The conscious apprehension of aesthetic value in nonfictional prose first emerged in English literature with Romantic prose writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey. Walter Pater represents the apogee of this critical development; he was the first to proclaim the prose essay the characteristic literary genre of his day, and to insist explicitly on its status as fine art, the province of the aesthetic critic. Despite the monumental achievements of the prose essay in Victorian literature, the great practitioners of the form made no significant claims for its aesthetic value. Even late in the century, nonfiction prose, like the novel, had not yet achieved fully respectable status, a function of its ubiquitous presence in the periodical press and popular culture, its cross-disciplinary purposes, and its connection with the occasional nature of the review, among other reasons. It was left to Pater not only to proclaim the essay a literary genre, but also to confirm its aesthetic possibilities. ‘And prose thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day’, Pater declares in ‘Style’, ‘will be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest experience—an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid’ (App., 11).² Pater refers to no fewer than seventy nonfiction prose writers in Appreciations, projecting a wide and deep command of the prose tradition, from ancient to modern, across disciplines and national boundaries. The groupings in the opening paragraph of ‘Style’, and of Appreciations as a whole, establish the range, yoking together prose writers from across time and space as representative of specific aesthetic qualities – Livy, the great ancient Roman historian, with Carlyle, the modern Scottish historian (the ‘picturesque’); Cicero, Livy’s older Roman contemporary and crucial figure in the development of Latin prose, with John Henry Newman (the ‘musical’); Plato with Jules Michelet, the French republican historian, and Sir Thomas Browne (the ‘mystical and intimate’). If the attribution of aesthetic effect is at times somewhat enigmatic (with Francis Bacon, for instance, prose is ‘found to be a coloured thing’), the point is in the emphatic discrimination of the aesthetic impression (App., 6).

Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (1889, 2nd edition revised 1890) represents a culmination, collecting all of the essays on English literary subjects Pater regularly published in roughly two-year intervals following Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), as well as significant portions of his first published essay, on Coleridge’s philosophical and religious thought (1866), and the early ‘Poems by William Morris’ (1868). Other than short reviews of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Edmund Gosse’s book of poems, On Viol and Flute (1890), the eclectic publications of the final years of his life do not include any further treatment of English literature.³ Despite covering more than two decades of criticism for a range of periodicals, the volume coheres both structurally and thematically. While the book does not offer a comprehensive treatment of literary history, in the manner, for example of Hippolyte Taine’s four-volume History of English Literature (1863–4), or, in the other direction, George Saintsbury’s Short History of French Literature (1882), it nevertheless represents a significant contribution to late nineteenth-century literary historiography, and, in particular, the delineation of the English literary essay tradition. In its organisation and treatment of subjects, Pater’s book asserts the centrality of romanticism in English literature, and develops a historical schema and characterisation of the English essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing historical narrative, most prominently articulated by Matthew Arnold, that regards eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the English achievement in that mode, the consummation of an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism and antique models. Against this narrative, Pater sets a modern, romantic tradition of English prose derived from Montaigne, and inaugurated by English writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy of English essayists, ‘of the true family of Montaigne’, as Pater suggests in the essay on Charles Lamb (116), epitomises the central romantic impulse of English literature, ‘that modern subjectivity’ (117) which Pater traces in Appreciations from Shakespeare to Morris and Rossetti. As I will show, Pater’s treatment of the English romantic literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critic-scholars such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, and associated with the rise of English studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.

By the time of Appreciations, English authors regularly issued compilations of previously published material. As early as 1859, John Stuart Mill introduced his two-volume collection of essays, Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, Reprinted Chiefly from the Edinburgh and Westminster Reviews, with the observation that the ‘republication in a more durable form, of papers originally contributed to periodicals, has grown into so common a practice as scarcely to need an apology’ (iii). Mill probably has in mind the self-effacing prefaces of Thomas Babington Macaulay (Critical and Historical Essays, 3 vols, 1843) or Francis Jeffrey (Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 4 vols, 1844), who, embracing the same humility topos, blames the republication of his work on the insistence of the Review’s publishers. In contrast, Thomas Carlyle’s four-volume Critical and Miscellaneous Essays appeared in 1838–9 without apology. Behind Carlyle, we have the example of William Hazlitt, and, in a different vein, Charles Lamb. Thomas De Quincey was not to publish his four-volume collection, Selections Grave and Gay: From Writings Published and Unpublished, until 1853–4, but by the second half of the century, as Mill’s note indicates, the practice became ubiquitous. ‘[A]lmost every author had one or more such collections’, according to Gertrude Himmelfarb.⁴ Major examples prior to Appreciations include Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888), Newman’s Historical Sketches (1872), Pater’s own Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and A. C. Swinburne’s Essays and Studies (1875). Between 1870 and 1881, T. H. Huxley published three separate collections. In the last decades of the century and into the next, the preternaturally prolific George Saintsbury published a new collection of essays seemingly every other year.

If Appreciations perhaps does not possess the cultural significance of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, nor that book’s sustained intensity, it nevertheless stands as a more intricately designed and unified collection of previously published essays than the majority of its Victorian counterparts. Central to Appreciations is Pater’s desire to assimilate the principles and achievements of the romantic tradition into the mainstream history of English literature, an effort shared by Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Swinburne, but never in such sustained and cohesive a fashion. Over the previous twenty plus years of his career, Pater had established his use of the term, ‘romantic’, given explicit definition in the essay ‘Romanticism’ (1876), as ‘an ever-present, an enduring principle in the artistic temperament’, discernible across historical time and national boundaries.⁵ Repurposed as the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations, the ‘Romanticism’ essay eventually exerted a profound influence on subsequent Anglo-American literary historiography and scholarship, affirming the classical-romantic distinction, in the words of George Whalley, as ‘both new and axiomatic for the polarity of all literature’,⁶ while also contributing substantially to the establishment of the term ‘Romantic’ to define and delineate English literature of the early nineteenth century.⁷ Most significantly, Pater is the first English writer to defend the concept of romanticism against its conservative Victorian critics. Pater’s Renaissance was an explicitly romantic movement, ranging from the medieval France of Abelard and Heloïse through sixteenth-century Italy into the eighteenth-century Germany of Winckelmann and Goethe. For Pater, Renaissance artists and art work are replete with the qualities he repeatedly associates with the romantic spirit: individualism, strangeness, curiosity, rebelliousness, antinomianism, sympathy. Appreciations extends Pater’s transhistorical and transnational treatment of the ‘romantic spirit’, tracing it throughout the history of English literature, in close relation to its manifestation in the modern French and German literary traditions.

The volume’s delineation of the English romantic tradition begins in medias res with the portraits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb; moves backwards in time through the ‘genuinely romantic’ (156) prose literature of the seventeenth century, exemplified by Sir Thomas Browne, and settles and centres in Shakespeare, the quintessential ‘humourist’, a term Pater uses throughout the volume to denote English counterparts to Montaigne. In the book’s final sequence, Pater leaps forward to his present day and the late romanticism of Morris and Rossetti, establishing the modern-day ‘aesthetic poetry’ as a highly self-conscious manifestation of the English romantic impetus, an ‘afterthought’ of the ‘romantic school’ (‘AP’, 214). The title of the essay, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (a revised version of the essay of 1868 on Morris), makes explicit the link between the work of the contemporary poets and Pater’s own ‘aesthetic criticism’, first defined in the ‘Preface’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

Two of the final three pieces that Pater composed, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ (1886) and ‘Style’ (1888), combine with the earlier essays on Coleridge (1866) and Lamb (1878) to bring the subject of prose to the forefront. In its defence of prose as the quintessential modern literary form, the opening ‘Style’ stands as a significant counterpoint to Arnold’s ‘The Study of Poetry’, with its defence of poetry’s high purpose and ‘destiny’ in the modern world, and which Arnold placed as the opening essay in his Essays in Criticism: Second Series, published only a year before Appreciations.⁸ Indeed, as a literary form, prose is given at least equal footing, in Pater’s volume, with poetry and Shakespeare’s plays. The first edition of Appreciations combines essays on prose (three), poetry (three), and drama (three), with ‘Coleridge’ standing as a hybrid text, a composite of Pater’s earlier essays on the philosopher-poet’s prose and poetry, and the concluding theoretical ‘Postscript’, too, focused primarily on prose texts. ‘Style’ represents, as well, a major contribution to the vibrant late-Victorian theoretical discourse on prose style, which includes, among essays published prior to Pater’s, John Dennis’s ‘Style in Literature’ (1885) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘On Style in Literature: Its Technical Elements’ (1885). Most directly, ‘Style’ responds in a number of significant ways to George Saintsbury’s ‘English Prose Style’ (1886), which served as the introduction to his anthology, Specimens of English Prose Style: From Malory to Macaulay (1886), and which Pater reviewed in The Guardian as part of his omnibus ‘Four Books for Students of English Literature’ (1886).⁹ With ‘Style’, together with the portraits of English prose writers, Appreciations stands as the most significant and most influential account of nonfictional prose as an art form of the Victorian age.

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Pater’s opening manoeuvre in Appreciations to establish prose as a ‘fine art’ is to dismantle the conventional hierarchy between poetry and prose. Those ‘who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction … have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly…. Critical efforts to limit art a priori … are always liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production’ (‘Style’, 5–6). This position is consistent with the mainstream of romantic poetics and its opposition, for instance, to the extreme conventions and strict rules of eighteenth-century French neoclassicism. Pater has in mind Wordsworth’s famous attack, in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), on Thomas Gray’s alleged attempt ‘to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition’.¹⁰ Both Wordsworth and De Quincey are presented as romantic theorists advancing the far more vital distinction between ‘imaginative and unimaginative’ composition (7). Pater takes interpretive liberties with his implied characterisation of De Quincey’s categories, ‘literature of knowledge’ and ‘literature of power’, but deftly reworks them into his own terms: the achieved distinction between ‘literature of fact’ and the ‘literature of imaginative fact’ clears the ground for the discussion of prose style to follow, and establishes the artist’s representation of fact ‘as connected with soul, of a specific personality’ as the very condition of literary art, in poetry or prose (10).¹¹

As a representative neoclassical adversary, Pater singles out John Dryden, the great early Augustan, who ‘with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose’ (7). Yet, almost nowhere in Dryden does one find him taking up the distinction, let alone defending it. His only direct treatment is brief, from the ‘Preface’ to The State of Innocence (1674) and the discussion on ‘Poetique License’, the ‘speaking things in Verse which are beyond the severity of Prose’, characterised by tropes and figures, ‘both which are of a much larger extent, and more forcibly to be us’d in Verse than Prose’;¹² and from the ‘Preface’ to Fables: Ancient and Modern (1700): ‘Prose allows more Liberty of Thought, and the Expression is more easie, when unconfin’d by Numbers.’¹³ Pater is probably thinking too of the distinctions Dryden draws, in both the ‘Epistle Dedicatory of the Rival Ladies’ (1664) and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), between rhymed and blank verse, the ‘sound’, ‘sweetness’ and resulting ‘advantage’ of rhyme absent in blank verse, which he likens to prose.¹⁴ But Pater’s claim is vastly overstated. Remarkable too is the condescending tone with which Pater represents Dryden. The writer’s ‘protest’ against any ‘confusion’ between poetry and prose comes ‘with somewhat diminished effect from one whose poetry was so prosaic’ (7), Pater comments, if not derisively, at least with an irony less oblique than is customary:

There is not, perhaps, a more patronising moment in Pater’s oeuvre than the dig at Dryden’s ‘imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun’. Certainly, this unusual confrontation with Dryden, at the very opening of the volume, signifies the polemical nature of Pater’s treatment of the essay tradition in English literature. For his real adversaries are not the Augustan writers themselves, but rather critics of his own day, most prominently Matthew Arnold and George Saintsbury, who regard Dryden as the founder, and the eighteenth century as the standard, of distinguished modern English prose.

Pater’s familiar catholicity of taste seemingly does not extend to eighteenth-century English literature, an age, we might say, he regards as classical in tendency to a fault. In this, Pater’s attitudes are largely consistent with the predominant mid-Victorian literary-critical reception of the period, exemplified in the rhetoric of Carlyle and Arnold. Eighteenth-century writing, they claim, is deficient in lyric impulse, imagination, and sincerity, while it is excessive in reason, artifice, and wit – ‘that unreal and transitory mirth’, as Pater defines ‘wit’ in the essay on Charles Lamb, ‘which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot’, as opposed to the ‘humour’ characteristic of Lamb and predominant in the literature of the nineteenth century, ‘the laughter which blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity’ (105).¹⁵ From the early essay on Morris, Pater paints the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century as ‘outworn’ and ‘severed … from the genuine motives of ancient art’ (‘AP’, 214). In ‘Romanticism’, Pater deems Pope the representative poet of ‘too little curiosity’, ‘in common with the age of literature to which he belonged’: ‘there is always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as it is’ (‘Postscript’, App., 247). A later reference to Pope and Dryden, from Pater’s review of Arthur Symons’s Nights and Days (1889), borders on satire, impatient of the fetishised ‘correctness’ of style and ‘academical proprieties’ Pater consistently associates with Dryden (246), while acknowledging in a more positive, yet still attenuated fashion, Pope’s poetic achievement: ‘for a poet after Dryden, nothing was left but correctness, and thereupon the genius of Pope became correct, with a correctness which made him profoundly original’.¹⁶

Yet, although Pater contributes to the portrait of the age as colourless and correct, he rejects critics’ concomitant (and influential) characterisation of it as the great age of English prose. Instead, in Appreciations he constructs a powerful alternative narrative of the development of the English essay tradition. Again, the chief undercurrent is a reaction against Arnold.¹⁷ In ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1880), Arnold famously declares Dryden ‘the puissant and glorious founder’, and Pope ‘the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason’; ‘[t]hough they may write in verse … Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose’.¹⁸ With Dryden, Arnold proclaims, ‘at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would all gladly use if we only knew how’.¹⁹ As he had maintained in the ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’ (1864), Arnold believed that ‘the true prose is Attic prose’,²⁰ ‘prose of the centre’,²¹ index of ‘correctness’ (in information, judgment, taste), the realisation of an evolutionary ‘stage in culture’ beyond the ‘provincial’.²² Arnold employs the ancient Western (and hence orientalist) distinction in style between the Attic and Asiatic; ‘Asiatic prose’ in the English literary tradition, as exemplified in the Anglican sermons of Jeremy Taylor, Arnold deems ‘extravagant’, ‘barbarously rich and overloaded’, marred by the persistent ‘note of provinciality … the want of simplicity, the want of measure’.²³ In 1864, Arnold had not yet identified the eighteenth century as the golden age of a new English prose, but merely the period of ‘our provincial and second-rate literature’. By the time of the ‘Preface’ to his popular selected edition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1878), however, Arnold had come to regard the eighteenth century as ‘a period of literary and intellectual movement’ representing the ‘passage’ of the English nation ‘to a type of thought and expression modern, European, and which on the whole is ours at the present day, from a type antiquated, peculiar, and which is ours no longer’.²⁴ Arnold uses the ‘Preface’ to construct a literary-historical narrative in which the Restoration initiates a decisive break from the prose style of the past, marked by ‘length and involvement’,²⁵ in favour of a cleaner, more athletic prose, derived from French models, characterised by ‘qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance’,²⁶ and responsive to the conditions of modern life. The achievement in eighteenth-century prose Arnold regards as both resulting from and encouraging the period’s deficiency in ‘poetical instincts’ and ‘mistaken poetical practice’.²⁷ ‘The glory of English literature is in poetry, and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie’, Arnold intones, yet the age ‘accomplished for us an immense literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an instrument to that progress, and served it’.²⁸ With the ‘ten-syllable couplet’ as its ‘ruling form’, the ‘poetry of the century was a perpetual school of the qualities requisite for a good prose’,²⁹ Arnold explains, in a comment that prefigures Pater’s characterisation of the ‘prosaic’ quality of Dryden’s poetry. As Arnold more memorably articulates the matter, in ‘The Study of Poetry’, ‘it was impossible that a fit prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul’.³⁰

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Appreciations appeared during the most volatile years in the campaign for the institutionalisation of English in British universities, led with maniacal energy and determination by the London Extension lecturer, John Churton Collins. From 1886 to 1891, the publication year of Collins’s manifesto, The Study of English Literature: A Plea for its Recognition and Organization at the Universities, the subject inspired something of a national conversation, both within and beyond the peculiar political dynamics of Oxford and Cambridge. In his only explicit contribution to the heated debates, the brief comment published in November 1886 as part of the series ‘English at the Universities’ in the Pall Mall Gazette, Pater provides a more reserved endorsement than the majority of respondents to Collins’s questionnaire, reflecting his position as Classics don at Oxford, as well as his relatively new status as a successful English novelist (Marius the Epicurean was published only one year earlier, in 1885). But Pater’s reticence was surely inspired too by the figure of Collins himself, a staunch critic of Pater’s own style and mode of subjective literary criticism. Only a year earlier, Collins had published in the Quarterly Review a long, scathing review of John Addington Symonds’s Shakspere’s [sic] Predecessors in the English Drama (1884),³¹ using the occasion to launch an attack on the Aesthetic Movement and aesthetic criticism (although Collins does not use the term). Collins anoints Swinburne the ‘leader and founder’³² of a ‘morbid’³³ school of literary criticism, characterised by arrogant displays of imagination and emotion, exaggerated eroticism, and unruly prose.³⁴ With Swinburne and his followers, Collins complains, style functions as means of obfuscation and index of affectation: ‘With them the art of expression is … the art of simulating originality and eloquence.’³⁵ Symonds’s work is ‘deformed with the offensive jargon’ and ‘metaphorical extravagance’ of ‘his master’ Swinburne (337).³⁶

Collins’s polemic closely resembles the rhetoric of W. J. Courthope and the conservative critics of the Quarterly from the previous decade. Members of this ‘minority tradition’ in Victorian criticism, conspicuous as well in periodicals such as Fraser’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, sought ‘to reassert a broadly Augustan conception of the nature and function of literature’, and to promote ‘a wider movement towards classicism in literature’.³⁷ They waged a sustained attack on the ‘modern romantic school’,³⁸which they regarded as promoting unhealthy tendencies in contemporary literature – excessive subjectivism, obscure subject matter, indefinite thought, and a perverse preoccupation with style. Yet the primary focus of their efforts was the state of contemporary English poetry as manifest, for example, in Browning, Rossetti, and especially Swinburne (all poets championed by Pater). Collins shifts the focus explicitly to prose and literary criticism:

Although Collins never mentions Pater by name, he is unavoidably associated with the substance and language of the attack; the thought and diction of the following passage reads almost like a parody of both the ‘Preface’ and ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, and anticipates, humourlessly, the wit of Wilde in ‘The Critic as Artist’:

Appreciations engages the contemporary arguments concerning English studies and the rehabilitation of eighteenth-century neoclassical literature. Both movements were characterised to a significant degree by anti-romantic sensibilities and a hostility towards the ‘impressionist’ criticism of Pater and the aesthetic fashions of the 1870s. By the 1880s, the ‘minority tradition’ in Victorian criticism had blossomed into a full-scale ‘Queen Anne’ revival.⁴¹ By 1880, Arnold had already observed that ‘the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favor again’.⁴² Scholarship focusing on eighteenth-century literature proliferates at the end of the century and into the next with books of literary history, biographies, editions, and articles in the periodical press. Almost half of the original English Men of Letters series, edited by John Morley, are of Augustan and neoclassical writers, beginning with Leslie Stephen’s Samuel Johnson (1878), and in general the largely conservative, so-called bookmen are partial to the period. Courthope, named Oxford Professor of English Poetry in 1895, was involved throughout the decade with a new, definitive edition of Alexander Pope, using the platform to excoriate contemporary literary values, and to resume his attacks on romantic individualism and nineteenth-century poetic language from the essays of the mid-1870s. Collins’s own collection, Essays and Studies (1895), which includes the Symonds review, focuses on the Augustans, including a long opening essay on Dryden (1878), as exemplars of literary and critical standards, and as ‘protest against the mischievous tendencies of the New School of Criticism, a school as inimical to good taste and good sense as it is to morals and decency’.⁴³

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Saintsbury, appointed to the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh in 1895, is another of the eighteenth-century enthusiasts, contributing John Dryden (1881) for the English Men of Letters, and re-editing the text of Sir Walter Scott’s 18-volume edition of Dryden (1882). A more complex figure than either Collins or Courthope, Saintsbury was himself something of an impressionistic critic, and a consistent admirer of Pater, praising his writing as early as 1875, culminating in what remains one of the most sympathetic, discerning analyses of Pater’s prose style in A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912).⁴⁴ Yet Saintsbury clearly regards the developments of English prose in his own time as a momentous falling away from the standards of form and style achieved in the earlier century. ‘English Prose Style’ hews closely to Arnold’s historical narrative, with Dryden the chief representative of the Restoration reform of English prose, completed by the writers of the Queen Anne school – Swift, Addison, and Steele. Before ‘the period itself had ceased English prose as an instrument may be said to have been perfected’.⁴⁵ Beginning with the reign of George IV (1820), prose style becomes increasingly ‘disarranged’,⁴⁶ giving rise to a ‘literary antinomianism’,⁴⁷ characterised by a ‘laboured and ornate manner’⁴⁸ and a confusion of the ‘distinct aims’⁴⁹ of the prose writer and poet, ‘faults’ discernible in both ‘French naturalism and English aestheticism’.⁵⁰

Pater regarded Saintsbury’s essay as a provocation. Scholars have long recognised that the argument of Pater’s review of Saintsbury’s Specimens (1886) prefigures ‘Style’.⁵¹ Pater deems the prose style of Dryden and the eighteenth century as merely one stylistic possibility among many, generating a ‘specific and unique beauty’ (Essays, 5), following from its ‘strictly prosaic merit’ and ‘conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure primarily reasonable’ (6). The claim for neoclassical prose as manifestation of ‘true law’ (Arnold), the fulfilment of prose style’s ‘obvious requirements’ (Saintsbury), Pater regards as ‘savouring … of the arbitrary psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style’ (‘Style’, App., 8). In a footnote Pater added to the Appreciations version of ‘Style’, he describes Saintsbury’s anthology as tracing ‘the tradition of that severer beauty’ of English prose, ‘of which this admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover’ (12). Dryden is Saintsbury’s ‘favourite’, Pater writes in the Guardian review, the ‘first master of the sort of prose he prefers’ (Essays, 7, 4). Pater’s description of the period’s anti-idealist orientation, its absence of speculative and religious instincts, echoes Arnold’s characterisation of the imaginative limitations of the age, its ‘touch of frost’ and disregard of the ‘deeper powers of mind and soul’.⁵² The ‘reaction’ of Dryden and his followers ‘against the exuberance and irregularity’ of Elizabethan prose, Pater asserts, ‘was effective only because an age had come—the age of a negative, or agnostic philosophy—in which men’s minds must needs be limited to the superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift’ (Essays, 9). Arnold’s ‘age of prose’ yields, for Pater, nothing ‘fit’ nor ‘true’, but rather a style narrow, regulated, codified. The prose style of Richard Steele, whom Pater regards as the most personal and ‘impulsive’ (11) of the neoclassical school, a ‘pioneer of an everybody’s literature’ who nevertheless ‘had his subjectivities’ (10), ‘is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight’ (12).⁵³

Three months before the appearance of ‘Style’, Pater published his own most explicit definition of the essay, pronouncing the genre the ‘characteristic’ literary form of his day. Paradoxically, Pater conveys this important critical statement within the fourth chapter of the serialised, ultimately unfinished, novel Gaston de Latour, ‘Peach Blossom and Wine’ (published in Macmillan’s Magazine, September 1888), an example of his insistent crossing of generic boundaries, a central strategy of Marius and the Imaginary Portraits. The subject is Michel de Montaigne. Pater’s narrator deems the author of Les Essais the ‘inventor’ of the form: ‘the essay in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and venturous possibilities—is indicative of his peculiar function with regard to that age, as in truth the commencement of our own’.⁵⁴ For Montaigne, as for Pater,

In Pater’s view, the essay embodies the relativity of knowledge and individualism that constitute the defining features of the modern romantic spirit as he repeatedly describes it.⁵⁶

Thus, Appreciations inscribes a Montaignian tradition of the essay in English literary history, a literary-historical narrative derived in part from the work of the English Romantic prose writers, but unique in the Victorian criticism of English prose, and in deliberate opposition to the prevailing Arnoldian vision of the English essay and its development. Beginning with Sir Thomas Browne, who represents for Pater the early modern English reception and assimilation of Montaigne, Pater presents an English tradition of the essay as ‘self-portraiture’ (‘Charles Lamb’, App., 119), idiosyncratic and stylistically heterogeneous. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, that tradition is interrupted and ‘reformed’, bringing to fruition, what Pater calls in Browne, ‘the tradition of a classical clearness in English literature’ (125), one with its own early modern antecedents (Pater singles out Hugh Latimer and Sir Thomas More). With Charles Lamb and other prose writers of the Romantic period (Hazlitt, Hunt), the Montaignian tradition is revived, taking the shape of what has come to be known as the ‘romantic familiar essay’, a tradition carried on by Pater himself, whose critical work one might regard as a defamiliarisation of the familiar essay as practised by an earlier nineteenth-century generation of literary ‘men of taste’.

The magisterial opening paragraph of ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, an essay first published only three months after the Guardian review of Saintsbury’s anthology, deftly articulates the contours of the development of the English essay, as well as its relation to the traditions of France and Germany. Pater introduces Browne as a culmination of that early English prose before the advent of neoclassical correctness represented by Dryden and Locke. The development of English prose follows the pattern established in France. Montaigne, the founder of the essay as a literary form decidedly unprofessional, informal, even confidential, addressed to a ‘friendly reader’, is displaced by the classical ethos of the French Academy and ‘the school of Malherbe’, as Pater had called French neoclassicism in ‘Joachim du Bellay’ (Ren., 132). Dryden will lead the derivative classical reforms of the Augustan age, displacing the Montaignesque prose literature of early modern England. Like Montaigne, Pater insists, who gives his reader ‘so much … of the “subjective,” … of the singularities of personal character’, Browne affords the reader a picture of the vision within, ‘a matter … “bred”’ wholly, ‘“amongst the weeds and tares” of his own brain’ (125). Pater acknowledges the Arnoldian critique of the extravagance and persistent note of provinciality that characterises early modern English prose, its ‘unevenness … in thought and style’, ‘lack of design’, and ‘lack of authority’ (125). It is all ‘so oddly mixed’, Pater observes, demonstrating ‘how much he [Browne], and the sort of literature he represents, really stood in need of technique’ (126). But for such ‘faults’ (125), abundant ‘recompense’ (see, for a full discussion, Chapter 9). Sincerity, such a serious and important word in Pater’s lexicon, always signifying profound artistic achievement, is more easily and transparently expressed in an earlier intellectual culture, one yet to embrace correctness, technique, professional training: ‘in their absolute sincerity, not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves … but, even more than mere professionally instructed writers, they belong to, and reflect, the age they lived in’ (127).

I close with another crucial interlocutor for Pater’s Appreciations: W. J. Courthope, who gives his most concerted late-century critique of English romantic values in The Liberal Movement in English Literature (1885), a collection of essays previously published in the National Review. The book extends the mid-century Tory polemic, setting the ‘conservatism’ of the eighteenth century against the ‘Romantic movement’ of the nineteenth, and its liberal ethos, which he deplores. With Appreciations, the long-standing debate between Courthope and Pater takes the form of competing book-length treatments of English romanticism. Read next to each other, Pater’s antinomian vision of ethics and justice starkly counters Courthope’s assertion of ‘ancestral law’ as the defining virtue of conservatism and the eighteenth century.⁵⁷ It is in the concluding section of the essay on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that Pater expresses most powerfully that ‘idea of justice’, cultivated by aesthetic experience and the relative spirit, ‘beyond the limits of any acknowledged law’ (183). But it equally informs his treatment of Wordsworth’s poems as teaching the ‘art of … contemplation’ (62), ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’, a protest against the machine-like conception of means and ends in practical, argumentative discourse. Above all, it is the character of the essay and the essayist, Pater suggests, amid the increasing moral and intellectual complexities of the late nineteenth century, that is most capable of conveying ‘true justice’ as ‘in its essence a finer knowledge through love’ (183). Appreciations represents a major contribution to the centuries-long conversation about the ‘essay’ as genre, a mode characterised by its heterogeneity and empathetic imagination, sympathy conveyed through sensibility, and subjectivity embedded in style – all privileged Paterian terms aligned with ‘romanticism’ and the ‘romantic spirit’.