The Critical Reception of Pater's Marius

THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF PATER'S MARIUS By Franklin E. Court (Northern Illinois University) Walter de la Mare said of George Edward Woodberry, an avid disciple of Platonism and New England Transcendentalism who reviewed Pater's Marius in the September 1885 issue of Nation, that "like all men of imagination," Woodberry "had made the world in his own image." De la Mare was referring to Woodberry's writings on aesthetics mainly, but the observation extends as well to his criticism, including his review of Marius which contains some rather tendentious items from Woodberry's self-reflective world. The case of Woodberry and his self-conceived world, one that will be discussed in more detail below, points up the difficulty of assessing critical reactions written by those who cannot resist the tendency ("like all men of imagination," if de la Mare is correct) to parade their own personalities through their criticism. Surely, meaning is a transitive phenomenon and highly individualized readings, however quixotic or marginal subsequent readers may judge them, are no less real, though they carry less cultural weight these days than more preferred, canonically fixed readings. Critical discourses of a literary nature are, therefore, no less valid because the author's idiosyncrasies show through the text at times. Consider, for example , George Eliot's critical attacks in Westminster Review on Dr. Cumming, the popular Victorian evangelist, and on Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts. Both critical essays were colored by a highly individualized philosophical vision that was distinctly George Eliot's own at the time, and one that she obviously wanted to dramatize in print. Significantly, the essays survive mainly because of the autobiographical implications. Or consider Ruskin's attack on Whistler in Fors Clavigera, or John Churton Colline' indictment of Edmund Gosse's scholarship. Both criticisms, like George Eliot's, were personally motivated. Ruskin was irritated by Whistler's "cockney impudence" (Whistler was young and very much In vogue; Ruskin was old and losing his critical footing), and Churton Collins was far more envious of Gosse's academic success than he was outraged by his shoddy scholarship . And so it goes. The examples drawn from literary history, are, of course, legion. And those critics who responded to Marius shortly after it appeared, either in reviews or elsewhere, were no exception. The personal motives at the root of much of the criticism are just more obvious in some than in others, but each reflects the desire to witness the sociological determinants of Pater's cultural-historical world as his own. One of the more obvious self-referential critics was G. E. Woodberry.2 In spite of some reservations about the novel (e.g., the character of Marius is not fully realized; at the end of the novel, the reader feels a sense of failure and incompleteness, etc.), he gave it a rather favorable review. But what he found in the novel to praise and to censure is much too close to his own personal interests to allow the review to be passed over. For one thing, it helps to realize that Woodberry was an avowed transcendentalist who wanted to wed Yankee individualism with the Platonic and Catholic traditions of Europe , it is not surprising then that what he found in Marius to praise was a tendency toward the transcendental and the Platonic that he claimed was at the novel's very heart. Marius is otherworldly, jealous of common, everyday intrusions into his life. The novel contains "a sense of preclousness, as of 124 125 sacred things, within itself." Marius, the exponent of other-worldly idealism , exudes a mood of "trustful waiting for the god's coming" and a prescience that enables him miraculously to see the future (the joy of Giotto's and Dante's visions, Raphael's Madonnas, the chivalry of Christianity, etc.). In short, what Woodberry argues is that Marius should be viewed as a transcendental hero, for that is exactly how Woodberry the transcendentalist preferred to perceive him. There is no need to quarrel with Woodberry's personalized reading or with any of the others who saw reflections of themselves in the text of Marius. He may have overemphasized the importance of the Platonic worldview (he...