In comparison with other Victorian critics, Walter Pater is, we could say, both too well known and barely known at all. ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits’; ‘to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame’; ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ – few critics are so instantly recognisable in fragmentary quotation. Oscar Wilde’s character Gilbert in ‘The Critic as Artist’ murmurs phrases from Walter Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa whenever he visits the Louvre, in antiphony with an unnamed friend; perhaps the implication is that any friend of an aesthete must have the passage by heart. W. B. Yeats divided the same passage into lines of free verse to print it as the first item in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), so that it becomes the initiating text for twentieth-century poetry. No aesthetic mantra is more vulnerable to caricature than the ‘hard, gem-like flame’ – unless it be the ‘condition of music’, so often taken simplistically (and anachronistically) as an endorsement of formalism.
Few authors of such obvious historical importance, on the other hand, have so high a proportion of their writings forgotten or neglected. These largely overlooked works include the essays on archaic Greek sculpture, the unfinished novel Gaston de Latour, Pater’s last book Plato and Platonism (significantly taken far more seriously in continental Europe than in Britain), not to mention such distinctly obscure pieces as that small-scale masterpiece, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’. Truly close analysis of Pater’s writings, complex and subtle and multi-dimensional as they are, tends to be confined to The Renaissance in particular and, to a lesser extent, the fiction.
Pater and English Studies
In nineteenth-century Britain, Classics was the premier university humanistic discipline dealing with matters literary. In the twentieth century, as everyone knows, it was replaced in that position by English.1 Pater, though himself a Classics don at Oxford who published widely on classical topics as well as art history, also wrote extensively about English literature (nine substantial essays on individual writers or works, plus others on literary topics, and a good number of short reviews). Pater collected most of his essays on English authors in Appreciations (1889). Although Appreciations is a central concern, our book is not just about that volume. Rather it explores the importance of Pater’s writings on English literature in the context of literary criticism and educational developments more generally. And it shows how Pater’s approach was radically informed by what we might call his ‘cosmopolitanism’, and why that mattered and still matters – perhaps more so today than ever.
In 1886 the Pall Mall Gazette – in connection with the campaign by John Churton Collins to establish a School of English at the University of Oxford – invited a number of leading intellectuals (including Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Max Müller, and Pater), and of the great and the good of the time, to comment on whether it might be desirable for universities to provide systematic instruction in English literature and, if so, in what form. In his response Pater, although in general liberal and progressive in educational matters, like several others sat on the fence, with three main arguments for maintaining the status quo. English as a university subject might kill off Classics (a prediction that indeed in the longer term proved correct); it might encourage lazy intellectual habits; examinations might destroy the students’ natural enjoyment of their native literature. However, Pater’s response shows his commitment to literary study broadly conceived, though still within the context of Classics (Churton Collins too argued that Classics and English should work closely together, and that classical texts should feature on an English syllabus). While insisting that the study of classical literature has proved ‘effective for the maintenance of what is excellent in our own’, Pater adds:
much probably might be done for the expansion and enlivening of classical study itself by a larger infusion into it of those literary interests which modern literature, in particular, has developed; and a closer connection of it, if this be practicable, with the study of great modern works (classical literature and the literature of modern Europe having, in truth, an organic unity); above all, by the maintenance, at its highest possible level, of the purely literary character of those literary exercises in which the classical examination mainly consists.2
One should note the insistent repetition of the word ‘literary’, and ask what precisely Pater might have meant by it in connection with ‘the classical examination’. If we look at the papers for classical ‘Mods’ (Moderations, the first part of Literae Humaniores, focused on Greek and Latin literature) for the 1860s through to the 1880s, we find that most of them are devoted to a single author (in addition to literary figures, there are some historians, as well as Plato and Aristotle).3 In the earlier period there are just passages for translation and brief notes, but later general questions were added, some of them ‘literary’. In due course more general papers appear, the first called ‘Questions on Language and Literature’, and subsequently a ‘General Paper’ and some topic papers (including ‘History of Greek Drama’, ‘History of Roman Poetry’, ‘History of Greek Drama with Aristotle’s Poetics’, ‘History of Augustan Literature’). There were also papers on philology, prose and verse composition, and the Bible. What one might call literary-critical questions are in the minority; questions tend rather to be about the text, manuscripts, metre, language, dialect, chronology, the life of the author, or factual details relating to the works. Examples of rather more ‘literary’ questions include these:
What constitutes originality in a poet? Discuss this with reference to Virgil. (1876)
‘The Latin poets had all a strong sense of their own personality’. Show how this sense comes out in the various authors and account for the difference between the Greek and Roman writers. (1878)
‘There is no morality in Homer’ ‘There is no chivalry in Virgil’ Discuss these statements. (1886, from ‘General Paper’)
What are the most remarkable points in Sophocles’s treatment of female character? (1887)
Poetry, says Milton, ‘should be simple, sensuous, impassioned’. Would you regard the poems of Catullus as fulfilling the requirement of this dictum? (1888)
Interestingly there are some questions concerned with reception, or the classical tradition, or general literary issues, including these:
What are the chief points of contrast between the Greek epic and modern poetry? (1873)
Notice any traces of Virgil’s influence on the greatest English poets (1886)
Compare classical Roman poetry with that of any modern nation as a vehicle for (1) sentiment (2) description (3) delineation of character (1887)
What fluctuations have there been in the esteem in which Virgil has been held from his own time down to the present day? Trace causes, where you can. (1888)
Pater also might well have regarded translation as a literary activity. He himself as a student at Queen’s College ‘every day … translated a page from some prose writer—Tacitus, Livy, Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Lessing, Flaubert or Sainte-Beuve’.4 He continued the practice into later life, and included passages of translation (always in prose, even when translating verse), as elegant as they are accurate, in his publications. We can see this again as an aspect of his cosmopolitanism.
The arguments in Oxford around a School of English concerned not only its desirability but also its character if established, whether the emphasis should be on language and philology or literary criticism (famously derided by one opponent, Edward Augustus Freeman, Regius Professor of Modern History, as ‘mere chatter about Shelley’). Churton Collins, appalled by the amateurish character of the Clark lectures given in Cambridge in 1884 by Pater’s friend and biographer Edmund Gosse, wanted academic study that was both rigorous and literary, not merely linguistic.5 However, the holder of the first Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature at Oxford (created in 1885, before the School) was a philologist, Arthur Napier, later Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon; only from 1904 did Oxford have a Professor of English, Sir Walter Raleigh, whose primary concern was with literary criticism. Pater, while always interested in matters philological, would have been unlikely to favour any version of English that was philological only. In the event Schools of English were not established in Oxford and Cambridge until 1894 and 1917 respectively. In 1911 Cambridge, after an internal deliberation lasting more than thirty years, made a professorial appointment for ‘English Literature from the age of Chaucer’, intended to ‘promote the study in the University of the subject of English Literature’, and to ‘treat this subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines’.6 In Pater’s own day schools already existed in London (University College appointed a Professor of English in 1828, King’s College in 1830) as well as in Scotland. And in due course Pater’s prose was itself subjected to criticism of an academic kind. For example, in 1933 Vernon Lee, a writer whom Pater knew and admired, and who herself conducted a form of ‘practical criticism’ well before its ‘invention’ by I. A. Richards, selected a page from Marius the Epicurean for the closest of close reading, in what in effect was an addendum to her previous publication The Handling of Words (1923), a discussion of prose writing from De Quincey to Henry James.7
The passionate late-Victorian debate about English Studies and what form it should take if more widely established as a university discipline, along with the various modes of literary enquiry pursued in this period, had an obvious importance for the formation of the subject and how it was taught, and helps, at least to an extent, to account for the shape it takes today. How would an appropriate measure of rigour be assured? How far would English follow the lines long established for Classics (not a few of its first teachers had themselves been trained as classicists, and the first Professor of English at Cambridge was the classical scholar A. W. Verrall)? Would it focus on language and philology or on literature (in practice it rarely managed to do both satisfactorily)? Would it stress history or critical evaluation? Would it help to build a national identity and ensure a supply of national guardians and public servants; or encourage an understanding of Britain’s relationship with the other literatures of Europe and the world? Would it pioneer new models for understanding? Would it develop an aesthetic temper, an ability to discriminate; or serve as a secular alternative to religion, a role for literary study envisaged by Matthew Arnold and others? (Pater’s own views on Christianity are somewhat elusive, but he was always interested in the content and lifestyle and history and cultural embeddedness of Christianity and not just its ‘aesthetics’.8) These are questions that are with us still.
Pater’s essays on English Literature are better known than his most neglected writings, but they have scarcely received the close attention they merit as accounts of their subject. Collectively this volume’s chapters demonstrate the importance of Pater as a major contributor to the serious study of English literature (just as he was with regards to Classics and Art History) and as, in the words of Jerome McGann, ‘the strongest as well as the subtlest literary-critical intelligence of the High Victorian period’.9 While many of the chapters look closely at particular essays or groups of essays, they also collectively cast light on a number of broader issues: how Pater’s way of writing about English literature relates to that of others, both at the time and later; the role he plays in the history of criticism and of English studies (histories that are much less closely intertwined in the nineteenth century than subsequently); and what reading Pater on a particular author tells us about reading that author more generally in the context of the author’s reception history.
Appreciations, like its predecessor The Renaissance, is made up of essays previously published in periodicals, though carefully revised for their new context in book form. And, again like its predecessor, it is not simply a random ad hoc assemblage in the manner of many Victorian collections, but a carefully contrived whole, in which the individual essays speak to each other and for an overall vision of English literature and its history (see Chapter 1). Appreciations comprises a series of essays on individual writers, but these are bookended by two pieces of general import: ‘Style’, which addresses the central question of what constitutes good writing in both prose and verse (see Chapter 6), and ‘Postscript’, a revised version of an essay originally called ‘Romanticism’, but which is rather a discussion of two significant literary phenomena, classicism and romanticism, and which takes us into important issues about literary history and periodisation (see Chapter 5). The word ‘Romanticism’ in its current valence to describe an early nineteenth-century literary movement that we might trace back to the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (followed by a new edition in 1800, with Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’) was a comparatively late import from Germany into the English critical lexicon. One of the first anglophone authors to use the continental category in this way was Thomas Budd Shaw in 1849, who argued that Scott was ‘the type, sign, or measure of the first step in literature towards romanticism’, and called Byron ‘the greatest of the romanticists’.10 For Pater the word can be applied both to a particular period in English letters and to a general tendency in all periods, whenever there is ‘the addition of strangeness to beauty’ (‘Postscript’, App., 246), a tendency that he is at some pains to approve and show as active in his own day. Pater is always interested in history and literary history, though not in the positivistic way demanded by many of his detractors both at the time and subsequently. In response to criticism by Emilia Pattison and others that it was not a responsible history,11 Pater changed the title of his first collection from Studies in the History of the Renaissance to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Clearly in so far as they are ‘histories’, both The Renaissance and Appreciations are fragmentary histories (though the latter contains extended discussions of works from every post-medieval century except the eighteenth12); but it does not follow that Pater was not interested in history and its relation to art and literature. However, in both cases that interest co-exists with ‘aesthetic criticism’ (as the title Appreciations suggests). The ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance offers a succinct but exceptionally lucid account of what Pater means by ‘aesthetic criticism’, but it also makes apparent that he wishes to offer more general thoughts on the Renaissance as a historical phenomenon and how we might think about it (paragraphs 6–8); in his words, the studies ‘touch what I think the chief points in that complex, many-sided movement’ (Ren., xxii).
Pater’s Critical Project: Aesthetic Criticism
What, then, is Pater’s larger critical project, and why should we value it today? Pater’s detractors, who include T. S. Eliot and Eliot’s admirer Christopher Ricks, typically accuse him of two failings: a tendency to subjectivism amounting at times to solipsism; and an espousal of belletrism, vagueness, and lack of critical rigour. The two charges, in our view, miss their mark and they are linked; the answer to them lies partly in Pater’s philosophical commitments, and in particular his careful attention to the implications of philosophical aesthetics, then still a relatively youthful discipline with its origins in eighteenth-century Germany. One purpose of our earlier volume, Pater the Classicist, was to combat the view that Pater’s essays tell us little or nothing about his objects of study, only about what Ricks calls his ‘fugitive noosphere’.13 Eliot, in ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, makes a – moderately – effective joke, in his de haut en bas critical mode, about the matter. Having reprimanded ‘that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order’ for finding in Hamlet ‘a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization’ and for substituting their Hamlet for Shakespeare’s, he concludes the paragraph: ‘We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.’14 (While we may not agree with Coleridge’s characterisation of Hamlet, it surely says something significant about the work, and its representation of subjectivity, that so many readers have subsequently in effect declared ‘I am Hamlet’.) Even among Pater specialists some are too sympathetic to reading his work primarily as oblique autobiography. In particular, gay and queer studies have contributed a great deal to a more correct and nuanced evaluation of Pater; but there is also danger in concentrating too much on a writer’s supposed sexuality in interpreting his or her work – a version surely of the old ‘biographical fallacy’ (the view that a work of art is best explained in terms of the artist’s life and character).
One of the essays in Appreciations, ‘Charles Lamb’, is especially instructive in this regard (see Chapter 12). Here it is particularly clear that there is an unusual degree of identification, even elision, of author and subject. This is partly because of Pater’s admiration for Lamb as an essayist, since the essay – along with its fictional equivalent the ‘imaginary portrait’ – is always Pater’s preferred form. But there are also biographical entanglements, not least Lamb’s relationship with his sister Mary, close as was Pater’s with his sisters, and places they lived. And there is the sense too in the writings of both of the mingling of joy and sorrow, of ‘the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty’ (‘The Child in the House’, MS, 189–90; CW, iii. 141). In finding out what Lamb is like, Pater is also finding out what he himself is like; just so, when Ben Jonson imitates Martial or Horace, he is discovering himself, but this does not detract from his ‘discoveries’ about his classical models. In ‘Charles Lamb’ Pater praises his predecessor, in connection with his work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, because ‘he has the true scholar’s way of forgetting himself in his subject’ (App., 111), pointing out beauties in his authors that the reader would not have noticed for him- or herself, which can itself be regarded as an oblique form of creation: ‘to interpret that charm, to convey it to others—he seeming to himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of which for them he is really the creator—this is the way of his criticism’ (112). But later in the essay Pater stresses that ‘with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is, below all more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at all—a desire closely connected with that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature’ (117). This is the ‘formula’, to use a word of Pater’s, for Lamb.15 This combination – self-effacing scholarship and a desire for self-portraiture, however indirect – might seem a paradox, even a contradiction, but is evidently not so for Pater. That may be explained in part by Kant’s equally paradoxical idea of ‘subjective universality’. The judgement of taste is both subjective, the response of a subject to the object of attention, but also ‘universal’, because it ‘imputes’, without of course necessarily obtaining in practice, the agreement of others, unlike ‘the judgement of the agreeable’ (I like spinach or the colour green, you don’t, but there is nothing to dispute about). That is to say it is communicable, and subject to contention or assent; in that sense it is emphatically not a form of solipsism.16
Eliot wrote of Pater: ‘Being incapable of sustained reasoning, he could not take philosophy or theology seriously.’17 However, Pater’s account of the job of the ‘aesthetic critic’, in the ten economical and elegant paragraphs of the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, while presented in a style appropriate to the essay, not the treatise (the term he uses for the form employed by Aristotle and alone approved for philosophical enquiry by analytic philosophers), is philosophically rigorous and assigns it three distinct phases. (One might compare the elegant clarity with which Pater summarises the complex arguments of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics in ‘Winckelmann’.) The first two phases of the critical process show Pater’s complete understanding of the main characteristics of aesthetic judgement, ‘the judgement of taste’, as set out by Kant at length in his Third Critique, the Critique of Judgement. The ‘judgement of taste’, which takes the form ‘this painting or poem is beautiful’, begins with an encounter by the judging subject that is personal and singular. In Kant’s words, ‘I must present the object immediately to my feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and that, too, without the aid of concepts’ (if there were a definite prior concept, the judgement could be made a priori, without the need for the encounter). No prior authority is of any relevance: ‘There must be no need of groping about among other people’s judgements and getting previous instruction from their delight in or aversion to the same object.’ Appeals to even the greatest critic will make no difference:
If any one reads me his poem, or brings me to a play, which, all said and done, fails to commend itself to my taste, then let him adduce Batteux or Lessing, or still older and more famous critics of taste, with all the host of rules laid down by them, as a proof of the beauty of his poem; let certain passages particularly displeasing to me accord completely with the rules of beauty, (as set out by these critics and universally recognized): I stop my ears …. I take my stand on the ground that my judgement is to be one of taste, and not one of understanding or reason.18
Pater gives an account of what this preliminary stage is like, emphasising the point about subjectivity:
What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one’s self, or not at all.
But there is a second stage for the aesthetic critic. For the Kantian judgement is, as we have seen, also ‘universal’; that is to say, it is communicable, although this may lead to contention, not agreement. And in this stage the job of the critic is, in Kant’s words, in relation to their judgements, not to provide ‘a universally applicable formula [Formel]—which is impossible’, but ‘the illustration, by the analysis of examples, of their mutual subjective finality, the form of which in a given representation has been shown above to constitute the beauty of their object’, what Kant calls the ‘art’ rather than the ‘science’ of criticism.19 Pater goes on to give an account of what such an art of criticism might be like, followed by an example, not a ‘universal formula’ (Kant’s Formel) but ‘the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it’ – what, in the case of Wordsworth, he also calls ‘the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth’s poetry’ (xix, xxii):
And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others.
The use of scientific metaphors here makes clear that the aim is precision and exactitude; there is nothing vague or woolly about such ‘impressionism’ – it is not in the least impressionistic (in the ordinary non-technical sense). And one should note the implication about communicability; the chemist disengages the virtue ‘for himself and others’ (emphasis added). Even this second stage is not the end of the matter, as we have already seen. The final paragraphs concern wider issues about the character of the Renaissance as a historical event; and Pater will go on to make transhistorical connections with later periods too. But the ordering is important. The historicising literary criticism de nos jours gets the process back to front, starting with ‘history’ and from there approaching the individual work. Pater begins at the beginning, with the ‘original facts’ and the ‘primary data’ (xx).
It is easy for a modern reader to ‘under-read’ so to say Pater’s writings, because his critical practice is in important respects unlike those with which we have become more familiar; the dominance of the now not-so-new ‘New Criticism’ may have been challenged during the theory wars, but many of its principal features remain firmly in place. Thus Pater in general does not engage in the kind of ‘close reading’ of a Christopher Ricks. This is not because he is incapable of it, as a couple of examples from Appreciations will show. Of Shakespeare’s lines from Henry V,
Pater writes: ‘The complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividly realised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the sense of their flight, conveyed to us by the single word “abreast,” comes to be more than half of the thought itself:—this, as the expression of exalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant by Imagination’ (‘Coleridge’, 88). Or this in the essay on Rossetti:
For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation. ‘Tell me now,’ he writes for Villon’s
—‘way,’ in which one might actually chance to meet her; the unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent to place or region.
But such moments are comparatively rare (rarer than they are in Ruskin, say, among Victorian critics).20 Pater is supposed to have told his students: ‘the great thing is to read authors whole; read Plato whole; read Kant whole; read Mill whole.’21 Typically an essay by Pater looks at a writer or artist whole, offering a kind of portrait not imaginary. Often it includes an element of biography, without falling into the biographical fallacy, but, more importantly, it treats the text or artwork rather as if it were a person with whom one has a relationship. When we talk of, say, ‘Milton’, we usually mean not quite the individual in his quotidian existence during his lifetime nor simply the corpus of his works, but something in between; and it is this in-between space that is very much the space of Pater’s criticism. It is significant that his aesthetic lists contain, in addition to natural beauty and works of art, ‘the face of one’s friend’ (‘Conclusion’, Ren., 189). If a limitation in Pater is the lack of close reading, the limitation in a critic like Ricks is that a concern with local particularities, always brilliant if perhaps not always persuasive, can override larger considerations. Ricks’s monograph Milton’s Grand Style, for example, has innumerable insights into individual lines and passages but is both less convincing and more conventional on the experience of reading Paradise Lost in its entirety; Ricks’s analysis does not show how the local effects he describes so well contribute to the poem’s larger trajectory and thus its overall greatness. And, as we have seen, Pater’s criticism is ‘aesthetic’, not hermeneutic. A modern critic characteristically offers an interpretation, and the holy grail is novelty in interpreting, something which confers prestige on the interpreter as well as insight into the text. Pater has much that is new to say about the objects with which he has to do; but novelty is not the aim, rather it is to convey to the reader the ‘virtue’, the quiddity, of the thing, the particular form of pleasure that it gives, what it is like in an encounter. And, unlike the judgement of taste, most modern criticism is certainly not ‘without a concept’, and furthermore claims objectivity; New Criticism, for example, is specifically premised on the merits of paradox and irony and verbal complexity, an a priori stance which stands in the way of the catholicity of taste that Pater seeks always to promote:
He [the aesthetic critic] will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal.
Unsurprisingly Pater was not born fully formed as an aesthetic critic like Athena from the head of Zeus. But his progress was remarkably swift. His first published essay ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ appeared in the Westminster Review anonymously in 1866 when he was twenty-six. There is a remarkable level of overall continuity about the concerns that were to preoccupy Pater throughout his life, even though there is also a constant process of adjustment, reformulation, and revision. Plato and Platonism, almost his last work published in 1893 a year before his death, shares many of those concerns with ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, though he has achieved greater economy, suppleness, subtlety in the handling of them. Already in 1866 we can hear some of the distinctive notes of the mature Paterian voice; there are numerous felicitous formulations, and the essay is chock-full of ideas. Many central preoccupations that will be frequently revisited are there: the need for the historical sense; the emphasis on the relative (‘To the modern spirit nothing is or can be rightly known except relatively under conditions’ (‘CW’, 107)); the interest in German philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Heine, Schlegel); the character of romanticism (Coleridge’s longing for the absolute makes him ‘the perfect flower of the romantic type’, representing ‘that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and home-sickness, the chords of which ring all through our modern literature’, 132). But the piece is also somewhat long-winded as well as unusually long for Pater and somewhat sprawling in structure, in that more like a typical Victorian essay on a subject broadly philosophical, without the concentration that later came to characterise his work. And, as with many a brilliant graduate student today, he is rather too keen to display the range of his learning, tell us everything he knows, and parade his sources.
Above all ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ can be described as in part an exercise in ‘negative criticism’. For all the ‘charm’ (107) and interest of his work, Coleridge for Pater was simply mistaken in his insistence on the absolute, in a way that vitiated his poetry as well as his views on art and religion; Pater only quotes once from the poems (109), in that context making clear his preference for Wordsworth. Such negative criticism is something that Pater subsequently largely eschewed. True, he can on occasion be waspish about critics or even, though much less often, artists; and he certainly concedes that among the gold that displays the qualities of Wordsworth’s poetry there is also much dross. But in general Pater’s aim is to demonstrate the ‘virtue’ of his objects of study, both in the particular sense of the word in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance and in its more general usage. Doubtless this was in part a matter of temperament and of his overall ethical stance (how unlike in this his great rival Ruskin!), but there may also be a philosophical point at issue. In Kant’s Third Critique, apart from the reference in the first sentence to ‘pleasure or displeasure’, the judgement of taste always takes a positive form, perhaps because negative judgements generally operate by putting the object under a concept, and are not therefore in Kant’s view properly ‘aesthetic’. We might say that, when we do not find an object beautiful, we withhold the judgement rather than making a negative one. Critics such as Dr Johnson often like to list the ‘faults’ as well as the ‘virtues’ of writers; however such ‘faults’ are often part of what makes a work of art distinctive, and thus contribute to the particular form of pleasure that it gives us. Without his awkwardnesses, his emotionalism, his extravagance, would Dickens be Dickens? When Pater revised his essay on Coleridge for Appreciations he reduced the element of negativity, partly by judicious cutting but mainly by grafting in most of the introduction to Coleridge as a poet that he had contributed to Ward’s English Poets (see Chapter 11). The result is not perhaps altogether satisfactory, because the two projects were so different, the one a critique of Coleridge’s whole intellectual programme, the other an exercise in describing favourably the ‘virtue’ of his poetry. However, it does allow Pater to comment with insight on the merits of Coleridge’s best poems, which in his view were nearly all written or planned in his annus mirabilis in Nether Stowey in 1797–8. Pater likes to end an essay on a positive or upbeat note, and even in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ he does so, in this case by means of an ingenious double manoeuvre. First, he insists that the absolute not only fails to accord with modern scientific knowledge but issues in an inferior morality:
The relative spirit, by dwelling constantly on the more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse, of which the ethical result is a delicate and tender justness in the criticism of human life.
Then he applies the point to Coleridge’s own case: judged according to the absolute, Coleridge is simply a failure, but, if we invoke the relative spirit, he becomes, as we have seen, ‘the perfect flower of the romantic type’ and ‘with his passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet’, he ‘may still be ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of our life’ (132).
Published a year after ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, ‘Winckelmann’ (which in revised form Pater included in The Renaissance in 1873) represents a formidable advance on its predecessor. It contains some of Pater’s finest writing, and some brilliant insights into the character and importance of Greek sculpture. It too is a long essay by Paterian standards, and perhaps outstays its welcome, and it too at times evinces what Pater in ‘Style’ would term ‘loose accretion’ as opposed to ‘composition’ (App., 24). One year more, and in ‘Poems by William Morris’ (1868) Pater has achieved full mastery in his mode of ‘aesthetic criticism’, before its definition in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance. The style, though now fully and consistently Pateresque, is rather more highly coloured than some of his later essays, partly under the influence of Swinburne; the achievement is the pinpointing of the particular character of the ‘pleasurable sensations’ we receive from these poems by Morris, ‘this special impression of beauty or pleasure’, their ‘virtue’ (Ren., xx–xxi). And Pater ends with a piece of theoretical writing that he will extract to form the ‘Conclusion’ of The Renaissance as justification for the aesthetic life. In its original position it serves a slightly different purpose: the paragraphs have an explicit relevance to a main concern of the Morris essay, the defence of a poetry of Morris’s kind that reworks material from the past, by way of the preceding passage, deleted in the later versions, with its dramatic intervention by a hostile, presumably French critic (someone like Champfleury or Proudhon, supporters of Courbet and modern realism):
‘Arriéré!’ you say, ‘here in a tangible form we have the defect of all poetry like this. The modern world is in possession of truths; what but a passing smile can it have for a kind of poetry which, assuming artistic beauty of form to be an end in itself, passes by those truths and the living interests which are connected with them, to spend a thousand cares in telling once more these pagan fables as if it had but to choose between a more and a less beautiful shadow?’ It is a strange transition from the earthly paradise to the sad-coloured world of abstract philosophy. But let us accept the challenge; let us see what modern philosophy, when it is sincere, really does say about human life and the truth we can attain in it, and the relation of this to the desire of beauty.23
Pater thus refutes the view of those critics, whether of his own day or ours – they continue to rule the roost in History of Art, where Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic art is still barely respectable – who argue that a modern artist must treat only modern-life subjects.
Form and Style
‘Form’ was a word of power for Pater, but it is important not to jump to conclusions about what he meant by it. Clearly Pater was not a formalist in the manner of writers on art and literature of the Modernist period, such as Roger Fry (who, at his most extreme, argued that the subject matter of an artwork was of no moment in respect of its aesthetic impact or value) or Clement Greenberg, though Greenberg professed a debt to him.24 The merest glance at the final paragraph of ‘Style’ should be enough to clear us of this misapprehension; there ‘great’ as opposed to ‘good’ art is characterised as ‘devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here’ – the examples Pater gives are The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, and The English Bible (App., 38). The nearest he comes to formalism of the Modernist kind is when writing about painting in ‘The School of Giorgione’:
In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself.
But, once Pater starts to characterise the ‘Giorgionesque’ in all its richness, the world with its multiple entanglements comes flooding back in; or, as the next sentence in our passage reads, ‘this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may trace the coming of poetry into painting’ (Ren., 104) – ‘primary’ here refers to a first stage (as with the ‘primary data’ of the ‘Preface’), and is not a loose synonym for ‘most important’. ‘Aesthetic criticism’ is indeed precisely not a formalist matter, since the subjectivism involved means that we are not in the first instance talking about qualities of the object but about the sensuous and sensual experience of the individual receiver, from the Greek word for perception, sensation, the process of perceiving, aesthesis. Pater’s most famous piece of art criticism (admittedly rather atypical of him) – the passage on the Mona Lisa – is not formalist in any sense whatever.25
Pater was well aware that, even for the oldest and seemingly ‘primary’ writers such as Homer and Plato, there was always a backstory, as he points out in a paragraph that is much beloved of poststructuralist critics:
The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we find it so again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we pass from him to them) are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had their earlier proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.
This passage anticipates twentieth-century theories of intertextuality, as Chapter 7 shows: indeed throughout his career a key part of Pater’s project is to suggest that every piece of writing or work of visual art – what we today call textuality – is orientated both ways, backwards and forwards, and thus does not in itself partake of either origination or finality. But what are the implications of the claim that only the form is new? Form, like its antonyms (content, or matter), is a slippery thing.26 It is perhaps best to treat these terms not as properties ‘in’ the work of art, but as mental frameworks useful in thinking about it; and certainly critics should not treat the words as having self-evident meaning, as they so often do (particularly when accusing their opponents of formalism). Here Pater may have in mind, as often, analogies from modern science: the world is composed of multiple stuff, chemicals and so forth, that then combine into various forms (human beings, for example). That ‘the form is new’ does not entail that Plato, or Pater, is a formalist. Pater is also probably thinking of an analogy familiar from German philosophy, in Schiller, for example: the artist in any medium takes unformed matter and shapes it into a work of art, as the potter shapes a pot from raw clay. Indeed, Pater often has Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters in mind when writing of such things, not least the 22nd letter, where Schiller writes:
In a truly successful work of art the contents should effect nothing, the form everything; for only through the form is the whole man affected, through the subject matter, by contrast, only one or other of his functions. … Herein, then, resides the real secret of the master in any art: that he can make his form consume his material …27
One might compare one of Pater’s most distinguished pieces of writing, the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance; every idea in it has its parallel in some other text, but there is nothing quite like it in the whole world of letters – only the form is new. It is not Plato, but his enemies the sophists who are the true formalists as valuing form without content:
With them art began too precipitately, as mere form without matter; a thing of disconnected empiric rules, caught from the mere surface of other people’s productions, in congruity with a general method which everywhere ruthlessly severed branch and flower from its natural root—art from one’s own vivid sensation or belief.
Plato is a better philosopher than the sophists because he is a better artist who, like any good artist, uses words with precision to express what is to be expressed; the matter is ‘nothing’, if it is ‘mere’ matter that is not formed. Thus, although Pater uses some of the same words (such as ‘form’ and ‘abstract’) as the twentieth-century formalists, he does so with a quite different valence; his discussion of the form of a painting (or any other artwork) is never just an opposition between its subject matter and the style of treatment, but something much richer and more complex.
For Pater the aesthetic critic, aesthetic judgement – Kant’s ‘judgement of taste’ – was always a judgement of form and content (on more or less any interpretation of these terms) together. And, in common with many other critics, he believed that, in any really distinguished piece of writing or work of art, form and content operated together to produce their effect on the reader or viewer. But he did not make the mistake of further arguing for an essentially ‘organicist’ account of that relationship. In an acute paragraph on Shakespeare in ‘Coleridge’ he warns wisely against any such assumption:
The first suggestion in Shakespeare is that of capacious detail, of a waywardness that plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if by some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity makes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identity Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural organism, and the associative act which effected it into something closely akin to the primitive power of nature itself.
(Pater’s distinguished contribution to Shakespeare’s criticism is insufficiently acknowledged; see Chapter 8.) In this way Pater avoids the romantic idea – found in Schiller as well as Coleridge – that in poetry there is necessarily a profound ‘organic’ unity between form and content. Much of the intellectual project of the Yale critic Paul de Man was devoted to attacking this view as the kind of aesthetic ideology that evinced ontological bad faith. It is a trap into which, for all his emphasis on form, Pater did not normally fall. Instead he stresses the literary artist’s striving towards both ‘clearness of idea’ and ‘clearness of expression’: ‘The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even in works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford’ (‘Coleridge’, App., 81).
In ‘Style’ Pater applies the ‘condition of music’ argument from ‘The School of Giorgione’ to literary style, including the writing of prose, for him ‘the special art of the modern world’ (App., 11). Perhaps no sentence of Pater’s is quoted more often, indeed often misquoted – there is a world of difference between ‘to’ and ‘towards’ – than ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (Ren., 106). But the sentence’s meaning is frequently misconstrued when taken out of its context. Pater is emphatically not saying that music is superior to other art forms (he repudiates hierarchy of such kinds consistently throughout his writing, and is anyway much less interested in music than he is in art and literature), still less that all art should try to be ‘musical’, or like music in some unspecified way, or become self-contained with no reference as it were beyond the score. It is rather that what he calls the condition of music or the musical law – the interpenetration of form and content – is the standard (he calls it the ‘measure’) for judging the quality of any artwork:
If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art.
So long as the principle is observed that supreme excellence in prose resides in the correspondence of the term to its import, no particular style can be ruled out: style can be ‘reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic or expressive’ (36). And the same is true of literary content in general; the attempt to set limits to prose style is ‘as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson’ (6). Such catholicity, as we have seen, is indeed another fundamental premise of Paterian criticism. It is all too easy to misunderstand art for art’s sake, as limited to a particular way of writing, and important to remember that Gautier’s example of it is Shakespeare’s Othello as opposed to Voltaire’s propagandising Mahomet.29 Gautier indeed insists that l’art pour l’art is not form for form’s sake. For Pater ‘art for art’s sake’ is rather a matter of the ‘disinterested’ service of literature shown by its practitioners, something for him more characteristic of French than of English letters, which does not preclude ‘an enduring moral effect also, in a sort of boundless sympathy’. Thus of Lamb he writes: ‘In the making of prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats in the making of verse’ (‘Charles Lamb’, App., 109–10).
In ‘Style’ Pater praises Flaubert for ‘the exact apprehension of what was needed to carry the meaning’ (App., 33); and that was always the goal for his own writings. Critics usually describe Pater’s style as though it were a single thing. It might indeed be better to talk of Paterian styles rather than style, even in the same work. In the case of The Renaissance, for example, the elegant clarity of the ‘Preface’ is very different in texture from the more highly coloured and resonant manner of the ‘Conclusion’. At some points Pater can be briskly informative, at others the quality he finds in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure may correspond to something of his own, ‘that sort of writing which is sometimes described as suggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hints only, brings into distinct shape the reader’s own half-developed imaginings’, a very different matter from ‘writing merely vague and unrealised’ (App., 173). At the beginning of his career Pater had in part modelled his style on that of Swinburne, including his ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence’ (1868), in a form of respectful imitation, most notably in the essay on Leonardo, something recognised, without annoyance, by Rossetti and Swinburne in correspondence.30 In doing so he greatly improved on his Swinburnian model, with its tendency to formlessness and rhetorical excess, accretion rather than composition, bringing out the full potential of this manner through discipline, control, improved structure, and generally greater economy, what Pater himself might have called ascêsis. It was a style, at times poetic and rhapsodic, that some of Pater’s hostile critics stigmatised as ‘epicene’.31 But thereafter Pater went his own way, and, while he engaged with the major Victorian critics – including Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, Saintsbury – and learned from them, as he did from the classical and modern European authors he read and translated, he never again practised such direct imitation. The aim was always to convey what was to be conveyed without remainder: ‘Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles’ (‘Style’, 19): ‘The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!—the unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within’ (29). Pater is an exact thinker, and that is why he is also an excessively fastidious or finicky writer – a student recalled him saying that he never published anything unless he had rewritten it seven times.32 It is often with something like physical pain that he notes the ‘uneven’ or ‘unequal’ quality of a writer or artist (the ethical connotation seems significant): Botticelli, Wordsworth, Thomas Browne, or Measure for Measure in explicit contrast to the ‘flawless execution of Romeo and Juliet’ (App., 170). Interestingly his own prose often rises to its best when he is dealing with a writer or artist whose technique he thinks uneven, as though he is making reparation or healing a wound. So Pater’s literary fastidiousness is no mere belletrism. Rather it is a form of scholarly ethics: it is the responsibility of scholars to write as well as they think.33
When Pater revised ‘Romanticism’ as the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations, he added a final paragraph, newly composed (260–1). Forthright, unusually combative for Pater, it is as much a manifesto as the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, this time on the subject of how to conduct ‘the literary art’ in Pater’s own day. It rejects any version of revivalism (as Pater had done long before in the Morris review), insists that modern writing must be eclectic, given the rich but ‘contorted, proportionless accumulation of our knowledge and experience, our science and history, our hopes and disillusion’, and makes stylistic recommendations (‘to write our English language as the Latins wrote theirs, as the French write, as scholars should write’ (260–1)). It ends with these resounding, fighting words:
To discriminate schools, of art, of literature, is, of course, part of the obvious business of literary criticism: but, in the work of literary production, it is easy to be overmuch preoccupied concerning them. For, in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.
Education
From time to time contributors to this volume throw out suggestions about what general conception of English as a discipline Pater’s writings might imply, and how they might help us to configure it now (see, for example, Chapter 13). Considering the alarming fall in competence in modern languages in the UK, it is important to be reminded of the transnational Republic of Letters in which writers like Pater formed their practices of reading and writing.35 This has implications for the ambitious task of rethinking and remaking the discipline today. And certainly one characteristic of English Literature as a developing university subject that Pater would undoubtedly have deplored was its intermittent tendency to what might be called ‘Little Englandism’, a tendency evident for example in some aspects of the work of the more extreme disciples of F. R. Leavis. Pater of course loved English literature, but he was equally committed to the literatures of Europe, in particular those of France, Germany, and Italy. He was strongly influenced by Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Baudelaire. Flaubert is the central presence in ‘Style’. The first chapter of The Renaissance is entitled ‘Two Early French Stories’, and in the ‘Preface’ he, perhaps surprisingly, talks about the Renaissance as beginning and ending in France, not Italy; could this be part of a sustained critical project to unsettle our received ideas about the ‘nationality’ – or even ‘nationalism’ – of significant historical movements? He wrote essays on Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard, Pascal, Mérimée, and the contemporary novelist Octave Feuillet (there are also shorter sympathetic reviews of writings by Ferdinand Fabre, Augustin Filon, and the Francophone Swiss writer Henri-Frédéric Amiel). He was a profound student of German philosophy and German scholarship, and the heroes of ‘Winckelmann’, the representatives of the spirit of the Renaissance in the Enlightenment, are both Winckelmann himself and Goethe. In addition to his studies of the Italian Renaissance he provided an introduction for his friend C. L. Shadwell’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (1892).
Overall then Pater was always the cosmopolitan, committed to a general culture; as we saw at the outset, he thought that classical literature and the literatures of modern Europe constituted a unity. In his Introduction to Purgatorio – one wonders if perhaps partly to cheer himself up in view of the nationalistic emphasis in much contemporary writing about literature – he uses the word ‘cosmopolitan’ in describing his own age which he describes as ‘sympathetic, eclectic, cosmopolitan, full of curiosity and abounding in the “historic sense”’.36 Subsequently he praises ‘the un-provincial or cosmopolitan air of the Divina Commedia’ itself;37 we are reminded of T. S. Eliot’s view in ‘What is a Classic?’ that one of the marks of the classic is an absence of provinciality. In ‘Style’ a French author is the principal exhibit, and in the ‘Postscript’ Romanticism is a pan-European phenomenon. Early reviewers of Appreciations picked up on the emphasis on France, including the possible French implications of the book’s title, and Mrs Oliphant strongly criticised it.38 In all this Pater was at one with the views of Matthew Arnold, and, like him, might well have preferred a degree in Comparative Literature to one in English. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, Arnold famously insisted that ‘everywhere there is connexion, everywhere there is illustration: no single event, no single literature, is adequately comprehended except in its relation to other events, to other literatures’.39 In ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’, he regrets a lack of ‘urbanity’, ‘a note of provinciality’, in much English prose that might have been avoided if the country possessed an institution like the French Academy. He starts his essay by quoting as ‘exhilarating’ an example of exceptionalist boosterism by Macaulay (‘It may safely be said that the literature now extant in the English language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together’); and ends by excoriating this as ‘both vulgar, and, besides being vulgar, retarding’.40 In ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ he writes:
By the very nature of things, as England is not all the world, much of the best that is known and thought cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence. The English critic of literature, therefore, must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part of it, which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him.41
(For the importance of French criticism, not least that of Sainte-Beuve, to Pater, as to Arnold, see Chapter 2.) Accordingly we adopt a prismatic approach to Pater in relation to the dynamic and fluid contours of a nascent discipline that was not yet defined by the exclusion of literature in other languages. Chapter 4 on Pater’s ‘cosmopolitan criticism’ is thus integral to this project as providing the required dialectical angle for thinking about a European take on English. Similarly Pater’s art criticism can illuminate his way of reading English and a sense of form and style that defines the workings of literature as a medium in relation to other media (see Chapters 10 and 14 on Blake and Rossetti).
Unlike most other leading Victorian men of letters Pater was himself an educator, a teacher of the young; he seems indeed to have been a conscientious tutor. And perhaps his role as tutor and his fondness for the essay form are related: the undergraduates presented an essay for their tutorials (some essays by Gerard Manley Hopkins written for his Oxford tutors who included Pater survive42); and even today the essay remains in many places the prime mode of assessment for a degree in English. Of this at least we can be sure, that Pater would have abhorred the instrumentalist bias currently in vogue throughout today’s schools and universities – ‘learning outcomes’, ‘the skills agenda’, and the like. One story about him is that in a discussion about educational reform in the Brasenose common-room he expostulated:
I do not know what your object is. At present the undergraduate is a child of nature; he grows up like a wild rose in a country lane; you want to turn him into a turnip, rob him of all grace, and plant him out in rows.43
Pater obviously thought hard about how education should be conducted. ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and parts of Plato and Platonism, for example, show the process in action, with an awareness of both the benefit and the dangers involved; Marius the Epicurean, subtitled ‘His Sensations and Ideas’, is an account of the ‘aesthetic education’ of a particular young man, in the light of the German tradition of Bildung. In his thinking Pater was doubtless influenced by debates in Germany (Schiller, Fichte, Alexander von Humboldt, Schelling) as well as in Britain. Indeed some of his critics found something disagreeably un-English in his overall approach. W. J. Courthope, for example, in an anonymous article ‘Modern Culture’ published in the Quarterly Review in 1874, censured Carlyle, Arnold, John Addington Symonds, and Pater for their espousal of ‘self-culture’ in accordance with their ‘Gospel according to Goethe’ and in a manner that undermined manliness, good sense, and patriotism for the pursuit of ‘feverish excitement’. And in 1876 Courthope continued his attack on Pater and romanticism more generally in his essay ‘Wordsworth and Grey’ (‘Romanticism’ may be in part Pater’s response).44
Pater’s espousal of the essay as a form can also be connected with his pedagogical goals. His most complete theorisation of the essay occurs in a discussion that ought to be much better known: the second section of the chapter on ‘The Doctrine of Plato’ in Plato and Platonism entitled ‘Dialectic’, in connection with the literature of philosophy. This he divides into ‘three distinct literary methods’ (174): the poem – ‘a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often turbid or obscure’ (174); the treatise – the invention of Aristotle, ‘the proper instrument of dogma’ (187), ‘with its ambitious array of premiss and conclusion’ (175); and the essay. For the modern period his prime exemplar of the essayist is, as always, Montaigne (see on this Chapter 3), and the essay is thus associated with scepticism and the modern relative spirit, ‘that characteristic literary type of our own time’ (174). But it is Pater’s lifelong concern to complicate this picture and make the essay a more constant presence in the Western tradition by tracing its origins back to the dialogues of Plato. Each of these three methods is ‘determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth’ (175). Plato’s dialectical method involves a ‘continuous discourse with one’s self, being, for those who prosecute it with thoroughness, co-extensive with life itself’ (185), and can best be figured as a journey (179–80). In that dialogue ‘many persons, so to speak, will necessarily take part; so many persons as there are possible contrasts or shades in the apprehension of some complex subject’ (183–4). There can be little doubt about Pater’s own preferences in all this. The final sentence of this whole section reads like a personal credo (note such key Paterian words as ‘culture’, ‘receptivity’, ‘faithful scholar’, ‘philosophic temper’):
Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the ‘philosophic temper,’ in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.
Contrary to the criticisms made of him by such as Eliot and Ricks, Pater is always concerned with truth, and the – sometimes unsuspected – obstacles to it, including particular methods of argumentation (see Chapter 6).45 There is a potential ‘politics’ here too (something generally denied to the supposedly apolitical Pater).46 It is certainly possible to prefer Pater’s critical idiom to Eliot’s – lordly, dogmatic; Pater’s is more democratic, dialogic, in his own terms evincing the proper character of the essay. That is due to his commitment to a dialectical form of thinking, a commitment as deeply held as Marx’s and from the same proximate source in the recent philosophy of Hegel, although, as we have just seen, in Pater’s case it was also a project to retrace it, for his own and his students’ benefit, back to the dialogues of Plato. As a result no quotation from Pater is complete without its dialectical counterpart; to quote a single sentence or phrase is not merely to present one half of an argument as though it were the whole, but systematically to suppress the dialectical play of sic et non. Pater thus seems to have regarded his job as an academic and educator as being not to inculcate any particular point of view but rather, in his words about Plato and Winckelmann, to help ‘form a temper’; and with many tempers formed on Paterian lines – attentive, curious, undogmatic, eager for dialogue with others, always willing to modify their view, suspicious of received opinion, cosmopolitan – our world might be in a rather better place.
Conclusion: A Place for Pater?
It has always been difficult to find a ‘place for Pater’, to use Eliot’s words. What is one to make of an author, whose most famous work, perhaps, is not a great poem or play or novel, but a short essay on Leonardo da Vinci? It may be that Pater is one of those artists that he himself characterised as follows:
There are a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in general culture …. But, besides those great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these too have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the object of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and authority.
Indeed Botticelli, about whom he wrote those words, has, partly as a result of this very essay, subsequently entered the canon of great artists. And Pater, for those who have come to admire, and even to love, his writings, becomes a highly important part of their mental furniture. On one thing at least Eliot was right: Pater, like his hero Goethe, is ‘that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order’; but that does not mean that he cannot teach us much of value about his objects of study, including a number of key figures in English literature. Himself a relentless critic of disciplinary boundaries, a comparatist of formidable learning, Pater is unusually difficult to pigeonhole. He believes in the fine discriminations of the aesthete but also the capacious interests of the intellectual. Interdisciplinarity, that academic slogan of our time! – he has much to teach us about that too. And if anglophone criticism still has difficulty finding a place for him, perhaps that is because a strong suspicion of the aesthetic persists: ‘beauty’ is not nearly so embarrassing to even the most radical French intellectual as it is to a British academic. As we have seen, Pater thought one should read authors whole. And to read Pater whole is to receive an aesthetic education of very great value, as well as an opportunity to enjoy (dare we say it) the sheer beauty of his prose.
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