Hypatia. or New Foes with an Old Face

Orestes smiled.

‘I certainly can have no objection to so good a purpose. But do you not think that the battle between the gladiators and the Libyans will have done that sufficiently beforehand? I can conceive nothing more fit for that end, unless it be Nero’s method of sending his guards among the spectators themselves, and throwing them down to the wild beasts in the arena. How thoroughly purified by pity and terror must every worthy shopkeeper have been, when he sat uncertain whether he might not follow his fat wife into the claws of the nearest lion!’

‘You are pleased to be witty, sir,’ said Hypatia, hardly able to conceal her disgust.

‘My dearest bride elect, I only meant the most harmless of reductiones ad absurdum of an abstract canon of Aristotle, with which I, who am a Platonist after my mistress’s model, do not happen to agree. But do, I beseech you, be ruled, not by me, but by your own wisdom. You cannot bring the people to appreciate your designs at the first sight. You are too wise, too pure, too lofty, too far-sighted for them. And therefore you must get power to compel them. Julian, after all, found it necessary to compel—if he had lived seven years more he would have found it necessary to persecute.’

‘The gods forbid that—that such a necessity should ever arise here.’

‘The only way to avoid it, believe me, is to allure and to indulge. After all, it is for their good.’

‘True,’ sighed Hypatia. ‘Have your way, sir.’

‘Believe me, you shall have yours in turn. I ask you to be ruled by me now, only that you may be in a position to rule me and Africa hereafter.’

‘And such an Africa! Well, if they are born low and earthly, they must, I suppose, he treated as such; and the fault of such a necessity is Nature’s, and not ours.—Yet it is most degrading!—But still, if the only method by which the philosophic few can assume their rights, as the divinely-appointed rulers of the world, is by indulging those lower beings whom they govern for their good—why, be it so. It is no worse necessity than many another which the servant of the gods must endure in days like these.’

‘Ah,’ said Orestes, refusing to hear the sigh, or to see the bitterness of the lip which accompanied the speech—‘now Hypatia is herself again; and my counsellor, and giver of deep and celestial reasons for all things at which poor I can only snatch and guess by vulpine cunning. So now for our lighter entertainment. What shall it be?’

‘What you will, provided it be not, as most such are, unfit for the eyes of modest women. I have no skill in catering for folly.’

‘A pantomime, then? We may make that as grand and as significant as we will, and expend too on it all our treasures in the way of gewgaws and wild beasts.’

‘As you like.’

‘Just consider, too, what a scope for mythologic learning a pantomime affords. Why not have a triumph of some deity? Could I commit myself more boldly to the service of the gods! Now—who shall it be?’

‘Pallas—unless, as I suppose, she is too modest and too sober for your Alexandrians?’

‘Yes—it does not seem to me that she would be appreciated—at all events for the present. Why not try Aphrodite? Christians as well as Pagans will thoroughly understand her; and I know no one who would not degrade the virgin goddess by representing her, except a certain lady, who has already, I hope, consented to sit in that very character, by the side of her too much honoured slave; and one Pallas is enough at a time in any theatre.’

Hypatia shuddered. He took it all for granted, then—and claimed her conditional promise to the uttermost. Was there no escape? She longed to spring up and rush away, into the streets, into the desert—anything to break the hideous net which she had wound around herself. And yet—was it not the cause of the gods—the one object of her life? And after all, if he the hateful was to be her emperor, she at least was to be an empress; and do what she would—and half in irony, and half in the attempt to hurl herself perforce into that which she knew that she must go through, and forget misery in activity, she answered as cheerfully as she could.

‘Then, my goddess, thou must wait the pleasure of these base ones! At least the young Apollo will have charms even for them.’

‘Ah, but who will represent him? This puny generation does not produce such figures as Pylades and Bathyllus—except among those Goths. Besides, Apollo must have golden hair; and our Greek race has intermixed itself so shamefully with these Egyptians, that our stage-troop is as dark as Andromeda, and we should have to apply again to those accursed Goths, who have nearly’ (with a bow) ‘all the beauty, and nearly all the money and the power, and will, I suspect, have the rest of it before I am safe out of this wicked world, because they have not nearly, but quite, all the courage. Now—Shall we ask a Goth to dance Apollo? for we can get no one else.’

Hypatia smiled in spite of herself at the notion. ‘That would be too shameful! I must forego the god of light himself, if I am to see him in the person of a clumsy barbarian.’

‘Then why not try my despised and rejected Aphrodite? Suppose we had her triumph, finishing with a dance of Venus Anadyomene. Surely that is a graceful myth enough.’

‘As a myth; but on the stage in reality?’

‘Not worse than what this Christian city has been looking at for many a year. We shall not run any danger of corrupting morality, be sure.’

Hypatia blushed.

‘Then you must not ask for my help.’

‘Or for your presence at the spectacle? For that be sure is a necessary point. You are too great a person, my dearest madam, in the eyes of these good folks to be allowed to absent yourself on such an occasion. If my little stratagem succeeds, it will be half owing to the fact of the people knowing that in crowning me, they crown Hypatia.... Come now—do you not see that as you must needs be present at their harmless scrap of mythology, taken from the authentic and undoubted histories of those very gods whose worship we intend to restore, you will consult your own comfort most in agreeing to it cheerfully, and in lending me your wisdom towards arranging it? Just conceive now, a triumph of Aphrodite, entering preceded by wild beasts led in chains by Cupids, the white elephant and all—what a field for the plastic art! You might have a thousand groupings, dispersions, regroupings, in as perfect bas-relief style as those of any Sophoclean drama. Allow me only to take this paper and pen—’

And he began sketching rapidly group after group.

‘Not so ugly, surely?’

‘They are very beautiful, I cannot deny,’ said poor Hypatia.

‘Ah, sweetest Empress! you forget sometimes that I, too, world-worm as I am, am a Greek, with as intense a love of the beautiful as even you yourself have. Do not fancy that every violation of correct taste does not torture me as keenly as it does you. Some day, I hope, you will have learned to pity and to excuse the wretched compromise between that which ought to be and that which can be, in which we hapless statesmen must struggle on, half-stunted, and wholly misunderstood—Ah, well! Look, now, at these fauns and dryads among the shrubs upon the stage, pausing in startled wonder at the first blast of music which proclaims the exit of the goddess from her temple.’

‘The temple? Why, where are you going to exhibit?’

‘In the Theatre, of course. Where else pantomimes?’

‘But will the spectators have time to move all the way from the Amphitheatre after that—those—’

‘The Amphitheatre? We shall exhibit the Libyans, too, in the Theatre.’

‘Combats in the Theatre sacred to Dionusos?’

‘My dear lady’—penitently—‘I know it is an offence against all the laws of the drama.’

‘Oh, worse than that! Consider what an impiety toward the god, to desecrate his altar with bloodshed?’

‘Fairest devotee, recollect that, after all, I may fairly borrow Dionusos’s altar in this my extreme need; for I saved its very existence for him, by preventing the magistrates from filling up the whole orchestra with benches for the patricians, after the barbarous Roman fashion. And besides, what possible sort of representation, or misrepresentation, has not been exhibited in every theatre of the empire for the last four hundred years? Have we not had tumblers, conjurers, allegories, martyrdoms, marriages, elephants on the tight-rope, learned horses, and learned asses too, if we may trust Apuleius of Madaura; with a good many other spectacles of which we must not speak in the presence of a vestal? It is an age of execrable taste, and we must act accordingly.’

‘Ah!’ answered Hypatia; ‘the first step in the downward career of the drama began when the successors of Alexander dared to profane theatres which had re-echoed the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides by degrading the altar of Dionusos into a stage for pantomimes!’

‘Which your pure mind must, doubtless, consider not so very much better than a little fighting. But, after all, the Ptolemies could not do otherwise. You can only have Sophoclean dramas in a Sophoclean age; and theirs was no more of one than ours is, and so the drama died a natural death; and when that happens to man or thing, you may weep over it if you will, but you must, after all, bury it, and get something else in its place—except, of course, the worship of the gods.’

‘I am glad that you except that, at least,’ said Hypatia, somewhat bitterly. ‘But why not use the Amphitheatre for both spectacles?’

‘What can I do? I am over head and ears in debt already; and the Amphitheatre is half in ruins, thanks to that fanatic edict of the late emperor’s against gladiators. There is no time or money for repairing it; and besides, how pitiful a poor hundred of combatants will look in an arena built to hold two thousand! Consider, my dearest lady, in what fallen times we live!’

‘I do, indeed!’ said Hypatia. ‘But I will not see the altar polluted by blood. It is the desecration which it has undergone already which has provoked the god to withdraw the poetic inspiration.’

‘I do not doubt the fact. Some curse from Heaven, certainly, has fallen on our poets, to judge by their exceeding badness. Indeed, I am inclined to attribute the insane vagaries of the water-drinking monks and nuns, like those of the Argive women, to the same celestial anger. But I will see that the sanctity of the altar is preserved, by confining the combat to the stage. And as for the pantomime which will follow, if you would only fall in with my fancy of the triumph of Aphrodite, Dionusos would hardly refuse his altar for the glorification of his own lady-love.’

‘Ah—that myth is a late, and in my opinion a degraded one.’

‘Be it so; but recollect, that another myth makes her, and not without reason, the mother of all living beings. Be sure that Dionusos will have no objection, or any other god either, to allow her to make her children feel her conquering might; for they all know well enough, that if we can once get her well worshipped here, all Olympus will follow in her train.’

‘That was spoken of the celestial Aphrodite, whose symbol is the tortoise, the emblem of domestic modesty and chastity: not of that baser Pandemic one.’

‘Then we will take care to make the people aware of whom they are admiring by exhibiting in the triumph whole legions of tortoises: and you yourself shall write the chant, while I will see that the chorus is worthy of what it has to sing. No mere squeaking double flute and a pair of boys: but a whole army of cyclops and graces, with such trebles and such bass-voices! It shall make Cyril’s ears tingle in his palace!’

‘The chant! A noble office for me, truly! That is the very part of the absurd spectacle to which you used to say the people never dreamed of attending. All which is worth settling you seemed to have settled for yourself before you deigned to consult me.’

‘I said so? Surely you must mistake. But if any hired poetaster’s chant do pass unheeded, what has that to do with Hypatia’s eloquence and science, glowing with the treble inspiration of Athene, Phoebus, and Dionusos? And as for having arranged beforehand—my adorable mistress, what more delicate compliment could I have paid you?’

‘I cannot say that it seems to me to be one.’

‘How? After saving you every trouble which I could, and racking my overburdened wits for stage effects and properties, have I not brought hither the darling children of my own brain, and laid them down ruthlessly, for life or death, before the judgment-seat of your lofty and unsparing criticism?’

Hypatia felt herself tricked: but there was no escape now.

‘And who, pray, is to disgrace herself and me, as Venus Anadyomene?’

‘Ah! that is the most exquisite article in all my bill of fare! What if the kind gods have enabled me to exact a promise from—whom, think you?’

‘What care I? How can I tell?’ asked Hypatia, who suspected and dreaded that she could tell.

‘Pelagia herself!’

Hypatia rose angrily.

‘This, sir, at least, is too much! It was not enough for you, it seems, to claim, or rather to take for granted, so imperiously, so mercilessly, a conditional promise—weakly, weakly made, in the vain hope that you would help forward aspirations of mine which you have let lie fallow for months—in which I do not believe that you sympathise now!—It was not enough for you to declare yourself publicly yesterday a Christian, and to come hither this morning to flatter me into the belief that you will dare, ten days hence, to restore the worship of the gods whom you have abjured!—It was not enough to plan without me all those movements in which you told me I was to be your fellow-counsellor—the very condition which you yourself offered!—It was not enough for you to command me to sit in that theatre, as your bait, your puppet, your victim, blushing and shuddering at sights unfit for the eyes of gods and men:—but, over and above all this, I must assist in the renewed triumph of a woman who has laughed down my teaching, seduced away my scholars, braved me in my very lecture-room—who for four years has done more than even Cyril himself to destroy all the virtue and truth which I have toiled to sow—and toiled in vain! Oh, beloved gods! where will end the tortures through which your martyr must witness for you to a fallen race?’

And, in spite of all her pride, and of Orestes’s presence, her eyes filled with scalding tears.

Orestes’s eyes had sunk before the vehemence of her just passion; but as she added the last sentence in a softer and sadder tone, he raised them again, with a look of sorrow and entreaty as his heart whispered—

‘Fool!—fanatic! But she is too beautiful! Win her I must and will!’

‘Ah! dearest, noblest Hypatia! What have I done? Unthinking fool that I was! In the wish to save you trouble—In the hope that I could show you, by the aptness of my own plans, that my practical statesmanship was not altogether an unworthy helpmate for your loftier wisdom—wretch that I am, I have offended you; and I have ruined the cause of those very gods for whom, I swear, I am as ready to sacrifice myself as ever you can be!’

The last sentence had the effect which it was meant to have.

‘Ruined the cause of the gods?’ asked she, in a startled tone.

‘Is it not ruined without your help? And what am I to understand from your words but that—hapless man that I am!—you leave me and them henceforth to our own unassisted strength?’

‘The unassisted strength of the gods is omnipotence.’

‘Be it so. But—why is Cyril, and not Hypatia, master of the masses of Alexandria this day? Why but because he and his have fought, and suffered, and died too, many a hundred of them, for their god, omnipotent as they believe him to be? Why are the old gods forgotten; my fairest logician?—for forgotten they are.’

Hypatia trembled from head to foot, and Orestes went on more blandly than ever.

‘I will not ask an answer to that question of mine. All I entreat is forgiveness for—what for I know not: but I have sinned, and that is enough for me. What if I have been too confident—too hasty? Are you not the price for which I strain? And will not the preciousness of the victor’s wreath excuse some impatience in the struggle for it? Hypatia has forgotten who and what the gods have made her—she has not even consulted her own mirror, when she blames one of her innumerable adorers for a forwardness which ought to be rather imputed to him as a virtue.’

And Orestes stole meekly such a glance of adoration, that Hypatia blushed, and turned her face away.... After all, she was woman. And she was a fanatic.... And she was to be an empress.... And Orestes’s voice was as melodious, and his manner as graceful as ever charmed the heart of woman.

‘But Pelagia?’ she said, at last, recovering herself.

‘Would that I had never seen the creature! But, after all, I really fancied that in doing what I have done I should gratify you.’

‘Me?’

‘Surely if revenge be sweet, as they say, it could hardly find a more delicate satisfaction than in degradation of one who—’

‘Revenge, sir? Do you dream that I am capable of so base a passion?’

‘I? Pallas forbid!’ said Orestes, finding himself on the wrong path again. ‘But recollect that the allowing this spectacle to take place might rid you for ever of an unpleasant—I will not say rival.’

‘How, then?’

‘Will not her reappearance on the stage, after all her proud professions of contempt for it, do something towards reducing her in the eyes of this scandalous little town to her true and native level? She will hardly dare thenceforth to go about parading herself as the consort of a god-descended hero, or thrusting herself unbidden into Hypatia’s presence, as if she were the daughter of a consul.’

‘But I cannot—I cannot allow it even to her. After all, Orestes, she is a woman. And can I, philosopher as I am, help to degrade her even one step lower than she lies already?’

Hypatia had all but said ‘a woman even as I am’: but Neo-Platonic philosophy taught her better; and she checked the hasty assertion of anything like a common sex or common humanity between two beings so antipodal.

‘Ah’ rejoined Orestes, ‘that unlucky word degrade! Unthinking that I was, to use it, forgetting that she herself will be no more degraded in her own eyes, or any one’s else, by hearing again the plaudits of those “dear Macedonians,” on whose breath she has lived for years, than a peacock when he displays his train. Unbounded vanity and self-conceit are not unpleasant passions, after all, for their victim. After all, she is what she is, and her being so is no fault of yours. Oh, it must be! indeed it must!’

Poor Hypatia! The bait was too delicate, the tempter too wily; and yet she was ashamed to speak aloud the philosophic dogma which flashed a ray of comfort and resignation through her mind, and reminded her that after all there was no harm in allowing lower natures to develop themselves freely in that direction which Nature had appointed for them, and in which only they could fulfil the laws of their being, as necessary varieties in the manifold whole of the universe. So she cut the interview short with—

‘If it must be, then.... I will now retire, and write the ode. Only, I refuse to have any communication whatsoever with—I am ashamed of even mentioning her name. I will send the ode to you, and she must adapt her dance to it as best she can. By her taste, or fancy rather, I will not be ruled.’

‘And I,’ said Orestes, with a profusion of thanks, ‘will retire to rack my faculties over the “dispositions.” On this day week we exhibit—and conquer! Farewell, queen of wisdom! Your philosophy never shows to better advantage than when you thus wisely and gracefully subordinate that which is beautiful in itself to that which is beautiful relatively and practically.’

He departed; and Hypatia, half dreading her own thoughts, sat down at once to labour at the ode. Certainly it was a magnificent subject. What etymologies, cosmogonies, allegories, myths, symbolisms, between all heaven and earth, might she not introduce—if she could but banish that figure of Pelagia dancing to it all, which would not be banished, but hovered, like a spectre, in the background of all her imaginations. She became quite angry, first with Pelagia, then with herself, for being weak enough to think of her. Was it not positive defilement of her mind to be haunted by the image of so defiled a being? She would purify her thoughts by prayer and meditation. But to whom of all the gods should she address herself? To her chosen favourite, Athene? She who had promised to be present at that spectacle? Oh, how weak she had been to yield! And yet she had been snared into it. Snared—there was no doubt of it—by the very man whom she had fancied that she could guide and mould to her own purposes. He had guided and moulded her now against her self-respect, her compassion, her innate sense of right. Already she was his tool. True, she had submitted to be so for a great purpose. But suppose she had to submit again hereafter—always henceforth? And what made the thought more poignant was, her knowledge that he was right; that he knew what to do, and how to do it. She could not help admiring him for his address, his quickness, his clear practical insight: and yet she despised, mistrusted, all but hated him. But what if his were the very qualities which were destined to succeed? What if her purer and loftier aims, her resolutions—now, alas! broken—never to act but on the deepest and holiest principles and by the most sacred means, were destined never to exert themselves in practice, except conjointly with miserable stratagems and cajoleries such as these? What if statecrafts and not philosophy and religion, were the appointed rulers of mankind? Hideous thought! And yet—she who had all her life tried to be self-dependent, originative, to face and crush the hostile mob of circumstance and custom, and do battle single-handed with Christianity and a fallen age—how was it that in her first important and critical opportunity of action she had been dumb, irresolute, passive, the victim, at last, of the very corruption which she was to exterminate? She did not know yet that those who have no other means for regenerating a corrupted time than dogmatic pedantries concerning the dead and unreturning past, must end, in practice, by borrowing insincerely, and using clumsily, the very weapons of that novel age which they deprecate, and ‘sewing new cloth into old garments,’ till the rent become patent and incurable. But in the meanwhile, such meditations as these drove from her mind for that day both Athene, and the ode, and philosophy, and all things but—Pelagia the wanton.

In the meanwhile, Alexandrian politics flowed onward in their usual pure and quiet course. The public buildings were placarded with the news of Heraclian’s victory; and groups of loungers expressed, loudly enough, their utter indifference as to who might rule at Rome—or even at Byzantium. Let Heraclian or Honorius be emperor, the capitals must be fed; and while the Alexandrian wheat-trade was uninjured, what matter who received the tribute? Certainly, as some friends of Orestes found means to suggest, it might not be a bad thing for Egypt, if she could keep the tribute in her own treasury, instead of sending it to Rome without any adequate return, save the presence of an expensive army.... Alexandria had been once the metropolis of an independent empire.... Why not again? Then came enormous largesses of corn, proving, more satisfactorily to the mob than to the shipowners, that Egyptian wheat was better employed at home than abroad. Nay, there were even rumours of a general amnesty for all prisoners; and as, of course, every evil-doer had a kind of friend, who considered him an injured martyr, all parties were well content, on their own accounts at least, with such a move.

And so Orestes’s bubble swelled, and grew, and glittered every day with fresh prismatic radiance; while Hypatia sat at home, with a heavy heart, writing her ode to Venus Urania, and submitting to Orestes’s daily visits.

One cloud, indeed, not without squalls of wind and rain, disfigured that sky which the Prefect had invested with such serenity by the simple expedient, well known to politicians, of painting it bright blue, since it would not assume that colour of its own accord. For, a day or two after Ammonius’s execution, the Prefect’s guards informed him that the corpse of the crucified man, with the cross on which it hung, had vanished. The Nitrian monks had come down in a body, and carried them off before the very eyes of the sentinels. Orestes knew well enough that the fellows must have been bribed to allow the theft; but he dare not say so to men on whose good humour his very life might depend; so, stomaching the affront as best he could, he vowed fresh vengeance against Cyril, and went on his way. But, behold!—within four-and-twenty hours of the theft, a procession of all the rascality, followed by all the piety, of Alexandria,—monks from Nitria counted by the thousand,—priests, deacons, archdeacons, Cyril himself, in full pontificals, and borne aloft in the midst, upon a splendid bier, the missing corpse, its nail-pierced hands and feet left uncovered for the pitying gaze of the Church.