Surviving Marius

This chapter considers Walter Pater’s late-career engagements with the old school and “mechanical exercise.” The chapter argues that these engagements index a refusal of the liberalism that Pater’s earlier work embraced. Whereas Pater’s readers have tended to understand this refusal as a “retreat,” this chapter reads Pater’s turn to mechanical and pedagogical—as well as ritual—forms as critical rather than reactionary or nostalgic. As he challenges what he sees as an impoverishment of thought, imagination, and memory in the present—a loss of contact with the past’s “complications of influence”—Pater returns repeatedly to “the older method” of instruction in his late essays, lectures, and fiction. Through their engagement with this method and other “survivals” from the past, these texts, including Marius the Epicurean, indirectly make the case for the old school. Pater shows that such a school produces or enforces a sociality that is at once temporal and spatial and thus contrasts starkly with the new school advocated by reformers, which isolates the individual student whom it privileges. Pater instead teaches us to affirm the relations that progressive education denies, relations that sustain a “reserve” that is also a minimal resistance.