Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/121

Rh promises of this æsthetic ideal, even when working on so unusual a nature as Marius's, interrogatively. Marius's life does not set it forth with convincing power. For one thing, it is not a vital life, but a painted one; and there is an inconsequence in the series of pictures,—they do not seem to follow one another by any iron necessity. It would be foolish to complain that a life avowedly only receptive and contemplative of the beautiful is inactive. Marius does nothing except at the end. Yet, within such limits, one never sees how beauty affected Marius or developed his soul, and though he is said to have got much from companionship, one sees love operant in him very seldom, and then it is a very silent and unexpressed love. He repeats his own epitaph,—tristem neminem fecit,—and it was true; but all his life seems negative, and continually one asks, How did he really live? and gets no answer. His whole life was a meditatio mortis,—that is all that is told us.

A sense of failure, or rather of incompleteness, oppresses one at the end of the narrative. Even granting that the success Marius is said to have achieved—one is never quite sure that he did—by that exquisite