To surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry:

Walter Pater, Many-Sidedness, and the Conversion

Novel
Sebastian Lecourt

n recent years, commentators across several disciplines have

begun to trace the key role that Protestant understandings of religious conversion have played in shaping modern modes of subjectivity, 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 Protestant 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 virtually 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 determinations of history and reflect on them through an anthropological lens.

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different effect of defamiliarizing the strong distaste that so many Victorian liberals expressed for the idea of religious conversion. If conversionist Protestantism had such direct links to the tradition of reflective
individualism, why would Walter Pater, who for many remains the essential Victorian theorist of detached reflection, write with disdain of the
process whereby men became Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression instead of being born Christians (3: 119)? Why
would Matthew Arnold, that avowed enemy of provinciality and champion 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, miraculously (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 otherwise centered upon cultivated individuality and critical reflection.
In this essay I read Walter Paters work as suggesting one particular 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 significance 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 recuperating 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 prominently 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 articulates 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 tradition that has focused largely on the question of whether Paters protagonist really does convert to Christianityand, by extension, whether
the novel represents Paters own rapprochement with Anglican orthodoxy. 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 religious 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 hesitating 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 (Donoghue 96), and he questioned Wards own rationalistic critique of Christianity 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 maintain itself long against its assailants, especially from the historical and literary

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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 Recollections 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 transformative 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 selfcontrol. Indeed, Paters writings on religion virtually transform the classical 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 progress, 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 mutilation 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 themselves 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 contradictory layers of motive, conscious and unconscious, which in turn

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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 prestigious 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 Wordsworth, 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 Euripides (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 preRoman 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 recuperation that he had begun to theorize in The Renaissance. By the mid1870s, 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). Similarly, 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, poetical 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 characteristic 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 interpretation of the whole of life (7: 18) into a standardized written narrative, 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
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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 contemplating that centuries growth, layer upon layer, of the curiosities of religion (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 reinvention, 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 attraction 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 modifiers 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 comprehending 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. Transformed, 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 Transvaluation 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

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independence of mind and spirit (Burrow 81; see Dowling, Vulgarization

7778). He also, as we have seen, developed some interest in Tylors evolutionary 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 technological 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 function 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, longsurviving cultural forms serve to establish a kind of bond between individual and collective sentiment. Because Mariuss character has been
shaped from an early age by his aesthetic surroundings, which are saturated 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 experiences 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 realized 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 historical 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 propositional 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 Victorian 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

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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 salvation, 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 subjective 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 posthumously 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 rejection of conversion, for example, seems to anticipate the work of
modernist anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, who saw the Evangelical 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, identified 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 collectivity and tradition as a straightforward rejection of the liberal individualism 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 encouraged 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, contradictory 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

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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 Christianity 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 encourages 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 independence 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 inheritance 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 sympathies (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 emancipation 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 sympathies. (1: 26)

In contrast, a system of symbolic usages that emphasizes the sacredness 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 whatsoever 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

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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 admirable 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 midVictorian 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 middleclass culture was no longer how to valorize . . . agency but how to cultivate 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 medieval 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 determining 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 dignified

these are phrases more evocative of asceticism than aestheticism. This
trajectory within Paters thought is perhaps epitomized by the Lacedaemon chapter of his last major work, Plato and Platonism (1893),
which argues that among all the ancient Greeks it was in fact the Spartans 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 functions, 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

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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 detachment 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 unfathomable, 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 expression 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 questions 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 collective? 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 generally praising the novel, also accused Pater of advocating a fundamentally 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 individualism 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.

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For more on individual conversion as a defining experience of modernity, see

Bebbington 4274.
2
Besides Ward, it is Paters early biographer Thomas Wright who is perhaps
most responsible for popularizing the view that Marius signals Paters return to Christian 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.
3
The OED also suggests that, apart from a single example in the early eigh1

teenth century, Tylor was the first writer in English to use the word survival as a noun.
4
See Dowling, Language 11720; Evangelista; Kissane; Shuter 10006.
5
Bronislaw 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).
6
See 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).
7
Paters 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.
8
There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Pater espoused a strangely negative 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 powerless 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 Recollections 210, emphasis original).
9
Pater 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.
10
The ambivalent attitude toward agency evident in Victorian discussions of
many-sidedness mirrors the dual attitudes toward eclecticism that Christine BolusReichert 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.
11
For a broader reading of the relationship between asceticism, aestheticism,
and masculinity in Pater, see Adams 14981.
12
In 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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