Page:The Golden Ass of Apuleius.djvu/21

 original. Here, indeed, we have a fragment of autobiography. When in 158, at the dramatic moment of an adventurous career, Apuleius delivered his Apology—pro se de magia—before Claudius Maximus, he confessed that he had been initiated into all the sacred rites of Greece, and had squandered the better part of a comfortable fortune in mysticism and the grand tour. The main accusation was that he had won his wife—a respectable and wealthy widow—by magic arts. He was also charged with other acts of witchcraft and enchantment. Thattus, it was said, and a free-born woman had swooned in his presence: a piece of superstition which reminds you of Cotton Mather. But, replied Apuleius, with excellent humour and a scepticism worthy of Reginald Scot, they were epileptics, who could stand in the presence of none save a magician. In brief, we cannot appreciate The Golden Ass, until we realise the modern spirit of curiosity which possessed its author. The lecturer's fame well-nigh outran the writer's. Apuleius travelled the length of civilised Africa with his orations, as the popular lecturer of to-day invades America; and the Majesty of Æsculapius, a favourite subject, was an excellent occasion for his familiar mysticism. He had been as intimately at home in the nineteenth century as in the second. Were he alive to-day Paris would have been his field, and he the undisputed master of Decadence and Symbolism. The comparison is close at all points. Would he not have delighted in the Black Mass, as celebrated on the heights of Mont Parnasse? Like too many among the makers of modern French literature he was an alien writing an alien tongue. His curiosity of diction, his unfailing