CHAPTER IX - NEW CYRENAICISM

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER IX - NEW CYRENAICISM, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

[144] 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.

[145] 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 [146] 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 [147]
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 [148] 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, [149] 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 [150] 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"-- [151] 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 [152] 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 [153] 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 [154] 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 hędonę+ 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, [155] 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,
[156] 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 [157]
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 hędonę. 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."