The adjective ‘English’ begins to figure in the titles of Walter Pater’s essays and reviews in the 1880s: ‘The English School of Painting’, ‘Four Books for Students of English Literature’, ‘English at the Universities’, ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’.¹ Pater’s unfinished portrait, published posthumously under the title ‘An English Poet’,² probably in part derives from this period, when his two contributions (Coleridge and Rossetti) to T. H. Ward’s The English Poets: Selections also appeared. This emphasis on ‘English’ might suggest an increasing concern with art and literature at a national level, yet Pater was still acutely aware of the European influence on English culture. When, in the autumn of 1886, the Pall Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of W. T. Stead, selected Pater as one of the contributors to the lengthy debate about the introduction of English as a university subject, the choice fell on an author whose publications reflected his profound concern with English literature. Although an Oxford classicist, Pater’s publications on Greek subjects were by 1886 limited to mythological essays on Dionysus, Demeter and Persephone, and three essays on Greek sculpture. His public engagement with English literature, on the other hand, with essays on two of Shakespeare plays, on Browne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Morris, D. G. Rossetti, and on Romanticism as a European phenomenon, marked him out as an authority on sixteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature, a likely supporter of Stead and John Churton Collins’s campaign for the establishing of schools of English. Yet Pater’s hesitations and reservations on the matter were audible throughout his contribution: pointing out the ‘organic unity’ of classical and modern European literature, he was wary that any examination in a literary discipline would result in the fading of the ‘“fine flower” of English poetry, or Latin oratory, or Greek art’, as ‘Intelligent Englishmen’ naturally resorted ‘for a liberal pleasure to their own literature’.³

Pater undoubtedly counted himself among such Englishmen enjoying English literature as ‘truant reading’ (ME, i. 54, ch. 4), that which you read for pleasure when you are really supposed to be reading something else. His floral imagery suggested aesthetic sensitivity and delight; in his fiction his protagonist with the flowery name, Florian Deleal, emerged in a modern allegory reminiscent of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as an aesthete in the making, perceptive of the beauty of the red hawthorn and associated with the wallflower, linking him to the house in which he was once a child. His Wordsworthian English poet, drawn to the rose and the honeysuckle, fully aware of the fragrance of words, encountered a wealth of wild marigold, yellow horned poppies, lavender, and dwarf-rose the moment he set foot on French soil, suggestive of the wealth of French literature awaiting him. And Gaston, having read Pierre de Ronsard’s poetry – such as the famous ‘To Cassandra’ (‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose’) in which youth, flower, and femininity merge – sought out the retired leader of the Pléiade, now turned gardening prior,⁴ while realising that even beautiful blossoms might be Baudelairean flowers of evil.

In the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s Pater developed the form of the imaginary portrait as a mode of literary criticism, merging fiction, (auto)biography, and travel writing into a genre which enabled him to write creatively in dialogue with English and French literature. The freedom he enjoyed once he embraced the short portrait of some 7,000 to 8,000 words, often based on a rough biographical outline of a young talented male protagonist, opened up a plethora of generic and intertextual possibilities for the study of literature in a self-reflexive mode in which he could imitate or comment on the literature and criticism of both the past and the present. In choosing the term ‘portrait’, he was inviting a dialogue with Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve who between 1827 and 1846 had published some 150 literary essays under the heading Portraits: Critiques et portraits (1839), Portraits des femmes (1844), Portraits littéraires (1844), and Portraits contemporains (1846). An ardent reader of Sainte-Beuve, Pater was repeatedly borrowing his works and acquiring his volumes for his private book collection.⁵ Most of the French subjects for Pater’s essays had been treated by Sainte-Beuve: Ronsard, du Bellay, Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Pascal, Flaubert, and Mérimée. Sainte-Beuve’s works blended biography with criticism, but also grew out of his own early toying with poetry and fiction. For Pater the liberty permitted by the imaginary portrait released the more playful and poetic parts of his intellect, although, interestingly, his name appeared on the title pages of both Marius the Epicurean (1885) and the Imaginary Portraits (1887) as ‘Walter Pater, M.A./Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford’. The portraits might be imaginary, but they were still published by an academic with a college affiliation at one of England’s two leading universities.

The cross-pollination between Pater’s literary essays and his portraits is profound; often he was working on essays, reviews, and portraits at the same time, and certain clusters of closely connected pieces of criticism and fiction were the result.⁶ Places, ideas, motifs, and atmospheres recur, yet treated in radically different ways. The large holdings of Pater’s unfinished manuscripts in the Houghton Library suggest that many of Pater’s texts had lengthy gestation periods: begun, left to simmer, sometimes for years, and then taken up again much later.⁷ Developments in Pater’s handwriting, references to the books he was borrowing in the Oxford libraries, or cross-references to some of Pater’s other texts provide clues to his lengthy composition process which, at the time of his death, was well known.⁸ Yet the dating of the manuscripts remains problematic, full of uncertainties and loose conjectures.⁹ The core texts for examination in this chapter are three such fragments, all revealing Pater’s strong interest in English literature in the mid-1880s: one long and one short manuscript fragment, and one posthumously published fragment of which there is no known manuscript in existence. One is an essay or lecture on English literature;¹⁰ the second a rough plot outline for a long imaginary portrait, entitled ‘Thistle’ (thus in keeping with the floral imagery), set in England in the second decade of the nineteenth century (‘STC. Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, are around.’¹¹); the third is the polished fragment of just over 5,000 words published in 1931 under the title ‘Imaginary Portraits 2: An English Poet’.¹² There is inconsistency with respect to the title; the heading of the 1931 text is ‘Imaginary Portraits 2: An English Poet’, while the title which precedes Pater’s narrative reads ‘The English Poet.’ Irrespective of whether Pater desired the definite or the indefinite article, the text is the only one of his portraits which foregrounds national identity. All three fragments reflect Pater’s concern with the impact of the reading of English literature on the individual, at the same time as they view English literature in a European perspective. They contextualise his contribution to the Pall Mall Gazette debate, even if his response turned out not to be quite as supportive as the editor might have hoped.

The three texts invite us to consider the individual as part of a zeitgeist: the harmony of Chaucer’s writings as emblematic of the undivided medieval church,¹³ the post-revolutionary protagonist Thistle as a Romantic precursor of John Henry Newman,¹⁴ and the nameless English poet as a mid-Victorian cosmopolitan writer, of Anglo-French descent, brought up in Cumberland on Renaissance and Romantic poetry, and ready to embrace his European heritage when the text finishes abruptly mid-sentence. William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits (1825) had used character sketches of real writers and philosophers to paint a portrait of his own era (he did, after all, have an artistic background as a portrait painter); by contrast, Pater’s imaginary portraits were concerned with Newman’s Romantic ancestors or an anonymous nineteenth-century poet whose fondness for hard, artificially crafted verses might remind the reader of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852–72). The zeitgeist left its imprint on great and small alike; in his ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance Pater made his aesthetic critic ask, ‘In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste?’ (Ren., xxi). Quoting from Sainte-Beuve’s definition of a humanist (from one of his essays on Joachim du Bellay), Pater envisioned his aesthetic critic:

Sainte-Beuve’s humanists and Pater’s ‘intelligent Englishmen’ are ‘truant readers’, whose discerning tastes rest on their extensive reading, equipping them for their own aesthetic criticism. Pater quotes William Blake’s ‘genius is always above its age’, but his imaginary portraits are less concerned with the outstanding individual than with the less remarkable people who surround them. Where many of his essays revolve around the life and activities of the individual genius, in the portraits the focus is on the minor spirits in their orbits. At the very beginning of the long manuscript subsequently entitled ‘English Literature’, Pater outlines two different types of contemporary criticism:

His imaginary portraits develop the first type of criticism, as they focus on intimate personality, while ‘English Literature’ outlines a series of evolutionary phases, like Ward’s English Poets, beginning with Chaucer and ending with the nineteenth century. The manuscript, probably begun in the mid-1870s when Pater borrowed Hippolyte Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) and the medieval volume of the Catholic John Lingard’s The History of England: From the First Invasion to the Accession of Henry VIII (1819),¹⁷ was probably worked on again in the late autumn of 1885 when he returned to Taine and Lingard.¹⁸ By then it appears as a lecture (‘I wish to dwell for a few minutes on a general/n’),¹⁹ and the first-person pronoun is repeated in a way uncharacteristic of Pater’s written work. In Pater’s sparse correspondence there is no reference to such a lecture but inevitably one wonders what kind of audience Pater had in mind and whether the lecture was ever delivered. The piece reworks a series of clearly outlined periods in English literature (because Pater needed to work them out for himself or because he was attempting to be pedagogical?), which in some respects seem uncharacteristically dogmatic:

As Pater’s heading informs us, this is a systematic philosophy of English poetry, of imaginative literature, rooted in Lingard’s view of the Reformation as the great schism bringing religious and philosophical division into Western literature. From Chaucer’s ‘cheerful’ England to the scepticism of Montaigne and Shakespeare and the nihilism of the eighteenth century, the drive is towards a nineteenth-century reconstruction, a return to the harmony of religion and culture which had existed in the medieval period. Pater stresses the international scheme in his headnote (where ‘international’ would seem to be familiar enough for abbreviation), and elsewhere sees Chaucer in the context of Dante and Petrarch. For Pater English literature begins with Chaucer; a large part of the manuscript revolves around Chaucer with notes about his life and individual Canterbury tales. By comparison, William Morris, in his contribution to the Pall Mall Gazette debate, had voiced concern that most teachers of the discipline would trace a national literature back only to Shakespeare, whereas, in fact, the relatively recently discovered Beowulf ought to be the originating point of English literature.²¹ The internationalism Pater sought from the initial stages of English literature was Greek, Italian, and French, rather than rooted in myths of the barbaric North.

For his four-volume The English Poets (1880) T. H. Ward had selected Chaucer as his point of departure. In his introductory essay to the anthology, Matthew Arnold, tracing ‘the stream of English poetry’ to its ‘historic origins’, connected Chaucer with early French poetry, while presenting him as ‘the father of our splendid English poetry’, since ‘he is our “well of English undefiled,” because by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition’.²² Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats were all indebted to Chaucer’s ‘liquid diction’ and ‘fluid movement’, in Arnold’s view, and although admitting that Chaucer’s language posed a difficulty, he concluded that ‘He will be read, as time goes on, far more generally than he is read now’.²³ Whatever the exact date(s) of Pater’s ‘English Literature’ manuscript, his general outline of the philosophy of English poetry has significant overlaps with Ward’s, something which is hardly surprising, given the close friendship between the Paters and the Wards, and Ward’s affiliation to Pater’s Oxford college. If one looks across Pater’s writings for references to Chaucer, the medieval writer becomes almost as plastic as Pater’s concept of the Renaissance; he could write of love between men in a Greek context in ‘The Knight’s Tale’, introduced in the second edition of The Renaissance (1877; Ren., 7). Elsewhere Chaucer’s characteristic animation or expression of life was detected in the Marbles of Aegina, as Pater concluded his essay of 1880:

By pointing out the qualities found in the crudeness of the Aegina figures Pater was acknowledging them on an equal footing with the relatively recent appreciation of Chaucer’s verse, thus taking canonical sculpture and literature one step further back than the classical period and the Renaissance. In the ‘English Literature’ lecture, Chaucer’s monolithic unity was compared to the great Gothic cathedrals: ‘he stands complete, of one piece, like one of the just finished ^contemporary^ Gothic cathedrals, in wh. the creatures of an alien sp/t figure only as gargoyles, caricatures, just permitted as exceptions’.²⁴ When in 1888 Pater’s sixteenth-century Gaston glanced at the pilgrims outside the cathedral at Chartres, this is what he found:

The allusion to Chaucer’s pilgrims in a narrative set during the French religious wars marks him out as part of the old-world order in a modern world undergoing rapid change. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, Gaston’s ‘motley host’ came from ‘every shires ende’,²⁵ from all walks of life; the Canterbury Tales might well be regarded as a series of character studies or imaginary portraits. Not only was Chaucer the father of English literature, but he was also the father of the genre which Pater himself would develop as a hybrid form between fiction and criticism in his search for the individual behind the type, the ordinary man or woman rather than the unique genius.

The full extent of Pater’s lecture on English literature will probably never be known, unless a more finished manuscript or a printed text surfaces one day. From the outline in the Houghton manuscript we can see that he also intended sections on Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hobbes; indeed, the fragments on Hobbes in the same collection may well be part of the English literature manuscript.²⁶ Pater’s interest in the study of English literature in the mid-1870s probably sprang from his essay on Wordsworth (1874) and the early essays on Shakespeare (‘A Fragment on Measure for Measure’ (1874) and ‘On Love’s Labours Lost’ (1878)), at a time when he also stood for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry (1877) and began the writing of his first imaginary portraits. The literary ambitions which made him put his name forward for the post, recently occupied by Matthew Arnold (1857–67) and Francis Hastings Doyle (1867–77), suggest that he did not see himself solely as a classicist with an added interest in the visual arts. What made him abandon the piece on English literature, we do not know, nor what made him return to it with renewed interest in Chaucer. Pointing out the Greek aspects of Chaucer, Pater made him a missing link between a classical Continental tradition and an emerging national school of English literature, thus stressing the ‘organic unity’ which he pointed out in his contribution to the Pall Mall Gazette.²⁷

In the mid-1880s, as he returned to his reading of Taine and Lingard, he plotted an ambitious trilogy of novels. Marius the Epicurean, described by himself as an imaginary portrait,²⁸ had appeared to great acclaim early in 1885; by January 1886 he was writing to an American admirer that

The second novel became the unfinished Gaston de Latour, serialised in Macmillan’s Magazine in the autumn of 1888 and published as a fragmentary novel posthumously in volume form in 1896, edited by Pater’s friend and literary executor Charles Lancelot Shadwell. As for the third of Pater’s projected long imaginary portraits, the ‘Thistle’ manuscript may provide us with a brief outline of the intended historical setting and a few lines about the central character, enigmatically named ‘Thistle’. We are left guessing why Pater selected this upright, spiky, solitary, but colourful, flower, emblem of Scotland and Lorraine, as the name for his protagonist. ‘Thistle’ is an unusual choice – less poetically evocative than Florian Deleal – for a young sensitive man given to a fondness for things medieval. Notice how Pater, in his notes to himself, embeds his character in a literary ambience, internationally and nationally, before he zooms in on some of the personal characteristics of his protagonist ‘after what may be called the psychological method’:

Peering over Pater’s shoulder in the early stages of the creative process allows us to observe the ways in which he thought of periods with clear reference to major moments, movements, and figures in European philosophy and literature. Probably only relatively few of the French, German, or English writers and philosophers would have figured explicitly in his imaginary portrait of a young man, who, coming after centuries of divisions between culture and religion, would become an anticipation of Newman. An imaginary Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, or, indeed, Newman might have been intended as the counterpart to the walk-on parts of Lucian, Marcus Aurelius, Ronsard, and Montaigne in the two previous novels. We can only regret that Pater did not live to create such fictional counterparts to the writers on whom he had written critical essays. Pater’s vision of the healing powers of Romantic literature in the long nineteenth century, with Newman as a central figure (Newman having himself, in his article ‘The state of religious parties’ (1839), argued for the inclusion of the Oxford Movement as part of Romanticism), paved a way for a return to the unity of Chaucer’s time. His Thistle is a neo-medieval seeker, fascinated by the quest for the Holy Grail, harking back to the Christian European myths of Anglo-French Romance. In many ways Pater’s initial outline for his third novel supplements the evolutionary sketch of English literature from his fragmentary lecture with a view of the nineteenth century as a new period of reconstruction and reconciliation, not unlike the Renaissance reconciliation of paganism and Christianity.

The thistle as an emblem of Pater’s own era emerges as one potential reading of another of his notes to himself in the ‘Thistle’ manuscript, in which he speaks of its ‘perfect flower’, of ‘the permanent tendency, strength, truth of the 19^th c.’³¹ Interesting words from the man who previously had argued for the need to ‘grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment’, while ‘all melts under our feet’ (Ren., 189). If anything, the thistle is long-lived, strong and forthright in its physical appearance, a hardy plant, and a powerful symbol, combining beauty and strength in its own peculiar way. The spiritual awakening experienced by Pater’s protagonist points towards Newman’s emphasis on soul and imagination in both education and religious experience, an issue further explored in ‘Style’ (1888), as discussed in Chapter 6. It might well be argued that Newman is a constant presence in Pater’s note, with links to the Houghton manuscripts ‘Art and religion’ and ‘The Writings of Cardinal Newman’,³² pointing towards the celebration of the perfection of Newman’s style and his Idea of a University (1873) in ‘Style’ (App., 18):

What Pater’s own idea of a university might have been is left to speculation. Solitary and shared reading and conversations with senior writers form the most important components of the education of his protagonists, in the long as well as the short imaginary portraits. His English poet is rounded by a formative reading of English literature, a childhood in Cumberland, and the imprint on his soul of a romantic landscape and the ghost of Wordsworth. A catalogue comprising Hawthorne, Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold, Coleridge, Clare, and Browning is expanded with Browne, Webster, Chapman, and Shakespeare, giving us a sense of a canonical education in which verses are linked with European topography, from Valhalla and the Alps to the Roman Campagna and the coast of France. Just as Pater had been concerned with the growth of Florian’s aesthetic awareness, so, in ‘An English Poet’, he was keen to trace the origins of the poetic spirit and the interplay between reading, perceiving, and creating. Pater’s own literary beginnings as a poet may run as an autobiografictional undercurrent; he had tried his hand at poetry before turning to prose in the 1860s.³⁴ Pater marks out the awakening of the poet’s imaginative and critical faculties, together with a sense of literary topography which connects books with places. His protagonist’s Englishness resides in a merging of ancestry and the notion of ‘mother tongue’ which gives him an affinity with the English language, despite his Anglo-French origin, born of an English mother and a French father in Normandy:

The text has fourteen occurrences of ‘English’, several of which cluster in the passages above. Pater invited the reader’s contemplation of the interrelationship between language and literature as something arising out of an interplay between landscape, spirit of place, and national character. Keen to tie his English poet to the European Continent, not merely by means of his gene pool, Pater singled out the French red honeysuckle blossoming in Cumberland (a counterpart to Florian’s red hawthorn) as the fragrant flower which triggered the poet’s imagination, in curious conjunction with a flowery metal screen wrought in Germany. The flower, even of English literature, has European roots and tendrils, we must infer. When in the last pages of the unfinished narrative the poet returns to Normandy and experiences a personal and poetic awakening, North is replaced with South and the poet’s aesthetic sense aroused, undoubtedly with the intention of setting his Englishness into relief by a European experience. We shall presumably never know what conclusion Pater intended for his fragmented narrative, or whether he ever wrote one.

‘An English Poet’ is in every respect a romantic text. Not only does it deal with the coming into being of a young orphaned poet, whom tuberculosis has singled out as its victim; it also deals with the impact of nature and literature on the individual. It is an important foundational text, elucidating Pater’s experiment with fiction as criticism in dialogue with Sainte-Beuve and his English admirer Matthew Arnold within the genre of the literary portrait. Arnold, one of the chief promoters of Sainte-Beuve to an English audience, had visited and corresponded with him, and written extensively about him.³⁷ Sainte-Beuve frequently traced the poets’ family origins, together with their education. Interested in the first signs of poetic talent, in the moment when genius came into its own, he observed: ‘If you understand the poet at this critical moment, if you unravel the node to which everything will be connected from that moment on, if you find what you might call the key to this mysterious link made half of iron and half of diamonds joining his second, radiant, dazzling, and solemn existence to his first, obscure, repressed, and solitary one (the memory of which he would more than once like to swallow up), then one could say of you that you thoroughly possess and know your poet.’³⁸ Pater’s concern with the English poet’s family, upbringing, and education gives us the very same focus. The images of iron and stone recall Pater’s evocation of the way the poet works with language and matches form to matter. Our narrator has the longer view; he knows the young man will turn into a poet before we see it happening in the narrative in a way similar to Sainte-Beuve’s well-informed critic.

Pater may have intended his English poet as a counterpart to Sainte-Beuve’s Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829), an early study of a fragile medical student and poet who dies an early death (whether of tuberculosis or of a weak heart remains uncertain) and leaves his poems (also written by Sainte-Beuve) to posterity. The text appeared anonymously, as an edited heterogeneous text, comprising prose and poetry, explanatory narrative, and extracts from the young man’s journal, followed by some of his verses. The life explains the poetry, just as the poetry explains the life in a circular movement. From the first we know that we will be witnessing the confessions of a romantic young man: ‘The friend whose works we now publish was torn from us very young, some five months ago. A few hours before dying, he left into our care a journal into which are confined the main circumstances of his life and some pieces of poetry which are nearly all devoted to the expression of his personal grief.’³⁹ Arnold, in his essay on Sainte-Beuve written for the Encyclopedia Britannica (1886), described Joseph Delorme as ‘not the Werther of romance, but a Werther in the shape of a Jacobin and medical student, the only Werther whom Sainte-Beuve by his own practical experience really knew’. He drew the reader’s attention to Sainte-Beuve’s English background: his mother was half-English, and he was brought up in Boulogne-sur-mer in a geographical location similar to that of Pater’s English poet. Arnold quoted Sainte-Beuve’s admiration for English poetry: praising the English for having ‘a poetical literature far superior to ours, and, above all, sounder, more full’, with Wordsworth as a supreme example of a great untranslatable modern poet, Sainte-Beuve advised his friend to go to the fountainhead for poetry and learn English.⁴⁰ Sainte-Beuve’s awareness of the interdependence between language and literature, of language as that which gives poetry its national specificity, reminds us of Pater’s English poet: rhythm and rhyme reside in language, and with Sainte-Beuve’s allusion to Wordsworth, and to the interrelationship between landscape, language, and demotic verse,⁴¹ Pater’s English poet becomes solidly rooted in a contemporary Anglo-French context. His unfinished portrait engaged with the English poet who for most of his life grappled with the growth of the poetic mind, with the leading French critic and experimenter with the literary portrait – a man who like Pater himself had turned from poetry to critical prose – and with the Oxford Professor of Poetry, who mastered both poetry and prose, and served as a go-between of the English and French literary worlds. With such an ambitious merging of Bildung, criticism, and life-writing with the poetry of place, it is perhaps little wonder that Pater never finished the manuscript sufficiently to publish it.

The allusions to the visual arts in Sainte-Beuve’s portraits indicate a degree of self-awareness, as his criticism hovers teasingly between the objective and the subjective. His elaborate narrative frames serve to alert us to the fact that the portrait is self-consciously poised halfway between two worlds. In choosing the term ‘portrait’ and by employing many of the Sainte-Beuveian devices, Pater acknowledged his indebtedness to the French writer and his merging of criticism and life-writing with a touch of fiction and self-reflection. Sainte-Beuve often let his subjects speak, allowing their own texts to form the core of his portraits. The function of the critic becomes partly a framing device, introducing the subject’s own words by means of a biographical narrative, sometimes preceded by the critic’s own meta-reflective thoughts on his task. In ‘An English Poet’, the life is foregrounded at the expense of the works, as is often the case with biographies of poets, even in so-called literary biographies.⁴² Pater’s English poet has been silenced; the omniscient narrator may give us access to his thoughts and sensations through descriptive passages which sometimes blend the poet’s experiences with those of the narrator himself by means of pronouns such as ‘one’ and ‘you’. The poet’s direct voice is never heard. One might well argue that, with his long lyrical landscape descriptions and his chronicling of the poet’s mother’s sentiments and her son’s inner growth, Pater’s narrator is far more poetic than his poet. The poetic tendrils that we never see fully explored in the poet’s own verses unfold themselves beautifully in the framing device in which the voice of a sensitive and perceptive persona draws our attention to the attractive Anglo-French subject.

Pater’s view of Romanticism as the most important artistic and literary movement of the nineteenth century, paving the way for a return to a new European cultural revival, may well have served to challenge too narrow ideas of patriotism. The essays which frame Appreciations – ‘Style’ (1888) and ‘Romanticism’ (1876) – are Anglo-French and essentially European in their approach, alerting our attention to the international context in which the English writers who constitute the core of his book lived, thought, and worked. Pater’s accentuated use of the adjective ‘English’ inevitably makes us question the peculiarity of the national as opposed to the international: what made the poet English was the language in which he worked rather than a narrowly patriotic approach to literature. The ‘“fine flower” of English poetry, or Latin oratory, or Greek art’ needed an international environment in order to reach its finest bloom. Pater’s characteristically cautious contribution to the Pall Mall Gazette debate may have surprised the editor but was fully consistent with the major argument which would structure his Appreciations some three years later.