Walter Pater (1839–1894)

Is Marius the Epicurean really a novel — I mean in the novelistic sense of "Novel"? Let us measure it against E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and see what we come up with. We know Forster read Marius because he mentions it in the introduction. Forster lists people, story, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm as aspects worth talking about.

We do have people. Marius is the main character, of course, and we start out with his boyhood, his friends, his encounter with the Emperor show more Marcus Aurelius, he grows up and he dies. Oops! Spoiler! There, I said it. Yes, Marius does indeed die, but then don't we all? So that's really not much of a spoiler. It is the circumstances that make all the difference.

There is a story — sort of. Boy grows up, meets the Emperor and a few others along the way and dies. This is the kind of bare bones "story" that causes Forster to refer to it as a "low atavistic form."

Is there a plot? Actually . . . no. There is no plot. Forster says that the plot is dependent upon causality. And Marius sticks strictly to the march of time.

One could stretch Forster's definition of fantasy and talk about Marius's interiority as a complete fantasy, but that would be to do both Forster and Pater a disservice. Let us just accept that fantasy is not a part of this novel.

Regarding prophecy Forster says:

With prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future, we have no concern and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for righteousness. What will interest us . . . is an accent in the novelist's voice. . . . His theme is the universe, or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to 'say' anything about the universe.

Marius would fall within Forster's definition, as it addresses something universal, larger than life in its quest for truth and a right way of living.

"Each aspect of the novel demands a different quality from the reader. [T]he prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of a sense of humor." And further on he reiterates that "we are not concerned with the prophet's message . . . what matters is the accent of his voice, his song."

And this is where Pater shines. In his era he was viewed as a great stylist. For the modern reader, the florid sentences take some getting used to, but persistence is rewarded. The intense interiority of this novel really does require the extra effort to get in synch with Pater's style.

But Marius is not entirely devoid of humor. There are two chapters which are largely lifted from classical antecedents that provide a spot of comic relief. Neither of these moves the story forward in any way but enriches the book nonetheless. One is the story of Cupid and Psyche from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, newly translated here by Pater, and the other is a highly edited satirical dialogue of Lucian which is delightfully reminiscent of Socrates.

And just to wrap up this discussion of aspects, pattern and rhythm are largely absent.

When you want to curl up with a good novel, you do not normally expect to have to do a lot of homework in preparation. After all, we think of a novel as leisure reading. Marius is an exception. It helps to know something about Pater himself, and it especially helps to know something about the intellectual and religious context in England leading up to and during the 1870s and 1880s when Pater was studying and eventually teaching at Oxford. Most Americans particularly are unlikely to be fully aware of the religious crisis that occurred at Oxford in the 1800s surrounding the so-called Oxford Movement. Knowing the historical context is essential to fully appreciate this very unusual novel. At the risk of causing the reader's eyes to glaze over, I would like to give a bit of that context in order to encourage people who enjoy philosophical fiction to explore further in preparation for reading Marius the Epicurean and other of Pater's writings.

The Oxford Movement culminated in the 1845 defection of John Henry Newman from the Anglican priesthood and his subsequent ordination as a Catholic priest and his later elevation as a cardinal. By the time Pater entered Oxford, a rather militant attitude had developed with respect to those desiring to teach at Oxford, and anyone who appeared to be other than a down-the-line Anglican might be subject to sanctions if not outright dismissal. Pater's own career at Oxford was disrupted because of what he wrote in the Conclusion of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which was his first book published in 1873.

In addition to or perhaps even as an outgrowth of the consequences of the Oxford Movement itself, the arbiters of literary taste in the 1870s and 1880s were Ruskin, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, who were the highly didactic opinion leaders of the day in terms of their judgments regarding the acceptability, or otherwise, of budding writers. Their collective reaction to Pater's Renaissance along with the highly judgmental atmosphere then prevailing at Oxford made life very difficult for Pater, and in fact, aside from the articles he continued to publish regularly in the literary magazines of the day, he never published another book until Marius in 1885.

What was the uproar about with respect to his notorious Conclusion to The Renaissance? It was primarily over the essentially hedonistic message of the following paragraph:

Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Pater was encouraging students "to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions," for "our one chance lies . . . in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time." His overt hedonism was viewed in a dim light as it seemed to suggest unbelief in any reality beyond this life, which meant that his moral qualifications to be a teacher of young men at Oxford were put into question. Should such a person be influencing the young?

Today, we read that paragraph and shake our heads because our value system has changed so dramatically. And that contrast in value systems is at the very heart of Marius the Epicurean, which is an account of youth and young manhood, tracing the development of his religious and philosophical attitudes.

Marius, it turns out, was much less of an Epicurean than the title suggests and most interpreters of the book believe. In fact, I interrupted my own reading of the book to do some background investigation of this very topic — and also to read a fairly recent biography of Pater to try to understand what was going on in his book. For this is the most unusual novel I have ever read. My own feeling is that there is nothing else quite like it. Marius is highly autobiographical in the sense that while we are reading about Marius's development, we are in fact reading about Pater's own experience. In some ways, this book is a response to the critics who were so outraged by his work at the beginning of his career, and it is an effort to set the record straight in a work of fiction.

Pater has set the novel during the reign of Marcus Aurelius so as to be able to suggest the pagan and Christian milieu during a period of relative calm in the history of Christian persecutions and also attempts to describe the appeal of the Church during the second century while it was still a fresh and developing religion.

Marius initially admires Marcus Aurelius, for whom he works briefly as secretary, but he loses respect for him when he is seen to be indifferent to the sufferings of both men and animals at the circus games that celebrated his return from a campaign. Marius saw an incongruity between this indifference and the Stoicism Aurelius professed.

As Marius goes through life exploring especially the Hellenistic philosophies — Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic — he concludes that no single school quite fills the bill, and then of course he encounters Christianity and explores his own positive response to it but never seems to experience real faith. In this sense, he seems to be mirroring Pater.

Basically, I enjoyed this novel. I suspect it will stay with me for a long time. It is rich in historical and literary lore that those of us may be ignorant of who did not have a Victorian classical education at Oxford.

Do yourself a favor, dear Reader, and avoid the mistakes I made in approaching this book. First of all, I read the version from Project Gutenberg, which has only a few notes and no introduction. I eventually ended up buying a used copy of the Penguin Classics version published in 1985, which has fairly good notes and a useful introduction written incidentally by Michael Levey, author of The Case of Walter Pater, the excellent critical biography I read and now recommend.

Read the notes, which help to breathe some life into this erudite novel and will surely make it a richer reading experience. Look up Apuleius, Numa, Lucian, Lucretius as they come up. Read about the differences between the Cyrenaic and Epicurean schools of philosophy. Remind yourself of the broad outlines of the Aurelian Age.

Take the detours. For example, you will find Lucian's dialogues to be as charming and witty as Socrates'. You will learn that a chapter titled "A Conversation Not Imaginary" makes vague reference to a collection of Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor. Nobody reads these anymore, but perhaps we should. Much of this literature — Landor, Lucian, Lucretius — is available at Project Gutenberg for sampling.

Since I began this review by dissecting Marius in light of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, I would like to add some criticisms of my own. Difficult as it is, I have to admit it was odd to read a novel that reflected so few aspects of a typical novel. It had a basic story, a few undercharacterized people, it had a touch of prophecy, but no plot, no fantasy, and no pattern or rhythm. What drives this novel is one's curiosity about Marius. And with all the interiority, I still come up feeling a bit empty. We never learn much about how Marius actually feels, only what he thinks.

While Pater wanted to draw comparisons between the Age of Marcus Aurelius and the Renaissance and the Victorian Age, I was disturbed by his constant tearing of the curtain, his repeated violation of the time-space continuum, by making reference to later authors, books or events. These intrusions have the same effect as anachronisms. For example, after reciting the story of Cupid and Psyche from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, Pater writes: "The petulant boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more like that 'Lord of terrible aspect' who stood at Dante's bedside and wept." Such instances are too common and tend to break the spell. It is as though Pater has forgotten he is writing a novel and not an academic treatise. Forster might not be as bothered by this as I was because he recommends detaching our criticism of a novel as much as possible from time and place, but in this case it is very difficult because the book is so much a part of its time and point of origin, even though it was set in an era sixteen hundred years earlier. The time-space problem is a difficult one to sort out in this instance.

More than once Forster says that human nature is unchangeable. And this is why this book is worth reading. It gives us a glimpse of one young man's development and the humanity of his creator. show less

Walter Pater had a passion for the Italian Renaissance, it spoke to him as something like a reassertion of paganism into the world of Christianity. He was able to see the Hellenistic world wherever he looked and he looked deep into Renaissance art to find it. [The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry is a collection of essays, originally collected together in 1873 under the title of [Studies in the History of the Renaissance] but the later edition published in 1888 has in addition his show more essay on the school of Giorgione, where he delves deeply into a definition for a work of art.

Like many other famous Victorian art critics Pater saw the Renaissance as an uplifting of the spirit from the dark ages of the medieval period. However he was careful to look backwards to the twelfth century and before to find the seeds for growth and his first chapter is on the early influence of France, this is followed by an essay on Pica Della Mirandola in whom Pater discovers in his writing its subject as the dignity of man:

"It helped man onward to that reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils"

It is in his essay on Sandro Botticelli that Pater launches into his ideas on the influence of Pagan images in Renaissance art, but he also does a wonderful job in describing the unique qualities of the paintings. There follows an excellent little essay on Luca Della Robbia before one of the highlights of the book is the essay on the poetry of Michelangelo. The essay title is a bit misleading because Pater talks about the 'sweetness and strength' in Michelangelo's work and it ranges over his painting and his sculpture. The following essay on Leonardo Da Vinci is equally impressive and here Pater talks about his curiosity and his desire for beauty and he tells us what he sees in the celebrated Mona Lisa. His essay on The School of Giorgione has the startling idea at it's heart that music is the most sublime form of all the arts because it unites subject and form and it is the paintings (there are only a handful in existence) of Giorgione that suggest this to him. In his essay on Joachim Du Bellay, Pater has come nearly full circle as he is back with France and the poetry of the Pleiad which takes him into the mid sixteenth century and towards the end of the Renaissance. Pater is not yet finished as two astonishing essays are still to follow the first is on the Germanart critic and archeologist: Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Pater says:

Winklemann -"As it is confessedly the beauty of man which is to be conceived under one general idea, so I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a higher sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be awakened and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct of which I am speaking must be exercised and directed to what is beautiful, before that age is reached, at which one would be afraid to confess that one had no taste for it."

His eulogy on Winckelmann leads Pater to discuss in detail the awakening to the divine forms of antiquity that signifies to him the Renaissance. He puts many of his thoughts together in his conclusion where he celebrates the quest for beauty in the artistry of the Renaissance:

"Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

These essays provide us with a Victorian art critic's view of the Renaissance by selecting key figures on which he can hang his theories and ideas. It is a celebration of the artistic genius that is paramount in these essays and they are written with a passion for the subject. They will serve as an introduction to the Renaissance, but they will be more appreciated by readers that already have some knowledge of the period. Pater is a critic that encourages his readers, by his writing, by his ideas and theories to look again at some of the great works of art, to see for himself just what he might have missed and so his essays are there to be read by all lovers of the period. A four star read. show less

In this his last work published before his death in 1894, Pater applies his considerable talents as critic and writer to a discussion of how one can derive great aesthetic pleasure from reading Plato. Plato and Platonism was composed as a series of ten lectures (which may account for Pater’s fondness for commas) in long, meandering sentences, but if you are reading by candlelight in an overstuffed burgundy velvet wingback chair with fraying seams surrounded by dusty stacks of old books, show more then Pater’s prose goes down like a jigger of vintage single malt.

To enjoy and appreciate Plato, Pater writes, we have to understand his intent by acknowledging the antecedents to his thought and recognizing the association between the method and the content of his work. Pater situates Plato in the evolutionary flow of Greek thought, as he drew inspiration from Heraclitus (the paradox of constant extinction and renewal), Parmenides (austere and abstract, by way of the dualism of Xenophanes), and Pythagoras ('the essential laws of measure' in time and space: Timaeus!). The distinctive genius of Plato, everyone should know by now, was in the development of the dialogue form, the hybrid poem-essay that illustrates the idea of which it speaks. The dialectic as a literary artform promotes the very process by which we reason, writes Pater, and cultivates 'the philosophic temper’: diffident, reserved, receptive to discovery and revelation, ‘determined not to foreclose what is still a question.’ The method models the dialogue of the mind with itself.

Plato and Platonism is the kind of commentary that is both enlightening and influential in its own right. Pater anticipates by thirty years Whitehead’s point about Plato as “an inexhaustible mine of suggestion” (Process and Reality, 1929) and recognizes in Plato the kind of ‘imaginative reason’ that fostered the cosmological theories of the 20th c. The same mind opened the way to both ontology and skepticism (two contradictory forms of Platonism, notes Pater) and saw in the cosmos both machine and music. Pater’s enthusiasm for Plato’s enthusiasm is what makes this book such a pleasure to read. Pater’s Plato is an artist, ‘a seer with the sensuous love of the unseen.’

The very words of Plato, then, challenge us straightway to larger and finer apprehension of the processes of our own minds; are themselves a discovery in the sphere of mind. It was he made us freemen of those solitary places, so trying yet so attractive, so remote and high, they seem, yet are naturally so close to us: he peopled them with intelligible forms. Nay more! By his peculiar gift of verbal articulation he divined the mere hollow spaces which a knowledge, then merely potential, and an experience still to come, would one day occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results, precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the point sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer effectiveness of abstract language, he gave an elusive air of reality or substance to the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis—of a mind trying to feed itself on its own emptiness.

[I read one of the inexpensive e-text print-on-demand editions of Plato and Platonism. There were words missing here and there, curious transliterations, and sloppily appended chapter notes—all minor distractions in the light of Pater’s achievement.] show less

Pater's Renaissance is an important contribution to the history of art for several reasons, though it is perhaps not to be classified as art history itself. In ten essays, Pater takes us through the Renaissance from what he sees as its foreshadowings in France, to the characters of Florence and the Italian Renaissane including Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Giorgione, before he ends where he started in France.
So why is this not always seen as strictly being a work of art history? show more Firstly the style of Pater's prose is more that of an aesthete than of a scholar; indeed he arguably set off the Aesthetic movement in Oxford in the mid Victorian period to much consternation from his peers in college. This is not a criticism - it is what makes this book memorable, quotable, and very enjoyable to read. Secondly, and this acknowledged in the books subtitle "studies in art and poetry", this is a work more about poetry, and musing on art in a poetical frame of mind, than it is about historical facts.
So why is this work important? Firstly, if we are interested in its subject matter, the Renaissance, there is much we can learn about its spirit as a phenomenon, and what separates it in a serious sense from the Gothic and the Classical. Secondly, Pater's aesthetic attitude comes through in this work, which is helpful for those wanting to understand his influence on the generations of aesthetes that were inspired by this work, from Oscar Wilde through to the Bloomsbury group. This influence was perhaps in part responsible for a move away from dry Victorian sensibilities towards more readable, sensuous prose, while retaining many of the interests that were formerly the preserve of the scholar.
As an introduction to the Renaissance this might not be the best work due to its gaps and errors in attribution of paintings that have now long since been corrected. However as a thoroughly readable work with its own unique spirit of beauty this is unlike anything else, and worth reading for this reason alone. show less