t was for the especial
guidance of his son Commodus that he had permitted himself to break
out, here [46] and there, into reflections upon what was passing, into
conversations with the reader. And then, as though he were put off his
guard in this way, there had escaped into the heavy matter-of-fact, of
which the main portion was composed, morsels of his conversation with
himself. It was the romance of a soul (to be traced only in hints,
wayside notes, quotations from older masters), as it were in lifelong,
and often baffled search after some vanished or elusive golden fleece,
or Hesperidean fruit-trees, or some mysterious light of doctrine, ever
retreating before him. A man, he had seemed to Marius from the first,
of two lives, as we say. Of what nature, he had sometimes wondered, on
the day, for instance, when he had interrupted the emperor's musings in
the empty palace, might be that placid inward guest or inhabitant, who
from amid the pre-occupations of the man of practical affairs looked
out, as if surprised, at the things and faces around. Here, then,
under the tame surface of what was meant for a life of business, Marius
discovered, welcoming a brother, the spontaneous self-revelation of a
soul as delicate as his own,--a soul for which conversation with itself
was a necessity of existence. Marius, indeed, had always suspected
that the sense of such necessity was a peculiarity of his. But here,
certainly, was another, in this respect like himself; and again he
seemed to detect the advent of some [47] new or changed spirit into the
world, mystic, inward, hardly to be satisfied with that wholly external
and objective habit of life, which had been sufficient for the old
classic soul. His purely literary curiosity was greatly stimulated by
this example of a book of self-portraiture. It was in fact the position
of the modern essayist,--creature of efforts rather than of
achievements, in the matter of apprehending truth, but at least
conscious of lights by the way, which he must needs record,
acknowledge. What seemed to underlie that position was the desire to
make the most of every experience that might come, outwardly or from
within: to perpetuate, to display, what was so fleeting, in a kind of
instinctive, pathetic protest against the imperial writer's own
theory--that theory of the "perpetual flux" of all things--to Marius
himself, so plausible from of old.

There was, besides, a special moral or doctrinal s