NEW CYRENAICISM
Such were the practical conclusions drawn for himself by Marius, when
somewhat later he had outgrown the mastery of others, from the
principle that “all is vanity.” If he could but count upon the present,
if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to conduct one
anywhere beyond itself, if men’s highest curiosity was indeed so
persistently baffled—then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at
least fill up the measure of that present with vivid sensations, and
such intellectual apprehensions, as, in strength and directness and
their immediately realised values at the bar of an actual experience,
are most like sensations. So some have spoken in every age; for, like
all theories which really express a strong natural tendency of the
human mind or even one of its characteristic modes of weakness, this
vein of reflection is a constant tradition in philosophy. Every age of
European thought has had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans, under many
disguises: even under the hood of the monk.
But—Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!—is a proposal, the real
import of which differs immensely, according to the natural taste, and
the acquired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table. It may
express nothing better than the instinct of Dante’s Ciacco, the
accomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno;+ or, since on no
hypothesis does man “live by bread alone,” may come to be identical
with—“My meat is to do what is just and kind;” while the soul, which
can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil
of immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in
conforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for itself;
and actually, though but with so faint hope, does the “Father’s
business.”
In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely disabused of the
metaphysical ambition to pass beyond “the flaming ramparts of the
world,” but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation of
intellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all varieties
of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works, the thoughts of
Marius did but follow the line taken by the majority of educated
persons, though to a different issue. Pitched to a really high and
serious key, the precept—Be perfect in regard to what is here and now:
the precept of “culture,” as it is called, or of a complete
education—might at least save him from the vulgarity and heaviness of a
generation, certainly of no general fineness of temper, though with a
material well-being abundant enough. Conceded that what is secure in
our existence is but the sharp apex of the present moment between two
hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our experience but a
series of fleeting impressions:—so Marius continued the sceptical
argument he had condensed, as the matter to hold by, from his various
philosophical reading:—given, that we are never to get beyond the walls
of the closely shut cell of one’s own personality; that the ideas we
are somehow impelled to form of an outer world, and of other minds akin
to our own, are, it may be, but a day-dream, and the thought of any
world beyond, a day-dream perhaps idler still: then, he, at least, in
whom those fleeting impressions—faces, voices, material sunshine—were
very real and imperious, might well set himself to the consideration,
how such actual moments as they passed might be made to yield their
utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract
metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that
experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of
human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him
at least make the most of what was “here and now.” In the actual
dimness of ways from means to ends—ends in themselves desirable, yet
for the most part distant and for him, certainly, below the visible
horizon—he would at all events be sure that the means, to use the
well-worn terminology, should have something of finality or perfection
about them, and themselves partake, in a measure, of the more excellent
nature of ends—that the means should justify the end.
With this view he would demand culture, paideia,+ as the Cyrenaics
said, or, in other words, a wide, a complete, education—an education
partly negative, as ascertaining the true limits of man’s capacities,
but for the most part positive, and directed especially to the
expansion and refinement of the power of reception; of those powers,
above all, which are immediately relative to fleeting phenomena, the
powers of emotion and sense. In such an education, an “aesthetic”
education, as it might now be termed, and certainly occupied very
largely with those aspects of things which affect us pleasurably
through sensation, art, of course, including all the finer sorts of
literature, would have a great part to play. The study of music, in
that wider Platonic sense, according to which, music comprehends all
those matters over which the Muses of Greek mythology preside, would
conduct one to an exquisite appreciation of all the finer traits of
nature and of man. Nay! the products of the imagination must themselves
be held to present the most perfect forms of life—spirit and matter
alike under their purest and most perfect conditions—the most strictly
appropriate objects of that impassioned contemplation, which, in the
world of intellectual discipline, as in the highest forms of morality
and religion, must be held to be the essential function of the
“perfect.” Such manner of life might come even to seem a kind of
religion—an inward, visionary, mystic piety, or religion, by virtue of
its effort to live days “lovely and pleasant” in themselves, here and
now, and with an all-sufficiency of well-being in the immediate sense
of the object contemplated, independently of any faith, or hope that
might be entertained as to their ulterior tendency. In this way, the
true aesthetic culture would be realisable as a new form of the
contemplative life, founding its claim on the intrinsic “blessedness”
of “vision”—the vision of perfect men and things. One’s human nature,
indeed, would fain reckon on an assured and endless future, pleasing
itself with the dream of a final home, to be attained at some still
remote date, yet with a conscious, delightful home-coming at last, as
depicted in many an old poetic Elysium. On the other hand, the world of
perfected sensation, intelligence, emotion, is so close to us, and so
attractive, that the most visionary of spirits must needs represent the
world unseen in colours, and under a form really borrowed from it. Let
me be sure then—might he not plausibly say?—that I miss no detail of
this life of realised consciousness in the present! Here at least is a
vision, a theory, theôria,+ which reposes on no basis of unverified
hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future after all somewhat
problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery of an
Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had
really been the origin, and course of development, of man’s actually
attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or
spirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of
course have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment, generally, of
what is near at hand, on the adornment of life, till, in a not
impracticable rule of conduct, one’s existence, from day to day, came
to be like a well-executed piece of music; that “perpetual motion” in
things (so Marius figured the matter to himself, under the old Greek
imageries) according itself to a kind of cadence or harmony.
It was intelligible that this “aesthetic” philosophy might find itself
(theoretically, at least, and by way of a curious question in
casuistry, legitimate from its own point of view) weighing the claims
of that eager, concentrated, impassioned realisation of experience,
against those of the received morality. Conceiving its own function in
a somewhat desperate temper, and becoming, as every high-strung form of
sentiment, as the religious sentiment itself, may become, somewhat
antinomian, when, in its effort towards the order of experiences it
prefers, it is confronted with the traditional and popular morality, at
points where that morality may look very like a convention, or a mere
stage-property of the world, it would be found, from time to time,
breaking beyond the limits of the actual moral order; perhaps not
without some pleasurable excitement in so bold a venture.
With the possibility of some such hazard as this, in thought or even in
practice—that it might be, though refining, or tonic even, in the case
of those strong and in health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly and
temperate wisdom of Montaigne, “pernicious for those who have any
natural tendency to impiety or vice,” the line of reflection traced out
above, was fairly chargeable.—Not, however, with “hedonism” and its
supposed consequences. The blood, the heart, of Marius were still pure.
He knew that his carefully considered theory of practice braced him,
with the effect of a moral principle duly recurring to mind every
morning, towards the work of a student, for which he might seem
intended. Yet there were some among his acquaintance who jumped to the
conclusion that, with the “Epicurean stye,” he was making
pleasure—pleasure, as they so poorly conceived it—the sole motive of
life; and they precluded any exacter estimate of the situation by
covering it with a high-sounding general term, through the vagueness of
which they were enabled to see the severe and laborious youth in the
vulgar company of Lais. Words like “hedonism”— terms of large and vague
comprehension—above all when used for a purpose avowedly controversial,
have ever been the worst examples of what are called “question-begging
terms;” and in that late age in which Marius lived, amid the dust of so
many centuries of philosophical debate, the air was full of them. Yet
those who used that reproachful Greek term for the philosophy of
pleasure, were hardly more likely than the old Greeks themselves (on
whom regarding this very subject of the theory of pleasure, their
masters in the art of thinking had so emphatically to impress the
necessity of “making distinctions”) to come to any very delicately
correct ethical conclusions by a reasoning, which began with a general
term, comprehensive enough to cover pleasures so different in quality,
in their causes and effects, as the pleasures of wine and love, of art
and science, of religious enthusiasm and political enterprise, and of
that taste or curiosity which satisfied itself with long days of
serious study. Yet, in truth, each of those pleasurable modes of
activity, may, in its turn, fairly become the ideal of the “hedonistic”
doctrine. Really, to the phase of reflection through which Marius was
then passing, the charge of “hedonism,” whatever its true weight might
be, was not properly applicable at all. Not pleasure, but fulness of
life, and “insight” as conducting to that fulness—energy, variety, and
choice of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such
as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous
forms of the moral life, such as Seneca and Epictetus—whatever form of
human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal: from these
the “new Cyrenaicism” of Marius took its criterion of values. It was a
theory, indeed, which might properly be regarded as in great degree
coincident with the main principle of the Stoics themselves, and an
older version of the precept “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it
with thy might”—a doctrine so widely acceptable among the nobler
spirits of that time. And, as with that, its mistaken tendency would
lie in the direction of a kind of idolatry of mere life, or natural
gift, or strength—l’idôlatrie des talents.
To understand the various forms of ancient art and thought, the various
forms of actual human feeling (the only new thing, in a world almost
too opulent in what was old) to satisfy, with a kind of scrupulous
equity, the claims of these concrete and actual objects on his
sympathy, his intelligence, his senses—to “pluck out the heart of their
mystery,” and in turn become the interpreter of them to others: this
had now defined itself for Marius as a very narrowly practical design:
it determined his choice of a vocation to live by. It was the era of
the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they were sometimes called; of men
who came in some instances to great fame and fortune, by way of a
literary cultivation of “science.” That science, it has been often
said, must have been wholly an affair of words. But in a world,
confessedly so opulent in what was old, the work, even of genius, must
necessarily consist very much in criticism; and, in the case of the
more excellent specimens of his class, the rhetorician was, after all,
the eloquent and effective interpreter, for the delighted ears of
others, of what understanding himself had come by, in years of travel
and study, of the beautiful house of art and thought which was the
inheritance of the age. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, to whose service
Marius had now been called, was himself, more or less openly, a
“lecturer.” That late world, amid many curiously vivid modern traits,
had this spectacle, so familiar to ourselves, of the public lecturer or
essayist; in some cases adding to his other gifts that of the Christian
preacher, who knows how to touch people’s sensibilities on behalf of
the suffering. To follow in the way of these successes, was the natural
instinct of youthful ambition; and it was with no vulgar egotism that
Marius, at the age of nineteen, determined, like many another young man
of parts, to enter as a student of rhetoric at Rome.
Though the manner of his work was changed formally from poetry to
prose, he remained, and must always be, of the poetic temper: by which,
I mean, among other things, that quite independently of the general
habit of that pensive age he lived much, and as it were by system, in
reminiscence. Amid his eager grasping at the sensation, the
consciousness, of the present, he had come to see that, after all, the
main point of economy in the conduct of the present, was the
question:—How will it look to me, at what shall I value it, this day
next year?—that in any given day or month one’s main concern was its
impression for the memory. A strange trick memory sometimes played him;
for, with no natural gradation, what was of last month, or of
yesterday, of to-day even, would seem as far off, as entirely detached
from him, as things of ten years ago. Detached from him, yet very real,
there lay certain spaces of his life, in delicate perspective, under a
favourable light; and, somehow, all the less fortunate detail and
circumstance had parted from them. Such hours were oftenest those in
which he had been helped by work of others to the pleasurable
apprehension of art, of nature, or of life. “Not what I do, but what I
am, under the power of this vision”—he would say to himself—“is what
were indeed pleasing to the gods!”
And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who had taken for his
philosophic ideal the monochronos hêdonê+ of Aristippus—the pleasure of
the ideal present, of the mystic now—there would come, together with
that precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire, after all,
to retain “what was so transitive.” Could he but arrest, for others
also, certain clauses of experience, as the imaginative memory
presented them to himself! In those grand, hot summers, he would have
imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers. To create, to live,
perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it were but in a
fragment of perfect expression:—it was thus his longing defined itself
for something to hold by amid the “perpetual flux.” With men of his
vocation, people were apt to say, words were things. Well! with him,
words should be indeed things,—the word, the phrase, valuable in exact
proportion to the transparency with which it conveyed to others the
apprehension, the emotion, the mood, so vividly real within himself.
Verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur:+ Virile apprehension of the
true nature of things, of the true nature of one’s own impression,
first of all!—words would follow that naturally, a true understanding
of one’s self being ever the first condition of genuine style. Language
delicate and measured, the delicate Attic phrase, for instance, in
which the eminent Aristeides could speak, was then a power to which
people’s hearts, and sometimes even their purses, readily responded.
And there were many points, as Marius thought, on which the heart of
that age greatly needed to be touched. He hardly knew how strong that
old religious sense of responsibility, the conscience, as we call it,
still was within him—a body of inward impressions, as real as those so
highly valued outward ones—to offend against which, brought with it a
strange feeling of disloyalty, as to a person. And the determination,
adhered to with no misgiving, to add nothing, not so much as a
transient sigh, to the great total of men’s unhappiness, in his way
through the world:—that too was something to rest on, in the drift of
mere “appearances.”
All this would involve a life of industry, of industrious study, only
possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body and
soul. For the male element, the logical conscience asserted itself now,
with opening manhood—asserted itself, even in his literary style, by a
certain firmness of outline, that touch of the worker in metal, amid
its richness. Already he blamed instinctively alike in his work and in
himself, as youth so seldom does, all that had not passed a long and
liberal process of erasure. The happy phrase or sentence was really
modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupulous thought. The
suggestive force of the one master of his development, who had battled
so hard with imaginative prose; the utterance, the golden utterance, of
the other, so content with its living power of persuasion that he had
never written at all,—in the commixture of these two qualities he set
up his literary ideal, and this rare blending of grace with an
intellectual rigour or astringency, was the secret of a singular
expressiveness in it.
He acquired at this time a certain bookish air, the somewhat sombre
habitude of the avowed scholar, which though it never interfered with
the perfect tone, “fresh and serenely disposed,” of the Roman
gentleman, yet qualified it as by an interesting oblique trait, and
frightened away some of his equals in age and rank. The sober
discretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation, the
sense of those negative conclusions enabling him to concentrate
himself, with an absorption so entire, upon what is immediately here
and now, gave him a peculiar manner of intellectual confidence, as of
one who had indeed been initiated into a great secret.—Though with an
air so disengaged, he seemed to be living so intently in the visible
world! And now, in revolt against that pre-occupation with other
persons, which had so often perturbed his spirit, his wistful
speculations as to what the real, the greater, experience might be,
determined in him, not as the longing for love—to be with Cynthia, or
Aspasia—but as a thirst for existence in exquisite places. The veil
that was to be lifted for him lay over the works of the old masters of
art, in places where nature also had used her mastery. And it was just
at this moment that a summons to Rome reached him.
NOTES
145. +Canto VI.
147. +Transliteration: paideia. Definition “rearing, education.”
149. +Transliteration: theôria. Definition “a looking at ... observing
... contemplation.”
154. +Transliteration: monochronos hêdonê. Pater’s definition “the
pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now.” The definition is
fitting; the unusual adjective monokhronos means, literally, “single or
unitary time.”
155. +Horace, Ars Poetica 311. +Etext editor’s translation: “The
subject once foreknown, the words will follow easily.”