A Look at Ten Versions of Martial's Guide to the Good Life

 

 

 

Martial x 47

 

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,

Iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:

Res non parta labore, sed relicta;

Non ingratus ager, focus perennis;

Lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;

Vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;

Prudens simplicitas, pares amici;

Convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;

Nox non ebria, sed soluta curis;

Non tristis torus, et tamen pudicus;

Somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras:

Quod sis, esse velis nihilque malis;

Summum nec metuas diem nec optes.

 

 

     All translators agree that no translation can be altogether successful in reproducing a poem’s qualities in a new language.  Yet translations remain useful for two reasons.  They convey some portion of the original, allowing readers a view, though an imperfect one, of otherwise inaccessible writing.  Secondly, each translation may excel in different ways, so that the reader of a number of versions of a lyric will not only develop a fuller view of the source poem but also encounter new poems, some of which are worth reading in the target language.  Works like Chapman or Pope’s renderings of Homer, Fitzgerald’s Rubiayat, Pound’s Cathay, and Lowell’s Imitations are valuable in themselves as well as embodying, to varying degrees of accuracy, earlier literary works.

     This principle is illustrated by an examination of several of the many translations of Martial X, 47, a poem that owes much of its celebrity to its attractive moralizing theme.  The poem has been a favorite for centuries: one scholar has published an article with thirty-nine versions before 1750 (Stuart Gillespie, “Martial's Epigram 10.47: Thirty-Nine English Translations to 1750,” Translation and Literature, Volume 24, Number 1).  The attraction is doubtless largely due to the author’s recommendation of a rational and moderate enjoyment of life.  Martial’s theme here has been labeled an “Intellectually debased Epicureanism” as well as, more sympathetically, “a cultivated Epicurean conformist.”  (The former is the opinion of Alison Keith,  the latter phrase is J. P. Sullivan’s.  See Allison Keith, “Epicurean Principle and Poetic Program in Martial Epigrams 10.47–48,” Phoenix Vol. 72, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018.)  For a modern pagan the recommendations remain as appealing as they did to the ancients.  This variety of philosophia perennis has been so attractive that this poem has been very frequently translated.  While another rendering is far from necessary to convey Martial’s ideas, each version possesses unique charms and weaknesses. 

     Martial seems to imagine himself being advised by a philosophic mentor on that central topic of Classical philosophy (though it plays little role for today’s academic philosophers), “the good life.”  Epicurus adapted  the old Delphic maxim “nothing in excess” (μηδὲν ἄγαν) recommending sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) and taught that one must strive to eliminate or minimize pain, both physical pain (ἀπονία) and mental anxiety (ἀταραξία).  Avoiding suffering is surely a program most could accept as desirable.  Martial here not only resembles other Classical authors (for instance Horace in Epode 2), but he is also reminiscent of the long tradition of Chinese poets retiring to mountain retreats under the influence of Buddhist or Daoist quietism or the Confucian doctrine of the mean, zhōngyōng (中庸). 

 

 

A new translation of Martial x, 47

 

The things that make a happy life,

are these, my genial friend:

no work, but money one’s been left,

rich fields, a burning hearth,

no fights, rare togas, quiet mind,

with strength and fleshly health,

simplicity and well-matched friends,

good guests at rustic meals,

no drunken nights, but free of cares,

a joyful decent bed,

good sleep that makes the night slip by,

satisfied, with spite for none,

you’ll neither dread nor crave your final day.

 

 

     The long list of desiderata makes this a comparatively simple poem to translate.  I proceeded pretty much line by line.  This version uses iambs with tetrameters alternating with trimeters with a bit of syncopation in line twelve and a concluding pentameter to lend the last line a gnomic air.  I like the less-than-blank verse line for its casual, folksy cadence.  Even without the rhyme, the background beat is like a nursery rhyme or folk song.  (And a few of Surrey’s stumbles are enough to suggest why rhyme is a burden in this short lyric even in the most skilled hands.)  This does, of course truncate the lines somewhat, leading to such decisions as the omission of Martial’s own name in the second line.  (This detail struck me as distracting in any event, causing the reader to wonder fruitlessly who the speaker might be.)  We will assume, as others do, that “rare togas” sufficiently implies a minimum of formal business.

 

 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1557)

 

Martial, the things that do attain

The happy life, be these, I find:

The riches left, not got with pain;

the fruitful ground, the quiet mind:

the equal friend, no grudge, no strife;

No charge of rule, nor governance;

Without disease, the healthful life;

The household of continuance:

The mean diet, no delicate fare;

True wisdom join'd with simpleness;

The night discharged of all care,

Where wine the wit may not oppress:

The faithful wife, without debate;

Such sleeps as may beguile the night.

Contented with thine own estate;

Ne wish for Death, ne Fear his might.

 

 

   Surrey uses smooth and polished four beat lines, though he does use three more than the Latin.  The interference of rhyme intrudes in such places as the slightly odd use of “attain” in the first line and the obscure “continuance” in line eight.  Surrey expands the reference to “rare toga-wearing” in line six as suggesting avoiding government office and then repeats the meaning to pad out the line.  In line thirteen the phrase “no debate,” absent in the original, calls up the convention of the termagant spouse, whereas the original simply implies passionate yet faithful.  Line fourteen is memorably strong.

    Surrey’s is a polished craftsman whose translations were among his most memorable and influential work.  He pioneered the use of blank verse in his admirable translation of a portion  of the Aeneid, and these shorter, more intimate lines are equally effective.  The epigram form encourages the formulation of witty little packages of thought contained in a line or a half-line, almost every one of which delivers his thought direct without distractions.  The tendency toward sententiae is foreign to the modern sensibility, but it appears here to advantage. 

  

 

Ben Jonson (1640)

 

The Things that make the happier life, are these,

Most pleasant Martial; Substance got with ease,

Not labour'd for, but left thee by thy Sire;

A Soyle, not barren, a continewall fire;

Never at law; seldome in office gown'd;

A quiet mind; free powers; and body sound;

A wise simplicity; freindes alike-stated;

Thy table without art, and easy-rated:

Thy night not dronken, but from cares layd wast;

No sowre, or sollen bed-mate, yet a Chast;

Sleepe, that will make the darkest howres swift-pac't;

Will to bee, what thou art; and nothing more:

Nor feare thy latest day, nor wish therfore.

 

    

     Jonson, a close student of Martial and the expert author of many epigrams himself, employs pentameters.  “Gown’d” is a clever word for the phrase about togas. “Friends alike-stated” is clumsy and unclear, and its rhyme “easy-rated” is little better.  “Cares laid waste” is another casualty of the rhyme scheme, and the phrase itself suggests the opposite of temperance.  Simply saying one’s wife ought be neither sour nor sullen yet chaste seems rather too modest an aim.  The penultimate line is neatly crafted, but the final word seems weak enough to spoil the otherwise good effect of the whole. 

    Jonson is, as in all his work, professionally competent.  I find this piece, however, to contain  few delights.  Though in fact he uses a syllable less per line than Martial, his English sounds slightly loosened.  The rhymes for me come round with too great a regularity, promising a conclusion with every other line that does not always arrive (and which sometimes arrives at more inopportune points). 

 

 

Abraham Cowley (1656)

 

Since, dearest Friend! 'tis your desire to see

A true receipt of happiness from me;

These are the chief ingredients, if not all:

Take an estate neither too great, nor small

Which quantum sufficit the doctors call.

Let this estate from parents' care descend;

The getting it too much of life does spend.

Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be

A fair encouragement for industry.

Let constant fires the winter's fury take,

And let thy kitchen's be a vestal flame.

Thee to the town let never suit at law,

And rarely, very rarely, business draw.

They active mind in equal temper keep,

in undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep.

Let exercise a vigorous health maintain,

Without which all the composition's vain.

In the same weight prudence and innocence take;

And of each does the just mixture make.

But a few friendships wear, and let them be

By nature and by fortune fit for thee.

Instead of art and luxury in food,

Let mirth and freedom make thy table good.

If any cares into the daytime creep,

At night, without wine's opium, let them sleep,

Let rest, which nature does to darkness wed,

And not lust, recommend to thee thy bed.

Be satisfied, and pleas'd with what thou art;

Act cheerfully and well th' allotted part;

Enjoy the present hour, be thankful for the past,

And neither fear, nor wish th' approaches of the last.

 

 

     One first notices the length.  At thirty-one lines Cowley’s rendering is two and a half times as long as Martial’s.  In part this expansion is due to vestiges of the amplificatio characterizing much medieval rhetoric and Renaissance euphuism.  Thus the two words denoting “fertile soil” here become two lines on the ideal size for an estate, an attribute unmentioned in the original, including the clause “which quantum sufficit the doctors call,” words that seem rather like an altogether unnecessary footnote.  Though neglected at first the simple word “ingratus” had not been forgotten, as it bobs up a few lines later in “Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be/ A fair encouragement for industry.”  The four word recommendation for “prudens simplicitas” and “pares amici” becomes here four lines instead. 

     This relaxed unfolding of Martial’s laconic phrases has its own charm, however, as Cowley generates a tone of leisurely discursiveness, implying a persona at ease, whose unhurried portrait of the civilized life is exemplary of the peaceful ease he has achieved.  In spite of his expansions and deviations from the Latin Cowley’s poem has much to recommend it.  He sounds like a baronet with a glass of port by the fireside, not Martial perhaps, but appealing.  (Cowley’s poetry and essays are, is in my opinion, unjustly neglected.)

 

 

Sir Richard Fanshawe (c. 1660)

 

The things that make a life to please,

Sweetest Martial, they are these:

Estate inherited not got:

A thankful field, hearth always hot:

City seldom , lawsuits never:

Equal friends agreeing ever:

Health of body, peace of mind:

Sleeps that till the morning bind:

Wise simplicity, plain fare:

Not drunken nights, yet loos'd from care:

A sober, not a sullen spouse,

Clean strength , not such as his that plows:

Wish only what thou art, to be;

Death neither wish , nor fear to see.

 

    

     Fanshawe is notably concise, with each four-beat line a unit.  Tight expressions such as “estate inherited not got” are followed by satisfying rhymes, here “a thankful field, hearth always hot.”  Similarly

“city seldom , lawsuits never” admirably conveys the sense, completed by “equal friends agreeing ever” where the melody compensates for the phrase’s awkwardness.  As with many other translators, Fanshawe decorously minimizes the marital joy with “a sober, not a sullen spouse,” which implies nothing positive at  all.  The antepenultimate line “clean strength, not such as his that plows” seems to come from nowhere, owing little to the corresponding Latin “somnus, qui faciat breves tenebras.”  Was he desperate to rhyme “spouse”?  And why does its apparent closer translation “sleeps that till the morning bind” occur earlier?  The concluding couplet, on the other hand, is accurate, shapely, and sweet-sounding.

     Sir Richard Fanshawe translated ably from Portuguese, Latin, and Italian.  This version of Martial has much to admire was well as several lapses.   

 

 

James Elphinston (1782)

 

Of things that heighten human bliss,

The sum, sweet Martial, may be this.

A freehold, not amast by care;

But dropt on a deserving heir:

A soil, that ev'ry culture pays,

A hearth, with never-dying blaze:

No contest, and but little court;

A quiet mind, her own support:

A gale, to fan ingenuous flame;

Exertion, to enforce the frame:

Simplicity, that wisdom blends;

Equality, the bond of friends:

An easy converse, artless board,

With all the little needfull stor'd:

A night not soaking, care effac'd;

A couch not dismal, always chaste:

Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,

That evening bids and morning meet.

content, which nought beyond aspires;

And death nor dreads, nor yet desires.

 

 

     Though Dr. Johnson’s friend James Elphinston was a considerable linguistics scholar, he seems to have been an indifferent poet.  Expanding the verse to twenty lines, he managed to include considerable extraneous material.  The meaning of “a soil, that ev'ry culture pays” is not immediately obvious; “enforce the frame” is awkward; and “not dismal, always chaste” hardly sounds positive.  A couplet like “Sleep stealing o'er the gloom so sweet,/ That evening bids and morning meet” has regular cadence and a neat rhyme but the syntax requires untangling.  “With all the little needful stor’d” comes out of nowhere and the meaning of “not soaking” is not clear at once.  Such difficulties are obstacles that the smooth metrics glide over.  His final line is tidy and effective, but perhaps more memorable than Elphinston’s translation is Burns’ epigrammatic reproach to its author.

 

 

To Mr E - on his translation of and commentaries on Martial

 

O Thou, whom Poesy abhors,

Whom Prose has turned out of doors;

Heards't thou yon groan? - proceed no further!

'Twas laurell'd Martial calling, Murther!

 

 

     While I would hardly imagine the shade of the Roman poet calling out for revenge, I do find Elphinston’s translation marred by awkward phrasing and shackled by rhyme. 

 

 

Rolfe Humphries (1963)

 

Here are the things, dear friend, which make

Life not impossible to take:

Riches bequeathed, not won by toil;

Fire on the hearth; responsive soil;

No law suits; seldom formal dress;

A frank but wise disarmingness;

A healthy body, and a mind

Alert, but peaceably inclined;

Congenial guests; a table set

Without excessive etiquette;

Nights free from exigence and worry,

But not too bleary or too blurry;

In bed, a wife not frigid nor

Too reminiscent of a whore;

Slumber, to make the shadows swift;

Contentment with your native gift;

And, without longing or dismay,

The prospect of your final day.

 

 

     Humhries is a professional, but his wit sometimes leads him beyond his original.  Lines like “life not impossible to take” are clever but misleading.   The rare term “disarmingness” is distracting.  “Bleary” and Blurry,” again, are ingenious but off-focus for tone.  “Exigence” is too formal a word for this usage, and “too reminiscent of a whore” is too inventive.

     In spite of these strictures, Humphries’ is an excellent version.  He is capable of juggling even the rhymes while staying on course. 

 

 

Peter Porter (1972)

 

Friend and namesake, genial Martial, life’s

happier when you know what happiness is:

money inherited, with no need to work,

property run by experts (yours or your wife’s),

Town House properly kitchened and no bus-

iness worries, family watchdogs, legal quirks.

Hardly ever required to wear a suit,

mind relaxed and body exercised

(nothing done that’s just seen to be done),

candour matched by tact; friends by repute

won and all guests good-natured -- wise

leavers and warm stayers like the sun;

food that isn’t smart or finicky,

not too often drunk or shaking off

dolorous dreams; your appetite for sex

moderate but inventive, nights like sea-

scapes under moonlight, never rough;

don’t scare yourself with formulae, like x

equals nought, the schizophrenic quest!

What else is there? Well, two points at least --

wishing change wastes both time and breath,

life's unfair and nothing's for the best,

but having started finish off the feats --

neither dread your last day nor long for death.

 

 

     Peter Porter called his 1972 collection After Martial since his intention was not to follow closely upon his original.  He stretches out Martial’s thirteen lines to twenty-four five-beat lines, allowing himself to introduce considerable new material.  His rationalization of the name in the first line (“friend and namesake”) serves a purpose, but the second half of line four is not only absent in the Latin but, more seriously, it adds nothing in the English.  Suspending the word ”business” at the end of line five only to complete it on line six is surely distracting and fussy to most peoples’ taste.  Breaking “seascapes” into two parts is less jarring due to its being a compound word and the whole phrase “seascapes under moonlight” is pretty enough to be satisfying though there is nothing in Martial to give it birth.  Lines seventeen and eighteen, though, run seriously awry with the peculiar formula “x equals nought” and the modern term “schizophrenic.”  Whatever it may mean to “finish off the feats,” the phrase enfeebles the conclusion here, though the final line is neatly crafted.  The “sneer” and “the poisoned sigh” are elaborations, vivid in English but absent in the original.

 

 

Peter Whigham (1984)

 

My carefree Namesake, this the art   

Shall lead thee to life's happier part:

A competence inherited, not won,

Productive acres and a constant home;

No courts, few formal days, your mind stable,

A native vigor in a healthy frame;

A tact in candor, friendships on a par,

Convivial courtesies, a plain table;

A night, not drunken, yet shall banish care,

A bed, not frigid, yet not one of shame;

A sleep that makes the dark hours shorter:

Prefer your state and hanker for none other,

Nor fear, nor seek to meet, your final hour.

 

 

     A follower of Pound, Whigham was capable of sounding like an eighteenth century neo-Classical poet at times, yet he has loosened his model to allow many half-rhymes in a pattern that will seem unpredictable at first reading.  His use of a pentameter line allows regular caesurae, and the whole proceeds most smoothly. 

     This is the best in my view of the modern translations. 

 

 

Brendan Kennelly (2008)

 

What constitutes a happy life?

Enough money to meet your needs

steady work

a comfortable fire

a clear distance from law

a minimum of city business

a peaceful mind and a healthy body

simple wisdom and firm friends

enjoyable dinners and plain living

nights free from care

a virtuous wife who's not a prude

enough sleep to make the darkness short

contentment with the life you have,

avoiding the sneer, the poisoned sigh;

no fear of death

and no desire to die.

 

 

     Kennelly is a talented modern poet whose version flouts the regularities of the original, preferring free verse with the line varying from three syllables to ten and little attention to rhyme or assonance.  Alliteration is allowed a subdued effect: the proximity of “money” and “meet” in line two, “”firm” and “friends” in  line eight, “sneer” and “sigh” in  eleven, and “desire” and “die” in thirteen.  This casual form and the lack of punctuation until the end supplies an appropriate off-hand tone that reinforces the theme.  M any of the lines are out so efficiently into English that, though Kennelly‘s version has three more lines than the Latin, many of the terms are expressed in fewer syllables.  “Steady work” deviates from his source which is closer to meaning no work at all, but perhaps this is a concession to modernity which frowns upon the idle aristocrat.  Like others, Kennelly neglects the positive term in describing the connubial bed.  “Make the darkness short” is both accurate and neatly phrased. 

     His rendering is smooth and natural in modern American usage and conveys the poem’s essential elements without asserting any translator’s peculiarities.  Its weakness arises from the same qualities: an offhand prosiness that, as it draws no attention to itself, run s the risk of sounding artless, though it is more successful than versions with distracting characteristics not found in the original.

Voluptuous Ascetics in Anatole France’s Thaïs

The translations of quoted French phrases are my own.

 

     The usefulness of distinguishing eras in literary history is indisputable, but they are never more than a convenience.  Anatole France, who wrote well into the twentieth century, turned not only from the schools of Realism and Naturalism, but from the preceding Romantic assumptions as well and wrote as an heir of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and, in particular, as a follower of Voltaire.  

     Heavy on theme as France typically is, the characters in Thaïs, even the central ones, are rather representative types or spokespersons for points of view than convincing personalities.  The two principals, Paphnutius and Thais, describe a narrative chiasmus as the monk realizes that beneath his pious reputation, he is in fact the slave of his desires while the abandoned Thais discovers her discipline and piety in spite of her once libertine lifestyle.  The formal symmetry of this movement is satisfying quite apart from the thematic implications, though the latter are in the foreground. 

     If the story is a sort of anti-clerical parable, an inverted saint’s life, Paphnutius is, of course, a negative exemplum.   Though France was an atheist, the novel can hardly be called anti-Christian.  Paphnutius’  co-religionists, from St. Anthony through Ahmes, Albina, and Palemon, and ultimately including Thaïs herself, are all depicted as sincere and benevolent, whether their beliefs are true or not.  Even asceticism, from which the author might be expected to recoil, is not confined to Christianity, but represented as well by Timocles the skeptic whom Paphnutius encounters meditating naked on the banks of the Nile like a saddhu (and indeed he is said to have visited India).   Timocles matches Paphnutius’ austerities without adopting any of his faith.  All decisions have become for Timocles a matter of indifference.  He reflexively responds to any question with the Skeptic’s ἐποχή (suspension of judgment, withholding of assent).  He may seem grotesque in his withdrawal from life, but he is not self-interested or hypocritical.  He declares quite simply that there is no certainty in the world and that impressions are always subjective.  “Les mêmes choses ont diverses apparences.” (“The same things have diverse appearances.”)

     The Banquet like the Symposia of Plato or Xenophon, like other dialogues, and like the novels of Thomas Love Peacock or Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s Heavenly Discourse, introduce characters who represent various points of view.   France conveniently labels each of his Hellenistic banqueters so there may be no confusion: thus Dorion is an Epicurean; Eucritus a Stoic, Zenothemis a Gnostic, Hermodorus a syncretist Serapian, and Marcus an Arian Christian.  They trade opinions not with the urgency of the true believer or the proselytizer, but with the casual detachment of people passing a pleasant afternoon together for whom the discussion is a worthy end in itself. 

     The likeliest spokesperson for France himself is, of course, none of these believers in religion or systematized philosophy.  He doubtless shares some of the attitudes of Cotta, the urbane Roman host to whom the civilized social order is the chief good, for whom the central role of religion is to define and reinforce a sense of community.  To him “il y a en tout dieu quelque chose de divin” (“every god has something divine in him”).  Yet the nation is what is important.  “La patrie doit être mise au-dessus de tout, et même des dieux, car elle les contient tous” (“fatherland must come first, even before the gods, for it contains them”).  His faith in stability and happiness rests on the strength of the imperial navy and army and the prosperity of the economy.  Open-minded about religion, he is no more dogmatic about politics.  Cotta says that he had in his youth sympathized with the Republic, but that he has come to believe that only a strong government can assure its citizens a peaceful and productive life.

     While Cotta is represented as a sensible man, the reader never doubts that the author’s heart is with Nicias.  Should this character be based on a historical figure, it would likely be Nicias of Miletus, a poet associated with Theocritus some of whose epigrams are extant.  It may be, too, that the character owes something to Nicias of Kos whom Cicero recalls as a witty raconteur who served an excellent mushroom dish at a dinner party.

     Possessing Cotta’s capacious broadmindedness while lacking his obtrusive patriotism, Nicias is the very soul of geniality.  When he speaks of the divine, it is often in a light and teasing manner, as though he and the gods are on familiar terms, such as his joking that if god loves, that is an imperfection or the more metaphysical claim that god is in “disgrace” due to the fact that “l'infini ressemble parfaitement au néant” (“the infinite is indistinguishable from nothingness”).

     He is perfectly at ease with the fact that “nous ne savons rien” (“we know nothing whatever”) we are unable even to distinguish between being and not being.  He approaches Gorgias in  his skepticism, declaring that, in  addition to the lack of any certain knowledge, “il est impossible aux hommes de s'entendre” (“people cannot [fully] understand each other”).

     For him, however, there is one element of life that evades Nicias’ otherwise universal Skeptic’s ἐποχή: eros.  The entire company enjoys the beauty of Philina and Drosea (whose looks are their only function in  the novel), and they all salute Thais with cries like “—Salut à la bien-aimée des dieux et des hommes!” (“Hail to the one beloved of both men and gods!”), but it is Nicias who cautions Paphnutius against offending love. 

     In fact Nicias is untroubled by the fact that we are unable even to distinguish being and not being.   Furthermore, “il est impossible aux hommes de s'entendre” (“people cannot ever [fully] understand each other”).  His equipoise in the face of the loss of any foundation for thought proves the success of his strategy of simply not caring about what he cannot change and passing his time in life in the most civilized and pleasant manner.  The company enjoys the beauty of Philina and Drosea (whose looks are their only function in the novel), they all salute Thais with cries like “—Salut à la bien-aimée des dieux et des hommes!” (“Hail to the one beloved of both men and gods!”), but it is Nicias who cautions Paphnutius against offending love. 

Je t'avais bien averti, mon frère, que Vénus était puissante. C'est elle dont la douce violence t'a amené ici malgré toi. Écoute, tu es un homme rempli de piété; mais, si tu ne reconnais pas qu'elle est la mère des dieux, ta ruine est certaine.

I have warned you, my friend that Venus is powerful.  It is she who has brought you here with gentle violence in spite of yourself.  Listen, you are a man full of piety, but, if you don’t recognize her as the mother of the gods, your ruin is certain. 

      When Cotta suggests that the tower on which Paphnutius sits is phallic, it is at once a nice turn of wit and a hint that Nicias’ respect for the goddess of love is shared by many like minds as well as suggesting the influence of Freud.  The centrality of sexual desire as the dynamo of human motivation is precisely what Paphnutius denies yet which entraps him in the end.  The anchorite with high ambitions and reputation turns out to be that most despised of moralists, the hypocrite, and the most dangerous of hypocrites: one who deceives himself as well.

     If philosophy is the pursuit of the good life, ideas must be judged by the lived experience of their advocates.  For France, the wisest people have no occult wisdom; they undergo no dramatic enlightenment.   For the most part they simply practice good will and enjoy each other’s company despite differences in creed and lifestyle.  They accept their human nature, looking with admiration on the opposite sex, dining together and conversing to further their intimacy while feeding their bodies.  Among this group are some, the wiser sort, it seems, who have less need of myth and ritual while remaining moral and philosophical.  For France, who was a materialist, the rational course is to recognize the prerogatives of the body with its desires for sex and food and the mind with its need for social interaction.  Rather than rejecting one’s natural qualities, France, like his Nicias, seeks to indulge all passions, but in a civilized manner unlikely to bring the ill consequences of dissipation.  While Paphnutius will seem misguided to all, and he is certainly unhappy in his fate, the self-abnegating life Thais chooses will also find few imitators.  The ascetic voluptuaries lose out to the practitioners of the Delphic slogan μηδὲν άγαν “nothing in excess.”  Most readers are likely to feel in concert with Anatole France that there could scarcely be a better way to spend an afternoon than at a banquet such as Cotta offers, enjoying visual, verbal, and gustatory pleasures as the sun descends toward dusk. 

Pater’s Renaissance

I used a 1959 Mentor volume of The Renaissance which sold for 50¢. Though the pages are brown and falling out, it sustained yet another reading. As no one else is likely to be using this particular edition I identify quotations here only by the chapter from which they come.


     During Walter Pater’s life, he suffered a degree of notoriety. Though a retiring and scholarly man, he was like Socrates accused of corrupting the youth by providing a justification for hedonism and denying religion. Wrong-headed though they were, his accusers, who included even such subtle thinkers as George Eliot, had reason. What his critics regarded as his baleful influence extends well beyond the author’s life; indeed, it even reached to mid-twentieth century Midwestern suburbs in America and indeed further still, to the very present.
     As a teenage aesthete I was deeply moved by The Renaissance. Probably to some extent under his influence I wrote a college admission essay that said nothing whatever about professional goals, but instead defined my main ambition as to experience as much as possible. The only concession I made to the role of higher education was to declare that by experience I included learning as much as possible and consuming the finest, most beautiful works of art and intelligence. I might have been taking my text directly from Pater’s famous conclusion. For better or worse my values remain unchanged over a half century.
     Immorality was, of course, never Pater’s aim, except for those to whom homoeroticism is a vice. [1] His radical theme was subjectivism. For all his denigration of “abstract theory,” his approach was founded on a thorough philosophic skepticism. Pater has been, I think, insufficiently recognized for the degree to which his ideas anticipate more recent thought in both aesthetic theory and philosophy more generally. Among the many trends for which Pater’s thought opened the way are Rorty’s “ironism,” the reader response theory associated with Stanley Fish, and Derridean Deconstruction.
     The author thought best to omit his “Conclusion” in the second edition for fear it “might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” Pater’s celebrated call “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” has suffered the curse of success and become a cliché, but the “Conclusion” opens with a less-cited line from Herakleitos which Pater translated as “All things give way; nothing remains.” [2] Pater develops then an evocative passage describing the flux of experience, sounding like a Tang Dynasty Buddhist in his wistful insistence on the insubstantiality of what ordinarily passes for reality. He spares neither body nor consciousness, deploying images of whirlpool and flame to demonstrate that physical life is a “perpetual motion” which is “beyond us.” Sense experience is a mere ”swarm of impressions,” “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The human ego is nothing but “an image,” a sort of recollection of memories of past moments. “Our life . . . is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.” Coherence, solidity, knowledge are all illusions.
     For Pater this meant no end of inquiry but rather the most powerful motivation to pursue his researches while privileging sensation. “While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.” As “we are all condamnés,” to spend life “in art and song” is the best strategy for “getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time,” while recognizing that “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”
     Pater entertains no illusions and takes refuge in no mythic refuge. [3] His subjectivism as a critic emerges naturally from his skepticism as a philosopher. He quite correctly identifies his position as distinctly modern in his early essay on Coleridge. “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ … To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under certain conditions.” [4] He later restates the theme, again with the emphasis on its modernity, noting that “according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra, after all.“ [5]
     It is curious but true that those who argue for impressionistic art criticism, while inviting the accusation that their judgements must be arbitrary and unfounded, are in fact the only critics who can present solid evidence. After all we know nothing of any topic whatever but the data of our senses imperfectly processed by our brains. Precisely in that interaction of subject and object is the spot where Pater correctly locates the aesthetic experience. In the “Preface” to The Renaissance he correctly locates aesthetic value neither in the author nor in the text, but in the reader’s reaction. “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?”
     While this focus on consumption is a productive approach, Pater does succumb to polemic’s temptation to overshoot the mark. He repeatedly claims that art has no relation whatever to lived experience, insisting, for instance, that “the Venus of Melos” “is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness.” “This ideal art, in the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond its sensible embodiment” [6] Any viewer of a human nude must react in part to a work’s content, in this case to the humanity, the femaleness, and the nudity of the statue. As for symbolism the viewer must realize that the object is in fact a religious cult image, meant for religious services.
     In another passage, Pater maintains that “in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor.” [7] Though stating it, he ignores the critical fact that the “play of sunlight” is, in fact, wholly “accidental,” lacking intention. Thus it cannot be a signifier unless one posits, as Pater would not, some artistic deity presiding over the enormous site-specific installation that is the cosmos. The distinction rests in the fact that every human artifact bears meaning whether consciously designed or not. Every objet d’art poses the question, impossible for natural phenomena, “what does it mean for a person to have made this?”
     Yet many have overestimated the role of truth in art. Art is by no means exhausted by a mimetic ideal. The maker may strive for the greatest verisimilitude, but books remain always black marks on a page and paintings smears of color on a surface, by all means “real” only in a qualified sense, and none “more real” than another. Truth occupies a place similar to realism in art. For some works such considerations are a part of the design, for others they are insignificant, while for yet others deviation and distortion of verisimilitude are intentional and effective. It is elementary that, while art may seek to seem “true” in one sense or another, such an end is merely one among a great many elements that may play a role in a work’s structure.
     Again, Pater has the passionate enthusiasm to go once more a bit too far. Discussing the meaning of false attributions to Giorgione, he comments that “in what is connected with a great name, much that is not real is often very stimulating.” [8] Even errors and misapprehensions are fruitful; indeed, like Freudian slips, they may provide the richest veins of meaning. Having no functional end, art resembles play. [9]
     Pater’s oft-quoted dictum declaring that the arts all aspire to the condition of music [7] does not, of course, suggest that in some way music is a higher or more perfect art than poetry or painting. He means only to clarify his claim that “the sensuous element in art” contains “almost everything in art that is essentially artistic.” Art differs from other human artifacts in that its form, its style, its manner is sufficient for its meaning, or, at any rate, those elements comprise the strictly artistic component of its appeal. A poem may have attractive ideals or a painting may include data of historic or scientific interest, but such considerations have no effect on its artistic worth.
     Pater is one of those like Frazer, Margaret Murray, Joseph Campbell, and others who made dramatic new readings of the materials of history and culture and who are liable to be picked to pieces by specialists far less capable of original thought. Of course, anyone who dares to suggest innovative readings of the past and attempts to synthesize great masses of data will be vulnerable to criticism, all the more as studies advance over the years, yet such work remains more significant, more beautiful, and more readable than any of those who point out their numerous errors. I might add even such names as Freud and Marx. All these are great artists, and from a literary point of view they are all true in the sense that the Iliad and the gospel of St. Matthew and King Lear are true. This would have been Pater’s point of view. In discussing Pico della Mirandola Pater says of Pico’s attempts to reconcile Greek religion and Christianity by imagining wildly fanciful allegorical interpretations “his thoughts, however little their positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of deep and passionate emotion” and this alone justifies them. Surely the very same may be said of Pater’s own deeply significant though highly idiosyncratic judgements.



1. No reader could deny what no one today will condemn, Pater’s homoerotic sensibility. We are inclined to be indulgent if his embattled tastes in life lead him slightly astray in theory. In accordance with his own notions, he approves Winckelmann’s “escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch.” He proceeds In the same essay to venture a side comment, suggesting that homosexuality is associated with “an inborn instinct for beauty and art.” While this is a very dubious notion, it does not entirely lack evidence.

2. Pater’s translation and a lengthy discussion in Plato and Platonism, “Plato and the Doctrine of Motion”: “[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing remains.” Plato, Cratylus 402 A.

3. Even his Marius the Epicurean is led only to the very edge of Christianity ten years after The Renaissance. Chastened by criticism and doubtless frightened by the outré behavior of some of his admirers, Pater hedged his bets, yet he still resisted making his hero a believer.

4. “Coleridge’s Writings,” Westminster Review 1866.

5. “Coleridge” in Appreciations.

6. See the “Essay on Winckelmann.”

7. In “The School of Giorgione.”

8. See “The School of Giorgione.”

9. In the same chapter, Pater links art and play in that neither has a functional end.

Marius the Epicurean as a Modern

Page references in parentheses are to Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (New York: The Modern Library). My copy bears no date but was printed after the time the series carried the Boni & Liveright imprint but before Random House, probably in the late 1920s. Endnotes are in brackets.


     The twenty-first century reader may perhaps be excused for thinking of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as an outdated old Victorian volume. The author indeed revels in archaic language to represent his second century characters, a strategy that makes about as much sense as film actors accenting their English to indicate that they are to be understood as speaking a foreign tongue. His elaborate prose style, whatever pains he may have taken over it with whatever success, has little general appeal these days. Some of his sentences, once they have taken off, hover over clause after clause, each with pendants of attached phrases, until the reader who fails to be entranced may begin to wonder when the soaring syntax will ever come in for a landing, though it generally sets down with considerable grace in the end.
     Since fictional representations of late antiquity and the early Christian era were exceedingly popular toward the end of the nineteenth century, they naturally seem outmoded today. The original buyers of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean may have expected something similar to the immensely popular novel by Marie Corelli Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy (1893). [1]
     Pater’s book, however, did not conform to a formula likely to produce a best-seller. His connoisseurship is evident in his inclusion of a miniature library of literary genres of the era in which he set his work: the entire Cupid and Psyche episode from The Golden Ass of Apuleius as well as Fronto’s oration, Eusebius’ letter, and a good bit of Lucian's Hermotimus. Though this assemblage might seem weighty with scholarship and bookish tastes, Marius the Epicurean was in fact attacked, not for being dryasdust, but as an enemy of public morals. The dangers some once saw in The Renaissance as an invitation to antinomian hedonism seem now distant indeed, but Yeats’ words can perhaps suggest the reaction of many less sympathetic readers in Pater’s own time and after. Though he says of the novel, “it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to all of us, the only great prose in modern English,” “yet I began to wonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.” [2] Yeats’ attitude surely expresses his personal regret at the dissolute ways and premature deaths of several associates including friends in the Rhymers’ Club, but newer forms of self-destructive behavior have rendered the aesthetic pose decidedly démodé.
     Even those with no lost bohemian friends once felt that Pater was potentially toxic. Legouis and Cazamian’s masterful and thorough literary history included a warning on Pater that must have made his readers feel as though they were in danger of contracting a dreadful and lethal progressive disease: “This consistent hedonism does not stop short of its ultimate stage; it shakes off all the chains with which society and the hygiene of souls have loaded the skillful search for pleasure, unmindful of the collectivity, it makes for the death of the individual along a path blossoming with roses and strewn with ashes.” [3]
     In spite of his place in what today seems quaint controversy, prose that strikes many as fustian, and absorption in the past, Pater’s recent editors claim him as a modernist of sorts. The prolific critic Harold Bloom deemed Marius the Epicurean “one of the more remarkable fictional experiments of the late nineteenth century," and considered Pater the inspiration of “all the High Modernists.” [4] while to Michael Levey the book "look[s] forward beyond its century to modern works of fiction". [5] To critic Gowan Dawson the book displays “a self-conscious manipulation of various levels of discourse and genre that anticipates the fictional techniques of modernism.” [6] One might in fact with some justice call the book postmodern on the basis of its substitution of bricolage for plotting, its self-referentiality and intertextuality, as well as its themes of decentered truth and ineluctable flux. In fact, Marius the Epicurean in both content and form is distinctly modern.
     Chapter VI titled “Euphuism” can be read as Pater’s apologia for his stylistic and narrative innovations, justifying highly artificial, ingenious, and learned rhetoric, yet mixed with vigorous and colorful demotic expressions, thereby constituting a “late” manner and forming a dramatic contrast to the realism and naturalism popular at the time of the book’s publication. Rather than ideals of spontaneity, sincerity, and directness, he claims for “the literary art,” “the secrets of utterance,” the sole power to convey “the intellectual or spiritual power within one.” (77) He praises Flavian’s taste: “What care for style! What patience of execution! What research for the significant tones of ancient idiom – sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular word-building! – gravis et decora construction!” (80) Though he likens his values to those of the writers of late antiquity and of the Elizabethan period, his style is, for his own age, a significant innovation.
     The modernity of the book in both style and content is evident if unintended from the statements of its most prestigious and hostile twentieth century reader, T. S. Eliot. While Yeats recalled Pater with admiration mixed with the pain of personal loss, Eliot’s far more influential criticism in “Arnold and Pater” aspires to a magisterial tone. To Eliot Pater followed Arnold in chipping away at the grounds for revealed religion (as though Darwin, Freud, Frazer, the Sacred Books of the East series, and the Higher Criticism had had little to do with God’s decline in the late nineteenth century). He objects to Arnold’s concept of Culture as a “study of perfection” as that “arrogates” too much from religion. Insisting on the value of the irrational, Eliot says with that without supernaturalism religion degrades into art and morality as though it were somehow thereby condemned. He tosses barbs even at those who seek to salvage spirituality: Spencer for preferring to call the divine “the Unknowable,” and Arnold for the “eternal-not-ourselves.” He imagines he can turn aside Pater’s comment that traditional religion is “impossible for a man of culture” by simply calling the remark “tedious.” While recognizing the very real phenomenon of what he calls the nineteenth century “dissolution” of thought,” Marius is significant to him chiefly for its inadequacy as religion. Eliot dismisses Pater’s life-work and characterizes his influence as noxious, saying, “The degradation of philosophy and religion, skillfully initiated by Arnold, is competently continued by Pater.”
     This is really the sum of his case, though he adds a few specific observations meant in the way of evidence. In formal terms Marius is “incoherent,” “a series of fresh starts,” a “hodgepodge.” While these departures from conventional narrative may support the book’s modernity to some, to Eliot they are simply signs of its failure. What really alarms Eliot, however, is not Marius the Epicurean but his preexisting discomfiture at finding religion in his day “partially retired and confined.” Paradoxically, for Eliot to lack religious faith is to be, as he calls Pater, “incapable of sustained reasoning.” [7]
     Pater, whether the fact pleases or dismays, was clearly looking forward while Eliot, who had made such technical innovations and so finely expressed twentieth century Angst in his early work, came to assume a defensive and reactionary posture, doing his best to look backwards to an age of universally shared faith. [8] The real modernity of Pater’s vision, though, emerges only upon a closer examination than Eliot cared to make. Though Marius is often said to have considered Epicureanism and Stoicism before becoming Christian in every way short of baptism, [10] this analysis neglects both the novel’s treatment of the Cyrenaic predecessors of Epicureanism and the likelihood that Pater had good reason to magnify his sympathy with Jesus and downplay Aristippus and Epicurus.
     Marius’ original orientation in the book is a sort of unreflecting traditional observance, but he then learns a spiritual goal from Plato, particularly from the Phaedrus, promising a vision like “a bride out of heaven” to the seeker who “fastidiously” selects “form and color” and mediates “much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth.” (26-7) Yet the higher rungs of Plato’s ladder of love strike him as fabulation. For him human nature is “bound so intimately to the sensuous world.” (121)
     The thoughtful young Roman admires the Stoicism of that remarkable emperor Marcus Aurelius, yet finds it unsatisfying. He leaves the imperial household feeling that, for all its temperance and humanity, his strongest impression was of “a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for once really golden.” (189) He condemns the Stoic and the medieval monk alike for despising the body and calling for worshippers to “Abase yourselves!” while contrasting their rejection of life with his wholesome “Cyrenaic eagerness . . . to taste and see and touch.” (165) It is because of his contempt for the world, Marius thinks, that the emperor can tolerate blood sports involving beasts in the amphitheater. (198)
     The philosophical position of Marius and presumably of Pater is best defined in the chapter title “The New Cyrenaicism.” He is a total skeptic for whom the phenomenal world, not to mention any notion of an afterlife, is a “day-dream.” (121) He feels a particular affinity for Lucian, who appears in the book and whose work Is enfolded within Pater’s text and who made the greater part of his humor out of debunking the claims of religious and philosophical systems. While the cruder sort of hedonist may occupy himself with satisfying grosser appetites, the wise man who realizes that he “can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the vail of immediate experience” will prefer the pleasures of “the highest moral ideal” which will lead to doing the “Father’s business.” His slogan emphasizes what a Buddhist might call mindfulness: “Be perfect in regard to what is here and now.” (120) The wise man who pursues an “esthetic education” in all the arts will find himself in the end with “a kind of religion – an inward, visionary, mystical piety” consistent with the sort Marius had instinctively displayed from his youth. This “new form of the contemplative life” would rest on “the intrinsic ‘blessedness’ of ‘vision’ – the vision of perfect men and things.” (122) This religion requires no irrational faith, no “unverified hypothesis” and, Pater drily adds, “makes no call upon a future after all somewhat problematic.” (123) In this way one might makes one’s own life a piece of music allowing one participation in the “’perpetual motion’ in things.” Moral and spiritual and aesthetic taste are revealed to be essentially the same (212) as the fine-tuned imagination will inevitably turn to morality’s service. (230)
     Criticism long before Yeats and Eliot yet on a similar moral or religious basis rather than a literary one disturbed Pater and he reacted. Indeed the very composition of the novel may well have been a project to clarify and redeem his value system. Pater says in a footnote to the 1888 edition of The Renaissance, “This brief ‘Conclusion’ was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.” Anxious to avoid the accusation of fostering immorality, he distorted his own views to portray Christianity in a more favorable light and to emphasize morality and even chastity to an extent that would never have occurred without the public controversy.
     Vague charges of “immorality” often represented euphemistic accusations of homosexuality. Though Pater tried to be fiercely private, his sexual orientation, no unusual thing in an academic culture that forbade marriage for Fellows until 1882, cannot be doubted. Stung by accusations that The Renaissance encouraged behavior the more shocking for being unspecified, he produced in Marius a singularly eremitical epicurean. It is of prime importance that “The blood, the heart, of Marius were still pure.” (124) Indeed, one critic at least finds that Pater “seems to spiritualize the search for pleasure as far as sacrifice pure and simple.” [10] To him Christianity is “the most beautiful thing in the world.” (303) (How this conviction differs from faith is unclear.) He not only finds the Christian home itself a (presumably sufficient) bride (277) and admires what he calls “the virginal beauty of the mother [!] and her children” (288) but he goes on to declare outright, “Chastity – as he seemed to understand – the chastity of men and women, amid all the conditions, and with all the results, proper to such chastity, is the most beautiful thing in the world and the truest conservation of that creative energy by which men and women were first brought into it.” (288) Even had it not been for such contrary assertions as his decision that he must be a “materialist” and “cling” to “the body and the affections it defined – the flesh” as opposed to incorporeal Platonic ideas, (103) he must surely be making such a conspicuous virtue of chastity to answer past critics and forestall future ones.
     Similarly, Marius’ approach to Christianity which never quite leads to conversion can only be an accommodation to the prejudices of his era. Pater’s father was himself an unbeliever and Pater felt strongly enough during his university days to found the Old Morality Club, often described as an agnostic group. Marius’ Christ-like self-sacrifice for Cornelius belies the insistence on the joy of Christianity in contrast to “the heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy” he sees in Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism. (103) Aware of the strong tendency for Christianity to view the body as corrupt, the world as hopelessly fallen, and the divine judge as stern indeed, he claims that the era of the Antonines represented a milder Christianity, one in which “gladness” is most welcome to God. (292-3) In this form of the church he finds its primary element to be Love. (338) Thus Cornelius’ “pleasantness” is the result of his faith, and to Marius the very first thing “he must ask of the powers” is to be happy in the world. (313) This agreeable sort of Christianity suits Marius’ nature as a “rich and genial character.” (112) Who could argue with a system that promises to deliver a “more durable cheerfulness” of which Greek pagan “blitheness” is a mere “transitory gleam”? (241-2)
     Nothing could be more modern than Pater’s acceptance of a world without certainty, without prescribed or revealed values except for those inherent in the human subject. Much of what he says is akin to the Existentialist writers of a half century ago or to more recent post-structuralist ones. Pater finds images for this flux and uncertainty, reusing old tags like a skillful bricoleur. The phrase from Lucretius “flammantia moenia mundi,” which in De rerum natura refers to a specific location between earth and heavens [12] is for Pater a beautiful and nearly mystical image of unknowability, the unstable flux of things and the mysterious boundaries between the human realm and the kosmos, “what might really lie behind,” (110). He cites Hadrian’s lines beginning “Animula, vagula” (101) to represent Marius’ speculation upon the death of Flavian, a poem which simply wonders about the soul’s wandering and the mystery of death, suggesting no answer but only a tone of pathos. The most powerful image of Pater’s enduring skepticism is perhaps the epigraph which might be translated "a winter's dream, when nights are longest." [13] Though Lucian speaks of a specific dream he means to discuss for the edification of the young, the notion of a long winter’s sleep is as well a skeptic’s view of human life experience, unsure of what is real and what is not, experiencing the hallucinatory fantasms of consciousness as we huddle in night-clothes against the cold of life’s inevitable suffering. More than a century later this powerful borrowed image seems not so much modern as timeless.



1. The genre included not only Corelli, a best-selling author for decades, but also books like Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), Kingsley’s Hypatia (1853), Wilkie Collins’ Antonina or The Fall of Rome (1871) Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896). On such texts was built Hollywood’s industry of Biblical epics.

2. William Butler Yeats, “More Memories LXXIII,” The Dial, August 1922, p. 148, reprinted in The Trembling of the Veil.

3. See p. 1273 of Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian’s A History of English Literature (first published by J. M. Dent in one volume in 1930). For a general treatment see Matthew Potolsky, “Fear of Falling: Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence,” ELH, Volume 65, Number 3, Fall 1998, pp. 701-729.

4. The first comment from Bloom is on page x of the introduction to the 1970 NAL edition; the second on p. 441 of Genius (Warner: New York, 2002).

5. See Michael Levey’s introduction page 8 of the 1985 Penguin edition.

6. Gowan Dawson, “Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and the Discourse of Sciencein Macmillan’s Magazine," English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2005.

7. T. S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater” originally appeared in The Bookman, Sept. 1930, LXXII, 1, and was later published in his Selected Essays. He was not alone in his opinion. According to Denis Donoghue Eliot’s essay “damaged Pater’s reputation beyond hope of repair in the English-speaking world.” Paul Elmer More had earlier made a similar attack in his Shelburne Essays, 8th Series “Walter Pater.” See also “The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe,” Comparative Critical Studies, Volume 5, Issue 2-3, 2008, p. 330 and David Weir’s “Decadence and Aestheticism: Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” chapter 4 of his Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

8. Eliot was sufficiently frightened by all the alternatives that he notoriously and rather absurdly called himself, in his preface to the volume For Lancelot Andrewes “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”

9. See Harold Bloom, Genius (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 441 “The greatness of Pater is his secularization of the religious epiphany, a displacement in which so many were to be his heirs: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and perhaps all the High Modernists.” For his influence on Joyce see again David Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

10. See, for example, Lee Behlman, “Burning, Burial, and the Critique of Stoicism in Pater's Marius the Epicurean,” Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol. 31, No. 1 , Spring 2004 or Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism by Carolyn Williams.