Renan and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean

Any account of Marius the Epicurean would naturally refer to the cultural significance of Marcus Aurelius for literate British people in the later nineteenth century. As a more recent translator remarks of George Long's 1862 version of the Meditations, the book "quickly became a cultural 'must' to the mid-Victorian generation, from great and eminent persons like the Dean of Canterbury and Matthew Arnold down to innumerable lesser folk." Over the next forty years, "printings and reprintings must have been legion." ¹ The editor of a new edition of Mrs Carter's eighteenth-century translation of Epictetus commented in 1910 that "Marcus Aurelius seems to have become a fashion with Omar Khayyam" in "an age of sentimentalists." ² The noble emperor doing his duty in a collapsing world became part of the baggage of civil servants and administrators in the British Empire. The Stoic saint met the spiritual needs of numerous reverent agnostics, and became, in Arnold's words, the "especial friend and comforter of all clear-headed and scrupulous, yet pure-hearted and upward striving men." ³

It would be natural to expect what Denis Donoghue and other critics have suggested, that Arnold's review of Long's translation, later reprinted in Essays in Criticism, would have been present in Pater's mind when he came to explore Marcus Aurelius, and the Second Century. Arnold's copious extracts from the Meditations and the pathos and appeal of his account of the emperor were clearly seminal to the Aurelius cult. As Denis Donoghue remarks, Pater was certainly aware of this, making Marcus Aurelius adopt Arnold's most famous phrase ("To see the object as in itself it really is") in the disquisition to the Senate on the world, life and death. Donoghue's comment that this is "the same phrase Pater showed up as spurious on the first page of Studies in the History of the Renaissance" ⁴ probably exaggerates Pater's hostility. Still, the irony of the quoted phrase is unmistakable.

Seminal as it was, however, Arnold's essay had long been familiar and represented little more than an introduction to the Stoic emperor. It would be worth looking at a far more recent and much fuller account of which Pater would have been aware, that of Ernest Renan. The object of this paper is to explore Pater's initial enthusiasm for Renan and his subsequent disenchantment with this French writer. In particular, it seeks to examine the ways in which Pater came to challenge the positive picture Renan painted of Marcus Aurelius in the last volume of Les Origines du Christianisme. The topic is important for the light it throws on a crucial phase of Pater's own thought, his move, during the 1880's, to a more sympathetic view of Christianity, in what was a retraction, or at least, a modification of some views expressed in The History of the Renaissance. Clearly, it will be necessary to trace Renan's view of Marcus Aurelius in some detail, before looking at Pater's often subtle critique of it.

Ernest Renan's reputation in the 1880's can hardly be exaggerated. George Brandes hailed him, along with Ibsen, Flaubert and J.S. Mill as one of the great modern emancipators in Men of the Modern Breakthrough (1880). Years later, Maurice Baring recalled the effect of Renan's work at the end of the Nineteenth Century:

To the young of my generation there was a certain excitement in reading Renan. We chuckled at his irony, thinking he had helped to emancipate us once and for all from many tedious superstitions, sham conventions and false traditions. ⁵

The notorious non-supernatural Vie de Jésus(1863) had been followed by the six remaining volumes of Les Origines du Christianisme, concluding in Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (1882). Most readers would probably agree that Renan's account of Marcus Aurelius gains its power and effectiveness from the historian's...