SOURCE: “Comparing Mythologies: Forster's Maurice and Pater's Marius,” in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 33, No. 2, 1990, pp. 141-53.

In the following essay, Stape examines E. M. Forster's debt to Pater, particularly as demonstrated in parallels between Marius the Epicurean and Forster's Maurice.

I

In her ninetieth birthday tribute to E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, having acknowledged that no English novelist had influenced her own fiction more than Forster, went on to query “who influenced him? One finds no traces.”¹ As perhaps befit the occasion, Bowen generously overstated her case: “traces” of Jane Austen, Samuel Butler, George Meredith, to name only the most obvious “influences,” are much in evidence. Bowen's comment, however, insightfully emphasizes how subtle and complex Forster's assimilation of his predecessors is, and the extent to which one of these—Walter Pater—informs and influences his fiction has been belatedly, but only partly, recognized.

In a path-breaking...