The relationship between the arts was central to Pater. Although Pater never devoted a whole essay to Blake, his name surfaces in discussions about form and style, soul and mind. This chapter traces Pater’s engagement with Blake, focusing on Blake’s function in Pater’s anachronic poetics. He appreciates Michelangelo through Hugo and Blake, who features as a ‘“survival” from a different age’ in essays on Demeter and Dionysus. Exhibitions in 1871 and 1876 present Blake’s allegorical portraits of Pitt, Nelson, and Napoleon as ‘Spiritual Forms’, a dystopian title Pater paradoxically repurposed to capture an embodied aesthetic and heal the separation between form and content. Comparison with Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue (1809) reveals how both Blake and Pater look to sculpture to develop an ideal of the human form divine. Explicit references to Blake’s illustrations to Job and Robert Blair’s The Grave reveal the role played by visual images in Pater’s writing, illuminating the inter-art dynamics of his critical practice. Pater’s Blake brings out a discipline of literary form that is shaped by a multisensorial aesthetic.

This chapter aims to expose what ‘quaint’ means for Pater, and the work it does in his criticism. His use of ‘quaint’ is idiosyncratic but connected to a wider pattern in criticism: on the one hand, the attempt of his predecessors and contemporaries to account for Browne’s peculiarity; on the other, a vogue for the word as a critical term with strong and ambivalent associations. It is a keyword, marking a simultaneous discomfort with and interest in the lingering appeal of outmoded aesthetic objects which connects it to Pater’s broader theoretical statements on style, and on the relationship between Classicism and Romanticism. The chapter shows how Pater’s quaintness fits in the longer history of the reception of Browne, which traces changing attitudes to difficulty, Latinity, and ‘metaphysical’ style. These qualities were associated with forms of religion and philosophical education rejected in the later seventeenth century, just as ‘classical clearness’ became the ideal of prose, and they have remained variously embarrassing, threatening, or appealing ever since: a complex of aesthetic effects which ‘quaint’ works both to name and conceal.

Pater acquired a copy of William Carew Hazlitt’s new edition of Montaigne’s Essays published in 1877. This chapter begins by drawing out similarities in the reception of Pater and Montaigne, both of whose writings were assailed for their egotism, scepticism, and sensuality. Such parallels laid the foundations for Pater’s adoption of Montaigne as a proxy for defending his own critical enterprise. Pater’s highly revisionist account of Montaigne hails him not only as a far subtler thinker and moralist than had hitherto been acknowledged in his English reception, but also as a model of aesthetic finesse, demonstrated above all in his engagement with literature. Rather than contesting the charge of self-centredness, Pater defends Montaigne’s incisive interest in his own various and volatile responsiveness as the essential precondition for any criticism worth having. Curious and sociable, the Selfish Reader as represented by Montaigne cherishes the opportunity to view things from different angles and to probe new possibilities for the self, which is never simply given but always at stake in its encounters.

In parallel with the establishment of English as an academic subject, Pater’s lifetime coincided with the institutionalisation of Modern Languages as an independent field of study within British universities. Pater’s contribution to the debate over a School of English at Oxford must therefore be understood in relation to his involvement with the Oxford School of Modern Languages and with the cultural and social space of the Taylorian Institution. In 1890, Pater was invited to contribute to the prestigious Taylor Lectures, which were designed to promote the study of modern European languages and literatures. The resulting lecture and essay, ‘Prosper Mérimée’, presents the French writer as a cosmopolitan and cultural mediator. After Pater’s death, the first series of Taylor lectures was collected in a volume entitled Studies in European Literature (1900). Reading the essay on Mérimée in the context of that volume enables us to see Pater as an advocate of a comparative approach to literature and as rejecting the nationalist mentality in which the rise of English in universities found itself implicated.

Pater’s individual volumes of essays were republished and reprinted many times in the years following his death. The books passed from hand to hand, and entered the second-hand market, often featuring brief inscriptions which indicate that they were proffered as gifts, in addition to more revealing marks of ownership comprising underlinings and marginal annotations. This postscript considers a small sample of such books, helpful in illustrating the diversity and orientation of Pater’s posthumous readership. Ranging from an early copy of Appreciations bought as a schoolboy by an eminent English scholar to a pocket edition of the same work presented to a prospective Oxford student, these books testify to the continuing appeal of Pater’s writings. An underlying theme to be followed is the vexed question of Pater’s perceived relevance to the study of English literature while the subject itself was acquiring its institutional framework in British universities. Some indications of Pater’s American readership, and his appeal to the more flexible curricula of the ‘new universities’ of the 1960s, are also relevant to the context under consideration here.

The Introduction frames a collection that makes the case for Pater’s importance for the study of English literature, bringing to the fore key themes and preoccupations and thus underlining the unity and coherence of the book. Discussion starts in 1886 when the Pall Mall Gazette asked writers, intellectuals, and educators to comment on the proposal by J. Churton Collins to establish a School of English at the University of Oxford; Pater’s writings on literature are looked at in the light of institutional debates and developments in literary criticism at this time. The Introduction explores in detail Pater’s commitment to what, in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he calls ‘aesthetic criticism’, derived in part from German philosophical aesthetics, and what he intends by his stress on ‘style’ and ‘form’. Finally it looks at Pater’s conception of education as dialogic process, stemming in particular from Plato and Montaigne, and the role his use of the essay plays in that process; the case is made that Pater has much to offer us when we think about desirable forms of English Studies for today that are neither nationalistic nor exceptionalist but cosmopolitan.

The first part of this book looks at Pater’s contribution to English studies and literary criticism within a number of broader contexts. Kenneth Daley provides initial orientation for the reader. He compares Pater’s Appreciations with the writings of other critics in the period, stressing how the volume asserts the centrality of the ‘romantic’ tradition in English literature, and contributes influentially to late nineteenth-century literary historiography and the tradition of the English critical essay. Appreciations may not have enjoyed the succès de scandale of The Renaissance, but it was widely disseminated and admired, with six editions and thirteen other reprintings up to 1927.

‘Style’ is a comparatively rare instance of Pater’s direct theorising; even by the standards of his other overtly theoretical interventions, the essay stands out for the breadth and importance of its subject and its capstone prominence within Appreciations, one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced. Scholars have often turned to ‘Style’ as if it were the author’s manifesto or summa on the subject, yet the essay tends to disappoint precisely on these terms. If ‘Style’ is the key to Pater’s aesthetic principles, most readers have found the lock jammed; or worse, they have concluded that the essay betrays the essential nature of his aestheticist vision. By contrast, this chapter argues that, while elusive, ‘Style’ is in fact a lucid and authentic intervention that at once tacitly responds to several of the most influential writers and critics of Pater’s generation (Wilde, Arnold, Saintsbury, Newman), while clarifying – rather than contradicting – his own convictions on the relationship between literary beauty or ‘perfection’, and the idea of transcendent ‘truth’.

Appreciations represents a significant contribution to nineteenth-century literary historiography and to the delineation of the English essay tradition. Pater’s book asserts the centrality of Romanticism and develops a historical schema for the essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing narrative, prominently articulated by Arnold, of eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the achievement in that mode, an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism. Pater sets a modern tradition of prose derived from Montaigne and inaugurated by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy epitomises the romantic impulse of English literature. Pater’s treatment of the literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critics such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, associated with the rise of English Studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.

I have tried particularly in the previous chapter to show how the connection between the sophists and tragedy is not to be seen as a matter of the regrettable influence on poetry of a rhetoric of tricks or an improper intellectualism, but rather as an important indication of the radical tensions that draw together sophistic and tragic questions about man’s place in the order of things. In this chapter, I am going to consider a further major area of innovativeness in tragic theatre that has proved instrumental in the evaluation and appreciation particularly of Euripides’ œuvre, namely, the poet’s self-conscious marking and manipulation of the conventions of the genre of tragedy. For Euripides’ innovativeness is developed not merely in the new material of his plots, the experimental use of lyric, or his ‘deglamorization’ of myth, but also in his tragedies’ self-reflexive sense of theatre as theatre.

Like so many modern philosophers, literary critics and novelists – heirs to ancient questions – fifth-century b.c. writers show an ‘intense interest in the limits and possibilities of language’.1 This interest connects numerous writers across numerous genres and disciplines. In the texts of philosophy, the concern with language not only gives rise to the development of linguistic study itself, but also is reflected in the prime place of logos, dialectic, rhetoric – the role of language itself – in the development of philosophical systems from Heraclitus to Aristotle. Modern occidental philosophy, for all its historical turns, is still working through Aristotelian linguistic categories and distinctions. It is the fifth century too that offers the first formal studies in rhetoric, the teaching and practice of which dominated education for two thousand years and more, and has recently been the focus of much of the most iconoclastic modern philosophical and literary criticism.2

If we wish to understand the force and direction of Greek tragedy, it is impossible not to bring into consideration the city of Athens, which gave rise to the institution of the tragic festivals and which, as we saw in the previous chapter, can be regarded as offering specific conditioning to its dramas. I do not mean by this to take for granted any simple relation between a society and the texts produced in it, nor do I wish to add my name to the roll call of those who have seen in the order of the polis one of the greatest glories of Greece. Rather, in this chapter I intend to develop briefly some sense of the ideology of the polis and a view of its structure: naturally, I shall not be attempting a full description of its institutions or of its history, two topics to which many words have been dedicated,1 nor am I attempting to define in full the term polis, a word whose transliteration covers a multitude of insufficient translations.2 Rather, within the terms of this book I shall be attempting to investigate some ways in which the structure of civic ideology may relate to the dramatic festivals and the sorts of transgressions enacted in tragedy and comedy. For even if the relations between the social conditions of production and the texts themselves remain obscure and difficult, it does not follow that the texts can simply be read divorced from any sense or investigation of those conditions.