‘Style’ is a comparatively rare instance of Pater’s direct theorising; more often, his views emerge implicitly, incidentally, through the critical evaluation of specific artists and their works. Even by the standards of his other overtly theoretical interventions, ‘Style’ stands out, for the breadth and importance of its subject, and for its capstone prominence within ‘one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced’¹ – as the first entry in Appreciations, and the only one to make it into the volume’s subtitle: ‘With an Essay on Style’. Correspondingly, scholars have often turned to ‘Style’ as if it were the author’s manifesto or summa on the subject, being ‘in the nature of a personal statement’,² as ‘a crystallizing and rationalizing of his theories and habits as a writer’.³ 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.

Oscar Wilde described ‘Style’ as ‘the most interesting, and certainly the least successful’ of the essays within Appreciations: ‘most interesting because it is the work of one who speaks with the high authority that comes from the noble realisation of things nobly conceived’; ‘least successful, because the subject is too abstract’, and a ‘true artist like Mr Pater’ is ‘most felicitous when he deals with the concrete’.⁴ Denis Donoghue, a century later, revived the chiastic snappiness of Wilde’s judgement in his estimation of ‘Style’ as Pater’s ‘best known but not his best essay’,⁵ with the corollary complaint that, while Pater is ‘[a]pparently concerned with style’, he ‘doesn’t quote so much as a line of verse or a sentence of prose to illustrate his argument’.⁶

Wilde and Donoghue raise important questions, but exaggerate and simplify. On the one hand, Pater clearly wrote essays that are better known than ‘Style’ (‘Leonardo’, ‘Giorgione’, his ‘Preface’ and ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, are obvious examples). On the other hand, it is far from self-evident what constitutes ‘interest’ and ‘success’ in Pater’s (or any essayist’s) account of style, and the relation of these things to ‘abstraction’. Abstraction tends to leave subjects unanchored, diffusing thoughts into thin air – that is true. And theorists have found the conceptual category of style in particular to be ‘famously indefinable and elusive’,⁷ such that individual texts tend to become eclipsed within the generalised activity of theorising itself.⁸ Which is no doubt why ‘literary theory has never tended to bother much with style anyway’, to the extent that it has been asked whether literary theory (as against literary criticism) might even be ‘definable by its relative indifference to style’.⁹ But Pater was not a literary critic who sometimes dabbled in theory. He instead combined and so confounded these separate disciplinary approaches. While he had a high degree of sensitivity to individual aesthetic objects, he was also a scholar of classical philosophy, and his ‘high authority’ ranged between these modes, even within single essays. Artistic and literary subjects inform but also provide the occasion for his broader philosophical thinking.

It is at once unsurprising and instructive, then, to notice that ‘Style’s theorising itself grew out of a study of particularity: from his review of ‘The Life and Letters of Gustave Flaubert’. Within weeks of its publication in the Pall Mall Gazette on 25 August 1888, Pater set to rewriting, teasing out certain universal stylistic principles that he found exemplified in Flaubert’s repertoire. 2584 words swelled to 8625, and more significantly, he changed its scope. By the time ‘Style’ appeared (first in December of the same year for Fortnightly Review, and then in the subsequent year within Appreciations), Flaubert continued to loom large, but he was no longer the object of study; he had become ‘our French guide’. The essay was no longer about a writer but about writing. Or more accurately, it had become an essay of theoretical principles informed by particularised example.

The Flaubert review begins by escorting the reader, with brisk economy, through concentrically nested degrees of generality towards ever-increasing particularity, within a single sentence: ‘Prose as a fine art, of which French literature provides a continuous illustration, had in Gustave Flaubert a follower, unique in the decisiveness of his conception of that art, and the disinterestedness of his service to it.’¹⁰ ‘Style’ reverses that explicatory direction, beginning instead by expanding even the category he had previously taken as the outer ring of generalisation. ‘Prose as a fine art’ is not, within ‘Style’, the first step towards specifying a literary tradition on the way to a specific writer within that tradition; it is the first step towards opening up the genre of prose itself. Prose style is not to be seen in clean contrast to poetry; that would be to ‘limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly’ (App., 5). While recognising the heuristic value of generic differences – it would be ‘the stupidest of losses to confuse things which right reason has put asunder’, including ‘the distinction between poetry and prose’ – Pater warns against the procrustean temptation ‘to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material which this or that artists works’ (5).

To opine on what is possible in writing, where his essays more typically explore actual artistic achievements, marks a significant shift. But ‘Style’ is, on closer inspection, still all about specificity. Pater has not simply swapped his microscope for a telescope. Flaubert’s voice continues to be heard in the essay, through ample quotation, and the animating principle of the essay’s argument – appearing from the very first paragraph – is that artworks cannot be evaluated by normative standards, because they are ‘liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production’ (6). ‘Appreciation’ only makes sense in relation to actual artworks that inevitably proliferate beyond whatever prior categories we seek to explain them.

Insofar as Pater is pursuing an ‘abstract’ argument, therefore, his argument is waged against the conceit of abstraction itself. What he said of ‘beauty’ some sixteen years earlier in his ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance holds here too, for how he defines ‘style’, as something to be understood and ‘appreciated’: ‘not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics’ (Ren., xix). ‘Style’ is, by extension, about writing’s potential multifariousness; it is a retort to ‘the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style’ (App., 8). A breathless list of divergent examples drives home the point, and the fact that the list has an off-the-cuff carelessness about it, rather than being systematic or exhaustive, is part of the point too, about the unruly fecundity of artistic richness that refuses neat taxonomies:

More than an argument for stylistic diversity within poetry and prose – ‘as there are many beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to estimate them as such’ (6) – Pater advances the pluralistic possibility that these separate genres may overlap. Following Wordsworth and De Quincey, Pater suggests that while distinctions between poetry and prose may be formal (the presence or absence of, say, metre or rhyme), there is another and more salient difference to be observed that transcends generic categories; namely, between ‘imaginative and unimaginative writing’ (7). Poetry may possess ‘hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences’; prose may likewise exhibit ‘the imaginative power’ conventionally associated with poetry – and quite properly so, not as something ‘out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder’ (6).

As it gathers momentum this line of argument appears to be directed against Dryden, who is derided for failing even to live up to his own narrow prescriptions: ‘Setting up correctness, that humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun’ (7). There is something deliciously waspish in the litotes of ‘imperfect mastery’, but something rather unjust as well, given the signal potency of his sentences that Gerard Manley Hopkins (among others) admired as ‘the naked thew and sinew of the English language’.¹¹ But Dryden is a red herring. Pater is in fact troubled by another figure altogether, one from his own age. Unnamed except by way of an innocuous footnote, it is the influential contemporary literary scholar and critic George Saintsbury who is, as John Coates puts it, ‘the silent adversary in “Style”’.¹²

Pater’s straining to make space for diverse, avant-garde and as-yet-unimagined prose styles is a riposte to the narrow and calcified standards promoted by Saintsbury in his valorisation of the historical moment of the ‘Queen Anne men’ (Addison, Steel, and Arbuthnot) as the apogee of tact, order, and lucid proportion. Pater does not at all object to these traits; he questions only the assumption that English prose style is necessarily best when it expresses itself in this way. That is why he is keen to defend, for instance, the possibility of ‘unexpectedness’ in writing, not as a requisite but as a possible virtue; disruption and disjunction may have their fit place too.

Having thus loosened up the generic expectations around poetry versus prose, Pater takes one audacious step further. From the possibility that the ‘imaginative power’ traditionally associated with poetry may find legitimate expression in ‘imaginative prose’, he moves to the proposition that prose may, at the moment of his writing, possess an even higher authority and power than poetry, as ‘the special and opportune art of the modern world’ (11). Differently from Hegel’s pronouncements on art and the modern world (to which he may or may not be responding), Pater provides his hieratic-sounding claim with a technical rationale, on two levels: prose has greater expressive range, as ‘an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid’; it can also more properly capture the everyday experience of life, through its ‘all-pervading naturalism, a curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the less ambitious form of literature’ (11). Such claims must be read against Pater’s recurring accent on modernity: the putative specialness of prose style relates to its timeliness. He is not expressing a private view, nor an ahistorical view: he is making an intervention in a debate in ‘the present day’ about the role and nature of prose in ‘the modern world’, as part of the rise of English studies as a discipline.

Pater’s review of Flaubert had appeared anonymously. But rewritten, retitled, and bearing his name, ‘Style’ was a way of planting a philosophical flag in the ground. Saintsbury had not by that time been appointed to the Regius Chair of English at Edinburgh that would make him ‘the nearest thing to Critic Laureate’,¹³ but he was already a highly influential figure whose ‘contemporary standing must be set in the context of the emergence of English studies in the universities’.¹⁴ ‘“Style” gains in force and significance’, Coates rightly observes, ‘if one sees it as a defense of what Pater valued and tried to practice in writing against the formidable and authoritative pronouncements of a dominant figure in the rise of English studies’.¹⁵

Two years before ‘Style’, Pater had reviewed Saintsbury’s Specimens of English Prose Style for the Guardian, in which, within an otherwise admiring appraisal, he offers an instructive cavil: ‘If there be a weakness in Mr Saintsbury’s view, it is perhaps a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter’ (Essays, 15). His subjunctive qualifications (‘If there be’, ‘perhaps’) together with his generous modifications (‘a tendency’, ‘a little too’) read more like politeness than the provisionality they profess. Pater’s urbane manner – by turns polite, circumspect, oblique, and ironic – characteristically disguises the incisiveness and boldness of his interventions, but it is clear from the wider corpus of his writings, and indeed their wider cultural context, that he is here expressing a fundamental difference of principle. Coates skewers Saintsbury’s prescriptivism on writing as ‘the prose equivalent of dressing for dinner’,¹⁶ and for Pater, the stakes of style evidently extend beyond some outmoded or bourgeois etiquette of ‘good taste’. But how far? To answer this question it is helpful to consider another unnamed interlocutor against whose influential pronouncements ‘Style’ is also tacitly addressed.

***

Along with Appreciations, the other ‘one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced’ was Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism. Scholars have (like T. S. Eliot) sometimes stressed the continuities between Pater and Arnold.¹⁷ But there are salient differences between their literary-critical stances too, as the respective titles of their most famous collections immediately announce. Whereas ‘Criticism’ comes loaded with the presumption of fixed objective criteria, ‘Appreciations’ insinuates mutable and varied impressionism, by an approach that is sympathetic and celebratory rather than stringently judgemental.

Laurel Brake has pressed this distinction, emphasising the extent to which Pater opposed Arnold’s foundational assumptions about literature and principles for literary criticism as a discipline. Noting their rivalrous public dialogue conducted over many years, Brake interprets ‘Style’, together with Pater’s essay on romanticism (which between them begin and end Appreciations), as an indirect but deliberate attack on Arnold’s convictions on the comparative inferiority of Romanticism as a movement and on the superiority of poetry as a genre.¹⁸ Arnold’s literary-critical bearings were taken from a classical tradition where Pater, though by scholarly formation an accomplished classicist himself, inhabits and seeks to defend the verbal milieu of his moment, and never more trenchantly than in ‘Style’ – which, as noted, actually elevates prose above poetry, as ‘the special art of the modern world’.

Between Saintsbury and Arnold, what’s special in Pater’s account of the specialness of ‘style’ begins to emerge by contradistinction. By whatever degree he felt Saintsbury to be in thrall to form, as if it might be entirely self-sufficient, he felt the opposite about Arnold, whose confident formulation of literary-critical judgement on ‘the best that has been known and thought’ edged towards presenting the ‘best’ of literature as determined by ‘matter’ over ‘form’ – as if the ‘best’ were a kind of sedimented knowledge existing separately from the style that breathes it into verbal life. Evaluating Pater against Saintsbury and Arnold in this way opens up the knotty conundrums of his gnomic formulations, but it also risks exaggeration. Because Arnold did himself recognise the limitations of didactic literature, in which matter entirely subordinates form; and because Saintsbury did not, either, view form entirely independently from matter: he viewed matter as entirely dependent on form.

For Saintsbury, ‘any subject may be deprived of its repulsiveness by the treatment of it’, but that is not to say that the ‘subject’ of literature is merely the excuse for formal virtuosity.¹⁹ He understood moreover that matter and form, and their interrelations, depend, in turn, on the human world from which they spring. ‘Form without matter, art without life, are’, Saintsbury says, ‘inconceivable’:²⁰

While it is right, then, to emphasise the fact that at the time Pater wrote ‘Style’, Saintsbury was ‘widely applauded and about to dominate academic English’, it is too much to say that his dominance assumed the absolute position of ‘rejecting moral criteria’ but endorsing instead ‘an overt literary hedonism’.²² Although critics continue to read Saintsbury as one who advocated an ‘extreme interpretation of “art for art’s sake”’, which meant ‘style over subject’, where ‘manner was everything’,²³ his position was not in fact so stark. The ‘isolation’ he imagines of form from matter is, as he says (and as I have elsewhere sought to demonstrate) avowedly ‘comparative’.²⁴ It remains valuable to suggest that Pater wished ‘to guard the subtle and discriminating aestheticism he had tried to formulate from being tainted by association with its popular, clumsy variants’ advanced by Saintsbury, or indeed Wilde or Swinburne.²⁵ But to gloss ‘subtlety’ as the defining difference between Pater and his aestheticist peers misses something important. Where Pater comes to in ‘Style’ is not so much a greater refinement of art for art’s sake as it is a radical reimagining of that movement’s metaphysical presuppositions, as suggested by the ways Pater finds himself at odds with Arnold too. Arnold’s emphasis on ‘matter’ certainly seems to go beyond Pater, while likewise heeding Aristotle’s ‘caution against confusion of kinds’; but the matter of ‘matter’ is yet more complicated.

Arnold is forceful on ‘the indispensable mechanical part’ of writing as well as on ‘soul and matter’ (‘an artisan’s readiness’ is not of itself enough, and neither is mere ‘spirituality and feeling’),²⁶ and he diagnosed his own century as underpowered in the latter (‘the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough’).²⁷ This judgement recoils onto his own creative writing too, vividly suggested by the tart response he gave to Clough’s admiration for one of his poems. ‘I am glad you like the Gipsy Scholar—but what does it do for you?’ Arnold asks, before impatiently answering himself, in a way that underscores his essential commitment to ‘soul and matter’: ‘Homer animates—Shakespeare animates—in its poor way I think Sohrab and Rustum animates—the Gipsy Scholar at best awakens a pleasing melancholy.’ A merely satisfying experience of reading, Arnold explains, is ‘not what we want’: for literature to ‘animate’ is to ‘ennoble’ readers – ‘not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their dreams’.²⁸ ‘People do not understand what a temptation there is’, Arnold confessed to his sister, ‘if you cannot bear anything not very good, to transfer your operations to a region where form is everything’:

Arnold here recognises the aestheticist temptation to which Pater had seemingly succumbed in some of his earlier accounts of art, before ‘Style’. In distancing himself from unchecked aestheticism, Pater is not seeking to moderate or clarify his earlier position by more fully accommodating ‘matter’ – more than Saintsbury, that is to say, if still rather less than Arnold. ‘Style’ is not an attempted tertium quid between these Scylla and Charybdis of English studies. It offers more than a tweak of emphasis. Pater is proposing something different in kind. Surprising – even shocking – though it is to read from the one-time author of the ‘golden book of aestheticism’, he is proposing that ‘great’ (as opposed to ‘good’) art requires more than aesthetic achievement, and more even than an Arnoldian affective ambition of ennobling: he contends that it must also be true. That is how ‘Style’ ends, and that is what most readers and critics and scholars have in the end found most difficult to accept about it.

So difficult indeed that the final paragraph of ‘Style’ is often said to be dishonest, a ‘defensive’ attempt, as J. P. Ward and others have argued, to separate himself from the association of aestheticism with amorality and corruption.³⁰ Pater’s gestures to truth are, by this reasoning, nothing more than a concessionary grace note to his insistence on perfect ‘form’ – a pragmatic move that, Harold Bloom complains, leads him to ‘falsify his vision’.³¹ René Wellek offers a similarly impugning swipe, calling it a ‘recantation at the expense of a unified, coherent view of art’.³² While the chorus of such disapproval has been extensive, little effort has been made to take Pater’s supposed falsification and recantation seriously, to examine how exactly, within his own style, he turns away from the open licence of aestheticism towards the apparent conservatism of cosmic piety.

Pater argues that the value of style is radically contingent. It is not to be estimated as a standalone aesthetic achievement, but expressive – more or less successfully – of articulate content, as the ‘adaptation of words to their matter’ (App., 35). And: ‘In the highest as in the lowliest literature’ – here is the controversial kicker – ‘the one indispensable beauty is, after all, truth’ (34). That seems bluntly clear. But quite what he means by ‘truth’ requires some unpacking. His governing distinction between ‘imaginative and unimaginative writing’ with which he leads in ‘Style’ is later parsed in somewhat enigmatic terms as the difference between language that trades in ‘mere fact’ (9, 10) or ‘bare fact’ (10, 34) and ‘the writer’s sense of fact’ (8, 9, 10, 34) or ‘soul-fact’ (11). Whereas the ‘lowliest’ literature has an obligation to the former kind, the ‘highest’ serves the latter, which he glosses, with more poetry than pellucidity, as ‘that finest and most intimate form of truth, the vraie vérité’ (34).

The primary burden of his essay, climaxing in its final paragraph, is to make sense of this axiom: that style aspires to beauty, through multifarious forms, and that beauty is ultimately convertible (to use the technical language of philosophical-theology) with ‘truth’. While the scientist sticks to objective transcription, the literary artist modifies, not by forsaking or distorting truth, but by interpreting it. The result is not the abandonment of facts for feelings, but what he calls ‘the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power’ (10). The reflexive turn here is by no means total; Pater is not advocating sheer subjectivity. He presses hard on the need for writers to possess a scholar’s learning and sensibility so as to respect and exploit the expressive resources of language and literary history, and this works by paradoxical synergy: such ‘restraints’ beget a ‘liberty’ in the act of verbal creation with the genius and peculiar ‘colouring’ of the writer’s ‘own spirit’ (15).

How might this faith in the truth-content of art, so defined, be reconciled with Pater’s other writings that have flown under the banner of aestheticism, notably his ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, proclaiming ‘art for its own sake’? Is ‘faith’ – trenching as it does into the religious lexicon – even the right word for what’s driving the turn towards ‘truth’ in ‘Style’? In his essay on Rossetti also collected within Appreciations, Pater sets his face against ‘mere tricks of manner’ that force readerly attention in favour of what he calls ‘the quality of sincerity’ (App., 206). But the ‘truth’ to which ‘Style’ tilts is towards an even higher ideal that implies an objective as well as personal value, of the sort advocated by one final, unnamed influence on Pater’s understanding and practice of style.

***

John Henry Newman was, David J. DeLaura has shown, of ‘decisive importance’ for, and ‘quite explicitly at the center’ of, the writing of ‘Style’.³³ Whereas the argument of ‘Style’ might helpfully be read as a reply to Arnold and Saintsbury, Newman’s influence is felt as a positive endorsement of his ideas: on the interpenetrating relationship between ‘style’ and ‘matter’ (which Newman advances in his essay on ‘Literature’ and later elaborated in the second half of The Idea of a University), and on the language of ‘soul-fact’ and ‘soul in style’. Newman looms also as ‘a supreme practitioner of the sort of “style” Pater most admired’.³⁴

To cast Newman as a dominant shaping influence is not to short-circuit to the conclusion that Pater was in fact a crypto-Catholic whose late essay aims to ratify the Christian theology of the co-inherence of truth and beauty. ‘Newman’s claims upon Pater’s attention were multiple and persistent’,³⁵ especially towards the end of this life, when he came to write ‘Style’; but they did not extend to anything like a formal or thoroughgoing religious conversion. A nuanced estimation is required. In recent years, critics (such as Coates) have urged differences between Pater and his contemporaries likewise caught up in the movement of aestheticism – yet Pater continues to be widely read as an eremite of art. The idea that his distinctiveness as an ‘aestheticist’ thinker might include an affront to the foundational premise of art for art’s sake remains a heresy within Pater studies.

Turning, however, to the text of ‘Style’ itself, we may find – in a passage from the middle of the essay rather less picked over than its controversial final paragraph – a decisive clue to Pater’s convictions on the criteria for ‘great art’. Surpassing Arnold’s vision of artistic ‘perfection’ as an achievable ambition of perfect ‘form’ that may only, in the works of genius, reach perfect union with ‘matter’, Pater lingers on the possibility that works of genius express and exert an influence beyond the formalist triumph of uniting form with matter. The ‘adaptation of words to their matter’ is, for Pater, an essential condition for good art; but great art opens up a further horizon unimagined by Arnold:

‘Perfection’ does not inhere within matter or form, nor merely in the union of these things. While Pater maintained a studied agnosticism when it came to organised religion, his account of artistic beauty here offers more than the ‘retreat’ from the world that it promises; it opens up also the possibility of redeeming that world. Pater’s vision of the artist and the appreciator of art is, by this implicitly metaphysical logic, less like a hermit and more like a monk. To recognise the force of this fortuity we must not skip too quickly to paraphrase. Pater’s comments on style here, as throughout the essay, must be read with due attention to their own styling. Newman, in an inspired phrase, once defined style as ‘a thinking out into language’,³⁶ and that dynamic and developing and indirect mode is exactly how Pater teases us in this passage, as he explores the ‘uses’ of the ‘fine art’ he commends.

For the ‘form’ of Pater’s sentences does not form their ‘matter’ once and for all. His is, as Angela Leighton deftly describes it, a ‘re-forming’ style.³⁷ Self-corrections do not delete the prior commitments but recalibrate them, dialectically. Each clause of self-revision marks a movement from provisionality towards a more precise, depurated formulation, whether or not a final, definitive formulation is ever reached. That is the nub of another common complaint against Pater, of course. While readers have always swooned over his verbal felicities (Wilde, quoted earlier, calls Appreciations ‘an exquisite collection of exquisite essays, of delicately wrought works of art’),³⁸ when it comes to unpicking the precise meaning of his phrasings, he has attracted his fair share of deprecators too. ‘Again and again, one has to re-read a sentence in order to make quite sure of its meaning’, complained one contemporary reviewer of Appreciations, who quotes only from the essay on ‘Style’ to make his case, followed by this blustering appeal: ‘Now, frankly, reader, have you more than a faint glimmer of the meaning of this wounded snake of a sentence?’³⁹ Nor has Pater shrugged off this charge in the century since: modern critics have likewise called his method ‘desultory’, or ‘convoluted’.⁴⁰

Even scholars like Leighton who commend Pater’s style concede that his sentences sometimes fail to ripen into a thesis. Writing on how the ‘very tenuousness’ of Pater’s suspended syntax and restlessly postmodifying propositions and lapidary but unruly lists (which promise but ultimately refuse definitive illustration and explanation) ‘rarely add up to a creed’, Leighton suggests that the fugitive imponderability of Pater’s style may not in the end be a regrettable weakness but ‘the source of his power’.⁴¹ His ‘dream rhythms, those pausing secondary and tertiary phrases, those vanishing tricks of his lists’, might prompt and allow us to rethink the word ‘thinking’ itself.⁴²

Or as Theodor Adorno would have it, there may be untapped epistemological possibilities attendant on forms of expression in which ‘thought does not advance in a single direction’, but ‘methodically unmethodically’; that is, by an essayistic mode that ‘does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction’, but which instead rebels against the limitations of thinking imposed by the scientistic spirit. The possibility Adorno adumbrates is for a form of truth-telling ‘more dynamic than traditional thought’ and so more adequate to construing the complex human experience of modernity.⁴³ Adorno’s account of modernity is not identical to Pater’s, but they both felt the exceptionalism of their respective moments, in terms of what one of Pater’s coevals, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, identified as the entangled challenge of meeting the ‘present day’ as a writer: ‘we want new forms, as well as thoughts’, she protested, on the understanding – urgently shared by Pater and Adorno – that new thoughts may not be thinkable without new forms to think them.⁴⁴

Pater’s passage on literary ‘perfection’ may be richly approached with that kind of provocation in mind: for the ways its demands of us, as the nonplussed reviewer complained, ‘to make quite sure of its meaning’, by ‘re-reading’. Qualifying the vague, vernacular senses of the words he uses, ‘refuge’ and ‘retreat’ worry self-consciously towards a different weighting that might look slight in its adjectival adjustment but on which hangs nothing less than everything: ‘cloistral’ and ‘religious’ change the domain in which ‘truth’ is to be understood, from the mundane to the metaphysical.

Reading Pater in this way, for his dynamic and dialectical revisings, is no speculative ingenuity: ‘Style’ itself provides the warrant, explicitly and at length. Pater spells out the virtue of providing readers with the ‘challenge’ of a ‘continuous effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp of the author’s sense’ (17). That ‘sense’ may never reach the status of a fixed, stable statement. He does not posit a direct equation between his views and those associated with the Christian religion. The ‘refuge’ of art is an analogy that is at once self-conscious and self-consciously loose in its analogical suggestion: it is a sort of cloistral refuge. Likewise, literary perfection has – we note the fractional measure – something of the uses of a religious retreat. Such calibrations do not imply unclarity. Asymptotically aligned though they may be with the theological tradition to which they refer, approaching without quite reaching a definitive creedal conviction, there is nonetheless something, some sort of alignment. To argue otherwise, or to argue for its insincerity, is to presume bad faith within an epistemological context that presumes faith to be in earnest.

While Pater continues to be read as if he does not believe his own conclusions in ‘Style’, for readers who have learnt to catch the essaying cadences of constellating self-correction, his position is neither obscure nor inconsistent. Mining the subtextual literary-theoretical politics between Saintsbury and Arnold helps us to trace Pater’s commitments away from the autotelic tendencies of the former and the over-determining moralism of the latter. Which in turn, remembering Newman, sets up the paradoxical possibility that looks – both as verb and noun – to ‘perfect’ style as a solace that might ultimately atone for the vulgarity of the world from which it offers retreat and refuge.