Gaston de Latour and Pater's Art of Autobiography

Abstract

PATER WROTE TO AN AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT that his first novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), was designed to be the first of a kind of trilogy, or triplet, of works of a similar character; dealing with the same problems, under altered historical conditions. The period of the second of the series would be at the end of the 16th century, and the place France: of the third, the time, probably the end of the last century-and the scene, England.'l Pater's unfinished second novel, Gaston de Latour (1888-) was to have been the sixteenth-century French study; of the third novel, nothing exists except, possibly, a few unpublished fragments at Harvard's Houghton Library. In comparison with Marius, Gaston exhibits a noticeable change in atmosphere: the violence is no longer quite so hidden under a tranquil surface, and the ambiguity of motives, the personal regrets, and especially an abiding sense of guilt are all more prominent. Yet what primarily distinguishes Gaston from Marius is Pater's failure, despite repeated efforts, to finish it; and the deducible reasons are pertinent to an understanding of Pater's art generally.