Walter Pater

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To surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry: Walter Pater, Many-Sidedness, and the Conversion Novel

Sebastian Lecourt

In recent years, commentators across several disciplines have begun to trace the key role that Protestant understandings of reli-gious conversion have played in shaping modern modes of subjec-tivity, in particular those of liberalism. Kenelm Burridge, for instance, argues that by encouraging individuals to regard religion as a matter of beliefs that they could radically change, evangelical preachers implicitly valorized the capacity to deliberately step outside custom, tradition, and given social roles . . . scrutinize them, formulate a moral critique, and envisage a new social order governed by new moralities (1314). Along similar lines, Webb Keane argues that when the Protes-tant churches taught their congregations that God spoke through the individual conscience instead of through received traditions, they were effectively inculcating John Lockes understanding of political freedom as requiring the violation of tradition, which is taken to be rooted in the contingent past and therefore seems to stand in the way of the full exercise of reason (116).1

Keane and Burridge both seek to put evangelical Protestantism back at the center of a modernization story in whichthe work of Max Weber notwithstandingit has often played marginal roles. Yet for scholars of the Victorian period their claims may have the somewhat

Abstract: This essay uses Walter Paters Marius the Epicurean (1885) to explore why certain Victorian liberals preferred to see religion as a matter of collective inheritance rather than personal belief. Recent commentators have portrayed the Protestant emphasis on individual conversion as one of the foundations of liberal individualism. Paters liberalism, however, sees radical breakage with the past as a threat to the humanist ideal of many-sidedness and instead imagines the path of a rich individuality as running precisely through a surrender to the inscriptions of cultural heritage. Indeed, Pater virtu-ally transforms the idea of self-culture into that of ethnographic culture, with the detached aesthete becoming a participant-observer who can both submit to the determi-nations of history and reflect on them through an anthropological lens.

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different effect of defamiliarizing the strong distaste that so many Victo-rian liberals expressed for the idea of religious conversion. If conver-sionist Protestantism had such direct links to the tradition of reflective individualism, why would Walter Pater, who for many remains the essen-tial Victorian theorist of detached reflection, write with disdain of the process whereby men became Christians under some sudden and over-powering impression instead of being born Christians (3: 119)? Why would Matthew Arnold, that avowed enemy of provinciality and cham-pion of disinterestedly trying . . . to see things as they really are (5: 237, 252), declare in 1876 that we should avoid violent revolution in the words and externals of religion (8: 142), and that religious change must come about by natural means and gradual growth, not suddenly, mirac-ulously (8: 138)? Religious historians have long noted the emergence, in nineteenth-century Britain, of an Anglo-Catholic strain within liberal Protestant thought that valorized tradition, ritual, and other aspects of religion seemingly unfriendly to individual choice (see McLeod 19091; Binfield 203, 20607). This liberal ritualism is often ascribed to nostalgia: intellectuals who could no longer believe in Christian doctrine, but remained sentimentally attached to the Church, supposedly found a kind of substitute-consolation in its aesthetic and ritual trappings. Yet such an account does not pause to consider what complications a turn toward anti-voluntaristic religion would pose for a liberal ethos other-wise centered upon cultivated individuality and critical reflection.

In this essay I read Walter Paters work as suggesting one partic-ular route by which a Victorian liberal could gravitate toward models of religion that valorize inheritance over volition. During the early 1870s, Pater became fascinated by anthropologist E. B. Tylors concept of cultural survivals, and over the next decade would use his essays on art, literature, and mythology to rework it from a theory of cultural detritus into an account of how certain aesthetic forms acquire their social signif-icance over time. By the time of Marius the Epicurean (1885), his novel of early Christianity, Paters revisionist account of survivals had become an almost Durkheimian celebration of religion as a fabric of images and symbols that embodies the collective memory of a society. The novel suggests that early Christianity was able to win the allegiance of Roman Europe not by introducing any new theological ideas but rather by recu-perating the ritual and artistic heritage of the pagan past. T. S. Eliot famously dismissed Marius as a paean to the dcor of a Christianity that Pater could no longer accept (35657), and while I do not think that

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Eliot was strictly wrong, I would suggest that his critique misses the way that valorizing a religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief (Pater 2: 8) became central to Paters understanding of many-sidedness, that Goethean ideal of character that figures so prom-inently in Victorian liberal writing. Ostensibly, many-sidedness was an ethos of complex, cultivated individualism. For Pater, however, becoming many-sided involves eschewing choice and decision as acts that narrow the self and instead surrendering to the determining influences of history, since these saturate the self with a maximum of memory and sentiment. Amanda Anderson has argued that some Victorian liberals found the idea of racial or cultural inheritance attractive because it promised to counteract the rootlessness implied by their own ideals of critical distance (11922). I suggest that something quite similar is going on in Paters work: for Pater, rewriting the conversion script to shift emphasis from change and breakage to continuity and inheritance artic-ulates a concern that traditional forms of liberal agency can narrow the very self that they claim to empower.

By reading Marius this way, I hope to reframe a critical tradi-tion that has focused largely on the question of whether Paters protag-onist really does convert to Christianityand, by extension, whether the novel represents Paters own rapprochement with Anglican ortho-doxy. Around 1860, while still an undergraduate at Oxford, Pater is reported to have undergone a kind of deconversion from Anglicanism. According to one of his early biographers, he burned most of his reli-gious books and embraced the subjective materialism that would make the Conclusion to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) seem so dangerous to his contemporaries (Wright 1: 199, 1: 170). By the mid-1870s, however, Pater was striking a different tone, and expressing (in the words of his friend, Mary Arnold Ward) a hesi-tating and wistful return towards Christianity, and Christianity of the Catholic type (A Writers Recollections 120). He proposed to Violet Paget the existence of a fourth sort of religious phase . . . possible for the modern mind beyond the three-stage progress of Enlightenment reason, aesthetic pessimism, and atheism that she imagined (Dono-ghue 96), and he questioned Wards own rationalistic critique of Chris-tianity by insisting upon the possibility of a recovered faith:

I once said to him in tte--tte, reckoning confidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty of youth, that orthodoxy could not possibly main-tain itself long against its assailants, especially from the historical and literary



camps, and that we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and looked rather troubled. I dont think so, he said. Then with hesitation, And we dont altogether agree. You think its all plain. But I cant. There are such mysterious things. Take that saying, Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden. How can you explain that? There is mystery in itsupernatural. (A Writers Recol-lections 163)

Ward began a tradition of reading Marius as Paters proxy-narrative of this change of mind, calling it the most beautiful of the spiritual romances of Europe since the Confessions (12021).2 But in fact Paters novel elides a full-on description of what would seem to be Mariuss conversion, leading many critics to question whether he is really meant to turn to Christianity at all (Court 12728). I suggest that Pater makes it difficult to tell whether Marius assents in a conventional sense because he is trying to imagine a kind of religious assent that escapes the dynamic of loss and gain altogethera conversion to many-sidedness, a transfor-mative experience in which the self becomes rich precisely by learning to hold back and remain in contemplative inaction as the fullest of all conditions. Although my point is that Pater articulates this move wholly within the language of liberal self-cultivation, I also want to stress that it represents a significant reinvention of individualism as a site of self-control. Indeed, Paters writings on religion virtually transform the clas-sical liberal model of self-culture into an ethnographic model of culture as the social totality that produces and embeds the individual. The most cultivated self, Pater suggests, is the one most fully attuned to the cultural system within which it is entrenched. This is why, I suggest, the cultivated subject that Pater portrays in Marius comes to look a bit like what James Buzard has called an autoethnographic narrator, a self that is fully immersed in a historical culture yet is also able to reflect on culture as culture, and tradition as tradition, in a way that retains a higher critical agency after all (11).

I begin with the idea of survival. The term survival led a busy life in late-Victorian literary culture. During the 1860s, as a wide array of Victorian social scientists turned toward models of evolutionary prog-ress, many found themselves preoccupied with the question of why certain biological and cultural forms endured while others died out. In his 1864 Principles of Biology, for instance, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase survival of the fittest to describe the process by which those organisms most able to fulfill the conditions to life managed to survive and propagate, while those that were less able died out (1: 445). Mean-


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while, the anthropologist E. B. Tylor, first in an 1867 address to the Royal Institution On the Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Man, and then in his pathbreaking Primitive Culture (1871), would define survivals as processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and which thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved (Primitive Culture 1: 15). The custom of saying God bless you when a friend sneezes, for instance, signals (according to Tylor) a primitive but now defunct belief in the identity of breath and the soul (On the Traces 91).

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that, by the end of the century, both Spencers and Tylors senses of survival were in heavy rotation among literary writers.3 In particular, Tylors noun had piqued the interest of many figures in the milieu of aestheticism. William Morriss 1888 essay on The Revival of Architecture acknowledges that new buildings constructed after Gothic models occasionally sink to the status of semi-Gothic survivals (670), while in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Oscar Wildes Lord Henry remarks that the mutila-tion of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives (21). Such writers, one could surmise, were drawn to Tylors sense of the word because it pointed toward a set of tensions central to the idea of decadencethe persistence of form beyond function, for example, and the autonomy of parts over the whole. Spencers survival of the fittest is the process by which certain organisms prove them-selves better than others at adapting to their environment, which is why he explicitly compares it to Mr. Darwins . . . natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life (1: 445). Tylors survivals, by contrast, are things that survive despite being out of step with the latest cultural advancesand it was precisely this kind of mismatch that drew Morriss and Wildes attentions. In the passage above, for example, Morris invokes the term survival to explore the relationship between an architectural form and the social system that produced it. When are contemporary structures built in a gothic style simply unthinking repetitions of an older form, and when are they capable of reviving something of the holistic society that underwrote medieval gothic? For Wilde, meanwhile, calling certain behaviors survivals allows him to suggest how they are charged with contradic-tory layers of motive, conscious and unconscious, which in turn



suggests a link between Tylors concept of survivals and emerging models of depth psychology (see Herbert 25258).

But perhaps the richest exploration of the survival as an aesthetic concept would come in the work of Walter Pater. In the late 1860s, Pater made the acquaintance of Andrew Lang, who held a pres-tigious Open Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, and belonged to an early circle of English aestheticist writers who sought to revive the pomes traditionnels forme fixe of medieval balladiers like Franois Villon, Clment Marot, and Pierre de Ronsard (see Crawford 85660). At the same time, Lang was developing an interest in anthropology, meeting Tylor at Oxford in 1872 and then reading Primitive Culture with rapt attention (Lang 12). Inspired by Tylors work, Lang would reroute his interest in ballad literature toward the study of folklore as a cultural survival, becoming an important anthropologist and literary primitivist in his own right. But he would also communicate his newfound interest to Pater, who by the mid-1870s had begun to deploy the term survival in his essays. Paters 1874 essay on William Words-worth, for instance, speculates that the poets sense of a life in natural objects represented a sort of survival, in . . . a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive condition, which some philosophers have traced in the general history of human culture, wherein all outward objects . . . were believed to be endowed with animation (5: 47)a nod to Tylors thesis that animism represented the original form of religion. Similarly, in The Bacchanals of Eurip-ides (1878), Pater refers to the Dionysian Thiasus ritual as a religious custom, in which the habit of an earlier world might seem to survive (7: 57), while in Marius the Epicurean he describes his protagonists pre-Roman folk religion as a survival that lingered on with little change amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and sentiments of which so much of it had grown (2: 7).

Although Pater, as critics have shown, was influenced by several strains of anthropological theory,4 the idea of survivals seems to have seized his imagination with special forcearguably because it allowed him to expand upon the problematic of historical recupera-tion that he had begun to theorize in The Renaissance. By the mid-1870s, Paters essays were using motifs of survival to deepen the historical scope of the idea of Renaissance so that it looked back beyond ancient Greece and toward the primitive human past. For example, where Winckelmann (1867) speaks of a universal pagan


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sentiment (1: 201) reasserting itself from age to age, Paters essay on Romanticism (1876) charts the recurrence of a desire for beauty and sweetness (5: 251) best exemplified by the Renaissance but also ultimately deriving from the free play of . . . savage life (5: 253). Simi-larly, Paters mid-70s essays on Greek mythology retrace how elements of primitive religion have been transmitted through successive eras until they have become the building blocks of modern literature. In the history of all myths, writes Pater in The Myth of Demeter and Persephone (1875),

There is first its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase, in which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living from mouth to mouth, and with details changing as it passes from place to place, there lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the natural world. We may trace it next in its conscious, poet-ical or literary, phase, in which the poets become the depositaries of the vague instinctive product of the popular imagination, and handle it with a purely literary interest, fixing its outlines, and simplifying or developing its situations. Thirdly, the myth passes into the ethical phase, in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical narrative are realised as abstract symbols, because intensely charac-teristic examples, of moral or spiritual conditions. (7: 91)

As stories survive through history, in other words, they simultaneously undergo a contraction of form and an expansion of meaning: they acquire concrete personae and standardized texts, but at the same time their significance also becomes increasingly general and symbolic. As Pater would put it a year later in A Study of Dionysus (1876), when a myth is formalized from a complete sacred representation and inter-pretation of the whole of life (7: 18) into a standardized written narra-tive, it also loses its original, particularized social significance for a merely human interest (7: 23). In antiquity, Pater writes, each race of and class of Greeks . . . had a religion of its own, centered upon the objects that came nearest to it and were most in its thoughts, with the rites of Dionysus almost certainly representing the religion of people who pass their lives among the vines (7: 910). And just as those rites would be taken up by Greek poets and transformed into literary symbols, so too were they themselves the surviving relics of a forgotten primitive tree-worship . . . found almost everywhere in the earlier stages of civilization (7: 11).

By the time of Marius, Pater had streamlined the dialectical rigors of these Greek Studies into a broader account of how cultural history is driven by the survival and transformation of aesthetic forms from age



to age. The novel narrates the life of a second-century Roman who befriends members of the early Christian church and develops an intense fascination for their iconography and rituals. Early Christianity, Pater suggests, captured the hearts and minds of Romans like Marius because it offered, not a rejection of classical pagan culture, but rather a taking up and a transforming of its fragments into a new mythos (3: 126, 97). The story of Jesus, for instance, was able to gather up images of hope . . . from that jaded pagan worldHercules wrestling with Death for possession of Alcestis, Orpheus taming the wild beasts, the Shepherd . . . carrying the sick lamb upon his shouldersand unite them in a new narrative that transfigured their old meanings (3: 104). As a kind of quasi-anthropological observer, Marius finds himself contem-plating that centuries growth, layer upon layer, of the curiosities of reli-gion (one faith jostling another out of place) without much concern . . . in the question which, if any of them, was to be the survivor, because he realizes that, through the interrelated processes of survival and reinven-tion, traditions that might seem to struggle against each other instead merge into a picturesque whole (2: 18485).

Read from the perspective of Victorian anthropological theory, the Greek Studies and Marius are interesting for the way that they posit a new relationship between survival and fitness. Where Spencers survivals survive because they possess an intrinsic merit, and Tylors survive despite being essentially unfit, Paters survivals acquire fitness simply by sticking around. In the most radical versions of this narrative, such as The Child in the House (1878), cultural value may become essentially arbitrary. So powerful, Pater writes, is our attrac-tion to certain aesthetic forms,

and yet accidents like those I have been speaking of so mechanically determine it; its essence being indeed the early familiar, as constituting our ideal, or typical conception, of rest and security. Out of so many possible conditions, just this for you and that for me, brings ever the unmistakable realization of the delightful chez soi; this for the Englishman, for me and you, with the closely-drawn white curtain and the shaded lamp; that, quite other, for the wandering Arab, who folds his tent every morning, and makes his sleeping-place among haunted ruins, or in old tombs. (8: 179)

What we have here, to adapt a good Paterian term, is appreciation: a cultural form becomes powerful, not because it expresses mans deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiri-


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tual life (7: 151), but because of the arbitrary familiarity it has acquired for a particular group of people. Tylor himself arguably imagined something like this process insofar as his examples of survivals tend to be objects whose original functions have been transmuted into a kind of aesthetic value. He points to the early modern practical coat that has become the Victorian gentlemans evening wear (Anthropology 16) and to the ostensibly ornamental details of the Victorian drawing room which lay bare their different histories upon a little reflection:

It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and modi-fiers of the results of long past ages. Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he who only knows his own time can be capable of rightly compre-hending even that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style of Louis XIV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking glass between them. Trans-formed, shifted, or mutilated, such elements of art still carry their history plainly stamped upon them. (Primitive Culture 1: 16)

During the 1920s, Tylors last major disciple, R. R. Marett, would devote several essays to this idea that inasmuch as survivals survive . . . they are not quite dead after all, but rather help to constitute and condition the living present (102). Sheer customariness, he argues in the Trans-valuation of Culture (1918), amounts to a kind of value (108), since a discarded rite may become an incident in a folk-story and a mask, once of sacred import, may decorat[e] the actor in a secular play (112). Yet Marett, like Tylor, retains a basic distinction between primary use-value and secondary aesthetic value, one that maps onto a broader dichotomy between the progressive development of new historical forms and the persistence of obsolete ones. Pater, by contrast, radically flattens the cultural field to the single level of acquired significance. Although his historicism is often called evolutionary, he tends in fact to imagine historical development as amplifying or refining existing forms instead of producing wholly new ones. For Pater, everything new in history is really a riff upon something that was already there.

Paters distinctive understanding of survival not only influenced his aesthetic practice (Dowling, Language 123), but also led him toward an ambitious rethinking of the very idea of culture itself. Pater is often read as a champion of self-cultivation, the liberal ideal of free exposure to variety of experience and diverse modes of life, issuing in an



independence of mind and spirit (Burrow 81; see Dowling, Vulgarization 7778). He also, as we have seen, developed some interest in Tylors evolu-tionary model of culture, or civilization (Primitive Culture 1: 1), which projects the image of personal development onto human history in general. Yet Paters survival-centered essays of the 1870s and 1880s also show him gradually turning toward the Romantic (and, eventually, modernist) notion of culture as the closed circulatory system of values and practices that binds a people together (Williams 8793). Culture in this sense is neither individual, nor progressive, but instead stands for the organic totality of a peoples way of life; where Tylor interpreted cultural institutions by locating them on a scale of intellectual and tech-nological advancement, this understanding of culture sees an objects significance as the symbolic meaning that it has acquired among cultural insiders. At one level the idea of survivals represents the antithesis of this view, since it treats social forms that have lost their original functions as essentially meaningless.5 Yet Christopher Herbert has noted how the survival-concept, insofar as it suggested a disparity between rational func-tion and continuing social relevance, very much implied a model of the social as organized around the acquired symbolic status of certain forms (263); and this, I argue, is where Pater takes the idea. For instance, in the above passage from The Child in the House, Paters contrast between the Arab and the Englishman suggests that it is individuals shared familiarity with certain recurring forms that binds them together in a sense of collective identity. Similarly, in Marius the Epicurean, long-surviving cultural forms serve to establish a kind of bond between indi-vidual and collective sentiment. Because Mariuss character has been shaped from an early age by his aesthetic surroundings, which are satu-rated with the surviving forms of earlier eras, he comes to feel within himself an echoing of all that was deep-felt or impassioned in the expe-riences of the past (3: 135).

Like the Romantics before him and the modernists after, Pater uses this holistic concept of culture to replace models of religion that stress personal belief with one that identifies the sacred with the authority of custom and collectivity. For Pater, institutional religion gains its power over the individual by gathering up an abundance of his societys recurring forms and thus bringing to an intense pitch a certain feeling of recognition and belonging. For this reason even a young religion like second-century Christianity must in some sense be old in order to work. Because the early Catholic Mass drew on so


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many pagan rites and symbols, he writes, it emerge[d] to general view already substantially complete, having already the character of what is ancient and venerable (3: 127):

The aesthetic charm of the catholic church [sic], her evocative power over all that is eloquent and expressive in the better mind of man . . . all this, as abundantly real-ized centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by the great medieval church-builders, by the great ritualists like Saint Gregory, and the masters of sacred music in the middle agewe may see already . . . towards the end of the second century. (3: 124)

Here Pater (as if anticipating the verbal tics of a much later critical school) harps on the word already to suggest how Christianity was always already an ancient and venerable institution. T. S. Eliot found it anachronistic to think that a second-century Roman, encountering Christianity for the first time, would nostalgically aestheticize it in the same manner as a skeptical Victorian intellectual; yet Paters claim is precisely that what we call nostalgia is not the hallmark of a late age but represents the primary religious sentiment of all periods. Indeed, for Pater, religions power comes not just from the pull of deep histor-ical memory but from collective states of feeling of the kind that that mile Durkheim would describe in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915). For instance, Paters draft-essay on Art and Religion suggests that the true essence of religion lies in a cons[cious]ness of the . . . community in a general way (Higgins 195), while Moral Philosophy argues that deference to custom, rather than proposi-tional assent, is the real basis of moral duty, since it implies sympathy with a body of persons (Higgins 194).6

In Marius, this collectivist take on religion has the striking effect of eliding the conversion that would seem to be central to the narrative. In one sense, of course, the novel belongs to a line of Victo-rian historical conversion novels that use a pagan characters turn toward Christianity to stand in for the Christianization of Europe in general (see Moran; Dahl). Yet because the novels main thrust is that Christianity won Rome over by reinventing the best aspects of classical paganism, the narrator must take care to distinguish the feelings that Marius experiences as he gravitates toward the new sect from the disturbing Evangelical experience of being born again:

Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time was gone by when men became Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression, and with all the



disturbing results of such a crisis. At this period, the larger number, perhaps, had been born Christians, had been ever with peaceful hearts in their Fathers house. (3: 119)

This passage recalls the distinction that William James (quoting Francis Newman) drew between the once-born religious sensibility, which sees the religious life as a progressive development of our natural selves, and those twice-born natures who must experience two lives, the natural and the spiritual, with a revolution of renunciation and despair in between (16667). For this reason Maureen Moran contrasts the process of passivity and surrender (188) dramatized in Marius with the manly heroic act of self-authorization described by the autobiography of Newmans illustrious brother (171). One might even say that the novel replaces conversion with survival as its preferred mode of religious changeone based on the transformation of the old rather than the irruption of the new. Survival also becomes a kind of substitute for salva-tion, a form of transcendence that requires no break between the world of flesh and the world of the spirit. For Pater, the dead live on only when their memory is yoked to physical objects: the tomb of Mariuss father, we are told, provides him with that secondary sort of life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realized memory of themthe subjec-tive immortality (2: 24). Survival performs both kinds of work in the novels famously ambiguous ending. Marius befriends members of the early Church, mingles among them, and becomes enamored of their ceremonies, then dies an almost accidental death and is named a martyr to the faith (3: 22324). He does not explicitly convert to Christianity, nor does the novel seem interested in whether the last rites administered to him bring about any sort of salvation; instead, he is incorporated post-humously into church hagiography, where he lives on in the memory of others. Like the myths of Greece and Rome, and like Virgilian pastoral, Marius himself becomes a survival of an older art, here arranged and harmonized . . . by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many times (3: 9697).

At this point there are several ways that we could identify Marius with an anti-liberal turn in Paters thought. The novels rejec-tion of conversion, for example, seems to anticipate the work of modernist anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, who saw the Evangel-ical emphasis on conversionespecially the conversion of othersas


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part of an imperialistic hubris that ignored the value of the local and instead sought to conscript all peoples into a single Whig history of rational progress (276). Similarly, Mariuss embrace of a holistic idea of social systems would seem to put it in a line of Victorian novels, identi-fied by James Buzard, that reject the imperial view from nowhere and instead remind Europe and England that they too are provincial (3759). This reading in particular appears to corroborate recent work that has questioned familiar accounts of Pater as a theorist of liberal individualism. Rachel Teukolsky, for instance, has argued that Paters post-Renaissance work shows a growing preoccupation with the work of creative communities (10148).

Yet it would be wrong, I argue, to read Paters turn to collec-tivity and tradition as a straightforward rejection of the liberal indi-vidualism with which Dowling associates himfor in fact Pater consistently articulates it through the rhetoric of that key Victorian liberal virtue, many-sidedness. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the English phrase many-sidedness back to John Strangs translation of the German Vielseitigkeit in his Germany in MDCCCXXXI (1836). Over the rest of the century it would become the preferred term among British writers for the German humanist ideal of the cultivation and harmonious development of the whole personality (Tennyson 137). John Stuart Mill employs the phrase in On Liberty (1859) to exhort his readers to a variety of . . . experience (67); Arnolds Culture and Anarchy (1869) uses it to demand that we com[e] to our best at all points (5: 180); and Paters Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance invokes the idea of many-sidedness to ask the reader, How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? (1: 236). For Mill, the goal of many-sidedness was to preserve the individuals autonomy against the forms of dependence encour-aged by specialized labor. For Pater, however, many-sidedness stands for an ethos that seeks self-enrichment precisely in the disavowal of autonomy, agency, and choice. To become many-sided, in Paters mind, one must first learn to hold back from choice and let a rich, contradic-tory range of influences build up the self. As he puts it in Art and Religion, it is only within a [great] System, mighty with associations deeply rooted in history, that a life of high artistic egotism, like Goethes, really finds its place (Inman 24). This line of thought can be seen as early as Pico Della Mirandola (1871), in which Pater praises



the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcile forms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust the various products of the human mind to one another in one many-sided type of intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination to feed upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to the generous instincts of that age. (1: 30)

In Marius this celebration of religious syncretism gives way to a more general ideal of opening oneself to the possibility of an ampler vision that gathers up the scattered fragments of different worldly wisdoms:

Throughout that elaborate and lifelong education of his receptive powers, [Marius] had ever kept in view the purpose of preparing himself towards possible further revelation some daytowards some ampler vision, which should take up into itself and explain this worlds delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic, recovered at last. (3: 21920)

Here Pater strongly echoes a tradition of typological thought in which Christianity represents the synthetic fulfillment of all truth that has come before it. Yet the ultimate thrust of this passage is not that Chris-tianity offers Marius philosophical closure, only that it represents a major breakthrough in the ongoing education of his receptive powers. Words like possible and ampler suggest that Marius finds Christianity so appealing because its deeply syncretistic nature encour-ages a stance of perpetual openness to further expansion, and reminds him that without him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea, a product . . . of the conjoint efforts of human mind through many generations . . . rich in the worlds experience that is larger than any one creed (3: 28). This is not a pick-and-choose mode of religiosity; instead, what Pater seems to be imagining is a kind of selfhood that is rich enough to yield to the contradictory elements of the cultural stream and in some measure say yes to all of them. The key value that sustains Marius throughout his education is less willfulness or inde-pendence than the impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to anything that, as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him strongly (3: 110).

And the converse is also true: just as a religion of cultural inheri-tance facilitates a many-sided type of intellectual culture, so do strong moments of decision, in Paters mind, threaten self-cultivation by cutting off lines of possible influence. Paters preferred term for such moments is


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sacrifice: animal sacrifice recurs throughout Marius as a symptom of humankinds limited sympathies for otherness (see 2: 23444), while Christian asceticism is condemned for represent[ing] moral effort as essentially a sacrifice, the sacrifice of one part of human nature to another, as against the idea of culture, which envisions a harmonious development of all the parts of human nature, in just proportion to each other (3: 122).7 In a strict sense Paters critique of sacrifice is aimed at any ethos that would privilege one side of human life over others, from Marcus Aureliuss Stoicism, which the narrator calls a theory . . . of loss and gain (3: 17), demanding the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympa-thies (3: 2324), to Mariuss simple childhood cult of Numa, which, for all of its virtues, makes a claim of a quite exclusive character, defining itself as essentially one of but two possible leaders of his spirit, the other proposing to him unlimited self-expansion in a world of various sunshine (2: 47). But Paters critique also focuses special animus upon propositional attitudesnot just because they privilege the abstract over the concrete, but also because they imagine truth to proceed from a struggle between mutually exclusive alternatives. Thus, in Emerald Uthwart (1892), Pater writes that Emerald found himself in a system of fixed rules, amid which, it might be, some of his own tendencies and inclinations would die out of him through disuse (8: 211), while in Two French Stories (1872) he notes that

the student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of the emanci-pation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms of some well-recognized controversy, with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelligence and limiting ones sympa-thies. (1: 26)

In contrast, a system of symbolic usages that emphasizes the sacred-ness of time, of life and its events, and . . . of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth (2: 910), can (as the paratactic structure of this sentence suggests) open up an enchanted region where there are no fixed parties, no exclusions, only a unity of culture in which whatso-ever things are comely are reconciled, for the elevation and adorning of our spirits (1: 2627). This is why Marius, though it does contain moments of epiphany, tends to diffuse their force in such a way that they become simply more sources of influence for a progressively cultured life rather than disruptions of it. In chapters 1619, Marius is on the



road, like Paul of Tarsus, and experiences a series of epiphanies. Each one seems at first like it might turn out to be a decisive turning-point in his story, and yet each also passes, diffusing itself into the so-called actual things of his subsequent experience and making him richer (3: 73). Pater staggers such moments as if to discourage us from attaching too much transformative significance to any one and to remind us that all real transformation must be a gradual process. The lesson here is not simply that Marius should seek the ideal in the actual, but that what is most valuable to the self is the kind of restraint that knows how to yield to multiple forms of intense experience, assimilating their influence without deciding any one to be final or all-sufficient.8

In short, Paters religious phase possible for the modern mind centers on the cultivation of a self that is rich precisely because it has abstained from those forms of agency usually associated with modern individualism. Although we are still in a liberal idiom, it is one that is at odds with the traditional aestheticist preoccupation with discriminating experiences of higher from those of lesser intensity; here, the highest intensity comes from daring to take in more rather than less.9 Indeed, it even leads to a kind of passivity, requiring for Marius some curtailment of his liberty, in concession to the actual manner, the distinctions, the enactments of that great crowd of admi-rable spirits whom he joins (3: 29). In this respect Paters novel would seem to corroborate the suspicion, voiced by many commentators on Victorian liberalism, that the rhetoric of many-sidedness played a crucial role in reimagining individualism as the site of self-control rather than of personal liberty. J. W. Burrow, for example, argues that the discourse on many-sidedness helped to shift the British liberal tradition from a hedonistic ethic of want satisfaction to one of the fullest possible realization of the whole self (82)from independence to individualitywhile David Wayne Thomas maintains that mid-Victorian liberal views of cultivated agency effectively displaced high-romantic conceptions of original agency (xiii) at a time when the latter was becoming increasingly associated with working-class agitation, and the most pressing concern for the dominant middle-class culture was no longer how to valorize . . . agency but how to culti-vate its forms along specific lines among plebians (xiv).10 Although it is difficult to implicate Pater in the kind of anti-democratic sentiments that one finds in Matthew Arnolds essays of the late 1860s, he does seem to share Arnolds sense that the cultivated self needs to be saved


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from the peculiar narrownesses of British individualism. For Pater, Puritanism and Jacobinism alike have recapitulated the errors of medi-eval asceticism, and his response is, in effect, to invert the paradox and imagine self-restraint as the path to unlimited self-expansion. To become a complex individual one must cultivate (however paradoxical that verb may be in this context) a rapt attentiveness to the deter-mining forces of the material universe:

To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar collectedness . . . a sort of devout circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of the demand upon him of anything in which deity was concerned. . . . And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world of men and things . . . kept him serious and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in after-years much engrossed him, when he had learned to think of all religions as indifferent. (2: 2122)

Demanding, devout circumspection, serious and dignifiedthese are phrases more evocative of asceticism than aestheticism. This trajectory within Paters thought is perhaps epitomized by the Lace-daemon chapter of his last major work, Plato and Platonism (1893), which argues that among all the ancient Greeks it was in fact the Spar-tans who most nearly achieved the true and genuine Hellenism (6: 224). Their system of education made no sharp distinction between mental and bodily exercise (6: 224) but rather conceived the whole of life as matter [sic] of attention, patience, a fidelity to detail (6: 215); their religion, although strenuous and monastic, was also cheerful, and above all a religion of sanity, supporting that harmony of func-tions, which is the Aristotelian definition of health (6: 227). If one were to ask, Why this strenuous task-work, day after day; why this loyalty to a system, so costly to you individually . . . ?, an intelligent young Spartan might have replied: To the end that I myself may be a perfect work of art (6: 232).11

Paters portrait of Spartan discipline highlights perhaps the most startling consequence of his anthropological turn: ethnographic culture does not replace liberal self-culture so much as merge with it. The Spartan system of education maps out a practice of self-discipline so comprehensive that following it becomes a matter less of doing than of being: You couldnt really know it unless you were of it (6: 215). Where writers in the Durkheimian tradition would draw increasingly stark lines between individual and group consciousness (Pecora



10130), Pater tends to imagine the cultivated subject and the subject of culture as one. In particular, his work is fascinated by the idea that submission to culture can dovetail with those forms of detachment and reserve that drive his brand of reflective individualism. For Pater, the self that yields before the social totality may not be an active agent, but it is a contemplative agent, one whose individuality always exceeds, or stands a step removed from, the cultural realm in which it is immersed.12 Marius the Epicurean dramatizes this dynamic by placing its protagonist into a participant-observer relation to culture (Buzard 810) that affirms the power of collectivity while consolidating a kind of detach-ment for the individual who can contemplate that power as such. Marius, that is, can stand both within culture and apart from it by taking on an anthropological perspective himself. For instance, Pater describes his protagonists increasing attraction to Christian ritual as a quasi-functionalist sympathy with the idea of historical community that holds him back from it, allowing him to become a center of consciousness for the narrators anthropological ruminations:

Marius informed himself with much pains concerning the church in Cecilias house. . . . And what he found . . . was the vision of a natural, a scrupulously natural love, transforming, by some new gift of insight into the truth of human relationships, and under the urgency of some new motive by him so far unfathom-able, all the conditions of life. He saw, in all its primitive freshness and amid the lively facts of its actual coming into the world, as a reality of experience, that regenerate type of humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and his successors, down to the best and purest days of the young Raphael, working under conditions very friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an artistic ideal. He felt there, felt amid the stirring of some wonderful new hope within himself, the genius, the unique power of Christianity. (3: 11011)

This passage is structured largely around the repetitions of he found . . . He saw . . . He felt . . . , which frame the scene in terms of Mariuss immersed point of view. Yet the observations themselves and the stakes they imagine betray a theoretical distance that seems better suited to the nineteenth-century narrator than to the second-century participant. This back-and-forth between immersed and detached perspectives recurs throughout the later episodes of the novel, such as this scene in which Marius observes a church service:

Coming thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so entirely united, in a silence so profound, for purposes unknown to him, Marius felt for a moment as if


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he had stumbled by chance upon some great conspiracy. Yet that could scarcely be, for the people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new world, from the very face of which discontent had passed away. Corresponding to the variety of human type there present, was the various expres-sion of every form of human sorrow assuaged. What desire, what fulfillment of desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features of these ranks of aged men and women of humble condition? . . . Was some credible message from beyond the flaming rampart of the worlda message of hope, regarding the place of mens souls and their interest in the sum of thingsalready moulding anew their very bodies, and looks, and voices, now and here? (3: 13132)

Marius enters this scene as an outsider, stumbling upon culture as a kind of conspiracy or pattern, a formation vibrant within yet cryptic from without. The first sentence thus segues into a sequence of ques-tions that are implicitly attributed to Mariuss perspective, yet seem to come from a more distanced, almost theoretical point of view: what is the shared desire that centers this community? What is it that has mould[ed] anew their very bodies, and looks, and voice, into a collec-tive? Yet as soon as the ceremony ends, we are told that the natural soul of worship in Marius has been satisfied as never before (3: 141). Marius receives the benefits of (to adapt a phrase) total immersion, yet he can evidently also come and go as a reflective individual.

In her review of Marius, Mary Arnold Ward, although gener-ally praising the novel, also accused Pater of advocating a fundamen-tally disingenuous stance toward religion. Submit, she paraphrased the novels message, to the religious order about you, accept the common beliefs, or at least behave as if you accepted them, and live habitually in the atmosphere of feeling and sensation which they have engendered . . . while you think with the elect (Marius 13536). Marius is indeed built around this kind of duality between inward thought and outward conformity, but where Ward sees contradiction, Pater seems to see enrichmentnot a dichotomy between individu-alism and conformity, but a refusal to give up the rewards of either.

Yale University

NOTES

I would like to thank those individuals who read and commented upon drafts of this essay as it evolved from seminar paper to dissertation chapter to article: Linda Peterson, Katie Trumpener, Rachel Teukolsky, James Eli Adams, and the anonymous readers at Victorian Studies.



1For more on individual conversion as a defining experience of modernity, see Bebbington 4274.

2Besides Ward, it is Paters early biographer Thomas Wright who is perhaps most responsible for popularizing the view that Marius signals Paters return to Chris-tian orthodoxy following a young-adult dalliance with subjectivism and decadence. Both Ward and Wright established a narrative template that would inform major studies of Pater like Ulrich Knoepflmachers in Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (1965). For a recent challenge to this narrative, see Potolksy; for a wider overview of the critical reception of Marius, see Court.

3The OED also suggests that, apart from a single example in the early eigh-teenth century, Tylor was the first writer in English to use the word survival as a noun.

4See Dowling, Language 11720; Evangelista; Kissane; Shuter 10006.5Bronislaw Malinowski in particular spent much ink ridiculing the idea that

there could ever be a cultural feature which does not fit in with its cultural medium . . . persist[ing] rather than function[ing]; a horse-drawn cab in 1940s New York City, for instance, may be anachronistic, but it also clearly functions within an economy of nostalgia and prestige (2829).

6See Durkheim 247. Perhaps the most striking such passage in Pater comes in The Bacchanals of Euripides, where he lets one of the seminal English organicists explain the collective ex-stasis generated by the Thiasus ritual: Coleridge, in one of his fantastic speculations, refining on the German word for enthusiasmSchwrmerei, swarming, as he says, like the swarming of bees togetherhas explained how the sympathies of mere numbers, as such, the random catching on fire of one here and another there, when people are collected together, generates as if by mere contact, some new and rapturous spirit, not traceable in the individual units of a multitude (7: 5657).

7Paters use of the term sacrifice is surprisingly close to Friedrich Nietzsches; see Nietzsche 6566 and Taylor 599. I would like to thank Nathan Suhr-Sytmsa for bringing this connection to my attention.

8There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Pater espoused a strangely nega-tive view of assent, not as the embrace of ideas, but as the refusal to dismiss any. For instance, writing to Ward a few months after the publication of Marius, he remarked: To my mind the beliefs, and the function in the world, of the historic church, form just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities, which the human mind is power-less effectively to dismiss from itself; and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the same sort of assent that we give to any assumption, in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question [of] whether those facts were real will, I think always continue to be what I should call one of the natural questions of the human mind (Ward, A Writers Recollec-tions 210, emphasis original).

9Pater himself seems to have taken this sacrificial approach to aesthetic discrimination from time to time. The Rev. Anthony Bathe, for example, reportedly recalled to Thomas Wright: Once . . . when I had been speaking to him of some book he rebuked me, and said life is not long enough to read such things, and then he inveighed against the folly of promiscuous reading and of squandering ones attention


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on unprofitable subjects (Wright 2: 14142). Wright continues: Before opening a book he used to say to himself, Is this book likely to assist me in my great aim in life? If the answer was No, he would put the book aside, no matter how tempted he might be to read it. In short, he practiced self-repression systematically (2: 142). Here, aesthetic cultivation entails sacrifice and curtails liberty in precisely the manner of which Marius warns.

10The ambivalent attitude toward agency evident in Victorian discussions of many-sidedness mirrors the dual attitudes toward eclecticism that Christine Bolus-Reichert has recently identified in Victorian thought. Like many-sidedness, and indeed like the idea of liberalism itself, Victorian eclecticism could carry connotations either of freedom and open-mindedness or of laxity and mediocrity (7). It could imply both active discrimination and a passive absorption of the given (910). Bolus-Reichert sees Paters work up through Marius as practicing a volitional eclecticism (16); I am arguing that Paters take is more complicated than this, both in Marius and earlier.

11For a broader reading of the relationship between asceticism, aestheticism, and masculinity in Pater, see Adams 14981.

12In an essay on Victorian theories of pedagogy, Sarah Winter has argued that figures like Harriet Martineau and James Mill saw ethnographic knowledge of other peoples societies as an influence that made for a many-sided character: Locke, Mill, and Martineau do not seek knowledge of diverse customs and habits as an end in itself, but as a means to a position of liberal indifference for the educated person, moral philosopher, social scientist, colonial administrator, and thoughtful traveler (438). Pater, I would suggest, wants to imagine that you can achieve the same end by reflectively grasping your inscription within your own culture.

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Walter Pater