virility was beginning for him. Prepared at Madaura, it suddenly burst out at Thagaste.
Augustin came back to his parents, no doubt during the vacation. But this vacation lasted perhaps a whole year. He had come to the end of his juvenile studies. The grammarians at Madaura could teach him nothing more. To round off his acquirements, it would be necessary to attend the lectures of some well-known rhetorician. Now there were very good rhetoricians only at Carthage. Besides, it was a fashion, and point of honour, for Numidian families to send their sons to finish their education in the provincial capital. Patricius was most eager to do this for his son, who at Madaura had shewn himself a very brilliant pupil and ought not therefore to be pulled up half-way down the course. But the life of a student cost a good deal, and Patricius had no money. His affairs were always muddled. He was obliged to wait for the rents from his farms, to grind down his tenants, and, ultimately, despairing of any other way out of it, to ask for an advance of money from a rich patron. That needed time and diplomacy.
Days and months went by, and Augustin, with nothing to do, joined in with easily-made friends and gave himself up to the pleasures of his time of life, like all the young townsmen of Thagaste—pleasures rather rough and little various, such as were to be got in a little free-town of those days, and as they have remained for the natives of to-day, whether they live a town or country life. To hunt, to ride horseback, to play at games of chance, to drink, eat, and make love—they wanted nothing beyond that. When Augustin in his Confessions accuses himself of his youthful escapades he uses the most scathing language. He speaks of them with horror and disgust. Once more we are tempted to believe that he exaggerates through an excess of Christian remorse. There are even some who, put on their guard by this vehement tone, have questioned the historical value of the Confessions. They argue that when the Bishop of Hippo wrote these things his views and feelings had altered. He could no longer judge with the same eye and in the same spirit the happenings of his youth. All this is only too certain: when he wrote, it was as a Christian he judged himself, and not as a cold historian who refuses to go beyond the brutal fact. He tried to unravel the origin and to trace the consequences of the humblest of his actions, because this is of the highest importance for salvation. But however severe his judgment may be, it does not impair the reality of the fact itself. Moreover, in natures like his, acts which others would hardly think of have a vibration out of all proportion with the act itself. The evil of sin depends upon the consciousness of the sin and the pleasure taken in it. Augustin was very intelligent and very sensual.