Venus, Mars, Aeneas, haunted, in contemporary shape, like ghosts of
folk one had known, the places with which he was familiar. Latin
might still seem the fittest language for oratory, sixteen hundred
years after Cicero was dead; those old Roman pontiffs, draped
grandly, sat in the stalls of the choir; Propertius made love to
Cynthia in the raiment of the foppish Amadee; they played Terence,
and it was but a play within a play. Above all, in natural,
heartfelt kinship with their own violent though refined and cunning
time, they loved every incident of soldiering; while the changes of
the year, the lights, the shadows, the flickering fires of winter,
with [38] which Gaston had first associated his companions, so full
of artificial enjoyment for the well-to-do, added themselves
pleasantly, by way of shifting background, to the spectacular effect.
It was the brilliant surface with which the untried world confronted
him. Touch it where you might, you felt the resistant force of the
solid matter of human experience--of human experience, in its strange
mixture of beauty and evil, its sorrow, its ill-assorted fates, its
pathetic acquiescence; above all, in its overpowering certainty, over
against his own world of echoes and shadows, which perhaps only
seemed to be so much as echoes or shadows.
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