the speaker carried him away, and the discourse broke off suddenly.
Its singular intimations, however, were sufficient to throw back on
this strange evening, in all its detail--the dance, the readings, the
distant fire--a kind of allegoric expression: gave it the character
of one of those famous Platonic figures or apologues which had then
been in fact under discussion. When Marius recalled its
circumstances he seemed to hear once more that voice of genuine
conviction, pleading, from amidst a [90] scene at best of elegant
frivolity, for so boldly mystical a view of man and his position in
the world. For a moment, but only for a moment, as he listened, the
trees had seemed, as of old, to be growing "close against the sky."
Yes! the reception of theory, of hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a
great deal on temperament. They were, so to speak, mere equivalents
of temperament. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth:
that was the assumption which the experience of Apuleius had
suggested to him: it was what, in different forms, certain persons in
every age had instinctively supposed: they would be glad to find
their supposition accredited by the authority of a grave philosophy.
Marius, however, yearning not less than they, in that hard world of
Rome, and below its unpeopled sky, for the trace of some celestial
wing across it, must still object that they assumed the thing with
too much facility, too much of self-complacency. And his second
thought was, that to indulge but for an hour fantasies, fantastic
visions of that sort, only left the actual world more lonely than
ever. For him certainly, and for his solace, the little godship for
whom the rude countryman, an unconscious Platonist, trimmed his
twinkling lamp, would never slip from the bark of these immemorial
olive-trees.--No! not even in the wildest moonlight. For himself, it
was clear, he must still hold by what his eyes really saw. Only, he
had to concede also, that [91] the very boldness of such theory bore