II.
CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE.
(A.D. 337.)
ARGUMENT.
The Emperor Constantine at Constantinople, a few days before
his death, revolves his past life and the failure of his design for
the creation of an Imperial Church under the Emperor's sway.
He calls to mind several of the causes which have forced him with
his own hand to break up the boasted unity of his Empire: but
he suspects also the existence of some higher and hidden cause.
His career he declares to have ended in frustration; yet he
suddenly deerees a new military expedition.
A missive from the Persian King! Those kings!
Their prayers and flatteries are more rankly base
Than those of humbler flatterers. I'll not read it:
Place it, Euphorbos, by yon desk. 'Tis well:
The sea-wind curls its page but wafts me not
Its perfumed fetor. Leave me.
From the seas,
The streets, the Forum, from the Hippodrome,
From circus, bath, and columned portico,
But chiefly from the base of that huge pillar
Whereon Apollo's statue stood, now mine,
Its eastern-bending head rayed round with gold—
Say, dost thou grudge thy gift, Helopolis?—
The multitudinous murmur spreads and grows.
Wherefore? Because a life ill-spent has reached
Its four-and-sixtieth year, perhaps its last.
Give me that year when first I fought with beasts
In Nicomedia's amphitheatre;
Gallerius sent me there to slay me there:
Not less he laughed to see that panther die;
Laughed louder when I charged him with his crime.
Give me that year when first my wife—not Fausta—
That year when launching from the British shore
I ceased not till my standard, my Labarum,
Waved from the walls of Rome. When Troy had fallen
That brave and pious exile-prince, Æneas,
Presaged the site of Rome: next, Romulus
Laid the first stone: Augustus laid the second:
I laid the last: I would have crowned their work:—
Rome from her flung me for my northern birth:
Eastward I turned.
Three empires to the ground
I trod. My warrant! Unauthentic they:
Their ruling was misrule. Huge, barbarous hosts
I hurled successive back o'er frozen floods:
Yet these, the labours of my sword, were naught:
The brain it was that laboured. I have written
The laws that bind a province in one night:
Such tasks have their revenge. O for a draught
Brimmed from the beaming beaker of my youth
Though all Medea's poisons drugged its wave,
And all the sighs by sad Cocytus heard
O'er-swept its purple margin! Give me youth!
At times I feel as if this total being
That once o'er-strode the subject world of man,
This body and soul insensibly had shrunk
As shrinks the sculptor's model of wet clay
In sunshine, unobserved by him who shaped it
Till some chance-comer laughs—
I touch once more dead times: their touch is chill:
My hand is chill, my heart.
I thought and wrought.
No dreamer I. I never fought for fame:
I strove for definite ends; for personal ends:
Helpful to man and me. Sacred Religion
I honoured not for mysteries occult
Hid 'neath her veil, as Alexandria boasts
Faithful to speculative Greece, its mother;
I honoured her because with both her hands
She stamps the broad seal of the Moral Law,
Red with God's Blood, upon the heart of man,
Teaching self-rule through rule of Law, and thus
Rendering the civil rule, the politic rule
A feasible emprise. My Empire made,
At once I sheathed my sword. For fifteen years
I, warrior-bred, maintained the world at peace.
In that I erred. What came of that, my error?
A realm's heart-sickness and soul-weariness,
The schism of classes warring each on each
And all to ruin tending, spite of cramps
Bound daily round the out-swelling wall. 'Twas vain!
Some Power there was that counter-worked my work
With hand too swift for sight, which, crossing mine,
Set warp 'gainst woof and ever with my dawn
Inwove its night. What hand was that I know not:
Perchance it was the Demon's of my House;
A sanguinary House by breed and nurture,
Perchance a Hand Divine.
I had two worlds—neither was made by me—
The Pagan and the Christian, glorious both—
To shape and blend in one—
One past her day, one nascent. Thus I mused—
Old Pagan Rome vanquished ignobler lands,
Then won them to herself through healing laws:
Thus Christian Rome must vanquish Pagan Rome,
The barbarous races next: both victories won,
Thus draw them to her, vanquishing their hearts
Through Law divine. What followed? Pagan Rome
Hates Christian Rome for my sake daily more;
Gnashes her teeth at me. ‘Who was it,’ she cries,
‘That laid the old Roman Legion prone in dust
Cancelling that law which freed it from taxation?
Who quelled the honest vices of the host
By laws that maimed all military pride?
Who hurled to earth the nobles of old race
And o'er them set his titular nobles new
And courtier prelates freed from tax and toll?
Who ground our merchants as they grind their corn?’
False charges all; they know them to be false:
The Roman legion ere my birth was dead:
Those other scandals were in substance old;
My laws were needfullest efforts to abate them.
They failed: when once the vital powers are spent
Best medicines turn to poisons. ‘God,’ 'tis writ,
‘Made curable the nations:’ Pagan Rome—
Who cures the dead? To her own level Rome
By equal laws had raised the conquered nations;
Yea; but by vices baser far than theirs
Below their level Rome had sunk herself;
The hordes she lifted knew it and despised her:
I came too late: the last, sole possible cure
Hastened, I deem, the judgment.
Diocletian
Affirmed that Christians, whether true or false,
At best were aliens in his scheme of empire,
At worst were hostile. Oft and loud he sware
That only on the old virtues, old traditions,
The patriot manliness of days gone by,
The fierce and fixed belief in temporal good
And earthly recompense for earthly merit,
Rome's Empire could find base. That Emperor erred
In what he saw not. What he saw was true.
I saw the old Rome was ended. What if I,
Like him, have missed some Truth those Christians see?
Men call that Race Baptized the illuminated.
The Race Baptized! To me it gave small aid!
An Empire's Faith must first be Faith in Empire:
Religious Faith comes next. To me Faith came,
A lightning flash, that hour when first I cried
‘My Empire's bound must be the Northern Seas’:
If not, some prophet from Arabian sands,
For Faith is hottest in the South, will rise
And snatch my destined crown.
The Race Baptized! A poor half Faith was theirs
In Charity dissolved. That Sin amerced
My faithful people of Faith's centre firm
Round which a Universe might have hung self-poised,
And barred my Northern March. The Cleric Counsel
Was evermore for peace. The Imperial purpose
Then first a limit knew to just Ambition:—
For that cause lies beyond my hand this day
In mass immeasurable that Race Barbaric
Likelier perchance to absorb more late my Empire
Than be in it absorbed.
I missed my spring: no second chance was granted:
I failed: none know it: I have known it long.
My counsels still were sage; yet nothing prospered,
Then dropped the strong hands baffled. Slowly, surely
The weed became the inheritor of all:
The tribute withered: offices of state
Were starved: and from the gold crown to her feet
Beneath her regal robe the Empire shrank:
Fair was the face; the rest was skeleton;
Dead breast; miscarrying womb. A hand not mine
Had counterworked my work. In rage of shame
Or seeking humblest peace at vilest cost,
There were that voluntary changed to slaves!
A priest made oath to me, ‘There's many a man
Sir, in your realm, who gladly, while I speak,
Would doff his human pride and hope immortal,
And run a careless leveret of the woods
Contented ne'er to see his Maker's Face
Here or in worlds to come.’ Death-pale he sware it!
What help? I worked with tools: my best were rotten,
Some Strong One worked against me.
I thought to rule my people through their Priests:
The spiritual power hath passed to men their foes.
Of late I made my youngest son a Cæsar:
I craved for him the blessing of God's Church:
I sought it not from prelates of my court:
I cast from me away the imperial pride:
I sent an embassage of princes twelve
In long procession o'er the Egyptian sands
To where within his lion-cinctured cave
Sits Anthony the Hermit. Thus he answered:
‘Well dost thou, Emperor, in adoring Christ:
Attend. Regard no more the things that pass:
Revere what lasts, God's judgment and thy Soul:
Serve God, and help His poor.’ His words meant this:
‘That work thou wouldst complete is unbegun;
Begin it Infant crowned.’
Three years of toil
With all earth's fleets and armies in my hand
Raised up this sovereign city. Mountains cleft
Sheer to the sea, and isles now sea-submerged,
Surrendered all their marbles and their pines;
And river-beds dried up yielded their gold
To flame along the roofs of palace halls
And basilics more palatial. Syrian wastes
Gave up their gems; her porphyries Egypt sent;
Athens and Rome their Phidian shapes eterne:
My work was not in hope but in despair,
I made an Empire's Picture, not an Empire:
My Empire had existence, but not life:
The child it was of Rome's decrepitude,
Imbecile as its sire. No youth-tide swelled
Its heart, or nerved its arm, or lit its eye:
Its sins themselves had naught of youth within them.
On Rome the shadow of great times was stayed;
The shadow and the substance here alike
Were absent; and the grandeur of the site
But signalized its lack. To the end Rome nursed
Some rock-flower virtues sown in years of freedom:
Maro and Flaccus thrilled the Palatine
With music of great thoughts. Pagan was Rome:
Ay, but the Catacombs were under Rome,
What if her one sole hope be buried there
With all their Christian dead?
That Rome was mine.
In it alone there wagged no tongue against me,
I left it for some future man;—for whom?
Old Sabine Numa can he come again
To list Egeria's whisper; or those priests
White-robed that, throned on Alba Longa's height,
Discoursed of peace to mortals? Romulus?
Augustus? These have left their Rome for ever:
With me they left it. Who shall be our heirs?
No man—till some new Deluge sweeps it clean.
Haply some barbarous race may prove that wave:
Haply, that wave back-driven or re-engulfed
Within some infinite ocean's breast unknown,
From the cleansed soil a stem may yet ascend;
A tree o'er-shade the earth.
That Rome I left:
I willed to raise an Empire great like Rome,
And yet in spirit Rome's great opposite,
What see I? Masking in a Name divine
A City like to Rome but worse than Rome;
A Rome with blunted sword and hollow heart,
And brain that came to her second-hand,
Weak, thin, worn out by one who had it first,
And, having it, abused. I vowed to lift
Religion's lordliest fane and amplest shrine:
My work will prove a Pagan reliquary
With Christian incrustations froz'n around.
It moulders. To corruption it hath said,
‘My sister;’ to the wormy grave, ‘My home.’
Not less that city for a thousand years
May keep its mummied mockery of rule
Like forms that sleep 'neath Egypt's Pyramids
Swathed round in balm and unguent, with blind eyes.
That were of dooms the worst.
My hope was this
That that high mercy of the Christian Law
Tempering the justice of the Roman Law,
Might make a single Law, and bless the world:
But Law is for the free man, not the slave:
I look abroad o'er all the earth: what see I?
One bondage, and self-willed.
I never sinned
As David sinned—except in blood—in blood:
Was this my sin, that not like him I loved?
Or this, that, sworn to raise o'er all the earth
Christ's realm, I drew not to His Church's font?—
To that a fatal obstacle I kenned:
The Church's son could ne'er have shaped her course.
Once more I sat in council at Nicæa:
In honour next to mine there stood a man—
I never loved that man—with piercing eye
And wingèd foot whene'er he moved; till then
Immovable as statue carved from rock;
That man was Athanasius. Late last year
A second sacred council sat at Tyre:
It lifted Arius from Nicæa's ban:
From Alexandria's Apostolic throne
Her Patriarch, Athanasius, it deposed:
Her priesthood and her people sued his pardon;
He was seditious, and I exiled him:
That was my last of spiritual acts.
Was it well done? Arius since then hath died:
Since then God's Church is cloven.
I willed her One.
Not less 'twas I dissolved her unity.
My Empire too is cloven, and cloven in five.
No choice remained. I never was the man
To close my eyes against unwelcome truth.
My sons, my nephews, ineffectual these!
Since childhood left them I have loved them not,
And late have learned that they conspire against me.
No zeal parental warps my life's resolve
To leave my Empire one and only one:
Yet now a net is round me. To bequeath
To one mid those incapables an Empire
Were with the sceptre's self to break that Empire,
To slay it at the moment of its birth,
To raise the war-cry o'er my funeral feast,
And, ere the snapt wand lay upon my grave,
To utter from that grave my race's doom
And yield the labour of my life a prey
To Vandal and to Goth.
Conviction came:
It comes to all; slowliest to him who knows
That Hope must flee before its face for ever:
Conviction that my Empire's Unity,
Must end, a dream. That Knowledge—that Conviction—
It came at first a shadow, not a shape;
It came again, a Phantom iron-handed:
It took me by the hand from plausive hosts;
It took me by the hand from senate halls;
It took me by the hand from basilic shrines;
It dragged me to the peak ice-cold; to depths
Caverned above earth's centre. From that depth
I saw no star; I heard no ‘De Profundis.’
One night, the revel past, I sat alone
Musing on things to come. In sleep I heard
The billow breaking 'gainst the huge sea-wall,
Then backward dragged, o'erspent. For hours I mused:
‘The life of man is Action and Frustration
Alternate. Both exhausted, what remains?
Endurance. Night is near its term. The morn
Will see my last of Acts, a parchment writ,
A parchment signed and sealed.’ Sudden I heard
Advancing as from all the ends of earth
Tramp of huge armies to the city walls:
Then silence fell. Anon my palace courts
Were thronged by warring hosts from every land
Headed by those disastrous Rivals Five
My sons, my nephews. Long that strife rang out;
First in the courts, then nearer shrieks I heard:
Amid the orange-scented colonnades
And inmost alabaster chambers dim;
And all the marble pavements gasped in blood,
And all the combatants at last lay dead:
Then o'er the dead without and dead within
A woman rode; one hand, far-stretched, sustained
A Portent—what I guessed—beneath a veil:
She dropped it at my feet: it was a Head.
She spake: ‘The deed was thine: take back thine own!
Bid Crispus bind in one thy shattered Empire!
Son of that earlier wife—the wife well-loved.’
Then fires burst forth as though all earth were flame,
And thunders rolled abroad of falling domes,
And tower, and temple, and a shout o'er all,
‘The Goth, the Vandal!’ 'Twas not these that roused me;
It was a voice well-loved, for years unheard,
‘Father, grieve not! That deed was never thine!’
Standing I woke, and in my hand my sword.
This was no vision; 'twas a dream; no more:
Next day at twelve I wrote my testament:
I wrote that testament in my heart's best blood:
That Empire, vaster far than those of old,
That Empire long divided, late by me
Consolidated, and by Christian Law
Lifted to heights that touch on heaven, that Empire
This hand that hour divided into five.
This hand it was which wrote that testament;
This hand which pressed thereon the Imperial Seal:
Then too I heard those shouting crowds. Poor fools!
They knew not that the labour of my life
Before me stood that hour, a grinning mask
Disfleshed by death. That was my Act supreme;
Like Diocletian's last; 'twas abdication:
How oft at his I scoffed!
They scoff not less
The ripples of yon glittering sea! they too
Shoot out their lips against me! They recall
That second crisis in my vanished years,
When from this seat, Byzantium then, forth fled
Vanquished Licinius. There from yonder rock,
Once more I see my fleet steer up full-sailed,
Glassing its standards in the Hellespont,
Triumphant; see the Apostate's navy load
The Asian shore with wrecks.
It was my Crispus ruled my fleet that hour!
That victory I saw was his, not mine:
His was the heroic strength that awes mankind,
The grace that wins, the majesty that rules them.
Had he but lived! Well spake my dying sister
Wedded to that Licinius whom I slew,
‘God for thy sins will part from thee thy realm.’
I heard that whisper as my city's walls
Ascended, daily. Night by night I heard
The tread of Remus by his brother slain
Circling the walls half-raised of Rome. He slew
His Brother only. I—Well, well! 'Tis past!
In age I built a City. So did Cain.
My portion in that City is yon church
Named of the Apostles: there I reared my tomb:
Around it rise twelve kingly cenotaphs
In honour of the Twelve Apostles raised;
These are my guards against the Powers Unblest:
Within that circle I shall sleep secure:
Thou Hermit of the Egyptian cave, be still!—
Ye too be mute, O mocking throngs far off!
Be mute, sweet song and adulating hymn!—
What scroll is that wind-curled? Ha! Persia's missive!
I ever scorned that Persia! I reject
Her mendicant hand, stretched from her bed of roses;
She that of Cyrus made of old her boast,
That tamed the steed, and spake the truth; and rais'd
The one sole possible rival of my Rome;
An Empire based on God and on His Law,
A mighty line of kings hereditary,
And, raising, proved my work was feasible!
This day she whines and fawns; one day she dragged
A Roman Emperor through her realm in chains,
By name Valerian. Roman none forgives her!
I'll send no answer; yet I'll read her missive.
‘The Great King thus to Constantine of Rome:
Galerius stole from Persia, while she slept,
Five provinces Caucasian. Yield them back!
If not, we launch our armies on thy coasts
And drag thee chained o'er that rough road and long
Trod by Valerian.’ Let me read once more:
Writ by his hand, and by his sigil sealed!
So be it! My boyhood's vision stands before me!
From Ganges' mouths to Calpé's Rock one realm!
Insolent boy! Well knows he I am old:
I was: I am not: youth is mine once more:
To-morrow in my army's van I ride.
Euphorbos! Sleep'st thou? Send me heralds forth!
Summon my captains! Bid these mummers cease!—
The error of my life lies plain before me,
That fifteen years of peace.
[_]
Note.
—The next day Constantine set out on his Persian
expedition; he fell sick at Hellenopolis, a city erected by him
in honour of his Mother, the Empress Helena. He demanded
Baptism, and died soon after he had received it.
