I do not know how to explain the Persian expedition.  He himself said, when dying, that he had loved and sought peace, and had but gone to war when driven to it.  We cannot see now what were the driving factors.  Did he go to reap glory that he might have used, or thought he might have used, in his grand design?  Did he go to break a way into India, perhaps there to find a light beyond any that was in Rome? ...  Or was it the supreme mistake of his life.... one would say the only mistake?

It failed, and he died, and his grand designs came to nothing; and Rome went out in utter darkness.  And men sneered at him then, and have been sneering at him ever since, for his failure.  Perhaps we must call it that; it was a forlorn hope at the best of times.  But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it:  a man for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty;—­unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water, without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam of aspiration,—­with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and from ruin.

XXIV.  FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA

When the news came drifting back over the Roman world that the Emperor had been killed in Persia, and that an unknown insignificant Jovian reigned in his stead;—­and while three parts of the population were rejoicing that there was an end of the Apostate and his apostasy; and half the rest, that there was an end of this terrible strenuosity, this taking of the Gods (good harmless useful fictions—­probably fictions) so fearfully in earnest:  I wonder how many there were to guess how near the end of the world had come?  The cataclysm was much more sudden and over-whelming than we commonly think; and to have prophesied, in Roman society, in the year 363, that in a century’s time the empire and all its culture would be things of the past (in the West), would have sounded just as ridiculous, probably, as such a prophesy concerning Europe and its culture would have sounded in a London drawing-room fifteen years ago.  There were signs and portents, of course, for the thoughtful; and no doubt some few Matthew Arnolds in their degree to be troubled by them.  And of course (as in our own day, but perhaps rather more), an idea with cranks that at any moment Doomsday might come.  But while the world endured, and the Last Trump had not sounded, of course the Roman empire would stand.—­Christianity?  Well, yes; it had grown very strong; and the extremists among the Christians were rabid enough against culture of any sort.  But there were also Christians