Stopping the Press in Marius

STOPPING THE PRESS IN MARIUS By Bernard Richards (Brasenose College, Oxford) Marius the Epicurean Is a disaster. It is no good as novel, and obviously unsatisfactory as a piece of historical analysis. It might serve as an indicator of Pater's mental processes, but we require more of major literature than that. There is virtually no conversation, virtually no direct speech, very few pin-pointed incidents, and almost no places where we can feel at home in what most readers will think of as the essential constituents of a novel—drama, scene, action and characterization. The texture can be very uneven; the great wedge of philosophical dialogue translated from LucÃ-an in chapter xxiv followed by the autobiographical prose jottings in chapter xxv makes for a very bumpy ride. From time to time there are vivid and concrete settings, but we never seem to be able to enter them completely, because the narrator insists on yanking us violently forward into the modern era to consider Montaigne, Shakespeare, Pascal, Wordsworth, Swedenborg, Comte, Gautier and other members of a motley crew. It is as if the narrator were continually "stopping the press"; this phrase was used by Hazlitt to describe Scott's interruptions: "And it is at this moment [the burning of Rebecca in Ivanhoe] . . . that Sir Walter stops the press to have a sneer at the people, and to put a spoke (as he thinks) in the wheel of upstart innovation !" For the first two pages one would not even suspect Marius was a novel at all. Of course some critics have tried to mount a rescue operation by suggesting that the work is a kind of autobiography. Pater's friend Mrs. Humphry Ward thought this might be a way to approach it, and explained the impulse behind it as shyness and reserve: "English feeling, at its best and subtlest, has almost always something elusive in it, something which resents a spectator, and only moves at ease when it has succeeded in interposing some light screen or some obvious mask between it and the public." These remarks are in the spirit of some of Pater's views. He thought that when a poet handled a subject "anything in the way of an actual revival must always be impossible" and that "such vain antiquarianism is a waste of the poet's power." Instead the poet "animates his subject by keeping it always close to himself." Something of this kind is true also of prose, and in Marius the literary conversations Marcus Aurelius has with himself adumbrate "the position of the modern essayist" in producing "self-portraiture." If Marius is some kind of autobiography, though, it is hard to see how it is going to displace The Renaissance, where Pater's response to art and to the imagined past is more accessible and less cluttered. I want to suggest that Marius is not distinctive as a new kind of literary genre. It is actually a caricature of the standard historical novel, bringing into prominence certain features common to his predecessors. This essay is a squawk of protest against historical novels in general and Marius in particular. I may be accused of employing the dishonest critical stategy of deliberately mis-identifying the genre of a work so as to discredit it, but I hope my analysis shows that whatever genre Marius is placed in it is not very rewarding or economical to read. The essay is well known to be one of the ancestors of the novel, and the ancestral lineaments tend to show up very markedly in the historical novel. The rock which always wrecks the historical novel is "point of view." When we read novels of contemporary life there is a relatively easy relationship between the narrator and his characters and readers. But with the historical 90 91 novel the distance separating narrator and reader from the past often looms large and detracts from immediacy and total immersion. Interruptions and digressions in the historical novel have the tendency to do much more damage to the illusion than in the contemporary novel. If the past was different from the present then the alteration has to be noted—either in the spirit of self...