[92] So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius,
with an expression changed in some ways from the original and on the
whole graver. The petulant, boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more
like that "Lord, of terrible aspect," who stood at Dante's bedside
and wept, or had at least grown to the manly earnestness of the Eros
of Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book,
this episode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of
meditation, already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect
imaginative love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless
and clean--an ideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts,
though he valued it at various times in different degrees. The human
body in its beauty, as the highest potency of all the beauty of
material objects, seemed to him just then to be matter no longer,
but, having taken celestial fire, to assert itself as indeed the
true, though visible, [93] soul or spirit in things. In contrast
with that ideal, in all the pure brilliancy, and as it were in the
happy light, of youth and morning and the springtide, men's actual
loves, with which at many points the book brings one into close
contact, might appear to him, like the general tenor of their lives,
to be somewhat mean and sordid. The hiddenness of perfect things: a
shrinking mysticism, a sentiment of diffidence like that expressed in
Psyche's so tremulous hope concerning the child to be born of the
husband she had never yet seen--"in the face of this little child, at
the least, shall I apprehend thine"--in hoc saltem parvulo cognoscam
faciem tuam: the fatality which seems to haunt any signal+ beauty,
whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something illicit
and isolating: the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the
vulgar:--these were some of the impressions, forming, as they do, a
constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience, from Medusa