THE LATEST PHILOSOPHICAL ROMANCE.

Marius the Epicurean. By WALTER PATER. M.A., Fellow of Brazenose College, Oxford. Macmillan and Co.:

Hitherto Mr. Pater has been known chiefly as a writer who has turned almost his whole attention to the history of the Renaissance—its literature art, and social life. His "Renaissance " may be said to have become a standard work, and at the time of its publication compelled the attention and won the admiration even of those who differed from the writer's philosophy of life as shadowed forth in that fascinating book. Nor can it be said that Mr. Pater has made any new departure in the work before us. The motif of " Marius the Epicurean " is rather an expansion of that of the " Studies." The " note " of each is very similar, the chief difference being that in his present essay the author has elected to clothe his thoughts in the form of a philosophical romance. It must be noted, however, that in " Marius " the lines of thought are broadened and deepened, with the result of greater suggestiveness and a richer vein of sentiment. That which startled not a few persons in Mr. Pater's first book—the serious and eloquent praise of a philosophy of life, which was in its essence a pure Epicureanism—finds fresh emphasis in " Marius ;" but in the latter work the writer's theories take a more practical shape, and are of broader application.

Marius, the hero of the romance, is a youth of noble birth, whoso family had fallen from their once prosperous estate, until their former wealth and dignity were little more than a name. But the father of the household had always retained the old patrician feeling, and had been careful to hand down the tradition to his son, intact and unsullied ; so that the boy grow up in an atmosphere of noble instincts and gentle thoughts, which the humble material circumstances of the house had no power to cancel. Especially was his boyhood influenced by the moral and religious sentiment, the pieties, rites, and observances belonging to Latin rural life in the second century. The religion of his house made large demands upon its members in the direction of ritual and formula, and these bred in the young Marius so great a sense of responsibility towards his fellow-men, and even toward all living things, that while still a boy he was already a philosopher—serious, dignified, and thoughtful amid his daily avocations and duties. The picture which Mr. Pater makes of the life at the little farm, and the attitude of his hero to this environment, is one of exceeding beauty, full of the finest and most delicate shading. Here is a description of the outward aspect of the old villa-farm : "The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luca, even as he got his first view of the Port of Venus,would pause by the way to read the face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying well away from the white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of pale yellow marble, mellowed by age, which ho saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea wind were in the relicts of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigns within. . . . . The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath ; the distant harbour, with its freight of white marble going to sea ; the lighthouse, Temple of Venus Speciosa, on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summer nights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the new made hay along all the passages of the house."

This lost image is a delightful one ; a picture in a sentence—the salt breath of the sea mingled with the sweet meadow scents blowing through all the old farmhouse.

Mr. Pater's leading idea in " Marius " is to show how a very susceptible and impressionable nature is gradually developed on its moral side through its intellectual and aesthetic side. From his quiet country home the hero goes to Pisa, where, in the study of philosophy and rhetoric, the educative process is carried on which had already actually begun under the paternal roof. The youth was already thinking out his philosophy of life —the lines upon which the intellectual and ethical fabric of his being were to be built up. The " best " in life, it seemed to him, was the pursuit of all the finer and most exquisite sensations, and this was to coexist with a gentle and guiltless life, a life which was to be hurtful to no man and to no living thing in the smallest degree. At Pisa, Marius becomes a familiar friend of the young Flavian, a youth of brilliant promise, whose companionship exerts a great influence over him, and whose premature death makes a deep impression upon him. The two young men acted upon each other as stimulants in the pursuit of a pure and refined Epicureanism.

At the death of Flavian, Marius proceeds to Rome, and his journey thither is described with rare skill and literary grace. The following picture is as delicate and minute as a mosaic, and yet has a breadth of suggestiveness that altogether saves it from being merely pretty and photographic :—

" The opening stages of his journey through the fine, golden weather, for which he had waited three days beyond the time of starting-days brown with the first ruins of autumn-brought him, by the bye-ways, among the lower slopes of the Apennines of Jura to the town of Luca, a station on the Cassian-way ; travelling so far mainly on foot, the baggage following under the care of his attendants. He wore a broad felt hat, in fashion not very unlike a more modern pilgrim's, the neat head projecting from the collar of his grey pænula, or travelling mantle, sewed closely together over the breast, but with the two sides folded back over the shoulders, to leave the arms free in walking ; and was altogether so trim and fresh, that as he climbed the hill from Pisa, by the long steep line through the olive-yards, and turned to gaze where he could just discern the cypresses of the old school garden, like the black lines upon the yellow walls, a little child took possession of his hand, and looking up at him with entire confidence, paced on bravely at his side, for the mere pleasure of his company, to a spot where the road sank again into the valley beyond.... And of the little town of Luca he felt that indescribable sense of a welcoming in the mere out ward appearance of things which seems to mark out certain places for the special purpose of evening rest, and gives them always a peculiar amiability in retrospect. Under the deepening twilight the rough-tiled roofs seem to huddle closer together side by side, like one continuous shutter over the whole township, spread low and broad over the snug sleeping-rooms within; and the place one sees for the first time, and must tarry in for a night, breathes the very spirit of home. The cottagers lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the shadows grow larger, and went to rest early; though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn cornfields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple ; and yet so quiet and air-swept was the place, you could hardly tell where the country left off in it, and the field paths became its streets."

During the first period of Marius' sojourn in Rome he falls under the influence of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose impressive personality and exceptional life, with its gracious dignity and serene upliftedness above the changes and chances of fate, were peculiarly calculated to excite the respect and admiration of a youth like Marius. But gradually the young man awakens to the sense that there are needs in his nature which neither the purest form of Epicureanism, nor the noblest phase of Stoicism, as exemplified in Marcus Aurelius, can satisfy. He eventually turns his thoughts towards Christianity, but more in the fashion of a fair-minded critic, not disinclined to be sympathetic, than as a self-surrendering disciple. There is much in the strange new religion that wins his admiration; its universal love, persuasiveness, and mystic poetic beauty fired his imagination, always abnormally receptive, and seem almost to have wholly conquered the spiritual part of his nature. Intellectual surrender, however, he does not make, and at this point of his history comes his death. He is made a prisoner by mistake with, the Christian martyrs, and suffers with them.

And so Marius ends his life in a vague and dreamy hope of he scarce knows what, his last hours being passed by no means in the leaden apathy and callousness of him who has convinced himself that there is no Beyond, but rather in a mood of speculative curiosity, with a leaning towards, and a vague yearning for, the " larger hope." In the following beautiful passage towards the close of the book Mr. Pater portrays this mental condition of Marius at the point of death :—

" And just then again, amid the memory of certain touching actual words and images, came the thought of the great hope, that hope against hope, which, as he conceived, had arisen— lux sedentibus in tenebris—upon the aged world, the hope which Cornelius had seemed to bear away upon him in his strength, with a buoyancy which had made Marius feel, somehow, less that by a caprice of destiny he had been left to die in his place, than that Cornelius had gone on a mission to deliver him also from death. There had been a permanent protest established in the world—a plea, a perpetual after-thought—which humanity would henceforth ever possess in reserve against a wholly mechanical and disheartening theory of itself and its conditions. It was a thought which relieved for him the iron outline of the horizon about him, touching it with soft light from beyond, filling the shadowy hollow places to which he was on his way with the sonnets of definite affection ; and confirming also certain definite considerations, by which he seemed to link himself to the generation to come in the world he was leading."

Mr. Pater's literary style is one of unusual fascination. The Epicureanism of which his hero is to a large degree the dramatic embodiment is reflected, so to speak, in the pages of the chronicler ; that is to say, there is everywhere throughout the book a most careful and dainty choice of phrases and words. Infinite pains are taken to choose the exact epithet or image that shall be most apt for the writer's purpose. The result is that the style is delicate and subtle rather than nervous or strong-pellucid and luminous, for the most part, as a mountain brook, the thoughts lying like pebbles beneath the transparent water. Only occasionally, when the theme grows most philosophic, does the author's meaning become a little obscured by a tendency to involution in the style, and a too frequent use of parenthesis. Some of the descriptive passages in Marius, pictures of natural scenery and rural life, are the most delightful genre studies of the kind which we have met with for a long time, and might take rank with Mr. Ruskin's best work in the same direction. One of the most marked characteristics of Mr. Pater's literary method is its "selection"—that highest touchstone of the true artist—the trained self-command of the writer which never permits him to overstep a wise literary restraint, or to descend for one moment into diffuseness. Yet this fastidiousness and selection never degenerate into an effeminate euphuism, as there was some peril of its doing, the style always maintaining a measured calm, and ordered beauty, most befitting the lofty and philosophic theme.

There is but one point in Mr. Pater's manner to which we might, perhaps, take exception. We certainly think that it breaks the continuity of thought, and jars upon the reader's mind almost as a palpable anachronism would, to illustrate one's argument by literary allusions to a much later period than that which is being treated of.

To illustrate what we mean, take the following extracts,

The italics are ours :—

" For in truth, all through the book there is an unmistakably real feeling for asses, with bold Swiftlike touches, and a genuine animal breadth."

" And the scene of the night watching of a dead body lest the witches should come to tear off the flesh with their teeth is worthy of Théophile Gautier."

And again:

"As Wilhelm Meister finds out one day, just not too late."

We submit that references to Swift, Theophile Gautier, and Goethe in criticising the literature of the second century, coming as they do in the midst of a romance in which the writer's personality is supposed to be merged, as much as possible, in the characters, incidents, and time he is describing, militate against verisimilitude, and are an obvious mistake in art.

That is the one word of adverse comment we have to make against the literary style of " Marius the Epicurean." The reader is carried on by the magical charm of the mere writing, apart from any consideration of the theme, by its musical flow and refined beauty, its graceful classicism and purity, and by a certain tenderness and blandness that breathe through it like the scent of fresh violets in a summer room, until he is lapped in a sort of pleasant dream, as by an exquisitely played andante by Beethoven, and seems only to hear melodious echoes of sound. After a surfeit of such work, say, as the late Mr. Hugh Conway and his following do—very clever and ingenious "railway reading "—one rises from an hour spent over a book like "Marius the Epicurean" with the thought—This is literature.

 s.m.h. 8 August 1885,