To-day, starting from the actual details of the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were like the passing of some mysterious influence over all the elements of his nature and experience.
(Marius the Epicurean, chapter 1)

‘The morning for creation,’ he would say; ‘the afternoon for the perfecting labour of the file; the evening for reception – the reception of matter from without one, of other men’s words and thoughts – matter for our own dreams, or the merely mechanic exercise of the brain, brooding thereon silently, in its dark chambers.’
(Marius’s practice as a mature thinker, chapter 24)

‘I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how every step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him, from age to age, must needs increase his dejection. It is as if the increase of knowledge were but an increasing revelation of the radical hopelessness of his position.
(Marius in a particularly gloomy mood, chapter 25, the diary chapter)

Marius the Epicurean: his sensations and ideas is a historical and philosophical novel by Walter Pater, written between 1881 and 1884 and published in 1885. It’s an odd, vaporous, dense and difficult book to read.

Walter Pater

Pater was born in 1839 in the East End of London where his father was a doctor. At the age of 14 he was sent to private school in Canterbury. where he was influenced by the soaring beauty of the cathedral and the stylish art criticism of John Ruskin. Aged 19 he went up to Oxford where he took a degree in Literae Humaniores in 1862. Within a few years he began writing essays about poets and artists, including ground-breaking essays about Leonardo da Vinci (1869), Sandro Botticelli (1870) and Michelangelo (1871). He gathered these in his 1873 volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance had a big impact on the literary world because 1) of the length and thoroughness of the essays, and 2) the exquisitely sensitive prose they were written in, prose which delicately describes the psychological impact of interacting with great works of art. The Leonardo essay contains the famous line that the Mona Lisa is ‘older than the rocks among which she sits’.

An essay on ‘The School of Giorgione’, originally published in 1877 and added to the third edition of The Renaissance (in 1888), features Pater’s much-quoted saying that: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’

And the volume ended with a Conclusion describing the swirl of impressions which make up the conscious mind: a drift of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, ‘the passage and dissolution of impressions…unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them,’ accompanied by a ‘continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’.

Because all our perceptions are in such a constant state of flux, the cultivated person, in order to get the most from life, must learn to discriminate through ‘sharp and eager observation’ between all these perceptions.

The essay leads up to its famous conclusion that the sole purpose of life is to live for the most intense sensations: ‘To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’ The essay suggests that art has no moral or pedagogic content but its sole purpose is to produce passionately intense moments: ‘such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake.’ Art for art’s sake.

Controversy

The astonishing power of this vision gave Pater a cult following among undergraduates at Oxford and young artistically-minded men in London. But by the same token it aroused strong criticism from traditional critics and churchmen, and from the authorities at Oxford. Quite clearly its promotion of a lifestyle of intense individual perceptions flew in the face of Victorian ideals of stern Christian belief, social responsibility and Duty – to God, to the Queen, to the Empire, and so on. Even so liberal and cultured a critic as George Eliot thought the book ‘quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life’ (cited in the Introduction to the Penguin edition of Marius, page 20).

Thus, in the later 1870s and early 1880s, Pater’s diaphanous prose and purely hedonistic approach to art came to be quoted and invoked by the new school of Aesthetic artists and poets, many of whom went beyond Pater in championing a form of self-involved aesthetic appreciation of precious objects and works of art which was openly decadent and dangerously homoerotic. But it also sparked strong criticism from literary commentators, churchmen, the authorities at Oxford and parody and ridicule from the sturdier type of undergraduate.

Pater was so unnerved by the controversy which the Conclusion caused that, in the second edition of The Renaissance, published in 1877, he quietly omitted it. And he decided that he could best address the misinterpretation his art essays were being subjected to by changing direction from art criticism to fiction.

Imaginary portraits

In 1878 he published a semi-autobiographical sketch titled ‘Imaginary Portraits 1. The Child in the House’, describing in subtle, willowy prose some of the formative experiences of his own childhood. It was the first of a dozen or so ‘Imaginary Portraits’ he was to write, a genre and name Pater could be said to have invented and in which he came to specialise.

The ‘Imaginary Portraits’ are not stories. There is little or no plot and no dialogue. Instead, they are more like psychological-cum-philosophical meditations, almost always of characters who lived at turning-points in the history of ideas or sensibility. They often focus on ‘misfits’ or men out of kilter with their own times, a heroic ‘outsider’ pose which Pater cultivated and which the Aesthetes copied.

The ‘Imaginary Portraits’ are psychological and philosophical prose poems. They tend to return again and again to the same set of polarities, exploring the tensions between tradition and innovation, intellect and sensation, asceticism and aestheticism, between social values and individual amorality. Subtle though they are, a consistent line emerges warning against the pursuit of extremes in matters intellectual, aesthetic or sensual.

In fact the hazy, slow-moving curls and eddies of his measured, complex prose militate against extremes of any kind, and Pater was increasingly at pains to distance himself from the cruder, shameless hedonism of the Aesthetes who endlessly, and embarrassingly, invoked his name. For example, Pater pointedly wrote a review of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which he disapproved of Wilde’s distortion of Epicureanism, comparing Wilde’s crude and melodramatic formulations with his (Pater’s) far more subtle depictions:

A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde’s heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as completely as they can, is…to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.

Still, it is noticeable that he is defending morality, not for its moral content as such, but in aesthetic-psychological terms, for simply being more complex and interesting.

Marius the Epicurean

Marius the Epicurean is Pater’s attempt at a novel-length version of an ‘Imaginary Portrait’, as he himself explained in a letter to the author Vernon Lee, where he described it as ‘an Imaginary Portrait of a peculiar type of mind in the time of Marcus Aurelius’.

Marius is an entirely fictional character living in the Italy of the Antonine emperors. The novel opens with him a teenager in 161 AD, as the emperor Antoninus Pius is dying and handing over power to his successor, Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161 to 180 AD). The narrative then follows Marius’s life and thoughts for the next 15 years or so, until his untimely early death – he goes to school, meets an older boy who becomes a kind of hero figure, when the latter dies of plague our hero goes to Rome where he is introduced to the emperor, and so on.

Marius is not a novel in the ordinary sense of the word. There are few characters, hardly any plot and little or no dialogue. Marius does age, move from place to place (from his home estate, to school in Pisa, and then to adulthood in Rome) but otherwise the text gently diaphanous exploration of the impressions and, above all, changing ideas, which form and shape the young Marius over the course of these fifteen or so years.

Pater chose the period of the Antonines because he considered it a pivotal moment in history, when Roman culture had reached a kind of peak:

He was certainly fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome. That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached its perfection in the things of poetry and art—a perfection which indicated only too surely the eve of decline. As in some vast intellectual museum, all its manifold products were intact and in their places, and with custodians also still extant, duly qualified to appreciate and explain them. And at no period of history had the material Rome itself been better worth seeing.

It was a moment when the pious certainties of the old state and family pagan religion were slowly decaying, and a sometimes bewildering number of other philosophical and religious schools flourished, some very old (all the Greek schools of philosophy), some new to Rome, such as the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis (whose rites are described in chapter 6), and the whole text concludes with almost all of book 4, chapters 21 to 28, describing Marius’s enchanted encounter with the new eastern religion of Christianity.

So the meandering narrative amounts to the journey of a sensitive pagan mind slowly becoming aware of, then attracted to, but never fully committing to, Christianity.

Anti-Aestheticism

Contrary to the cult of Aestheticism which was luxuriating in languid lilies and rare jewels and precious moments, Pater was at pains to bring out the ascetic and non-sensuous side of his Epicureanism. In the third edition of The Renaissance (1888), published 4 years after Marius, he felt confident enough to reintroduce the notorious ‘Conclusion’, which he had previously suppressed, because, as he himself explained, Marius presented a counterweight to it. Here’s the note he added to the third edition, in full:

This brief ‘Conclusion’ was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.

The novel can, then, be read as the Anti-Conclusion, designed to rebut and refute the dangerous amorality implied by the notorious Conclusion. Which explains why Pater goes out of his way to emphasise the cerebral, ascetic, restrained and pious aspects of Marius’s character – in countless places going to great lengths to deliberately distance himself from his Art for Art’s Sake fans.

This is all established in the first chapter which dwells at length on what a traditionalist young Marius is, a chaste and restrained follower of traditional Roman religion and values, not at all a self-indulgent hedonist. In its swirling gaseous prose the text is studied with keywords designed to reinforce the point:

After the deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar collectedness. The severe and archaic religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of the demand upon him of anything in which deity was concerned.

Chapter 1 shows Marius taking part in a traditional Roman religious ceremony with complete piety and devotion:

With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a leading part in the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to complete this impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of mind, esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of these sacred functions. To him the sustained stillness without seemed really but to be waiting upon that interior, mental condition of preparation or expectancy, for which he was just then intently striving.

Filial duty, chaste, monastic:

Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them

And much more in the same vein. It feels very deliberately the opposite of the breathless sensationalism of the Conclusion. The very last words of part 2 seem deliberately written to echo and refute lines in the Conclusion. In the Conclusion Pater writes that:

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

In Marius the same sort of sentiment has been comprehensively reworked and become thoroughly moralised. When he visits the amphitheatre and watches the animals being tortured, he realises he is in the presence of real evil i.e. there is a morality deeper and truer than just sensations, and:

Surely evil was a real thing, and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where, not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side, was to have failed in life.

Marius and Dorian

I’m sure it’s been done by academics many times but the more you grasp of Marius’s character and purpose, the more you can see him as a kind of anti-Dorian Gray. Or are led to think of Dorian (a later creation: Marius 1885, Dorian 1891) as the anti-Marius. Certainly there is a striking parallelism between them.

It would hardly have been possible to feel more seriously than did Marius in those grave years of his early life. (Chapter 4)

Avoiding the hackneyed subject of Doubt

There is another way of viewing all this. The second half of the nineteenth century was awash with treatises, novels, autobiographies and whatnot all wrestling with the great subject of Religious Doubt, as writers struggled with their loss of Christian faith or worried about the impact of waning Christian faith on social cohesion (see, for example, the agonising of Tennyson in In Memoriam or Matthew Arnold in his prose and poetry).

Marius pulls off the clever trick of turning all this on its head. It is a novel about a sensitive, thoughtful young man who comes to doubt the ancestral religion of his family and country – but it is not Christianity but the old pagan beliefs which he feels slipping away, and which he seeks to replace by more rational, philosophical alternatives, first Epicureanism, then the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.

In the final, Christian, chapters, Christianity is depicted not as ageing and declining, as a dwindling Sea of Faith fading away with the ‘long melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ described by Arnold in Dover Beach. On the contrary, maybe the most startling aspect of the novel is that Marius comes across it as it is on the way up, as it has passed the first wave of martyrs, as it is developing its extended acts of worship which will lead to the Mass, as it is incorporating aspects of the old Jewish religion as well as bits of pagan philosophy, to produce a New System, a new belief, which offers – in the key word Pater uses again and again – hope. It is young, fresh and virile.

So Pater manages an extended meditation on Christianity which not only manages not to be doleful and melancholy but turns all the familiar tropes of sad Victorians losing their faith on their heads. Pater’s description of Christianity is full of vigour and life!

Intertextuality

Smooth and beguilingly complex as Pater’s style is, from a modern point of view he also subjected the novel form to some interesting experiments. The most noticeable of these is the use of other texts which are inserted into the narrative. These range from adaptations of classical and early Christian writings to Marius’s diary and authorial comments. Thus:

• chapter 5 contains a translation of the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’s second century text, The Golden Ass
• chapter 12 contains an extended tissue of quotations from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
• chapter 20 contains a translation of a short prose piece, in Pater’s day thought to be by the Greek humorist, Lucian
• chapter 22 an excerpt from the early Christian text, The Shepherd of Hermas
• the longest chapter, 24, consists of a philosophical dialogue by Lucian
• chapter 26 contains an extended translation from the Church historian, Eusebius

Quotes

On a smaller scale, the text often strays into the form of an essay by the continual referencing Great Writers and Thinkers, not just from Marius’s time and before (particularly Homer and Horace), but from the full history of Western Civilisation up to the time of writing in the 1880s. Thus, without doing a particularly exhaustive survey, I can point to references to Dante, Montaigne, Pascal, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, Goethe and so on scattered through the text. Or take the surprising moment when he hasn’t got far into his description of ancient Rome before he is comparing it to Paris at the time of Louis XIV, and Hadrian’s extensions to Rome to the revival of Gothic architecture in Pater’s own time (chapter 11). Typically, the title of chapter 12, ‘The divinity that doth hedge a king’, is a quote from Hamlet, and so on.

These references to people who died a thousand years or more after the period the narrative is set in, are obviously anachronistic. I wonder if there’s a literary critical term, if not I’ll invent one: anachro-textuality. It has at least three effects:

1. to momentarily pull you out of the main narrative, and make you regard it from a distance, from the outside
2. to expand the meaning and resonance of the narrative by referring to the canon of Great Thinkers

Personally, I don’t think Pater was especially in control of this approach. This kind of showing off, name-dropping tags and fragments from canonic authors, had been part of literary criticism since Coleridge or before. William Hazlitt’s essays amount to mosaics of quotes from famous authors, his texts float on a sea of quotations. So rather than being an innovation, Pater’s name-dropping strikes me as being pretty standard procedure for the art and literary criticism of his day.

The third effect, Pater makes explicit in chapter 16, which is where his character and his philosophical dilemmas, shed light on the present day readers:

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.

Tourism

This habit of stepping back and regarding his own narrative is evident in another, fairly obvious way: the tour guide. As Marius travels through the Roman countryside to Rome, and then once he is in Rome, there are passages describing how both (countryside and Rome) appeared centuries later, to visitors in Pater’s day. At these moments the text, again, ceases to be a narrative so much as a scaffold for digressions and anachronistic impressions, momentarily invoking the sights one would have seen in Pater’s day.

Twelve o’clock was come before they left the Forum, waiting in a little crowd to hear the Accensus, according to old custom, proclaim the hour of noonday, at the moment when, from the steps of the Senate-house, the sun could be seen standing between the Rostra and the Græcostasis. He exerted for this function a strength of voice, which confirmed in Marius a judgment the modern visitor may share with him, that Roman throats and Roman chests, namely, must, in some peculiar way, be differently constructed from those of other people.

The plague, as we saw when Marius was on his way to Rome, was not to depart till it had done a large part in the formation of the melancholy picturesque of modern Italy—till it had made, or prepared for the making of the Roman Campagna. (chapter 11)

Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline and some other museums, Fronto had been struck, pleasantly struck, by the family likeness among the Antonines. (chapter 13)

Philosophy

Marius is a much more philosophical novel than I expected, frequently verging on turning into a treatise, albeit not as methodical or logical as a philosophical treatise probably ought to be. The use of the novel format allows Pater to structure the philosophical ponderings not according to logic but according to the very well-established structure of the Bildungsroman i.e. a fiction describing the development of a sensitive thoughtful mind, a genre conventionally dated to the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 1795.

In turn the Bildungsroman can be thought of as a translation into the third person of the autobiography, specifically the kind of autobiography which focuses on the moral or philosophical growth and development of the author. As a genre, this is much older and goes back at least as far as the Confessions of St Augustine, written about 400 AD.

In terms of its exposition of philosophy, Marius divides into three parts:

1. Marius’s original Cyrenaicism and how this is deepened by his friendship with Flavian (books 1 and 2)
2. Marius’s encounter with different styles of Stoicism among the elite of Rome (the 2 distinct styles of Marcus Aurelius and Fronto) (book 3)
3. Marius’s encounter with Christianity (book 4)

Christianity

Marcus is intrigued by the up-and-coming new religion of the empire but critics then and now have pointed out that he never really engages with it. For Marius, Christianity’s strongest point is the way it is preserving and enhancing the best of the old pagan religion, its sense of piety towards numinous realities i.e. he perceives it mostly in aesthetic terms. He dies before he gets close to the real core of Christian theology – the belief that all mankind fell in the sin of Adam and needs to be redeemed through the willing sacrifice of God’s only son. The crudity of clarity is not what Pater was about.

Barely a novel

It really is not at all what most people would consider a novel, but rather a beautifully meandering saunter through hazily expressed ideas of religious thought and feeling.

A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily life – that conscience, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and observance

The key unit of the book is the paragraph and these are often a page long and built up through sentences which themselves contain swirls and eddies, heavily qualified by subordinate clauses, so that it is liberating and beguiling to abandon yourself to their flow. It is like being lulled into a completely different place from our usual, hurried, instrumental way of thinking, freed to drift with the drifting thoughts and impressions of the hazy protagonist.

Marius’s character

During adolescence Marius develops into a dreamy idealist, in the strict sense of someone who lives in his head and constructs the world through his imagining rather than interacting with it on a pragmatic level.

Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by the exercise of meditative power. A vein of subjective philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, there would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men’s valuations.

PART THE FIRST

1. ‘The Religion of Numa’

In which we are introduced to Marius, a ‘young lad’, whose father has died and left him the man of the house in a modest rural estate, somewhere near Pisa, in the time of the Emperor Antoninus. He is portrayed as sober and pious and respectful of religious tradition. ‘The religion of Numa’ because Numa Pompilius was the second of the seven kings of Rome and ‘many of Rome’s most important religious and political institutions are attributed to him, such as the Roman calendar, Vestal Virgins, the cult of Mars, the cult of Jupiter, the cult of Romulus, and the office of pontifex maximus‘ (Wikipedia).

2. White-Nights

White Nights is a possible translation of the name of Marius’s estate, Ad Vigilias Albas, so this chapter describes its layout and location, and the ‘ceremonial traditions’ which have come down through the ages, part of the pious old Roman religion whose rites Marius is very conscientious in keeping up.

The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally…a certain tradition of life, which came to mean much for the young Marius.

Worth noting that Pater has his young hero be very sensitive to the suffering of animals:

One important principle, of fruit afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the winters especially, when the sufferings of the animal world became so palpable even to the least observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the almost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for life as such…

He becomes an intellectual, an idealist (see quote above).

3. Change of Air

Describes an episode from his adolescence when Marius contracts a fever, ‘some boyish sickness’, and is sent to a temple of Aesculapius among the hills of Etruria. This is, of course, an opportunity to reinforce the mood of chaste restraint which surrounded Roman religion, but for Marius to encounter a young priest with whom he has intellectual conversation about Plato and such, another opportunity to preach restraint:

“If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some fresh picture, in a clear light,” so the discourse recommenced after a pause, “be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in all things, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows.”

The net effect of his stay at the temple is to associate physical and mental health, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ as the poet Juvenal wrote: ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’.

All this served, as he understood afterwards in retrospect, at once to strengthen and to purify a certain vein of character in him. Developing the ideal, pre-existent there, of a religious beauty, associated for the future with the exquisite splendour of the temple of Aesculapius, as it dawned upon him on that morning of his first visit – it developed that ideal in connection with a vivid sense of the value of mental and bodily sanity. And this recognition of the beauty, even for the aesthetic sense, of mere bodily health, now acquired, operated afterwards as an influence morally salutary, counteracting the less desirable or hazardous tendencies of some phases of thought, through which he was to pass.

Giving him a solid moral and imaginative foundation. You can see how all this militates against the amoral hedonism of the aesthetes.

It would hardly have been possible to feel more seriously than did Marius in those grave years of his early life.

4. The Tree of Knowledge

The death of Marius’s mother turns ‘seriousness of feeling into a matter of the intelligence’. Marius goes to the sea port of Pisa, beautifully described, to live in the villa of his guardian and rhetorician, to attend school. Here he is introduced to the intellectual sense of the New, the Modern, which came to feel different from the conservative, backward-looking culture he was raised in.

A great friendship develops with an older boy named Flavian, a freedman’s son being put through school by a rich sponsor. Marius transcribes Flavian’s poems. Flavian is like a breathing embodiment ‘his own Cyrenaic philosophy’ whose watchword is:

Trust the eye: Strive to be right always in regard to the concrete experience: Beware of falsifying your impressions.

Flavian introduces him to the Greek satirist, Lucian. Pater expresses the purpose of education:

the chief function of all higher education [is] to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our everyday life—of so exclusively living in them—that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or débris of our days, comes to be as though it were not.

Not as ringing as the Conclusion, but repeating the same idea that the aim is to savour and soak in the ideal traits and elements of distinction in our lives that the other stuff, work, shopping, chores, fades away. Puzzled that he writes ‘relieving’, is that a typo or Victorian variation of ‘reliving’?

5. The Golden Book

Flavian introduces him to what was then a new book by Apuleius, The Golden Ass. The narrator gives a brief summary of the plot, then, surprisingly, includes an extended translation of the story of Cupid and Psyche as it appeared in The Golden Ass – 14 pages or so of translation from the ancient Latin cut & pasted into this Victorian novel. The translation is in a horrible pseudo-archaic style, for example:

And she, erewhile of no strength, the hard purpose of destiny assisting her, is confirmed in force. With lamp plucked forth, knife in hand, she put by her sex; and lo! as the secrets of the bed became manifest, the sweetest and most gentle of all creatures, Love himself, reclined there, in his own proper loveliness!

6. Euphuism

The boys’ reaction to The Golden Ass. For young Marius it becomes the book, the epitome of literary beauty, probably more than it deserved. In Flavian it inspired the wish to be a great writer who would restore the classic elegance and power of Latin:

Latin literature and the Latin tongue were dying of routine and languor; and what was necessary, first of all, was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship between thought and expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore to words their primitive power.

Dense description of Marius and Flavian’s feel for how literature ought to be, drawing parallels with Plato, Cicero, Lucian, Lucretius and the Pervigilium Veneris.

Marius and Flavian attend a ceremony for the goddess Isis, the Isis navigium, namely the launching of a boat full of spices and votive offerings out into Pisa harbour, lavishly described by Pater. They sail out to a spot on the bay which was once an old Greek colony, now abandoned ruins. By the end of the day Flavian has developed a fever.

7. A Pagan End [i.e. death]

Returning from the Roman-Parthian War (161 to 166) Marcus Aurelius brought the plague which Pater describes as spreading quickly throughout Europe, Italy, and devastating entire neighbourhoods.

• Antonine plague

From his fever-bed Flavian dictates to Marius new stanzas of his work which is to celebrate Venus and the pairing of animals in the lovely spring. Pater describes the style as moving beyond the syllabics of classical Latin verse and foreshadowing the use of rhyme in medieval Latin.

A record of Flavian’s illness, fever, vomiting, moments of lucidity and final decline as Marius holds his hand. Then stands vigil through the night beside his friend’s corpse. Then accompanies Flavian’s corpse to a funeral, where it is burned, and he brings the urn of still warm ashes home.

PART THE SECOND

8. Animula Vagula

The death of his friend destroys the simple religious faith of Marius’s boyhood. He is saved from slipping into mysticism by a native virility of mind, a preference for ‘vigorous intelligence’. He prefers:

poetic beauty in mere clearness of thought, the actually aesthetic charm of a cold austerity of mind.

For Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old, ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and the honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence.

Marius turns 18 but instead of the dreamy, poetic musings which might be expected of a boy of his age, he undertakes ‘severe intellectual meditation’. Marius worries his friends with his earnestness. He drills back before Lucretius and Epicurus to the thinker who was father to them both, Heraclitus.

A complex wordy summary not only of Heraclitus but of the kinds of ways of thought he gave rise to; in Marius Heraclitus’s scepticism about the fixed nature of reality i.e. his insistence that everything is in flux, gave rise, instead of to despair, to a resolve to savour each passing impression in its fullness.

The kind of hedonism Pater says Marius came to believe in is closer to Aristippus of Cyrene than the later Epicurus.

• Cyrenaics

9. New Cyrenaicism

If he could but count upon the present, if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to conduct one anywhere beyond itself, if men’s highest curiosity was indeed so persistently baffled—then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that present with vivid sensations – and such intellectual apprehensions, as, in strength and directness and their immediately realised values at the bar of an actual experience, are most like sensations.

‘Hedonism’ is a crude term used by people who don’t understand. The aim is not crude pleasure. In fact the word Pater repeatedly uses is ‘insight’, suggesting a very intellectual type of pleasure, the pleasure of understanding.

Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, a life of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, freedom from all partial and misrepresentative doctrine which does but relieve one element in our experience at the cost of another, freedom from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on the future: this would be but preliminary to the real business of education — insight, insight through culture, into all that the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.

To the phase of reflection through which Marius was then passing, the charge of ‘hedonism’, whatever its true weight might be, was not properly applicable at all. Not pleasure, but fullness of life, and insight as conducting to that fullness — energy, variety, and choice of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, such as Seneca and Epictetus – whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal…

In this and countless other passages you can hear Pater doggedly denying that he was the godfather of Aestheticism, refuting the criticism that he promoted fleshly sensuality, and repeating again and again that his notion of Cyrenaicism is noble, moral, strenuous and pure.

The sober discretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation, the sense of those negative conclusions enabling him to concentrate himself, with an absorption so entire, upon what is immediately here and now, gave him a peculiar manner of intellectual confidence…

And not at all gay:

• A singularly virile consciousness of the realities of life pronounced itself in him
• Virile apprehension of the true nature of things, of the true nature of one’s own impression, first of all!

At the age of 19 Marius decides to enrol as a student of rhetoric in Rome.

10. On the Way

A former friend of his (dead) father’s had been following Marius’s progress, his scholarly studies and his fine penmanship, and invited him to Rome to become an amanuensis or secretary. Description of his journey from Pisa to Rome. En route he falls in with a strapping young man, Cornelius of the 12th Legion. Their growing friendship is recorded without a word of dialogue, all summarised in descriptive prose.

11. “The Most Religious City in the World”

Marius awakes in the house of his forefathers on the Caelian Hill in Rome and goes strolling through the city with Cornelius. A long languid description of how Rome had become prey to all kinds of foreign religions, encouraged by the new emperor, Marcus Aurelius (came to power 161 AD) who was not only very philosophical, given to philosophical speeches, but also a devotee of countless foreign cults, of which Pater singles out worship of Isis.

12. “The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King”

Marius is a spectator to the return of Marcus Aurelius into Rome from a victorious war on the Danube border, as the emperor, his partner and countless priests and officials process along the Via Sacra to a sacrifice at the Capitol. A close description of Marcus Aurelius’s appearance which emphasises the austerity of ‘this dainty and high-bred Stoic’. And derogatory profile of his younger co-emperor, Lucius Verus, who had become corrupted by luxury in the East.

The narrator states that Aurelius is 45 years old which dates the year to 166 AD.

After religious rites and a feast, Marius describes the long address Aurelius the Stoic emperor gives to the crowd. According to Michael Levey’s notes, this is a collage of quotes from Aurelius’s well-known publication, the Meditations.

The narrator points to the way that the same philosophical premise from Heraclitus, of the eternal changing of everything – ‘The world, within me and without, flows away like a river’ – you can deduce two diametrically opposite conclusions:

1. Marius’s Cyrenaic Epicureanism: ‘let me make the most of what is here and now’ and throw myself into a world of sense impressions, sensations, and beautiful thoughts; or
2. Aurelius’s ascetic Stoic rejection of the world of the senses as obviously fake and misleading: ‘The world and the thinker upon it, are consumed like a flame, therefore will I turn away my eyes from vanity: renounce: withdraw myself alike from all affection’

In addition, a pose of lofty dignified detachment was also, obviously, appropriate for the role of emperor of the greatest empire in the world. Hence Aurelius’s elevated, rather scornful version of Stoicism.

The peculiar character of Aurelius, at once a ceremonious polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical calling, and a philosopher whose mystic speculation encircled him with a sort of saintly halo, had restored to his person, without his intending it, something of that divine prerogative, or prestige.

Once again this long-ish (6 pages) tissue of quotations from the Meditations, like the passage from Apuleius, is rendered in a style notably more affected and archaic and quaint than Pater’s narrative voice. Levey says it is the style of Walter Savage Landor. No likee.

“Art thou in love with men’s praises, get thee into the very soul of them, and see!—see what judges they be, even in those matters which concern themselves. Wouldst thou have their praise after death, bethink thee, that they who shall come hereafter, and with whom thou wouldst survive by thy great name, will be but as these, whom here thou hast found so hard to live with. For of a truth, the soul of him who is aflutter upon renown after death, presents not this aright to itself, that of all whose memory he would have each one will likewise very quickly depart, until memory herself be put out, as she journeys on by means of such as are themselves on the wing but for a while, and are extinguished in their turn…”

Identical to the sentiment of Ecclesiastes in the Bible:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

The chapter ends rather beautifully with Pater describing how night has fallen, it begins to snow, and the emperor is escorted from the Capitol by a sequence of torch bearing lictors, ‘a long stream of moving lights across the white Forum, up the great stairs, to the palace’.

13. The “Mistress and Mother” of Palaces

The spring day on which Marius is introduced to the emperor Marcus Aurelius in his palace, with a long, lavish and adulatory description of the emperor’s character, of the empress Faustina, the royal children, and their tutor, the 80-year-old Stoic philosopher Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the ‘Orator’.

Continuing the practice of extensive quotation (or intertextuality) the chapter contains passages from the letters exchanged between Aurelius and Fronto (which had only been discovered earlier in the nineteenth century). These lead up to a 2-page translation of a fable about Jupiter’s invention of Sleep, from a work by Fronto.

As usual, although the chapter is long, there manages to be not a word of dialogue between Marius and Marcus; instead the narrative relays Marius’s impressions of the imperial household and, more than that, the swirling divagations of Marius’s thoughts, which are all very lush and flattering: ‘How temperate, how tranquillising! what humanity!’

14. Manly Amusement

Marius sees, from outside, the grand ceremony of the wedding of Aurelius’s co-emperor, Lucius Verus, with his elegant slender daughter, Lucilla. In the crowd he bumps into Cornelius, ‘the clear, cold corrective, which the fever of his present life demanded’. Marius compares and contrasts the appearance and personalities of Flavian and Cornelius, and how they have embodied his changing philosophy.

What struck me is how, in a heterosexual Bildungsroman, the text tends to be dominated by the love life of the hero, from early puppy love through to the Grand Amour. The complete absence of woman-love and, instead, the centrality of two young men who Marius has philosophical crushes on, proclaim the text’s homosexuality. But did contemporary readers and critics pick up on this?

Anyway, suddenly the narrative moves on to a grand gladiatorial show at the amphitheatre, paid for by Lucius Verus, who, on his journey back from the Parthian campaign, had picked up the cult of the great goddess of Ephesus, the goddess of hunters.

‘Manly amusement’ is fairly bitter sarcasm. Pater describes the brutal slaughter of huge numbers of wild animals for the baying audience’s entertainments, all very contrary to his and Marius’s fellow feelings for poor, abused animals. It’s an extended and quite angry passage.

In the middle there’s a satirical swipe at the contemporary (Victorian) habit of novel reading, seen as a crutch for feeble imaginations:

For the long shows of the amphitheatre 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.

Watching Aurelius sit through the entire gruesome bloody display with a detached expression, often turning aside to read or sign documents, revealed to Marius the profound gap between them. He, Marius, has a conscience and is aware of the big difference between good and evil to which the emperor seems oblivious.

Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of blindness, of deadness and stupidity, in the age of Marius…

And Pater turns away from ancient Rome to wonder whether ‘we’ (his Victorian readers) are any better, in their own time, an age still dogged by the slave trade (in Africa) and religious persecution.

PART THE THIRD

15. Stoicism at Court

A few months later the 80-year-old Fronto delivers a lecture on Stoic morality to the court. The problem Marius now faces is that he has built his entire morality to date on the Cyrenaic basis of seeking a life of fine sensations and thoughts; but the experience of the amphitheatre made him realise that morality is real. It’s dawning on him that old-time morality has a power and a truth. The problem is how to admit rules of morality into his thought without undermining it:

with as little logical inconsistency as may be, to find a place for duty and righteousness in his house of thought.

Fronto’s lecture squares the circle by presenting morality not as a set of leaden laws, but on the contrary as a kind of quintessence of good taste and fine manners. Interpreting morality in aesthetic terms. Morality is more like conforming to the Order of the Universe, more in the nature of dancing to the music of the universe. Thus, out of enjoyment of the beauty of fine sensations and thoughts, an epicurean may end up being more moral than the sternest moralist, exercising a more discriminating and sensitive morality. And avoiding immoral conduct not on a moral basis, but out of good taste.

In much the same way, conforming to traditional morality can be rethought to be defined as conforming with the best thoughts of mankind. Or based on the notion of:

the idea of Humanity – of a universal commonwealth of mind, which becomes explicit, and as if incarnate, in a select communion of just men made perfect.

In other words, Fronto is made to make traditional morality and customary behaviour acceptable to potential rebels and outsiders like Marius, by reframing it as joining a kind of aristocracy of thought, of the best that has been spoken and done. Rather than truckling to humdrum bourgeois morality, one would be joining an invisible aristocracy of righteousness. Elects spirits, elect souls. This seems to me, to be making traditional morality palatable by appealing to intellectual snobbery.

But where can Marius find these elect souls:

But where might Marius search for all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction? Where were those elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable, winning, persuasive—whose footsteps through the world were so beautiful in the actual order he saw?

I’m guessing in Christian communities.

16. Second Thoughts

The narrator intrudes into the narrative with reflections: he says that we adults know, what young Marius hasn’t grasped, that Cyrenaicism is a philosophy of young people, fired up by hormones, the feel of then sun on their faces, the exuberance of young healthy bodies. It is the ideology of:

the strong young man in all the freshness of thought and feeling, fascinated by the notion of raising his life to the level of a daring theory, while, in the first genial heat of existence, the beauty of the physical world strikes potently upon his wide-open, unwearied senses.

It is the product of the receptive and not the reflective powers of the mind.

The narrator takes us right away from the narrative by saying all this applies now, in modern London, a place where ‘the fresh imagination of a youth to build its “palace of art”‘. All this appears to be addressing the Aesthetic movement Pater was godfather to and which had made him so lamentably notorious, for he goes on to explain that this is all well and good for excitable young people, BUT is, in the end, it is narrow and blinkered, mistaking one era of vivid perception for the whole of life. What this excited philosophy needs is the corrective of an older, more mature wisdom, a wider worldview.

17. Beata Urbs

Back to narrative: The co-emperor Lucius Verus died in 169, en route to renewed fighting with barbarians on the Danube border. Aurelius brings his body back to Rome and sees his corpse lying in state in the Forum. Marius witnesses the subsequent funeral pyre in the Campus Martius and the rackety contrivance whereby a not-very-young eagle was released from a cage, flying upwards so that various witnesses could testify they saw the soul of the deceased mounting to heaven; which was what was required to allow the senate to declare the deceased had become a god.

Marius is summoned a second time to attend the emperor. Walking through the corridor where Caligula was assassinated, he is momentarily overcome by the history of Rome’s tyrants, their insanity and cruelty.

Marius is struck that the palace rooms are mostly empty because Aurelius is auctioning off all its treasures to pay for the military campaign on the Danube. In his empty rooms Aurelius has, momentarily, attained the clarity and simplicity of the philosopher kings described by Plato. His mind has momentarily conflated the real buzzing city of Rome with the ‘city on high’, the ideal city inhabited by ideal beings, the beata urbs, which recurs in his writings. Aurelius has summoned Marius to sort out the imperial manuscripts but we hear little about this, instead pages of Pater’s description of the mind of the philosopher-emperor. Again, rather magically, Aurelius hands over the manuscripts to Marius without a word of dialogue. Did Pater set himself the challenge of writing a dialogue-free novel?

18. “The Ceremony of the Dart”

In many of its followers Stoicism bred a coldness of heart. Not so in Aurelius who had inherited from his mother a sincere belief in the old pagan gods, which warmed his Stoicism, humanised, gave him great human sympathy.

It is 173 AD, a time of anxiety triggered by the threat of invasion and the plague. For seven days the Romans exposed statues of all their gods in the open air and worshipped them every day. Pater describes the weird cults and insistence on bloodshed, on animal sacrifice, on baths in fresh blood, in flagelation.

Only now did I realise that the manuscripts Aurelius has given Marius are of his own writings. Some are factual and statistical (and maybe found their way into the unreliable Historia Augusta which covers this period); others are letters of instruction to his son, the future emperor Commodus. But what strikes Marius is the many texts where Aurelius carries on an endless dialogue with himself about the philosophical perfection he seeks and is always just over the horizon.

Aurelius is like the modern essayist, repeatedly trying to make sense of his own thoughts. The narrator points out that this is a new, mystical, inwardness of spirit, very unlike the external factual activity of the classical mind. It is about the inner self, above all gaining complete mastery of one’s own moods, emotions and thoughts:

Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt:

Moreover, it implies someone or something to have a dialogue with and it is possible this is the Logos, or spark of Divine Mind within man – ‘that eternal reason, which was also his own proper self, with the divine companion, whose tabernacle was in the intelligence of men’.

Marcus Aurelius is a fundamentally sad man using Stoicism to try and buck himself up, and in so doing, the narrator points out, anticipates the rejection of the world and movement to monasticism, the cultivation of the soul, embodied in early medieval Christianity. And yet his austere Stoicism lacks a proper apprehension of evil. Secondly, Aurelius despises the body, cultivates contempt for it. Again, this is contrasted with Cornelius’s reverence for the human body as the temple of the spirit. Lastly, Aurelius seems at times to recommend suicide, giving the body, the proto-corpse, the slip. Marius finds that unforgivable.

There’s a rare bit of plot: as Marius is reading a manuscript roll a letter falls out of it and Marius, thinking he ought to return it to the emperor, rides out to the town in the Campagna where Aurelius is staying, only to come into the imperial palace as there is much fuss because on of the emperor’s children is dying of a sudden infection and Marius sees him hugging the helpless infant, ‘as if he yearned just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress.’

19. The Will as Vision

For Aurelius rule is a great sacrifice. Marius sees Aurelius clothed in armour and helped up onto his warhorse, ready to set off to the German wars and is struck by how defeated he looks.

With the emperor departed, Marius settles down into his study of Aurelius’s manuscripts, broken up by rides out into the country. On one of these he has a vision of the entire world as intellect, a world of thought, of which he intermittently partook. This in fact grows out of a conviction that wherever he has gone, there has always been an invisible other accompanying him, with which he shared his thoughts and feelings. What if this is an intuition of the permanent world of intellect which is the real enduring Reality? Suddenly everything fits into place and he sees that he must spend the rest of his life searching for every evidence, every trace or token of this high Ideal as it displays in the actual world of things.

The experience of that fortunate hour, seeming to gather into one central act of vision all the deeper impressions his mind had ever received, did not leave him quite as he had been.

PART THE FOURTH

20. Two Curious Houses—1. Guests [Apuleius]

Cut to ‘some years later’ when the famous writer Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass which had been Marius’s holy book when he as a teenage friend of Flavian, comes to Rome. Marius is invited to supper at the house of an aristocratic poet ‘who loved every sort of superiorities’, sited at Tusculum some distance from Rome and close to the famous (and now ruined) villa of the great Cicero (died about 210 year before, in 43 BC).

Marius describes the elite, literature-loving elite lazing on divans decorated with flowers. Young men perform a dance (The Death of Paris) in light armour, including Commodus, son of the emperor. Then one of them recites The Halcyon, a short prose piece, in Pater’s day thought to be by the Greek humorist, Lucian, in which Socrates is made to mouth conventional sentiments about human limitations.

As usual Apuleius’s presence and character are conveyed not through anything he says, not through any dialogue, but via Marius’s impressions of his presence and tone of voice, thus:

There was a piquancy in his [Apuleius’s] rococo, very African, and as it were perfumed personality, though he was now well-nigh sixty years old, a mixture there of that sort of Platonic spiritualism which can speak of the soul of man as but a sojourner in the prison of the body

As the party breaks up Marius finds himself alone with the great man for a moment and manages to get some serious talk out of him. His position is Platonic Idealism:

It was the Platonic Idealism, as he conceived it, which for him literally animated, and gave him so lively an interest in, this world of the purely outward aspects of men and things.—Did material things, such things as they had had around them all that evening, really need apology for being there, to interest one, at all? Were not all visible objects—the whole material world indeed, according to the consistent testimony of philosophy in many forms—“full of souls”? embarrassed perhaps, partly imprisoned, but still eloquent souls?

So Apuleius takes Plato seriously and claims to be almost able to hear and feel the True Souls of things straining to burst through their mere appearances to the senses. Put like this, Plato’s theory is at one with the extravagant high fashion, the elaborate wigs and fancy clothes of the 2nd century elite. In fact maybe all this philosophising is the discourse of the pampered and well fed.

What really surprised me is that Apuleius speaks. Not Marius’s mother, his tutor, his boyfriend Flavian, his soldier friend Cornelius nor the emperor himself are given any dialogue at all. So it’s a red letter moment when Apuleius speaks, and his three paragraphs are pure philosophy, insisting that there are ‘divine powers of a middle nature who interceded between the timeless immortals and men who die like flies,

‘Through them, all revelations, miracles, magic processes, are effected.’

This is, of course, appropriate for a man (Apuleius) who was accused of witchcraft and whose most famous book features magic spells and rites of initiation into mystery cults. Marius extends Apuleius’s brief explication of Plato’s idea of interceding spirits towards the notion of a hierarchy of spirits or intellect, from inanimate objects, through animals, to man with his soul, up through various spirits to angels, to God himself, the kind of thing I associate with the Hellenistic philosopher, Plotinus, founder of neo-Platonism who, however, cannot appear in this book because he had not yet been born (205 to 270 AD).

21. Two Curious Houses—2. The Church in Cecilia’s House

En route back to Rome from another country house party, Cornelius takes Marius out of their way, through a locked door in a wall into what turns out to be a Christian cemetery where the dear are, of course, interred, as opposed to being incinerated according to traditional Roman practice.

He realises the tombs represent a new kind of hope which doesn’t exist in the pagan world, where death is final. As he wanders the catacombs and tombs Marius can hear sweet singing as by women or children, unlike anything he’s heard before, bespeaking a new kind of piety.

It turns out to be attached to, in the grounds of, a house belonging to none other than (Saint) Cecilia, patron saint of music. Cornelius, clearly a Christian, knows her. As usual there is no dialogue whatsoever, because what matters is that Marius experiences the clear music and hopeful atmosphere as a break from Rome which he started to find oppressive.

Here, it might be, was, if not the cure, yet the solace or anodyne of his great sorrows – of that constitutional sorrowfulness, not peculiar to himself perhaps, but which had made his life certainly like one long ‘disease of the spirit’.

22. ‘The Minor Peace of the Church’

Here begins the sequence of chapters which praise the sweetness and piety and chastity of the early church which Marius now encounters. The key word is hope, an optimism which sharply contrasts with, say, the heavy depression of the emperor Aurelius.

It was Christianity in its humanity, or even its humanism, in its generous hopes for man, its common sense and alacrity of cheerful service, its sympathy with all creatures, its appreciation of beauty and daylight.

He calls the tenor of the church under the Antonines the minor peace of the Church by contrast with the major peace which began under the Christian emperor Constantine (if we’re in about the year 170 and Constantine was converted in 312, that’s about 140 years in the future).

Pater now switches to full-on, pro-Christian mode. The church is hopeful, urbane, moderate, characterised by ‘a cheerful liberty of heart’ and ‘full, fresh faith’, lovely in ‘its comely order’, ‘the elegance of sanctity’, ‘a bold and confident gladness’, ‘her dignifying convictions about human nature’, which are to be realised centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by the great medieval church-builders, by the great ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the masters of sacred music in the middle age.

It stops being a novel altogether and becomes a sort of history, of a very old-fashioned, bookish, belles-lettres type. It is also relentlessly propagandistic, Pater insisting everything in the church was wonderful and moderate and how it expresses the finer nature of man and gave rise to all good art; how any fanaticism, asceticism, destruction of pagan buildings and statues and so on, were the result of ‘fanaticism’ and not of the mild and civilised Christianity he’s talking about. It is, in other words, bad history, because wishful, naive and superficial.

It is also chauvinistic, in the sense that Pater’s gushing over-praise of Christianity leads him to predict that it will one day become the religion of all mankind:

destined, surely! one day, under the sanction of so many ages of human experience, to take exclusive possession of the religious consciousness.

Er, no. Other religions exist, Walter. Islam. Hinduism.

23. Divine Service

Waking early Marius goes to Cecilia’s house and stumbles upon a whole congregation practising an early Christian service, something he’s never seen before and is dazzled at the beauty, the serenity etc, the devotion of the acolytes, the noble gestures of the pontiff, all carried out on a table created by the tome of a recent martyr. The text overflows with praise for the vigorous new young religion which has incorporated everything that is noble and good in the old pagan religions and lifted them to a new level, centred on the figure of Christ:

It was the image of a young man giving up voluntarily, one by one, for the greatest of ends, the greatest gifts; actually parting with himself, above all, with the serenity, the divine serenity, of his own soul; yet from the midst of his desolation crying out upon the greatness of his success, as if foreseeing this very worship.

As he does everywhere else, Pater feels no reluctance to expand what are supposedly Marius’s perceptions of ideas by relating them to the entire further development of western culture, invoking the influence of Saint Francis of Assisi, St Louis of France, the history of Renaissance painting from Giotto to Raphael.

Some critics claim this wandering feel as prophetic of post-modernist freedom, but I’d have thought it is more like standard pre-modernist lack of discipline which allowed authors to digress from a strict adherence to point of view or immediate subject matter, and wander off on whatever hobby horses they felt like indulging.

With Cornelius, in fact, it was nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect, the outward semblance of which, like a reflex of physical light upon human faces from “the land which is very far off,” we may trace from Giotto onward to its consummation in the work of Raphael—the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, of those who have been indeed delivered from death, and of which the utmost degree of that famed “blitheness” of the Greeks had been but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth.

In other words, Pater is more concerned to show off his fine feelings and sensitive appreciation of the history of western art than to stick to the ‘discipline’ of the novel as a form. You could exaggerate only a little and see Marius as a series of philosophical and art-historical essays masquerading as a novel.

24. A Conversation Not Imaginary [Lucian]

The Greek humorist Lucian visits Rome and Marius is his host. Marius takes him to see a famous Stoic philosopher who is, however, out, so they walk on along the Appian Way. Lucian is 60 and an ‘elegant and self-complacent but far from unamiable scepticism, long since brought to perfection, never failed him’.

Lucian asks who are the up-and-coming young scholars of Rome and, as it happens, the young fellow who Marius recommends, one Hermotimus, at that very moment comes walking towards him. So they stop him, introductions are made, then Lucian questions Hermotimus, which turns into an extended dialogue. According to Michael Levey’s notes, this is an abbreviated version of an actual dialogue of Lucian’s, titled Hermotimus.

It starts as a tissue of clichés describing the supposed journey and hopes of a student of philosophy – art is long and life is short, I have a long way to travel to get to the summit of wisdom, the prize of knowledge is worth devoting your life to etc etc with zero actual argumentation. More reminiscent of the little I know of Eastern philosophy, which is more about cultivating a certain state of mind than about logic and argument. Hermotimus describes what he is devoting his life to seeking in rhetoric and figures of speech, rather than logic and argument. The elect he seeks to join enjoy:

‘Wisdom, the absolute goodness and the absolute beauty, with the sure and certain knowledge of all things—how they are. Riches and glory and pleasure – whatsoever belongs to the body – they have cast from them: stripped bare of all that, they mount up, even as Hercules, consumed in the fire, became a god… They whose initiation is entire are subject no longer to anger, fear, desire, regret. Nay! They scarcely feel at all.’

What I took from this long dialogue is that Hermotimus’s ideology is just another form of snobbery and elitism. He wants to join an elect so they can look down on all the little people who let themselves still be ruled by passion, emotion, ignorance of The Truth. So many religious and philosophical systems boil down to wanting to join a gang, become an insider, able to look down on everyone left on the outside, on ‘the vulgar herd’. If Lucian follows Hermotimus on the path to Wisdom:

‘you will learn in no long time your advantage over all other people. They will seem but as children, so far above them will be your thoughts.’

Anyway, within the narrative the point of this extended set-piece dialogue is that Lucian undermines Hermotimus’s confidence that he is on the right way by pointing out that there are no end of philosophers and rhetoricians and wise men infesting the Roman empire, all claiming that their way and their way alone is the Right Way to Wisdom. How can a learner possibly know which one to choose, unless he was already in possession of a good definition of Wisdom. In which case he wouldn’t have to choose. So, a paradox.

Lucian’s calm unrelenting scepticism wears down Hermotimus who is forced to concede that he cannot, in fact, ever be sure that the Stoic way (which he has adopted) is the True Way. He is reduced to tears. He had started out the day happy and confident in his life path and now he is reduced to utter bewilderment.

‘Ah! Lucian, what have you done to me? You have proved my priceless pearl to be but ashes, and all my past labour to have been in vain.’

As the dialogue progresses, the pair enjoy identifying and trapping each other in logical errors, non-sequiturs, unjustified conclusions and so on. If at moments it reads like one of Plato’s dialogues with the tricksy Socrates outwitting his opponent, at others it sounds like a school debating society, with each picking holes in the other’s arguments; or more like the sophists who were paid to teach just this sort of nitpicking and argufying.

The debate ends as abruptly as it began, his people coming to collect Lucian on horseback, the poor disillusioned youth continuing on his way, while Marius walks some more, then turns and heads back to Rome, along the road lined with gloomy cemeteries, and Pater superimposes the incident from the Acts of the Apostles where Jesus appeared to St Paul on this very road, only 130 or so years previously. He doesn’t name the incident, but alludes to it.

The power of the Lucian dialogue makes this a very powerful, standalone chapter but in doing so emphasises the way the entire text is constructed of defined episodes and, as here, quoted texts.

25. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum [which could be renamed the Diary Chapter]

A famous quote from Virgil, sunt lachrimae rerum literally means ‘there are tears in things’ but is often used to mean ‘the tearfulness or sorrow of the world’.

Marius kept a diary, or a ‘conversation with himself’. This chapter consists of various entries. They read like the self-pitying morbidness of a self-centred adolescent, a Goth, an emo:

‘We are constructed for suffering! What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we care to note them, as we go – a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries!’

Marius is afflicted by the sense of all the suffering around him (he gives examples of labourers drudging away, of the children of the poor, of an old lady being led to a workhouse), suffering which, if he gave in to it, would drive him mad. He feels he has failed in love. He feels the need for a greater love to arise in his heart; the recognition that we need more love than we are individually capable of in order to respond adequately to a world of suffering. This is where Jesus comes in, with his infinite capacity for bearing the suffering of the world, and transcending it by his superhuman love, limitless capacity for love, godlike love.

Even if all humans were made perfect, the world itself declines and falls, flowers fade, trees are cut down: ‘there is a certain grief in things as they are’. He is hinting, I think, at the Christian doctrine of the Fall – ‘some inexplicable shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself’. It is not just mankind that needs to be redeemed; it is the entire world.

And in the last paragraph he describes an intimation he has that there is someone else, a hidden power, capable of this great redemption, ‘behind this vain show of things’.

Clearly Pater’s aim is to show Marius as a sensitive thoughtful pagan, trembling on the brink of becoming a Christian, intellectually prepared in every way, but stopping short of the personal conviction, the spiritual ‘conversion’, which would finish the job. This ‘trembling’ aspect gives the book a pleasing tantalising feel, far more subtle and powerful than a thorough-going conversion would have been.

But there is a completely different way of reading all this, a Marxist way. At the same time as Pater was writing Marius, Friedrich Engels was preparing his most influential work, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’. Seen from this Marxist perspective Marius/Pater is a classic example of bourgeois narcissism. He enjoys all the good things of the world, never has to work, is waited on hand and foot by servants and yet is discontent. Every day he witnesses the suffering of the poor, specifically the labouring working classes and their wretched children, and feels guilty and inadequate. He knows something is terribly wrong with the world but hasn’t a clue what to do about it.

In the framework of the narrative (and Pater’s bourgeois Victorian Oxford milieu) the answer remains a personal, selfish one, namely converting to Christianity, becoming a Christian, sharing the love of the redeemer who will save all the world and, to be fair, maybe engaging in the energetic Christian charity work which characterised the Victorians.

But Engels and the international communist movement offered an alternative and communism wasn’t just a continental import. In 1881, the year Pater began Marius, English artist and designer William Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) at its inaugural meeting. In 1884, as Pater was finishing Marius, Morris wrote ‘A Summary of the Principles of Socialism’. Believing the Federation wasn’t radical enough, in 1885, the year Pater published Marius, Morris founded the Socialist League and wrote The Manifesto of the Socialist League calling for a communist revolution in Britain.

I’m not saying that Morris’s communism was right; just pointing out that, even at the time, there were other ways of escaping from the ultimately claustrophobic, narrow, guilty world which Marius gives such a strong sense of.

26. The Martyrs

Marius finds himself drawn back more and more to Cecilia’s house with its poetry, intellectual pleasure, above all a generosity and charity utterly lacking from the tone of Marcus Aurelius’s stern Stoic contempt for one’s own or another person’s pain.

One of her children dies and is buried. The Romans cultivated indifference to the fate of children who, after all, died in their thousands. And Marius had laboured long to maintain a ‘philosophical’ detachment from all emotions so as to cultivate his precious thoughts. And yet now he finds himself deeply moved by a compassion which threatens to destabilise his careful equilibrium.

He attends a Christian service at Cecilia’s house and is transported by it, by the expression of a tremendous hope, to be liberated from the sadness and travails involved in all human existence:

It breathed more than ever the spirit of a wonderful hope – of hopes more daring than poor, labouring humanity had ever seriously entertained before…They [the congregation] were still under the influence of an immense gratitude in thinking, even amid their present distress, of the hour of a great deliverance.

But the second part of the chapter brings bad news of Christians who have been martyred by the Roman authorities, on the ultimate orders of his one-time hero Marcus Aurelius. Pater gives it in the form of a letter from the churches of Lyons and Vienne in distant Gaul, and it is in fact an actual early Christian from Eusebius’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’ (published in 325 AD). The passage describes the martyrdoms of Blandina, who remains seraphic despite the worst the Roman torturers could do to her, along with Alexander, the 90-year-old bishop Pothinus, Sanctus the deacon, tortured by having red hot plates applied to his genitals – all rejoicing in their witness and proving ‘that there is nothing fearful, nothing painful, where the love of the Father overcomes’.

Sanctus and Maturus were then thrown to the beasts in the amphitheatre and torn to pieces; Blandina was tied upon a stake for the beasts to maul but they were all overawed by her holiness and backed away. So Blandina is sent back to prison, only to be brought out the next day, and once again tortured for the crowd, alongside a 15-year-old boy, who she inspired by her bravery, till she eventually died, hastening to her death as to a bridal feast:

the enemy himself confessing that no woman had ever borne pain so manifold and great as hers.

This raises a point I like repeating which is that most modern feminists I’ve ever met excoriate ‘the Church’ and all its doings for its repression of women etc; and yet, back at the beginning, the Christian church represented a massive liberation for women. Ancient Roman like ancient Greek women, lived much as women in Saudi Arabia nowadays, confined to their houses, not allowed to leave without a chaperone, the belongings and chattels of their fathers or husbands. Early Christianity offered women an escape from the home, to take part in religious ceremonies, to perform acts of charity, to achieve a sense of personal identity and agency and, as here, to acquire fame and glory in this entirely new form of heroism, the heroic acceptance of torture and death in the name of God.

27. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius

Not a metaphor but a literal description of the triumph of Marcus Aurelius returning into Rome from victory against German tribes in the Marcommanic Wars. This would have been 176 AD. In one of his characteristic achronicities, Pater has barely started describing it before he makes a great swoop through time to bring in an entire paragraph about Andrea Mantegna (1431 to 1506), Renaissance painter of just such triumphs.

Anyway, the point is that Marius has grown up and finds all the fanfare and splendour of the triumph trashy and vulgar.

Yes! these Romans were a coarse, a vulgar people; and their vulgarities of soul in full evidence here.

Marius sets out to visit Aurelius at his villa in the country, previously home of the pious emperor Antoninus, with a passage describing the countryside as you leave Rome and travel up towards the Apennines. Marius had hoped to petition the emperor to be more humane though I didn’t understand Pater’s meaning – does he mean Marius was going to ask Aurelius to spare the defeated German tribesmen dragged along in chains in the triumph the day before?

In any case, Aurelius already has visitors, a flock of children now being kept in the orphanage established by his wife, Faustina (who had died two years earlier). Marius hears gales of childish laughter coming from the audience room and decides, on balance, not to interrupt the happy scene nor wait. He has to press on with his journey.

This turns out to be a pilgrimage to the old family estate, White-nights, to the old villa and, above all, to the family tomb where his parents ashes were stored in ashes. He is overcome with sad feelings, not least when he sees the urn of a serving boy who was the same age as him when his mother died, placed next to hers, torn out of the world with so much left to see and feel.

With a rush of characteristic self-pity he realises that ‘he is the last of his race’. Maybe Pater the homosexual felt the same; no marry, no kids, end of the line. Anyway, the fictional Marius on the spur decides that he will be the last to visit his family tomb in this way, and orders his workmen to dismantle it and bury all the urns:

to bury all that, deep below the surface, to be remembered only by him.

28. Anima Naturaliter Christiana

Marius spends eight days at the family estate and feels death reaching up out of the ground towards him. Being the last chapter, he reviews his life and realises it has been an existence with almost zero activity, surprised by:

the unbroken placidity of the contemplation in which it had been passed. His own temper, his early theoretic scheme of things, would have pushed him on to movement and adventure. Actually, as circumstances had determined, all its movement had been inward; movement of observation only, or even of pure meditation…

Cornelius comes to stay and they explore the country and villages thereabouts. They are visiting the site of the martyrdom of Saint Hyacinthus, along with some other Christian pilgrims, when there is an earthquake. The population of the town rush out of their houses and, inflamed with panic, and the return of the plague, which they blame on the rebellious Christians, turn into a mob which attacks the small congregation. Some Christians are lynched there and then, but the others taken captive, including Marius and Cornelius.

Word gets around that one of the prisoners is not actually a Christian and Marius, in a moment of high-minded ‘nerve’, tells the warders it is Cornelius who, helped by a large bribe, they set free. Marius then spends days of anxiety wondering when Cornelius will return to free him, Marius. This reminds me of the ending of A Tale of Two Cities and also the play by Terence, when one prisoner sacrifices his freedom in order to secure his best friend’s liberty.

Instead he is shuffled along with the rest of the prisoners on the march to the nearest major town (for the trial), walking in the rain, sleeping in the open like everyone else. Eventually he becomes so ill his warders dump him at the cottage of some poor country peasants. Here he drifts in and out of fever, remembering much, conscious of having sacrificed himself for his friend.

He remembers, not so much everything he’s done as he hasn’t in fact, done very much, but everything he’s thought and felt, and the people who sparked those thoughts and feelings.

the persons, the places, above all, the touching image of Jesus, apprehended dimly through the expressive faces, the crying of the children, in that mysterious drama, with a sudden sense of peace and satisfaction now, which he could not explain to himself.

He feels there is some companion in h is suffering, that he is prepared for some revelation, for some ampler vision, the house of his mind is ready for a new guest. He feels ‘the great hope, that hope against hope, which, as he conceived, had arisen upon the aged world,’ that future generations will enjoy ampler visions, and yet…

In his last lucid moments he feels the peasants who have tended him, have offered him consecrated bread, have anointed his feet and hands with oil and are kneeling by his bedside praying. And after he dies, they bury him in secret, saying Christian prayers for his soul and considering him to have been a martyr to the faith, and yet…

We know that Marius never actually becomes a Christian. He has, after all, never been educated in Christian doctrine. The word crucifixion occurs only once, and that in the passage from Eusebius. The word resurrection occurs nowhere in the text.

It’s pretty obvious that Pater intends Marius to be the type of sensitive, thoughtful pagan who travels through pagan philosophies, discovers Christians and is attracted to their piety and faith and honour, but never, quite, crosses the threshold to actually become a Christian himself.

The fact that the peasants who nurse him and bury him consider him to have been a martyr is a puzzle. On the face of it it’s a mistake and therefore an ironic comment on the credulousness of uneducated Christians which, by implication, begs the question how many other alleged ‘martyrdoms’ celebrated by a pious church might be similar mistakes. Surely Pater didn’t intend it that way, did he?

Marius the solipsist

It’s really the story of a solipsist. Solipsism is defined as ‘the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.’ Marius doesn’t go that far, he’s more a solipsist in the popular sense of the word, meaning immensely self centred. The vision he has at the end of chapter 19 makes the world seem even further off than before crystallises this interpretation.

It confirms my sense that, although his ostensible philosophical position, which Pater takes hundreds of pages to describe in such gassy detail, changes somewhat, from Cyrenaicism to Epicureanism, encountering Stoicism etc – although there may be a slight change in his stated views – there is no change in his fundamental attitude, which is of an immense, overwhelming, stifling self-centredness.

In truth, he had been so closely bent of late on certain very personal interests that the broad current of the world’s doings seemed to have withdrawn into the distance. (Chapter 27)

Although I mentioned that the book is possibly in the genre of the Bildungsoman, this is questionable because it’s questionable whether Marius’s colossal self-centredness ever changes at all. In a way, this may explain why there is almost no dialogue in the entire book – because what people say to him barely registers, barely dents his bullet-proof self-absorption.

At a tangent to this idea is another fairly obvious thought about ‘philosophy’ as a subject or ‘discipline’, which is that there is so much of it, covering more or less every kind of belief or theory or system man has ever devised, that ‘believing’ any particular philosophy is usually a matter of personality rather than argumentation.

Yes! the reception of theory, of hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a great deal on temperament. They were, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament.

‘Philosophy’ obviously refers to a vast set of systems of thought, often worked out to mind-numbing levels of logical detail. But at the same time…people generally believe what they want to. For all its claims to Grand Truth, someone’s philosophy is mostly, in the end, a reflection of their personality.

Quotes

Individual quotes from the work show that Pater is a very good prose stylist but, in my opinion, in the end, not great. He has the sensitivity but he doesn’t, in the end have quite the clarity and fluency of style to carry it off. Nothing in the entire wordy text is as quotable as the famous half dozen sentences from the Conclusion

Books

A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured for him as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal gratitude to its writer, and saw in it doubtless far more than was really there for any other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in his remembrance, never quite losing its power in frequent return to it for the revival of that first glowing impression.

Self knowledge the basis of good art

A true understanding of one’s self being ever the first condition of genuine style…The happy phrase or sentence was really modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupulous thought.

Last thought

Having struggled to the end of this endless interweaving fabric of philosophical speculations, many quite knotty and demanding, one big thing strikes me. We are the heirs of Darwin, Marx and Freud. When we theorise we do so in a mental universe vastly expanded by modern science – specifically biology and evolutionary theory, DNA, genes etc – a huge world of medical discoveries. Without being conscious of it most people invoke the ideas of depth psychology and therapy invented by Freud, which has split into a thousand varieties of counselling. And we talk about politics and society by the light of social theories which all start with economics and often have a Marxist materialist root, whether the authors realise it or not.

Pater had absolutely none of these things in his mental world and this explains, I think, why Marius the Epicurean feels so gaseous and often difficult to grasp. In the complete absence of modern thought, all he had was the ancient world and classical thinkers to fall back on, and the endlessly subtle distinctions the narrator makes between slightly different versions of Cyrenaicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Platonism (vide chapter 24 in which the clever sceptic Lucian destroys the apprentice Stoic, Hermotimus).

These subtleties, along with his application of them to the imaginative world of the early Christians, are difficult to read, rewarding, clever, sometimes moving – but all the time feel like children playing in a sandpit, compared to the vast and vastly different mental world we all now inhabit.

Related links

• Conclusion to The Renaissance online
• Marius the Epicurean part one online
• Marius the Epicurean part two online

Related reviews

• Moral letters by Seneca
• On the nature of the gods by Cicero
• Roman reviews
• The Conclusion by Walter Pater
• Nineteenth century Britain reviews