In Way of Introduction: Marius Past and Present

IN WAY OF INTRODUCTION: MARIUS PAST AND PRESENT By Ian Fletcher (Arizona State University) Marius is a hundred years old. It is still read; it is still argued about; it is, major or minor, a classic. Many readers may prefer the antinomian Pater of the Renaissance, he "who made the lights burn blue," or the grave essay on Wordsworth, or those mythicised narratives, essays in a genre virtually of his own devising, the "Imaginary Portraits." Still, Marius remains Pater's most ambitious, most painfully considered, central work, his densest legacy. And so inevitably it is the work that has fluctuated most in esteem. Marius, to vary a phrase, is the gorgon at the gate: strangely structured, offering itself as travelogue, essay, fiction, redaction of historia, oblique autobiography, spicilegium of late antique texts, elegant translations, with firm beginning and a faltering closure, tremulously Protean . How appropriate then is this gathering of scholarship from both the trans and cisatlantic shores: not a formalised centennial recognition so much as an attempt to entertain, not certainly for the last time, a difficult text—"text" or frankly, and in spirited detail, like Bernard Richards, to dismiss it (27:2). My authority for introducing these offerings is slender. More than a quarter of a century past I wrote for the use of undergraduates a little monograph on Pater. It had some mild success. Twice reprinted, with additions , but not revisions, it figures now and again in the bibliographies, on the recluse pages of dissertations and in confidently learned articles among that prescribed list of items mustered, like the names of captive generals, at the beginning of the work that shall undo them all. Since then, apart from a stray review of so, and some casual assistance with the late D. J. Gordon's "middle" on Evans's edition of Pater's Letters in TLS, I have written nothing about "the cultured devil of Brasenose." My piece was fortunate in its moment. There was much that demanded setting right and was easy to rectify. In Britain, the master had been ignored or sneered at pretty generally since the "honeymoon" period of his "afterlife " ended in 1913 with the extended niggling of Edward Thomas. Eliot and Bloomsbury had successfully masked their debts while in the U. S., among all those Babbitts and Paul Elmer Mores, he had fared little better. Then in the 1950s all was changed: Rene Wellek included him in his history of critical theory; Graham Hough had an approving chapter in Last Romantics. And Frank Ermode was at hand with his brilliant Romantic Image, where Pater was treated with a proper seriousness and new interpretations of literary history suggested . Kermode's book was studded with the names of such obscure fellows as Wilde and Symons, along with Pater, no longer sealed off from the "modern moment." To be sure, chapters on Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold were included, lest the essay suffer the fate of Dr. Watson's tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, "for which the world" was "not yet prepared." And since that time— God'β Plenty indeed: a mere run must suffice: Bloom, Ellmann, Monsman, Inman. By the early 1970s it seemed as if the whole might of American literary critical technology had been brought to bear on those delicate "texts" and from an amiable private vice Pater went fully public, but public less in the sense of becoming an idol of the market place than the kept man of the Goddess Meta-criticlsm. It was a tinge tardy for the New Critical Pater (and perhaps just as well); but there was no difficulty in hoisting the Freudian, 6 the Neo-Freudian, the Phenomenological, the Structuralist, the Neo-Structuralist , the Marxist and the New-Structuralist Marxist Walters. Bibliographies bloomed and Pater was elected to the status of not merely an honorary "proto-" but an actual "Modern," his influence detected at book length even upon those who had derided him. One dazed admirer, anxious to deny nothing to his hero, went so far as to identify Walter Horatio with "Walter," pseudonymously profuse hero of that great underground Victorian epic My Secret Life. All those critics who had complained of epicene prose had been barking...