by Walter Pater
The service at Brasenose retains several peculiar little ceremonies; the candles are lit at celebrations. The Junior Fellows bring in the elements with solemnity from the anti-chapel. When the procession leaves the altar, the dignitaries who carry the alms and the vessels bow at the lectern to the altar, and to the Principal as they pass his stall. The Vice-Principal bows to the altar on leaving his stall, and to the Principal as he passes out. These little observances, dating from Laudian, or even pre-Reformation times, were very congenial to Pater; and it was always observed that though kneeling was painful to him, he always remained on his knees, in an attitude of deep reverence, during the whole administration of the Sacrament. Indeed his reverent and absorbed appearance in chapel will be long remembered by those to whom he was a familiar figure. His large pale face, his heavy moustache and firm chin, his stoop, his eyes cast down on his book in a veritable custodia oculorum — all this was deeply impressive, and truly reflected the solemn preoccupation which he felt. It is characteristic of him that he used to regret that the ardour with which the undergraduates sang the Psalms abated in the Magnificat, which to him was the Song of Songs.
One of the very few pieces of writing composed during the years devoted to Marius was the little Essay on “Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” This was written in 1883, not long after the poet’s death, and is perhaps tinged with a memorial respect. Yet it is a subtle piece of praise, in which at the same time Pater seems delicately to weigh and test the author he is discussing; but one cannot help feeling that the innermost world of mystical passion in which Rossetti lived was as a locked and darkened chamber to Pater. He can look into it, he can admire the accessories of the scene, he can analyse, he can even sympathise to a degree; but it was after all to Pater an unnatural region; the heated atmosphere of passion, the supreme significance of love, being foreign and almost antipathetic to Pater’s serious and sober view of intellectual tranquillity. To be intellectually and perceptively impassioned indeed he desired; but the physical ardours of love, the longing for enamoured possession — with this Pater had nothing in common.
He divined the truth indeed by a sort of analogy of sympathy.
“To Rossetti,” he wrote, “life is a crisis at every moment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions of man’s everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite to him.”
And again: —
“For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other, swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius, mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a world where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those affections — of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunate collisions with those other great matters; how it looks, as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them: all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse.”
This is ingenious enough, though it is hard to see exactly what Pater meant by the “casuistry,” the “philosophical” vein of Rossetti. Rossetti rather seems to feel, to state the problem, with the solution of which philosophical minds might concern themselves. Thus he affords plentiful matter for philosophical speculation, but without philosophical intention; and indeed the deep-seated impatience of Rossetti’s nature had very little that was akin to the philosophical spirit. He felt the mystery, which is the basis of all philosophy, deeply; but it was to him a baffling, a despairing mystery; not an attractive mystery, supremely worth disentangling.
And thus it is that Pater chooses as the typical instance of Rossetti’s work the single composition which he says he would select if he had to name one to a reader desiring to make acquaintance with him for the first time — The King’s Tragedy, a ballad which is hardly typical of Rossetti at all, a piece of somewhat languid unemotional workmanship; with an excellence of its own indeed, but not even touched with the inner spirit of Rossetti’s work. The reason of this is that Pater, admiring with a deep respect and regard the attitude of Rossetti to art, but yet not entering into his inner mood, found the restraint, the directness, the absence of exotic suggestiveness displayed in this poem more congenial to him; and thus the essay remains rather a tour de force than a sympathetic appreciation; he was surveying Rossetti from the outside, not, as in the writers whom he himself selected to deal with, from the inside. Pater in his critical work bears always, like the angel of the Revelation, a golden reed to measure the city; but in this particular essay it is a piece of measuring and no more; and nothing could more clearly show the impersonal, the intellectual trend of Pater’s temperament than his comparative failure to accompany Rossetti into the penetralia of his beauty-haunted and beauty-tortured spirit.
CHAPTER IV. MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
WHEN or how Pater began to form the design of Marius the Epicurean is not known. I cannot help doubting whether it was at first intended to be so large a work. His method of working was so elaborate, so deliberate, that he preferred shorter studies, episodes rather than continuous narrative. The year 1878 had been a more or less busy year. The Child in the House had appeared, and he had written three other studies; but he fell into a long silence. In 1879 nothing appeared from his pen. In 1880 two short Greek Studies were all that he published; in 1881 and 1882 he published nothing; in 1883 came the little study of Rossetti, published as an introduction in Ward’s English Poets. In 1884 he published nothing; and at last in 1885 appeared Marius the Epicurean. It may be said that he gave up six years of his life, when his mental powers were at their strongest, to the preparation of this great book. He felt the strain imposed upon him by the size of the conception very severely; moreover, he realised that to execute a subject on so large a scale was not wholly consonant with the bent of his mind; thus he wrote to Miss Paget (Vernon Lee) in July 1883: —
“I have hopes of completing one half of my present chief work — an Imaginary Portrait of a peculiar type of mind in the time of Marcus Aurelius, by the end of this vacation.... I am wishing to get the whole completed, as I have visions of many smaller pieces of work, the composition of which would be actually pleasanter to me. However, I regard this present matter as a sort of duty. For you know I think that there is a... sort of religious phase possible for the modern mind, the conditions of which phase it is the main object of my design to convey.”
So few personal hints are preserved of Pater’s feelings about any of his works that this statement, made in the very throes of his labour, has a peculiar interest.
The motive of Marius is the tracing of the history of a highly intellectual nature, with a deep religious bias, through various stages of philosophy to the threshold of Christianity; for it is impossible to resist the conviction that Marius, dying technically a Christian, his last moments soothed with Christian rites, would, if the creator of the book had decided to prolong his progress, have become a professed Christian.
Before we examine the book in detail we may briefly indicate the stages through which Marius passes. The first part traces his boyhood and school life, and shows him, so to speak, in the orthodox stage, accepting without question and with deep devotion the old native religion of his land; in his school days comes the mental awakening, and the birth of philosophical speculation. In the second part Marius takes his bearings, and becomes an intellectual Epicurean, of the Cyrenaic school. He goes to Rome, and joins the Imperial household as secretary to the Emperor Aurelius; and thus the Stoic position is brought before him in its most attractive form. In the third part Marius learns the inadequacy of his Cyrenaic philosophy, and begins to see that there is an isolation and a lack of sympathy in his position. He feels, too, the incompleteness of the Stoical system; and realises the need of a vital faith in some unseen and guiding power to preserve the serenity of mind which he
desires. At the end of this part Marius is a Theist; at this point some unrecorded years are supposed to elapse. In the fourth part Marius is brought into direct contact with Christianity, but the appeal that it makes to him is mainly aesthetic; yet the faith in an unseen power comes nearer as the shadow of death begins to fall.
The background, carefully selected by Pater for the story to enact itself in, is the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a skilfully chosen period, when philosophy was fashionable, and when a liberal toleration was extended to Christianity; so that the development of Marius’ philosophical and religious position takes place equably and naturally, without the severe strain which a period of barbarism or persecution might have put upon it.
It may also be observed that the story, though in a sense romantic, is free from emotional incidents. Two friendships play their part in the development of Marius; but there is no hint from first to last of the distracting emotion of love. With the exception of the faint picture of his mother in the opening of the book, transitory glimpses of the Empress Faustina and of the Christian widow Cecilia, there is an entire absence of the feminine element.
The book bears from first to last a strong personal, almost autobiographical, impress; but at the same time it may be said that it is essentially a learned book; the local colour, the archaeological element, is very closely studied, and used, as was ever Pater’s way, in no pedantic fashion, but fused with a perfect naturalism into the story. It is probably, however, true to say that the fact that Pater’s knowledge of Italy was to a great extent superficial helped him to make his picture so clear and vivid; he was always at his best when he was amplifying slender hints and recollected glimpses. Too great a wealth of detailed materials tended, as we shall have occasion to observe in a later book, Gaston de Latour, to blur the sharp outline and to interfere with lucid execution.
The workmanship of the book is from first to last perfect; if there is a fault, and it may be fairly reckoned a fault, it lies in the introduction of certain rather over-lengthy episodes of translated or adapted passages, such as the story of Cupid and Psyche out of the Golden Book of Apuleius, the discourses of the Emperor Aurelius, and the conversation between Lucian and Hermotimus in the fourth part. In themselves they are models of literary grace; but in a connected narrative they are rather as wide trenches dug across the reader’s path. They are felicitous indeed, and in a sense apposite; but just as in the Arabian Nights the device of story within story, like those nests of enamelled Indian boxes, causes a reluctant suspension of thought, so it may be said in Marius that the holding up of the main interest by the introduction of pieces of work on so minute a scale is not justified. It is as though pilgrims on a river, who desire above all things to complete their journey, should be compelled to traverse and explore a backwater, where no amount of beautiful detail reconciles them to the temporary abandonment of their original quest.
The art of the writer is perhaps most manifest in the first part, in which there is a delighted, a luxurious zest, hardly maintained in the same evenness throughout. Indeed, in spite of the size of the whole conception, and the perfect craftsmanship displayed, one is tempted to believe that Pater’s real strength was the strength of the essayist rather than of the narrator; a belief in which, as we have seen, he himself concurred.
In the first part is brought out with exquisite grace the life of the old Roman villa, buried in the remote countryside, near the sea: the name of the place is White-nights (Ad Vigilias Albas). It is half-farm, halfvilla; here the lonely boy grows up, with his widowed mother, whose life is but a life of shadowy sentiment consecrated to the memory of the dead.
“The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape — the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers.... The air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.”
There is a beautiful passage about the boy’s simple pursuits: —
“The ramble to the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and delightful signs, one after another — the abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild birds — that one was approaching the sea; the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds.”
The house itself has the perfect Italian charm: —
“Lying away from the white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age... beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds had forced their way.”
The boy grows up in an intense meditative cloistered mood, with a scrupulous conscience carefully fostered by his mother. “A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place — his own soul was like that!” There is a traditional, inherited priesthood in the family, and the boy has a deep liturgical and ritual preoccupation; he is happiest in sacred places, and is conscious all his life, even in the midst of worldly distractions, of “a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct of life.” Perhaps it may be said that the ritual element, the pleasure in processions, and ordered hymns, and ceremonies and symbols is a little over-weighted. There is a sense of unreality, a lack of lifelikeness, about the dramatic intentness with which the functions described are carried out; the devout temper of the central figure, of Marius himself, is too definitely presupposed in the worshippers. We shall have occasion to advert to this point again; but in this first part the spectacle of the religious ceremonies so tenderly and quaintly described gives one the feeling that one is watching the movements of the well-drilled supers of a play, rather than the unconstrained movement of actual life.
The boy’s religious sense is deepened by a visit that he pays, for the sake of curing a boyish ailment, to a neighbouring temple of Aesculapius, where he listens to the mystical discourse of a young priest. He is shown through a sliding panel a retired long-drawn valley, lit with sunlight and closed by a misty mountain, which gives him a strong sense of the unsuspected presence of the unseen in life. His mother dies; and he himself goes to Pisa to school, where he lives a somewhat isolated life, with dreams of literary fame.
“While all the heart (of his fellow-scholars) was in their limited boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was already entertaining himself, very pleasurably meditative, with the tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic, preliminary exercise for a larger contest, and already with an implicit epicureanism.”
His view of life is coloured by an intense boyish attachment to a school friend Flavian, a wayward, selfabsorbed, brilliant boy, with a strong taste for euphuistic literature, and of sceptical tendency. Flavian’s life is already tainted by sensuality: “How often, afterwards, did evil things present themselves in malign association with the memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of borrowed sanction and charm in its natural grace!” But Marius by a certain coldness and fastidiousness of temperament preserves his purity untouched. And Marius here learns his first lessons in Epicureanism of the higher kind. “He was acquiring what it is the chief function of all higher education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our everyday life — of so exclusively living in them — that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or débris of our days, comes to be as though it were not.” But it was not the prescribed studies of the school that gave him his hints of beauty. “If our modern education, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind of idealising power, it does so (tho
ugh dealing mainly, as its professed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of ancient literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened also, long ago, with Marius and his friend.”
Then comes Marius’ literary training in association with Flavian. He learns to appreciate the delicate manipulation of words, the sharp impression, the exclusion of all “that was but middling, tame, or only half-true,” the refinement of what is already refined, the fastidious correctness of form, the principle that “to know when one’s self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.” And this brings Marius to the knowledge of the necessity of scrupulous independence in literary taste.
“It was a principle, the forcible apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in the selection of his intellectual food; often listless while others read or gazed diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere complaisance to other people’s emotions: it served to foster in him a very scrupulous literary sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demand for a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personal intuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved his euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice.”
Then comes the sudden death of Flavian, in a fever; and his end is told with apathetic intensity which makes it one of the strongest passages in the book. Flavian is writing a poem, and struggles to continue his work through the slow progress of decay. In this beautiful passage one entirely false note is struck; and it has a special interest because it is the only moment at which the narrative form is interrupted for a moment by the dramatic. Marius lies down beside his dying friend, heedless of possible contagion, to try and communicate some warmth to the shivering frame. In the morning Flavian’s delirious anguish ceases with a revival of mental clearness. “‘Is it a comfort,’ Marius whispered then, ‘that I shall often come and weep over you?’—’ Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!’” It is certain that this effort to sum up a thought, which might have been present in Marius’ mind, in definite words is an artistic mistake. If any confession of the terrible consciousness that death was at hand was to be made, it was for Flavian to confess it; and Flavian’s own answer is equally untrue to nature.