Marius The Epicurean - Themes

Themes

Marius the Epicurean explores a theme central to Pater's thinking and already examined in his earlier Imaginary Portrait 'The Child in the House' (1878): the importance to the adult personality of formative childhood experiences. In addition, conscious of his growing influence and aware that the ‘Conclusion’ to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) had been misconstrued as amoral, Pater set about clarifying his published ideas. As he states in the third edition of The Renaissance (1888), Marius the Epicurean "deal more fully with thoughts suggested by" the 'Conclusion'. In particular Pater is careful in the novel to distinguish between 'hedonism', as usually understood, and Marius's cerebral, ascetic version of Epicureanism:

"How little I myself really need," (runs Marius' diary ) "when people leave me alone, with the intellectual powers at work serenely. The drops of falling water, a few wild flowers with their priceless fragrance, a few tufts even of half-dead leaves, changing colour in the quiet of a room that has but light and shadow in it ..."

Marius' quest exemplifies Pater's dictum that we should "be for ever testing new opinions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy" :

"Liberty of soul, freedom from all partial doctrine which does but relieve one element of our experience at the cost of another, freedom from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past and calculation for the future: this would be but the preliminary to the real business of education – insight, insight through culture into all that the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence."

Thus the novel elaborates Pater's ideal of the aesthetic life – a life based on αίσθησις, perception – and his theory of the stimulating effect of the pursuit of sensation and insight as an ideal in itself. Centrally, Marius dedicates much time, and Pater much space, to examining the Meditations and character of Marcus Aurelius, who was warmly admired in the 19th century as a paragon of intellectual and moral virtue (by Niebuhr, Matthew Arnold, Renan, George Long and many others), but whose Stoicism Marius ultimately finds too bleak and lacking in compassion.

The appeal of religion – whether ancestral paganism or primitive Christianity – is another major theme of the novel. Indeed the novel's opening and closing episodes betray Pater's continuing nostalgia for the atmosphere, ritual and community of the religious faith he himself had lost. Michael Levey, a biographer and editor of Pater, writes: "Pater is able to depict an early, pure Christianity, not yet sectarian, authoritarian, or established, which offers Marius a vision which is ideal because untarnished." Early Christianity, Pater notes, "had adopted many of the graces of pagan feeling and pagan custom ... So much of what Marius had valued most in the old world seemed to be under renewal and further promotion". Marius, however, having outgrown his childhood piety, dies before he has engaged intellectually with the doctrines of the new faith. He remains essentially Epicurean: "For still, in a shadowy world, his deeper wisdom had ever been, with a sense of economy, with a jealous estimate of gain and loss, to use life, not as the means to some problematic end, but, as far as might be, from dying hour to dying hour, an end in itself – a kind of music, all-sufficing to the duly trained ear, even as it died out on the air." His epiphany in the Sabine Hills, where he sensed a "divine companion" and the existence of a Platonic "Eternal Reason" or Cosmic Mind, is not a prelude to religious faith. Readers may feel that Pater makes it hard for them to believe that Marius, with his acute, probing, restless mind, would have embraced Christian doctrines if he had examined them. Instead the novel remains open-ended, leaving us with a provisional ideal of 'aesthetic humanism'.