Pater lived at a time of mounting nationalism. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, in Britain as all over Europe, the study of literature became increasingly bound up with questions of national identity, both in educational institutions and in the public sphere at large. At the same time, however, this period also witnessed the birth of comparative literature as an independent branch of literary enquiry and numerous practical and theoretical attempts to inject new life into Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur. Registering this schism between nationalist and cosmopolitan approaches to literary studies, Pater championed a cosmopolitan method that was informed by a polyglot mentality and celebrated the diversity of European literatures and cultures. Rejecting nationalist agendas, he practised criticism as an art of dialogue and exchange that transported readers beyond the narrow moral and cultural horizon of the nation. His intervention in this charged field was neither totalising nor systematic, but it was powerful nonetheless: true to the principles of aesthetic criticism that he laid down in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he was weary of abstract methodological discussions, preferring instead to express his theories through critical practice, for instance by focusing on figures that exemplified his own cosmopolitan interests.

Several Oxford figures intervened in the public debate on literature and national identity. In ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864), for instance, Matthew Arnold was passionate about the fundamental role of literary criticism in shaping the intellectual life, and consequently the character, of the nation; in his view, by not taking criticism seriously, the English revealed an inferiority to the French and the Germans – an inferiority that could only be remedied by improving the quality of periodicals and educational curricula. With a nod back to Goethe’s Weltliteratur, Arnold urged English literary critics to concentrate only on ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’.¹ This necessarily meant reading extensively in foreign literatures and leaving undistinguished domestic products to one side, since Arnold made no bones about his low opinion of much contemporary English literature and his impatience with the bad habit of inflating the merit of English authors on patriotic or chauvinistic grounds. Because of this double argument about the need to institutionalise criticism and, at the same time, to study English literature in an international perspective, Arnold’s essay has been seen as marking an important stage both in the rise of English as an academic subject and in setting a comparative agenda for literary studies.² Indeed, his often-cited plea that criticism should regard ‘Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation’ implies that a study of literature unbound by parochial loyalties and national interests fostered a desirable internationalism – or, in other words, that criticism paved the way for the ‘spiritual’ unity of Europe.³ Max Müller was even more explicit about the urgent spiritual mission of literature at a time when ‘national partisanship threatens to darken all wise counsel and to extinguish all human sympathies’.⁴ Müller was the first Oxford Professor of Comparative Philology, a discipline that prepared the ground for comparative literary studies as we understand and practise them today. Speaking as the first President of the newly formed English Goethe Society and again inspired by Goethe’s Weltliteratur, he urged that cosmopolitan reading habits and a greater respect for the diversity of the world’s literatures would not only improve public culture in England but also encourage peaceful relations between the nations of Europe.

Müller’s inaugural lecture to the English Goethe Society took place in May 1886, and it was circulated in periodical form later that year. It therefore coincided in the public sphere with the debate in the Pall Mall Gazette on a possible School of English at Oxford initiated by John Churton Collins, in which Müller was among those invited to contribute. That same year also saw the publication of the Irish philologist Hutcheson Macauley Posnett’s Comparative Literature, the first book to make a sustained case in English for comparative literary studies as an academic discipline.⁵ This historical convergence should encourage us to see the public debate on English at Oxford, ostensibly a controversy between English and Classics, as bleeding into the politically charged question of national identity and national feeling in literary studies. The question that was being discussed in the Pall Mall was not only whether English should be approached through the prism of literature or philology, and where it should fit within existing disciplinary structures, in Oxford and elsewhere. It was also about the role of literary studies in the increasingly tense field of international literary relations outlined by Arnold and Müller. Should the study of English literature aim to cement national sentiment and bolster Englishness at home and internationally? Or should it be conceived in a way that encouraged dialogue and connection with foreign forms and ideas? In other words, should studying English serve a national or a cosmopolitan idea of culture?

Pater’s intervention in the Pall Mall Gazette touched on these questions in a characteristically oblique way when he argued that classical study would be expanded and enlivened by ‘a closer connection … with the study of great modern works (classical literature and the literature of modern Europe having, in truth, an organic unity)’.⁶ Pater followed Arnold, who had spoken of ‘a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity’ as ‘the proper outfit’ for the members of his European ‘great confederation’, and who reiterated his opposition to separating Classics, English, and modern European languages in his own response to the Pall Mall Gazette survey.⁷ Arnold used Classics to dismiss patriotism and nationalist sentiment as belonging to what he calls ‘those alien practical considerations’ that had no place in his definition of criticism.⁸ Read in this context, Pater’s defence of Classics over English must therefore also be seen as a rejection of the nationalist mentality in which the rise of English in universities found itself implicated. This chapter examines Pater’s positioning vis-à-vis English studies by shifting the focus to another discipline that was struggling for academic recognition in those years: Modern Languages. Pater’s commitment to the study of modern languages at Oxford and in his literary criticism more broadly comes together in his late essay on the French writer Prosper Mérimée – a relatively understudied work that sheds light on Pater’s subtle undermining of cultural nationalism. With its nod to the evolutionary method of Müller’s comparative philology, Pater’s image of the ‘organic unity’ of classical and modern European literatures sees the natural place of English within a broader economy of world-literary exchanges that transcends national borders.

The Taylor Institution and the Taylor Lectures

First, it will be useful to explore the institutional background out of which the Mérimée essay came into being. In nineteenth-century Oxford, the debate on the establishment of a School of English ran parallel with an equally embittered controversy over the creation of a new School of Modern Languages. An account published in 1929 by the historian Charles Firth – Regius Professor of Modern History and a controversial figure within Oxford – charts the struggle for recognition fought by Modern Languages. Firth explains that the turning point in the fortune of foreign languages at Oxford came with the establishment of the Taylor Institution, which was explicitly conceived mid-century as a foundation dedicated to European languages.⁹ The Taylorian was to have its own library and support its own educational activities, notably through the appointment of a new Professor of Modern European Languages. In 1848, the first person to hold this post was the polyglot Swiss-born Indologist Francis Henry Trithen, who gave lectures on the language and literature of Russia.¹⁰ Then, in 1854 the position went to Max Müller, who dominated the life and reputation of the Taylorian for the whole second half of the century. Müller, who would achieve global fame for his studies of comparative mythology, was an extremely prestigious appointment, but his expertise was in philology rather than in literature. In recognition of this, in 1868 the university created for him a bespoke Professorship of Comparative Philology that remained attached to the Taylorian and effectively caused the Professorship of Modern European Languages to lapse. Like English, therefore, and replicating a dynamic that also operated within Classics, the early development of Modern Languages as an academic discipline within Oxford was caught in an opposition between philology and literary scholarship. Those who favoured the latter felt that provision for the teaching of modern European literatures was disappointingly poor – a perception that was endorsed by a University commission appointed in 1877, which found that the available modern language teaching was mostly restricted to grammar. The commission’s report resulted in a protracted discussion about the establishment of a School of Modern Languages, with numerous pamphlets being issued for and against, prior to the eventual defeat by Congregation (the sovereign body of the University) in 1887.

In the absence of a dedicated Professorship, the Curators of the Taylorian tried to fill the gap by inviting distinguished foreign scholars to offer ad hoc lecture courses. The first person to receive the prestigious commission in 1871 was the French critic Hippolyte Taine, who had come to prominence with his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863), where he pioneered a philosophical-scientific approach to literature based on the three key variables of ‘race, surroundings, and epoch’.¹¹ Taine’s presence in Oxford was a concrete sign that the University was starting to heed Arnold’s appeal to import modern European criticism (Taine was also awarded an honorary doctorate when he was there). Most importantly, the circumstances shed light on the workings of the Taylorian not only as an academic institution but also as a social and intellectual space. Despite the fact that his visit was constantly overshadowed by the distressing news coming from France, where Paris was falling to the Germans at the culmination of the Franco-Prussian war, Taine enjoyed a busy social life in Oxford, which he depicted in his detailed letters to his wife.¹² He had many conversations with Max Müller, who acted as his professional host, and was introduced to several of the University’s literary personalities, including, besides the ubiquitous Benjamin Jowett, Arnold, Swinburne, and Emilia Pattison (later Lady Dilke). His lectures took place in French (not uncontroversially, according to Müller), and he noted that his audience always comprised a majority of women.¹³ In other words, well before the official establishment of Modern Languages as an academic discipline within Oxford, which would not take place until 1905, the Taylorian was able to create and support a network of those interested in modern European languages and literatures that cut across faculties and colleges, that involved prominent literary figures, and that crucially included women as well as men.

In his Oxford letters Taine does not mention meeting Pater, who in 1871 was still making his first forays into periodical publishing and was therefore unlikely to have been introduced to the French critic as one of the university’s literary personalities. We do know, however, from his borrowing records that Pater made extensive use of the Taylorian library over the years.¹⁴ And we should understand this close relationship with the Taylorian not simply as showing that Pater was a solitary reader of European literature and criticism, which formed the core of the Taylor’s collections, but that he belonged to the cosmopolitan Oxford set encountered by Taine for which the Taylorian now provided a gathering point. Over the years, as Pater’s published works, deeply informed as they were by the Taylorian holdings, projected the cosmopolitan mission of the Institution in the public sphere, Pater participated in the discursive construction of a symbolic space within Oxford for the critical study of modern European languages. While Max Müller embodied the philological side of the project of comparatism at Oxford, Pater belonged to its literary side.

Pater’s collaboration was formally recognised by the Curators of the Taylor Institution when they invited him to participate in their second major initiative to promote the cause of Modern Languages at Oxford and on the national stage: in 1889, they launched a series of annual lectures on a subject related to the topic of ‘foreign literature’ for which they commissioned an impressive list of international speakers. The inaugural lecture was given by Edward Dowden, the first chair of English literature at Trinity College Dublin. Dowden was not only a distinguished literary scholar (he was a specialist on Shakespeare) and biographer (he wrote a widely noted life of Shelley), but he was also an advocate of Goethe’s ideal of world literature.¹⁵ In fact, two years previously Dowden had succeeded Max Müller in the presidency of the English Goethe Society. In Oxford, Dowden lectured on ‘Literary Criticism in France’, a topic that linked back to Taine’s visit almost twenty years earlier. The second invited speaker was Pater, who delivered a lecture on Prosper Mérimée on 17 November 1890.

The choice of Pater as the first Oxford figure to be included in the Taylor lectures is significant. It honours the public contribution to the knowledge of European literature that he had made not only in his criticism but, as Lene Østermark-Johansen has shown, also in his fiction.¹⁶ At the same time, this prestigious commission helps us to put into focus Pater’s reputation within the university, where the Brasenose Classics don was clearly perceived as an outstanding critic of foreign literatures and an intellectual ally of those who fought the cause of modern European languages. Indeed, surveying the first series of Taylor lectures, which were delivered between 1889 and 1900, what stands out is that Pater is the only Oxford speaker alongside the now obscure Henry Butler Clarke, who taught Spanish at the Taylorian Institution and gave his lecture on the subject of Spanish picaresque novels in 1898. The others comprised Professors of English Literature in other universities (Dowden, C. H. Herford, W. P. Ker) as well as distinguished historians and literary critics (Horatio Brown, William Michael Rossetti, T. W. Rolleston) who all shared interests in European literature and culture that went beyond their narrow disciplinary fields. The series also included three important French speakers who, like Taine, delivered their lectures in their native language: the leading Hispanist Alfred Morel-Fatio, and the star contributors Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Bourget, who lectured respectively on the topic of music and literature, and on Gustave Flaubert. Taken together, this heterogeneous group, which in the course of ten years covered the major languages of Western Europe (French, German, Spanish, and Italian), embodied the cosmopolitan mission of the study of modern languages as the Taylorian conceived it.

It is possible to get a clearer sense of the mission and pitch of the Taylor lectures by turning again to Pater’s predecessor, Edward Dowden. In New Studies in Literature (1895), where he later collected the text of the Taylor lecture together with various addresses to the English Goethe Society and other essays, Dowden gave a very cautious assessment of the conflict between national and cosmopolitan points of view. He conceded that literature must always retain the mark of the ‘profound differences’ between the nations caused by their use of different languages, and he portrayed a self-conscious cosmopolitanism in literature as a sign of decline;¹⁷ but he also stressed literature and criticism’s need to be hospitable to foreign ideas, praising Carlyle’s ability to be simultaneously a citizen of Scotland and Weimar, and chastising the nationalist sentiment that accompanied the contemporary Irish literary revival.¹⁸ When it came to studying English at university, Dowden explained that he wanted his students to ‘conceive the history of English literature as part of a larger movement’: if he could have his way, their university education would start with a historical map of European literature that would encourage them to draw international connections between authors and gain a broader understanding of the transnational evolution of genres and literary movements.¹⁹ He pleaded for a comparative or, as he called it, ‘philosophical’ approach to literary studies that went beyond narrow national concerns:

By choosing to speak about French criticism in front of his Oxford audience, the English Professor made a deliberate gesture: it was his way of performing the ideal of literary comparatism and the critique of cultural nationalism articulated here. The Taylor lectures created a prestigious stage on which the complex relationship between English and Modern Languages was entangled and unravelled, and in which the type of cosmopolitan criticism outlined by Dowden was publicly advocated.

Mérimée and European Literature

If the essay on Mérimée still remains among Pater’s least discussed works, this is mostly due to its publication history: shortly after giving it as a lecture in Oxford, Pater delivered it again at the London Institution, where its metropolitan audience included Oscar Wilde and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). ‘Prosper Mérimée’ was then promptly printed in the Fortnightly Review, but it was never issued in book form during the author’s lifetime. After Pater’s death, his literary executor Charles Lancelot Shadwell included it in Miscellaneous Studies (1895), the volume where he assembled the remaining uncollected pieces of Pater’s corpus admittedly without a ‘unifying principle’.²¹ As a result, ‘Prosper Mérimée’, which is arguably one of the most accomplished of Pater’s late works, has always existed in a vacuum. In fact, however, the natural ‘home’ of this seemingly eccentric essay was, in the first instance, the Taylorian Institution and, later, the bilingual volume Studies in European Literature (1900), which collected the first series of Taylor lectures with the intent to ‘contribute to further the study of foreign letters beyond as well as in the University’.²² Studies in European Literature provides us with a context to retrace the shared intellectual endeavour to which Pater’s essay on Mérimée belongs. Disparate though they are in terms of topics and approaches, its contributions sketch out a highly selective and partial but nonetheless organic notion of European literature as a ‘confederation’ of sorts, to go back to Matthew Arnold’s terms. They embody a vision of Weltliteratur, understood as writing that has a significance beyond the nation in which it was produced, from the perspective of cosmopolitan English and French critics. Conscious of entering a distinctive intellectual community, the authors occasionally echo each other. Bourget’s essay, for instance, delivered as a lecture in 1897, starts with a tribute to Pater, whom he had met on a previous visit to Oxford. The French author compared Pater as ‘scrupuleux ouvrier de style’ (‘scrupulous craftsman of style’) to the subject of his lecture: Flaubert – perhaps as a way to pay a posthumous homage to the Oxford don who had left a powerful critical portrait of Flaubert in the essay on ‘Style’.²³

‘Prosper Mérimée’ shows substantive elements of continuity with ‘Style’: both essays are about nineteenth-century French writers who, after their deaths, acquired a notable and slightly sensational profile as letter writers. Mérimée’s Lettres à une inconnue (1873), which Pater cites, was the record of the notoriously reserved author’s romantic exchange with an anonymous correspondent said to be an aristocratic English woman. In the years preceding Pater’s lecture the Lettres had gone into several English editions and, in fact, Pater’s publisher Macmillan had just issued a book that purported to be the missing half of the correspondence: An Author’s Love: Being the Unpublished Letters of Prosper Mérimée’s ‘Inconnue’ (1889) pretended to be the mysterious literary lady’s replies to the French author’s letters but was in fact the work of the American writer Elizabeth Balch.²⁴ Pater’s interest in Mérimée may well have been triggered by the renewed public curiosity aroused by the letters. In any case, there were several aspects of the French author’s work that would have persuaded Pater to make him the subject of his lecture. Mérimée’s double profile as writer and as inspector of French historical monuments meant that his literary writings engage with material culture, preservation, and survival in a manner that resonated heavily with Pater’s own interests. In particular, Mérimée’s famous short story ‘La Venus d’Ille’ (1837), in which a recently unearthed ancient statue of Venus comes back to life, provided one of the urtexts for Pater’s uncanny rendition of classical myth in the imaginary portraits. More generally, as he made very clear in the essay, Pater admired Mérimée as a stylist and a literary aesthete, although he also expressed certain reservations about what he perceived as Mérimée’s coldness and reserve, and what he calls his ‘contemptuous grace’.²⁵ If John J. Conlon is right in seeing a strong element of kinship and self-recognition in Pater’s portrait of Mérimée, it is even more striking that he did not shy away from stressing Mérimée’s quest for ‘a kind of artificial stimulus’ in art (Studies in European Literature, 44; MS, 27), as well as an obsessive quality and propensity for aestheticised violence – a set of characteristics that Pater arguably also shared and that his turn-of-the-century audience might have recognised as ‘decadent’.²⁶ Indeed, by labelling Mérimée as ‘the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubious significance in later French literature’ (47; MS, 31), Pater built a bridge between Mérimée and the contemporary trends that Arthur Symons would shortly examine in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893), where Symons would name Pater himself as a leading English voice of literary decadence.

Above all, however, Pater wants to give a full and nuanced portrayal of Mérimée’s cosmopolitanism – a concept that he does not name explicitly but that clearly shapes his understanding of Mérimée’s literary significance. Pater’s Mérimée is therefore first and foremost a ‘man of the world’ (33; MS, 14) by which Pater means that he had the qualities of eloquence and social polish, worldliness and ‘infallible self-possession’ (33; MS, 14) that made him a successful public figure. The real hallmark of Mérimée’s social cosmopolitanism was his irony – a detached attitude to the world that also informed his literary work and that, to follow Pater’s own habit of projecting into a later decadent sensibility, anticipates the blasé attitude that Baudelaire saw as the emblem of dandyism and cosmopolitan self-fashioning.²⁷ Mérimée’s worldliness took the form of a relentless intellectual curiosity about the world in all its variety, and found an outlet in travel, international friendships, and a wide reading in foreign literatures. The French author’s heightened receptivity to foreign ideas, combined with the ability to reconfigure them across space and languages, meant that his literary achievement as characterised by Pater rested chiefly on his talent for translation and mediation – a talent that comes to the fore in his handling of Russian literature. Pater compares Mérimée’s discovery of Russia to the laying open of a new quarry of an ancient marble that had long been thought exhausted: the French writer, ‘like a veritable son of the old pagan Renaissance’, seems to find in the ‘youthful Russia’ of the mid-nineteenth century the survival of certain characteristics of old Roman civilisation that had otherwise been obliterated from the belated cultures of Western Europe (36; MS, 17). Pater is right in stressing that Mérimée played a pioneering role at a time in which the knowledge of Russian language and culture was extremely rare in the West, and when, even within Russia, the educated classes used French as the chief medium of communication. There is something of the visionary quality that Pater had attributed to Winckelmann’s quest for ancient Greece in the way in which Mérimée penetrates this alien world in order to reveal the concealed greatness of Russian literature in a series of groundbreaking French translations of works by Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenev among others.²⁸

The references to Russian literature would have resonated with the cosmopolitan literary crowd in the Taylorian (as we have seen, the first Professor of European Languages at Oxford was a Russianist), as well as with Pater’s early readers, because Britain was then experiencing a vogue for Russian novels that had come from France. In an influential essay on Tolstoy (1887), Matthew Arnold encouraged English readers to admire the ethical realism of ‘Anna Karénine’ (which, in the absence of an English translation, he was reading in French), as an alternative to the lubricity and ‘petrified feeling’ that he associated with French naturalism and Flaubert – an author that, as we have seen, Pater held as a model of good style.²⁹ The image of Russian literature that Pater shows his audience through Mérimée, while also mediated by way of France, is different both from the version of realism that appealed to Arnold and from the philosophical/political Russia that would take hold of English readers in the 1890s. It is an earlier and more exotic Russia captured by Pater’s orientalising comparison of Mérimée’s style to ‘some harshly dyed oriental carpet from the sumptuous floor of the Kremlin, on which blood had fallen’ (37; MS, 18). It is a romantic Russia identified with Pushkin – or ‘Pouchkine’ (44; MS, 27) as Pater writes, following Arnold’s francophone spellings – which Mérimée introduced to France and more broadly to readers in Western Europe through translation (Pater refers to Mérimée’s translation of Pushkin’s novella ‘The Shot’) but that he also filtered through his own fiction – the famous short story ‘Carmen’ (1845), which Pater also discusses, was based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies (1842), which Mérimée rendered into French. By drawing attention to the Russophile current of Mérimée’s work, Pater undoes the dichotomy created by Arnold between realist/vitalist Russia and naturalist/decadent France. Instead, he unravels a thread that goes from the origins of modern Russian literature to those fictions of ‘dubious significance’ that mark out the literature of the fin de siècle, in Britain as well as France.

If we turn back to the Taylorian Institution and the Oxford School of Modern Languages, we can start to see that Mérimée could be presented as an excellent advocate of why the study of foreign languages and literatures was a matter of profound importance. In the centre of an international network that connected Russia, France, Spain, and Britain, but that also reached back to classical antiquity, Pater’s Mérimée exemplified a way of practising literature and criticism that was based on acts of reception, transition, and cultural contamination rather than on the quest for a national identity. Indeed, the vexed question of nationality in literature became an explicit concern in later Taylor lectures. In 1892, the poet and Lessing scholar Thomas William Rolleston put it succinctly in these terms: ‘Literature is universally regarded as being something peculiarly national. How far does the actual history of literature justify this view?’³⁰ Chief among those who argued for the close bond between literature and the nation was none other than former Taylor guest lecturer Hippolyte Taine: his famous mantra of ‘race, surrounding, and epoch’ propounded in the Histoire de la littérature anglaise implied that individual authors and their works could only be properly understood through the prisms of national history and national character – the variables embraced by his ambiguous term ‘race’. A corollary of this theory was that literary criticism became a vehicle to prove, essentialise, or even magnify the differences between nations, potentially feeding into nationalist thought.

In the inaugural Taylor lecture that preceded Pater’s by a year, Dowden had spoken against the French critic. He argued that Taine’s criticism overlooked both the agency of the individual writer and what he called ‘the universal mind of humanity’, which can be glossed as literature’s ability to transcend boundaries and, by so doing, connect rather than separate nations.³¹ This is the same spiritual power that Goethe ascribed to Weltliteratur. Believing that a work of literature ought not to be reduced to ‘a document in the history and the psychology of a people’, Dowden found fault with a fundamental premise of Taine’s theory of literature – his problematic slippage between the concepts of ‘race’ and nation: ‘There is no pure, homogeneous race in existence, or at least none exists which has become a nation, none which has founded a civilized state, and produced a literature and art. Nor is it true, as M. Taine assumes, that the intellectual characteristics of a people persist unchanged from generation to generation.’³² In his essay on Mérimée, Pater also demonstrates a critical stance towards Taine, who is a hidden presence in the text as Pater borrows from Taine’s own portrait of Mérimée in his preface to Lettres à une inconnue (1873).³³ Rather than presenting the author and his works as the mirror of a French national identity, Pater sees them as the site of crossings and transitions: Mérimée is delineated against the backdrop of a cultural geography of Europe that stretches from Moscow to Seville by way of the Balkans and France. The same is also true of Pater’s indirect account of Russian literature, whose evolution and reception are pointedly divorced from the growth into self-consciousness of the Russian nation.

The study of translation is integral to this de-nationalised model of criticism. Pater, as we have seen, emphasises the porousness between Mérimée’s work of translation and his ‘original’ writings, refusing to see translation as a derivative or purely ancillary form of literature. This enlarged concept of translation embraces a range of different practices, such as imitation and creative translation, building a bridge between philology and literature that resonates with Pater’s description of the writer as a scholar of language in ‘Style’. Particularly characteristic of Mérimée, however, is the genre of pseudotranslation: his debut work Le Theâtre de Clara Gazul (1825) purported, in Pater’s description, ‘to be from a rare Spanish original, the work of a nun, who, under tame, conventual reading, had felt the touch of mundane, of physical passions; had become a dramatic poet, and herself a powerful actress’ (46; MS, 29–30). The slightly later La Guzla (1827) – Pater mistakenly inverts the chronology – presented itself as a translation of popular verse collected by the author in the course of extensive travels through Dalmatia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Herzegovina. In the former Mérimée created not only a fictive author, Clara Gazul, but also a fictive translator, Joseph L’Estrange, adding layer on layer of mystification; he even had a portrait of himself painted as Clara, draped under a mantilla, which he included in presentation copies for some of his friends.³⁴ In the latter he described himself as an Italian, the son of a Morlach woman from Spalatro [sic], who had recently become a naturalised French citizen and had decided to write his translations in French despite his non-native command of the language.³⁵ The fact that La Guzla was partly translated into Russian by none other than Pushkin, who believed the work authentic and included it in his Song of the Western Slavs, creates a felicitous short-circuiting between the two writers’ identities as poets and translators. For Pater, these works exemplify Mérimée’s taste for masks and deception – a taste that was cleverly mirrored in the recent An Author’s Love, mentioned earlier, in which the American Elizabeth Balch had masqueraded as Mérimée’s ‘inconnue’, inventing the mysterious lady’s replies to the French author’s letters. Balch’s work was also a pseudotranslation, complete with a learned preface full of critical quotations. Pater shows that this network of mystification is also part of Mérimée’s literary cosmopolitanism, which collapses different forms of identity, exposing the practice of reifying the foreign and the exotic and, at the same time, subverting the ideal of authenticity that was crucial to ethnocentric and national models of literary criticism.

Conclusion

The essay on Mérimée should be read within a corpus of late essays on foreign literatures that also comprises ‘Style’ and Pater’s introduction to Shadwell’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (1892). The latter – a bilingual volume – is, in fact, another testimony to Pater’s involvement in an intellectual community in Oxford that actively promoted foreign languages and literature. Across these late works Pater engages with fundamental questions related to cosmopolitan literary practices, such as translation and how to understand the universality of world literature – this is the substance of the argument on ‘the soul of humanity’ in the closing of ‘Style’ (App., 38). In the introduction to the Purgatorio, Pater also explicitly deploys the concept of cosmopolitanism in relation to literature and criticism. He argues that Dante’s work spoke directly to a cosmopolitan orientation that was characteristic of the ‘genius’ of the nineteenth century, which he defined as a ‘minute sense of the external world and its beauties’ coupled with a demand for ‘a largeness of spirit in its application to life’.³⁶

Assessing the parallel struggle for recognition fought by English and Modern Languages at Oxford, Charles Firth noted that ‘there was throughout a working alliance between the group who studied English and the groups who studied other European tongues’.³⁷ Occurring as they did within a short time lapse, Pater’s contribution to the Pall Mall Gazette and his Taylor lecture show that he had a foot in both camps: in this crucial phase of the history of academic specialisation, he played a mediating role within Oxford but also on the national stage, largely by resisting the pressures of the modern culture of specialisation. His criticism of both English and European literatures, as much as his writings on classical cultures and art history, manifest his unwillingness to abide by the new institutional and disciplinary boundaries that were being erected in the world of academia. Pater’s literary criticism did not embrace the new advancements in the comparative method, like Müller’s, and it generally shied away from making systematic statements of the type we find in Arnold’s and Dowden’s, but it was nonetheless firmly committed to what we now recognise as a comparative path. His interest in points of contact between cultures and in how ideas and forms travel across borders reveals his opposition to the nationalist project attached to English studies and to sectarianism in literary studies more generally.