Fear of Falling: Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence

I. Art of Life?

“One learns nothing from him,” he says to Eckermann, “but one becomes something.”

—Walter Pater, “Winckelmann”¹

There has long been a threatening air surrounding accounts of Walter Pater’s influence on his students and disciples. The reserved Oxford don, whose staid but quietly subversive writings set the tone of the English fin de siècle, is regularly credited with destroying lives, undermining morals and contributing to the perversion of countless students. His writings were greeted by contemporaries with condemnation, caricature, or fulsome (and often misdirected) praise. Later writers, who contributed to his general under-appreciation throughout much of the twentieth century, described his works as “essentially perverted” and “not wholly irresponsible for some untidy lives.” ² Pater is cast as a seducer, his works as threatening in their ostensibly pagan worship of beauty. ³ Recent research has suggested that much of the contemporary response to Pater comprised a coded attack upon his reputed homosexuality, an attack also leveled at other writers in the aesthetic movement. ⁴ Since male-male desire could not be directly addressed in an increasingly homophobic social context, such a constraint goes a long way toward explaining the diffused sense of threat attributed to Pater and his writings. But sexual politics cannot entirely account for the narratives of pedagogical danger one repeatedly finds in recollections or discussions of Pater’s influence. For it is nearly always by means of reading, rather than by face-to-face interaction, that Pater has his most threatening effect. One might, of course, attribute the importance of reading in accounts of Pater’s influence to the teacher’s shyness and personal reserve. But the peril attributed to Pater’s books and essays is, I would argue, far more than an incidental consequence of their author’s personality. Rather, the act of reading—both in Pater’s works, and in their later reception—poses at once a privileged means of education, and the gravest danger education faces. The present essay will take up the question of this danger in terms of a series of pedagogical scenes depicted in and prompted by the reading of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885).

W. B. Yeats, in his autobiographical work The Trembling of the Veil (1922), provides a well-known and typical representation of the threat associated with Pater’s teaching, and in particular of the purported effect of Marius the Epicurean upon its readers. In the chapter on “The Tragic Generation,” Yeats writes of Pater’s impact on his younger contemporaries, and tells of the strange force exerted by Pater’s only completed novel:

Three or four years ago I re-read Marius the Epicurean, expecting to find I cared for it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to all of us, the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began to wonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm. ⁵

The combination of beauty and peril, greatness and danger, that informs Yeats’s account and shapes his imagery, constitutes something of a topos in treatments of Pater’s teaching. The beauty of Pater’s writing, according to this topos, makes his ideas almost irresistible to impressionable minds. Literary pedagogy becomes a dangerous stunt, the teacher a circus master who seduces his students and promptly vanishes from the scene, leaving them to find their footing alone. So decisive is the teacher’s force that he need not even be present for his ideas to have an effect. His book alone seems sufficient to seduce the unwitting student, his writing itself forceful enough, as Yeats would claim in his 1937 introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Poetry, to have “dominated a generation.” ⁶ Yeats depicts himself as a survivor of Pater’s seductive teaching, and one thereby qualified to deliver...