Marius the Epicurean, vol 2 | Page 6

of old Greek [20] 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 [21] 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, [22] 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.
[23] 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 aesthetic 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