[In the following essay, Bump describes how Pater uses aural imagery and performatives in Marius the Epicureanto lead Marius to “the music of Logos” and “a fuller sense of human communication.”]

It would be difficult to overestimate just how pervasive are the spatial paradigms of literature we have inherited from Pater. Sharon Bassett points out that Pater was an important precursor of Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, and the American deconstructionists, and demonstrates that the source of Pater's influence on modern literary criticism was his anticipation of what Joseph Frank calls “spatiality”: “When, in 1945, Joseph Frank endeavors to articulate those specific qualities that belong to modern literature he unerringly focuses on features that a half century earlier Pater had associated with what he hoped would be the modern critical intelligence … the a-temporal forms that Frank so convincingly describes … Pater's ultimate resting point seems to be not so much that art aspires to the condition of music but that narrative art aspires to the condition, which is to say, to the immediate impact, of visual or spatial art.”¹ Pater was clearly the pivotal figure in the transmission of the spatial orientation of Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites to Wilde and our century. The influence of Pater's spatial paradigms of language is obvious, for instance, in such essays of Wilde's as “The Critic as Artist” and “The Decay of Lying,” essays which contain in embryo many essential axioms of formalism and its various permutations in our century, including structuralism and deconstructionism.

The dominance of Pater's seminal, visual models of language is nowhere more obvious than in Marius the Epicurean. “The sum” of the recommendations of the priest of Aesculapius “was the precept, repeated many times under slightly varied aspects, of a diligent promotion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eye would lie for him the determining influence of life: he was of the number of those who, in the words of a poet who came long after, must be ‘made perfect by the love of visible beauty.’”² The “tyrannous reality” of “things visible” “was borne in upon” Marius (ch. 4), and thus of all the “various religious fantasies” of his day “he could well appreciate the picturesque; that was made easy by his natural Epicureanism, already prompting him to conceive of himself as but the passive spectator of the world around him … a materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee” (ch. 8). Marius's “natural Epicureanism” survives the competing claims of Cyrenaicism and Stoicism because Marius retains his “strong apprehension … of the beauty of the visible things around him,” and “his natural susceptibility in this direction, enlarged by experience, seems to demand of him an almost exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of things … their revelations to the eye” (ch. 16).

As Pater's heirs, we too have adopted an almost exclusive preoccupation with the visual aspects of things. When we read, for instance, we usually assume that we are to read with our eyes only, and we look for images and examples of reading and writing in the text which will confirm our paradigm. For example, Gerald Monsman points out that “in Marius's truant reading of Apuleius's Golden Book” readers encounter “a mirror of their own activity of reading and responding to Pater's novel” in which “the text is clearly depicting the process of its own making and of its being read. … The two lads ‘half-buried in a heap of dry corn, in an old granary’ looked around: ‘How like a picture! and it was precisely the scene described in what they were reading.’”³

“How like a picture!” has become the subliminal refrain of much of modern criticism. Monsman emphasizes the visual aspects of St. Cecilia's house, for instance: “In Saint Cecilia and the church in her house, Marius finds a relational interplay surpassing Apuleius's fantasies, arranged, ‘as if in designed congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision, into an actual picture.’” Monsman also focuses on the garden which formed “a picture” recalling “the old miniature-painters’ work on the walls of the chambers within” and on comparisons of Cecilia to a statue, and of Marius's feelings to those of a painter who sees an opening in the background of his picture.⁴

Yet this almost exclusively visual approach to reading is very recent. Just a hundred years ago there was a much wider variety of models of reading. Philip Collins has demonstrated the popularity of reading aloud in the Victorian age, for instance, and Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong have revealed that auditory paradigms were still more prominent in previous eras. Thus, if we are to avoid a simplistic model of reading based on exclusive preoccupation with a single sense, the eye, do we not need to recover some of these other modes of reading? Just as we have searched texts for visual models of reading and writing, we can become aware of auditory models as well: for example, scripts for the dramatic performance of the text itself.

It is easy enough to reconstruct such a model for the performance of, say, Dickens's novels, but I would argue that auditory models of reading were so pervasive, even in the late nineteenth century, that they can be discovered even in texts apparently completely dominated by visual paradigms, indeed even in the seminal text of “spatiality,” Marius the Epicurean.⁵ Acknowledgment of the auditory as well as the spatial imagery in the novel affects our sense of the ending and suggests an alternative to our current critical paradigm, an alternative only now beginning to be adumbrated by speech act theories of language.

In Marius the two lads' truant reading of Apuleius is not the only example of Pater's dramatization of the reading of his own text. Consider, for instance, three more extensive narratives within the novel that suggest how the larger narrative should be read: the Halcyon legend, the story of Cupid and Psyche, and the recitation of the Gospel. At the feast for Apuleius manuscripts are brought out, but they are not read in our sense of the word. They are performed: “a famous reader, choosing his lucky moment, delivered in a tenor voice” the tale (ch. 20). Gerald Monsman has shown that this legend is another “allegory, like the story of Cupid and Psyche, of a love stronger than death,”⁶ but it is also an allegory in the text itself of how to read a text. Pater stresses the power not of sight but of sound: “What sound was that, Socrates? … And how melodious it was! Was it a bird, I wonder. I thought all sea-birds were songless.” “Aye! a sea-bird,” answered Socrates, “a bird called the Halcyon, and has a note full of plaining and tears.” Moreover, the speaker's oral performance of the sounds or “notes” of the text has a powerful effect on a live audience, especially on Apuleius: “The reader's well-turned periods seemed to stimulate, almost uncontrollably, the eloquent stirrings of the eminent man of letters then present. The impulse to speak masterfully was visible, before the recital was well over, in the moving lines about his mouth. … One of the company … made ready to transcribe what he would say, the sort of things of which a collection was then forming … elaborate, carved ivories of speech, drawn, at length, out of the rich treasure-house of a memory stored with such” (ch. 20). Despite the belated and subordinate spatial metaphor (“carved ivories”) we are reminded that this kind of oral tradition was the model of communication not only for Socrates but also for Jesus, Buddha, and many other leaders who have changed the course of human history through speaking rather than writing.

Apuleius's tale of Cupid and Psyche in the Golden Book that the truant boys were reading places still more emphasis on the ears, even to the exclusion of the eyes. The story is framed by invocations of the magical power of the spoken word, the power of what we now call performatives, in this case “Declarations: Illocutionary acts that bring about the state of affairs they refer to.”⁷ As Pater writes,

The scene of the romance was laid in … the original land of witchcraft. … haunts of magic and incantations. …

“You might think that through the murmuring of some cadaverous spell, all things had been changed … that the birds you heard singing were feathered men. … The statues seemed about to move, the walls to speak, the dumb cattle to break out in prophecy; nay! the very sky and the sunbeams, as if they might suddenly cry out.” (ch. 5)

And indeed in the tale which follows not only does an ant, a reed, an eagle, a tower, and a river speak but humans elicit speech from the gods themselves: Psyche speaks with Cupid, Ceres, Juno, Pan, and Venus.

Admittedly, Psyche is originally drawn by the visual beauty of Cupid's palace: “but as she gazed there came a voice—a voice, as it were unclothed by bodily vesture. … Still she saw no one: only she heard words falling here and there, and had voices alone to serve her.” When darkness descends and her eyes are rendered completely useless, “behold a sound of a certain clemency approache[d] her” and “the sound of the voice grew to be her solace in that condition of loneliness and uncertainty.” The God of Love becomes her bridegroom but warns her that if she seeks to use her eyes rather than her ears to know him their marriage will be at an end. Like Marius, however, she is too dependent on her eyes and finally insists on seeing as well as hearing him. He, “beholding the overthrow of her faith, quietly took flight from her embraces.” The remainder of the tale tells the story of Venus, who sought “the service of Mercury, the god of speech,” admitting, “never at any time have I done anything without thy help” (ch. 5). Venus tests Psyche but she survives with the help of the speech of other creatures, and finally Jupiter commands Mercury to assemble the gods and he blesses their marriage.

If both the story of Cupid and Psyche and the Halcyon legend may be read as Christian allegories we should not be surprised to discover that hearing, as opposed to seeing, is even more strongly emphasized in the explicitly Christian sections. Like the God of Love, Cornelius is introduced as a disembodied voice. Stopping at an inn on the way to Rome, Marius is feeling melancholy: “It was just then that he heard the voice of one, newly arrived at the inn … a youthful voice, with a reassuring clearness of note, which completed his cure. He seemed to hear that voice again in dreams, uttering his name” (ch. 10). The stress on a voice in dreams calling his name recalls the Victorian myth of the power of Newman's voice and the emphasis on the voice of God throughout the Bible,⁸ especially in the parable of the Good Shepherd: “the sheep hear his voice, one by one he calls his own sheep and leads them out. When he has brought out his flock, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow because they know his voice. They never follow a stranger but run away from him: they do not recognise the voice of strangers. … And there are other sheep I have that are not of this fold, and these I have to lead as well. They too will listen to my voice” (John 10:3-5, 16). The reference to leading sheep not of this fold, that is, to the conversion of the gentiles, is the subject again when Peter hears the voice of God in a trance telling him, “What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane” (Acts 10:15), but Peter does not understand until he discovers the holiness of the Roman centurion, Cornelius, and authorizes the baptism of the first pagans.⁹

Apparently the appeal is to the eye, however, in the climactic visit to Cecilia's house: “Was he willing to look upon that, the seeing of which might define—yes! define the critical turning-point in his days?” But it is not so much the “seeing” of it as the hearing of it that defines this “critical turning-point”: “And from the first they could hear singing … and of a new kind” (ch. 21). We discover, as Daniel Hughes puts it, that “a kind of musicalization is the key to the ‘Christian’ chapters of the book”:

Cecilia, in whose house Marius finds the purest Christian sentiment, is of course the later martyred patron saint of music, and it is to the pure sound of the early mass that we are directed. … Unlike Marcus' [Aurelius] rejection of the physical world, Cecilian Christianity restores visual and aural exaltation to their purest operation in the early Mass.¹⁰

Hughes is the only critic to my knowledge to have placed much emphasis on the aural imagery in Marius, but the term “pure sound” may need some qualification and the “kind of musicalization” needs to be specified, for the implied association of these terms with Pater's suggestion in the Renaissance that all art aspires to the condition of music can be misleading. Pure music, at least instrumental music, is not the key to this novel. There are references to instrumental music: the invisible harp, lyre, and pipes in Cupid's palace, Apollo's lyre and Pan's reeds at the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, the flutes in Marcus Aurelius's procession (ch. 12), and the performance of the acroama at the feast to honor Apuleius (ch. 20). Moreover, music in the “wider Platonic sense” (ch. 9) is important because it becomes a metaphor for the artistic ordering of life (chs. 9, 15, 16, 28) and for the Logos itself (ch. 8). Yet even as metaphor the term “music” includes song and thus speech as well, as in the references to the “call to play,” which was heard all over Rome (ch. 9), and to the evening which itself became audible in the singing of the Christians (ch. 21).

In fact, the “kind of musicalization” that is the key to the novel is singing, that is, a combination of two genres, music and poetry. Moreover, the emphasis is on the human voice, one of the motifs of the novel, repeated in varying contexts ranging from the metaphorical “voice” of philosophy recurring in the Mass “with clearer accent than had ever belonged to it before, as if lifted, above its first intention, into the harmonies of some supreme system of knowledge or doctrine, at length complete” (ch. 23) to a brief epithet such as “the voice of Dante, the hand of Giotto” (ch. 22) implying that the essential difference between literature and art was the difference between an invisible voice and a visible hand.

To be more specific, the “kind of musicalization” that is the key to the novel is a fusion of music and a special kind of poetic speech: prayer. It is the “mystic tone of this praying and singing” (ch. 23) that attracts Marius to Cecilian Christianity, especially “the religious poetry of those Hebrew psalms”:

In the old pagan worship there had been little to call the understanding into play. Here, on the other hand, the utterance, the eloquence, the music of worship conveyed, as Marius readily understood, a fact or series of facts, for intellectual reception. That became evident, more especially, in those lessons, or sacred readings, which, like the singing, in broken vernacular Latin, occurred at certain intervals, amid the silence of the assembly. (ch. 23)

“Music” becomes almost a synonym for “utterance” or “eloquence” in this construction, especially the oral performance of sacred texts.¹¹

Perhaps the best examples of music in this sense were hymns. Marius is familiar with various pagan combinations of prayer and song, such as the hymns sung during the Ambarvalia (ch. 1), the ancient hymns sung by his paternal relatives (ch. 2), Flavian's mystic hymn to life (ch. 6), the hymn sung by the choir of youths at the pageant for the launching of the Ship of Isis (ch. 6), the hymn to Diana in the Roman amphitheatre (ch. 14), the hymns chanted while the body of Lucius Verus lay in state at the Forum (ch. 17), but the Judeo-Christian hymns were different. The most successful ones derived from the Psalms. The Psalms had evolved into the music Marius most admires, the music of the Mass:

In this way an obscure synagogue was expanded into the catholic church … she was already, as we have heard, the house of song—of a wonderful new music and poesy. … Singing there had been in abundance from the first; though often it dared only be “of the heart.” And it burst forth, when it might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical music; the Jewish psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now, gradually, from Greek into Latin—broken Latin, into Italian, as the ritual use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the earlier authorised language of the Church. … That hymn sung in the early morning, of which Pliny had heard, was kindling into the service of the Mass. (ch. 22)

The result is a seminal paradigm of its age “like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of frescoes which commemorate The Acts of Saint Francis” (ch. 23).

However, there is a crucial difference: this is as much an auditory as a spatial paradigm: “It was not in an image, or series of images, yet still in a sort of dramatic action, and with the unity of a single appeal to eye and ear, that Marius about this time found all his new impressions set forth, regarding what he had already recognised, intellectually, as for him at least the most beautiful thing in the world” (ch. 23). The new paradigm, moreover, is without the advantage of a visible central image; it is what we now call a speech event, integrating many genres of speech: “The entire office, indeed, with its interchange of lessons, hymns, prayer, silence, was itself like a single piece of highly composite, dramatic music; a ‘song of degrees,’ rising steadily to a climax. Notwithstanding the absence of any central image visible to the eye, the entire ceremonial process, like the place in which it was enacted, was weighty with symbolic significance, seemed to express a single leading motive” (ch. 23). As Flavian had recommended in his literary program, this service draws its strength from the living language, that is the spoken language, the colloquial idiom, the vernacular, and it incorporates within it the basic conversational model, dialogue.

All the previous dialogues—the dialogue of cries in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, the dialogue generated by the performance of the text at the feast for Apuleius, the ongoing dialogue between Marius and Cornelius—are summarized and surpassed by the antiphonies of the service:

The voices burst out … though still of an antiphonal character; the men, the women and children, the deacons, the people, answering one another, somewhat after the manner of a Greek chorus. But again with what a novelty of poetic accent; what a genuine expansion of heart; what profound intimations for the intellect, as the meaning of the words grew upon him! … Still in a strain of inspired supplication, the antiphonal singing developed, from this point, into a kind of dialogue between the chief minister and the whole assisting company—(ch. 23)

The result is that the communion hymn becomes a new model of human dialogue: “a hymn like the spontaneous product of two opposed militant companies, contending accordantly together, heightening, accumulating, their witness, provoking one another's worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry” (ch. 23).

Yet the most powerful part of the service is the oral performance of a text more like that of the novel itself, that is, a narrative. Here it is quite clear that what appealed to Marius's ear was not so much music, in the usual sense of the word, as the speaking of words we now call performatives. Marius had encountered performatives before—in the repetitions of a consecrated form of words in old Roman religious usage, such as the exclamation “Numen Inest” when passing into a grove of ilex, in the recitation of the old Latin words of the pagan liturgy in the procession of the Ambarvalia (ch. 1), in the words of some philter or malison a frantic woman cried out as the travelers passed on the way to Rome (ch. 10), in the spells and blessings recounted in the Cupid and Psyche story, in the forms of incantation recited by Aurelius as the chief religious functionary of the state (ch. 12), in the proclamation of the hour of noon by the Accensus in Rome (ch. 11), in the changing of the decree of divine rank for Lucius Verus (ch. 17)—but he found all these surpassed by the performatives inspired by the Christian narrative:¹²

And last of all came a narrative. …

… the proper action of the rite itself, like a half-opened book to be read by the duly initiated mind took up those suggestions, and carried them forward into the present, as having reference to a power still efficacious, still after some mystic sense even now in action among the people there assembled. …

… Adoramus te Christe, quia per crucem tuam redemisti mundum!—they cry together. So deep is the emotion that at moments it seems to Marius as if some there present apprehend that prayer prevails, that the very object of this pathetic crying himself draws near. From the first there had been the sense, an increasing assurance, of one coming:—actually with them now, according to the oft-repeated affirmation or petition, Dominus vobiscum! …

… catching therewith a portion of the enthusiasm of those beside him, Marius could discern dimly, behind the solemn recitation which now followed, at once a narrative and a prayer, the most touching image truly that had ever come within the scope of his mental or physical gaze. (ch. 23)

Of course this “image” is produced by an appeal not to his “physical gaze” but to his ears.

Nor is this an isolated incident in the text: “In early spring, he ventured once more to listen to the sweet singing of the Eucharist. It breathed more than ever the spirit of a wonderful hope. … As he followed again that mystical dialogue, he felt also again, like a mighty spirit about him, the potency, the half-realised presence, of a great multitude … the whole company of mankind. … And then, in its place, by way of sacred lection … came the Epistle of the churches of Lyons and Vienne” calling for a “new order of knighthood,” of martyrdom if need be (ch. 26). The epistle thus invokes the biblical sense of the word “perform,” a meaning even more powerful than those suggested by the modern concept of performatives. In the biblical model the performance of the words of a text demands the complete participation of the reader; his heart and soul are to embrace the heart and soul of the text: “I have inclined my heart to perform thy statutes always, even unto the end” (Psalms 119:112). It is not enough to read the text or even to speak it aloud; one must pour one's whole being into the performance of it: “Now therefore perform the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to will, so there may be a performance also out of that which ye have” (2 Cor. 8:11).¹³

The final chapter takes up the question of whether Marius—until now one of the most passive spectators of life—will be able to respond to this new model of reading. The answer is suggested by the title of the chapter, “Anima Naturaliter Christiana.” Marius and Cornelius come to a church associated with the legend of the martyr Hyacinthus. Losing sleep over thoughts of that martyrdom, Marius at last sleeps heavily but awakens to find Cornelius absent. The Christians of the town “were at prayer before the tomb of the martyr; and even as Marius pressed among them to a place beside Cornelius” there is an earthquake. The pagans of the town, blaming the Christians, attack them and take Marius and Cornelius prisoner:

It was surmised that one of the prisoners was not a Christian … and in the night, Marius … contrived that Cornelius, as the really innocent person, should be dismissed in safety on his way. … We wait for the great crisis which is to try what is in us … the “great climacteric point”—has been passed, which changes ourselves or our lives. … Marius had taken upon himself all the heavy risk of the position in which Cornelius had then been … possibly the danger of death. He had delivered his brother. (ch. 28)

The call to martyrdom in the Epistle of the churches of Lyons and Vienne had been truly “heard” by Marius; he “perform[ed] the doing of it.”

On his deathbed he recalls his almost exclusive preoccupation with the visual aspects of things: “Even then, just ere his eyes were to be shut for ever, the things they had seen seemed a veritable possession in hand; the persons, the places, above all, the touching image of Jesus, apprehended dimly through the expressive faces, the crying of the children, in that mysterious drama, with a sudden sense of peace and satisfaction now, which he could not explain to himself. … And again, as of old, the sense of gratitude seemed to bring with it the sense also of a living person at his side” (ch. 28). Those who emphasize Marius's Epicureanism point out that his “faith, to the end, is in the evidence of things seen,” that “at the last Marius still longs to see.”¹⁴ But now the most important “image” for him is clearly visionary rather than visualized, one that in fact he never really “sees” except in the symbolic sense that the “body of Christ” is reconstituted by his followers. The “touching image of Jesus,” of the “living person at his side” is conveyed to him not by his eyes but by the power of the spoken word, a power again invoked in Marius's final moments. Memories of his life flood in upon him: “He awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people who had kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness. … The people around his bed were praying fervently—Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana!” The title of the chapter suggests the success of this final performative. As he dies they give him the Eucharist and minister Extreme Unction. Finally they give him a Christian burial, “holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the church had always said, a kind of sacrament with plenary grace” (ch. 28).

Readers with different interpretations of the terms “Christianity” and “Catholic Church” have not always taken such a generous view of the matter, of course. Many regard Marius's sacrifice of himself for Cornelius as a parody or an irony because once “Marius the spectator had become Marius the actor … commitment leads only to self-destruction.”¹⁵ While some readers may feel that the initial focus on martyrdom was an unfortunate tendency in early Christianity, there can be little doubt that the act itself is a final revelation of whether or not an individual has become a Christian. Marius obviously passes the ultimate test, one many more “orthodox” Christians would have failed: “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12-13).¹⁶ In terms of this act alone, Marius has clearly become a Christian in some sense of the word.

Readers can still protest that they remain unconvinced, of course, that Marius's conversion is out of character: he has been so passive up to this point that such a sudden act is not believable. U. C. Knoepflmacher, for example, concedes that “this passivity is meant to characterize a deliberate defect in Marius' mental make-up” but feels that “Marius' sacrifice is far less convincing as an active exercise of the ‘heart’ than either Dorothea Brooke's vindication of Tertius Lydgate or Daniel Deronda's adoption of his people's cause.” In his view Marius's death “parodies, rather than re-enacts, the myth of the self-sacrificing God common to the religions of Christ and Apollo.”¹⁷

Such a view is understandable but does not, it seems to me, give due weight to the power of performatives and the rest of the auditory imagery in the novel, nor to the history and psychology of conversions. Both subjects were dramatized by one of Pater's best pupils:

                                                  We lash with the best or worst
                    Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe
                                                  Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,
                    Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither then, last or
first,
                                                  To hero of Calvary, Christ's feet—
Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go.

Because sloes can be sour or sweet, it is only when we crush them that we find which they are. Similarly, a man can be good or bad and it is only when his back is to the wall and he lashes out with his best or worst word last that his true being will be revealed. Hopkins goes on to relate this drama to the history of conversions:

                                                            With an anvil-ding
                              And with fire in him forge thy will
                    Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
          Through him, melt him but master him still:
                    Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,
Or as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll. … (18)

Marius's conversion is ultimately more in the tradition of the surprising, sudden conversions typified by “as once at a crash Paul” rather than by Augustine. Hence we should not be surprised when the narrator goes on to ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it, Marius sought martyrdom, and we learn that even that glory was not sought by him, that, like Jesus in Gethsemane, he would have preferred that this cup of bitterness had been removed.

Although the gospels are clearly invoked in this way in an historical novel about the second century, one can still protest that it remains a Victorian novel and, compared to a realistic Victorian novel such as Middlemarch, that the conversion of Marius comes as too much of a surprise. Pater probably did not intend to be as realistic as George Eliot, but Marius's sudden action need not be dismissed as simply unrealistic if we consider the remarks of perhaps the greatest modern critic of realism, George Lukács:

Situations arise in which a man is confronted with a choice; and in the act of choice a man's character may reveal itself in a light that surprises even himself. In literature … the denouement often consists in the realization of just such a potentiality, which circumstances have kept from coming to the fore. … The fate of the character depends upon the potentiality in question, even if it should condemn him to a tragic end. … It may even be buried away so completely that, before the moment of decision, it has never entered his mind even as an abstract potentiality. The subject, after taking his decision, may be unconscious of his own motives. Thus Richard Dudgeon, Shaw's Devil's Disciple, having sacrificed himself as Pastor Andersen, confesses: “I have often asked myself for the motive, but I find no good reason to explain why I acted as I did.” Yet it is a decision which has altered the direction of his life … the qualitative leap of the denouement, cancelling and at the same time renewing the continuity of individual consciousness, can never be predicted. … The literature of realism, aiming at a truthful reflection of reality, must demonstrate both the concrete and abstract potentialities of human beings in extreme situations of this kind.¹⁹

Marius's self-defining sacrifice demonstrates that finally his most concrete potentiality is Christianity. Yet, partly because the title of the book is Marius the Epicurean, many readers prefer to stress the Epicurean potentiality. William Sharp, for example, in his review for the Athenaeum, was uncertain “if it has been Mr. Pater's intention to offer an apology for the higher Epicureanism.”²⁰ Yet Pater wrote immediately to Sharp: “As regards the ethical drift of Marius, I should like to talk to you, if you were here. I did mean it to be more anti-Epicurean than it has struck you as being.” While Pater made it clear that he was not “pleading for a formal thesis, or ‘parti pris,’”²¹ his own statement suggests that he would find some irony in modern arguments that Marius remains Epicurean or even “uncertain” about his potentialities.

Thus Harold Bloom is certainly correct to argue that “currently fashionable sensibility, two-thirds of the way through the century, is perhaps another ironic disordering of Paterian sensibility.”²² But there may be some difference of opinion about the definition of that irony. Bloom's description of Pater, for instance, as one who “makes … available to the coming age” the moment “when the mind will know neither itself nor the object but only the dumbfoundering abyss that comes between”²³ suggests how Pater's account of Heraclitus's reputation in the second century ironically foreshadowed his own reputation in the twentieth century: “Heracliteanism has grown to be almost identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras, that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was the only standard of what is or is not, and each one the measure of all things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had become but an authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge” (ch. 8).

Yet if we heed Pater's auditory as well as his visual metaphors we can reconstruct a more balanced model of his theory of language and literature. Heraclitus's “negative doctrine,” Pater reminds us, “had been, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a large positive system of almost religious philosophy.” We have overlooked this perhaps because that “almost religious philosophy” is expressed best in auditory rather than in visual images: in Heraclitus's “perpetual flux” there is a “continuance” of “orderly intelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical notes … ordinances of the divine reason” (ch. 8). In Plato and Platonism Pater again emphasizes that there was “another side to the doctrine of Heraclitus; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the search for and the notation, if there be such, of an antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in some intricate musical theme, might link together in one those contending, infinitely diverse impulses.”²⁴ Pater's musical imagery reminds us that despite Marius's initial sense of “the eye, the visual faculty of the mind,” as the “unchangeable law of his temperament” (ch. 21), it is the ear which leads him to the music of the Logos.

The appeal of that music, moreover, is precisely that it is the opposite of a philosophy of despair. For Marius, in particular, the divine service was “contrasting itself … very forcibly, with the imperial philosopher's so heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy” (ch. 22). In comparison with the merely visual, written words of Marcus Aurelius, which stimulated only an inner dialogue, the oral performance of the script of the divine service provides Marius with a model of a dramatic, external dialogue with others. Thus his ear not only led him to the music of the Logos, but also to a fuller sense of human communication.

Speech is a more inclusive model because, as linguistic pragmatics has shown, it includes forms which writing usually avoids, such as those whose meaning depends on gesture, intonation, speech styles, or other vocal qualifiers, and more informal expressions drawn from the living language so frequently praised in Marius, the colloquial idiom as it was actually spoken. In spoken discourse, moreover, knowledge of the audience is usually more precise than in writing, and hence the relationships can be more personal and flexible. While written composition, once delivered to the recipient, is regarded as relatively fixed, not subject to further revision, oral composition has the advantage of revision and clarification in response to the audience.²⁵ The audience in turn has the additional information of the kinesis or para-language of the speaker. A speech act theory of literature, therefore, “offers the important possibility of integrating literary discourse into the same basic model of language as all our other communicative activities,” for, unlike structuralist poetics, it need not associate “‘literariness’ directly with formal textual properties.”²⁶ Moreover, the emphasis on the impact of “performatives” in speech act theory offers a more positive paradigm of language, one that can act as a counterpoise for spatial models, which if stressed too exclusively can lead to a philosophy of the despair of knowledge.

On the other hand, we do not really need a new theory to remind us that part of our experience of a text should be the living human voice. Victorian novels, after all, were often read aloud to families and larger audiences, and Philip Collins reminds us that a hundred years ago “much current literature was apprehended in this way—was indeed written with such a reception in mind,” and thus “many people met contemporary literature as a group or communal, rather than an individual experience.”²⁷

The pervasiveness of auditory imagery even in the seminal text of “spatiality,” Marius the Epicurean, suggests the importance of sound and voice in other texts. Take, for example, the novel we have already mentioned, Middlemarch. For Pater, George Eliot's most remarkable passage was Piero di Cosimo's remark in chapter 8 of Romola that “the only passionate life is in form and colour,” and David DeLaura has demonstrated the influence of that novel on Marius the Epicurean.²⁸ Pater's remark suggests that one of the key influences of Eliot on Marius was her visual imagery. The artistic associations of her Dorothea, for instance, suggest that she may be regarded as a prototype for Cecilia in Marius. The names of both heroines are allusions to saints famous in painting and sculpture. In fact both Dorothea and Cecilia were Latin virgin martyrs who were able to convert men partly because their guardian angels brought fresh flowers gathered in Paradise. Hence both were represented in painting with the palm of victory, a crown of red and white roses, and an angel, and were therefore sometimes difficult to distinguish.

Moreover, the cult of Dorothea among the Pre-Raphaelites endowed her with contemporary artistic associations as well. By the time Eliot wrote Middlemarch Dante Gabriel Rossetti had painted his Dorothy and Theophilus, Christina Rossetti had completed her “A Shadow of Dorothea,” Hopkins had composed two versions of his “For a Picture of St. Dorothea,” Swinburne had finished his “St. Dorothy,” Burne-Jones had completed his design for an embroidery of her, and Morris had begun a poem on her for The Earthly Paradise.²⁹ These representations of her lend support to the suggestion that the opening sentence of Middlemarch “makes of Dorothea a genuinely Pre-Raphaelite Madonna.”³⁰ Moreover, the original nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites, the Nazarenes, play an important role in the novel.

Yet it is particularly significant for the auditory imagery of Marius, especially that associated with St. Cecilia, as well as for our sense of how language and literature work, that the hero of Middlemarch finally rejects the visual arts because he discovers, as he tells the leader of the Nazarenes, that only language can begin to convey the ideal which Dorothea represents:

“And what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them. Language is a finer medium. … Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. … This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.”³¹

Ladislaw's comments about Dorothea may well have recalled for Pater the descriptions of responses to paintings of Cecilia by Anna Jameson, the founder of the Victorian cult of St. Dorothea. She reported that in one painting Cecilia was “listening with an entranced expression to the song of invisible angels” and in another a friend of hers “was struck by the peculiar expression in the eyes of St. Cecilia, which he said he had often remarked as characteristic of musicians by profession, or those devoted to music,—an expression of listening rather than seeing.”³²

Notes

1. “The Uncanny Critic of Brasenose: Walter Pater and Modernisms,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 58 (1980), pp. 12-13; for examples of the modern emphasis on the visual paradigm see Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 159; René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), p. 126; Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), p. 29; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 7, and Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), p. 76; Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany, eds., Spatial Form in Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981).

2. Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, Library Edition, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1914), ch. 3; subsequent citations in my text are to this edition.

3. Walter Pater's Art of Autobiography (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), p. 52.

4. Ibid., pp. 65-66.

5. On Marius the Epicurean as Pater's seminal text see Blanche Winder, “A Master of Aesthetic,” Spectator, 11 Aug. 1928, p. 186; Joseph Sagmaster, ed., Marius the Epicurean (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935), pp. xix-xxii; David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 263, 285; and Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (1949; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961), p. 145.

6. Pater's Portraits (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 86; cf. pp. 66, 71-74.

7. Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Mary Louise Pratt, Linguistics for Students of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1980), p. 229.

8. See David J. DeLaura, “‘O Unforgotten Voice’: The Memory of Newman in the Nineteenth Century,” in Sources for Reinterpretation: The Use of Nineteenth-Century Literary Documents: Essays in Honor of C. L. Cline (Austin: Dept. of English and Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas, 1975), pp. 23-55; James Nohrnberg, “Literature and the Bible,” Centrum, 2, No. 2 (1974), 19-20, 22-37, 30; and Donald D. Evans, The Logic of Self-Involvement (London: SCM Press, 1963).

9. The Jerusalem Bible, ed. Alexander Jones et al. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 168, 217.

10. “Marius and the Diaphane,” Novel, 9 (1975), 63.

11. On eloquence as music see DeLaura, “‘O Unforgotten Voice,’” pp. 23, 26-27, 41, 43.

12. See Nohrnberg, “Literature and the Bible,” and Evans, The Logic of Self-Involvement; for the relationship between the divine service and performatives see A. P. Martinich, “Sacraments and Speech Acts,” Heythrop Journal, 16 (1975), 289-303, 405-417; for a connection with literature see James Leggio, “Hopkins and Alchemy,” Renascence, 29 (1977), 115-30.

13. King James Authorized version of the Bible.

14. Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 189, 194.

15. Ian Fletcher, Walter Pater (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), p. 27; a number of other readers find Marius's attraction to Christianity a “movement toward death” and “a surrender of reason,” as Avrom Fleishman puts it in The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 173-75.

16. Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

17. Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 221.

18. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 54. On the power of performatives in the poem see W. David Shaw, “Mill on Poetic Truth: Are Intuitive Inferences Valid?” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 23 (1981), 30-35; for the relationship between Pater and Hopkins see Bernard Duffey, “The Religion of Pater's Marius,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2 (1960), 103-14; David Anthony Downes, Victorian Portraits: Hopkins and Pater (New York: Bookman, 1965); and Jerome Bump, “Hopkins, Pater, and Medievalism,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 50 (1976), pp. 10-15, which focuses on Pater's initial antagonism to Christianity.

19. “The Ideology of Modernism,” The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), pp. 22-23; rpt. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1972), p. 478.

20. Unsigned review of Marius the Epicurean, Athenaeum, 28 Feb. 1885, p. 272.

21. Pater to William Sharp, 1 Mar. 1885, Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 58-59.

22. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 186.

23. Harold Bloom, “Walter Pater: The Intoxication of Belatedness,” Yale French Studies, No. 50 (1974), p. 172.

24. Plato and Platonism, New Library Edition (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 17-18.

25. Traugott and Pratt, Linguistics for Students of Literature, pp. 41-46, 260-62.

26. Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 88, 87; see also Richard Ohmann, “Literature as Act,” in Approaches to Poetics, ed. Seymour Chatman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 81-107. For a sense of the debate between writing and speech models of literature see Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” and John R. Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” both in Glyph, No. 1 (1977), pp. 172-208; Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc.,” Glyph, No. 2 (1977), pp. 162-254; E. D. Hirsch, “What’s the Use of Speech-Act Theory?” Centrum, 3, No. 2 (1975), 122-23; Avrom Fleishman, “Speech and Writing in Under Western Eyes,” in Fiction and the Ways of Knowing (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 123-35; and Jerome Bump, “Reading Hopkins: Visual vs. Auditory Paradigms,” Bucknell Review, 26, No. 2 (1982), 119-45.

27. Reading Aloud: A Victorian Métier, Tennyson Society Monographs, No. 5 (Lincoln, England: Tennyson Research Centre, 1972), pp. 10, 27.

28. “Romola and the Origin of the Paterian View of Life,” NCF [Nineteenth-Century Fiction], 21 (1966), 225-26, 230, 233.

29. For more on the Pre-Raphaelite cult of St. Dorothy see Jerome Bump, “Reading Hopkins: Visual vs. Auditory Paradigms,” pp. 122-30.

30. Gillian Beer, “Myth and the Single Consciousness: Middlemarch and The Lifted Veil” in This Particular Web, ed. Ian Adam (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 102.

31. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight, Riverside ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1956), ch. 19, p. 142.

32. Sacred and Legendary Art, 2 vols. (1896; rpt. AMS Press, 1970), II, 594, and II, 594, n. 6.