m the admission of
certain first principles such as might misdirect or retard him in his
efforts towards a complete, many-sided existence; or distort the
revelations of the experience of life; or curtail his natural liberty
of heart and mind. But now (his imagination being occupied for the
moment with the noble and resolute air, the gallantry, so to call it,
which composed the outward mien and presentment of his strange friend's
inflexible ethics) he felt already some nascent suspicion of his
philosophic programme, in regard, precisely, to the question of good
taste. There was the taint of a graceless "antinomianism" perceptible
in it, a dissidence, a revolt against accustomed modes, the actual
impression of which on other [7] men might rebound upon himself in some
loss of that personal pride to which it was part of his theory of life
to allow so much. And it was exactly a moral situation such as this
that Fronto appeared to be contemplating. He seemed to have before his
mind the case of one--Cyrenaic or Epicurean, as the courtier tends to
be, by habit and instinct, if not on principle--who yet experiences,
actually, a strong tendency to moral assents, and a desire, with as
little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place for duty and
righteousness in his house of thought.

And the Stoic professor found the key to this problem in the purely
aesthetic beauty of the old morality, as an element in things,
fascinating to the imagination, to good taste in its most highly
developed form, through association--a system or order, as a matter of
fact, in possession, not only of the larger world, but of the rare
minority of elite intelligences; from which, therefore, least of all
would the sort of Epicurean he had in view endure to become, so to
speak, an outlaw. He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in
search after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he seemed
to Marius to be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of
motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life,
determined partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened
self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere
fear of penalties; no element of which, [8] however, was distinctively
moral in the agent himself as such, and providing him, therefore, no
common ground with a really moral being like Cornelius, or even like
the philosophic emperor. Performing the same offices; actually
satisfy