Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/74

 all things created, iv. 33; upon divine dispensation, v. 8; upon Nature's gradual evolution, ix. 9; on human fellowship, xi. 8. These and others, such as reflections upon lives lived fruitlessly or governed by a ruling passion (iv. 32, 48; vi. 47; xii. 27) are hardly to be viewed as personal reminders; rather they are admonitory and consolatory thoughts, statements of religious belief, criticisms upon the vanity of human wishes, all such as might be elements of a book of wholesome doctrine.

To the two distinct kinds of material corresponds broadly a contrast of style. There are, on the one hand, the unstudied notes, the aides-mémoire or brief hints, which Marcus himself compares to a surgeon's 'first-aid' equipment, aphorisms resembling the well-known Prescriptions of Hippocrates. These are often bald and simple in shape. Much the larger part, on the other hand, is laboured with care, worked up into something approaching artistic finish. The style is always notably parsimonious, free from rhetorical artifice and, except for an occasional alliteration, brief, succinct, and severe. An extreme case will illustrate my meaning. The chapter upon the Age of the Emperor Augustus (viii. 31) is the quintessence of this studied manner; the effect upon a reader who recalls the long reign, involuntarily contrasting its outward success as recorded on the Monument of Ancyra with its domestic failure, the chagrin and sorrow of the solitary ruler, is overwhelming. Very powerful too is the brief corollary; the thought of Rome's street of tombs, and the melancholy epigram: 'The last of his line'.

Samuel Johnson once said: 'I fancy mankind may come in time to write all aphoristically, except in narrative, grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.' Is not much of the Meditations an attempt to create a novel form of literature and to find the proper vehicle for its lxvi