KU LEUVEN FACULTY OF ARTS BLIJDE INKOMSTSTRAAT 21 BOX 3301 3000 LEUVEN, BELGIË
“The Flaming Ramparts of the World”: The Function of Rome in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean
Melanie Hacke
Presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Western Literature
Supervisor: Dr. Frederik Van Dam Co-supervisor: Prof. dr. Reine Meylaerts
Leuven 2015
147. 317 characters
Abstract Terwijl de achttiende-eeuwse Britse cultuur gefascineerd was door het Romeinse Rijk, vertoonde de negentiende eeuw een hevige interesse voor het oude Griekenland. Toch bleef de Romeinse invloed voortduren, onder meer in de traditie van (overwegend populaire) romans die zich afspeelden in de Oudheid. Vanwege zijn manifeste belangstelling voor de Griekse wereld wordt Walter Pater (1839- 1894), professor in de klassieke talen aan de universiteit van Oxford, doorgaans als een Hellenistisch auteur beschouwd. Toch speelt zijn eerste roman, Marius the Epicurean (1885), zich af in het Rome van de tweede eeuw na Christus. Eerst en vooral is het doel van deze masterproef dan ook te bepalen waarom Pater voor een Romeinse setting koos eerder dan voor een Griekse. Daarbij wordt onderzocht hoe Marius the Epicurean omgaat met het stereotype beeld van Rome zoals het in de traditie van populaire romans wordt aangetroffen: door ze te verwerken in zijn estheticisme daagt Pater de traditionele topoi uit. Deze onderzoeksvragen worden gelinkt aan Marius’ Bildung, die opgedeeld is in twee fasen: de eerste helft van de roman behandelt de ontwikkeling van Marius’ esthetische levensbeschouwing, terwijl de tweede helft beschrijft hoe de jonge man zijn individualisme probeert te verzoenen met het gemeenschapsleven. Pater slaagt er moeilijk in om Marius’ esthetisch individualisme te verenigen met zijn natuurlijke drang naar menselijk contact. Het eerste deel van deze masterproef bestaat uit een korte synopsis van Paters leven en werk, gevolgd door een historisch overzicht van de receptie van de Griekse en Romeinse Oudheid in het Groot-Brittannië van de negentiende eeuw. Het tweede deel bevat een analyse van Marius the Epicurean, enerzijds gebaseerd op een gedetailleerde lezing van de roman, en anderzijds op eerdere literaire kritiek, zowel over Paters werk als over de intellectuele cultuur waarbinnen hij wordt geplaatst. Een groot deel van deze analyse is gewijd aan Paters gebruik van De Rerum Natura (Over de Natuur der Dingen), een epicuristisch leerdicht geschreven door de Romeinse auteur Lucretius (ca. 99-55 v.C.), een veelbesproken figuur in de Victoriaanse cultuur. De romans verwijzingen naar Lucretius verschaffen inzicht in Paters houding tegenover materialisme en epicurisme: hoewel hij De Rerum Natura’s theorie over de zintuigen en de ziel waardeerde, geloofde Pater niet dat de mens kan leven zonder enige vorm van religieus bewustzijn. Het laatste hoofdstuk van deze masterproef plaatst Marius in het licht van Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Dit hoofdstuk toont aan hoe Pater, door zijn modernistische stijl en zijn voorstelling van de realiteit, de historische beperkingen van de context waarin hij werkte tegelijkertijd confronteert en ontwijkt.
1
Acknowledgments ...... 3
Introduction ...... 4
Life and Work of Walter Pater ...... 5 Early Life and Aestheticism ...... 5 Marius the Epicurean and Later Work ...... 8
The Reception of Antiquity in Victorian Britain ...... 10 Hellenism: the Reception of Greek culture ...... 10 A Quest for Authenticity ...... 10 Arnold’s Hellenism : Greece as It Really Was? ...... 12 Evolutionary Humanistic Hellenism ...... 14 “The Scarce Remediable Cleavage” ...... 16 Romanism: the Reception of Roman Culture ...... 17 Rome as an Arena for Contemporary Concerns ...... 19
Marius the Epicurean ...... 23 The Odd Novel Out ...... 23 Part the first: A Golden Childhood ...... 24 The Boy Priest ...... 24 The Lure of Decadence ...... 26 Part the Second: The Epicurean Rose Garden ...... 28 Marius the Materialist ...... 28 Pater’s Aesthetic Interpretation of Epicureanism ...... 30 Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in Marius the Epicurean ...... 32 Part the Third: Corruption and Kindness ...... 42 Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic Indifference ...... 42 The Question of Sympathy ...... 45 Part the Fourth: “The Saint, and the Cyrenaic” ...... 48 An Orthodox Portrayal of Early Christianity ...... 48 A Christian End? ...... 49 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Marius The Epicurean ...... 52
Conclusion ...... 55
Bibliography ...... 58
2
Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank my supervisor Doctor Frederik Van Dam, without whose help I could never have finished this thesis successfully. I am grateful to him for suggesting Marius the Epicurean, since I instantly fell for Pater’s poetic language, and shared Marius’s sentimental fondness for “the clear song of the blackbird on that gray March evening” (Pater ME 40). Moreover, the topic has allowed me to combine my passion for Latin with that for Victorian literature. My thanks also go to Professor Reine Meylaerts, for her kindly offer to act as a co-supervisor and lector for this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends: my parents, for their unwavering support, and for passing down their love of literature; my brother, for perfecting the lay-out of this thesis, but, more importantly, for being my brother; and my friends, particularly Leontien and Morien, for proofreading my abstract, and for offering me welcome breaks from Marius.
3
Introduction Eighteenth-century British culture was characterised by a fascination with the Roman Empire: Rome became a popular travel destination, functioned as a setting for literature and art, and was the dominant metaphor for politics. The nineteenth century, in contrast, was captivated by Ancient Greece. Nevertheless, the influence of Rome continued; in literature this is most apparent in the tradition of novels set in Antiquity, most of which were written for a popular audience. Walter Pater (1839-1894), who was a classics don at Oxford, can easily be classified among the Victorian Hellenist authors, since his work manifests a strong interest in the Ancient Greek world. However, his first novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) is set in second- century Rome. The aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate why Pater decided to set Marius in Rome rather than in Greece. Furthermore, it aims to examine how Marius deals with the stereotypical image of Rome that can be found in the popular Rome novels. All this is considered in relation to Marius’s Bildung, which is divisible into two major phases. The first volume of the novel discusses the development of his individual aesthetic philosophy, while in the second volume Marius strives to reconcile this individualism with a life in community. The first part of this thesis consists of a brief synopsis of Pater’s life and work, followed by a historical overview of the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in Victorian Britain. The second part provides an analysis of Marius, based on a close reading of the novel, and on previous literary criticism of both Pater’s work and the intellectual culture in which he worked. A large section of this analysis is devoted to the novel’s use of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), an Epicurean didactic poem by the Roman author Lucretius (ca. 99-55 BC), who was a vexed figure in nineteenth-century thought. The novel’s references to Lucretius give insight into Pater’s attitude towards materialism and Epicureanism. The thesis closes with a chapter that examines Marius from the perspective of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). By highlighting Pater’s pre-modernist style and his depiction of reality in Marius, the chapter will demonstrate how the text simultaneously confronts and evades the historical constraints of the context in which it was written.
4
Life and Work of Walter Pater
Early Life and Aestheticism Walter Pater was born in London in 1839, as the third of four children. His father, a surgeon, died in 1842, when Pater was still a toddler. Pater received private tutoring until he was sent to the King’s School in Canterbury at the age of fourteen. Despite the grief following his mother’s death in 1854, Pater enjoyed his schooldays at the King’s School: he formed his first lasting friendships, and, attracted by its grandeur, frequently attended services in Canterbury Cathedral (Brake “Pater” 6). In 1858, he started reading classics at Queen’s College in Oxford, where one of his tutors was Benjamin Jowett, a classical scholar involved in the debates on the role of religion in university education of the 1850s and 60s. Pater graduated with second-class honours in 1862, and was appointed tutorial fellow at Brasenose College in 1864. In 1867, he became a lecturer at Brasenose, and in 1869 he settled in Oxford with his sisters Hester (1837-1922) and Clara (1841-1910), who was a staunch promoter of higher education for women and a founder and tutor of Somerville College in Oxford (Brake “Pater” 9; Buckler 63). The hours spent with Jowett and the liberal ideas circulating among his college companions soon had their effect on Pater: around 1864, he broke with Christianity by burning his stock of religiously inspired adolescence poems. The outspoken views on religion and sexuality expressed by his earliest essays and reviews ‘Diaphaneite’ (1864; on the ideal aesthetic hero), ‘Subjective Immortality’ (1864; on the German philosopher Fichte), ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ (1866) and especially ‘Winckelmann’ (1867) and ‘The Poetry of William Morris’ (1868), were deemed objectionable by the nineteenth-century reading public and earned him the reputation of iconoclast (Brake “Pater” 7). However, the work that sparked the fiercest reactions was his 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a collection of articles on Renaissance subjects that Pater had written earlier for the Fortnightly Review. The process of gathering and rewriting separately published pieces was to become a strategy frequently resorted to in Pater’s later oeuvre. Though the aftereffects of English Romanticism together with the French and German model had boosted the development of aestheticism in Britain (Johnson 2), The Renaissance was one of the movement’s first manifestos. It states that the Renaissance should not be regarded as a historical period, but as a transhistorical collective term for artists who created ‘art for art’s sake’ (Brake “Pater” 9). Pater situates the first of these among the troubadours of medieval France, for whom the
5 pleasant flow of the narrative is more important than the actual plot line (Buckler 11); the movement then reaches its high point in sixteenth-century Italy and culminates a last time in Winckelmann’s eighteenth-century Germany, though Pater seems to imply that it lives on in authors such as himself. In his preface to The Renaissance, Pater finds fault with Matthew Arnold’s essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1865): the task of the critic is not, as Arnold proposes, to objectively attempt “[t]o see the object as in itself it really is” (qtd. in Pater Three Major Texts 71) but to ask: “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?” (Pater Three Major Texts 71). Readers chiefly took umbrage at The Renaissance’s ‘Conclusion’, a reworking of ‘The Poetry of William Morris’. The ‘Conclusion’ draws attention to the constant Heraclitean renewal of our surroundings, which emit streams of impressions that attack our senses and affect our inner lives. The wisest way to spend our time is therefore to learn to process this myriad of impressions and emotions, and the purpose of life for Pater is to train our senses to passively contemplate the incessant current: “[n]ot the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end” (Pater Three Major Texts 219). In order to distinguish this aesthetic life from aestheticism in art, R. V. Johnson calls it ‘contemplative aestheticism’, (Johnson 20). A wise spectator prefers sublime beauty over unsightly everyday realities: “[f]or art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments” (Pater Three Major Texts 220). Philosophical theories can help us to notice previously veiled phenomena. However, since every object is unique, it is better to test all existing theories than to relapse into the habit of assessing the world on the basis of one philosophy only. Appreciation of the beauty and art in everyday life was something that even the masses could practice, but Pater did not intend his aestheticism to be democratic. He wished to eradicate habit and to protest against social conventions, primarily against the capitalist logic of the middle classes. Rather, he had in mind a minority of readers and writers who did not look for meaning in the traditional and dominant. Consequently, Pater’s plea for passive contemplation of abundant sense-impressions was not to the liking of many Protestant readers, who believed in an active life of temperance and industry (Johnson 20). They objected strongly to his hedonism, so that the ‘Conclusion’ was left out in the second edition of The Renaissance (1877), until in the third edition of 1888 a slightly altered version was reinstated (Buckler 64-65). In contrast to his reputation as a radical aesthete, Pater did not distance himself from the traditional belief that good art should hold a moral lesson. He refused to be associated with Decadent writing such as Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (Vance 248). Although he argued that art
6 should be judged for its autonomous beauty rather than for its moral value (Johnson 16), his essay ‘Style’ (1888) claimed that good art, like music, united form with matter (Johnson 22), but that the matter of great art, however, dealt with human issues (Johnson 70), and was devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God. (Pater Appreciations 38) In his view of the aesthetic life too, Pater paid attention to moral conduct. He pleaded for a flexible and humane appreciation of others, which takes into account the circumstances and the character of each person and so opens itself to behaviour that the strict Protestant morality would have denounced, such as homosexuality (Johnson 22 and 73). But Pater was not wholly inimical to Christianity; he only disapproved of the Christian distrust of the senses, since it made any guiltless enjoyment of sensuous beauty impossible. He found an alternative religion in the Greek attitude to art, a neo-paganism that was later rediscovered by the Renaissance masters (Johnson 74). Though there is little evidence available to confirm it, Pater’s attitude towards Christianity seems to have become more lenient in the years before his death (Brake “Pater” 10). He was particularly attracted to the ritual of the church service, which complemented his aesthetic philosophy of life (Johnson 72). Pater’s faith is best summarised by what his friend, the author Edmund Gosse wrote about him: “He was not all for Apollo, nor all for Christ, but each deity swayed in him, and neither had that perfect homage that brings peace behind it” (qtd. in Brake “Pater” 10). Since the aesthetic school was associated with deviant views on sexuality and several of Pater’s Oxford friends (Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde) were known for their sexual peculiarities (Brake “Pater” 9), his behaviour was closely watched. During the late 1860s and early 1870s he maintained sexual relationships with men, including the painter Simeon Solomon and the poet A. C. Swinburne. In 1874, letters from Pater, addressed to the Oxford undergraduate William Money Hardinge and expressing homosexual feelings, were discovered: Pater was called to account, but was not expelled from his post (Brake “Pater” 8). For fear of being exposed, Pater did not apply for any university posts during the years following the incident, nor did he publish Dionysus and Other Studies, although the book was ready to be printed in 1878. He did continue to write for magazines (Brake “Pater” 9).
7
Marius the Epicurean and Later Work From the early 1880s on, Pater’s output diminished considerably; in 1882 he travelled to Rome for research; in 1883 he gave up his tutorship (Brake “Pater” 9), but kept his fellowship (Fletcher 7). These were all signs were that he was preparing to author a novel. In view of its monthly serialisation in Macmillan’s Magazine, he divided the story into short chapters, similar to his earlier essays. In 1884 Macmillan nevertheless decided not to serialise, and in March of 1885 Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas was published in two volumes (Brake “Pater” 9). A second revised edition appeared in November (Buckler 65). Set in the second-century Rome of emperor Marcus Aurelius, the story traces the mental development of Marius, a well-to-do Roman, from his early boyhood to his untimely death. The first volume relates how Marius is brought up to worship the Roman pagan gods, but during his adolescence discovers Epicureanism, which he, as the book’s title suggests, makes his basic philosophy of life. Marius’s Epicureanism (which Pater terms New Cyrenaicism, since Marius reverts to Epicurus’s precursor Aristippus of Cyrene (435-356 BC)) can easily be equated with the aesthetic life Pater so ardently promoted in his ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance. By dealing “more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by [the ‘Conclusion’]” (Pater Three Major Texts 216), Pater explained in the third edition of The Renaissance, he hoped to counter the criticism that his aesthetic mode of living had received. The novel’s second volume confronts Marius with the limitations of his life as a passive spectator. He finds that New Cyrenaicism fails to deal with issues of suffering and sympathy with other human beings. As a result, Marius takes recourse to the ‘old morality’, a term which Pater never explicates, but which seems to be founded on Roman pagan religion, complemented by an instinctive sense of just moral behaviour. In the final chapters, the young Roman is also drawn towards the rituals and humanistic values of early Christianity, but dies before he has become completely familiar with them, or, as some critics contend, before his conversion can take place. Marius was received favourably, so that Pater won more of the reading public’s respect as the controversy surrounding him gradually subsided. This favourable reception also resulted in higher sales figures for the work that followed (Brake “Pater” 9). By now, Pater and his sisters had moved to the London district of Kensington (Brake “Pater” 9), where his production rate sped up significantly. He wrote magazine articles on British, French, German,
8 and classical literature and culture: his wide range of interests bears witness to his fascination with the whole of European culture. Next to this steady flow of articles, Pater turned out several books. 1887 saw the publication of Imaginary Portraits, a collection in which young men from various eras and regions were portrayed in a new form of writing that hesitated between essay and short story. Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (1889) enveloped the bulk of Pater’s literary criticism. Applying his theories of the aesthetic life on the task of the art critic, Pater substituted impressionistic or appreciative criticism for its traditional evaluative variant: the critic should not judge an artwork, but should try to word the impression that it made on him, so that the review’s readers can experience the sensation indirectly (Johnson 31, 33). The essay ‘Style’ stresses the importance of the quality of the subject matter, together with a well-chosen form. Hence, ‘Style’ can be read as implicit support for contemporary novelists such as George Moore, who sought to weaken literary censorship (Brake “Pater” 9). In 1893 Pater published his popularisation of Plato, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures, based on lectures that he had delivered to Oxford undergraduates. In the same year the Pater household moved back to Oxford, as Pater’s failing health hindered the weekly commute from London to Oxford. He died of a heart attack in July 1894, aged fifty-four (Brake “Pater” 10). Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (1895), Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays (1895), and Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance (1896) appeared posthumously.
9
The Reception of Antiquity in Victorian Britain
Hellenism: the Reception of Greek culture
A Quest for Authenticity The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are known for their Hellenism, i.e. their fascination with Ancient Greece (Sachs 315). Jonathan Sachs labels this early Hellenism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Romantic Hellenism, but since Romanticism does not begin until the late eighteenth century, the term Enlightenment Hellenism would be more suitable. At this stage, more people started travelling to Greece to see ancient ruins and artefacts. The main interest lay with material objects and experiences rather than with texts (Sachs 316). However, this changed from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, due to the work of the German Hellenists, among whom the idealists Fichte and Hegel, and most importantly the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), whose writings caused the mania for Ancient Greece to boom. Where before Rome was considered the source of all culture, German Hellenism now transferred this title to Ancient Greece (Turner Greek Heritage 2; Sachs 319). Much knowledge of Greece had been handed down through Latin texts and Roman culture, so that Greece was habitually studied in relation to Rome. The German Hellenists were the first to regard Greece as an independent society. Consequently, Hellenism became a quest for authenticity; a quest to rid the Greek ideals from their Roman coating (Evangelista 6-7). Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755, translated in 1765 by Henry Fuseli as Reflections on the Painting and the Sculpture of the Greeks) and Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, translated in 1850 by Giles Henry Lodge as The History of Ancient Art) derived their understanding of Ancient Greece from an environmental theory: the health of the people, the purity of Greek art, and the freedom that democracy allowed were all attributed to the mild climate (Evangelista 26-27; Sachs 316-317). Due to an innate harmony with nature, the Greeks did not experience any duality between man and nature, man and the gods, or body and mind. Since modern man did suffer a form of alienation, German Hellenism indirectly challenged Europe’s socio-political establishment and Christianity, which had become too
10 institutionalised (Sachs 320) and engrossed by asceticism (Turner Greek Heritage 2). The concurrent Neue Humanismus impulse in philology, which aimed at reading classical texts more critically than before, also revealed that a considerable amount of Christian elements had their origin in Greek pagan religion (Turner Greek Heritage 3). In German art and literature, Hellenism served as an alternative to the strict rules of French classicism. Moreover, every artist could claim to have extracted his own ideals and values from the Ancient Greeks (Turner Greek Heritage 2). For Winckelmann, Greek art was exceptional because of its capacity to fuse both simplicity and grandeur within one artefact, a quality that he propagated as an ideal for all future art (Evangelista 27). As Europe tired of the traditional values and institutions inherited from Rome and from Christianity and sought alternatives in Ancient Greece, the Britons too turned towards Hellenism in every sphere of society. British Enlightenment Hellenism also commenced with a material fascination for travelling, archaeological finds, and designing buildings in Greek style, but is ultimately best known for the texts in which Greek Antiquity figures, such as Keats’s Endymion (1818) or Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) (Sachs 318-319). Though Greece was regarded as the cradle of civilization and all Europeans were consequently considered descendants of that favoured race, the British thought their temper particularly alike to that of the Greek (Evangelista 9). The British Museum’s purchase of the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles in 1816 symbolically added a Hellene element to the British cultural identity (Evangelista 8). Frank M. Turner calls this the “tyranny of the nineteenth-century European experience over that of Greek antiquity” (Turner Greek Heritage 8): even though the Mediterranean culture did not resemble the Western European, authors shaped it according to their need, and made it into a forum that suited any contemporary debate (Turner Greek Heritage 10). Though now part of the British identity, Greek culture remained elitist, especially during the nineteenth century, when Hellenism grew more academic, and shaped Victorian intellectual culture and art rather than the political and public sphere (Evangelista 9). First, there was an increased interest in the Ancient Greek language and literature in secondary schools and universities (Sachs 318). Educational institutions had no difficulties in replacing a large part of the Latin curriculum, since, as Turner writes, “the inheritance of the humanist education enjoyed by the educated classes in Britain since the Renaissance made the appeal to and the use of Greek antiquity both possible and effective” (Turner Greek Heritage 4). However, academics were equally guilty of the tyranny of selective reading. Scholars
11 investigated a specific element or era of Greek culture, but afterwards generalised their findings to the whole of Greek culture (Turner Greek Heritage 9). These selective readings were often indulged in by the humanistic Hellenists, who employed the example of the past in order to plead for the reform of contemporary social and moral realities. Building upon sixteenth-century humanist ideas, they assumed that the essence of human nature did not change throughout time, so that the history of human behaviour could be useful in ethical questions. For this purpose, it was convenient for them to view Greece as a homogenous entity (Turner Greek Heritage 15).
Arnold’s Hellenism : Greece as It Really Was? Such was also the case for Matthew Arnold’s (1822-1888) Hellenism, which has wrongly come to be regarded as representative of Victorian humanistic Hellenism. Arnold’s Hellenism features most distinctly in Culture and Anarchy (1869) and in his 1869 inaugural lecture as a professor of poetry at Oxford, “On the Modern Element in Literature”. These two documents show how his view of Ancient Greece served to combat bourgeois philistinism, commercialism, narrow puritan morality, and romantic and modern excesses (Turner Greek Heritage 17-18). This criticism is embodied in the distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism, two ideals of conduct that have prevailed alternately throughout history. In Arnold’s opinion, the middle classes still held on too fervently to Hebraism, which is characterised by self-control, observance of duty, asceticism, and a strong belief in the work ethic. He thought it high time for a return to Hellenism, to flexibility, scepticism, and to “see[ing] things as they really are” (qtd. in Turner Greek Heritage 19). Arnold saw these qualities best embodied by the Greeks of the fifth century BC, the Golden Age of Pericles, which he deemed the high point of literature. Yet the work of Simonides, Pindar, and the three great tragedians Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides appealed more to Arnold for what it said about the fifth-century world than for its poetic beauty (Turner Greek Heritage 29). To give grounds for that century’s relevance in the Victorian age, he developed his own version of the humanistic Hellenists’ theory of history. It sprang from the modified Viconian theory of early nineteenth-century liberal Anglican historians, among whom his father Thomas Arnold, Connop Thirlwall, and Henry Hart Milman. For them, history did not progress linearly, but underwent organic cycles of growth, maturity, and decay. Every civilization passed through these cycles, although the duration of each stage differed individually (Turner
12
Greek Heritage 26). Contrary to his predecessors, however, Matthew Arnold did not accept that God had imposed cyclical time on mankind; he surmised a natural cause rather than a divine one (Turner Greek Heritage 31). As a consequence of Arnold’s theory, two nations in the same phase of cyclical time, no matter how far apart in history, could be compared (Turner Greek Heritage 26). ‘On The Modern Element in Literature’ employs the same logic to explain Arnold’s analogy between fifth-century Greece and nineteenth-century Britain: both were modern eras that had recently left a more archaic period behind, moving “from an age of feeling to one of reflection, from a period of ignorance and credulity to one of inquiry and scepticism” (qtd. in Turner Greek Heritage 27). Arnold’s 1869 lecture aimed to appease anxieties about the preservation of traditional religious values in the modern era: if the Ancient Greeks could lead a secular life without suffering any moral decay, so could the British. Even so, his Hellenism did not meet with the public’s approval. Because Greece was still generally looked on as a pagan and licentious civilisation, most Victorians were sceptical of adopting Greece as a model for their own lives (Turner Greek Heritage 31). Though the public’s notion of Greek society was faulty, Matthew Arnold’s Hellenism was no less prejudiced. Turner reveals how Arnold’s Greek ideal combined traditional English humanist values with ideas of the eighteenth-century German Hellenists, especially those of Herder, Humboldt, Heine, and Goethe (Turner Greek Heritage 21, 23). Arnold had a thorough knowledge of ancient texts and was well aware that many aspects of the Hellene world did not tally with his ideal of rationality, virtue, and creativity; yet he read both his German and ancient sources selectively, in search of evidence to corroborate his Hellenism (Turner Greek Heritage 23). First, he viewed the fifth century BC as representative of the entire Greek culture, because that epoch best embodied the values he had in mind (Turner Greek Heritage 16). Thus, “see[ing] things as they really are” signified a subjective rather than scientific approach to history (Turner Greek Heritage 21). Arnold had read and accepted the evolutionary theories that circulated during the second half of the nineteenth century, but was ambivalent about them, as he feared their consequences for culture and religion (DeLaura 176). Secondly, Arnold “simply assumed the German writers had assimilated the Greek spirit” (Turner Greek Heritage 24), while he did not perceive that the rational morality which he ascribed to the Ancient Greeks stemmed from the German Hellenists, who in turn had retained it from their Protestant education. Consequently, Arnold’s Hellenism derived its moral aspect from Hebraism. The reason why Arnold deemed the calm British temper so suited for a Hellenistic mode of life, was that it still carried enough traces of Puritan morality,
13 with its emphasis on moderation (DeLaura 174; Turner Greek Heritage 31). Hence, Hellenism could not prevail without Hebraism to keep it in balance. The selectivity of his research was soon exposed by literary critics such as John Addington Symonds, who in 1873 wrote: “You cannot go on long regarding Greeks as pure ‘Hellenists’, or beautiful ideal children, if ever you read a book of Thucydides” (qtd. in Turner Greek Heritage 32). Despite such criticism, Hellenism remained a weapon against middle-class mores until the beginning of the twentieth century, when a more liberal Anglicanism blunted the opposition between Hellenism and Hebraism (Turner Greek Heritage 32-33).
Evolutionary Humanistic Hellenism From 1850 on, new archaeological findings and advanced historical and anthropologic theories confirmed that Ancient Greek civilisation had been far from uniform, and that it had changed markedly over time (Turner Greek Heritage 17). While Arnold and his fellow humanistic Hellenists did not look beyond the fifth and fourth centuries BC, adherents of the later dynamic or evolutionary Humanistic Hellenism did take recent scholarship into account: asserting the ceaseless variation of human nature and culture, they set their dynamic and nuanced Hellenism against Arnold’s static idyll (Turner Greek Heritage 61-62). Evolutionary Humanistic Hellenism also observed dynamism in the reception of Antiquity; as each generation interpreted Greek art in its own way, Hellenism was regularly revived by this yielding of new values and ideas (Turner Greek Heritage 17). Turner names Pater, Ruskin, the archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton, and the classical scholar Gilbert Murray as adherents of evolutionary Hellenism. Of these, he chooses to elaborate on Ruskin as an early representative of evolutionary Hellenism, and on Pater’s Hellenism as the most complex and nuanced of his contemporaries. Though Ruskin initially viewed Ancient Greece from an Arnoldian perspective, he seems to have made a switch-over towards evolutionary Hellenism by 1870. In a series of lectures on sculpture delivered during that year, ‘Aratra Pentilici’ (‘The Ploughs of Mount Pentelicus’), he praises the earliest Greek sculptors for their craftsmanship. Their statues were the first that did not idealise or emulate nature, but presented reality truthfully (Turner Greek Heritage 65-66). They were craftsmen who worked “without mystery and without undue complication of thought” (Turner Greek Heritage 66). By extolling this aspect of Greek sculpture, Ruskin purposed to urge British artists to a return to nature. But, even though
14
Ruskin’s comparison of Greek art to that of earlier cultures placed Ancient Greece in a developmental perspective, he did not investigate whether his assertion would hold for all Greek sculpture (Turner Greek Heritage 68). Turner admits that Pater’s protean spiritual and intellectual viewpoint, which shifted from highly sceptical to more religious, makes it difficult to pinpoint his Hellenism, but he tries to make some generalisations, primarily from the essays ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ and ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, which appeared in Greek Studies. Like Ruskin, Pater praises the practicality and materiality of the archaic, or Ionian, craftsmen (Turner Greek Heritage 71-72). However, he disagreed with Ruskin in that he thought the Ionian statues were not yet able to render human figures perfectly (Turner Greek Heritage 72). It was only with the Aegina Marbles of the late archaic, or Dorian, period that Greek sculptors mastered human proportions (Turner Greek Heritage 73). In opposition to the centrifugal, particular, and material Ionian impulse, the Dorian was centripetal and spiritual, and strived towards order for the whole of Greece. A synthesis of both the Ionian and the Dorian impulse was needed to form Greek art as well as general culture; though the latter was superior to the former, one could not get at perfection without the other (Turner Greek Heritage 73). For Pater, Hellenism was just that dialectical combination, which made it possible for Greece to grow into an empire (Turner Greek Heritage 74). Pater’s evolutionary Hellenism was deliberately constructed to counter Arnold’s (Turner Greek Heritage 68). Pater accepted the contradictions and irrationalities that Arnold had wished to smooth out. He likened the development of Greek history, variegated and full of internal tensions, to the same Heraclitean flux that he had promoted in his ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance. Though he studied Greece from a developmental viewpoint, he held that every age could extract lasting values out of the flux, like he had brought to light the Ionian and Dorian impulse (Turner Greek Heritage 69-70). Since Pater’s Hellenism “associate[d] Greece with positive forces for change and human improvement as well as with the preservation of enduring moral and social values” (Turner Greek Heritage 74), his progressive approach would serve as a model for the Hellenism of the next half-century. Even during the tense climate of the First World War, when classics was criticised for being too static, it could still put forward the hopeful conjecture that European civilisation would blossom again, as Ancient Greece had done before (Turner Greek Heritage 75-76).
15
“The Scarce Remediable Cleavage” In spite of the fact that Turner pits Arnold and Pater’s Hellenism against one another, both theories stem from a similar dissatisfaction with modern life. By returning to Ancient Greece, where such dissatisfaction was not noticeable, or at least less manifestly, they wished to arrive at a synthesis for the conflict between culture and religion, between thought and feeling, Apollo and Christ. Hebraism-Hellenism, and Ionian-Dorian can be understood as different formulations of the same dilemma. Only when the gap was stopped, a third and more advanced condition of humanity could emerge (DeLaura xviii). Arnold and Pater were not the only Victorian thinkers who were seeking to transcend what David DeLaura terms “the scarce remediable cleavage” (DeLaura 165): many had detached themselves from Christianity, but struggled to attribute meaning to a life devoid of belief (DeLaura 167). As DeLaura claims that “there is no other author whose phrases, ideas, arguments, and attitudes so completely saturate Pater’s writings at all stages as do Arnold’s, […] as much by contrast as by likeness” (DeLaura xvi), it is not surprising that their concept pairs correspond. Though they both employed Hellenism to fight middle-class philistinism, Pater often strived to nuance and elaborate on Arnold’s ideas in order to prove that Ancient Greece was not so one-sided as Arnold made it appear. Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’, for instance, can be read as a response to Arnold’s essay ‘Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment’ (1864), wherein Arnold contended that pagan religion revolved around pleasure, while Christianity was centred on sorrow. Pater in turn claimed that paganism was complex, and attracted worshippers in both happiness and hardship (Evangelista 36-37). Pater’s dilemma between Christ and Apollo, as it figures in Marius the Epicurean, can be traced back to his essay ‘Romanticism’ (1876 in Macmillan’s Magazine, 1889 in Appreciations), which explores the tension between classicism and romanticism. The essay attempts to reconcile the two movements by contending that the romantic spirit (i.e. curiosity and the love of beauty) already flourished in Ancient Greece, then lessened but continued during the Middle Ages, and was revived again by Dante in the early Renaissance (DeLaura 256-258). From ‘Romanticism’ onwards, Pater was preoccupied with the problem of a ‘unity of culture’ (DeLaura 261). DeLaura argues that by 1880 Pater, due to his renewed interest in Christian ritual, had come closer to transcending the historic dualism than he would ever again, and that Marius the Epicurean reflects that breakthrough. After having discussed the harmony of Ionian and Dorian impulses in Ancient Greece, Pater accomplished a securer synthesis in Marius’s merging of consciousness and sympathy, or the aesthetic and the
16 religious. For DeLaura, and later also for Lee Behlman, only religious awareness enables a union of the two: for them, the early Christian liturgy is the final outcome of this Hegelian synthesis (Behlman 134, DeLaura 263). Furthermore, DeLaura recognizes the influence of Arnold’s concept pairs in the novel’s structure. The first volume mirrors Arnold’s Hebraism and Hellenism, since it contrasts the pagan morality of Marius’s childhood with the sensuous Epicureanism that he discovers during his adolescence. The second volume shows how a Stoic like Marcus Aurelius can be affected by sorrow, while Christian services foreground joy and celebration: hereby Pater again nuances Arnold’s ‘Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment’ (DeLaura 266-267). Yet DeLaura, more than Behlman, keeps the novel’s ending in mind: Marius’s untimely death prevents him from realising the approaching synthesis. This might imply that Pater was unable to specify his thoughts and formulate them for his reading public. After a culmination of ideas in Marius, DeLaura observes a weariness in Pater, which results from a “failure to define the ‘mixed’ culture he aspired to” (DeLaura xviii). Moreover, the fact that Pater still distinguishes two distinct impulses in his Hellenism and in Marius the Epicurean, denominating each impulse separately but not their union, suggests that he did not succeed in wording man’s third condition.
Romanism: the Reception of Roman Culture Britain’s nineteenth-century preoccupation with Greece felt more novel than the eighteenth- century fascination with Rome, which had been growing steadily since the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and continued into the Victorian age. Though travelling to Greece was more fashionable, Roman ruins in both Italy and Britain attracted great crowds of tourists. Since both Rome and Britain were vast and well-organised empires, their politics were frequently compared (Vance 38). The peace of the first monarchs after the Restoration, for instance, was likened to that of Augustus after the Battle of Actium (Vance 11). The eighteenth century, with its mixed and thus balanced constitution, was equated with the Roman Republic, admired for its military and administrative order, rationalism, and utilitarianism (Turner “Why the Greeks” 65, 76). However, due to the troubles in France and America during the second half of the century, republicanism lost its popularity. Rome seemed a dangerous political example, so that the British turned to comparisons with Greek democracy (Turner “Why the Greeks” 69; Sachs 322).
17
Although the nineteenth century was now fascinated by Greece, Latin was increasingly taught in schools. While only the privileged could afford to study Greek at public schools and long-established universities, democratisation of education enabled middle-class pupils to study Latin. Consequently, a larger reading public came into contact with classics and ancient history (Vance 14-15). As David Skilton demonstrates, abundant Latin quotations in mid-Victorian novels meant to establish a bond between reader and author: knowledge of ‘schoolboy Latin’ signified a shared genteel background and education. Though Latin was no longer spoken except during official ceremonies and church services (Vance 7), a passive knowledge continued to be important for constituting elite identity. Until far into the twentieth century, classics at Oxford or Cambridge remained the main ingredient for a successful political career (Evangelista 9). However, many of those trained in Greek regarded the Latin culture and language with contempt. Proud of their exceptional schooling, and eager to distinguish themselves from the masses, they held the elitist belief that the Roman past could not be fully understood without its Greek precedents (Vance 16). Though the Romans had generally been praised for passing on Greek culture to the West, Greek scholars now blamed Rome for bringing about the decline of its colony (Sachs 323). Ancient Greece was honoured with a cult status, while the Romans were considered unoriginal imitators. These elite Hellenist intellectuals owned that Rome had been a well-regulated empire, but deemed it intellectually and artistically inferior to the refinement of Greece (Vance 16). As a consequence, Latin literature was disparaged. Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, was looked on as a poor imitation of Homer and insincere adulation for the emperor Augustus (Turner “Why the Greeks” 71-72). Since numerable works by these Hellenist authors (among whom Norman Vance places Walter Pater, A. C. Swinburne, and W. B. Yeats) entered the nineteenth-century canon, it is tempting to conclude that Rome was of little importance for Victorian culture (Vance 17). Nevertheless, the reverse is true: the majority of readers did not worry about the problem of Roman versus Greek culture. They indiscriminately enjoyed Rome and Greece through contemporary literature and art, for the most educated among them complemented by their knowledge of the classics (Vance 16).
18
Rome as an Arena for Contemporary Concerns While the Roman Empire was depicted in paintings, plays, essays, and poems, most Victorians encountered it through popular novels. These historical novels mediated between elite and popular culture: though set in Antiquity, they formulated contemporary political, intellectual, and theological issues in a comprehensible way (Goldhill 157). As the historical novel had developed out of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century didactic fiction, which combined historical material with moral precepts (Dahl 2-3), it had retained its instructive purpose. As Simon Goldhill puts it, fictions of Rome were filled with “contemporary figures in togas” (Goldhill 231). The novel’s portrayal of Rome depended on the political, moral, and religious views of its author, for whom the Roman world was but a background to stage the subjects that absorbed him (Goldhill 244). For this purpose novelists frequently reverted to methods used by historians. The first was that of exemplary history: when concerned with moral or religious issues, the author transformed his characters into epitomes of virtue. This, however, implied that he had to ignore the historical facts that did not correspond to the ideal (Vance 57). The figure of Acte, Nero’s famous mistress, illustrates this technique well: in some novels she is depicted as a malicious villain, in others she is noble and innocent, or even a Christian convert. In this manner, female characters were moulded into stereotypical Victorian gender roles (Goldhill 227-228). Even if heroines were not Christian, their moral purity made them proto-Victorian (Vance 202). The second method was to zoom in on events or aspects of Roman civilisation for which there was a clear link with nineteenth-century Britain. Like Thomas Arnold’s History of Rome (1838-43) paid much attention to the early Roman constitution in order to evoke a parallel with the 1832 Reform Bill, novelists too selected from Roman history in function of the statement they wished to make (Vance 68). The success of Rome as a setting for fiction was mainly brought on by a heady mix of sensation and suspense: the stories were teeming with conspiracy, heroism, prophecy, natural disaster, and other spectacular events associated with Roman history (Vance 31). The Roman world shared many affinities with nineteenth-century Britain, but was also excitingly alien and other (Vance 199). The image of Rome presented in popular novels was seldom accurate, but still the genre pretended to provide amusement as well as education in Roman history. As a reaction, authors of more literary historical novels displayed their erudition by including long prefaces and footnotes (Goldhill 182-183). However, their writings tended more to historiography than to fiction (Goldhill 184).
19
Due to their use of recurring themes or topoi, popular as well as literary novels contributed to the formation of a tenacious stereotypical image of Rome, which continues into the present (Goldhill 182). The first of these topoi is that of corruption and decline, which featured in fictions set in the post-Augustan era. Late Roman history provided authors with an opportunity to stage violence, sin, and horror. Since these elements gravitated towards the Gothic novel (Dahl 4), decadent writers were particularly attracted to the Romans’ foul side. Aestheticism, often incorrectly equated with decadence, accepts immorality as long as it is not central to the work, while decadence does foreground moral deviance. For aesthetes, a focus on the senses meant that they were able to write about Rome without having to resort to clichés such as the emperors or militarism; instead they could deal with art, daily life, or philosophy. Decadent writers, in contrast, saw the new literary current as an opportunity to scan Roman history for degeneracy (Vance 247-248). Swinburne’s ‘Faustine’, for instance, portrayed Marcus Aurelius’ promiscuous spouse’s obsession with gladiators and sailors (Vance 250). The corruption motif had several functions. For instance, the description of gladiatorial games could be a way to express the Victorian anxiety concerning public amusements, dangerous in a post-revolutionary Europe where social hierarchies were crumbling down. Yet in most cases the motif was aimed at juxtaposing the Romans’ immorality with the purity of another group. In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) Greek heroes (of whom one is converted to Christianity) triumph over Roman villains. While Bulwer-Lytton confirmed the stereotype of Rome as a corrupt society whose crimes paved the way for its destruction, he presented Greece as the preserver of moral principles that would later be taken up by Christianity (Goldhill 196-197). As the plot of The Last Days of Pompeii already suggests, authors primarily selected the late empire as a background for their novels in order to measure the declining pagan morals against the innocence of early Christianity. In addition, the corruption motif also confronted the reader with a moral dilemma. For example, when reading a passage in which a Christian martyr dies bravely in the arena, he is carried away by the suspenseful and violent scene, while he simultaneously has to realise that, as a Christian, he must disapprove of the games (Goldhill 228-229). As the aforementioned scene demonstrates, the corruption motif was often combined with that of early Christianity. This most frequently took the form of a martyr’s death, preferably a recently converted pagan. Conversion novels served to instruct the populace as to
20 where the roots of their Anglicanism lay, and in what light they had to view the Christian beginnings (Goldhill 157). Accordingly, the life of the early Christians was depicted as idyllic and unproblematic (Vance 202). This ideal portrayal was also intended to rouse readers to rethink their personal faith, and to mend their conduct if necessary. Examples of popular conversion novels are Fabiola (1854) by Cardinal Wiseman, the more literary Callista (1855) by John Henry Newman, and Valerius (1821) by John Gibson Lockhart. Another subgenre in popular as well as literary Rome fiction is the Bildungsroman. The Victorians were preoccupied with personal development, so that (auto)biographies and other narratives of the self were widely read. More than the conventional biographies, novels of formation attempted to fathom the connection between inward feeling and outward behaviour (Goldhill 248-249). The so-called school novels can also be classified among the coming of age novels. Often set in Ancient Rome, but modelled on the narrative framework of the traditional public school novel, they present a mischievous but good-hearted hero or heroine, who collides with authority, and so embarks on a journey of personal discovery (Goldhill 229). A good example is Edward Lucas White’s The Unwilling Vestal (1918), an American school novel wherein the heroine is forced to attend a college for training Vestal Virgins (Goldhill 230). The literary variant of these novels is the philosophical novel: in order to form an adequate philosophy of life, the protagonist passes through several religions and/or philosophical schools. It is in this category that Marius the Epicurean can be grouped. Other examples of this genre are Fanny Wright’s A Few Days in Athens (1822), which deals with Epicureanism, and the American Eliza Buckminster Lee’s Parthenia (1858), a fictional biography of the emperor Julian the Apostate. Lockhart’s Valerius also belongs to this category, since Valerius experiments with various pagan religions and philosophies before he converts to Christianity (Dahl 8-10). Though popular Rome novels confirmed traditional and conservative ideologies, writers of a higher aesthetic level, such as those of the philosophical novels just mentioned, escaped to the Greco-Roman world out of disgust with nineteenth-century life (Highet 438). Gilbert Highet subdivides these progressive artists into two categories: the Parnassians, who revolted against materialism, and the Antichrists. Among those turning to Greco-Roman subjects out of hostility towards Christianity, Highet mainly places novelists and philosophers; he lists Nietzsche, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, and Ernest Renan. As the roots of Christianity lie in the Middle East, Antichrists argue that it is a barbarous faith
21
(Highet 454); an easy and popular religion, it promotes repression and tyranny (Highet 455). Paganism, on the other hand, symbolises complexity and freedom (Highet 456). The Parnassians’ name refers to Mount Parnassus, on which the nine Greek Muses were said to reside. Like the Muses, they longed to live elevated above the greedy capitalist world. Accordingly, they called their journal Le Parnasse Contemporain, and eventually the Montparnasse district in Paris was named after them (Highet 439). The Parnassus movement can be largely equated with aestheticism, though it differed in its denouncement of Romanticism, which the Parnassians did not consider an adequate solution to materialism. Next to Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier, and José-Marie de Heredia, French poets customarily associated with Parnassianism, Highet also names Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Walter Pater, “whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance became the young Parnassians’ breviary” (Highet 445). Parnassianism based its aesthetic principles on Kant’s notion of purposiveness without purpose (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck): nature’s beauty seems to hint that the world is good and has been created for a purpose, yet provides no empirical evidence to confirm such intimations. This notion led the Parnassians to ‘art for art’s sake’: as long as art could work the same effect on its audience, no moral significance was needed (Highet 444). Disapproving of the Romantics’ uncontrolled emotions, they preferred to express their feelings in a restrained manner, which they thought rendered them more genuine (Highet 440). Accordingly, they opted for a severe style, of which the main features were clarity and regularity (Highet 443). The Parnassian aesthetes, the majority of whom was proficient in Latin and Greek, turned to Antiquity because of its physical beauty (Highet 446-447). However, though less concerned with morality than popular authors, Parnassians also scanned ancient history for exemplary figures whose primary object was not money or status, and thus were morally superior to nineteenth-century man. Since the lives of many classical figures remained obscure, universal emotions could easily be projected onto them, as the chapter on Lucretius below will illustrate (Highet 449).
22
Marius the Epicurean
The Odd Novel Out With thought predominating over action, and its lack of overt moral precepts or spectacular events, Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (abbreviated infra as ME) is exceptional among the other fictions of Rome. Even though it so deliberately refuses to be part of the corpus of conventional Rome novels, it needs to be considered in relation to them (Vance 198). Following the novel’s plot sequence, the succeeding chapters will investigate the function of Rome in Marius, and will explain how the novel both incorporates and reacts to some of the popular topoi. Though Pater must have examined a considerable number of popular novels, it seems that he preferred to model Marius on their more literary variants, such as the philosophical novels mentioned above. DeLaura shows how much Pater (as well as Arnold) was indebted to the writings of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890), a High Church Anglican and founder of the Oxford Movement (which sought to restore Catholic ceremonies within the Church of England) who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. Next to the fact that Pater’s return to religion displays affinities with Newman’s emphasis on Catholic ritual, Pater adopts a good deal of Newman’s terminology, especially “on the psychology of belief and on the credentials of the historic church” (DeLaura 316). Other concepts in Pater’s oeuvre also derive from Newman, such as his emphasis on the beauty of a moral life (DeLaura xiii), and his aesthetic ideal of the passive spectator, which was modelled on Newman’s notion of ‘inwardness’ (DeLaura xi). Apart from parallels with the Cardinal’s religious writings, Marius bears resemblance to Newman’s Callista, which describes the stages preceding Callista’s conversion more subtly than the typical conversion novel does, and to Loss and Gain (1848), a fictionalisation of the religious debates surrounding the Oxford Movement (DeLaura 315). Yet Marius was more modern and readable than the outmoded philosophical novel (Dahl 18), a fact which may signify that Pater did not write for well-educated intellectuals only, but also for a larger reading public that had previously enjoyed the mass-market Rome novels. When Pater inserts a Latin or Greek quotation, in the majority of cases he either translates or paraphrases it further on in the text. Roman terminology or practices are explained in an elaborate, though not overly didactic, way. For instance, the novel’s first
23 chapter registers the Ambarvalia ritual in which Marius assists in detail, but above all emphasises the effect that the offering rite has on the boy priest. In a playful manner that would not have suited his non-fiction work, Pater combines translation with direct and indirect quotations, so that the text remains accessible for those who are not sufficiently educated to grasp all literary allusions (Brake “Art of the Novel” 227). Additionally, Pater intended this abundant paraphrasing as a reflection of Marius’s mind: the young Roman has digested his reading so carefully that it has become part of his flow of thought (Vance 214). In order to make it easier for his readers to conceptualise certain aspects of Roman history, Pater regularly introduces explicit parallels with nineteenth-century Europe. To justify the frequency of these comparisons, he brings in the popular argument that the second century resembled the Victorian era, both ripe empires believed to be in decline: That age and our own have much in common – many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives – from Rome, to Paris or London. (Pater ME 210) By demonstrating how everyday experience does not change over time, Pater stresses the continuity of human history. For example, Marius looks at buildings of Nero’s time in much the same way as nineteenth-century Parisians regard edifices constructed during the reign of Louis XIV (Pater ME 143). At times the comparisons with Victorian Britain serve to enhance the autobiographical aspect in Marius. When Marius leaves his rural home to attend school in Pisa and later to work for Marcus Aurelius in Rome, the descriptions of both cities draw attention to the process of urbanisation in Rome as well as in Britain, but they also mirror Pater’s journey from his childhood home in Harbledown (near Canterbury) to Oxford and later to London (Vance 216). However, Pater primarily chose to set Marius in the second century because of the numerous religions and philosophies simultaneously present, rather than for its easy parallels with the nineteenth century, or for contrasting Marius with the corruption or conversion novels set in the same era (Fletcher 30-31; Turner “Christians and Pagans” 182).
Part the first: A Golden Childhood
The Boy Priest In the first part of the first volume, the novel’s main themes are introduced. The first chapter is titled ‘The Religion of Numa’ and is set on the day of the Ambarvalia, a feast in spring
24 during which the paterfamilias, in order to secure the fertility of his lands, leads his household round (ambo) the fields (arva), and afterwards makes an offering to Ceres. Marius, in his early teens, has been head of the family since his father’s death, and thus leads the procession. Marius’s piety, love of ritual, and the strong connection between his religion and his home, echo Pater’s childhood fascination with Anglicanism (Fletcher 32; Hext 66). Nevertheless, the first chapter already registers how the boy feels isolated from the other worshippers, for whom the pagan ceremonies are no more than a mark of their aristocratic identity. In all probability Pater intended this remark as a criticism of upper-class Anglicans. The ritual causes the sensitive and thoughtful Marius to muse on the nature of the Unknown, and to question the pagan conception of it: The persons about him, certainly, had never been challenged by those prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine nature […]. But in the young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much speculative activity. (Pater ME 5-6) Wolfgang Iser observes the contradictoriness of Marius’s isolation; in order to arrive at an explanation for his difference from others, he will rely on the writings of philosophers, and thus, of other human beings (Iser 137-138). From a very early age onwards, Marius vaguely senses that there is a double purpose to life: on the one hand he needs to dedicate himself to the sacredness and beauty of the world around him, while on the other he wishes to sacrifice himself for other human beings, even though he sometimes might feel alienated from them. “[T]his feeling of responsibility towards the world of men and things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side, came to be a part of his nature not to be put of” (Pater ME 14). Since he does not know how to fulfil and reconcile both duties, the demand weighs heavily on him. In this dilemma, which will engage all Marius’s attention, Pater reformulates his preoccupation with the breach between thought and feeling. Thus, though the first volume chiefly deals with thought, paganism (or what will later be termed ‘the old morality’) already makes Marius realise the importance of human sympathy. By looking forward eagerly to “some great occasion of self- devotion, such as really came, that should consecrate his life” (Pater ME 14), he even anticipates his own untimely death. To Marius everything seems beautiful, from “the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender” to “the abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild birds” (Pater ME 20). Enthralled by the divine beauty of his surroundings, the boy dreams of becoming a pagan
25 priest. When he is staying at the temple of Aesculapius to recover from a fever, one of the priests introduces him to the aesthetic Epicureanism that will later become his basic philosophy. Therefore, the chapter fittingly is titled ‘The Tree of Knowledge” (Vance 218). In the young priest’s speech Pater popularises ideas from Plato’s dialogues. From Phaedrus Pater takes an idea similar to Kant’s purposiveness without purpose, formulated by Plato as ‘the effluence of beauty’: knowledge seems to flow out of beautiful objects, and the young priest recommends Marius to train his vision in order to catch that truth. Plato’s Charmides, on temperance and self-control, supports the priest’s claim that beauty cannot be enjoyed without appropriate conduct: “If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colors of some fresh picture, in a clear light, […] be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in all things, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows” (Pater ME 26). Marius leaves the temple with a disgust for excess, and with the realisation that bodily health will facilitate his dual task in life. When he returns home, his gusto for reading makes him abandon his childhood dream of becoming a priest, and he decides to go to school. After his mother’s death, he leaves his rural home to study in Pisa.
The Lure of Decadence At school, Marius meets the charismatic Flavian, the son of a freed slave, and Marius’s senior by three years. Marius assists in transcribing Flavian’s poems, which are described as euphuistic and highly artificial. Pater’s description of Flavian hints that he intended the boy as representation of the nineteenth-century decadent writer: The brilliant youth who loved dress, and dainty food, and flowers, and seemed to have a natural alliance with, and claim upon, everything else which was physically select and bright, cultivated also that foppery of words, of choice diction, which was common among the élite spirits of that day. (Pater ME 41) Flavian is an atheist, a solitary soul who since the tragic death of his father has not cared for anyone. Like decadent authors, who were frequently associated with corruption, he has “yielded himself, though still with untouched health, in a world where manhood comes early, to the seductions of that luxurious town” (Pater ME 43). Flavian personifies the corruption of late Antiquity, which Pater throughout the whole novel significantly connects to perfection. Pater’s use of the corruption motif is in stark contrast with that of other authors: though his description of Flavian can be read as a critique of art without morality, Flavian is also a
26 positive figure. Not only is he handsome and charming, he also teaches Marius how art and literature can serve to catch life’s poetic moments (Iser 136). Consequently, Marius leaves his spiritual paganism behind in order to pursue the splendour of the present. There is another link to decadence in the boys’ reading of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, nicknamed The Golden Ass. Flavian’s name, derived from the Latin flavus or golden-yellow, underlines his predilection for the ‘golden’ book. Flavian’s copy is adorned with “purple ink on the handsome yellow wrapper […], perfumed with oil of sandal-wood, and decorated with carved and gilt ivory bosses at the ends of the roller” (Pater ME 45). In antique literature, as in Catullus’s poems for example, such expensive books were endowed with human characteristics, and likened to effeminate and decadent dandies. On the other hand, a polished exterior promised a highly literary text on the interior. Though Pater disapproves of the book’s “almost insane preoccupation with the materialities of the mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption, which was connected […] with not a little obvious coarseness” (Pater ME 49), he admires its realistic descriptions and visible imagery. Because it seems to contain a hidden allegorical meaning, Marius particularly treasures Apuleius’s retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche, which Pater translates entirely. Of the numerous fragments of translated Greek and Latin texts that Marius includes, ‘The Golden Book’ is the longest, thus creating a mise en abyme; a short story (or even a novella) within a novel. The tale has traditionally been read as an allegory of the soul (Psyche) and desire (Cupid), ultimately united in marriage. Therefore, Simon Goldhill contends that the story functions as an allegory of Marius’s Bildung: just like “the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius” (Pater ME 76), the young Roman will passively absorb different philosophies and religions, which will settle and ‘compose themselves’ in his mind. The allegory even extends itself to Pater, inventing Marius’s development, and to the reader, who embarks on a spiritual journey together with the protagonist (Goldhill 221). In sum, “Cupid and Psyche” becomes an icon and performance of the typological process (an allegory of allegory, if you chose) – the past neither as mirror nor as linear genealogy for the here and now, but as indwelling, through the process of translating (for) the present. (Goldhill 221) Pater casts Flavian as the writer of the famous Pervigilium Veneris, a poem written between the second and fifth century AD by an unknown author. It sings the beginning of spring, youth, and love; a scene from which the persona feels locked out. Though Flavian’s character is depicted as decadent, his poetics are clearly aesthetic. Flavian’s primary concern
27 is form: he wishes to revive the Latin language and to reinforce the ties between language and reality. Flavian’s “horror of profanities” (Pater ME 80) and passion for sacred beauty appeals to Marius’s love for ritual. As in The Renaissance, Pater argues that the preoccupation with form should be regarded as a transhistorical impulse rather than as a movement belonging to a particular era or group of artists. Apart from striving for the perfect form, Flavian seeks to communicate his personal vision of reality: “this uncompromising demand for matter […] saved his euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice” (Pater ME 85). The last chapter of Part the First narrates how Flavian suddenly falls ill, as a result of the Antonine Plague, brought to Rome by soldiers returning from the East. Now believed to have been measles or smallpox, the plague flared up during the late 160s, and after an interval recommenced in the 170s. Marius attends to his friend’s sickbed, where he helps him to write down the Pervigilium Veneris. The intimacy between the two boys produces an atmosphere that suggests homosexuality, a theme which resurfaces when Marius meets a new friend in the Christian Cornelius, but is not pursued in greater depth. However, these scenes need not be read as an indication of Marius’s homosexuality, but rather as an exploration of the classical theme of intense male friendship, which for a modern reader may seem to border on homosexuality (Brake “Art of the Novel” 227). Just before Flavian dies, Marius asks him whether it would be a comfort that he will weep at his friend’s grave. Flavian answers: “Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!” (Pater ME 98). Consequently, the first chapter of ‘Part the Second’ starts with Marius’s wondering if Flavian’s soul is still alive to witness his tears.
Part the Second: The Epicurean Rose Garden
Marius the Materialist The chapter following Flavian’s death opens with the first four lines of ‘Animula Vagula Blandula’ (‘Charming Little Wandering Soul’), a poem which is usually ascribed to the Stoic emperor Hadrian, though its authenticity is contested. It expresses the Stoic belief that the underworld is a cold and unpleasant place, except for extraordinary people, such as heroes. Yet the Epicurean Marius struggles to accept that Flavian’s soul feels the cold of the underworld, or that he can see Marius mourning him: he is convinced that his companion’s soul has died together with his body, and that there does not exist a hereafter. Marius only believes in what he sees, and with the material evidence of Flavian’s ashes still in his
28 possession, he cannot agree with the prevailing Platonic dualism, which claims that the soul lives on after the body has ceased to exist. Accordingly, he tries to arrive at a satisfactory theory of the soul by reading up on materialist Epicurean philosophy. Marius’s wish for an elaborated philosophy is repeatedly compared to that of a religious person, since both desire to commit themselves wholly to a system upon which they can rely in difficult times. Paradoxically, Marius has become “a materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee” (Pater ME 103). Just as the previous chapters had made Plato, Apuleius, and the Pervigilium Veneris accessible for a large public, ‘Animula Vagula’ summarises the Epicureanism of Heraclitus, Aristippus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. Heraclitus (ca. 540-480 BC) is not typically associated with Epicureanism, but Marius considers him to be the forefather of all Epicurean thought, and consequently decides to read him first. Most likely, Heraclitus’s flux, already mentioned in the ‘Conclusion’, is included because it fitted into Pater’s theory of the aesthetic life. Heraclitus teaches Marius to abandon the idea that his surroundings are fixed; distrusting his senses and confiding in his ratio instead, Marius learns that reality is ever changing. Nevertheless, there does exist a principle of continuity amidst the flux; paradoxically enough, the very fact that things are constantly in motion is the only fixed knowledge in Heraclitus’s philosophy. Pater recounts how many of Heraclitus’s followers neglected this positive proposition, and remembered only the impossibility of knowledge. Too young to grasp Heraclitus’s difficult texts, Marius makes the same mistake, and rejects Heraclitus, not only because he does not seem to offer any certainty but also because the weeping philosopher is too preoccupied with the transcendent, instead of with the visible world around him. Still, Marius’s interest in the nature of reality is roused, and he is finally satisfied by the theories of Aristippus of Cyrene (ca. 435-356 BC), one of Socrates’s pupils. Because Aristippus links up metaphysics with ethics, and thought with sentiment, Marius finds it easier to use his theories in actual practice: “[t]he metaphysical principle […] translated into a precept as to how it were best to feel and act” (Pater ME 111). Aristippus takes up Heraclitus’s idea of flux, but adds the Epicurean notion of pleasure to it: if life’s impressions are fleeting, it is best to pay attention to the most agreeable impressions only. Having witnessed the effects of a decadent lifestyle in Flavian, Marius at once understands Epicurean pleasure as absence of pain rather than as an excuse for excessive feasting. Yet Pater broadens Aristippus’s idea of pleasure by supplementing it with his own theory of the aesthetic life. Even though Marius realises that his perception of reality might be faulty, he cannot step
29 outside his body, so that his knowledge must be limited to what his senses can discern. Moreover, he can solely grasp the impressions of the present moment, since past and future are too distant to guarantee definite knowledge. Marius must refine his powers of perception, so as to be able to fully enjoy the present, and work towards a “general completeness of life” (Pater ME 117). Marius’s newfound maxim of “[l]ife as the end of life” (Pater ME 117) can be equated with a motto from the ‘Conclusion’: “[n]ot the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end” (Pater Three Major Texts 219). That way, the Epicurean’s present can be compared to the heaven that so many religions promise only after death.
Pater’s Aesthetic Interpretation of Epicureanism By calling Marius’s version of Aristippus of Cyrene’s philosophy ‘New Cyrenaicism’, Pater indicates that he has added his own ideas to those of Aristippus. Together with ‘Animula Vagula’, the chapter ‘New Cyrenaicism’ corresponds most obviously to The Renaissance’s ‘Conclusion’. It narrates how Marius has established Pater’s aesthetic Epicureanism as his basic philosophy of life, and it expounds on another aesthetic aspect of this ideal: since Marius has been attracted towards beauty since his childhood, his New Cyrenaicism seeks to select the most agreeable elements out of the visible reality around him. He encounters this aesthetic pleasure in nature, in ordinary man-made objects, and in art, philosophy, literature, and music. Art and study are part of the “‘esthetic’ education” (Pater ME 121); they cultivate the reader’s senses. In addition, Epicurean writing is composed in a manner so close to actual experience, that it has the same effect as sensory input. In this chapter the ripeness of the Roman Empire is again associated with perfection rather than with degeneracy: because Greco-Roman culture is so old, it has amassed a wealth of cultural capital, most of which is still extant in the second century. “In that age of Marcus Aurelius […] possessed of so vast an accumulation of intellectual treasure” (Pater ME 120), it is not surprising that Marius decides to dedicate his life to sensory experience: In an age still so materially brilliant, so expert in the artistic handling of material things, with sensible capacities still in undiminished vigor, with the whole world of classic art and poetry outspread before it, and where there was more than eye or ear could well take in – how natural the determination to rely exclusively upon the phenomena of the senses. (Pater ME 114)
30
By describing the treasure of Roman culture as “the beautiful house of art and thought which was the inheritance of the age” (Pater ME 126), Pater links up the maturity of the second century with his well-known conception of the western canon as ‘the House Beautiful’. In ‘New Cyrenaicism’, Pater attaches more importance to Marius’s experience of the world’s beauty than to the impressions themselves. This shows how “[t]he individual, and not art, is at the very heart of [Pater’s] aestheticism” (Hext 1). Throughout his life Pater attempted to grasp the precise nature of what he despairingly termed “the elusive inscrutable mistakable self” (qtd. in Hext 2). From German Romanticism, he derived the notion that the search for identity is centred on uniqueness, self-realisation, and that aesthetic experience can assist in this process. On the other hand, the same flow of impressions can assail the individual’s identity: Marius’s self can be supressed by the flux of visual impressions and philosophic- religious movements, like modern nineteenth-century man is in danger of being determined by his socio-economic and political context, and by the latest scientific and philosophical findings. Thus, by letting Marius look for his unique selfhood as well as for an adequate view on reality, Pater fuses the Romantic and Victorian theories on individualism, a mix which Kate Hext terms ‘late-Romantic individualism’ (Hext 4). The sensations that Marius seeks need not always be beautiful and idyllic, they can “includ[e] noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, such as Seneca and Epictetus – whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal” (Pater ME 125). This fascination with human fortunes already suggests that Marius’s philosophy of life will also delve into moral issues. Accordingly, at the end of ‘New Cyrenaicism’ he reformulates his life’s double purpose: he must “understand the various forms of ancient art, and thought, the various forms of actual human feeling” (Pater ME 126), and communicate his insights to the masses, like a Christian preacher or prophet. With a sense of superiority that can be attributed to his youthful age (Marius is now nineteen), he considers himself a Romantic seer who is more receptive to nature’s intimations than the average human being. Apart from his wish to become a lecturer, Marius dreams of writing poetry: poems could afford stability amidst the incessant Heraclitean flux, since they can preserve the most perfect of his sensations and so convey them to the public. In all this he still inclines to thought rather than to feeling. Absorbed by outward sensations and their effect on his inner world, Marius, already “in [a] life of so few attachments”, now increases his distance from others. In revolt to the behaviour of other adolescents, he longs for solitude rather than for romantic love or for
31 community. However, the true crisis between thought and feeling will become apparent in ‘Part the Third’.
Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in Marius the Epicurean
Life and Work of Lucretius Lucretius and Horace (who was an enthusiastic disciple of Aristippus) are the only Roman authors mentioned among the Epicurean philosophers of ‘Animula Vagula’ and ‘New Cyrenaicism’. Since Lucretius is better known for his Epicureanism than Horace, and was a popular but controversial figure during the nineteenth century, it is interesting to examine how both his figure and his philosophy function in Marius. Titus Lucretius Carus lived from circa 99 until 55 BC, though these dates are uncertain (Smith xi). Even less is known about his life. He was probably born in Rome, where he later continued to live (Rouse vii). The gens Lucretia belonged to the nobiles, the Roman aristocracy (Rouse vii); Lucretius was therefore fluent in Greek, and could address the aristocratic Memmius, to whom he dedicated his poem, as an equal (Smith xiv). Saint Jerome (ca. 342-420) has offered a notorious explanation to account for Lucretius’s untimely death. He claims that the poet’s wife, disappointed by her husband’s scant affection, concocted a love-potion for him. The potion drove Lucretius mad, so that he was forced to write De Rerum Natura during his sane intervals. According to Jerome, the poet ultimately committed suicide, unable to bear the potion’s effects any longer (Fowler and Fowler 863). Although the story is obviously faulty, since there does not even exist evidence that Lucretius was married (Rouse vii), it remains ineradicable in the reception of Lucretius. De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things, hereafter DRN) is the only work that Lucretius left. The title derives from Epicurus’s (341-270 BC) prose work Peri Physeos, which Lucretius wanted to translate into a didactic poem. Since the text of Peri Physeos is no longer extant, it cannot be determined how closely Lucretius’s rendering sticks to the source text. Some passages of DRN are clearly translated from Epicurus’s ‘Letter to Herodotus’, which is still extant. Though Epicurus seems to be Lucretius’s main source, he also draws on various Greek and Latin texts. For instance, Empedocles’s lost didactic poem Peri Physeos is believed to have been the model for DRN’s structure (Fowler and Fowler 864). After Democritus (ca. 460-370 BC) and Epicurus, Lucretius was the first to introduce atomic theory. He distinguished two constituents in the universe: atoms, varying in
32 shape and size, and the void, the empty space in which atoms move. Groups of atoms form objects; when these groups fall apart, the atoms are scattered and go on to form other objects (Rouse viii-ix). Every aspect of reality is caused by the movement of atoms, even intangible concepts such as mind, thought, or free will. However, DRN tends more towards philosophy than towards science: often Lucretius will sum up several explanations to account for the same phenomenon, but does not indicate which interpretation is the most probable, as if the scientific truth does not interest him (Sikes 162). Lucretius wrote DRN with a specific purpose in mind: by uncovering that everything in nature arose from a material cause, and that the gods lived in intermundia (spaces between the worlds) where they did not control the fate of man, he wanted to rid people of their fear of the gods, so that they could live peaceably (Rouse vii). Lucretius’s readers need not live in fear of death either, since he explains how the soul dies simultaneously with the body, so that it does not have to endure the pain of dying.
Reception History of De Rerum Natura During late Antiquity the Church, always averse to Epicureanism, branded Lucretius an atheist (Rouse xvi), though his religious position would today be termed agnostic (Vance 91). During the Middle Ages DRN was practically unknown, until the manuscript was rediscovered by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 (Rouse xvi). From the sixteenth until the eighteenth century there were opponents as well as supporters of Lucretius: some admired his poetic skill, others his scepticism towards traditional scientific thinking and superstition (Vance 85). Since science and religion had not yet been separated into autonomous research areas, many believed that DRN would disrupt religious life (Vance 87). During the nineteenth century DRN gained popularity: between 1799 and 1813 four translations appeared (Priestman 289). As a young man, Wordsworth admired Lucretius for his iconoclasm and radicalism, and read DRN thoroughly. Even in later years, when he had returned to a conservative Christian belief, Lucretian echoes can be found in his poetry (Priestman 293). Byron and Shelley, both atheists, ranked Lucretius among their favourite authors and regularly referred to him in their work (Priestman 297). Blake and Coleridge, in contrast, were devoted Christians and thus dismissed Lucretian philosophy (Priestman 295). Vance discerns three tendencies in the Victorian reception of Lucretius: there were those who admired his poetic imagery, those who reflected upon his agnosticism, and those who regarded him as a precursor of modern science. The first category primarily consisted of
33
Romantics, such as Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. They imitated the vitality in Lucretius’s writing, his optimism in proclaiming that nature perpetually renewed itself, and his pastoral imagery (Vance 110). The Romantics were equally intrigued by the gloomy atmosphere that Lucretius used to describe the Creation of the world and the atoms (Vance 94). This first tendency in Lucretius’s reception continued into the twentieth century, when he was no longer relevant for science, and thus predominantly treasured as a nature poet and philosopher (Gillespie and Mackenzie 307; Vance 95). Donald Mackenzie indicates how the poetry of A.E. Housman (1859-1936) uses DRN to express a sentimental pessimism about the human fate; Housman employs Lucretian language and imagery in bleak pastoral poems that discuss death or the final collapse of the world. Dark Lucretian metaphors are also be found in the work of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost (Gillespie and Mackenzie 314). As the late nineteenth century was no longer theocentric, many writers were drawn towards Lucretius’s agnosticism, which for them symbolised the ultimate freedom of the human mind (Vance 103). For instance, George Eliot’s notebooks reveal that she was reading DRN extensively during her preparation for Middlemarch (1874), and that she admired Lucretius’s anti-providentialism (Vance 97). While some ardently idolised Lucretius and others accused him of atheism and of opposing all forms of religious belief, many were ambivalent about his philosophy. The most famous instances of this ambivalent attitude are Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), and Matthew Arnold. In Barrett Browning’s poem ‘A Vision of Poets’ (1844), Lucretius features as the atheist poet who “said “No God””, but whose “face is stern/As one compelled, in spite of scorn, /To teach a truth he would not learn” (Barrett Browning 242; Hadzsits 355). Her intuition tells her that Lucretius was right, but she does not think mankind can live without being comforted by the existence of a personal providential God. Tennyson expresses a similar ambivalence: he likes to believe that the world is steered towards purpose, and centred around the human, but at the same time he suspects that Lucretius may be right in claiming a world without any divine providence (Vance 107). ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1832, revised 1842) depicts the gods’ indifference as something negative rather than positive; while the gods amuse themselves in their intermundia, people suffer and die. The twin poems ‘Nothing will die’ and ‘All things will die’ (1830) explores DRN’s claim that while the falling apart of atoms causes death, the atoms themselves live on eternally, a paradox that made Tennyson uneasy (Vance 106). In ‘In Memoriam’ (1850), the Epicurean assertion that death is a painless natural phenomenon that should not be grieved for does not
34 console Tennyson in his grief for Arthur Hallam. He consequently seeks solace in the traditional belief that death has stolen Hallam away for a reason (Vance 106-107). Tennyson at length confronts the Epicurean poet in the dramatic monologue ‘Lucretius’ (1868), in which an account of Lucretius’s last moments is given, based on St Jerome’s tale. The love- potion and ensuing madness are punishment from the gods, for mocking their power. The whole argument of DRN is disproven, and when Lucretius realises that he will never be able to enjoy the Epicurean peace of mind except in death, he commits suicide (Vance 108-109). Thus, Tennyson’s Christian views win out on the pagan author’s materialism (Vance 110). Matthew Arnold was troubled by Lucretius’s agnosticism as well as by his withdrawal from modern life. Arnold had read DRN several times, and was planning a tragedy about Lucretius, on which he had been working at intervals from the mid 1840s until the mid 1860s. However, he abandoned the project in the late 1860s, partly because Tennyson had by then published his ‘Lucretius’, and Arnold did not want the public to think that he had derived the idea from Tennyson (Mackenzie 163). Much of Arnold’s material had already gone into a poem about Lucretius’s “suicidal scientist-poet predecessor Empedocles” (Priestman 300), ‘Empedocles on Etna’ (1852). Arnold may have been inspired by the work of his friend W. Y. Sellar, who was investigating the parallels between Lucretius and Empedocles (Priestman 300). The poem introduces some Lucretian ideas, of which the most important is that nature is not created for mankind (MacKenzie 163). The detached Epicurean spectator, calmly observing a sinking ship from the shore, and Lucretius’s view that the simplicity of an outdoor life should be preferred over luxury, also appear in ‘Empedocles on Etna’ (Mackenzie 164-165). “On the Modern Element in Literature” gives a more detailed image of Arnold’s perspective on Lucretius. For Arnold, both the Age of Pericles and the first century BC were modern eras, because they were characterised by “a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting comprehension” (qtd. in de Graef 147). Fifth-century Athens was able to deliver itself from the chaos by representing and thus understanding it, but in Rome this deliverance could not be achieved, despite the presence of critical spirits such as Lucretius (de Graef 148). Still influenced by St Jerome’s story, Arnold portrays Lucretius as an unhappy man, plagued by “depression and ennui” (qtd. in MacKenzie 166), since he cannot fathom the busy and modern world of the first century BC, from which he feels isolated. Therefore, he invented an agnostic philosophy that would justify his refusal to participate in life’s maddening bustle. Yet for Arnold, Lucretius’s suicide proves that the philosopher had not succeeded in realising his own
35 principles (Mackenzie 166). Arnold dislikes Lucretius’s Epicurean isolation, which prevented him from representing reality adequately (de Graef 149). In sum, Arnold considers Lucretius’s life as a prefiguration of the modern condition, and his philosophy as an inadequate remedy to that condition. However, he must have taken Lucretius’s agnosticism seriously, since poems such as ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) reflect a materialist anti-providential view of the world (MacKenzie 168). The last and most common tendency in Lucretius’s Victorian reception was to regard him in the context of the debate between science and religion of the second half of the nineteenth century. The debate flared in the 1870s, when science tried to free itself from the yoke of the church. John Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer belonged to the science faction. Among their opponents were John Tulloch, James Martineau, John Veitch, John Masson, and W. H. Mallock. Though their Christianity was liberal, they protested against the naturalistic positivism of their adversaries (Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 264-265). The commotion began in 1874, after a speech from Tyndall, who was then president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. By praising Lucretius as the first advocate of true science, the speech broke with the tradition of previous presidential addresses, which had stated that science and religion were compatible (Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 271). Yet Tyndall’s Christian opponents tried to claim the pagan poet for themselves. They argued that he had rebelled against the crude paganism of his time, which left too many scientific questions unanswered. DRN therefore paved the way for the purer religion of Christianity, the rationality and uniformity of which Lucretius would have liked. The scientists were blamed for equating Lucretius’s primitive pagan gods with the mature Christian God (Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 277-278). Moreover, the Christian camp stated that their rivals had misinterpreted DRN; Lucretius’s atoms were not the atoms that chemists dealt with, but only a generalisation, a metaphor to facilitate his abstract thinking (Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 274). However, the scientists were not prepared to give Lucretius up to the Christian party, and continued to portray him as an anti-religious writer. Still they tried to nuance Tyndall’s radical speech by confirming that the scientific ideas in DRN had long been superseded, but that they admired Lucretius as a revolutionary historic figure (Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 280). By 1914, the debate had wholly petered out, as the nation’s authority and prestige had shifted from the clergy to scientists (Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 175), and the church had ceased to rival scientists with the practice of natural theology (Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 199). Nevertheless,
36 whenever classical scholars or critics wrote about Lucretius after 1874, they brought up contemporary science and Lucretius’s position in “the old war between science and theology” (W. Y. Sellar, qtd. in Turner Contesting Cultural Authority 263).
“The Thunder and Lightning of Lucretius” Since Marius’s Cyrenaicism is an Epicurean philosophy of life, Marius (especially the chapters ‘Animula Vagula’ and ‘New Cyrenaicism’) frequently alludes to Lucretius. These references typically occur in passages on the mortality of the soul, on the Epicurean ataraxia or peace of mind, and on the senses. However, prudence is called for in identifying certain passages as references to Lucretius, since many ideas that appear in DRN are also covered by other Epicurean philosophers, often in similar phrasings. Marius has an appetite for philosophy that expresses “poetic beauty in mere clearness of thought”, that possesses “genuine virility”, and “vigorous intelligence” (Pater ME 102). Accordingly it is suggested that DRN, philosophy in the form of poetry, written with extraordinary energy and force of expression, is completely to Marius’s liking. Marius realises that before he can express himself as lucidly as his favourite philosophers, he will have to specify his findings by a “virile apprehension of the true nature of things, of the true nature of one’s own impression, first of all” (Pater ME 128, my italics). Though the phrase is common, it may well refer to the title of Lucretius’s poem. Marius in the first place turns to Epicureanism for a satisfactory theory of the soul, as he senses that Flavian’s soul has perished together with his body. Like Marius, Lucretius believes that body and mind are inseparable (Lucretius 3.323-326), and that the soul is mortal (Lucretius 3.417-424). Both Pater and Lucretius use imagery of heat and fire to describe the soul’s death. Pater states that “Flavian had gone out as utterly as the fire among those still beloved ashes” (Pater ME 101), and that “that strange, enigmatic, personal essence, had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires” (Pater ME 105). For Lucretius too, death is the result of heat leaving the body: atque eadem rursum, cum corpora pauca caloris diffugere forasque per os est editus aer, deserit extemplo venas atque ossa relinquit; noscere ut hinc possis non aequas omnia partis corpora habere neque ex aequo fulcire salutem
37
sed magis haec, venti quae sunt calidique vaporis semina, curare in membris ut vita moretur. (Lucretius 3.121-127)
and again when a few particles of heat have dispersed abroad and air is driven out through the mouth, the same life in a moment deserts the veins and leaves the bones; so that from this you may recognise that not all particles have a like function or support life equally, but rather that those which are seeds of wind and warming heat see to it that life lingers in the frame. (Lucretius 197,199) Lucretius also likens the dissolution of the soul to smoke departing from a fire: ergo dissolui quoque convenit omnem animai naturam, ceu fumus, in altas aeris auras (Lucretius 3.455-456)
It follows therefore that the whole nature of the spirit is dissolved abroad, like smoke, into the high winds of the air. (Lucretius 223) Besides Lucretius’s theory on the mortality of the soul, in book three of DRN, Marius seems to admire the opening of the poem, since three explicit references to the beginning of the first book are made. Lucretius’s philosophy is summarised when Pater describes Marius’s reading in ‘Animula Vagula’: “From Epicurus, from the thunder and lightning of Lucretius – like thunder and lightning some distance off, one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses – he had gone back to the writer who was in a certain sense the teacher of both, Heraclitus of Iona” (Pater ME 105). This links up with Lucretius’s praise of Epicurus’s ataraxia (Lucretius 1.62-79), who, after he had been convinced himself of the gods’ indifference, no longer feared thunderstorms, which traditional paganism regarded as an indication of wrathful gods (Lucretius 5.1218-1225). The connection to a rose-garden, which Pater repeats in the third part of the novel, when Marius is “anxious to try the lastingness of his own Epicurean rose- garden” (Pater ME 120), is not Lucretian. However, it does fit in with Marius’s love of nature, and with other idyllic nature scenes in DRN, which expand on the fact that the trained Epicurean can be content without luxury (for instance, Lucretius 2.20-36). Both Lucretius and Pater seek to underline the contrast between the quiet peace of the Epicurean and the anxiety of the unenlightened mass, whose fear of the gods does not permit them to take pleasure in life: Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem
38
no quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas, sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est. (Lucretius 2.1-4)
Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive what ills you are free from yourself is pleasant. (Lucretius 95) A second explicit reference to the first book of DRN and to Lucretius’s treatment of pagan superstition is made in the chapter discussing Flavian’s euphuism: Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddess Venus, the work of his earlier manhood, and designed originally to open an argument less persistently somber than that protest against the whole pagan heaven which actually follows it? (Pater ME 85-86) Here Pater surmises that the first books of DRN are the work of a young and sentimental Lucretius, still excited about the world, while the later books’ invective against paganism resulted from embittered age. A later remark about Lucretius also suggests that Pater considered Lucretius’s evaluation of paganism too severe. When he compares the bloodshed of the Roman games to religious human sacrifices, Pater states that “[j]ust at this point, certainly, the judgment of Lucretius on pagan religion is without reproach – Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum” (Pater ME 198). This is the third reference too book one: the citation is from DRN 1.101, and concludes a passage on the offering of Iphigenia: “so potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds” (Lucretius 11). From the numerous chapters and passages that Pater devotes to pagan ceremonies, it is clear that he sincerely respected paganism and its love for the beauty of ritual. Pater also refers to Lucretius to elucidate New Cyrenaicism’s theory of the senses, and of visual input particularly. As in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, impressions are described as particle currents streaming towards the senses, an image for which Lucretius is famous. Moreover, Lucretius, like Marius, pleads for trusting man’s perception. Without the presupposition that the senses see the world as it is, science becomes impossible: “quid nobis certius ipsis/sensibus esse potest, qui vera ac falsa notemus” (Lucretius 1.699-700), “[w]hat can we find more certain than the senses themselves, to mark us for truth and falsehood?” (Lucretius 57). A Lucretian phrase, again from book one, illustrates that Marius has no other choice than to trust his senses, even though his perception might be faulty: “Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of judgment to what might really lie behind – flammantia
39 moenia mundi: the flaming ramparts of the world.” (Pater ME 110). Aristippus thought up a practical philosophy, but did not work out a metaphysical system in order to explain what lay behind the belt of fire of which the Epicureans believed that it encircled the world (Lucretius 9, footnote). Thus, the philosopher does not attempt to look beyond the boundaries of the world, or beyond the moenia of his senses. Throughout the rest of Marius, Pater repeatedly returns to the English phrase, and the broader concept of the limitation of the senses. In DRN the phrase is used in the praise of Epicurus mentioned above. Epicurus “extra/processit longe flammantia moenia mundi” (Lucretius 1.72-73); “marched far beyond the flaming walls of the world” (Lucretius 9). In contrast with Aristippus, Epicurus’s philosophy does encompass the entire universe. In addition, Lucretius intended the phrase to evoke the image of an army general storming the city walls and setting fire to them (Lucretius 9, footnote). A few pages further, while Marius is still musing on the possible faultiness of his perception, Pater explains how “[m]ere peculiarities in the instruments of our cognition, like the little knots and waves on the surface of a mirror, may distort the matter they seem but to represent” (Pater ME 113). This bears resemblance to Lucretius’s lengthy discussion of mirrors in book four, the last part of which also discusses how mirrors reverse the images, and how strangely shaped mirrors reflect false images (Lucretius 4.292-317). The vocabulary with which Pater describes Heraclitus’s flux is also reminiscent of the semantic field in DRN 2.67-79, which argues that the sum of matter remains the same despite increases and decreases. In Marius, “things, and men’s impressions of them, were ever ‘coming to be’, alternately consumed and renewed” (Pater ME 107), “they did pass away like a devouring flame, or like the race of water in the mid-stream” (Pater ME 108). In DRN 2.67- 79, the verbs minuere, fluere, decedere, abire, senescere, florescere, novare, and augescere are used. Though Pater may have obtained these images from other sources than DRN, the resemblance certainly adds to Pater’s engagement with Lucretius. Furthermore, it is striking that Lucretius can be categorised among those followers of Heraclitus, who, like Marius, do not remember the positive principle of motion as the only certainty. In his criticism of Heraclitus, Lucretius too understands that nothing in his predecessor’s flux is certain. Therefore, he supposes the existence of objects whose nature does not change: “certissima corpora quaedam/sunt, quae conservant naturam semper eandem” (Lucretius 1.675-676), “there are certain most definite bodies which preserve their nature always the same” (Lucretius 57).
40
Lastly, ‘Animula Vagula’ incorporates an obscure reference to the figure of Lucretius as he had been described by St Jerome, Tennyson, and Arnold. The passage in which it is embedded talks about the superfluity of metaphysics: Cyrenaicism needs theory merely to prove the impossibility of metaphysical speculation, and as a succinct framework for practice. However, Marius’s predecessors in the history of Greco-Roman philosophy did try to establish a theoretical system, “that vision of a wholly reasonable world” (Pater ME 115), and despaired when they did not succeed: Men’s minds, even young men’s minds, at that late day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which had so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind of Marius, as in that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui, combined with appetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort of suicide (instances of the like have been seen since) by which a great metaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving metaphysical speculation impossible, or useless. (Pater ME 115- 116) Though the language remains vague, this sentence can point to the nineteenth-century image of Lucretius. Plagued by Arnold’s modern ennui, madness made the frustrated poet discover that the philosophy of DRN was incorrect and useless, so that he resorted to suicide. In ‘New Cyrenaicism’, Pater connects the impossibility of metaphysics with his favourite Lucretian phrase: “that age of Marcus Aurelius [was] so completely disabused of the metaphysical ambition to pass beyond ‘the flaming ramparts of the world’” (Pater ME 120). This coupling may suggest that the above quotation indeed alludes to Lucretius. Accordingly, it seems that Pater did not only find fault with Lucretius’s intolerance towards paganism, but also disagreed with his exposition of the universe’s first principles. As the remainder of ‘Animula Vagula’ explains, too elaborate theories burden the reader with prejudices that affect his perception of reality. Cyrenaicism, in contrast, provides him with “a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from the tyranny of mere theories” (Pater ME 117), so that he can approach his surroundings with a virgin mind. Nevertheless, Pater shared the Romantics’ and twentieth-century poets’ reverence for the imagery and poetry of DRN. In contrast to poets such as Housman, Pater was less drawn towards gloomy settings than towards the idyllic nature scenes that are the outcome of Epicurean ataraxy. Like Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and Arnold, he is ambiguous about Lucretius’s agnosticism: although Pater did not believe in a providential God, he did not accept the idea of life without religious ritual, either pagan or Christian. Religious ceremony
41 connected people, and provided them with a clear-cut philosophy of life. Pater did respect Lucretius’s attempt at metaphysics, since he used DRN’s theory on the mortal soul and on the senses, but he probably wished the Roman poet to supplement his work with a more detailed practical account of the passive ataraxic spectator. Like Arnold, Pater considered Lucretius’s fervent quest for the first principles of things a symptom of the modern mind “at that late day” (Pater ME 115). For Pater, a classics don without any active interest in science, Lucretius is an Epicurean philosopher rather than a scientist. Hence, he is only influenced by DRN’s concepts when they can be applied to the practical reality of the aesthetic life and New Cyrenaicism. The vague reference to Lucretius’s suicide may even suggest that Pater did not only think metaphysics futile, but science as well, since it also studies the ‘true nature of things’. However, as the chapter on Mimesis will illustrate, Pater did wonder about what lay beyond “the flaming ramparts of the world” (Pater ME 120).
Part the Third: Corruption and Kindness
Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic Indifference At the age of nineteen, Marius abandons his dream of becoming a public lecturer, and travels to Rome to work as an amanuensis for Marcus Aurelius. As he enters Rome he is struck by the magnificence of its buildings, and the topic of corruption is again touched upon; Marius is fortunate to live in so late an age, because “at no period of history had the material Rome itself been better worth seeing” (Pater ME 142). Even the timeworn aspect of some buildings “add[s] the final grace of a rich softness to its complex expression” (Pater ME 142). Furthermore, Pater’s neutral description of the empress Faustina suggests that he wished to distance himself from the traditional corruption motif. Though Marius is a little upset by her frank gaze, he realises that the rumours about her infidelity are highly exaggerated, and no final judgment on her character is made. Yet Pater does not entirely dismiss the omens of decline. He acknowledges that the city’s “perfection […] indicated only too surely the eve of decline” (Pater ME 142): war is raging at the Empire’s borders, the Antonine Plague continues to claim lives, and most importantly, the great multitude of religions causes tension in “the fervid and corrupt life” (Pater ME 191) of Rome. The effect of deterioration is enforced when a few lines from Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) are quoted at the beginning of the following chapter. Significantly, they are taken from the section on the month October, and mourn the end of Rome’s Golden Age:
42
But ah! Maecenas is yclad in claye, And great Augustus long ygoe is dead, And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead, That matter made for poets on to playe (Pater ME 155) Shortly after Marius’s arrival, Marcus Aurelius returns to the Eternal City after a campaign in the East. He is received with the ovation, i.e. the processional entrance of victorious troops into Rome. In the chapter ‘The Divinity That Doth Hedge a King’ (a reference to Hamlet) Pater describes the procession, and he lets Aurelius make a speech in the Senate, which expresses ideas from the emperor’s Meditations. Not only does Aurelius’s Stoicism correspond closely with New Cyrenaicism, Marius also recognises himself in Aurelius’s person; he is thoughtful, isolated, and piously devotes himself to pagan ritual. The emperor’s Stoicism is essentially monotheistic, but this does not cause Aurelius to withdraw from the traditional polytheistic paganism, and he even performs the pagan ceremonies with a greater presence of mind that the crowd around him, which adheres to paganism merely for tradition’s sake. The combination of Stoicism and the traditional Roman religion aid Aurelius in fulfilling life’s double purpose: Stoicism satisfies his hunger for thought, while polytheism helps him in questions of feeling. According to a common view in Stoicism, he considers the traditional pagan gods as subordinate assistants of one divine spirit, who has assigned a certain realm of everyday life to each of them. The detailed and respectful recording of Aurelius’s piety again proves that Pater regards a certain kind of religious consciousness as the permanent summit of the most worthy human striving; it may be achieved without belief in a transcendent object of consciousness, indeed without any detectable object at all save certain evocative intellectual and aesthetic stimuli. (DeLaura 196) Yet when Marius is invited to attend the games, held in order to celebrate the marriage of Aurelius’s eldest daughter, he is disappointed by the emperor’s indifference. The sensitive Marius and his Christian friend Cornelius are immediately unsettled by the bloodshed, and Marius apprehends that such scenes should not be taken in by the passive Cyrenaic spectator: “‘[t]his, and this, is what you may not look upon!’” (Pater ME 200). Iser rightly remarks that Marius is forced to rethink his philosophy of life through negative experiences, such as the death of his mother, of Flavian, and the violence of the arena (Iser 143). Aurelius is reading or working instead of watching the games, but to Marius “[t]here was something in a tolerance such as this, in the bare fact that he could sit patiently through a scene like this, which seemed
43 to Marius to mark Aurelius as his inferor [sic] now and forever on the question of righteousness” (Pater ME 199). Apart from depicting a decisive crisis in Marius’s coming of age process, the scene in the arena criticises the treatment of the Roman games in other novels. The first chapter of Marius had already alluded to the perversity of Roman spectators, and by extension also of Victorian readers. When the bystanders at the Ambarvalia are eagerly watching the ritual slaughter, Pater observes that “some then present certainly displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted them on a religious pretext” (Pater ME 6). Since the conversion novels regularly provided readers with bloodshed ‘on a religious pretext’, the remark can be interpreted as a comment on the moral dilemma of reading such scenes: the Christian reader knows that he has to disapprove of violence, but at the same time he is fascinated by it. A remark in the chapter on the games itself is more explicit in its criticism: For the long shows of the amphitheater were, so to speak, the novel-reading of that age – a current help provided for sluggish imaginations, in regard, for instance, to grisly accidents, such as might happen to one’s self: but with every facility for comfortable inspection. (Pater ME 197) For Pater the violent scenes in popular Rome novels were intended for people who, as long as they could look at it from a safe distance, were intrigued by gruesome slaughter, but needed detailed descriptions to set their imagination going. However, Laurel Brake and Curtis Dahl detect a hint of the macabre in Marius, not only in Pater’s rendering of the games, but also in other scenes of death and destruction. Pater leaves out spectacular melodrama, but underneath the surface placidity of his brief descriptions of the arena (its predilection for pregnant animals, the skinning or burning of victims, etc.), there lurks a fascination for the grotesque (Brake “The Art of the Novel” 227; Dahl 12). Pater may have used this technique deliberately, so that the horror of his descriptions would make his readers aware of the impropriety of the more common, longer descriptions of corrupt Rome. However, several passages in which the empire’s corruption is not directly at issue are also marked by the macabre. A good example of this is the description of the funeral of Aurelius’s fellow ruler Lucius Verus, in which Pater remarks that “even the skill of Galen [was] not wholly successful in the process of embalming” (Pater ME 223-224). Accordingly, it seems that Pater was, perhaps unconsciously, attracted towards the grotesque.
44
The Question of Sympathy Although the games diminish Marius’s adoration for the emperor, the atmosphere of the imperial household prompts Marius to make adjustments to his New Cyrenaicism. He is impressed by Aurelius’s kindness (resulting from Stoicism, which attaches great importance to cosmopolitanism) towards others, even towards slaves and dishonest people. Yet the real change in Marius’s attitude occurs in the first chapter of Part the Third, ‘Stoicism at Court’, which is also the first chapter of the second volume. Accordingly, the second half of the novel charts Marius quest to complement the thought of his now completely thought-out New Cyrenaicism with feeling for other human beings. This turn in Marius’s Bildung is based on a dilemma that occupied Pater during the last years of his life. Since the passive spectator had frequently been criticised for self-centeredness, Pater began to look for a harmonisation between the individualist aesthetic life and a moral life in society (Hext 166). In ‘Stoicism at Court’, the aged Cornelius Fronto, former tutor and confidant of Aurelius, gives a speech on morals. It is the beautiful rhetoric of Fronto’s discourse, reminiscent of the poetic language of Epicurean philosophy, that persuades Marius to look into the “the old morality” (Pater ME 203), a concept which is never specified, but seems to indicate a sort of common sense, a natural intuition as to what is right. Pater derived this idea from Schiller, who believed that the individual’s sense of righteousness should spring from the imagination rather than from the intellect or from moral laws imposed by society (Hext 168-169). For Pater, “aesthetic judgments correlate to just ethical judgments” (Hext 177); the good is equivalent to the beautiful. Since every individual defines beauty differently, the moral good is subjective, and not universal, as Schiller thought (Hext 177). Nevertheless, Pater’s concept of personal morality was not as independent of ideology as he had wished it to be, as it was still based on Christian values of good and evil (Hext 180-181). This is apparent in Marius, where the old morality has its roots in the ancient ‘religion of Numa’ (and ultimately in the older Greek religion), when fear of the gods forced people to behave morally. Therefore, it can be compared with Puritanism, or Arnold’s Hebraism: “[t]he old- fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry” (Pater ME 3). Thus, in an ironic reversal of Arnold’s ideas, Pater portrays Hebraism as having Hellenistic origins. Apart from this religious origin, it was developed by the earliest Greek philosophers, “of whose successive personal preferences in the conduct of life, the ‘old morality’ was the sum” (Pater ME 207). Since it involves “actually satisfying […] the external claims of others” and “car[ing] for all weakly creatures”
45
(Pater ME 205), the moral ideal of Fronto and Aurelius approaches Christian charity. Accordingly, when Fronto’s discourse touches upon cosmopolitanism, the Cyrenaic Marius, who finds it difficult to visualise abstract concepts, longs for a material city filled with kind- hearted inhabitants, which he will find in the Christian community of Cornelius and Cecilia. Marius senses that he must define the unspecified moral knowledge that the beautiful impressions of his Cyrenaic lifestyle seemed to promise, but did not convey (Iser 139-140). At first, he hesitates over enriching his philosophy of life with a moral dimension, since he would then concede that Epicureanism does not cover all aspects of life adequately. However, he soon understands that his New Cyrenaicism would be inconsistent only “if he did not make that concession, if he did but remain just there” (Pater ME 221). Consequently, he decides to complement his New Cyrenaicism with Cynicism. Just as Cyrenaicism predicts Epicureanism for Pater, Stoicism springs from Cynicism. Marius’s New Cyrenaicism consists of the ideas of Aristippus combined with The Renaissance’s theory of the aesthetic life, so that Pater complacently defines it as “the nobler form of Cyrenaicism – Cyrenaicism cured of its faults” (Pater ME 214-215). Similarly, Marius commits himself to “the nobler form of Cynicism” (Pater ME 215), wherein Cynic virtue and temperance are supplemented by Marcus Aurelius’s kindness and the old morality’s rules of conduct. Although Cyrenaicism focuses on pleasure and is a-religious, while Cynicism promotes asceticism and shares many affinities with Christianity, for Pater “[t]he saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty” (Pater ME 215) can easily meet half-way. Wolfgang Iser describes Marius’s struggle to balance thought and feeling in slightly different terms: for him, Marius tries to reconcile his inward “optic way of living” (Iser 133) with the things that lie outside his perception, i.e. emotion (Iser 133). More importantly, he contends that Marius experiments with the applicability of the aesthetic life in the ‘real’ human life of Marius. In the ‘Conclusion’ Pater’s theory seems perfectly attainable, but Marius uncovers its shortcomings (Iser 141). In the chapter ‘Second Thoughts’, New Cyrenaicism is depicted as a philosophy for adolescents who have not yet been saturated by the world’s beauty: bedazzled by its myriad impressions, they do not yet esteem contact with other people. Nevertheless, Marius, and Pater with him, discovers that a life of the senses yields only a partial view of reality: “these moments were a very costly matter: they paid a great price for them, in the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy” (Pater ME 216). After he has improved his natural Epicureanism by adding feeling to it, Marius feels that he is a true citizen of Fronto’s cosmopolitan city.
46
At the end of Part the Third, Marius entirely distances himself from the philosophy of his employer. The emperor is indifferent to evil, and his sad disposition provides an unfavourable contrast with Cornelius, who, though he is as serious as Aurelius, seems to irradiate joy, in spite of his “bold recognition of evil” (Pater ME 242). In addition, Marius considers Aurelius’s severe asceticism “nothing less than a sin against nature” (Pater ME 242), since his own Cyrenaicism does not accept any dualism between body and soul, but regards the body as an invaluable instrument for receiving pleasurable impressions. However, it is Aurelius’s excessive grief at the death of his son Annius Verus that convinces Marius of the inadequacy of the emperor’s Stoicism. Aurelius’s “desolate face […], as if he yearned just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with [the child], in its obscure distress” makes a deep impression upon Marius’s mind, and the incident proves that Aurelius, despite his Stoicism, is helpless in the face of death (Fletcher 33). The emperor leaves for war shortly afterwards, but “with the air less of a sanguine and self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other already defeated” (Pater ME 247). An epiphany in the last chapter of Part the Third indicates the beginning of Marius’s move towards Christianity. On one of his rambles through the hills, Marius feels the presence of a guardian spirit, “an unfailing companion” (Pater ME 254) that has been taking care of him throughout his whole life, but whose existence he had never noticed. Before that moment, Marius had never genuinely reflected on the nature of the Unknown: he did not seem convinced of the existence of the pagan gods, but never delved into the question in detail. After some thought Marius decides that the spirit is not just a companion, but also a creator. The guardian spirit is likened to the Christian God, since Pater states that it resembles the god of Plato and Aurelius, both considered proto-Christians, and that it can be equated with “that reasonable Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator […], and in the New Testament the Father of Men” (Pater ME 255). The newfound “Great Ideal” (Pater ME 257) can easily be coupled with New Cyrenaicism, and even solves some of its irregularities. First, the Creator provides a principle of certainty in the Heraclitean flux. Secondly, Marius no longer feels the need to preserve arresting sensuous impressions by writing them down: expressing his gratitude for the beauty that the Creator has endowed the world with is enough, since then they will perpetually remain in the God’s boundless memory. Instead of searching reality for sublime sights, Marius now scans it for tokens of his Creator. Thirdly, the epiphany suggests to Marius that the celestial city of Fronto’s speech may exist in reality.
47
Part the Fourth: “The Saint, and the Cyrenaic”
An Orthodox Portrayal of Early Christianity The fourth part of the novel is set “some years later” (Pater ME 259). Cornelius introduces his friend to a Christian community that gathers in the house of Cecilia. Though the resemblance is never made explicit, she is likened to Saint Cecilia, who lived under Aurelius and is held to be the foundress one of the first Roman Christian churches. Marius is shown the catacombs that surround Cecilia’s villa, and he is delighted with the Christians’ belief in an afterlife. In contrast to Aurelius’s Stoicism, Christianity is not defeated by death. Marius, who has an “old instinctive yearning towards those inhabitants of the shadowy land he had known in life” (Pater ME 133), is greatly influenced by this Christian hope, and will bury the ashes of his parents at the end of the novel. When Cornelius and Cecilia invite him to attend a service, Marius learns that Christianity satisfies his love for ritual, and for natural beauty. In addition, the Christian charity fits in with the kindness that he has picked up from “the nobler form of Cynicism”. Ever since Cornelius, shortly after their first meeting, donned his armour in order to impress his new friend, Marius has associated him with chivalry, and a readiness to help others. As Cornelius also seems to carry “such a breeze of hopefulness – freshness and hopefulness, as of a new morning, about him” (Pater ME 192), the novel, much like the typical conversion novel, connects early Christianity with the commencement of a new and innocent era, which will replace the decline and corruption of the pagan world. Like the conservative conversion novels, Marius depicts early Christianity in a naively positive manner. Just like Pater had added his own ideas to those of Cyrenaicism and Cynicism, he now ‘cures’ Christianity of its faults by projecting his own ideals on second-century Christianity, so that “so much of what Marius had valued most in the old world seemed to be under renewal and further promotion” (Pater ME 293). Consequently, pagan philosophy and Christianity link up with each other perfectly: if Epicureanism and Stoicism can meet each other half-way, then ultimately Christianity can be reconciled with Marius’s New Cyrenaicism (Vance 220). The church of Cornelius and Cecilia has left behind the millenarianism and severe asceticism of the earliest subterranean Christianity, and has replaced it by a Hebraic ideal (chastity, hard work, home life, and good deeds), supplemented with Pater’s own Hellenistic commitment to beauty (Goldhill 219). Goldhill remarks how Pater’s view of church history is surprisingly conservative, because it resembles High Church
48
Anglicanism, which enriched Protestantism with elements of Roman Catholicism (Goldhill 220). However, Pater argues that this pureness did not last: “the church was true for a moment, truer perhaps than she would ever be again, to that element of profound serenity in the soul of her Founder” (Pater ME 294). Later Christianity is characterised as “the degenerate society of a later age” (Pater ME 290). The opposition between a reasonable early Christianity and the barbarous superstition of a later age derives from Lessing and Herder, who also discerned two Christianities (DeLaura 185).
A Christian End? Under the influence of Christianity, Marius, now about thirty years old, gradually comes to terms with evil, suffering, and death. He realises that man is “constructed for suffering” (Pater ME 342) and that death “must be for everyone nothing less than the fifth or last act of a drama” (Pater ME 370-371). Nevertheless, he does not forget his Epicureanism, since the enjoyment of beauty can alleviate suffering. Looking back on his life, he is surprised that the majority of it has been spent in contemplation, in one long “meditatio mortis, ever facing towards the act of final detachment” (Pater ME 370). The fact that Marius wonders at the intensity of his reflection and now spends less time thinking and studying, signifies that his Bildung is drawing to a close, and that he is content with life. This makes his approaching death, which Pater has predicted from the very beginning of the novel, even more melancholy: “it was in form tragic enough that his end not long afterwards came to him” (Pater ME 371). However, in spite of his acceptance of death, Marius has not yet bridged the gap between community and the individualism of his Epicurean lifestyle. By confronting his protagonist with this quandary, Pater wanted to determine how the individual, after having perfected his moral principles, could turn to the world to apply them. In Schiller’s theory the universality of intuitive morals made this an easy step, but for Pater it was problematic: his morals were subjective, and, more importantly, he did not believe in society (Hext 169-170), since it forced people to conform to a dull mediocrity and so curbed their creativity (Hext 171). The fact that Pater had always considered himself an outsider to society only deepened his disapproval of it (Hext 167). Kate Hext argues that in the last moments before Marius’s death, Pater does triumph briefly in a reconciliation of thought and feeling (Hext 175). In the second last chapter Marius goes to see Aurelius’s triumphal procession, and the citizens’ impiety during the religious ceremonies convinces him of Rome’s total corruption:
49
“these Romans were a coarse, a vulgar people; and their vulgarities of soul in full evidence here” (Pater ME 362). In addition, the (now deceased) empress Faustina is for the first time described as “malign” (Pater ME 364). Thus, Pater’s treatment of the corruption motif evolves together with his protagonist; in the first volume, when the quest for splendour determines Marius’s life, the cultural heritage of the late empire is associated with perfection. When in Part the Third Marius is confronted with the question of community, Pater touches upon Rome’s moral and religious decline. At the time of Aurelius’s triumphal procession, Marius’s principles have diverged so far from that of the plebs and the emperor that he disapproves of the city’s habits. Marius resolves to convince Aurelius of his “great mistake” (Pater ME 362) by teaching him that death and evil can be redeemed. He sets off to the palace, but the emperor is occupied, and Marius postpones his quest. Not long afterwards, when he is looking for Cornelius, he accidentally finds himself at the tomb of a martyr, where his friend is praying amidst a small congregation. When he joins the Cornelius, an earthquake shakes the town. The inhabitants immediately blame the Christian congregation, not only for the earthquake, but also for the Antonine Plague: “[s]urely, the old gods were wroth at the presence of this new enemy among them!” (Pater ME 372). Marius and Cornelius are arrested with the rest of the Christian townspeople, and set out for Rome, where a trial is to be held. However, Marius bribes the soldiers to free Cornelius. Marius himself stays in the band of prisoners, but is soon fatigued by the journey and contracts the plague. When the soldiers perceive that he is dying, they leave him under the care of some peasants. The resolution of the divide between thought and feeling to which Hext refers, occurs when Marius is lying ill in a hut that the peasants have prepared for him. For the first time, Marius can fully enjoy the impressions of the countryside, because he experiences an intense feeling of human kinship with the people that surround him. Thus, it is only when the delirious Marius is suspended between life and death that he is able to connect his Cyrenaicism with human contact. In addition, his death soon afterwards seems to suggest that Pater did not know how to address the practical details of a life both aesthetic and ethical, and that he therefore cut short his protagonist’s progress (Hext 175). During his last moments a strong clinging to life alternates with periods of resignation and contentedness: the newly-experienced union of thought and feeling makes Marius wish “to enter upon a future, the possibilities of which seemed large” (Pater ME 380). Though he is satisfied by the impressions that his aesthetic life has given him, he longs to discover more of
50 the world’s beauty. He is proud of his courageous self-sacrifice, but wishes he had spent more time in human contact. As parents hope to live on through their children, Marius depends on Cornelius for the future: he will live in Marius’s stead, and possibly deliver his companion from death. However, in the hours leading up to his death, Marius experiences a short moment of intense disappointment, since the sensations to which he has dedicated so much of his life have not disclosed any final knowledge about life’s meaning. Despite the withholding of this divine revelation, he dies contentedly, seeing the faces of his family and friends before his mind’s eye. Critics such as Curtis Dahl, Lee Behlman, and Gilbert Highet argue that Marius dies as a Christian, even though he has not been baptised. For Highet Marius’s Bildung is linear rather than cumulative: at the end of the novel, he is “about to become Christian” (Highet 465), since the early Church has absorbed all the Greco-Roman thought that appealed to him (Highet 465). Behlman regards Marius’s development as a Hegelian synthesis: Epicureanism (thesis) is complemented by Stoicism (antithesis), and forms Christianity (synthesis) (Behlman 134). Some indications do suggest that Pater intended Marius as a Christian. Pater may have based his novel on Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean (1827), which tells of an Epicurean philosopher’s conversion to Christianity (Vance 214). In addition, Marius’s name may derive from an inscription in the Roman catacombs, which mentions a young Christian officer named Marius, who died under the emperor Trajan (Vance 202). However, the text itself seems to indicate that Marius is not a conversion novel, since Marius has no intention of being baptised, at least not at the moment of his death. The peasants who have cared for him during his illness “hold[…] his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyrdom” (Pater ME 383-384, my italics). Thus, the goodly country people are wrong; Marius’s death may resemble a Christian martyrdom, but it is not (Goldhill 218-219). The same logic can be applied to the first allusion to Marius’s end, when in the second chapter he looks forward to “some great occasion of self-devotion, […] as the early Christian looked forward to martyrdom” (Pater ME 14, my italics). Moreover, the same passage states that Marius by the end of the novel “ had learned to think of all religions as indifferent” (Pater ME 14). Accordingly, Marius should be regarded as an eclectic: he does not commit himself to one creed, but selects the most suitable principles from different religions and philosophies, the accumulation of which forms his philosophy of life. It is more important to cultivate a religious and thoughtful consciousness than to adhere to a specific belief (DeLaura 196; Vance 217). As the title of the
51 last chapter implies, Marius possesses an ‘anima naturaliter christiana’ (a reference to Tertulian’s Apologeticum), since early Christianity tallies with his Cyrenaic principles, and offers him a solution to his fear of death and evil. However, the novel’s title suggests that Epicureanism remains his basic philosophy. Whenever Marius is confronted with an unfamiliar idea, he approaches it from the perspective of his aesthetic life. The fact that the chapter on early Christianity is preceded by a chapter in which Marius speaks with Apuleius, and followed by a conversation with Lucian, proves that Pater did not want to present Christianity as the ideal faith, since both Apuleius and Lucian are agnostics who argue that no philosopher can ever be certain that his principles are the only path to truth (Iser 148; Vance 221). Although Marius has reached the end of his Bildung, he has not desisted his quest for the complete truth (Iser 149), so that his final philosophy of life must remain a mystery to the reader. Furthermore, his disappointment at the absence of a divine revelation gives the reader to understand that it would be impossible for Marius (and thus for mankind), even if he had grown old, to arrive at a satisfactory theory of life (Iser 151- 152). The sudden stop of Marius’s spiritual journey has annoyed many readers and critics. Wolfgang Iser was disappointed by Marius’s failure to arrive at an ultimate resolution between thought and feeling: “All that he does demonstrate is that no idea can give permanent satisfaction” (Iser 131). T.S. Eliot also disliked Marius: he had hoped for a definite conclusion of Marius’s Bildung (Dahl 14), and considered Pater an uninventive moralist (Bloom 188).
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Marius The Epicurean Since Pater is frequently regarded as an early modernist writer (Evangelista 50; Vance 214), it is interesting to examine Marius from the perspective of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Pieter Vermeulen’s article ‘Philological Modernity’ argues that all texts that Auerbach analyses both confront and evade the historical constraints of the context in which they were written. Pater’s Marius could easily have formed an additional chapter in Mimesis, in between ‘Germinie Lacerteux’ (on the Goncourt brothers and Zola) and ‘The Brown Stocking’ (on Virginia Woolf): Pater embeds numerous conventions from nineteenth-century fiction, especially from those novels set in Antiquity, but his use of them deliberately deviates from the stereotype.
52
Pater’s style is his most striking modernist characteristic; his long Ciceronian sentences full of commas are reminiscent of the stream of consciousness technique of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The Latinate sentences simulate the flow of Marius’s thoughts and the sensory impressions that he registers, so that the reader can participate in his spiritual journey. The novel focuses so intensely on the protagonist’s ‘sensations and ideas’ that the turning points in his life are often mentioned only in passing (Iser 129-130). For instance, when Marius travels to Rome in order to take up his function as Aurelius’s amanuensis, the event is casually brought up in a subordinate clause: “The emperor Marcus Aurelius, to whose service Marius had now been called, was himself, more or less openly a ‘lecturer’ (Pater ME 126, my italics). Pater does not give the impression of steering the plot towards a particular point, so that the few events in Marius’s dreamlike life seem to result from coincidence. This apparent absence of plot hints that Pater did not think that reality could be directed towards an optimistic solution (Iser 134). Actions are only recorded insofar as they affect Marius’s inner world, and information that would be indispensable in conventional realist novels, such as the history or status of his family, is left out (Iser 130). Although Pater’s authorial voice seldom disappears into the background, it does not offer any clear guidance or judgment, so that the reader has to depend on ‘showing’ rather than on ‘telling’, a paradox in a novel in which there is so little action (Iser 129). Thus, Marius can be considered as a forerunner of Woolf’s modernist novels, in that it is constructed as a series of random moments, in which the action is mainly psychological (Iser 134). For both Pater and Woolf, the constantly developing flux of “art, economy, material and intellectual culture, […] the depths of the workaday world and its men and women” provides a more truthful representation of human life than “the upper strata of society and […] major political events” (Auerbach xxviii). Yet Iser contends that Pater’s representation of reality differs from Woolf’s. For Woolf, the moment is a positive concept, since it can provide time-transcending insight into the way human beings experience reality. Pater values the flux of succeeding moments negatively: mankind is bound to the passage of time, and can never come to a standstill (Iser 138-139). This is reflected in Marius’s struggle to try to live in the present, even though the moment eventually does not convey definite knowledge to the passive spectator. Furthermore, the narrative structure of Marius is relatively traditional in comparison with that of later modernist writers (Goldhill 221). Pater adheres to a teleological time sequence, and his novel can be classified as a Bildungsroman. In addition, Pater is indebted to the Romantic tradition, since he registers how the
53 consciousness of a sentimental and isolated young man develops in his struggles to come to terms with himself, the world, and community. In this respect, Marius can be likened to Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850) (Bloom 189; Vance 213). Another difference with modernist literature is the abundance of historical details, typical for nineteenth-century literature (Auerbach 457). Together with the numerous translations and paraphrases from classical literature, this realistic historical background helps to immerse the reader in Marius’s intellectual environment. Marius’s own stance towards reality is ambiguous: ‘Animula Vagula’ and ‘New Cyrenaicism’ recount how he has no other option than to assume that his perception of reality is correct. Consequently, he renounces all attempts at metaphysics. Though in the succeeding chapters he maintains that “he must still hold by what his eyes really saw” (Pater ME 272), the various religions around him, with their different conceptions of the divine, rouse his curiosity as to what lies beyond “the flaming ramparts of the world” (Pater ME 120). This dilemma reflects Pater’s attitude towards empiricism: he agreed with its theory on the senses, but disapproved of its rejection of metaphysics. Because of empiricism’s claim that man’s knowledge should be based on sensory experience, life lost its mystery and spiritual dimension (Hext 45). Pater is so imbued with Christian structures of thought (Hext 66) that he cannot rid himself of the idea that a divine spirit is in charge of life on earth: “[i]t is one of many ironies that whilst he declares the primacy of the seen world, he is captivated by that which cannot be understood” (Hext 188). Thus, his attempt at atheism fails (Hext 64). Accordingly, Marius’s perception is characterised by the same feeling: despite his materialism, beautiful objects seem to convey a vague transcendent meaning to him (Kant’s purposiveness without purpose), a mysteriousness that only enhances their splendour. The brief epiphanic moment during which Marius is struck by the presence of a divine being expresses Pater’s conviction that people cannot acquiesce in absolute materialism, but need a religious consciousness to meet with their spiritual needs. This ties in with an anecdote by Pater’s biographer Thomas Wright, who records how a friend asked Pater why he had written Marius, to which he replied: “To show the necessity of religion” (qtd. in Hext 77). Yet Marius’s disappointment at the absence of a final revelation that can impart definite knowledge on the purpose of life signals that Pater had not yet arrived at a satisfactory theory of reality.
54
Conclusion In Marius, Pater portrays second-century Rome, with its wealth of religions and philosophies, as a perfect age for young men like Marius, who are seeking to develop their own unique subjectivity. Yet this perfection holds the danger of corruption, since the incessant flux of impressions can act as an impediment when trying to select an ideal lifestyle, and makes it difficult to maintain a sense of selfhood. In this way, Marius the Epicurean can be regarded as an allegory for the spiritual journey of the late Victorian individual, who risks being smothered by the changing socio-economic and political context, the variety of beliefs, and the religious uneasiness resulting from the latest scientific discoveries. Instead of setting the story in nineteenth-century Britain, or in Ancient Greece, by which he was fascinated, Pater chose Rome as the background of his novel, not only because the late Roman Empire had previously been depicted as a modern epoch, but also because Victorian readers were already familiar with a tradition of popular fiction set in Rome. Pater deliberately wrote Marius in the same tradition, so that the novel would attract the interest of a wider public, and not just of the elite intellectuals at whom his earlier work was aimed. Thus, he could communicate his aestheticism to a large public. Furthermore, the traditional background prevented his most progressive ideas from provoking angry reactions, like the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance had done. His strategy was effective, since Marius’s favourable reception secured Pater the reputation of a respectable writer. The aesthetic dimension makes Marius stand out in the corpus of Rome fiction, and demonstrates how Rome can serve as a background for subjects other than the promotion of Christianity or of virtue. Nevertheless, the novel does touch upon the standard topoi (the games, early Christianity, etc.), mainly because Pater wished to determine, for himself as well as for the public, how the aesthete would respond to them. Pater’s first novel can also be regarded as an attempt to assess the applicability of the aesthetic individualism that he had promoted in his essays. By applying the ideas of the ‘Conclusion’ to the life of Marius, he sought to nuance his aestheticism not only for the public, but also for himself: “to try the lastingness of his own Epicurean rose-garden” (Pater ME 120). Since Pater’s previous work had frequently been criticised for being too egocentric, Marius revolves around stopping “the scarce remediable cleavage” (DeLaura 165) between thought and feeling, beauty and sympathy, Hellenism and Hebraism, the Ionian and Dorian
55 impulse, aestheticism and Romanticism, Apollo and Christ, form and matter (in Flavian’s euphuist poetics), Epicureanism and Stoicism, New Cyrenaicism and “the nobler form of Cynicism” (Pater ME 215). Though Pater attached more importance to the first component, as the novel’s title indicates, he realised that a life devoid of altruism was worthless. However, the brief moment of delirium before his death excepted, Marius does not transcend his isolation, and so Pater fails at formulating a perfectly balanced philosophy of life that would lead mankind into a third and more advanced era of civilisation. The novel ends in aporia: can the human mind balance thought and feeling, or are people naturally inclined more to one impulse than to the other, like Marius towards isolation, and Marcus Aurelius towards self- effacement? Even if he suspected that an absolute equilibrium was impossible, nevertheless “Pater hanker[ed] still after some such unifying essence and the means to make one’s self whole” (Hext 5). In his portrayal of Marius’s development Pater sought to counter the humanist Hellenists’ selective readings of Greco-Roman culture, and to nuance Arnold’s simplified distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism. Pater wished to show that Greco-Roman culture was not static, and that the Apollo-Christ dilemma was not without irregularities and contradictions. The ‘old morality’ and the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics confirm that the Hellenistic pagan culture does incorporate feeling, while early Christianity has grown out of paganism, so that it includes the Cyrenaic love of beauty and ritual, and fulfils Marius’s metaphysical curiosity by its portrayal of a divine Creator. Hence, Hebraism and Hellenism can meet each other half-way. Through Pater’s playful mix of biblical language with Latin and Greek thought, and, to a slightly lesser extent, with allusions to British, French, and German history and literature, European culture is presented as a continuum. However, despite its Roman setting, Marius does have a Hellenistic tinge. The novel’s use of Lucretius illustrates this well: most references to DRN are embedded in ‘Animula Vagula’, which popularises the ideas of Heraclitus and Aristippus, whom Pater regarded as Lucretius’s forerunners. This implies that for Pater Rome could not be thoroughly understood without recourse to Ancient Greece. In this sense, Pater is decidedly a Hellenist, but he is not an elitist, since Marius draws just as much from Greek culture as from Roman and Christian literature and thought. The allusions to DRN do not only point to Pater’s view of European culture, but they also reveal Pater’s indecisive attitude towards Lucretius’s metaphysics and radical materialism, and they make the basic principles of DRN’s Epicureanism available for a larger public.
56
As he conceives of European culture as a continuum, Pater allows his protagonist to select the most suitable concepts from the different philosophies and religions present during the second century. From his native paganism Marius retains a fascination for the beauty of ritual, to which his New Cyrenaicism adds the ideal of the passive spectator. When he has gratified his longing for beauty and thought, Marius learns compassion through the “nobler form of Cynicism” (Pater ME 215), a combination of Aurelius’s Stoicism and the ‘old morality’, after which he comes to terms with death through the Christianity of Cornelius and Cecilia. Thus, Pater is a post-philosophical author: although he has absorbed the bulk of Western philosophy, he pleads that in modern times abstract systems of thought should be abandoned, and replaced by a selection adapted to the individual’s context (Hext 17, 187). Marius’s eclecticism indicates that every system of belief has its merits and faults, so that it is wiser to cultivate a critical religious consciousness with which to form one’s own philosophy of life, than to commit oneself wholly to one religion or philosophy. Thus, Marius the Epicurean confronts and evades the historical constraints of Victorian literature and thought in various ways. On the level of style, Pater can be considered an early modernist writer, since he chooses to represent random moments from Marius’s everyday life rather than major historical events of the second century. In addition, he challenges the stereotypical image of Rome, as it appeared in the more popular tradition of novels set in Antiquity, by incorporating it into his aestheticism. However, his main aim is to demonstrate that an individual and eclectic religious consciousness should be preferred over complete commitment to a specific religion, as well as over extreme materialism. Still, Pater does not succeed in formulating a practical philosophy that reconciles his aesthetic individualism with man’s natural tendency towards altruism.
57
Bibliography Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. Print. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from 1826 to 1844. Ed. John H. Ingram. Glasgow: The Grand Colosseum Warehouse Co, s.d. Print Behlman, Lee. “Burning, Burial, and the Critique of Stoicism in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean.” Nineteenth Century Prose 31.3 (2004): 133-169. Print. Bloom, Harold. The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. Print. Brake, Laurel. “Pater, Walter Horatio.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Volume 43. Eds. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 6- 10. Print. Brake, Laurel. “The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction”. In Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts. Eds. Elicia Clements and Lesley L. Higgins. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 220-231. Print. Buckler, William E. Introduction: Walter Pater and the Art of Criticism. Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits). By Walter Pater. New York: New York University Press, 1986. 1-68. Print. Dahl, Curtis. “Pater’s Marius and Historical Novels on Early Christian Times.” Nineteenth- Century Fiction 28.1 (1973): 1-24. Print. de Graef, Ortwin. “Grave Livers: On the Modern Element in Wordsworth, Arnold, and Warner.” English Literary History 74.1 (2007): 145-169. Print. DeLaura, David J. Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969. Print. Evangelista, Stefano. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Fletcher, Ian. Walter Pater. Harlow: Longman Group, 1971. Print. Fowler, Peta G. and Don P. Fowler. “Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus)”. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 863-864. Print.
58
Gillespie, Stuart and Donald Mackenzie. “Lucretius and the Moderns.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Eds. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 306-324. Print. Goldhill, Simon. Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Print. Hadzsits, George Depue. Lucretius and His Influence. London: Harrap, 1935. Print. Hext, Kate. Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print. Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Print. Iser, Wolfgang. Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print. Johnson, R. V. Aestheticism. London: Methuen, 1969. Print. Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse. Ed. Martin Ferguson Smith. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1992. Print. Mackenzie, Donald. “Two Versions of Lucretius: Arnold and Housman.” Translation and Literature 16.2 (2007): 166-177. Print. Pater, Walter. Appreciations: With an Essay on Style. Oxford: Blackwell, 1973. Print. ——. Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits). Ed. William E. Buckler. New York: New York University Press, 1986. Print. ——. Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005. Print. Priestman, Martin. “Lucretius in Romantic and Victorian Britain.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Eds. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 289-305. Print. Rouse, W. H. D. Introduction. Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse. Ed. Martin Ferguson Smith. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1966. Print. Sachs, Jonathan. “Greece or Rome?: The Uses of Antiquity in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Literature.” Literature Compass 6.2 (2009): 314-331. Print. Sikes, E. E. Lucretius: Poet & Philosopher. New York: Russell & Russell, 1971. Print.
59
Skilton, David. “Schoolboy Latin and the Mid-Victorian Novelist: A Study in Reader Competence.” Browning Institute Studies 16 (1988): 39-55. Print. Smith, Martin Ferguson. Introduction. Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse. Ed. Martin Ferguson Smith. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1992. Print. Turner, Frank M. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. Print. ———. “Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?” In Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination. Ed. G. W. Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 61-81. Print. ———. “Christians and Pagans in Victorian Novels.” In Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945. Ed. Catharine Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 173-187. Print. ———. Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. Vance, Norman. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Print. Vermeulen, Pieter. “Philological Modernity: Mimesis and Materiality in Auerbach and Adorno.” Phrasis 49.1 (2008): 93-115. Print.
60