Walter Pater’s answer to the Pall Mall Gazette’s question about a School of English at Oxford confirms the primacy of his affiliation to Classics, as well as his sense of its civilisational priority.¹ But equally that response need not imply indifference to the fortunes of literature in English, nor to its critical import as a focus for ‘study’. On the contrary, Pater presents the literatures of ancient civilisation as a beneficent well-spring, a resource ‘effective for the maintenance of what is excellent in our own’. This sense of a radiant, rather than exclusive, good justifies a turn towards a less familiar Pater: a vernacular version of the great critic who lives alongside the Classics don mindful of how the old literary languages could achieve ‘infusion’ with the new. While this rules out thinking of Pater as an architect of modern subject categories – invested, as they tend to be, in distinguishing English literature from other modern literatures – there remains scope for considering him in relation to what English would become, and in particular to its status as a repository of disciplinary thinking. My focus in this respect is his unsigned review of ‘Poems by William Morris’.² Published in the Westminster Review as far back as 1868, it more often receives attention as a quarry of passages destined for better-known titles. Considered in its own right, however, it offers one of the most concerted, and revealingly counterfactual, accounts of critical method in Pater’s canon of works.

What might we understand by ‘disciplinary thinking’? While the words ‘subject’ and ‘discipline’ are often used interchangeably, the distinction between them has a crucial bearing on this discussion. Literary subjects may differ in their linguistic content but share much of the same disciplinary apparatus; equally, they may coincide in content while differing in discipline, or differ with respect both to content and discipline. Anecdotal reflection is not out of place here because it reveals the staggered, experiential path that disciplinary understanding travels. The last two scenarios dawned on me as an undergraduate when I moved from studying English at a British university to taking courses in French literature at a Belgian university, and also in taking courses there in English literature. Even where the literary content was the same, the methods of commentary, and the judgements at stake, could be radically different. And while the basis for these differences is often a matter of national intellectual tradition, it is not exclusively so, as revealed by the different textual approaches taken in the same university by departments, say, of English, French, History, and Theology. This is one reason why the ‘efficiencies’ delivered when university literature departments merge can be so brutal. Even when separate subject streams are maintained, the result can be annihilation of the disciplines subtly imbricated with them. At stake, then, is not the general understanding of ‘discipline’ as derived from the Latin disciplīna, or ‘branch of study’ (OED). Rather, I am concerned with the rules and laws that become associated with an area. Put differently, this is the regime that transforms a mere pupil (discipulus) into a disciple: one, that is, who upholds an intellectual ‘order’ as derived from the originally monastic form of Western educational norms.

Of course the ‘discipline’ associated with individual subjects is rarely stable, and in the case of ‘English’ notably contested. Only I am thinking here less of changing critical fashions – which may aspire to revolutionise critical methods – than of assumptions and methods embedded more deeply. This distinction is often missed. As Helen Thaventhiran observes, we tend to approach ‘critical history as a pattern of ideas and influences rather than as a … set of practices’.³ Typically, such practices are reproduced institutionally, and expressed across generations, ensuring that new approaches are often more modified by the classroom than modifying. Another way of conceiving this effect arises from Carolyn Levine’s commentary on the studied repetitions of institutional life, and the ‘path dependency’ – or prohibitive cost of change – that reflects and reinforces them.⁴ Because English is a relatively young subject, it is still possible to identify this disciplinary subconscious with its roots. These are apparent in the Victorian historicism of a subject whose independent status remained uncertain, and then in the philological and ‘practical’ curricula pioneered at Oxford and Cambridge respectively in the early twentieth century.⁵ The success in particular of the Cambridge School – and of the American New Criticism – in establishing English as reputable, independent, and no longer confined to ‘extension’ teaching, is a familiar story. By attending to ‘the words on the page’, the ‘practical’ method evolved a set of core skills and interpretative priorities that countered Frederic W.H. Myers’s foundational concern about the subject’s uncertain ‘difficulty’, and guided teaching in secondary schools for generations.⁶

Not accidentally, the interpretative toolkit that English inherited was adapted to parsing modernist literary forms. As many critics note, this circumstance exercised a crucial influence on canon formation.⁷ A discipline emerged that knew how to talk about verbal concision and compression, about formal integrity, about writing (as opposed to orality), and about austerity (whether linguistic, religious, or political). And it outlined the forms of apprenticeship that authors required to achieve these qualities. When I first encountered Pater as an undergraduate in the 1990s, my critical faculties were still channelled through these precepts, honed as they had been by my Cambridge-trained A-Level teacher. Reading Pater entailed a related sense that he was an accidental Victorian, precisely because he wrote in ways one knew how to explain. His prose seemed not so far removed from the cerebral impressionism of Virginia Woolf, or the early modern preferences of T. S. Eliot. A more historically situated ‘Victorian Pater’ had long since been established in the specialist literature. But my point is that this state of ‘research’ – a scientistic principle domesticated only slowly by the liberal arts – tells us surprisingly little about the practical persistence of disciplines.

Of course there are several reasons for resisting this view of Pater as a precedent for modernist critical orthodoxies. Like the Woolfian impressionism he inspires, his approach feeds more obviously into the poet’s essay – a learned, but not academic, genre revived by the likes of Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and Denise Riley – than into the hygienic precincts of academic English.⁸ Equally, the fundamental aspects of Pater’s convergence of fact and fiction are derived from a range of European progenitors – from authors such as Sainte-Beuve, Lamb, Carlyle, and Ruskin – in a way that confounds the idea of a late Victorian critical ‘big bang’. Rather than seeing Pater as a precursor to the impressionistic strand in Modernism, or indeed the ‘modernist paradigm’ as explored by Francis McGrath, this chapter proposes an alternative way of understanding Pater’s freshness.⁹ More particularly, it strikes me that Pater’s version of English is less anticipatory than counterfactual, and that its unrealised lineaments might be reconstructed. This possibility is appreciated more readily if, instead of tracing the afterlife of Pater’s prose style, we attend to his status as a disciplinary thinker, and to the origins of his own critical discipline. The essay on ‘Style’ has a great deal to say about discipline in the straining Flaubertian sense (App., 26) – a sense that seems indirectly to channel Carlylean versions of literature as strife and struggle. Pater’s most notorious statement of critical procedure, as set out in his ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance (1873), is not exempt from this unification of stylistic discretion with values. It, too, invites us to think forward to Bloomsbury, and if not that, then from the ‘hard, gem-like flame’ (Ren., 189) to Poundian imagism and lapidary poetry.¹⁰ Certainly, the work’s broader neoclassicism rejects Gothicist Victoriana in favour of lighter habiliments.

But here we must reconfigure our sense both of origins and of destination. Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ saw its first incarnation as the closing phase of his Morris review. The early part experienced a different second life: in its case, as the essay on ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ in the first edition of Appreciations (1889).¹¹ Indeed, the bare fact that Pater’s most notorious critical statement derives from a reading of modern poetry suggests a view of English literary criticism as generative rather than secondary. Through its subsequent, partial republication, it also represents an unusual instance of a press notice – originally sandwiched between articles on ‘Landed Tenure in the Highlands’ and ‘Reform of Our Civil Procedure’ – attaining the status and primacy of an artwork. Equally pertinent is the author in question. While Pater’s connection to Morris is not much discussed outside Morris studies, its disciplinary import seems not to have been considered at all. The review addresses Morris’s early – and until then neglected – collection of Arthurian and Froissartian lyrics, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), alongside two more recent narrative poems: The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).¹² All three apply the referred dreamwork of late Pre-Raphaelitism to familiar mythic subject matter. But while the first work is determinedly Gothic, the last two develop a kind of mythic cosmopolitanism. The Earthly Paradise, most notably, unfolds a story cycle whose frame narrative recalls that of The Canterbury Tales (c.1345–1400) and The Decameron (c.1348–53), and as such facilitates a mixing of Greek, Norse, and Persian legend. Such mixing posits the artful as the artificial: an anticipation of aestheticist ideology according to which roots and realities weaken, and ‘the forms of things are transfigured’ (300). While the combinations are pleasing, things are not found in their usual places.

Pater alters not just the location and use of his review, but redeploys its limited scope to serve a creative art history ranging from the late Middle Ages right up to Winckelmann’s eighteenth-century classicism. That move alone assumes considerable flexibility of purpose, a kind of contextual amplitude. As a critical manoeuvre, however, it is not isolated or accidental: rather, it reflects the breadth of analysis implicit in Pater’s biographical imagination, a method of thinking through texts that not only reimagines them through recycled uses – as the history of the review itself reveals – but addresses wide, unanticipated fields from an initially narrowed point. As Denis Donoghue puts it, ‘Such thinking as Pater did, he did by commenting on the work of other writers’.¹³ The whiff of condescension in ‘such thinking’ should not distract from the more interesting point that Pater’s critical thinking is also a sympathetic thinking, which is as interested in creating a chain as manifesting a source. The effect, crucially, is not to downgrade his thought but to uplift the status of criticism, so as to spurn the idea of a parasitical or secondary endeavour in favour of a co-creative impulse. As with its heterodox equivalent in theology – which understands artistic creation less as praise or prayer than as occupying a continuum with divine creation – there is a danger of profaning the original word, of overlaying rather than reading.¹⁴ Even when that applies, though, an inviting space opens for interpretative work that is not simply exegetical.

Pater’s appreciation of these poems also implies specific critical values. On first publication, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems was attacked either for being evasive of modern life, or an inauthentic rendering of the medieval past; by contrast, it now stands alongside Sigurd the Volsung (1876) as the most admired of Morris’s poetical works, largely on account of its Browningesque concision.¹⁵ By contrast, The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise were popular in their time, as well as admired by, among others, George Eliot and Henry James.¹⁶ They have been found unpalatably prolix by modern readers – despite scholarly attempts to rehabilitate them dating back to the 1970s.¹⁷ Pater registers the differences between these works, but presents them as a single achievement unrelated to the virtues or the faults detected by later generations. Moreover, he dwells on characteristics that are not just stylistic but suggestive of how we might account for the shape and value of literature as critics. In short, they elaborate a counterfactual formalism – one that points beyond a familiar association of form with fixed or tangible shape, and imagines a poetry whose qualities are keenly felt yet curiously amorphous. If Pater is the inadvertent founder of a subject of which he disapproved – that is, of a vernacular competitor to Classics – he is also the founder of a parallel discipline, a version of English whose tenets were never enacted. The evaluative criteria and methodology of Pater’s review are both germane in this regard: what he values in Morris envisions what he values in literature more generally. Whereas modernist form typically privileges classical aesthetics, clean shapes, and marked boundaries, Pater’s review discloses four alternative formal values.

The most prominent of these is fluidity: a quality that Pater detects and describes before recuperating it as an artistic principle applicable elsewhere. Betokening an aversion to walls and other fixed points, it prepares the ground for the account of ‘flux’ and perceptualism elaborated in The Renaissance. Though not formlessness exactly, it removes Pater’s aesthetics from Poundian values of concretion, or ‘boundary stones’.¹⁸ Indeed, he reads ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ as a commentary on sealed ‘outlets’ that beget the ‘tension of nerve’ and ‘convulsed sensuousness’ of medieval poetry (303). But Pater is more precisely concerned with a related set of analogies with water, often expressed through a preference for immersive experience. Morris’s later poems are seen as expressing a Golden Age innocence whose ongoing ‘impression of surprise’ recalls ‘the touch of water as one swims’ (306). Far from being a complete resignation to flow, or a dissolution, the experience is intimate, indeed imputed to the agency of ‘touch’. Escape from the self-confining ego dawns in a suggestion that physical selves – ‘[o]ur physical life’ (310) – might operate across a broader spectrum than the mind knows. We are invited to consider the ‘delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat’ (310), in whose moment one learns that ‘those elements, phosphorus and lime, and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone’, but extend ‘beyond us’ (310). The bodily imagination of the review thus understands contact with water as a point of interface, an opportunity to connect with a world of related chemical traces. Pater is sensitised, likewise, to physical and architectural symbols of this interrelation, quoting as he does Morris’s lines in which Medea ‘came down to a gilded watergate, / Which with a golden key she opened straight, / And swiftly stept into a little boat’ (308). Medea moves between elements in this way, migrating through a portal – the watergate – that symbolises the kinds of passage that Pater’s prose strives to enact.

The aestheticist watchword ‘exquisite’ recurs here (307, 308, 309, 310, 311), its mobility along the pain–pleasure axis activated by related permeabilities. As the rush of the ‘whirlpool’ (310) and the ‘race of the midstream’ (310) intensify, we approach the perceptual flow better known to readers of The Renaissance, and relatedly the Heraclitan ‘PANTA RHEI’ (‘everything flows’) that animates Marius the Epicurean (1885). Crucially, though, Pater’s attention to water also offers a way of thinking about qualities of story. Claiming that ‘in perfect story-telling like this the manner rises and falls with the story itself’ (309), he imputes a natural swell that turns the painterly category of ‘manner’ into a buoy inseparable from the height of the flood. In the Paterian universe, stories are never far away from histories. In this case, a quotation from The Life and Death of Jason, concerning an encounter with the Sirens, heightens their watery interrelation. Medea invokes ‘lovely things once sung / Beside the sea, while yet the world was young’ (307), and Pater finishes the image: ‘Then literally like an echo from the Greek world, heard across so great a distance only as through some miraculous calm, subdued in colour and cadence, the ghosts of passionate song, come those matchless lyrics’ (307). Once again, his commentary assumes a primary quality, based in textual, generic, and historic permeability – and, more conspicuously, these qualities are staged syntactically by the collapse of a sonorous linguistic wave at the suspended verb, ‘come’.

From these fluid affinities, Pater moves to perverse affinities, between styles, forms, and times. In The Renaissance, he enlarges on the internal conflict between ‘Christian ascetism’ and its provocation ‘of the artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness’ (‘Winckelmann’, Ren., 177). The abrupt shifts and passionate interjections of The Defence of Guenevere help develop this idea of the unlikely pairing: here, Pater finds ‘the mood of the cloister taking a new direction’ (‘Poems by William Morris’, 302), so that ‘religion shades into sensuous love, and sensuous love into religion’ (301). It is not always clear whether this reading of the Middle Ages is an accessory to a reading of Morris, or whether Morris is an accessory to reading the Middle Ages; but a broader conception of the perverse affinity helps Pater knit together discrete textual bodies. The change of manner from Guenevere to Jason is ‘almost a revolt’ (305), he claims, but a revolt that discloses unsuspected links between opposites. In The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise, no such damming up applies. Instead, connections are intensified. And the affinities here are not perverse, but a marker of enlarged consciousness: an anti-purism expressed through Pater’s observation that ‘the choice life of the human spirit is always under mixed lights, and in mixed situations’ (307). The ‘mediævalisms’ of ‘a Greek poem’ – Morris’s Life and Death of Jason – become ‘delicate inconsistencies’ (308). As the review proceeds, such ‘mixed lights’ increasingly resemble an active literary-critical procedure, one that favours a set of alternative structuring mechanisms governing relations between different pasts and different texts. Though heavily invested in periodisation, Pater repeatedly licenses redemptive anachronism. The effect is to recast history as a formal property. By ‘an exquisite dexterity the two threads of sentiment’ – medievalism and Hellenism – ‘are here interwoven and contrasted’ (308). Historical character becomes sentiment, and sentiments are threaded with dexterous hands in a process at once amenable to splicing, and susceptible to cut and paste.

The idea that Morris might inspire this historical amplitude pulls against the way that critics commonly situate Pater. According to Jonathan Freedman, such ‘historical shuttling’ redefines the Renaissance ‘not as a historical phenomenon but rather as an ideal criterion of value, an abstract standard’.¹⁹ Certainly, periods become plastic in Pater’s hands. In medieval history and literature, he discovers transitions ‘of which what we call the Renaissance is only a supreme instance’ (305). Losing its singularity, it becomes a vivid example of something that can happen to all cultures. But Freedman also claims that ‘this move … explicitly prohibits the escape into nostalgic reverie that Ruskin and Morris’s critical methodology permitted’.²⁰ One might argue here with ‘nostalgic’. In his criticism, at least, Pater tends to resist fall narratives. But he agrees with Ruskin and Morris – and, indeed, T. S. Eliot – in seeing that ‘anything in the way of an actual revival must always be impossible’ (307). Morris’s opposition to restorative architecture, for instance – his understanding that buildings cannot be returned to an authentic moment – finds a point of origin in the kind of ‘shuttling’ between contexts enacted in The Earthly Paradise.²¹ This work imagines a haunting down the ages that influences Pater in the ‘real time’ of his review. Recognising this habit of transferred sensibility, Pater speaks of ‘the Hellenism of Chaucer’ (307); and he refers to Morris as ‘this Hellenist of the middle age’ (305).

Apart from redescribing historical periods as repeatable forms to be recycled and spliced, Pater’s interpretative methodology psychologises our relationship with the past. Rather as Freud describes Rome as an analogue for the unconscious, this model of culture posits a place where ‘everything past is preserved’.²² That realm is never wholly alien, Pater explains, because ‘The composite experience of all the ages is part of each one of us’ (307), and equally it is ‘not possible to repress a single phase of that humanity’ (307). Such psychologising leads to the next major structuring mechanism that Pater privileges over concrete form, that of dream. The emphasis here is less on sleep than on the cargo transferred when we move ‘from dreamlight to daylight’ (305). Equally, Pater notices the forms of connection and scene-making that dreams can model for the waking mind: ‘as in a dream the scene shifts’, he remarks on noting the Argus’s embarkation in The Life and Death of Jason, ‘and we go down … to the sea through a pageant of the fourteenth century in some French or Italian town’ (308). If ‘the strangest creations of sleep seem here’ (303), this strangeness is figured as a resource for art, indeed for human civilisation. These dreams are not excluded from the sphere of history – rather, the formal bounds of history and historicity are vastly expanded to accommodate them, so that ‘Reverie, illusion, delirium’ (302) figure less as mind-states than as lapses from medieval civilisation. Importantly, though, it is the structure of the dream, rather than analysis of its content, that preoccupies Pater. This sets in train an associative method of composition that reveals affinities in a ‘strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ (311). Pater takes dreams seriously, then: seriously enough to categorise and distinguish their types. But he does not present them as a content to be read diagnostically, whether in search of coherence or conflict (311). They escape that burden on account of their unconscious artistry, and their tendency to slip between the personal, the collective, and the mythic. Instead, we contemplate a psychologised version of that proto-Arts and Crafts Penelope whom Morris depicts ‘weaving a web within the hall’ that she ‘undid’ at night.²³

Pater’s last alternative structure relates back to fluidity, but is expressed in terms of the poem rather than bodily experience. This initially takes the form of an apology for the length of The Earthly Paradise. As if addressing the author’s self-doubt about spawning such ‘flabby’ poems, Pater makes a case for larger units of analysis, a stretching out that is not necessarily a harmful thinning:²⁴

This ‘lengthiness’ suggests something happening in space, as well as on the folded page: a poem whose sheer mass is hard to see around. But as the idea of atmosphere is introduced, the sense of an environment rather than an obstruction emerges. Pater mentions ‘desolate’ thoughts as if they were coagulating: ‘at times’, he writes, ‘all the bitterness of life seems concentrated in them’ (311). Here he commends a ‘mass’ or volume that rejects ‘austerity’ and ‘concentration’ as critical virtues. Pater’s confidence, here, depends on the notion that something dormant or inert can harbour unexpected rewards in large quantities. Speaking of the fourteenth book of The Life and Death of Jason, he remarks that ‘The power of an artist will sometimes remain inactive over us … till on a sudden we are found by one revealing example of it which makes all he did precious’ (306). Indeed, we are missing something if we mistake tranquillity for a lack of effect in large volumes. In this way, he musters the beginnings of an apology for literature administered in high degrees of dilution. ‘The water is not less medicinal’, he writes, ‘not less gifted with virtues, because a few drops of it are without effect; it is water to bathe and swim in’ (309). There are hints here of the culture of public bathing and spa visits. Pater and his sisters spent several summers by the sea at Sidmouth. Morris, for his part, took the waters at Bad Ems in Germany while he was completing The Earthly Paradise, a trip whose poetic import Dante Gabriel Rossetti lampooned in the form of ‘The M’s at Ems’, a sketch that shows Morris reading the Earthly Paradise to Jane Morris as she lies in the bath, severally drowning her sorrows.²⁵

More seriously, Pater reconfigures Morris’s poetic ‘mass’ – and the narcotic copiousness elsewhere imputed by Edward Burne-Jones²⁶ – as a homeopathic cure: a method, in other words, that recovers strength from the dynamisation of extreme dilution. Pater’s reading of German literature would have exposed him to the debates surrounding this controversial school of alternative medicine. Indeed, the ‘curative’ foot-stomping scene in Goethe’s Faust (1808) explicitly sends up the central claims of its founder, Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), that similia similibus currentur (‘like can cure like’, known as the Law of Similars).²⁷ It was in any case a familiar preoccupation of intellectual life in the late nineteenth century: while Oscar Wilde has his hero dress up neat poison as ‘homeopathic medicine’ in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1887), the broader concepts of dose and efficacy arise in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) (whose famous allusion to a ‘poisonous book’ could be reread as an aestheticist reclamation of toxicology along homeopathic lines) and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).²⁸ Closer to home, the Epps family – who were closely integrated into the social circle surrounding the Rossettis and Ford Madox Brown – were known for their advocacy of Hahnemann. As such, his name would have been familiar to Morris (and probably also to Pater) through personal channels as well.²⁹

Drawing on Paracelsus’s notion that ‘in all good things poison also resides’,³⁰ Hahnemann developed the related Law of the Minimum Dose, applicable to poisons that resemble or simulate the symptoms of a disease. This posits the counterintuitive principle that ‘curative power will be wonderfully increased in proportion to the reduction of the dose’.³¹ Pater’s figurative attraction to homeopathic methods has been noted only in passing by critics: Jay Fellows observes that ‘To be in a curative position and to be acting from it are not, with Pater, the same thing. Pater’s medicine would only be homeopathic’,³² while Matthew Beaumont compares his focus on the ‘instant itself’ to ‘some homeopathic solution’.³³ But the principle of dilution also applies to the critical and poetic values that inform Pater’s high valuation of Morris, and his suspicion of those poetic concentrations later upheld by modernist critics. Had Jacques Benveniste’s more recent conception of ‘water memory’ – according to which water recollects substances previously and undetectably dissolved in it – been a part of the original homeopathic regime, it too might present as a source for Pater’s proto-Jungian notion of ‘composite experience’. But Hahnemann’s equally outlandish notion of succussion, or shaking to activate ‘vital force’, does inflect Pater’s confidence in the principle of mixing, whether of time, cultures, or literature.³⁴ Equally, it recalls that broader aestheticist ‘agitation’ more usually understood as nervous or perceptual. Principles of miscellaneity, flood, and copiousness also resolve back into the immersive principle of the review, where the body is cathartically engulfed in recollection of the fashionable transfer of curative bathing from the eighteenth-century spa to the Victorian coast, and related treatises on medical hydrology.³⁵

The closing phase of this chapter addresses the meaning of these alternative structures at the level of English’s disciplinary fabric. Though inspired by Morris’s poetry, Pater’s review increasingly resists the contingency of that narrowed attention. By the time we reach the last section, on ‘modern thought’ (310), the connection is almost amusingly weak. Pater delights in a gratuitous movement from the particular to the general: he likewise observes of the Sirens episode in The Life and Death of Jason that it prompts the unnerving feeling that literary sources are immaterial – a suspicion strengthened by the ease with which the review’s philosophical conclusion becomes the conclusion to an altogether different work. But of course this vaunting sense of disproportion is part of the appeal, and perhaps a necessary evil which can be accepted in favour of greater gains. It is possible, of course, that the structuring mechanisms I have surveyed are a dead-end: that they are self-confining, in as much as they reflect the limits of a single personality, a single set of associations, a Paterian critical encounter. A ‘discipline’, as such, cannot rely on the vagaries of one personality. But it seems to me that more is at stake in Pater’s refusal to prioritise concision over copiousness, and shape over flow. These are not Victorian critical values. And while T. S. Eliot mounts an apology for Swinburne’s ‘diffuseness’ as ‘one of his glories’, such values are not readily assimilable to modernist aesthetics, hinting as they do at an English organised around radically different principles.³⁶ In this parallel universe, the dilution rendered by length is understood not as a threat to formal integrity or authorial control, but as a cathartic method, and a dispersed source of atmosphere. As Pater intimates in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, the means to expand consciousness are not supplied by limitation or refinement. This is not monitory reading – or reading as ‘scrutiny’ – but a ritual dunking that rejects the baptismal divide between new life and old. It is a full-blown immersion that makes everything present and available at once. One might think of Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) – only, here, the new work is not entering ‘an existing order’, but a constant wash of art, experience, fantasy, and dream.³⁷ At the opposite pole from harmful concentration, Pater glimpses ‘the image of one washed out beyond the bar in a sea at ebb, losing even his personality’ (311). Unlike the ‘mixed lights’ of Paterian physical communion, the threat here is of complete dissolution. And it is a threat that he actively resists. His critical method relies on identities, after all, on patterns of association. A discipline based on this might be regarded as an ‘anti-discipline’, in as much as it resists hygienic procedures, but it must retain enough integrity to ensure flow from one position to the next.

This paradoxically amorphous formalism can be parsed in ways that address the four pillars of modern literary criticism: namely, the work, the text, the author, and the reader. Where ‘the work’ is concerned, the link between concentration and significance – understood both as meaning and as artistic value – is broken. Indeed, the word ‘text’ may be more appropriate, albeit without the connotation of more modern ‘textualities’ where a boundless system of signs transgresses the arbitrary limits upheld by title pages. Pater, as we have seen, secures identities, but privileges signs of flow. Contrary to his modernist successors, he avoids analogies that present literature as a fixed shape in the world. Equally, an incipient Arts and Crafts materiality conditions a blended understanding of the work in relation to the text. Pater turns abstractions like history or dream into a physically worked substance, a material form in effect; meanwhile, the hard edges of literature dissolve into an immersive experience that values dilution over concentration, and prolixity over concision. As the names studded through The Renaissance indicate, ‘the author’ remains a meaningful entity in this vision, the proviso being that the work of life is also the work of art. It is not so much that all writing occupies a levelled plain of discourse, but that Paterian criticism undertakes enough biographical thinking to activate the perceptualism upon which his impressionism depends. Walt Whitman manages a similar balancing act in ‘Song of Myself’, where authorial and lyric voices meld in ways offensive to New Critical precepts: ‘To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow’, the speaker declares, secure that ‘My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite’.³⁸ Adding that ‘I laugh at what you call dissolution’, he implies that force of will maintains the distinction between solvent flow and self-annihilation.³⁹ This example acquires an ironic valence in the light of Havelock Ellis’s dismissive description (later recanted) of Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy (1st edn, 1883) as ‘Whitman and water’, which by implication imagines the great American poet not as submerged, but as ordinarily having dry feet.⁴⁰

The Paterian reader follows the author in resisting rigid historicisms and concentrations of focus, preferring to absorb matters even of periodicity into the ambit of manipulable form. A resolution to use the ‘interval’, to get ‘as many pulsations as possible into the given time’ (312), applies here too: it is, in some senses, a theory of reading based on mortal awareness, a version of The Arabian Nights predicament, where stories must be told (or read) to ward off the arrival of death in the morning. This is not reading as ‘research’ or edification, but an existential strategy, far removed from the ideas of scientificity that I. A. Richards instilled through readings unburdened by ‘presuppositions’ and ‘preconceptions’.⁴¹ If we are to sum up the fundamental tenet of Pater’s counterfactual disciple, we might just as well concentrate on the word ‘discipline’ itself. It hints at an approach to ‘English’ that relies not so much on a stated content – whether a canon based on value, language, or nation – than on a set of principles applicable across different literatures and different genres. Pater’s version of this – a kind of immersive habitus – assumes a flow between the work and the life, between criticism and authorship, between past states and present ones. The resulting interpretative amplitude flourishes in the ‘dreamlight’ of a fully solvent consciousness, underpinned by the strange affinity of his own Law of Similars.