SECOND THOUGHTS
And Marius, for his part, was grave enough. The discourse of Cornelius
Fronto, with its wide prospect over the human, the spiritual, horizon,
had set him on a review—on a review of the isolating narrowness, in
particular, of his own theoretic scheme. Long after the very latest
roses were faded, when “the town” had departed to country villas, or
the baths, or the war, he remained behind in Rome; anxious to try the
lastingness of his own Epicurean rose-garden; setting to work over
again, and deliberately passing from point to point of his old argument
with himself, down to its practical conclusions. That age and our own
have much in common—many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon
me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern
representatives—from Rome, to Paris or London.
What really were its claims as a theory of practice, of the sympathies
that determine practice? It had been a theory, avowedly, of loss and
gain (so to call it) of an economy. If, therefore, it missed something
in the commerce of life, which some other theory of practice was able
to include, if it made a needless sacrifice, then it must be, in a
manner, inconsistent with itself, and lack theoretic completeness. Did
it make such a sacrifice? What did it lose, or cause one to lose?
And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaicism is
ever the characteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in its
survey—sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical. It is
one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because
limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this
case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man’s life there)
which it may be said to be the special vocation of the young to
express. In the school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh Greek
world, we see this philosophy where it is least blasé, as we say; in
its most pleasant, its blithest and yet perhaps its wisest form,
youthfully bright in the youth of European thought. But it grows young
again for a while in almost every youthful soul. It is spoken of
sometimes as the appropriate utterance of jaded men; but in them it can
hardly be sincere, or, by the nature of the case, an enthusiasm. “Walk
in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes,” is,
indeed, most often, according to the supposition of the book from which
I quote it, the counsel of the young, who feel that the sunshine is
pleasant along their veins, and wintry weather, though in a general
sense foreseen, a long way off. The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism,
the self-abandonment to one favourite mode of thought or taste, which
occurs, quite naturally, at the outset of every really vigorous
intellectual career, finds its special opportunity in a theory such as
that so carefully put together by Marius, just because it seems to call
on one to make the sacrifice, accompanied by a vivid sensation of power
and will, of what others value—sacrifice of some conviction, or
doctrine, or supposed first principle—for the sake of that clear-eyed
intellectual consistency, which is like spotless bodily cleanliness, or
scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the mind of the youthful
student, when he first comes to appreciate it, the fascination of an
ideal.
The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of strenuousness or
enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance of the “jaded Epicurean,”
as of the strong young man in all the freshness of thought and feeling,
fascinated by the notion of raising his life to the level of a daring
theory, while, in the first genial heat of existence, the beauty of the
physical world strikes potently upon his wide-open, unwearied senses.
He discovers a great new poem every spring, with a hundred delightful
things he too has felt, but which have never been expressed, or at
least never so truly, before. The workshops of the artists, who can
select and set before us what is really most distinguished in visible
life, are open to him. He thinks that the old Platonic, or the new
Baconian philosophy, has been better explained than by the authors
themselves, or with some striking original development, this very
month. In the quiet heat of early summer, on the dusty gold morning,
the music comes, louder at intervals, above the hum of voices from some
neighbouring church, among the flowering trees, valued now, perhaps,
only for the poetically rapt faces among priests or worshippers, or the
mere skill and eloquence, it may be, of its preachers of faith and
righteousness. In his scrupulous idealism, indeed, he too feels himself
to be something of a priest, and that devotion of his days to the
contemplation of what is beautiful, a sort of perpetual religious
service. Afar off, how many fair cities and delicate sea-coasts await
him! At that age, with minds of a certain constitution, no very choice
or exceptional circumstances are needed to provoke an enthusiasm
something like this. Life in modern London even, in the heavy glow of
summer, is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to
build its “palace of art” of; and the very sense and enjoyment of an
experience in which all is new, are but enhanced, like that glow of
summer itself, by the thought of its brevity, giving him something of a
gambler’s zest, in the apprehension, by dexterous act or diligently
appreciative thought, of the highly coloured moments which are to pass
away so quickly. At bottom, perhaps, in his elaborately developed
self-consciousness, his sensibilities, his almost fierce grasp upon the
things he values at all, he has, beyond all others, an inward need of
something permanent in its character, to hold by: of which
circumstance, also, he may be partly aware, and that, as with the
brilliant Claudio in Measure for Measure, it is, in truth, but darkness
he is, “encountering, like a bride.” But the inevitable falling of the
curtain is probably distant; and in the daylight, at least, it is not
often that he really shudders at the thought of the grave—the weight
above, the narrow world and its company, within. When the thought of it
does occur to him, he may say to himself:—Well! and the rude monk, for
instance, who has renounced all this, on the security of some dim world
beyond it, really acquiesces in that “fifth act,” amid all the
consoling ministries around him, as little as I should at this moment;
though I may hope, that, as at the real ending of a play, however well
acted, I may already have had quite enough of it, and find a true
well-being in eternal sleep.
And precisely in this circumstance, that, consistently with the
function of youth in general, Cyrenaicism will always be more or less
the special philosophy, or “prophecy,” of the young, when the ideal of
a rich experience comes to them in the ripeness of the receptive, if
not of the reflective, powers—precisely in this circumstance, if we
rightly consider it, lies the duly prescribed corrective of that
philosophy. For it is by its exclusiveness, and by negation rather than
positively, that such theories fail to satisfy us permanently; and what
they really need for their correction, is the complementary influence
of some greater system, in which they may find their due place. That
Sturm und Drang of the spirit, as it has been called, that ardent and
special apprehension of half-truths, in the enthusiastic, and as it
were “prophetic” advocacy of which, devotion to truth, in the case of
the young—apprehending but one point at a time in the great
circumference—most usually embodies itself, is levelled down, safely
enough, afterwards, as in history so in the individual, by the weakness
and mere weariness, as well as by the maturer wisdom, of our nature.
And though truth indeed, resides, as has been said, “in the whole”—in
harmonisings and adjustments like this—yet those special apprehensions
may still owe their full value, in this sense of “the whole,” to that
earlier, one-sided but ardent pre-occupation with them.
Cynicism and Cyrenaicism:—they are the earlier Greek forms of Roman
Stoicism and Epicureanism, and in that world of old Greek thought, we
may notice with some surprise that, in a little while, the nobler form
of Cyrenaicism—Cyrenaicism cured of its faults—met the nobler form of
Cynicism half-way. Starting from opposed points, they merged, each in
its most refined form, in a single ideal of temperance or moderation.
Something of the same kind may be noticed regarding some later phases
of Cyrenaic theory. If it starts with considerations opposed to the
religious temper, which the religious temper holds it a duty to
repress, it is like it, nevertheless, and very unlike any lower
development of temper, in its stress and earnestness, its serious
application to the pursuit of a very unworldly type of perfection. The
saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty, it may be thought, would at
least understand each other better than either would understand the
mere man of the world. Carry their respective positions a point
further, shift the terms a little, and they might actually touch.
Perhaps all theories of practice tend, as they rise to their best, as
understood by their worthiest representatives, to identification with
each other. For the variety of men’s possible reflections on their
experience, as of that experience itself, is not really so great as it
seems; and as the highest and most disinterested ethical formulae,
filtering down into men’s everyday existence, reach the same poor level
of vulgar egotism, so, we may fairly suppose that all the highest
spirits, from whatever contrasted points they have started, would yet
be found to entertain, in the moral consciousness realised by
themselves, much the same kind of mental company; to hold, far more
than might be thought probable, at first sight, the same personal types
of character, and even the same artistic and literary types, in esteem
or aversion; to convey, all of them alike, the same savour of
unworldliness. And Cyrenaicism or Epicureanism too, new or old, may be
noticed, in proportion to the completeness of its development, to
approach, as to the nobler form of Cynicism, so also to the more nobly
developed phases of the old, or traditional morality. In the gravity of
its conception of life, in its pursuit after nothing less than a
perfection, in its apprehension of the value of time—the passion and
the seriousness which are like a consecration—la passion et le sérieux
qui consacrent—it may be conceived, as regards its main drift, to be
not so much opposed to the old morality, as an exaggeration of one
special motive in it.
Some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own
nature, and of the nature of things, to another, Marius seemed to have
detected in himself, meantime,—in himself, as also in those old masters
of the Cyrenaic philosophy. If they did realise the monochronos hêdonê+
as it was called—the pleasure of the “Ideal Now”—if certain moments of
their lives were high-pitched, passionately coloured, intent with
sensation, and a kind of knowledge which, in its vivid clearness, was
like sensation—if, now and then, they apprehended the world in its
fulness, and had a vision, almost “beatific,” of ideal personalities in
life and art, yet these moments were a very costly matter: they paid a
great price for them, in the sacrifice of a thousand possible
sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which
they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere
theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no
approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly, repellent
attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality,
surely, they had been but faulty economists. The Greek religion was
then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, the
higher view of it was possible, even for the philosopher. Its story
made little or no demand for a reasoned or formal acceptance. A
religion, which had grown through and through man’s life, with so much
natural strength; had meant so much for so many generations; which
expressed so much of their hopes, in forms so familiar and so winning;
linked by associations so manifold to man as he had been and was—a
religion like this, one would think, might have had its uses, even for
a philosophic sceptic. Yet those beautiful gods, with the whole round
of their poetic worship, the school of Cyrene definitely renounced.
The old Greek morality, again, with all its imperfections, was
certainly a comely thing.—Yes! a harmony, a music, in men’s ways, one
might well hesitate to jar. The merely æsthetic sense might have had a
legitimate satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair order of choice
manners, in those attractive conventions, enveloping, so gracefully,
the whole of life, insuring some sweetness, some security at least
against offence, in the intercourse of the world. Beyond an obvious
utility, it could claim, indeed but custom—use-and-wont, as we say—for
its sanction. But then, one of the advantages of that liberty of spirit
among the Cyrenaics (in which, through theory, they had become dead to
theory, so that all theory, as such, was really indifferent to them,
and indeed nothing valuable but in its tangible ministration to life)
was precisely this, that it gave them free play in using as their
ministers or servants, things which, to the uninitiated, must be
masters or nothing. Yet, how little the followers of Aristippus made of
that whole comely system of manners or morals, then actually in
possession of life, is shown by the bold practical consequence, which
one of them maintained (with a hard, self-opinionated adherence to his
peculiar theory of values) in the not very amiable paradox that
friendship and patriotism were things one could do without; while
another—Death’s-advocate, as he was called—helped so many to
self-destruction, by his pessimistic eloquence on the evils of life,
that his lecture-room was closed. That this was in the range of their
consequences—that this was a possible, if remote, deduction from the
premisses of the discreet Aristippus—was surely an inconsistency in a
thinker who professed above all things an economy of the moments of
life. And yet those old Cyrenaics felt their way, as if in the dark, we
may be sure, like other men in the ordinary transactions of life,
beyond the narrow limits they drew of clear and absolutely legitimate
knowledge, admitting what was not of immediate sensation, and drawing
upon that “fantastic” future which might never come. A little more of
such “walking by faith,” a little more of such not unreasonable
“assent,” and they might have profited by a hundred services to their
culture, from Greek religion and Greek morality, as they actually were.
The spectacle of their fierce, exclusive, tenacious hold on their own
narrow apprehension, makes one think of a picture with no relief, no
soft shadows nor breadth of space, or of a drama without proportionate
repose.
Yet it was of perfection that Marius (to return to him again from his
masters, his intellectual heirs) had been really thinking all the time:
a narrow perfection it might be objected, the perfection of but one
part of his nature—his capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical
impressions, of an imaginative sympathy—but still, a true perfection of
those capacities, wrought out to their utmost degree, admirable enough
in its way. He too is an economist: he hopes, by that “insight” of
which the old Cyrenaics made so much, by skilful apprehension of the
conditions of spiritual success as they really are, the special
circumstances of the occasion with which he has to deal, the special
felicities of his own nature, to make the most, in no mean or vulgar
sense, of the few years of life; few, indeed, for the attainment of
anything like general perfection! With the brevity of that sum of years
his mind is exceptionally impressed; and this purpose makes him no
frivolous dilettante, but graver than other men: his scheme is not that
of a trifler, but rather of one who gives a meaning of his own, yet a
very real one, to those old words—Let us work while it is day! He has a
strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the visible things around
him; their fading, momentary, graces and attractions. His natural
susceptibility in this direction, enlarged by experience, seems to
demand of him an almost exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of
things; with their æsthetic character, as it is called—their
revelations to the eye and the imagination: not so much because those
aspects of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as because
to be occupied, in this way, with the æsthetic or imaginative side of
things, is to be in real contact with those elements of his own nature,
and of theirs, which, for him at least, are matter of the most real
kind of apprehension. As other men are concentrated upon truths of
number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of
appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of refined
sensation. And in the prosecution of this love of beauty, he claims an
entire personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty, above all,
from what may seem conventional answers to first questions.
But, without him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea,
widely extended in time and place, in a kind of impregnable possession
of human life—a system, which, like some other great products of the
conjoint efforts of human mind through many generations, is rich in the
world’s experience; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one lets in a
great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were with a single
step, a great experience of one’s own, and with great consequent
increase to one’s sense of colour, variety, and relief, in the
spectacle of men and things. The mere sense that one belongs to a
system—an imperial system or organisation—has, in itself, the expanding
power of a great experience; as some have felt who have been admitted
from narrower sects into the communion of the catholic church; or as
the old Roman citizen felt. It is, we might fancy, what the coming into
possession of a very widely spoken language might be, with a great
literature, which is also the speech of the people we have to live
among.
A wonderful order, actually in possession of human life!—grown
inextricably through and through it; penetrating into its laws, its
very language, its mere habits of decorum, in a thousand half-conscious
ways; yet still felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal; and, as
such, awakening hope, and an aim, identical with the one only
consistent aspiration of mankind! In the apprehension of that, just
then, Marius seemed to have joined company once more with his own old
self; to have overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to Rome,
with absolute sincerity, on the search for perfection. It defined not
so much a change of practice, as of sympathy—a new departure, an
expansion, of sympathy. It involved, certainly, some curtailment of his
liberty, in concession to the actual manner, the distinctions, the
enactments of that great crowd of admirable spirits, who have elected
so, and not otherwise, in their conduct of life, and are not here to
give one, so to term it, an “indulgence.” But then, under the
supposition of their disapproval, no roses would ever seem worth
plucking again. The authority they exercised was like that of classic
taste—an influence so subtle, yet so real, as defining the loyalty of
the scholar; or of some beautiful and venerable ritual, in which every
observance is become spontaneous and almost mechanical, yet is found,
the more carefully one considers it, to have a reasonable significance
and a natural history.
And Marius saw that he would be but an inconsistent Cyrenaic, mistaken
in his estimate of values, of loss and gain, and untrue to the
well-considered economy of life which he had brought with him to
Rome—that some drops of the great cup would fall to the ground—if he
did not make that concession, if he did but remain just there.
NOTES
21. +Transliteration: monochronos hêdonê. Pater’s definition “the
pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now.” The definition is
fitting; the unusual adjective monochronos means, literally, “single or
unitary time.”