SOURCE: “‘Definite History and Dogmatic Interpretation’: The ‘White-nights’ of Pater's Marius the Epicurean,” in Criticism, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1984, pp. 171-91.

[In the following essay, Monsman asserts that Pater's work contains many alternative possible meanings; its ambiguities, variations, and masks defy final meaning, he concludes.]

“White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name. ‘The red rose came first,’ says a quaint German mystic, speaking of ‘the mystery of so-called white things,’ as being ‘ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material’ … So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but passed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainly the place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in this, that you might very well conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in the daytime might come to much there” (Marius, 1: 13-14).¹ If the reader is called upon to “interpret” the old Latin of the villa's name as signifying dreaming nights and days (the absence of the original Latin belatedly supplied in a footnote as Ad Vigilias Albas had given the “you” an interpretation in the first two editions of the novel without any means of authentication), then Pater's readers as well as Pater's characters and Pater himself are concerned even more with the problematics of interpreting those dreams themselves. There is a great deal about the meaning of sleep, dreams, and vision not only in the chapter describing Marius' home of White-nights but throughout the novel; indeed, the novel's epigraph seems to characterize the whole work as a fantasy in the mind of the author or reader: “A dream in wintertime, when the nights are longest.” Long before Joseph was sold into Egyptian slavery and rose by interpreting the Pharoah's dreams, this activity had a venerable tradition. But if Joseph's success lay in what essentially is the technocrat's accurate forecast, Pater's originality is constituted by his realization that meaning always eludes any final form. Every bit as avant-garde as Freud's pioneering work in the interpretation of dreams some fifteen years later, Marius the Epicurean sponsors a theory of interpretation that denies dreams any definitive meaning but instead offers other dreams as their explanation, one behind another like the layers of a lily bulb without a final core (or much like the pages of the text which at Marius' death has circled back to its opening scenes). So too Freud's or Jung's archetypal myths operate like the meaning of the dream scenes in Marius, each patient's history is a layer of the bulb's overlapping leaves, a form of the myth which itself is but a story whose explanation depends on and varies with other myths. The process of interpreting the dreamtext itself is, I intend to show, like the activity of interpreting the old Latin name of Marius' villa—a translation or substitution of one name or sign for another without any final closure. Notice in the opening quotation the dubiety expressed by the triple use of “might,” of “I suppose,” of “something like” which leaves as the only certainty a mere possibility of productive dreaming (“certainly … you might”)—but productive of what the “you” (always a transparent mask for the authorial “I” behind) is not sure.

Of course, the reader who is familiar with Pater's other works may be aware that this world of dreams between sleep and waking is under the aegis of Persephone who holds “the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its innumerable seeds, of the dreams, therefore, that may intervene between falling asleep and waking” (Greek Studies, 148-49). Pater says that the best Latin equivalent for the English unworldly is “the beautiful word umbratilis” (Marius, 1: 25) which describes Marius' life as shadowy or as remaining in the shade and, when taken together with the “languid and shadowy” (17) existence of his mother, seems to present an underworld abode of the dead—not unlike Swinburne's “Garden of Proserpine” where all life ends “in doubtful dreams of dreams,” except that in Pater's novel there is the hope of an awakening. The thrust of Marius is from dream—“‘sometimes those dreams come true’” (228)—to vision, from the “half real” to the seeing of a wholly real embodiment of the early desire for maternal love: “And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;—so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain” (22). Presumably White-nights embodies the realm of the cyclic Persephone in her innocent phase as Kore, united with her mother Demeter as described by Pater in Greek Studies, before the dream turns to the nightmare of separation and she once again enters the kingdom of Dis. Pater may have been thinking of this cyclic coinherence of modes when he describes how Wordsworth had pondered deeply

on those strange reminiscences and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of connexion. … It was in this mood that he conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul—a childhood, as it seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over again, in the passing away of actual youth. (Appreciations, 54-55)

Notwithstanding the novel's repeatedly stated hopes of vision, dreaming is productive only of more dreams of lost love or of nightmare.

As Marius lies dying, sleeping and awakening by turns, he seems primarily prepared for some written revelation. Mindful possibly of his life at White-nights that “had been so like the reading of a romance to him” (Marius, 1: 25), Marius in his last hours looks forward to

some ampler vision, which should take up into itself and explain this world's 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. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers might choose to write there. (2: 220).

But does the writing of the divine fingers complete the “scattered fragments”? Perhaps, rather, it is akin to the “long-lost text” of the Homeric Hymn recovered in 1780 that Pater will translate in his “attempt to select and weave together” the details of the myth of Demeter: “Portions of the text are missing, and there are probably some additions by later hands. … Listen now to a somewhat abbreviated version of it” (Greek Studies, 82-83). Fragmentary by both what still is missing and what here is deleted, a pastiche by virtue of those additions by “hands” that come later, Pater's exquisite story-translation somehow affords a glimpse more revelatory of the original ideal than any text hitherto produced. Yet, Pater observes, all knowledge of truth

precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver; and must be, in that degree, elusive, provisional, contingent, a matter of various approximation. … The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philosophy begins with an axiom or definition: the essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be co-extensive with life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps. (Plato, 187-88)

Applied to the dying Marius, the “mental tablet” resists the closure of dogmatic inscription; instead, Marius' life-long “dialectic” or “dialogue” has been like that “of persons to persons”—from Kore to Persephone to Kore, from dream to nightmare and back again. The long-awaited vision is still only a “perhaps” within a Platonic dialogue of search: “every one of Plato's Dialogues is in essence such like that whole, life-long, endless dialogue which dialectic, in its largest scope, does but formulate, and in which truly the last, the infallible word, after all, never gets spoken. Our pilgrimage is meant indeed to end in nothing less than the vision of what we seek. But can we ever be quite sure that we are really come to that? By what sign or test?” (192).

One might say that in the shadowy, dreamy world of White-nights signs of the vision remain only signs. The central event in the opening chapters, the spring festival of the Ambarvalia and its sacrifice of bull, ram, and pig offered to Mars as an agricultural deity, entails “the old Latin words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved on its way, though their precise meaning was long since become unintelligible. … But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the priests … the procession moved in absolute stillness, all persons, even the children, abstaining from speech … lest any words save those proper to the occasion should hinder the religious efficacy of the rite” (Marius, 1: 7-8). Like the scattered poetry figuratively “half-understood” by the dying Marius, the “unintelligible” words of the liturgy have an important implication for the boy:

in the young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were like the passing of some mysterious influence over all the elements of his nature and experience. (9)

The “unintelligible” liturgy is not mere nonsense; whatever its tenor might be taken to be, the ritual has a very specific organization or differentiated structure: no words are permitted “save those proper to the occasion,” no reflections except “upon the scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial” (9). But just as Marius' tablet of the mind resists dogmatic inscription, so here among the fragments of words Marius cannot read (the root sense of “unintelligible” from inter + legere) any final meaning, any last infallible word. Nevertheless, the awakening of his surmises seems to occur precisely in this absence of “dogmatic interpretation.” Ergo, the medium really is the message.

The chief characteristic of the medium is, then, its heterogeneity, its alternative possibilities of meaning which preclude choice. Both language inevitably and art by intention are, Pater would say, “receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities” (Renaissance, viii). But the impression that any specific virtue makes upon the beholder is the result not of some mediated reality, some fixed meaning recoverable by interpretation from within the aesthetic receptacle as wine may be drunk from its cup; rather, the ordering, the juxtapositions of aesthetic forms speak directly as a primary reality in their own right. Notice how in Pater's description of the feast in honor of Apuleius, for example, he calls his readers' attention not merely to the dark red wine but to the more striking image of “the crystal vessels darkened with old wine” (Marius, 2: 78). What is important here is not the contents—this or that shade of reds or whites—but the way the container contains. The fact that the aesthetic object lays claim to no reality “beyond its own victorious fairness” (Renaissance, 205) gives point to Lucian's image of the seekers for ultimate truth who are like temple guards searching among a host of secular cups, flagons, and diadems for a missing sacred vessel—neither shape nor material known, and unfortunately not inscribed with the name of its divine owner. Like the undoubtedly beautiful but unspecified cup, the aesthetic object reduces to no final reality in consequence of a privileged meaning. Thus the importance in The Renaissance of the cups given to Amis and Amile, doubles like the Dioscuri or Demeter's daughters, lies not in their contents or specific usage but, like the twins themselves, in their doubleness: “two marvelously beautiful cups, also exactly like each other. … These two cups, which by their resemblance help to bring the friends together at critical moments, … cross and recross very strangely in the narrative” (9). This unity only in multeity is the regnant quality of the aesthetic object. Just as the identical cups “bring the friends together,” so each work of art, doubling all others, embodies an infinite host of interchangeable meanings that “cross and recross very strangely in the narrative.”

Granting that the doubling of cups, brothers, persons or personae is (or may be) a figure for the way a work of art carries its meanings, let us consider two cupular images associated with the snakes that appear so ominously at the core of the White-nights chapter—the mouth of the garden god and the oval chamber. In particular, I would like to begin with an interpretation by J. Hillis Miller of an incident involving an encounter with breeding snakes and Marius' recollection of an earlier event:

He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have killed or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the very circumstance of their life, being what they were. (Marius, 1: 23-24).

Miller speaks of the “pleasure in rousing the viper” and notes that the companion, “like Marius, has ‘no particular dread of a snake.’”² For Miller, the companion deliberately puts his hand into the mouth of the garden god aware of the sluggish reptile within and with no fear of its bite plays with that phallic creature. Now, my first impulse is to interpret the passage in diametrically opposite terms. I read it as saying that Marius and his companion both disliked snakes but that Marius, never having been bitten, did not particularly fear the snake's bite but that his companion certainly did, owing to the experience of playfully (sacrilegiously perhaps) putting his hand into the mouth of the god not suspecting the presence of a snake—and then getting bit as a nasty surprise. The difference of interpretation turns on whether the connective “like” links Marius and his companion in straightforward similarity or whether “like” compares the “dread” and the companion. In my interpretation “like” really means “unlike”—Marius has “no particular dread” of the sort harbored by one of his companions. Down the page a few lines that “sluggish” snake really does try to bite: “There was a humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmity against him” (24). Miller's observation that the companion is a displaced version of Marius makes even more sense if we presume the snake struck the companion since here the snake strikes directly at Marius himself. However, I think both of our contradictory interpretations inhere in the garden god episode, just as the old Latin words of the Ambarvalia permit associations “backwards and forwards.” The displacement in the incident with the companion allows Pater to have Marius react to the snake in two ways—literally with “no particular dread” and displaced as his companion with “dread.” Marius is both afraid and not afraid of the serpents; he both pities and hates them. Pater's language here does no more than what psychoanalysis has recognized personality itself as sometimes doing; namely, resolving conflicts by multiple, dissociated personalities—contradictory attitudes, opposing emotional drives in which different groups of strivings, attitudes and values are associated with independent self-systems.

Miller's pleasures of the viper have their equivalences elsewhere in the novel's design of recurrent imagery, as in the prick of an arrow for example—and arrows are everywhere present, especially the prick of Cupid at Psyche's first glimpse of the god: “And Psyche, gazing hungrily thereon, draws an arrow from the quiver, and trying the point upon her thumb, tremulous still, drave in the barb, so that a drop of blood came forth. Thus fell she, by her own act, and unaware, into the love of Love” (75). Psyche, of course, originally had dreaded “that evil serpent-thing” (64) but, like the ambiguous interpretations of the snake in the god's mouth, her fear turns to love and “under one bodily form she loathes the monster and loves the bridegroom” (74). Although Cupid's arrow clearly mimics the benign Millerian serpent inasmuch as Psyche bears Voluptas, whose name means “pleasure,” the object of Psyche's desire, Cupid, turns out to be simply a vision or personification of cupido—“the love of Love” or the desire of forever desiring. By definition Cupid is like the “absent or veiled” image of Zeus in the middle ages, “distracted … into a thousand symbols and reflections”³; only by imagining Psyche on Olympus can the storyteller award her the final vision. As mortal, Psyche has no more chance of arriving at the determinate vision of her desire than would any viewer of some mythical creature fragmented among the multiple planes of Cubist art. Yet Psyche's story is in sharp contrast to the sad narrative in “The Ceremony of the Dart.” Cupid's barb becomes there “the bloodstained spear” (2: 44) the emperor Aurelius casts to insure public victory; he reaps only personal defeat. Desirous of attaining to some inner and permanent spiritual reality, Aurelius doubles the boy thrusting his hand into the face of the garden god, striking through the mask of the phenomenal to seize the reality of the noumenal within. But all he finds is the sting of death, dimly the victim of his own deadly dart.

The ceremonial knife-play and blood-letting with which the chapter opens (echoes of the fertility sacrifices of the Ambarvalia) are a prelude to the tragically pathetic repetition and inversion of its close, the knife of the country surgeon and afterwards “a company of pupils pressing in” (56) around the dying child of the emperor, recalling again the slaughter of the suovetaurilia and the “frank curiosity in the spectacle” (1: 9). The loss of Aurelius' child contrasts with the expectation and delight of Psyche in recovering her absent lover not by any direct vision (her original error) but indirectly in the form of her child to be born: “‘in the face of this little child, at the least, shall I apprehend thine’” (93). Aurelius finds nothing but his own overthrow doubled in the child's misery: “Marius was forced into the privacy of a grief, the desolate face of which went deep into his memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away—quite conscious at last, but with a touching expression upon it of weakness and defeat—pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress” (2: 56). Aurelius' understandable yearning for absolute unity with his dying son is expressed in the generalized face of grief reflected in both parent and child—a unity of visage owing its radical hopelessness to the emperor's Psyche-like error of desiring to attain directly to a suprahuman reality, to some permanent ideal that excludes renewal because it transcends flux. But as the cupular figure of his furniture-emptied palace ultimately indicates, there is no determinate center within appearances except for the emptiness of the grave. Despiser of the physical body, Aurelius erringly focuses entirely on inner, visionary ideals, on what might be called with a certain irony the furniture of thought rather than on the process itself whereby the palace of thought is replenished with those moveable articles. Since Aurelius does not value the “crystal vessel” for its protean possibilities of endlessly renewed meanings, he cannot turn the loss of his child back onto the hope of a renewal as do the Christians with the child's grave: “treated as, natalitia—a birthday” (102). The Christian practice of “burial instead of burning” (99) turns the tomb into a womb and the sting of death into the thrusting through or piercing of the sexual act, a sowing of the seed that the fertility rite of the Ambarvalia celebrated. In this sense Cupid revives the sleep-enveloped Psyche, “awaking her with the innocent point of his arrow” (1: 89-90). Having turned her vanished old love back upon the new, death is thus employed against itself to summon the face and renew the pleasure of her absent lord.

Throughout much of his novel Pater seems to be reweaving the familiar words from the fifteenth chapter of the first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians; only Paul's imagery of the body sown in “corruption” that is not quickened and raised in incorruption except it die becomes for Pater an endless process of dying and renewal without final wholeness—other than the innocence concealed as the sting of death momentarily glimpsed in Cupid's “innocent” arrow. Except for G. M. Hopkins, I do not know another of Pater's contemporaries who adapts so subtly and yet so pervasively the thematic motif of the nail and thorn-pierced crucifixus in order to portray life concealed within the wound of death. As might be expected, the ramifying image of the serpent in the mouth of the garden god is not fully deployed in the White-nights chapter except by reference to the “chamber, curved ingeniously into oval form” that contains the “head of Medusa, for which the villa was famous” (19). Persephone, of course, had been the goddess of White-night's dreaming; and it is she, Pater states in Greek Studies, who keeps the gorgon-head of Medusa. Miller is right, as far as he goes, in associating this Medusa with that of Leonardo da Vinci described by Pater in his essay on Leonardo as

the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death. What may be called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty. … The delicate snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings with it is in the features; features singularly massive and grand, as we catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, crown foremost, like a great calm stone against which the wave of serpents breaks.

(Renaissance, 106)

If, as we are told, the traveler pauses “to read the face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place” (Marius, 1: 18), then in one sense the oval chamber of White-nights is itself the os (L face, mouth) of the garden god in which the ophidian form of death lurks; however, since the ovular pinacotheca also contains the death masks of Marius' ancestors, as well as the head of Medusa, container and contained once again present themselves as differentiated but interconnected masks for each other. What the traveler “reads,” then, is the disguised form of a familiar visage—life hidden in death, death hidden in life.

This ambiguity is clearly present in Marius' friend Flavian who serves as Medusa's double in real life:

How often, afterwards, did evil things present themselves in malign association with the memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of borrowed sanction and charm in its natural grace! To Marius, at a later time, he counted for as it were an epitome of the whole pagan world, the depth of its corruption, and its perfection of form. And still, in his mobility, his animation, in his eager capacity for various life, he was so real an object, after that visionary idealism of the villa. His voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions of a dream. A shadow, handling all things as shadows, had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them. (53)

Flavian's “breaking in” upon the shadowy Marius with “real and poignant” (L pungere to prick, sting) heat anticipates his own death “with a fiery pang in the brain, fancying no covering thin or light enough to be applied to his body” (112). As Flavian lies dying, he dictates to Marius a nuptial hymn in which his feverish pangs now are read playfully as priapic ferment: Cupid “‘has put his weapons by and will keep holiday. He was bidden go without apparel, that none might be wounded by his bow and arrows. But take care! In truth he is none the less armed than usual, though he be all unclad’” (113). This equivocal flip-flopping between Marius and Flavian, mortal and god, arrow of fever and phallus of lust is precisely what the shape of the Medusa chamber realizes. The curious form of the room, oddly oval, suggests binary foci that make it impossible to place anything truly at its center. Wherever the head of Medusa is placed in the room, at best it can be positioned only at one focus with, perhaps, the beholder standing at the other interchangeable focus—sinister arrangement! This is, of course, exactly the double condition of Persephone and White-nights in which dreams, death, and unreality never quite restate themselves as vision, life, and reality. Like some final meaning within the unintelligible words of the Ambarvalia, the presence of vision, life, and reality dwell amidst the alternations of Marius' home but remain invisible, ungraspable. In this, the ovular room can be seen to be a significant foreshadowing of the central episode in the novel, central thematically as well as by actual word count—the butchery of the arena in “Manly Amusement.” The rising tiers of seats around the red patches of blood on the sand of the amphitheater gather up into an elliptical image the butchering knives, the bite and barb of fang and arrow, the “poignant heat” of fever and lust. The crowd's “curious interest in the dexterously contrived escape of the young from their mother's torn bosoms” (238) is both a larger setting for the morbidity of the laborers at the Ambarvalia and the pupils around Aurelius' child as well as the climatic presentation of the Medusa transformations. As the gestating creatures fall from their torn mothers, so also the young of Leonardo's viviparous mother struggle in terror to escape her brain—images of life concealed by death and death concealed by life. Thus Pater says that in Leonardo's Medusa “corruption penetrates … beauty” to produce his great Florentine masterpiece—which, we may be sure, Pater then studies with “a certain curious interest” also.

What governs the beholder's involvement with the Medusan head, with “the depth of its corruption, and its perfection of form,” is the phenomenon that the necessary precondition to any symbolic (Gk syn with + ballein to throw) or aesthetic mode of unity is the diabolic (dyo two = dia- across, apart + ballein) polarization of mortal existence. For precisely this reason the Pater-saturated Yeats has his Crazy Jane tell the Bishop that “‘nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.’” Beauty without its fallen temporality is no beauty any mortal can apprehend; and if the throw and thrust of coition seems to reverse the stab and sting of death, it does so only by engendering a new mortality. Pater and Pater's heroes, like Baudelaire before them, puzzle over the philosophical conundrum concerning “the entanglement of beauty with evil—to what extent one might succeed in disentangling them or, failing that, how far one may warm and water the dubious, double root, watch for its flower or retain the hope, or the memory, or the mere token of it in one's keeping.”⁴ To disentangle Flavian's “beautiful head” from its corruption—to clear the snakes from Medusa's brow—is to disavow the very means of renewal by which one arrives at beauty in the first place. Here and there in Pater's work we catch a glimpse of this uncorrupted ideal—most notably in his earliest essay, “Diaphaneitè,” in which he observes of this diaphanous figure that “as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner. … The veil or mask of such a nature would be … entire transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously all that is really lifegiving” (Miscellaneous Studies, 249, 251). Beyond “violence” (252) and “sexless” (253), such a “clear crystal nature” (253) notoriously lacks concrete identity—at least until Pater cannibalized parts of his unpublished essay to describe Winckelmann's interest in antique statues. In order “to suggest and interpret a train of feeling,” Greek statuary had simplified its resources to only “a little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming surfaces, with pure form—only these. And it gains more than it loses by this limitation to its own distinguishing motives; it unveils man in the repose of his unchanging characteristics. That white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion, reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the tranquil godship in him” (Renaissance, 212-13).

Pater's well-known conclusion to his portrait of Emerald Uthwart which consists of the surgeon's postmortem describing “the extreme purity of the outlines, both of the faces and limbs” (Miscellaneous Studies, 245) of the almost living body of Emerald in death is an English echo of this Greek ideal. Modeling his description on two famous accounts—by Sir Thomas Browne to a friend upon the demise of a common acquaintance and by Johann Peter Eckermann on the beauty of Goethe's face and form in death—Pater implies that although mortals reveal a glimpse of this diaphanous purity, the condition itself does not coexist with life. If applied to Emerald's character, Pater's description of the diaphane must be qualified: “it is that fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point. … It is a thread of pure white light that one might disentwine from the tumultuary richness of Goethe's nature” (248-54). The “thread” (OE thrāwan to cause to twist or turn; akin to L terere and Gk tetrainein to bore, pierce) is in its root sense the cycling that twists the filaments into the syn + ballein of personality; to “disentwine” and isolate the pure white light is to reinstate the diabolic or Medusan dividing of forces. This urge to privilege a single thread is a version of Psyche's error of desiring to behold the divine form, and the hot oil that burns Cupid's shoulder is an image of the dia + ballein, the “poignant heat” of death's sting. Although the figure of the edge or thread of light refining itself “to the burning point” seems inescapably an anticipation of the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance where Pater maintains that “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (Renaissance, 236), the “to” of the burning point to which the diaphanous hero refines his elements functions equivocally to signify either a flame attained or not fully attained. The diaphane seems to but does not descend into the arena of the “angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion.” In death Emerald, whose name suggests the “gemlike flame,” becomes a gem without its vivifying flame, a “clear crystal nature” not unlike those “crystal vessels” at Apuleius' feast but now without the darkening of their old wine. Were it not for his heart-piercing, blood-corroded bullet, Emerald would not have satisfied the necessary precondition for renewal, would not be like the transparent crystal or gem erubesced by wine or flame, nor like Marius' sense of the crucified Christ who seemed “to have absorbed, like some rich tincture in his garment, all that was deep-felt and impassioned in the experiences of the past” (Marius, 1: 134).

A few pages after Pater's description of Leonardo's Medusa comes the most sinister and famous head in the whole range of Pater's writing—the Mona Lisa. If the beholder cannot look upon Medusa without petrifaction nor upon Cupid without his vanishing, Mona Lisa also thwarts the urge typified by Aurelius or Psyche to disentwine her meanings and isolate the infallible last word; yet all the time she obscenely weaves and unweaves her sinuous guises before the beholder, tantalizing him with her dark and forbidden knowledge. On one of those small slips on which he habitually scribbled notes to himself, Pater reversed the Aristotelean preeminence of plot, the soul of tragedy, over character by defining his more fanciful instances of portraiture as “imaginary:—and portraits, because they present not an action, a story: but a personality, character—revealed especially in outward detail.”⁵ In the place of action or story, which suggest in any given work or passage the organic unity or plot closure of a beginning, middle, and end, Pater places the heterogeneous ideal of the old Latin words of the uninterpretable Ambarvalia. In Pater's word “character,” which derives from a Greek marking instrument and has “engrave” or “scratch” as its basal meaning, one again encounters the serpent's fang and the arrow's barb, as well as Lady Lisa's face which has been “etched” by all the thoughts and experiences of the world (Renaissance, 125). Pater's other term, “personality,” derives of course from the Latin for “mask” and suggests that the scratch which erubesces the light is the mask of selfhood. Standing as they do in syntactical apposition to each other, the adjacent nouns, “personality, character,” imply that this scratch that constitutes the “fine edge” or “thread of pure white light” cannot be disentwined from its mask because any unveiling or unmasking of personality would entail precisely the filiform abrasion that by erasing away reconstitutes the scratch of character palimpsestically. Psyche's compulsion to see the “godlike” form or the dying Marius' yearning to read some infallible, determinate meaning are errors that nevertheless serve as preconditions for renewal insofar as they cause one sign to be substituted for another—as in Plato's philosophy “the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before” (Plato, 8), as in “the old over-written pavement at the great open door” (Gaston, 10) of Saint Hubert's in Pater's unfinished second novel, as in the elaborately carved desk top at Emerald Uthwart's school, or as in Lisa's face on which “all the thoughts and experience of the world have etched” their lust and love, saintliness and sin.

Among the women of Florence, Leonardo “found a vent for his thought in taking one of these languid women”—like Marius' “languid and shadowy” mother—“and raising her … to the seventh heaven of symbolical expression” (Renaissance, 123). As “the presence that rose” (124) so strangely and symbolically, Mona Lisa betokens Leonardo's desire to apprehend the ideal face, not unlike Psyche's desire to see the divine form of Cupid:

We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. … Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's brain, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected? (123-24)

Her circle or “cirque” of rocks, as the first edition reads, is, like her marble chair and “unfathomable smile,” a curve in transit, an oscillating cycle broken into multiplying arcs like the image of Zeus “distracted” in the middle ages “into a thousand symbols and reflections.” As the only possible origin of that ideal beauty which—ironically—she resists and disorganizes, Mona Lisa is a function of the losses and imperfections of the Medusan dia + ballein employed against themselves to generate within or among their dissimilar yet echoing modes or masks the textual syn + ballien. Suddenly or violently pulled apart or “distracted” among lust, mysticism, ambition, love, and sin, she is nevertheless also the arena, the “cirque” or bowl of the natural mountain amphitheater, that symbolizes “all modes of thought and life.”

Present finally in Il Giocondo's house exactly as the Medusa had been present in Marius' villa, Lady Lisa sits for a portrait that the artist either completes with magical dispatch, much as the cathedral of St. Etienne had been finished in Pater's “Denys l’Auxerrois,” or that he must finally abandon as fragmentary, much as Flavian put aside his “unfinished manuscript” (Marius, 1: 116) or as Watteau in “A Prince of Court Painters” left the portrait of Marie-Marguerite incomplete on the easel. Heterogeneous and without determinate unity, the palimpsestic work will always, short of magic, resist closure while proclaiming its manifold richness. In her play of multiple masks, each of which in turn grounds the other's figure, each of which serves as the crystal vessel for the other's wine, Lisa is like nothing so much as the old Latin words of the Ambarvalia; she is “expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire” (Renaissance, 124). Accordingly, Leonardo's portrait will delight not by any appeal to some interpretable or privileged meaning but will “first of all delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment of Venetian glass; and through this delight alone become the vehicle of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them in the intention of the composer” (132-33). Notice how the vehicle's tenor is merely a “whatever”—anything or everything the artist may intend—whereas what is important for the beholder is that “outward detail” in which “character, personality” are revealed. “In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself” (133). The accidental or unintended play of nature becomes in the work of art a more finely woven, cunningly contrived, carefully selected play of rhetorical figures that by substitutions, displacements, and differences approaches the colorless all-color of “transparency in language” (Appreciations, 215); but since no artifact literally includes but only stands in the place of other innumerable and often unnameable sources, the translucence of the symbol is darkened at its source by the cleavage of the diabolic that preceded it. Thus, like the “fragment of Venetian glass,” White-nights is itself an “exquisite fragment” (Marius, 1: 18-19); and, of course, the dying Marius who anticipated uniting the “scattered fragments” (2: 220) of some lost epic had aspired earlier to live more modestly in some “fragment of perfect expression” (1: 155).

Given that even the most finely woven artwork cannot hope to reify all possible meanings but can aspire only to symbolize that ultimate wholeness, it remains a fragment of multiple masks perpetually without closure. No solid archetypal model grounds any action or story; no single determinate meaning governs any phrase or passage. Like the traveler who pauses “to read the face” of Marius' villa, the reader of Pater's text also will be concerned with its surface, with what is on its face, because the play of masks is all it offers for interpretation. Accordingly, Pater writes of the way in which “Pascal re-echoes Montaigne” that “one of the leading interests in the study of Pascal is to trace the influence upon him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century. Pascal's ‘Thoughts’ we shall never understand unless we realise the under-texture in them of Montaigne's very phrases” (Miscellaneous Studies, 84). In the phrases of the not quite consistent skeptic (so Pater elsewhere defines Montaigne), the reader approaches the text of the not quite certain believer (so Pater here describes Pascal); beneath the surface of one text is simply the antithetical surface of an earlier text, itself no less a palimpsestic surface previously engraved or scratched (palin - again + psaō rub, scratch). Thus the phrases, passages, actions, and stories in Pater's Marius are to be understood only in terms of similar words in his other works, such as The Renaissance, or in terms of their echoes in other writers. When in 1873 Pater published his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the storm that broke over its “Conclusion” caused him to suppress it in the second edition and not restore it until the third after he had “dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it” (Renaissance, 233). Marius, then, was an attempt to explain and develop the doctrine of flux so startlingly appended to Pater's study of the lives and works of the Renaissance artists. And, indeed, the resemblances are extensive. The imprisoned, dreaming mind of the “Conclusion” is everywhere as the undertexture of the dreamy, shadowy life of the lad Marius—both are “chambers” of Persephone's kingdom. If “no real voice has ever pierced” the prison of the solipsistic mind, then only “a single sharp impression”—the serpent's fang and arrow's barb of Marius—will free the imprisoned self; and the child's hand that “roused” the sluggish viper is not unlike the tool of philosophy employed “to rouse, to startle” the human spirit “to a life of constant and eager observation” (235-36). Again, this “eager observation” is dramatized in Psyche's quest actuated by her forbidden glimpse that caused the “clear, perpetual outline of face and limb” to transform itself into nothing less than “that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (234, 236) as the “Conclusion” depicts it.

Pater remarked, both of Leonardo's “lost originals” and of those existing originals that are mere thematic fragments to be treated developmentally, that “variations” of these works in the art of others bring out “the purpose, or expression of the original” (118). Thus, when after Marius Pater restored his “Conclusion” in the third edition of 1888 and mentioned in his footnote that he had made some “slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning” (233), he well knew that this “original meaning” could be expressed only through an undertexture of re-echoing and open-ended “variations,” Marius being designed to refine and deal “more subtly and exquisitely” with them. So, for example, the quotation in the “Conclusion” from Hugo's Le dernier jour d’un condamné is re-echoed and vastly extended in Marius' sense of being “condemned to die” (Marius, 2: 223): “Well! we are all condamnés as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more” (Renaissance, 238). Indeed, the reader finds this condemned criminal at the very center of Pater's novel: “Scaevola might watch his own hand, crackling, in the fire, in the person of a culprit, willing to redeem his life by an act so delightful to the eyes, the very ears, of a curious public” (Marius, 1: 239). By repeating the hand-destroying act that saved the Romans, the condemned criminal, impersonating the legendary hero Scaevola, saves his own life. One recognizes with something of a shock that this indeed might be one way to burn with the “hard, gemlike flame,” the “one chance” of the condamné. Allusively, in Pater's desire to “be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy,” in his desire “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy” (Renaissance, 236), one half-hears both Bentham's phrase, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” and Mill's definition of the philosopher's “rapture” and “exalted pleasure” that “lasts only moments … and is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame.”⁶ Returning Mill's revision of Bentham to the textual arena that de- and reconstructs both Bentham and Mill, Pater insists that the pursuit of ecstasy is the foundation neither of public nor of private morality but of consciousness itself. When in his essay on Leonardo Pater describes the four years' period during which the Mona Lisa was painted as “one of prolonged rapture or ecstasy” (122), he ironically transforms the “occasional” in Mill's “rapture” into the “always” of the “ecstasy” of the “Conclusion.”

Given the cruel dilaceration of Bentham and Mill in Pater's text, one suspects the “reprieve” of the “Conclusion” is only a mask for the actual execution of the death sentence. Consider what occurs when “the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world” (235), attempts his escape. “What more ingenious diversion had stage manager ever contrived,” Pater writes in Marius of the amusement in the amphitheater, “than that incident, itself a practical epigram never to be forgotten, when a criminal, who, like slaves and animals, had no rights, was compelled to present the part of Icarus; and, the wings failing him in due course, had fallen into a pack of hungry bears?” (Marius, 1: 238-39). The prisoner in the first text, escaping, is mangled by bears in the second. Attempting to read every scene in terms of another, one recalls a footnote somewhere to the effect that in the first edition Pater erroneously had written not Icarus, but Daedalus. If the meaning of any scene is dependent on and varies with other scenes to which it refers the reader, then what directions had Pater been giving, consciously or unconsciously, in the first edition? Suddenly, alerted by the strange phrase, “practical epigram,” one goes to Marcus Valerius Martialis. And there the scene is, in the eighth epigram of Martial's “On the Spectacles”: “Being so mangled by a Lucanian bear, how you must wish, Daedalus, you had your wings now!”⁷ So the first edition's Daedalus is indeed the legitimate father of the second edition's Icarus. Moreover, the association of Pater's spectacles with Martial's thin first book of epigrams on the same scenes opens to scrutiny the poet's later epigrams as well. Martial's bear lurks elsewhere in Pater's text, but disguised like the original father in his filial emendation; in his third book, nineteenth epigram, Martial writes: “Next to the Hundred Columns, where figures of wild beasts ornament the grove of sycamore trees, a bear is displayed. While playfully baiting its gaping jaws, fair Hylas plunged his young hand into its mouth. But an evil viper lurked in the shadows of the bronze, animated with a life more deadly than that of the beast. The boy suspected nothing until he felt the sting and died. O what an outrage, that the bear was unreal!” Martial's bear is doubly masked; disguised as the old wooden garden god Priapus (my authority for the deity being yet another epigram of Martial), it conceals itself within itself as the snake, a mask not without its own horticultural associations.

Like Marius among the “scattered fragments” of some “lost epic,” the reader searches in vain for an original version that will control all these variants. But precisely because Pater hides the bear of Daedalus inside the bear of Hylas—concealing the real in the unreal, disguising the condemned criminal in the innocent boy—the text offers only a vertiginously arch play of differences without reconciliation. Nesting thus one within the other, these rhetorical fragments are not susceptible to the coadunation of polar opposites; their relationship is surdal, incommensurable, capable only of a perpetual turning back of the one upon the other. For this reason the only final meaning is that there is no final meaning, merely “that continual vanishing away.” Like old wine darkening the cup of the textual receptaculum, the pierced hand of the innocent-guilty (he plays most suggestively with Priapus) Hylas is erubesced by the burning hand of the criminal-hero Scaevola (the reader now is hardly surprised to discover that Scaevola himself had been the subject of an epigram or two by Martial) which gathers up into its incandescence Marius' first view of the ambiguous Faustina, “her long fingers lighted up red by the glowing coals” (218), as well as various lightning-struck images of miraculous birth and death (5, 186), and, of course, the burning oil of Psyche's lamp on Cupid's shoulder, his vanishing away and her guilt, sentence, reprieve, and prolonged ecstasy—bringing the reader back to the “Conclusion” and the condamné who burns with a gemlike flame.

None of this has yet alluded to the autobiographical level—to the snake, for example, that brother William wound around a doorknob on which the horrified Walter put his hand—or to scission imagery in works other than The Renaissance and Marius, as, for example, the missing arm of Apollyon in “Apollo in Picardy” or the “sudden, severe pain” of a wasp sting and the analogous burning of the child's hand while making flowers of sealing-wax, both in “The Child in the House” (Miscellaneous Studies, 189). Indeed, the most memorable of all such passages belongs to the unpublished pages of Pater's most tantalizing work, the incomparable Gaston de Latour. It takes the famous image of the metal honeysuckle that in “An English Poet” had been Pater's figure for prose style itself and relates it directly to the serpent's ambiguous fang:

You may read in a certain old Suabian chronicler whose grimy blacksmith's hands handled a pen forcibly, how a famous Italian smith constructed a singular flower of iron. … They loved, those genial old Swiss and South German masters, to curb, smooth, and curl their harsh rude metal into trellis work of honeysuckle, spiked lilies, bossy roses: and now here was a cunning Italian more than emulating their art, being determined for once to do the like while retaining under the undulous leaves all iron's native poignancy and defiance. How he contrived, polished, veiled his machinery, you were tempted to try with the finger amid the graceful foliage, touched the hidden spring perchance, and found your wrist imprisoned in a moment in a circle of bristling points, while the central stamen slid through your hand, like a great poignard from its sheath, or the fang of a steely serpent.⁸

The forcible pen in the blacksmith's hand doubles the Italian smith's poniard that pierces the palm of the curious beholder. Here surely is an image of the paralyzing Medusan trap—the “delicate snakes” and their “terrified struggle to escape” now mock the victim whose hand they pierce with their “circle of bristling points.”

Like Psyche who would see the god and so reify her dream or like the curious spectators fascinated by the dismemberment in the arena who feel themselves immune, the beholder “tempted to try” the iron lily's “how”—i.e., to interpret absolutely what he himself has touched—looks directly upon the petrifying face of the gorgon. Because the red rose always precedes the white, to privilege any dream as final vision is to lose the symbolic within the diabolic, to become the victim of the Medusa head. Dreaming cannot produce vision; but enriched by the red rose reveries that precede, it can forge more cunningly contrived symbols of the white rose of innocence. Like some departed saint's “relic” spied through the crystal of a medieval reliquary, consciousness, as Pater remarked in the “Conclusion,” reduces “to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by” (Renaissance, 236). Within the present the dead past is still capable of working a miracle, a miracle (L mirari to wonder, Skt smayate he smiles) reflected in the smile of Lady Lisa who shares the secret of the beholder. This beholder, willing to put all definite histories and dogmatic interpretations back into play, looks upon Medusa's reflection from beyond her enclosing border and glimpses her “virginal beauty” (Marius, 2: 106). He does not exempt himself from the Medusan sting of death; but, knowing her as the goddess who conceals herself within herself, he turns the steely fang that pierces his hand back upon itself to find there the ecstasy of the pen. This is the artist who raises his mortality to the level of symbol in order “to live, perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it were but in a fragment of perfect expression” (Marius, 1: 155).

Notes

1. Parenthetical citations made within the text are to the Library Edition of The Works of Walter Pater, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1910); these citations are shortened to only the page number if they follow a previous reference to the identical volume.

2. J. Hillis Miller, “Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait,” Daedalus, 105 (1976), 102-103.

3. Walter Pater, “Poems by William Morris,” Westminster Review, 34 (October, 1868), 302.

4. Quoted in Germain d’Hangest, Walter Pater: L’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris: Didier, 1961), 2: 364 n. 15. This passage is without commas in the MS.

5. d’Hangest, 2: 45, 356 n. 11. Pater's symbol for “because” has been converted into its verbal form.

6. Present throughout Bentham's work, the Greatest Happiness formula first appears in the opening sentences of the Preface of his first book, A Fragment on Government, vol. 1 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 227. The quotation from Mill appears in “Utilitarianism,” ed. D. P. Dyer in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 215.

7. Unlike the hypothetical reader, this author is indebted to Roland G. Frean, “Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean: Notes and Commentary Preliminary to a Critical Edition,” Diss. University of Toronto 1961, pp. 341-44, 55.

8. Walter Pater, Gaston de Latour, Chapter XI, presently being edited by the author for Gaston de Latour and Criticism, vol. 5 of the projected Complete Works of Walter Pater.