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, half-villa; 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, self-absorbed, 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 (though 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.
And so with the death of Flavian the first part closes in desolation.
The death of his friend is the event which, at the beginning of the
second part, flings Marius into philosophical speculation. “To Marius
... the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing
less than the soul’s extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as the
fire among those still beloved ashes.” Thus he is confronted in the
sternest and saddest way with the mystery of death: and the thought
comes home to him that he must at all costs realise the significance
of life, and how he must play his part in the days that remain before
he too passes into shadow and silence; the religion of his childhood
deserts him; and he is forced to turn to the “honest action of his own
untroubled, unassisted intelligence.”
He secluded himself in a severe intellectual meditation, becoming
something of a mystery to his fellows. He was reading, “for the most
part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what
might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence,
which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.”
He studies Heraclitus, and learns to mistrust habitual impressions and
uncorrected sensation, and to discern the movement in things of “the
sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine reason.”
He accepts the canon that the individual must be to himself the measure
of all things, and resolves to limit his researches to what immediately
interests him, resting peacefully in a profound ignorance of all
beside. “He would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow
its due weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in
the conditions of man’s life.” And here he fell under the dominion of
Aristippus of Cyrene, who was the first to translate the abstractions
of metaphysics into a practical sentiment. He, too, was more than
half an agnostic; but instead of his agnosticism leading to a languid
enervation, it led rather to a perpetual and inextinguishable thirst
for experience.
“What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of one of the happiest
temperaments coming, so to speak, to an understanding with the most
depressing of theories”; and the practical conclusion he arrived at
was that self-culture was probably the best solution, the impulse
to “adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls,
and whatever our souls touch upon—these wonderful bodies, these
material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together
for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the
intercourse of society.”
Aristippus, indeed, became to Marius a master of decorous and
high-minded living. Metaphysic, as described by Michelet, “the art of
bewildering oneself methodically,” he must spend little time upon that.
“Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical
ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed,” and
to acquire this, to regard life as the end of life, the only way was
through “insight, through culture, into all that the present moment
holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.”
The pursuit of vivid sensations and intellectual apprehensions must
be his work, until such a manner of life, by its effort to live days
“lovely and pleasant,” might become a kind of hidden mystic religion.
But there was no touch of hedonism in this:—
“Not pleasure, but fulness of life, and ‘insight’ as conducting to
that fulness—energy, variety, and choice of experience, including
noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite
old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral
life ... whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic,
impassioned, ideal: from these the ‘new Cyrenaicism’ of Marius took
its criterion of values.”
This would involve “a life of industry, of industrious study, only
possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body and
soul.”
Marius then, with his creed formulated, at nineteen years of age,
sets out for Rome, where he has an old family mansion, to become the
amanuensis of the Emperor. There is a beautiful description of his
journey: how the sun went down “though there was still a glow along the
road through the shorn cornfields, and the birds were still awake about
the crumbling gray heights of an old temple.”
On the journey he meets the young Christian knight, Cornelius. And
it must be here confessed that the youthful soldier of the Imperial
guard, with his gilded armour, his blithe manliness, his sense of
secret serenity, is one of the least convincing figures of the book.
To put it in the plainest way possible, there is an indefinable taint
of priggishness about Cornelius, and Pater in vain labours to create a
charm about him. To weave such a charm the elaborate narrative style
is inadequate; one gets no glimpse into the blithe and serene mind
of Cornelius; he is “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly
null”—no touch of humanity ever comes to relieve his statuesque pose,
and one wearies of his golden armour and his handsome face. Nothing
but dramatic art, such as the art of Scott, could have given Cornelius
attractiveness; and even he would have been baffled by the sober
perfection of the young knight. One longs that he should lose his
temper, make some human mistake, exhibit some trace of emotion or even
frailty; but he takes instead his icy shining way through the story,
and the heart never desires to follow him.
Then comes Marius’ first sight of Rome, his realisation of the fact
that it was, beside being a city of palaces, become the romantic home
of the most restless religious instinct, of the wildest superstition.
Religions were draining into Rome, as the rivers into the sea. In the
midst moved the stately figure of the Stoic Emperor, whom Marius first
sees in a religious procession, and whose calm face, with its prominent
eyes demurely downcast, but yet “broadly and benignantly observant,”
candid gaze, and ascetic air, as though “the flesh had scarcely been
an equal gainer with the spirit,” impressed him profoundly. With him
walked the goodly, comely, sensual Lucius Verus, the other Augustus,
with his “strange capacity for misusing the adornments of life, with a
masterly grace.” Then follows the Emperor’s discourse on the Vanity of
Human Ambitions, delivered in the Senate, a skilful cento of aphorisms
taken from the _Meditations_, and finally Marius’ introduction to the
Imperial household, his sight of Faustina the Empress, Fronto the
philosopher, and the Emperor himself. He sees, too, a gladiatorial
show, at which the Emperor sits impassibly, writing and reading, and
wonders at the tolerance, “which seemed to Marius to mark Aurelius as
his inferior now and for ever on the question of righteousness; to set
them on opposite sides, in some great conflict.”
It may be freely confessed that Pater does contrive, by pathetic
and emotional touches, to bring out with wonderful vividness the
human charm of the Emperor, his deep patience, his fatigue, his
affectionateness, his devotion to duty. He and Flavian remain as the
two vital figures of the book, apart from the hero himself; and it may
be held a true triumph of a species of historical art to have evolved
so real, so dignified, so intensely vivid a figure out of the somewhat
chilly abstractedness that had hitherto surrounded the philosophic Lord
of legions, the Stoic master of the world.
In the third part of _Marius_, which is much shorter than any of the
other parts, the revelation grows more distinct. Marius, overcome with
doubt as to whether his new intellectual scheme can be harmonised with
the old serious morality of his childhood, hears a discourse by Fronto
on the question of morals.
“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.... How tenderly—more tenderly than many stricter
souls—he might yield himself to kindly instinct! What fineness of
charity in passing judgment on others! What an exquisite conscience
of other men’s susceptibilities! He knows for how much the manner,
because the heart itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He goes
beyond most people in his care for all weakly creatures; judging,
instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess rights. He
conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call them by that
name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may have no
suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in a way
of his own.”
And then the orator proceeds to sketch a kind of universal
commonwealth, a heavenly citizenship, in which all men should realise
their position, their duty; and Marius falls to wondering whether
there could be any such inner community of humanity, wider than even
the community of nationality, and with a larger patriotism, with an
aristocracy of elect spirits, an ever-widening example, and a comely
order of its own. He realises that his Cyrenaicism is after all but
an enthusiasm characteristic of youth, almost a fanaticism, and that
something wider, larger, more impersonal is needed, as life goes on. He
realised that in his first philosophy there had been “some cramping,
narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own nature,” and that
he had paid a great price “in the sacrifice of a thousand possible
sympathies” for the intense personal appreciation of the beauty of the
moment. It was a narrow perfection that he had been aiming at after
all, the perfection of “capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical
impressions, of an imaginative sympathy.” But he had rejected the
wider, the more venerable system of religious sentiments and ideas,
which had grown up in the vast field of human experience. And thus
he saw that he could not stay where he was; that he must recognise
not only his own personal point of view, but the wider community of
humanity.
In this frame of mind Marius has a memorable interview with the
Emperor, who, in order to raise funds for the war, has determined
to sell by public auction the accumulated treasures of the Imperial
palace, and is feeling with an austere joy the pleasure of a deep
philosophical detachment from the world. Marius sees that this kind of
renunciation, a renunciation of the very things of the purest quality
of beauty that his philosophy had taught him to value, may bring with
it a loftier and simpler kind of joy than even the sober and refined
enjoyment of them. Aurelius, with a supreme sense of duty, is about to
plunge into the uncongenial labours of a great campaign, and Marius
sees that in the selfless surrender to what appears the Divine will
lay his true generosity of soul. He sees that one of the strongest
features of the Emperor’s character is the union of intellectual
independence with a tender sympathy for all the manifestations of the
popular religious sense, realising, as he does, that men must reach
their ideal by very different paths. Marius finds, among the Emperor’s
papers committed to him, a document, a species of diary, full of the
most intimate self-communings. And in spite of the magnificence of
character, the resolute determination, the amazing generosity there
revealed, there is a note of heaviness. He sees how “the forced and
yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, after
all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight
upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no
real justification of the ways of Heaven to man.” The cheerfulness
of demeanour, indeed, to which the Emperor had attained, was not a
spontaneous joy breaking out from an inner source of happy faith,
but a practised, a deliberate attitude, attained by a rigorous
self-restraint. Marius thinks of Cornelius, whose cheerfulness seems
of a totally different kind, “united with the bold recognition of
evil as a fact in the world,” yet he sees or suspects in Cornelius an
irrepressible and impassioned hopefulness. He finds it necessary to
go to Praeneste, where the Emperor is staying for a few days with his
younger children, and arrives to find the little Annius Verus dying;
and here comes one of the beautiful touches through which one comes so
close to the humanity of Aurelius:—
“He saw the emperor carry the child away—quite conscious at last,
but with a touching expression ... of weakness and defeat—pressed
close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one thing
only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure
distress.”
And so the Emperor sets out on the campaign from which he has reason
to think that he may never return. The pageantry of his departure,
the magnificent armour that he wears, are in strange contrast to the
face of Aurelius, “with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an
expression of positive suffering.” He departs, and Marius returns
to his musings; but in a lonely ride into the Sabine Hills he has a
strange uplifting of spirit, in which he feels that behind all the
complexity of life, “behind the veil of a mechanical and material
order, but only just behind it,” there moves a guide, a heavenly
friend, ever at his side, to whom he is perhaps dearer than even to
himself, a Father of Men.
Marius felt that after the realisation of this possibility, his life
could never be quite the same again, and that only in the light of this
hope could he apprehend the secret of the lonely pilgrimage upon which
he seemed to be bound.
Some time is now supposed to elapse, and in the fourth part Marius
comes upon the scene again at a banquet at which the young Commodus
is present, and also the great Apuleius, with whom Marius has a few
moments of private conversation. Apuleius unfolds to his companion
his belief in a kind of middle order of beings, between man and God,
by whom the prayers and aspirations of humanity can be carried and
interpreted to God. It is, indeed, the doctrine of the ministry of
angels which is thus foreshadowed; and the effect on Marius is to give
a heightened sense of unreality to the world in which he moves; and it
is at this juncture that he visits with Cornelius the villa of Cecilia,
and is deeply impressed with the order, the industry, the joyful peace
of the household. Cornelius takes his friend through a garden and
into the old catacomb of the Cecilii, where Marius sees the graves of
Christians, and reads with a strange thrill of spirit the touching
and inspiring inscriptions on their tombs, that seem to exorcise the
terrors of death by a serene and lively hope. The fresh and cool
sensation of peace with which the whole surroundings are invested is to
Marius like a window opened from a hot and fragrant room into the dawn
of some other morning. Here, he fancied, might be the cure, the anodyne
for the deep sorrowfulness of spirit under which he seemed to have been
always labouring. He began to discern the source of that untroubled
serenity, that quiet happiness of which he had always been conscious
in his friend. The Christian ideal of that period, during the peace
of the Antonines, had lent itself to the harmonious development of
human nature, in a due proportion, rather than to the idea of ascetic
self-sacrifice; and the divine urbanity and moderation of this secluded
household exercised a strong spell over the sensuous temperament of
Marius.
But here there creeps in the intense liturgical and ritual
preoccupation of the author. Marius goes to find Cornelius at the
Cecilian villa, and becomes by accident the spectator of a solemn
celebration of the Eucharistic mystery.
The description of the service is exquisitely, almost lusciously
rendered; it satisfies Marius’ deep instinct for worship to the
uttermost. But here the reader cannot help feeling a lack of
proportion; the sensuous element triumphs over the intellectual. The
choir of children, the white-robed youths, the bishop himself, “moving
the hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious power
... or chanting in cadence of a grave sweetness the leading parts of
the rite,” have a certain unreality about them, an impossible peace,
an almost mawkishness of conception. It seems, perhaps, a hard and
unsympathic criticism to make of a passage into which so much tender
idealism has passed, but there is a taint as of the Sunday-school type
about the incident, which not even its elaborate art can surmount.
One feels in a false atmosphere, an atmosphere which is not only
unrealisable but actually undesirable. It lacks the salt of humanity,
and is touched with the unalloyed meekness which the manly heart,
however tender, however responsive, does not really wish to enforce.
The narrative then passes with a singular abruptness back to Marius’
literary preoccupations; and the intrusion of this chapter at this
point may be held to be one of the few artistic mistakes of the book.
It interrupts the progress, as if by a whimsical diversion, at a
crucial point; it introduces the figure of the satirist Lucian, and
relates a conversation with Hermotimus, a beautiful thing in itself,
but with no real bearing on the development of the central theme.
The upshot of the talk, which is in itself a delicious Platonic
dialogue, full of humour and fancy, is that there is no certain
criterion of philosophical ideas, but that the adoption of any form
of philosophical belief is dictated by a preference and an instinct
in the disciple; Lucian, employing a species of Socratic questioning,
extinguishes, by a sort of affectionate and tender scepticism, the
burning enthusiasm of the boy’s ardent philosophy. The real gist of
the chapter lies in the sight which Marius has as he returns to Rome
of a wayside crucifix; and the echoes of the conversation take shape
in his mind, making him reflect whether it were possible that Love
“in the greatness of his strength” could condescend to sustain Love
“fainting by the road.” It is just a hint, like a ray of light through
a half-opened door.
There follow passages of a diary of Marius with many vignettes of small
sorrowful and loving things; a racehorse led to death, a crippled child
at play with his sister, a boy, the son of a labourer, waiting with
his father’s dinner, and gazing “with a sorrowful distaste for the din
and dirt” at the brick-kiln where his father is at work. The _motif_
of the chapter is that an enlarged charity, a passionate sympathy with
humanity, so apt to be excluded by a philosophical system, contains
perhaps a truer estimate of the secret of life.
“A protest comes, out of the very depths of man’s radically
hopeless condition in the world.... Dared one hope that there is a
heart, even as ours ... a heart even as mine, behind this vain show
of things!”
And now again Marius goes to the house of Cecilia, and sees the
burial of a child; he notes that not even the intensity of human
grief which the household feels and manifests in its stifled sobbing,
its unrestrained tears, can do away with “the habitual gleam of joy,
the placid satisfaction” of spirit. At the service is read aloud an
epistle speaking of martyrdoms in Gaul, of Blandina and Ponticus,
bringing to Marius the sense of the “strange new heroism,” uplifting
sorrow out of the region of “private regret,” which seems to be
appearing in the world.
Marius sees the return of the Emperor in triumph; and he is filled
with a sense of sickening reaction at the sight of the captives in
the procession, and at the fact that one of so lofty a spirit as
the Emperor can fall so low as to take his place in the midst of so
barbarous a ceremony. “Aurelius himself seemed to have undergone the
world’s coinage, and fallen to the level of his reward, in a mediocrity
no longer golden.” And thus at that moment the vital failure of the
philosophical attitude reveals itself to Marius; he sets out to revisit
his old home, with a shadow of approaching disaster upon him. He opens
the old mausoleum of the house, and the thought that he may be the last
of his race, blending with a passionate tenderness for the past, his
father, his ancestry, induces him to bury all the remains of the dead
deep below the ground.
“He himself watched the work, early and late; coming on the last
day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the last touches,
while the workmen were absent; one young lad only, finally
smoothing down the earthy bed, greatly surprised at the seriousness
with which Marius flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle with
the dark mould.”
And now the end comes with a certain unexpectedness. Marius, reflecting
on his own life, sees that though with a natural bent for adventure and
action, all his progress has been inward and meditative, always aiming
at detachment rather than at the intermingling of himself with the
current.
The death that follows was no doubt designed by the author to have
something tragic and what may be called almost sensational about
it, to relieve by contrast the contemplative texture of the work.
Cornelius finds Marius in depression and weariness at White-nights,
and contrasting sadly his own languor of spirit with the irrepressible
youth of the other.
They set off for Rome. The plague is ravaging the land, and this,
together with a shock of earthquake, loosens the superstitions of the
natives; an attack is made on a body of Christians who are praying
by the grave of the martyr Hyacinthus. Blood is shed, and the group,
including Cornelius and Marius, are arrested and sent for trial to the
chief town of the district. Marius, in obedience to a sudden instinct,
procures the liberation of Cornelius by bribing the guards, explaining
to Cornelius that he is allowed to depart to procure the means of
legal defence. The first feeling of Marius as he sees Cornelius depart
is a kind of innocent pride that he, who had always believed himself
to lack the heroic temper, could thus display a sudden courage. But
a mood of dark melancholy follows; he foresees that he will suffer
the death of a common felon, without even the Christian consolation
of the martyr’s example. The hardships of the march bring on a fever,
and Marius is abandoned by the guard as a dying man in a little hill
village. At first the rest and quiet relieve his tortured mind, and
he is filled with a sense of gratitude to the unseen Friend who has
guarded him through his long journey, and draws near in faith to the
crucified Jesus. In this half-peaceful mood he finds himself able to
think of death with an intense and reverent curiosity, as of a door
through which he must pass to his further pilgrimage. And then the
weariness comes back tenfold as death draws near; the Christians of
the place surround his bed, and hearing of the deed he has done in
saving Cornelius, administer the last rites, the consecrated bread, the
holy oil; and when all is over bury him with the accustomed prayers,
and with an added joy, holding him to have been a martyr indeed.
Such is the progress of this melancholy and meditative soul, to whom
even youth had hardly been a season of joy, so oppressed was it by the
sad malady of thought.
It is difficult to treat so intimate a memorial of a personality in a
critical spirit; and we may say at once that to deal with a book that
is so sacred a document in the spirit of finding fault with it for not
being other than it is, is wholly out of place. It may be said to have
nothing heroic about it, but to be almost purely spectatorial. It may
be easily labelled introspective, even morbid; but it is of the very
essence of the book that it is designed to trace the story of a soul to
which the ordinary sources of happiness are denied, and to which, from
temperament and instinct, the whole of life is a species of struggle,
an attempt to gain serenity and liberty by facing the darkest problems
candidly and courageously, rather than by trying to drown the mournful
questionings of the mind in the tide of life and activity. What we have
to do is, granted the type and the conception, to see how near the
execution comes to the idea which inspired it.
It will be seen that the book is to a certain extent the history of
a noble failure; Marius’ attempt to arrive, by his own unassisted
strength, by a firm and candid judgment, at a solution for life, breaks
down at every point. He falls back in a kind of weariness upon the old
religious intuitions that had been his joy in boyhood. He learns that
not in isolation, not in self-sufficiency, does the soul draw near
to the apprehension of the truth, but in enlarged sympathy, in the
sense of comradeship, in the perhaps anthropomorphic instinct of the
Fatherhood, the brotherhood of God. It is a passionate protest not only
against materialism, but against the intellectual ideal too; it is a
no less passionate pronouncement of the demand of the individual to be
satisfied and convinced, within his brief span of life, of the truth
that he desires and needs.
But the weakness of the case is, that instead of emphasising the power
of sympathy, the Christian conception of Love, which differentiates
Christianity from all other religious systems, Marius is after all
converted, or brought near to the threshold of the faith, more by its
sensuous appeal, its liturgical solemnities; the element, that is to
say, which Christianity has in common with all religions, and which
is essentially human in character. And more than that, even the very
peace which Marius discerns in Christianity is the old philosophical
peace over again. What attracts Marius in the Christian spirit is
its serenity and its detachment, not its vision of the corporateness
of humanity and the supreme tie of perfect love. This element is
introduced, indeed, but fitfully, and as if by a sense of historical
fidelity, rather than from any personal conviction of its supreme
vitality. With all its candid effort the spirit of the writer could not
disentangle itself from the sense of personal isolation, of personal
independence; there is no sense of union with God: the soul and its
creator, however near they draw in a species of divine sympathy, are
always treated of as severely apart and separate. The mystical union of
the personality with God is outside the writer’s ken; the obedience of
the human will to the divine, rather than the identification of the
two, is the end to which he moves; and this perhaps accounts for the
drawing of the line at the point which leaves Marius still outside the
fold, because one feels that the author himself hardly dared to attempt
to put into words what lay inside.
And now, as our chief concern is with the literary art of the book, we
may turn to consider its main characteristics.
“Though the manner of his work,” says Pater, speaking of Marius,
“was changed formally from poetry to prose, he remained, and
must always be, of the poetic temper: by which, I mean, among
other things, that quite independently of the general habit of
that pensive age he lived much, and as it were by system, in
reminiscence.”
This is true of the book itself: we cannot say that it is all
reminiscence, but it is all bound up with reminiscence. The author
makes little attempt to deal with the fresh atmosphere, the sharp
detail of the present; still less to throw himself forward into the
glowing idealization of the future; the whole book is that of a man
looking back, the outlines of what he sees all mellowed and rounded
in a sort of golden haze of pensive light. And it is thus essentially
poetical. The carefully studied archaeology of the book is never
insisted upon, but only used as contributing a picturesque and hinted
background; but it is poetical in the sense that there is no attempt
at definite or scientific statement—even the abstrusest doctrines
of philosophy, as well as the intricate details of the setting, are
all touched with a personal appeal. Nothing is presented in its own
dry light; it is all coloured, tinged, transformed by the mind of the
writer, it all ministers to his mood.
The one artistic fault of the book is, as we have said, the
introduction of alien episodes, of actual documents into the imaginary
fabric; and these give the effect, so to speak, of pictures hung upon
a tapestry. The style is of course entirely individual; it is a style
of which Pater was the inventor; it is not only easy to imitate, but it
is almost impossible, if one studies it closely, not to fall into the
very mannerisms of the writer. Of course it is easy to say that it is
languid, highly perfumed, luscious, over-ripe; but here again we fall
into the error of analysing the essential quality, and disapproving of
it. It cannot be pretended that it is brisk, lucid, or lively; there is
nothing of “sonorous metal, blowing martial sounds,” about it; rather
it winds like a cloud of smoke on a still day, hanging in fine-drawn
veils and aerial weft. It is intensely deliberate, self-conscious,
mannerised. Its fault is to fall into involved sentences, with long
parentheses and melodious cadences. It never trips or leaps or runs;
but always moves like a slow pontifical procession, stiff-robed,
mystical, and profound. It never aims at crisp precision, but rather at
a subtle refinement, a mysterious grace.
Its finest art is displayed in an economy of impression, whose very
severity ends in a suggestiveness of picture which is attained, not
by elaborate description, but by haunted glimpses of beauty. These
touches of perfect loveliness relieve the graver analysis with a
sudden sense of coolness and repose, as a student may look up from a
book into a sunny garden, and find in the golden light some hallowing,
some confirmation of the inner mood. And the most severe passages of
philosophical writing are again lit up by exquisite similes or still
more delicate metaphors, in which the whole sentence seems steeped and
stained, as with the juice of a berry shut in upon the page.
Thus he writes:—
“He, too, paused at the apprehension of that constant motion
of things—the drift of flowers, of little or great souls, of
ambitious systems, in the stream around him, the first source, the
ultimate issue, of which, in regions out of sight, must count with
him as but a dim problem.... He might reserve it as a fine, high,
visionary consideration, very remote upon the intellectual ladder,
just at the point, indeed, where that ladder seemed to pass into
the clouds, but for which there was certainly no time left just now
by his eager interest in the real objects so close to him, on the
lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground.”
No one can say that these sentences are obvious, clear, sharply cut.
But they are full of a poetical suggestiveness, and sparkle with hidden
lights like opalescent gems.
Indeed, the writing of Pater may best be compared to the opal. It has
not the clear facets, the limpid colour of the unclouded gem; but it
is iridescent, rounded, shot with flashing lights and suffused with a
milky mist of which one can hardly say whether it be near or far. It is
this strange sense of depth, so inherent in a cloudy gem, that it gives
one. One can measure to a millimetre the actual bulk of the jewel; but
within that limit, what spent lights gleam, what misty textures roll!
it is like a little coloured eyehole, through which one can discern the
orbits of pale stars, the swimming vapors of some uncreated world.
But the fact is that most of the objections that can be urged against
_Marius_ are _prima facie_ objections; it is criticised mostly for not
possessing qualities that it was not meant to have; it stands as one
of the great works of art of which it may be said that the execution
comes very near to the intention. Possibly Pater himself did not
feel it to be so; he said once humorously to a friend that he would
like to give him a copy of the second edition, because the first was
“so very rough.” That is a criticism which could have entered into
no mind except the author’s own. It remains a monument of sustained
dignity and mellifluous precision. The style of it is absolutely
distinctive and entirely new: the thing had never been done before;
it is a revelation of the possibilities of poetical prose which the
English language contains. The fact that it is not difficult to imitate
is in its favour rather than otherwise, because the same is true of
all great masters of individual style. But the feat was to discern
and then to display a new capacity in English prose. It might have
been said with truth that, before the advent of Pater, English prose
could display qualities of lucidity, vigor, force; that it could lend
itself to stately rhetoric and even glowing ornament; but it had never
before exhibited the characteristic of seductive grace. And yet this
was effected by Pater by the pure instinct for what was beautiful and
melodious; he has no special preference for either the use of Saxon
terms or for more elaborate Latinisms. He uses both impartially. Indeed
his use of short, crisp, emphatic, homely words side by side with
rotund, sonorous classicalities is one of the charms of the style. He
never hesitates to employ technical, metaphysical language, but he
contrives to fuse the whole into a singular unity; it is not even a
fair criticism to say that his language is not natural, for there are
many sentences of an almost childish _naïveté_. The only thing of which
one is almost invariably conscious is of the art employed, and thus
the writings of Pater appeal more, perhaps, to the craftsman than to
the ordinary reader, because of the constantly delightful sense of
difficulties overcome and crooked places made straight. There will, of
course, always be people who will feel a sense of constraint, a lack of
freedom. But those who feel the charm, will rightly discern in Marius
the true impassioned poetical quality, guided and enforced by severe
economy and delicate taste.
But however much we may analyse the characteristics of the style,
its inversions, its cadences, its peculiar use of metaphor, its
accumulation of delicate touches, its swift pictorial quality, we
cannot penetrate its secret any more than we can penetrate the secret
of the painter or the musician. Unity, due subordination, clearness
of conception, subtle correspondence of language to emotion, these
were the qualities which Pater used by a sort of fine native instinct.
It is the natural consequence of our type of classical education,
which encourages imitation rather than originality, and submission to
authority rather than individual expansion, that we fail to do justice
to such an achievement as Pater’s. We need not look upon his work as
containing a finality of expression, we need not desire that he should
originate a school of similar writers, but we may recognise gratefully
the fact that he discovered and exhibited a new possibility in the
composition of English prose.