Imaginary LIves (2 page)

“Monsieur RENATUS DES CARTES: Nobilis Gallus, Perroni Dominus, summus Mathematicus et Philosophus, natus turonum, pridie Calendas Apriles 1596. Denatus Holmiæ, Calendus Februarii, 1650. (I find this inscription on his portrait by C. V. Dalen.) How did he spend his youth, and by what means become so learned? He has given the world knowledge of these matters in his treatise
De la
Method
. The Society de Jesus prides itself with having had the honour of his education. For a number of years he lived at Egmont near The Hague, and several of his books are dated from there. He was far too wise a man to encumber himself with a wife, but being nevertheless a man with a man’s desires and appetites, he took for a companion a handsome, well made woman whom he loved, and who bore him several children (two or three, I believe). It would be very surprising had the offspring of such a father not received excellent educations. So eminently learned was he that all the scholars of the day visited him, many asking to see his instruments (in those days the science of mathematics was thought to consist largely in a knowledge of instruments). Then the great savant would pull out a little drawer in his table and show his guests a compass with one arm broken, a twisted scrap of paper serving in place of the missing part.” Aubrey clearly understood this phase of his work. He was perfectly conscious of what he did. Do not think he mistook the value of Hobbes or Descartes as philosophers. He was simply not interested there. He tells us plainly enough that Descartes himself has explained his is and systems to the world. Aubrey does not ignore the fact that Harvey discovered the principle of the blood’s circulation, but he prefers to note down how this great man strolled abroad in his nightshirt to walk off the insomnia, that he was a faulty penman and that the most celebrated doctors in London would not have given sixpence for any of his prescriptions.

Aubrey is sure he is startling us when he describes Francis Bacon’s eye as being fine, hazel, and quick like a viper’s. But Aubrey was not the artist that Holbein was. He never knew how to fix an individual forever in our mind, by giving us his special traits against a background of resemblances to the average or the ideal. He put life in the eye, the nose, the leg or the pout of his models; he could not animate the face. Old Hokusai saw very well the necessity of drawing generalities so that they should seem to be individual. Aubrey failed to penetrate as deep as that. Were Boswell’s book confined to ten pages it would be the artistic masterpiece so long awaited. Doctor Johnson’s good taste guided him safely through the vulgar and the commonplace.

Boswell has slighted the bizarre violence that gave Johnson a quality unique in all the world. One might print a
Scientia Johnsoniana
with an index Boswell would not have had the aesthetic courage to choose from.

As an art, biography is founded upon choice; truth need not be its preoccupation, for out of a chaos of human traits it can create. To create the world, said Leibnitz, God chose the best from the possible. So, like some inferior deity, biography should select unique individuals from the realm of human material available. And it should fail in its art no farther than God fails in His favour and mercy. In both cases instinct must be infallible.

Patient men have assembled ideas, records of events and descriptions of faces – all for the benefit of biography. In the midst of these great collections art must choose what it needs to compose a form that will be like no other form. It matters not if this form resemble something formerly created by a superior god, so long as it is unique and a genuine creation.

As a rule biographers have unfortunately considered themselves historians, thus depriving us of many admirable portraits. They have supposed the lives of great men only would interest us. Art is a stranger to such considerations. To the eyes of a painter a portrait of an unknown man, by Cranach, is as valuable as a portrait of the great Erasmus.

For the name, Erasmus, cannot make a picture inimitable. Biography should give as much worth to an obscure actor as it gives to the life of Shakespeare. Deep is the instinct compelling us to note with pleasure the shortened sterno-mastoid formation in a bust of Alexander, or the lock of hair in portraits of Napoleon. The Mona Lisa smile of which we know nothing (it is possibly a man’s face), remains forever mysterious and arresting. A grimace drawn by Hokusai leads us to profound meditation. If the art in which Boswell and Aubrey excelled is to be continued, minute records of great men or epochs or events of the past are not especially needed. With equal care must be recounted the unique existences of men – priests, criminals or nobodies.

EMPEDOCLES

Supposed God

No one knows in what manner he was born or how he came upon the earth. He appeared near the golden banks of the river Acragas, in the good city of Agrigentum, a little after the time Xerxes had the sea beaten with chains. Tradition tells only that his grandfather named him Empedocles; nothing more is known. Undoubtedly he was said to be self-conceived, for he was admittedly a god. His disciples were sure that before visiting in his glory the Sicilian lands, he had already passed through four existences, having been plant, fish, bird and girl. He wore a purple mantle with his long locks falling over it; he had a fillet of gold around his head, on his feet were brazen sandals, and he carried a garland of fleece and laurel intertwined.

By the touch of his hand he cured the sick, or, mounted on a chariot, he would recite verses in the Homeric style, with pompous accents, his head raised toward the heavens. Great troops of people followed him, prostrating themselves before him as they listened to his poems. Under bright skies shining over fields of grain, men from all parts came to Empedocles, their arms filled with offerings. He held them spellbound, singing of a divine crystal vault, the mass of fire we call the sun, and the love that envelops all like a vast sphere.

All beings, he said, are no more than disjointed fragments of this sphere of love, though hate has been insinuated into them. And that which we now call love, he contended, is our desire to unite ourselves one unto the other, to merge and be lost as we once were lost on the breast of this great sphere-god whom discord has alienated. He invoked the day when the old divinity should rise again after the transformation of souls. For, he said, the world we know is a product of hatred and its dissolution shall be the work of love. In this manner he chanted through the towns and through the fields, the brazen sandals of Laconia tinkling on his feet while a sound of cymbals went on before him. Meanwhile from Etna’s crater rose a black smoke column casting its shadow over Sicily.

Like a king of heaven, Empedocles was robed in purple and girdled with gold, while the Pythagorians wore thin linen tunics and shoes of papyrus. He knew how to drive away rheums, they said, how to heal sores and how to draw the evil from afflicted limbs. They begged him to make the storms cease, so he conjured with tempests from a crest of the hills. At Selinus he turned two streams into the bed of a third and stemmed a flood; then the people of that place adored him, raising a temple in his honour and striking coins on which his image appeared face to face with the image of Apollo.

Others pretended he was a wizard instructed by Persian magicians; that he possessed the power of necromancy and the science of those herbs which render men mad. One day as he dined with Anchitos, a madman rushed into the hail, sword upraised. Empedocles stretched out his arms, chanting the Homeric verse on the nepenthe of forgetfulness, and a spell descended over the madman until he stood there rigid, blade in air, forgetting his dementia as if he had drunk sweet poison mixed with sparkling wine.

The afflicted came to Empedocles outside the cities, where he was often surrounded by a crowd of miserable folk. Women mingled in the following and kissed the hem of his precious mantle. One of those women was called Panthea, daughter of a noble of Agrigentum. She was to have been consecrated to Artemis, but she fled the cold statue of the goddess, vowing her virginity to Empedocles. No one ever witnessed their affection, for Empedocles preserved a divine detachment, speaking always in epic meter with the dialect of Jonia, while the people of Agrigentum knew only the Dorian. All his gestures were sacred; when he met with men it was to bless or cure them. Usually he remained silent. None who followed him ever saw him sleep; they knew him only as a majestic being.

Panthea dressed in fine wool and gold, her hair arranged after the rich mode of Agrigentum, where life ran smooth. A red strophe supported her breasts and her sandals were perfumed. As for the rest of her, she was tall and fine and her colour was desirable. It is impossible to be sure that Empedocles loved her, but he pitied her. Soon a breath of Asia brought the plague to those Sicilian fields. Many were touched by the black fingers of the pest, and fallen beasts strewed the edge of the prairie where they could be seen beside the carcasses of sheep, dead with their mouths gaping toward the heavens and their ribs sticking out white and dry through their sides. Stricken by this malady, Panthea fell at Empedocles’ feet and breathed no more. Those who were near raised her stiffening limbs to bathe them with spirits and aromatics. They loosed the red strophe from her young breasts, winding a funereal band in its place.

Her mouth, lips slightly parted, was sealed by a tight bandage. Her deep eyes no longer mirrored the light.

Empedocles gazed down at her where she lay.

He took the golden circlet from his forehead and he touched her with it. He placed the garland of prophetic laurel on her breast, chanting unknown verses of the soul’s migration. And three times he commanded her to rise and to walk; then the people were filled with terror. At his third command Panthea left the kingdom of shadows, life came into her body and she rose to her feet, all swathed as she was in the cloths of the tomb. And the people saw that Empedocles had power to recall the dead.

Pysianactes, father of Panthea, now adored the new god. Long tables were spread under the trees of his estate, where a feast of wines and viands was offered. By the side of Empedocles slaves held up great torches, while heralds proclaimed him as did the solemn mystery of his own deep silence.

Suddenly, at the third watch of the night, the torches sputtered out and darkness enveloped the worshippers. Then a strong voice called, “Empedocles!” When the lights burned once more Empedocles was gone. Men never saw him again.

A frightened slave told how he had watched a red flare cut the night near Etna’s summit. At the first dull gleam of dawn the worshippers climbed the sterile slopes of the mountain. Jets of fire were still darting like tongues from the volcano’s crater.

In the porous lava on the brink of the burning abyss, they found a brazen sandal writhen by the flames.

EROSTRAT

Incendiary

With her two river harbours the city of Ephesus, birthplace of Herostratos, stretched across the mouth of the Cayster as far as Panorama Quay.

From there the shores of Samos could be seen in a misty line along the dark sea horizon. Wealthy in gold, in stuffs and in roses, Ephesus prospered now, since the Magnesians with their dogs of war and their javelineers had been vanquished on the banks of the Meander, and Miletus the Magnificent destroyed by the Persians.

Relaxed during these days of peace, Ephesus feted courtesans in the temple of Aphrodite Hetaira.

Citizens arrayed themselves in tunics of amorgine, in transparent garments of spun linen tinted violet, purple and crocodile green. They wore sarapides the colour of yellow apples or white or rose, and Egyptian fabrics in hyacinth shades, shot with flame hues and the changing tints of the sea. Their Persian calasiris were of finest crinkled tissues besprinkled with clusters of tiny golden beads.

On the banks of the Cayster between Mount Prion and another lofty cliff, stood the great temple of Artemis, built after one hundred and twenty years of labor. The porches were of ebony and cypress, the heavy supporting columns were red, and tall paintings ornamented the inner walls. The shrine room of the goddess was little and oval; in the centre, graven with lunar symbols in gold, rose a huge black cone hewn out of solid rock. The triangular altar was of this same material as were several tables, these last being pierced with holes at regular spaces to drain the blood of sacrificial victims. Beside the tables hung broad golden hilted blades of steel for slitting human throats, and the floor was strewn with bloody cloths. The black idol was carved in the form of two great breasts, hard and pointed. Such was Diana of Ephesus, her ancient divinity lost in the darkness of Egyptian tombs and Persian ritual. The treasure of the temple was secreted in a small coffer shaped like a miniature pyramid with brass-studded doors.

There, among precious rings, coins and rubies, lay the manuscript of Heraclitus, prophet of the reign of fire. With his own hands the old philosopher had deposited the scroll at the base of the pyramid while the mason builders were still at work.

The mother of Herostratos was a proud, harsh woman. His father’s identity never became known, and Herostratos finally declared he had been sired by the fire. The crescent birth mark under his left breast seemed certainly to blaze like a living flame on the night he was tortured. Those who assisted at his birth predicted his devotion to Artemis. Dark, swarthy, his face strangely lined, from childhood days he loved to walk along the towering cliffs beneath the temple. He was ineligible for the priesthood, being of uncertain race, and several times the sacerdotal college warned him away from the Naos where he lurked, watching his chance to draw back the heavy sacred veils and behold the forbidden deity. He grew to hate her. He made a secret vow to violate her shrine.

To him his own name seemed comparable with no other, while his very physical being must be superior, he thought, to the rest of humanity. He wanted fame. At first he joined a group of philosophers who professed to teach the doctrines of Heraclitus, but the secret was not theirs, he knew.