The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction

Abstract

Walter Pater’s second book was a novel. Issued first in 1885, Marius the Epicurean was his only experiment in this genre to be completed and published in his lifetime. Three years later, chapters of Gaston de Latour, his second novel, appeared serially in five parts as magazine instalments. Conceived of as a sequel to Marius, they seemed a canny bid by Pater and his publisher to reinforce his reputation as a novelist and to augment that of the critic. Gaston was a historical novel, similar in kind to Marius, and the linking of the two projects as parts of a series suggests a commercial eye, with the setting of the second in sixteenth-century France replacing that of the first in Antonine Rome. It is a strategy that twenty-first-century publishers and authors still deploy. During Pater’s lifetime, the commercial success of Marius, which went into a second edition within weeks in 1885, and the truncated publication of Gaston in 1888, are the sum of his public association with the novel form as a practitioner. But Pater’s persistence in novel writing also suggests that he took a writerly pleasure in the freedoms of fiction, and in the possibilities of the novel as a form. In so doing, Pater was participating in an interrogation of the novel that might be said, literarily, to characterize the 1880s. The hypothesis of Pater’s pleasure prompts one of the research questions of this essay: what are the advantages of fiction for Pater, and specifically those of the novel?