rofessed 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 [25] 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 aesthetic character, as it is called--their
revelations to the eye and the imagination: not so much because those
aspects of them yield him the larges