The Emergence of Pater's Marius Mentality: 1874-1875

THE EMERGENCE OF PATER'S MARIUS MENTALITY: 1874-1875 By Billie Andrew Inman (The University of Arizona) Ever since Mary Arnold Ward concluded in her review of Marius the Epicurean that the book was a fictionalized portrayal of Pater's inner life, critics have been saying that in Marius Pater reveals the development of his own sensations and ideas. Yet to my knowledge no one has tried to relate the experience in the novel that prompts Marius' restructuring of his philosophy, the moral indignation stirred in him by the slaughter scene in the Colosseum, to a parallel experience in Pater's life. Further, no one has explained when and under what conditions Pater rethought and enlarged his philosophy, if indeed Marius' rethinking and enlarging represent his own. One would suppose from reading criticism of Marius that the novel represents Pater's thinking at the time of writing, but not before. I hope to show here that Pater's crucial self-appraisal occurred during 1874 and 1875 and was prompted by the experience of "evil" that came to him vicariously through reading Prosper Mérimée, a new insight into the implications of "epicureanism" that he derived from reading Stendhal, and the suffering he endured from censure by clergymen for his "anti-Christian" ideas in The Renaissance. I will show, moreover, that the Marius mentality is expressed in essays composed in 1875 —the review of John Addington Symonds' Age of ,,the Despots, "The Myth of Demeter and Persephone," and "A Study of Dionysus." In September and October of 1874 Pater borrowed from the Taylor Institution Library two volumes of Mérimée's works that contained almost all of his fiction besides the stories in Dernières Nouvelles, as well as his letters to the Director of the Revue de Paris, 1830-31, describing experiences of his in Spain. In December, he borrowed Lettres à une Inconnue. Pater did not write an essay on Mérimée until 1890, but this fact does not give one reason to suppose that he was not influenced by Mérimée in 1874. Most of the authors who impressed him most deeply, including Goethe, Fichte, and Renan, he did not write essays on at all; moreover, in most of his late essays, including those in Plato and Platonism, he drew upon reading done many years before. It is most likely that when Pater stated in his essay on Mérimée in 1890—"You seem to find your hand on a serpent, in reading him" —he was recording an aversion from the first reading. In Mérimée's powerful short stories and novellas Pater found characters quite different from the people in his world and the figures in his dreams. He also found a challenge to his easy-going assumptions that "mere human nature" was harmless, that the proper stance for an artist was sympathetic but nonjudgmental detachment, and that superior minds would feel Christian sentiment after allegiance to the Christian creed had departed. Colomba, whom Pater called "Mérimée's best known creation" (Misc. Studies , p. 24) was especially disturbing to him. In some ways she was like the sweet Victorian heroine—young, beautiful, soft-spoken—or, as Pater says, she had "a singularly wholesome type of personal beauty, a natural grace of manner which is irresistible" (p. 24). But there were other elements in her character that brought down upon her and her creator this judgment from Pater: "Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code of action, of self-respect, a conscience, all to herself, who with all her virginal charm only does not make you hate her, is in truth, the type of a sort of humanity Mérimée found it pleasant to dream of—a humanity as alien as the animals, 100 101 with whose moral affinities to man his imaginative work is often directly concerned" (p. 28). In the novella, Colomba uses her "cunning intellect" to wreak revenge upon the murderers of her father, not with her own hands (although her brother knows her capable of killing for revenge with her own hands if the duty and privilege were not his), but by intelligent investigation...