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THE WHITE BIRD IN THE MARKETPLACE: ANIMULA VAGULA, ANIMA CHRISTIANA By Gerald Monsman (Duke University) One is tempted to observe that the nineteenth century was preeminently the age of the elegy—of "Adonais," of In Memoriam, of "Thyrsis," and of "Ave Atque Vale," to name several of the greatest. Certainly this elegiac mode of sorrow and regret, its melancholy or mournfully poetic temper, is expressed in and through the prose of Pater's Marius also. Consider, for example, the remarkable number of deaths Marius encounters—those of his parents, of his countrymen by plague or violence, of children and the aged, of the martyrs, of animals even. "'We are constructed for suffering! What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we care to note them, as we go— a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries! Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentum mortalia tangunt,'" cries Marius. Indeed, for Pater the elegiac voice proclaims one's life as lost even before it is lived, insofar as the loss of every moment engenders "that continual vanishing away, that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves. Such thoughts seem desolate at first; at times all the bitterness of life seems concentrated in them. They bring the image of one washed out beyond the bar in a sea at ebb, losing even his personality, as the elements of which he is composed pass into new combinations. Struggling,as he must, to save himself, it is himself that he loses at every moment." Bewildered and overwhelmed by the flux of phenomena, Pater and Pater's hero look wistfully toward some celestial revelation that can answer temporal decay with eternal permanence. At the conclusion of the novel's third part, Marius experiences in the Sabine hills his well-known sense of the material world as less real than some higher, divine reality: Might not that whole material world . . . be . . . but ... a creation of that perpetual mind, wherein he too became conscious, for an hour, a day, or for so many years? . . . And he had apprehended to-day, in the special clearness of one privileged hour, that in which the experiences he most valued might as it were take refuge—birds of passage as they were for himself, in and by himself, soon out of sight or with broken wing; yet not really lost, after all, on their way to the enduring light, in which the fair hours of life would present themselves as living creatures for ever before the perpetual observer. In its most optimistic nineteenth-century form, Browning (thinking of his lost wife Elizabeth) has Abt Vogler express this eternal conservation of the fair hours of life : There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round. All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist . . . When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 41 42 Vogler'β affirmation of time's broken arcs by eternity's perfect round is surely also for Pater the meaning of Marius' mystic experience in the hills outside of Rome. Yet the thin bat-squeak of skepticism is never far removed from Pater's professions of faith and vision. After the death of Marius' friend Flavian, Pater quotes as epigraph to the following chapter the lines addressed to his soul by the Emperor Hadrian as he lay dying: "Elusive, seductive little soul,/ Guest and companion of the body,/ Where will you go now,/ Pale, stiff, and naked?" Hadrian's question leaves in doubt, at this point in the novel, the possiblity of any harmonious completion by eternity of life's discords. Marius initially had begun with a somewhat more optimistic image of the enfranchised soul: "One by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springs for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul...

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