The first part of this book looks at Pater’s contribution to English studies and literary criticism within a number of broader contexts. Kenneth Daley provides initial orientation for the reader. He compares Pater’s Appreciations with the writings of other critics in the period, stressing how the volume asserts the centrality of the ‘romantic’ tradition in English literature, and contributes influentially to late nineteenth-century literary historiography and the tradition of the English critical essay. Appreciations may not have enjoyed the succès de scandale of The Renaissance, but it was widely disseminated and admired, with six editions and thirteen other reprintings up to 1927.

Pater pioneered a new literary form which he called the ‘imaginary portrait’, a hybrid of fiction and essay, which had a considerable influence, first on Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee, and then on the Modernist generation, and which can be read as literary or artistic criticism in another mode. Lene Østermark-Johansen focusses on two such portraits with an English setting and on the nature of the ‘Englishness’ involved: the unfinished fragment ‘An English Poet’ written in the late 1870s but not published until 1931; and the short manuscript fragment for Pater’s proposed third novel entitled ‘Thistle’ (late 1880s). In their concern with Bildung, with the coming-into-being of the poet or aesthete, and the growth of the imagination, these exhibit Pater as a late-flourishing romantic, while also closely tracking Sainte-Beuve’s portraits littéraires, and so giving the stories a European dimension.

Pater devoted much of his career as a writer to the essay form (and its fictional equivalent, the imaginary portrait). Along with the dialogues of Plato, Montaigne’s Essais, which, perhaps surprisingly, Pater seems to have read, not in the original French, but in Charles Cotton’s elegant seventeenth-century translation, were always, for him, especially exemplary for the mode. In his view the essay suited ‘the relative spirit’ so characteristic of modernity: sceptical, informal, undogmatic, provisional (‘Que sais-je?’), committed to suspended judgement, multi-faceted, fluctuant and diverse, above all revealing of personality. Furthermore, in Gaston de Latour Pater brings Montaigne to life, introducing him, as Fergus McGhee argues, not only as a philosopher and self-inquirer, but as a ‘lover of style’, anticipating Harold Bloom’s characterisation of the Essays as a vast work of literary criticism.

In parallel with the establishment of English as an academic subject, Pater’s lifetime coincided with the institutionalisation of Modern Languages as an independent field of enquiry within British universities; in 1886 – the year of the Pall Mall Gazette survey on English at Oxford – H. M. Posnett’s Comparative Literature, the foundational document in English for comparative literary studies, was published. Stefano Evangelista shows how Pater’s writings on English literature, like those of Matthew Arnold, favoured cosmopolitan and comparative approaches that rejected the increasingly widespread Victorian practice of appropriating English literature for the promotion of a nationalist ideology. Evangelista pays particular attention to Pater’s late lecture (1890) on the French writer Prosper Mérimée, which he was invited to deliver as part of the Taylor Lectures alongside European figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Bourget, and which were later collected, after Pater’s death, in a volume entitled Studies in European Literature (1900).

To conclude Appreciations, Pater repurposed his essay of 1876 ‘Romanticism’ (a telling title for an essay that actually deals with the opposition between romanticism and classicism). The new title, ‘Postscript’, as Ross Wilson observes, reminds us that for Pater there is never, except contingently, a last word, and of his commitment to the provisional and to second thoughts, and a never-ending process of revision, refinement, and reformulation. Wilson explores the complexities in Pater’s account about aesthetic and historical categorisation, and about the way that periodisation can act as a straitjacket inhibiting proper understanding and appreciation; on this reading the essay becomes a key text for a crucial ongoing debate in literary study.

This first part concludes with two very different takes on Pater’s somewhat controversial essay ‘Style’, an essay that over the years has been both highly praised and roundly disparaged. Michael Hurley contrasts Pater’s views with those of three influential contemporaries, Arnold, Saintsbury, and Newman. He also insists that Pater’s version of art for art’s sake has been widely misunderstood by those who ignore his emphasis on ‘truth’; for this reason, he sees the eloquent final paragraph of ‘Style’ as entirely at one with Pater’s larger vision. Scarlett Baron, by contrast, finds here an inconsistent return to literary orthodoxy on Pater’s part, but she also highlights the way that other aspects of his style and aesthetics, which he explores in ‘Style’ through his reading of Flaubert, position him on the threshold of Modernism, and explain his influence on authors such as Joyce and Woolf. Pater’s practice of citation, which has aroused some criticism, can be seen more profitably as an anticipation of twentieth-century accounts of intertextuality from Joyce to Kristeva and the practice of ‘second-hand writing’ (to coin a phrase from Antoine Compagnon’s La seconde main).

The conscious apprehension of aesthetic value in nonfictional prose first emerged in English literature with Romantic prose writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey. Walter Pater represents the apogee of this critical development; he was the first to proclaim the prose essay the characteristic literary genre of his day, and to insist explicitly on its status as fine art, the province of the aesthetic critic. Despite the monumental achievements of the prose essay in Victorian literature, the great practitioners of the form made no significant claims for its aesthetic value. Even late in the century, nonfiction prose, like the novel, had not yet achieved fully respectable status, a function of its ubiquitous presence in the periodical press and popular culture, its cross-disciplinary purposes, and its connection with the occasional nature of the review, among other reasons. It was left to Pater not only to proclaim the essay a literary genre, but also to confirm its aesthetic possibilities. ‘And prose thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day’, Pater declares in ‘Style’, ‘will be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest experience—an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid’ (App., 11).² Pater refers to no fewer than seventy nonfiction prose writers in Appreciations, projecting a wide and deep command of the prose tradition, from ancient to modern, across disciplines and national boundaries. The groupings in the opening paragraph of ‘Style’, and of Appreciations as a whole, establish the range, yoking together prose writers from across time and space as representative of specific aesthetic qualities – Livy, the great ancient Roman historian, with Carlyle, the modern Scottish historian (the ‘picturesque’); Cicero, Livy’s older Roman contemporary and crucial figure in the development of Latin prose, with John Henry Newman (the ‘musical’); Plato with Jules Michelet, the French republican historian, and Sir Thomas Browne (the ‘mystical and intimate’). If the attribution of aesthetic effect is at times somewhat enigmatic (with Francis Bacon, for instance, prose is ‘found to be a coloured thing’), the point is in the emphatic discrimination of the aesthetic impression (App., 6).

Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (1889, 2nd edition revised 1890) represents a culmination, collecting all of the essays on English literary subjects Pater regularly published in roughly two-year intervals following Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), as well as significant portions of his first published essay, on Coleridge’s philosophical and religious thought (1866), and the early ‘Poems by William Morris’ (1868). Other than short reviews of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Edmund Gosse’s book of poems, On Viol and Flute (1890), the eclectic publications of the final years of his life do not include any further treatment of English literature.³ Despite covering more than two decades of criticism for a range of periodicals, the volume coheres both structurally and thematically. While the book does not offer a comprehensive treatment of literary history, in the manner, for example of Hippolyte Taine’s four-volume History of English Literature (1863–4), or, in the other direction, George Saintsbury’s Short History of French Literature (1882), it nevertheless represents a significant contribution to late nineteenth-century literary historiography, and, in particular, the delineation of the English literary essay tradition. In its organisation and treatment of subjects, Pater’s book asserts the centrality of romanticism in English literature, and develops a historical schema and characterisation of the English essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing historical narrative, most prominently articulated by Matthew Arnold, that regards eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the English achievement in that mode, the consummation of an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism and antique models. Against this narrative, Pater sets a modern, romantic tradition of English prose derived from Montaigne, and inaugurated by English writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy of English essayists, ‘of the true family of Montaigne’, as Pater suggests in the essay on Charles Lamb (116), epitomises the central romantic impulse of English literature, ‘that modern subjectivity’ (117) which Pater traces in Appreciations from Shakespeare to Morris and Rossetti. As I will show, Pater’s treatment of the English romantic literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critic-scholars such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, and associated with the rise of English studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.

By the time of Appreciations, English authors regularly issued compilations of previously published material. As early as 1859, John Stuart Mill introduced his two-volume collection of essays, Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, Reprinted Chiefly from the Edinburgh and Westminster Reviews, with the observation that the ‘republication in a more durable form, of papers originally contributed to periodicals, has grown into so common a practice as scarcely to need an apology’ (iii). Mill probably has in mind the self-effacing prefaces of Thomas Babington Macaulay (Critical and Historical Essays, 3 vols, 1843) or Francis Jeffrey (Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 4 vols, 1844), who, embracing the same humility topos, blames the republication of his work on the insistence of the Review’s publishers. In contrast, Thomas Carlyle’s four-volume Critical and Miscellaneous Essays appeared in 1838–9 without apology. Behind Carlyle, we have the example of William Hazlitt, and, in a different vein, Charles Lamb. Thomas De Quincey was not to publish his four-volume collection, Selections Grave and Gay: From Writings Published and Unpublished, until 1853–4, but by the second half of the century, as Mill’s note indicates, the practice became ubiquitous. ‘[A]lmost every author had one or more such collections’, according to Gertrude Himmelfarb.⁴ Major examples prior to Appreciations include Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888), Newman’s Historical Sketches (1872), Pater’s own Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and A. C. Swinburne’s Essays and Studies (1875). Between 1870 and 1881, T. H. Huxley published three separate collections. In the last decades of the century and into the next, the preternaturally prolific George Saintsbury published a new collection of essays seemingly every other year.

If Appreciations perhaps does not possess the cultural significance of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, nor that book’s sustained intensity, it nevertheless stands as a more intricately designed and unified collection of previously published essays than the majority of its Victorian counterparts. Central to Appreciations is Pater’s desire to assimilate the principles and achievements of the romantic tradition into the mainstream history of English literature, an effort shared by Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Swinburne, but never in such sustained and cohesive a fashion. Over the previous twenty plus years of his career, Pater had established his use of the term, ‘romantic’, given explicit definition in the essay ‘Romanticism’ (1876), as ‘an ever-present, an enduring principle in the artistic temperament’, discernible across historical time and national boundaries.⁵ Repurposed as the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations, the ‘Romanticism’ essay eventually exerted a profound influence on subsequent Anglo-American literary historiography and scholarship, affirming the classical-romantic distinction, in the words of George Whalley, as ‘both new and axiomatic for the polarity of all literature’,⁶ while also contributing substantially to the establishment of the term ‘Romantic’ to define and delineate English literature of the early nineteenth century.⁷ Most significantly, Pater is the first English writer to defend the concept of romanticism against its conservative Victorian critics. Pater’s Renaissance was an explicitly romantic movement, ranging from the medieval France of Abelard and Heloïse through sixteenth-century Italy into the eighteenth-century Germany of Winckelmann and Goethe. For Pater, Renaissance artists and art work are replete with the qualities he repeatedly associates with the romantic spirit: individualism, strangeness, curiosity, rebelliousness, antinomianism, sympathy. Appreciations extends Pater’s transhistorical and transnational treatment of the ‘romantic spirit’, tracing it throughout the history of English literature, in close relation to its manifestation in the modern French and German literary traditions.

The volume’s delineation of the English romantic tradition begins in medias res with the portraits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb; moves backwards in time through the ‘genuinely romantic’ (156) prose literature of the seventeenth century, exemplified by Sir Thomas Browne, and settles and centres in Shakespeare, the quintessential ‘humourist’, a term Pater uses throughout the volume to denote English counterparts to Montaigne. In the book’s final sequence, Pater leaps forward to his present day and the late romanticism of Morris and Rossetti, establishing the modern-day ‘aesthetic poetry’ as a highly self-conscious manifestation of the English romantic impetus, an ‘afterthought’ of the ‘romantic school’ (‘AP’, 214). The title of the essay, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (a revised version of the essay of 1868 on Morris), makes explicit the link between the work of the contemporary poets and Pater’s own ‘aesthetic criticism’, first defined in the ‘Preface’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

Two of the final three pieces that Pater composed, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ (1886) and ‘Style’ (1888), combine with the earlier essays on Coleridge (1866) and Lamb (1878) to bring the subject of prose to the forefront. In its defence of prose as the quintessential modern literary form, the opening ‘Style’ stands as a significant counterpoint to Arnold’s ‘The Study of Poetry’, with its defence of poetry’s high purpose and ‘destiny’ in the modern world, and which Arnold placed as the opening essay in his Essays in Criticism: Second Series, published only a year before Appreciations.⁸ Indeed, as a literary form, prose is given at least equal footing, in Pater’s volume, with poetry and Shakespeare’s plays. The first edition of Appreciations combines essays on prose (three), poetry (three), and drama (three), with ‘Coleridge’ standing as a hybrid text, a composite of Pater’s earlier essays on the philosopher-poet’s prose and poetry, and the concluding theoretical ‘Postscript’, too, focused primarily on prose texts. ‘Style’ represents, as well, a major contribution to the vibrant late-Victorian theoretical discourse on prose style, which includes, among essays published prior to Pater’s, John Dennis’s ‘Style in Literature’ (1885) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘On Style in Literature: Its Technical Elements’ (1885). Most directly, ‘Style’ responds in a number of significant ways to George Saintsbury’s ‘English Prose Style’ (1886), which served as the introduction to his anthology, Specimens of English Prose Style: From Malory to Macaulay (1886), and which Pater reviewed in The Guardian as part of his omnibus ‘Four Books for Students of English Literature’ (1886).⁹ With ‘Style’, together with the portraits of English prose writers, Appreciations stands as the most significant and most influential account of nonfictional prose as an art form of the Victorian age.

***

Pater’s opening manoeuvre in Appreciations to establish prose as a ‘fine art’ is to dismantle the conventional hierarchy between poetry and prose. Those ‘who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction … have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly…. Critical efforts to limit art a priori … are always liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production’ (‘Style’, 5–6). This position is consistent with the mainstream of romantic poetics and its opposition, for instance, to the extreme conventions and strict rules of eighteenth-century French neoclassicism. Pater has in mind Wordsworth’s famous attack, in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), on Thomas Gray’s alleged attempt ‘to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition’.¹⁰ Both Wordsworth and De Quincey are presented as romantic theorists advancing the far more vital distinction between ‘imaginative and unimaginative’ composition (7). Pater takes interpretive liberties with his implied characterisation of De Quincey’s categories, ‘literature of knowledge’ and ‘literature of power’, but deftly reworks them into his own terms: the achieved distinction between ‘literature of fact’ and the ‘literature of imaginative fact’ clears the ground for the discussion of prose style to follow, and establishes the artist’s representation of fact ‘as connected with soul, of a specific personality’ as the very condition of literary art, in poetry or prose (10).¹¹

As a representative neoclassical adversary, Pater singles out John Dryden, the great early Augustan, who ‘with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose’ (7). Yet, almost nowhere in Dryden does one find him taking up the distinction, let alone defending it. His only direct treatment is brief, from the ‘Preface’ to The State of Innocence (1674) and the discussion on ‘Poetique License’, the ‘speaking things in Verse which are beyond the severity of Prose’, characterised by tropes and figures, ‘both which are of a much larger extent, and more forcibly to be us’d in Verse than Prose’;¹² and from the ‘Preface’ to Fables: Ancient and Modern (1700): ‘Prose allows more Liberty of Thought, and the Expression is more easie, when unconfin’d by Numbers.’¹³ Pater is probably thinking too of the distinctions Dryden draws, in both the ‘Epistle Dedicatory of the Rival Ladies’ (1664) and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), between rhymed and blank verse, the ‘sound’, ‘sweetness’ and resulting ‘advantage’ of rhyme absent in blank verse, which he likens to prose.¹⁴ But Pater’s claim is vastly overstated. Remarkable too is the condescending tone with which Pater represents Dryden. The writer’s ‘protest’ against any ‘confusion’ between poetry and prose comes ‘with somewhat diminished effect from one whose poetry was so prosaic’ (7), Pater comments, if not derisively, at least with an irony less oblique than is customary:

There is not, perhaps, a more patronising moment in Pater’s oeuvre than the dig at Dryden’s ‘imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun’. Certainly, this unusual confrontation with Dryden, at the very opening of the volume, signifies the polemical nature of Pater’s treatment of the essay tradition in English literature. For his real adversaries are not the Augustan writers themselves, but rather critics of his own day, most prominently Matthew Arnold and George Saintsbury, who regard Dryden as the founder, and the eighteenth century as the standard, of distinguished modern English prose.

Pater’s familiar catholicity of taste seemingly does not extend to eighteenth-century English literature, an age, we might say, he regards as classical in tendency to a fault. In this, Pater’s attitudes are largely consistent with the predominant mid-Victorian literary-critical reception of the period, exemplified in the rhetoric of Carlyle and Arnold. Eighteenth-century writing, they claim, is deficient in lyric impulse, imagination, and sincerity, while it is excessive in reason, artifice, and wit – ‘that unreal and transitory mirth’, as Pater defines ‘wit’ in the essay on Charles Lamb, ‘which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot’, as opposed to the ‘humour’ characteristic of Lamb and predominant in the literature of the nineteenth century, ‘the laughter which blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity’ (105).¹⁵ From the early essay on Morris, Pater paints the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century as ‘outworn’ and ‘severed … from the genuine motives of ancient art’ (‘AP’, 214). In ‘Romanticism’, Pater deems Pope the representative poet of ‘too little curiosity’, ‘in common with the age of literature to which he belonged’: ‘there is always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as it is’ (‘Postscript’, App., 247). A later reference to Pope and Dryden, from Pater’s review of Arthur Symons’s Nights and Days (1889), borders on satire, impatient of the fetishised ‘correctness’ of style and ‘academical proprieties’ Pater consistently associates with Dryden (246), while acknowledging in a more positive, yet still attenuated fashion, Pope’s poetic achievement: ‘for a poet after Dryden, nothing was left but correctness, and thereupon the genius of Pope became correct, with a correctness which made him profoundly original’.¹⁶

Yet, although Pater contributes to the portrait of the age as colourless and correct, he rejects critics’ concomitant (and influential) characterisation of it as the great age of English prose. Instead, in Appreciations he constructs a powerful alternative narrative of the development of the English essay tradition. Again, the chief undercurrent is a reaction against Arnold.¹⁷ In ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1880), Arnold famously declares Dryden ‘the puissant and glorious founder’, and Pope ‘the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason’; ‘[t]hough they may write in verse … Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose’.¹⁸ With Dryden, Arnold proclaims, ‘at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would all gladly use if we only knew how’.¹⁹ As he had maintained in the ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’ (1864), Arnold believed that ‘the true prose is Attic prose’,²⁰ ‘prose of the centre’,²¹ index of ‘correctness’ (in information, judgment, taste), the realisation of an evolutionary ‘stage in culture’ beyond the ‘provincial’.²² Arnold employs the ancient Western (and hence orientalist) distinction in style between the Attic and Asiatic; ‘Asiatic prose’ in the English literary tradition, as exemplified in the Anglican sermons of Jeremy Taylor, Arnold deems ‘extravagant’, ‘barbarously rich and overloaded’, marred by the persistent ‘note of provinciality … the want of simplicity, the want of measure’.²³ In 1864, Arnold had not yet identified the eighteenth century as the golden age of a new English prose, but merely the period of ‘our provincial and second-rate literature’. By the time of the ‘Preface’ to his popular selected edition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1878), however, Arnold had come to regard the eighteenth century as ‘a period of literary and intellectual movement’ representing the ‘passage’ of the English nation ‘to a type of thought and expression modern, European, and which on the whole is ours at the present day, from a type antiquated, peculiar, and which is ours no longer’.²⁴ Arnold uses the ‘Preface’ to construct a literary-historical narrative in which the Restoration initiates a decisive break from the prose style of the past, marked by ‘length and involvement’,²⁵ in favour of a cleaner, more athletic prose, derived from French models, characterised by ‘qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance’,²⁶ and responsive to the conditions of modern life. The achievement in eighteenth-century prose Arnold regards as both resulting from and encouraging the period’s deficiency in ‘poetical instincts’ and ‘mistaken poetical practice’.²⁷ ‘The glory of English literature is in poetry, and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie’, Arnold intones, yet the age ‘accomplished for us an immense literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an instrument to that progress, and served it’.²⁸ With the ‘ten-syllable couplet’ as its ‘ruling form’, the ‘poetry of the century was a perpetual school of the qualities requisite for a good prose’,²⁹ Arnold explains, in a comment that prefigures Pater’s characterisation of the ‘prosaic’ quality of Dryden’s poetry. As Arnold more memorably articulates the matter, in ‘The Study of Poetry’, ‘it was impossible that a fit prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul’.³⁰

***

Appreciations appeared during the most volatile years in the campaign for the institutionalisation of English in British universities, led with maniacal energy and determination by the London Extension lecturer, John Churton Collins. From 1886 to 1891, the publication year of Collins’s manifesto, The Study of English Literature: A Plea for its Recognition and Organization at the Universities, the subject inspired something of a national conversation, both within and beyond the peculiar political dynamics of Oxford and Cambridge. In his only explicit contribution to the heated debates, the brief comment published in November 1886 as part of the series ‘English at the Universities’ in the Pall Mall Gazette, Pater provides a more reserved endorsement than the majority of respondents to Collins’s questionnaire, reflecting his position as Classics don at Oxford, as well as his relatively new status as a successful English novelist (Marius the Epicurean was published only one year earlier, in 1885). But Pater’s reticence was surely inspired too by the figure of Collins himself, a staunch critic of Pater’s own style and mode of subjective literary criticism. Only a year earlier, Collins had published in the Quarterly Review a long, scathing review of John Addington Symonds’s Shakspere’s [sic] Predecessors in the English Drama (1884),³¹ using the occasion to launch an attack on the Aesthetic Movement and aesthetic criticism (although Collins does not use the term). Collins anoints Swinburne the ‘leader and founder’³² of a ‘morbid’³³ school of literary criticism, characterised by arrogant displays of imagination and emotion, exaggerated eroticism, and unruly prose.³⁴ With Swinburne and his followers, Collins complains, style functions as means of obfuscation and index of affectation: ‘With them the art of expression is … the art of simulating originality and eloquence.’³⁵ Symonds’s work is ‘deformed with the offensive jargon’ and ‘metaphorical extravagance’ of ‘his master’ Swinburne (337).³⁶

Collins’s polemic closely resembles the rhetoric of W. J. Courthope and the conservative critics of the Quarterly from the previous decade. Members of this ‘minority tradition’ in Victorian criticism, conspicuous as well in periodicals such as Fraser’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, sought ‘to reassert a broadly Augustan conception of the nature and function of literature’, and to promote ‘a wider movement towards classicism in literature’.³⁷ They waged a sustained attack on the ‘modern romantic school’,³⁸which they regarded as promoting unhealthy tendencies in contemporary literature – excessive subjectivism, obscure subject matter, indefinite thought, and a perverse preoccupation with style. Yet the primary focus of their efforts was the state of contemporary English poetry as manifest, for example, in Browning, Rossetti, and especially Swinburne (all poets championed by Pater). Collins shifts the focus explicitly to prose and literary criticism:

Although Collins never mentions Pater by name, he is unavoidably associated with the substance and language of the attack; the thought and diction of the following passage reads almost like a parody of both the ‘Preface’ and ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, and anticipates, humourlessly, the wit of Wilde in ‘The Critic as Artist’:

Appreciations engages the contemporary arguments concerning English studies and the rehabilitation of eighteenth-century neoclassical literature. Both movements were characterised to a significant degree by anti-romantic sensibilities and a hostility towards the ‘impressionist’ criticism of Pater and the aesthetic fashions of the 1870s. By the 1880s, the ‘minority tradition’ in Victorian criticism had blossomed into a full-scale ‘Queen Anne’ revival.⁴¹ By 1880, Arnold had already observed that ‘the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favor again’.⁴² Scholarship focusing on eighteenth-century literature proliferates at the end of the century and into the next with books of literary history, biographies, editions, and articles in the periodical press. Almost half of the original English Men of Letters series, edited by John Morley, are of Augustan and neoclassical writers, beginning with Leslie Stephen’s Samuel Johnson (1878), and in general the largely conservative, so-called bookmen are partial to the period. Courthope, named Oxford Professor of English Poetry in 1895, was involved throughout the decade with a new, definitive edition of Alexander Pope, using the platform to excoriate contemporary literary values, and to resume his attacks on romantic individualism and nineteenth-century poetic language from the essays of the mid-1870s. Collins’s own collection, Essays and Studies (1895), which includes the Symonds review, focuses on the Augustans, including a long opening essay on Dryden (1878), as exemplars of literary and critical standards, and as ‘protest against the mischievous tendencies of the New School of Criticism, a school as inimical to good taste and good sense as it is to morals and decency’.⁴³

***

Saintsbury, appointed to the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh in 1895, is another of the eighteenth-century enthusiasts, contributing John Dryden (1881) for the English Men of Letters, and re-editing the text of Sir Walter Scott’s 18-volume edition of Dryden (1882). A more complex figure than either Collins or Courthope, Saintsbury was himself something of an impressionistic critic, and a consistent admirer of Pater, praising his writing as early as 1875, culminating in what remains one of the most sympathetic, discerning analyses of Pater’s prose style in A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912).⁴⁴ Yet Saintsbury clearly regards the developments of English prose in his own time as a momentous falling away from the standards of form and style achieved in the earlier century. ‘English Prose Style’ hews closely to Arnold’s historical narrative, with Dryden the chief representative of the Restoration reform of English prose, completed by the writers of the Queen Anne school – Swift, Addison, and Steele. Before ‘the period itself had ceased English prose as an instrument may be said to have been perfected’.⁴⁵ Beginning with the reign of George IV (1820), prose style becomes increasingly ‘disarranged’,⁴⁶ giving rise to a ‘literary antinomianism’,⁴⁷ characterised by a ‘laboured and ornate manner’⁴⁸ and a confusion of the ‘distinct aims’⁴⁹ of the prose writer and poet, ‘faults’ discernible in both ‘French naturalism and English aestheticism’.⁵⁰

Pater regarded Saintsbury’s essay as a provocation. Scholars have long recognised that the argument of Pater’s review of Saintsbury’s Specimens (1886) prefigures ‘Style’.⁵¹ Pater deems the prose style of Dryden and the eighteenth century as merely one stylistic possibility among many, generating a ‘specific and unique beauty’ (Essays, 5), following from its ‘strictly prosaic merit’ and ‘conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure primarily reasonable’ (6). The claim for neoclassical prose as manifestation of ‘true law’ (Arnold), the fulfilment of prose style’s ‘obvious requirements’ (Saintsbury), Pater regards as ‘savouring … of the arbitrary psychology of the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style’ (‘Style’, App., 8). In a footnote Pater added to the Appreciations version of ‘Style’, he describes Saintsbury’s anthology as tracing ‘the tradition of that severer beauty’ of English prose, ‘of which this admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover’ (12). Dryden is Saintsbury’s ‘favourite’, Pater writes in the Guardian review, the ‘first master of the sort of prose he prefers’ (Essays, 7, 4). Pater’s description of the period’s anti-idealist orientation, its absence of speculative and religious instincts, echoes Arnold’s characterisation of the imaginative limitations of the age, its ‘touch of frost’ and disregard of the ‘deeper powers of mind and soul’.⁵² The ‘reaction’ of Dryden and his followers ‘against the exuberance and irregularity’ of Elizabethan prose, Pater asserts, ‘was effective only because an age had come—the age of a negative, or agnostic philosophy—in which men’s minds must needs be limited to the superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift’ (Essays, 9). Arnold’s ‘age of prose’ yields, for Pater, nothing ‘fit’ nor ‘true’, but rather a style narrow, regulated, codified. The prose style of Richard Steele, whom Pater regards as the most personal and ‘impulsive’ (11) of the neoclassical school, a ‘pioneer of an everybody’s literature’ who nevertheless ‘had his subjectivities’ (10), ‘is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight’ (12).⁵³

Three months before the appearance of ‘Style’, Pater published his own most explicit definition of the essay, pronouncing the genre the ‘characteristic’ literary form of his day. Paradoxically, Pater conveys this important critical statement within the fourth chapter of the serialised, ultimately unfinished, novel Gaston de Latour, ‘Peach Blossom and Wine’ (published in Macmillan’s Magazine, September 1888), an example of his insistent crossing of generic boundaries, a central strategy of Marius and the Imaginary Portraits. The subject is Michel de Montaigne. Pater’s narrator deems the author of Les Essais the ‘inventor’ of the form: ‘the essay in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and venturous possibilities—is indicative of his peculiar function with regard to that age, as in truth the commencement of our own’.⁵⁴ For Montaigne, as for Pater,

In Pater’s view, the essay embodies the relativity of knowledge and individualism that constitute the defining features of the modern romantic spirit as he repeatedly describes it.⁵⁶

Thus, Appreciations inscribes a Montaignian tradition of the essay in English literary history, a literary-historical narrative derived in part from the work of the English Romantic prose writers, but unique in the Victorian criticism of English prose, and in deliberate opposition to the prevailing Arnoldian vision of the English essay and its development. Beginning with Sir Thomas Browne, who represents for Pater the early modern English reception and assimilation of Montaigne, Pater presents an English tradition of the essay as ‘self-portraiture’ (‘Charles Lamb’, App., 119), idiosyncratic and stylistically heterogeneous. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, that tradition is interrupted and ‘reformed’, bringing to fruition, what Pater calls in Browne, ‘the tradition of a classical clearness in English literature’ (125), one with its own early modern antecedents (Pater singles out Hugh Latimer and Sir Thomas More). With Charles Lamb and other prose writers of the Romantic period (Hazlitt, Hunt), the Montaignian tradition is revived, taking the shape of what has come to be known as the ‘romantic familiar essay’, a tradition carried on by Pater himself, whose critical work one might regard as a defamiliarisation of the familiar essay as practised by an earlier nineteenth-century generation of literary ‘men of taste’.

The magisterial opening paragraph of ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, an essay first published only three months after the Guardian review of Saintsbury’s anthology, deftly articulates the contours of the development of the English essay, as well as its relation to the traditions of France and Germany. Pater introduces Browne as a culmination of that early English prose before the advent of neoclassical correctness represented by Dryden and Locke. The development of English prose follows the pattern established in France. Montaigne, the founder of the essay as a literary form decidedly unprofessional, informal, even confidential, addressed to a ‘friendly reader’, is displaced by the classical ethos of the French Academy and ‘the school of Malherbe’, as Pater had called French neoclassicism in ‘Joachim du Bellay’ (Ren., 132). Dryden will lead the derivative classical reforms of the Augustan age, displacing the Montaignesque prose literature of early modern England. Like Montaigne, Pater insists, who gives his reader ‘so much … of the “subjective,” … of the singularities of personal character’, Browne affords the reader a picture of the vision within, ‘a matter … “bred”’ wholly, ‘“amongst the weeds and tares” of his own brain’ (125). Pater acknowledges the Arnoldian critique of the extravagance and persistent note of provinciality that characterises early modern English prose, its ‘unevenness … in thought and style’, ‘lack of design’, and ‘lack of authority’ (125). It is all ‘so oddly mixed’, Pater observes, demonstrating ‘how much he [Browne], and the sort of literature he represents, really stood in need of technique’ (126). But for such ‘faults’ (125), abundant ‘recompense’ (see, for a full discussion, Chapter 9). Sincerity, such a serious and important word in Pater’s lexicon, always signifying profound artistic achievement, is more easily and transparently expressed in an earlier intellectual culture, one yet to embrace correctness, technique, professional training: ‘in their absolute sincerity, not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves … but, even more than mere professionally instructed writers, they belong to, and reflect, the age they lived in’ (127).

I close with another crucial interlocutor for Pater’s Appreciations: W. J. Courthope, who gives his most concerted late-century critique of English romantic values in The Liberal Movement in English Literature (1885), a collection of essays previously published in the National Review. The book extends the mid-century Tory polemic, setting the ‘conservatism’ of the eighteenth century against the ‘Romantic movement’ of the nineteenth, and its liberal ethos, which he deplores. With Appreciations, the long-standing debate between Courthope and Pater takes the form of competing book-length treatments of English romanticism. Read next to each other, Pater’s antinomian vision of ethics and justice starkly counters Courthope’s assertion of ‘ancestral law’ as the defining virtue of conservatism and the eighteenth century.⁵⁷ It is in the concluding section of the essay on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that Pater expresses most powerfully that ‘idea of justice’, cultivated by aesthetic experience and the relative spirit, ‘beyond the limits of any acknowledged law’ (183). But it equally informs his treatment of Wordsworth’s poems as teaching the ‘art of … contemplation’ (62), ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’, a protest against the machine-like conception of means and ends in practical, argumentative discourse. Above all, it is the character of the essay and the essayist, Pater suggests, amid the increasing moral and intellectual complexities of the late nineteenth century, that is most capable of conveying ‘true justice’ as ‘in its essence a finer knowledge through love’ (183). Appreciations represents a major contribution to the centuries-long conversation about the ‘essay’ as genre, a mode characterised by its heterogeneity and empathetic imagination, sympathy conveyed through sensibility, and subjectivity embedded in style – all privileged Paterian terms aligned with ‘romanticism’ and the ‘romantic spirit’.

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.

‘A book, like a person’, suggests the narrator of Marius the Epicurean, ‘has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way’ (ME, i. 93, ch. 6). In the autumn of 1877, advertisements began to appear for a new English edition of Montaigne’s Essais.² Fresh from a tour of France, his mind still grazing on ‘stained glass, old tapestries, and new wildflowers’, Pater was thirty-eight years old – the very age at which ‘this quietly enthusiastic reader’, as he would later call Montaigne, withdrew from public office to begin a life of literary adventure in his book-jammed tower (Gast., 89, ch. 4; CW, iv. 83).³ Pater had reasons to feel similarly disposed. As the controversy kindled by The Renaissance in 1873 once again fanned into flame, it seemed to put a decisive end to his remaining Oxford ambitions. Renewed attacks in the press coincided with the publication in book form of W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic (successfully serialised the previous year), with its caricature of Pater as the whimsical and fleshly ‘Mr Rose’. In March, he withdrew from the race to become Oxford’s next Professor of Poetry, but the student press continued to give him a thrashing, and in May, Macmillan published the second edition of The Renaissance, stripped of its controversial ‘Conclusion’ at Pater’s own request.⁴ The nature of the attacks on Pater in this period bear a remarkable resemblance to the fraught reception of Montaigne’s Essays, arraigned down the centuries for their egotism, scepticism, and sensuality.

Patricia Clements has observed that, after The Renaissance, Pater’s work was largely ‘tailored as explanation and justification’; but rather than viewing this process as a bashful retreat from youthful indiscretion, it might better be understood as a witness to the tenacity of his convictions.⁵ Montaigne’s essays, I want to suggest, played a vital role in helping Pater to articulate a renewed defence of his critical enterprise. The character of this enterprise is adumbrated by Mallock in the suggestion that Mr Rose has but two interests: ‘self-indulgence and art’.⁶ Mr Rose, one might say, indulges himself in art and makes an art of self-indulgence. I propose to take this criticism seriously, as I believe Pater did, and to examine both halves of this far from ill-chosen term of abuse in connection with Pater’s portrayal of Montaigne. If Pater fashions Montaigne as an exemplary reader, he does so not in spite of, but because of his being – as William Hazlitt warmly described him – a ‘most magnanimous and undisguised egotist’.⁷

Pater borrowed the first volume of Charles Cotton’s seventeenth-century translation of the Essays from Brasenose College library in October 1877, and later acquired his own copy of the revamped version of Cotton published that November, edited by William Carew Hazlitt (grandson of the famous essayist).⁸ Hazlitt’s edition sought to take advantage of the French variorum edition published in Paris in 1854, gently pruning Cotton’s translation of redundancies and paraphrases, and restoring passages omitted by Cotton’s eighteenth-century editors on the grounds of delicacy.⁹ Though it may have lacked the exuberance of John Florio’s Elizabethan translation, Cotton’s version was rightly regarded as more accurate and scholarly, and still more so in the light of Hazlitt’s emendations. A landmark essay on Montaigne by Henry Crabb Robinson (1820), for example, praised Cotton for reproducing ‘the quaintness, liveliness, and simplicity, of the author’s style, with great felicity and effect’.¹⁰ As the century wore on, ‘Cotton’s Montaigne’ began to attain the status of a classic of English literature, hallowed by the love of Byron, Hazlitt, Emerson, and Arnold (Cotton was, after all, a vigorous poet in his own right).¹¹ This context may partly explain why Pater did not choose to read Montaigne in the original, uniquely among the French writers on whom he wrote. At least, there is no evidence he did so, and every one of Pater’s quotations from the Essays is drawn from Hazlitt’s Cotton.

Pater’s own three-volume copy of this edition now resides at Brasenose, and like his volume of Flaubert’s Trois Contes (also published in 1877), its margins bristle with ticks and scores in pencil.¹² Though none of Pater’s other extant books are marked in this way, Edmund Gosse makes tantalising mention of a ‘curiously marked copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin belonging to Pater’ in 1885.¹³ Moreover, the documented chains of provenance of the Montaigne and Flaubert volumes are substantially distinct, reducing the possibility that the annotations can be attributed to subsequent owners.¹⁴ It is tempting to speculate, therefore, that the markings are Pater’s own, but in the absence of further evidence this surmise remains impossible to prove. If such evidence were ever forthcoming, it would suggest just how much Montaigne meant to Pater; but we need no archival proof of that – it is written all through Pater’s later work.

To Eat of All the Trees

Indulge: ‘To give free course to one’s inclination or liking’, suggests the OED.¹⁵ In his review of The Renaissance, Sidney Colvin had worried that Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ would lead to ‘general indulgence’, and when the second edition appeared the admonitions grew still more excitable: ‘Pater-paganism’, it was warned, with its gospel of ‘promiscuous indulgence’, would unleash ‘the worst passions and most carnal inclinations of humanity’.¹⁶ The fear that Pater had provided an intellectual licence for unrestrained sensual gratification was central to criticism of his work through the 1870s. Pater was accused of leading young men ‘miserably astray’ by teaching them to abandon all ‘self-restraint’; of being like a highly cultivated Renaissance prince who besmirched his honour with ‘license foul’; of providing an insidious ‘sanction’ for ‘casting to the winds … all exterior systems of morals or religion which can restrain a man against his will’.¹⁷ So widely had Pater’s influence penetrated, agonised one writer in the reliably illiberal student press, that in certain public schools ‘many subjects are daily discussed, which should never be discussed at all and many others treated as open questions which in sober earnest, are no more open questions than the facts of our own existences’.¹⁸ As Pater’s rival for the Chair of Poetry, W. J. Courthope, suggested in a vituperative article of 1876, the ‘general point at issue’ in Pater’s reception was ‘the right of the imagination to unlimited liberty’. Accordingly, accusations of ‘scepticism and sensuality’ went hand in hand.¹⁹

I quote these assaults in quantity because they sow the seeds of Pater’s portrayal of Montaigne as one who provided ‘a theoretic justification, a sanction’ for the liberty of thought and sensation which Pater associated with the Renaissance and, by extension, ‘modernity’ (Gast., 83, ch. 4; CW, iv. 80).²⁰ In Pater’s unfinished novel Gaston de Latour (the first five chapters of which, including the ones on Montaigne, were published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1888²¹), the impressionable young hero’s arrival at the Château de Montaigne emblematises the wider historical moment when humanity ‘was called, through a full knowledge of the past, to enjoy the present with an unrestricted expansion of its own capacities’ (82−3, CW, iv. 80). The crucial ‘justification’ for this emancipating ethic, argues Pater, ‘was furnished by the Essays of Montaigne’ (83; CW, iv, 80). In making this claim, Pater granted Montaigne a much more significant role as a moral philosopher than he had usually been accorded in Britain, where he was regarded as a congenially empirical thinker hopelessly compromised by his ‘carelessness’ and inconsistency, his lack of intellectual ‘refinement’.²² As with so many of the portraits in The Renaissance, then, Pater’s account of Montaigne is highly revisionist: not only does he give Montaigne pride of place among Renaissance philosophers, he refutes the charge that his thinking lacked refinement by invoking ‘the spectacle of that keen-edged intelligence, dividing evidence so finely, like some exquisite steel instrument with impeccable sufficiency’ (104, ch. 5; CW, iv. 91).

But if Montaigne’s mind was not held in especially high esteem in Victorian intellectual culture, he was nonetheless widely respected for his benevolent heart: Montaigne was the ‘apostle of toleration’, a voice of sanity and moderation who loathed all forms of cruelty and persecution.²³ Pater endorsed this view of Montaigne as a ‘singularly humane and sensitive spirit’ (88, ch. 4; CW, iv. 83), going so far as to call him ‘the solitary conscience of the age’ (114, ch. 5; CW, iv. 96). And yet he also insinuated a ‘strange ambiguousness in the result of his lengthy inquiries’, which threw some doubt on the effects, if not the motives, of his singular moral temper (114; CW, iv. 96). The scene of Ulysses approaching the palace of Circe, illustrated by the tapestry in Montaigne’s study, becomes a symbol for this lingering anxiety in the novel. ‘Was Circe’s castle here?’ Gaston wonders; if she ‘could turn men into swine, could she also release them again?’ (90, ch. 4; CW, iv. 83). When, therefore, the narrator notes Montaigne’s stress on ‘Man’s kinship to the animal, the material’ (112, ch. 5; CW, iv. 95) – ‘the earthy side of existence’ (108; CW, iv. 93) – these homely observations come haunted by the ghost of Homer’s enchantress. And just as Circe’s song ‘makes one forget everything beside’ (CW, iv. 138, ch. 9), Montaigne’s ‘magnetic’ conversation (87, ch. 4; CW, iv. 82) insulates Gaston against the ‘reverberation of actual events around him’, and still more of ‘great events in preparation’, like the terrible massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day (115, ch. 5; CW, iv. 97). In Paris, Gaston reflects that he may have learned Montaigne’s lesson too well, or perhaps that he had taken one side of it too much to heart. Following ‘with only too entire a mobility the experience of the hour’, he finds himself ‘more than he could have thought possible the toy of external accident’ (124, ch. 6; CW, iv. 103). Unleavened by judgement, Pater implies, such mobility may wither into helplessness; and experience, which might have been ‘water to bathe and swim in’ (as he puts it in his preternaturally eloquent early essay on William Morris) may leave us ‘washed out beyond the bar in a sea at ebb’.²⁴

This glimmer of Montaigne as a potentially threatening, even Mephistophelean, presence had played almost no part in his English reception hitherto, but was a key aspect of his reception in France, notably in the writings of Pascal and his nineteenth-century chronicler, Sainte-Beuve. In an extraordinary passage of Port-Royal (1842), which Pater was reading at Brasenose in 1868, Sainte-Beuve compares Montaigne to ‘a cunning demon, a cursed enchanter’ who takes his victims by the hand, draws them into his sceptical labyrinth, and tells them to trust to his lamp alone, before snuffing it out with a chuckle.²⁵ For Sainte-Beuve at this period (he later modified his view substantially) Montaigne was a playful figure who may have meant little harm but who wreaked havoc through the godless radicals inspired by his writings, like Rousseau and Bayle.²⁶ The pleasant-seeming roots of ‘paganism’ planted by Montaigne had grown into a Dantesque abode of suicides: a ‘thick, dark, and poisonous forest … fatal to Werther and to all dreamers who fall asleep in its shade’.²⁷

The parallels with Pater’s reception are striking: ‘Could you indeed have known the dangers into which you were likely to lead minds weaker than your own,’ his colleague John Wordsworth wrote to him, ‘you would, I believe, have paused.’²⁸ Pater’s was ‘the voice of the charmer’, leading unsuspecting young men to their doom.²⁹ In 1877, an article on him observed that ‘The cultured College Tutor … wields a potent influence over his pupils’, and Pater himself was to use the loaded Oxford term ‘tutor’ to describe the role Montaigne occupied in relation to Gaston (CW, iv. 166, ch. 11).³⁰ Indeed, Pater repeatedly invoked Montaigne to parry contemporary criticism of his own supposed debaucheries, first by exposing the hypocrisy of such indictments and secondly by demonstrating the tact and acuity of Montaigne’s famous fleshliness.

As early as Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater had contended that, like the ‘“aesthetic” philosophy’ of the Cyrenaics, the ‘kindly and temperate wisdom of Montaigne’, though it be ‘refining, or tonic even, in the case of those strong and in health’, was ‘as Pascal says … “pernicious for those who have any natural tendency to impiety or vice”’ (ME, i. 149, 150, ch. 9). This exculpation reappears in Gaston, which quotes Montaigne’s own plea to this effect: ‘In truth,’ the narrator admits, Montaigne ‘led the way to the immodesty of French literature’, but he ‘had his defence, a sort of defence, ready.—“I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts”’ (Gast., 112, ch. 5; CW, iv. 95). Pater’s late essay, ‘Pascal’, turns the tables on Montaigne’s great antagonist by applying the same principle. For Pascal might equally be credited with ‘a somewhat Satanic intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lâcheté, of the human heart’, writes Pater; ‘so that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious study for those who have a native tendency to corruption’ (MS, 85).³¹ Montaigne had been habitually rebuked in the nineteenth century for his ‘love … of coarseness and obscenity’, his ‘indecency’, his ‘unabashed and deliberate filthiness’.³² But the fact that Montaigne was ‘not revolted’ by such subjects, Pater argues, should not blind us to his keenly discriminating sensibility (Gast., 112, ch. 5; CW, iv. 95). ‘Delicacy there was, certainly’, he suggests, ‘—a wonderful fineness of sensation’ (111; CW, iv. 94). Pater pieces together a cento of quotations in support of this provocative reading, citing Montaigne’s intense sensitivity to particular scents and climes, his ear for the breeze that forebodes the storm, and his desire for wine served in the clearest of glasses, ‘that the eye might taste too’ (112; CW, iv. 95). Pater’s Montaigne, then, is not (or not merely) a bantering bawd but a scrupulous aesthete. And nowhere does he apply his discernment more scrupulously, and more passionately, than in his appreciation of literature.

Lively Oracles

When the poet Ronsard commends Montaigne to Gaston, it is not as a philosopher, an analyst of human behaviour, or a delightful raconteur, but as a student of style: ‘Monsieur Michel could tell him much of the great ones—of the Greek and Latin masters of style. Let his study be in them!’ (69, ch. 3; CW, iv. 71). In Montaigne’s tower, Gaston finds ‘quaintly labelled drawers’ filled with ‘Notes of expressive facts, of words also worthy of note (for he was a lover of style)’ (86, ch. 4; CW, iv. 81). This makes Montaigne sound not unlike the subject of Pater’s ‘An English Poet’, who has ‘a savour before all things of the style—how things were said—of manner’ (CW, iii. 151). Given that Pater composed this essay around 1878, just as he was devouring the Essays, it is perhaps no coincidence that Pater there defines style as ‘those elements of taste or of literary production which, because they are so delicately and individually apprehended and are yet so real, resemble physical sensations’ (151). For this is how Montaigne describes the language that makes the greatest impression on him: the ‘sinewy’ style of his Gascon countrymen, or the ‘sharp’ style of Seneca’s Latin, which ‘pricks and makes us start’.³³ Language, in this way, may evoke what one of Pater’s most influential critical heirs, Bernard Berenson, called ‘tactile values’: weaving a Pateresque chaplet of nouns, Berenson describes how the work of art may ‘appeal to one’s senses, nerves, muscles, viscera’.³⁴ Cognition is not eschewed in favour of frissons that are merely skin-deep, but continually proved on the pulse, so that (as Marius suggests) ‘one’s whole nature’ is mobilised as ‘one complex medium of reception’ (ME, i. 143, ch. 8).

An extraordinary gift of receptivity is what Gaston finds in Montaigne, a profound interest in his own responsiveness to the world that is the very opposite of solipsistic: ‘openness—that all was wide open, searched through by light and warmth and air from the soil’ – as with the house, so with its master (Gast., 84, ch. 4; CW, iv. 80). Pater’s celebration of the breezy openness of Montaigne’s abode, and by extension his writings, defiantly revises the French historian Michelet’s crotchety characterisation of the Essays, in his monumental Histoire de France (1833−67), as ‘this airless bookshop’ (‘cette librairie calfeutrée’).³⁵ That Pater should champion the vitality of Montaigne’s romance with literature is entirely apt, since as Denis Donoghue notes (with a coolness somewhat mysterious in a professional literary critic), ‘Such thinking as Pater did, he did by commenting on the work of other writers’.³⁶ In The Renaissance, Pater had lovingly quoted Goethe’s remark about Winckelmann’s writings: ‘they are a life, a living thing, designed for those who are alive’ (‘Winckelmann’, Ren., 155), and in Gaston he makes the same suggestion about Montaigne’s Essays: they ‘were themselves a life’ (83, ch. 4; CW, iv. 80).

This is no casual hyperbole: for Montaigne himself, Pater writes, the activity of reading, ‘which with others was often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact’ (97, ch. 5; CW, iv. 88). Mallock’s New Republic made much comic ado about people throwing their ‘souls and sympathies’ into ‘the happier art-ages of the past’, lampooning those quixotic creatures for whom ‘Borgia is a more familiar name than Bismarck’.³⁷ Pater calls Montaigne as his witness against this parochialism of the present: for if ‘“we have no hold even on things present but by imagination”, as he loved to observe,—then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of Virgil and Cæsar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility’ (98, ch. 5; CW, iv. 88). Seen in this context, the well-worn criticism of Pater’s fictional method – that Gaston ‘seems almost to be reading about himself and the age in which he lived’ – self-combusts.³⁸ In Pater’s account, reading is not a bloodless imitation of reality, but one of the most powerful, intimate, and sensuous ways we have of experiencing it. In his unpublished essay ‘The Aesthetic Life’ (probably begun around 1877), Pater wrote lyrically of ‘that large life wh[ich] he looks in the face, ponders like a strange book’;³⁹ as though reading were a way not of shirking reality, or facing it down, but of squaring up to it in all its breadth and mysteriousness.

Montaigne’s scepticism is both cause and effect of his many-mingled engagement with literature: whereas in Marius the satirist Lucian’s scepticism is said to have ‘surrounded him … with “a rampart,” through which he himself never broke, nor permitted any thing or person to break upon him’ (ME, ii. 143, ch. 24), Montaigne’s was ‘the proper intellectual equivalent to the infinite possibilities of things’ (Gast., 104, ch. 5; CW, iv. 91). Not things in general merely, but particular things. For ‘it is “things” after all which direct him’, as Erich Auerbach would later say of Montaigne: ‘he moves among them, he lives in them; it is in things that he can always be found, for, with his very open eyes and his very impressionable mind, he stands in the midst of the world’.⁴⁰ ‘Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact’, Pater marvels, ‘in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces full of beauty in their vigour’ (95, ch. 5; CW, iv. 87). Pater’s account of Montaigne’s pre-eminent impressionability builds upon Matthew Arnold’s observation, in On Translating Homer (1861), that the critic of poetry should have ‘the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable’, ever aspiring towards ‘the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne’.⁴¹ But Pater also controverts Arnold by insisting that, for Montaigne, ‘the essential dialogue was that of the mind with itself’ – the very malaise with which Arnold thought modern literature was afflicted (85, ch. 4; CW, iv. 81). Such ‘inward converse’, Pater suggested, was not in the least hidebound, let alone ‘morbid’ and ‘monotonous’ (as Arnold had claimed), because it ‘throve best’ with ‘some outward stimulus’, like ‘some text shot from a book’, for example (85, ch. 4; CW, iv. 81).⁴²

Pater quotes Montaigne’s testimony that books were ever ‘at his elbow to test and be tested’ (88; CW, iv. 82), alluding to the literary form which he credited Montaigne with inventing: the essay, cognate with ‘assay’, ‘A trial, testing’.⁴³ The quotation nicely suggests the reciprocal nature of Montaigne’s relationship to literature, which both bombards him with impressions and calls forth his own best powers in response. In Marius, Pater had compared Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations to ‘the modern essayist’, whose desire is ‘to make the most of every experience that might come’ (ME, ii. 47, ch. 18), while in his essay on Lamb he associated ‘true essay-writing’ with ‘the dexterous availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the prosecution of deeper lines of observation’ (App., 118). Pater’s portrayal of Montaigne glances back at these earlier formulations of the essayist’s double existence as pursuer and pursued. Pater pictures Montaigne ‘shrewdly economising the opportunities of the present hour’ (Gast., 104, ch. 5; CW, iv. 91), sifting experience with a bright expectancy: ‘That “free and roving thing,” the human soul,—what might it not have found out for itself, in a world so wide?’ (113; CW, iv. 96).

This Montaigne is indeed ‘the studious man’ (84, ch. 4; CW, iv. 81), but his ‘studies’ are of a very particular kind, for which Pater celebrates the essay as the ideal medium. In a passage which he later plucked from Gaston for his lectures on Plato, Pater identifies this medium as ‘that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and issues’ (‘The Doctrine of Plato’, PP, 174).⁴⁴ These two aspects of the essay’s identity are related to its ambiguous location ‘midway’ between two earlier historic forms of philosophical thought, the poem and the treatise (174). As Pater notes, Montaigne rejoiced in prose that shone with ‘the lustre, vigour and boldness … of poetry’ (Gast., 101, ch. 5; CW, iv. 90), and in Pater’s essay on ‘Style’ he too would insist that poetry was no unwelcome ‘intruder’ in prose (App., 6). As an instrument of literary criticism, the essay is at once keenly investigative like the treatise, while at the same time willing to risk lyricism in virtue of the peculiarly evocative character of its objects of investigation. Just as Montaigne did with the moral and historical curiosities he loved to recount, the essay is always insisting that experience is ‘not to be resolved into anything less surprising than itself’ (Gast., 95, ch. 5; CW, iv. 87). Its distinctive mission is the pursuit of truth, ‘not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience’ (PP, 175).⁴⁵

Spontaneous Me

Montaigne’s essays, Pater affirms, are an account of ‘how things affected him, what they really were to him, Michael, much more than man’ (Gast., 105, ch. 5; CW, iv. 92), echoing the demand which The Renaissance makes of every encounter: ‘What is this … to me?’ (‘Preface’, Ren., xix−xx). ‘Every one has heard of Montaigne’s egotism’, observed R. W. Church in 1857, and Pater does not shrink from the charge: ‘beyond and above all the various interests upon which the philosopher’s mind was for ever afloat,’ the narrator of Gaston reflects, ‘there was one subject always in prominence—himself’ (105, ch. 5; CW, iv. 92).⁴⁶ Pater’s sentence glows with ironic lustre, for he himself had been unceasingly accused of just this: ‘Selfishness’, ‘self-worship’, ‘self-centred thought’.⁴⁷ Christopher Ricks is the most accomplished recent critic to have picked up this baton (or bludgeon): ‘criticism, like creation for him’, he laments, ‘is not a loss of self, joyful or otherwise, but … a matter of never finding yourself at an end’.⁴⁸ Selfishness, however, comes in many guises. There is the selfishness of self-conceit – ‘the egotism which vulgarises most of us’, as Pater deplores it in ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (MS, 225; CW, iii. 188) – but there is also the stealthier selfishness of self-effacement. There is a curiously Nietzschean moment in Pater’s essay on Wordsworth where he alludes to the pursuit of ‘mean, or intensely selfish ends’ like those ‘of Grandet, or Javert’ (App., 60). As if selfishness might keep company, not with indulgence, but with meanness: the wretched austerity of Balzac’s miser, or the sinister sobriety of Hugo’s police inspector, with his ‘life of privation, isolation, self-denial’.⁴⁹ By contrast, Montaigne takes an ‘undissembled’ interest in the quality of his own various and volatile awareness of the world (Gast., 105, ch. 5; CW, iv. 92). Like Socrates, not the least of his virtues is ‘[t]o make men interested in themselves’ (‘Plato and the Sophists’, PP, 120).⁵⁰

From Pater’s very first mention of Montaigne in the essay on du Bellay, he had associated him with ‘something individual, inventive, unique, the impress there of the writer’s own temper and personality’ (Ren., 137), and in the essay on Lamb he dubbed such subjectivity ‘the Montaignesque element in literature’ (App., 117). In these circumstances, it might even be said that ‘egotism is true modesty’, as John Henry Newman had outrageously proposed in his much-discussed Grammar of Assent (1870). The honest religious inquirer, Newman wrote, ‘brings together his reasons, and relies on them, because they are his own, and this is his primary evidence’.⁵¹ Three years later, Pater would make the parallel insistence that in the realm of aesthetic experience, ‘one must realise such primary data for one’s self, or not at all’ (‘Preface’, Ren., xx). Though Newman’s seeker is convinced that others will agree with him if they themselves ‘inquired fairly’, or will only ‘listen to him’, he is at the same time clear that ‘he cannot lay down the law’.⁵² Montaigne makes a still humbler and more hospitable claim, as Pater observes: ‘I never see all of anything’ (and ‘neither do they who so largely promise to show it to others’, he roundly adds (Gast., 103, ch. 5; CW, iv. 91)). For this reason Montaigne can maintain that ‘a competent reader often discovers in other men’s writings other perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a richer sense and more quaint expression’.⁵³ This, of course, is a notorious trademark of Pater’s own critical practice, whether it be his perception of a vein of ‘sweetness’ in Michelangelo or a kind of sceptical indifference in the expression of Botticelli’s Madonnas – insights which baffled critics pledged to hair-shirt historicism.⁵⁴

The Montaignesque critic, attracted by ‘some new light’ he finds in one in a hundred of the faces belonging to the work under contemplation, will in turn leave much to the ‘willing intelligence’ of the reader (103; CW, iv. 91). Such writing, then, participates in a virtuous spiral: ‘dependent to so great a degree on external converse for the best fruit of his own thought’, as Pater observes of Montaigne, ‘he was also an efficient evocator of the thought of another—himself an original spirit more than tolerating the originality of others,—which brought it into play’ (86–7; CW, iv. 82). In this spirit of curiosity and respect, Pater goes on, Montaigne ‘would welcome one’s very self, undistressed by, while fully observant of, its difference from his own’ (87; CW, iv. 82). Not only, perhaps, because he wants to see the object from a different angle, but because he values new ways in which he might differ from himself.

Writing, then, if it touches us at all, bids for an interest that is vitally personal, not because it can be threaded through the needles of our existing interests and commitments but precisely to the extent that it prises open those needles’ eyes. ‘For if men are so diverse’, remarks Montaigne, ‘not less disparate are the many men who keep discordant company within each one of us’; hence, Pater comments, ‘the variancy of the individual in regard to himself’ (93, ch. 5; CW, iv. 86). The theme is recognisably Paterian: consider the ‘strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ insisted upon by the ‘Conclusion’ (Ren., 188), or Emerald Uthwart’s ‘vagrant self’ (MS, 207; CW, iii. 180), or the ‘elusive inscrutable mistakeable self’ evoked in ‘The History of Philosophy’.⁵⁵ But Montaigne inflects it for him with a bracing sense of possibility missing from these elegiac intimations, and he does so by uniting it to Pater’s passion for surprise: ‘even on this ultimate ground of judgement’, notes the narrator of Gaston, ‘what undulancy, complexity, surprises!’ (Gast., 106, ch. 5; CW, iv. 92). ‘The more I frequent myself … the less do I understand myself’, Pater quotes, and the words have the air of a boast, not a concession (107; CW, iv. 92−3). Montaigne’s sense of the self as inchoate and anticipatory – a fount of ‘miraculous surprises’ – suggests that we reimagine self-indulgence as a kind of sociable self-experiment (89, ch. 4; CW, iv. 83). Aesthetic experience may be richly and ineluctably personal, but it is not ineffably private nor jealously proprietary. What’s more, if the self is perpetually at stake in such encounters, then it is never something already given, nor has it need of any anxious defence. The antithesis of blocked sympathies and cloying consumption, the selfish reader so conceived comes close to fulfilling one of Pater’s earliest and most hopeful intuitions: that ‘the choice life of the human spirit is always under mixed lights, and in mixed situations; when it is not too sure of itself, is still expectant, girt up to leap forward to the promise’.⁵⁶

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.

Appreciations, as is well known, gathers a number of essays that Pater had already published. The ‘Postscript’ both is and, in some notable respects, is not the reissue of an essay already published elsewhere. It is, because Pater had published ‘Romanticism’ in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1876 and the ‘Postscript’ substantially reprises this text. However, there are significant changes – both omissions and additions – as well. (It is striking, incidentally, that in his positive review of Appreciations for the Glasgow Herald, William Sharp identifies the essay on ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, replaced in subsequent editions, and the ‘Postscript’ as ‘two suggestive new papers’; both, in fact, had been published in earlier versions before.¹) In the ‘Postscript’, for instance, the references to Whitman and Baudelaire that are present in ‘Romanticism’ are excised and, lest these excisions suggest that Pater was backing away from controversy in the process of revision, a polemical final paragraph is added. At least as significant as these particular emendations is, however, the change of title itself, from ‘Romanticism’ to ‘Postscript’. It is worth noting here that ‘Romanticism’ was already a significant title, since the essay in fact addresses romanticism and classicism, and the dialectical relation between the two. It is tempting to speculate that ‘Romanticism’ designates what was for Pater the dominant artistic tendency, or the one with which his sympathies reside, or that which stands, in 1876, most in need of defence. The question of Pater’s estimation of romanticism is, needless to say, central to this chapter. But the point to emphasise here is that ‘Romanticism’ is not the title granted this essay (even allowing for the revisions Pater made to it) in Appreciations. Indeed, the focus on Pater as a gifted essayist, which has gained considerable impetus from the recent resurgence of interest in the essay as form, runs the risk of deflecting from the fact that much of his work took different forms: there is the novel, of course, and the ‘imaginary portrait’, but also the lecture and the review, neither of which are straightforwardly subsumable under the omnivorous category of the essay. ‘Romanticism’ does not appear in Appreciations as a merely retitled essay, then, but rather as a text cast in a new and distinctive form: postscripts, that is, are a particular kind of paratext, one that marks the threshold through which the reader makes their exit from the reading of a text at the end of which they have arrived. As such, the relation of a postscript to the texts – the script – it comes after is one not simply of addition, but of reflection and commentary. Given the concern of Pater’s Appreciations ‘Postscript’ with questions of before, after, and what exceeds the demarcations of before and after in the course of literary history, this placement and designation is especially noteworthy; its placement at the end – or, even, after the end – of the volume provokes a heightened consciousness of the reader’s situation as they finish their reading of Appreciations and are thus poised to go on to other reading or, indeed, to other kinds of activity altogether on which reading (and the reading of Appreciations in particular) may be hoped to have some bearing. It is the consciousness of this situation that issues in Pater’s addition of a final paragraph to the ‘Postscript’ of which there is no trace in ‘Romanticism’. I consider this important addition in more detail at the conclusion to this chapter.

The ‘Postscript’, therefore, occupies a peculiar place in relation to the other essays in Appreciations and, indeed, in relation to its own forebear in print, namely, the Macmillan’s ‘Romanticism’. The peculiarities of the ‘Postscript’, its marginal (by which I do not at all mean insignificant or unrelated) status with respect to the other essays in Appreciations, are detectable in its content as well as in the form by which Pater designates it. A chapter addressing Pater’s conception of the relation between classicism and romanticism in a collection on Pater and English studies, for instance, needs to confront the fact that Pater’s sense of romanticism (and of classicism as well, for that matter) does not seem especially English. This is by no means a problem for contemporary readers of Pater, for whom Pater’s cosmopolitan conception of literary tradition is cause for admiration, although it was a problem, as we shall see, for some of Pater’s contemporaries; and it is also the case, of course, that other essays in Appreciations, most notably the essay on ‘Style’, take their bearings from literary traditions from beyond English shores. The point to emphasise here, though, is that any Paterian conception of ‘English studies’ must be provisional, capacious, and internally differentiated. To be sure, after the opening essay on ‘Style’ – which, like the ‘Postscript’, both titularly eschews the focus on one authorship and is marked as paratextual with relation to the other texts in Appreciations: With an Essay on Style – the first three essays of Appreciations deal with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb – all English. In the ‘Postscript’ itself, Pater adduces Scott as a lover of ‘strange adventure’ which he ‘sought … in the Middle Age’, as well as Emily Brontë, ‘a more really characteristic fruit’ borne by ‘the spirit of romanticism’, the chief characters of whose Wuthering Heights are ‘figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately beautiful, moorland scenery’ (App., 242). As noted above, in the Macmillan’s essay, Pater had also cited Whitman as an example of the extremity of curiosity into which romanticism may sometimes run, although this example was excised from the ‘Postscript’.² Yet it is not just Scott’s Scottishness nor Whitman’s Americanness, nor even Pater’s reminder that Brontë belonged to a distinctly non-metropolitan ‘Yorkshire village’, that foster the sense that Pater’s romanticism may be more than English. It is in France, we are told, that ‘the romantic movement … bore its most characteristic fruits’, a point he emphasises again slightly later: ‘But neither Germany, with its Goethe and Tieck, nor England, with its Byron and Scott, is nearly so representative of the romantic temper as France, with Murger, and Gautier, and Victor Hugo. It is in French literature that its most characteristic expression is to be found’ (App., 243, 249).

What is it that motivates Pater’s turn to, and defence of, French romanticism – or, specifically, romanticism as French? The volume’s Frenchness was certainly remarked by its original reviewers. Arthur Symons, for instance, noted that ‘Appreciations’ is ‘a word occurring very often in the essays, and used, evidently, in the sense of the French appréciation, a weighing, a valuing, more even than in the general English sense of valuing highly’.³ Symons’s ‘more even’ subtly complicates the suggestion that the French mode of appreciation simply entails a refusal to value, an abdication of praise, and hints in its ampliative reach that ‘a weighing, a valuing’ involves, in fact, a more capacious and expansive method than merely making a dash for the heights. Symons goes on to extol Pater’s ‘sympathy’ – a term, this time, with Greek roots and many European cousins – noting in particular ‘a remarkable breadth and catholicity’ discernible, especially, in the essay on ‘Style’ and the ‘Postscript’, which Symons, notably, takes together.⁴

Needless to say, not all contemporary readers of Appreciations were quite so appreciative of Pater’s debts to France. Like Symons, C.L. Graves noticed the linguistic origins of the book’s title, although for Graves, however, ‘the effort to acclimatise a Gallicism smacks of affectation’ (the Germanic ‘smacks’ is aptly pugnacious);⁵ and Mrs Oliphant complained of the ‘Postscript’ in particular that ‘[i]t is rather terrible to meet with this old classical and romantic business in the discussion of English literature. We have had, Heaven knows, enough of it in French to bewilder anyone’s brain’, before she went on to protest more generally ‘against a foreign model which is altogether out of the question as affording any rule for us’.⁶ The national exceptionalism in the fields of language and literature – and, by implication, in life in general, to which language and literature give expression – expressed in response to Pater was precisely what Pater had himself been responding to, both in the ‘Romanticism’ essay and in the placement of a version of this text as the ‘Postscript’ to his appréciations of English texts. ‘Romanticism’, that is, had responded to a series of decided accounts of modern romantic literature by, above all, W.J. Courthope and John Ruskin. In his account of this context for Pater’s essay, Kenneth Daley has emphasised in particular the importance of Ruskin’s lecture on ‘Franchise’, one of the lectures in the latter’s Val d’Arno series that, Daley suggests, Pater is likely to have heard in Oxford in 1873. I will turn to ‘Franchise’ in a moment, but first it is worth briefly examining the place of France in Courthope’s interventions in the romanticism debate in two essays of the mid-1870s. ‘Though much behind the French in polish and critical perception,’ Courthope concedes, without caring much for what is conceded, ‘England has produced a literature more vigorous and original than her neighbour.’ The distinction between the merely perceptive French and the productive English is the keynote of Courthope’s interventions in this debate, and he goes on to insist that ‘all great poetry stimulates to action’. With grim inevitability, English heroes of wars with the French are Courthope’s favourite exemplars of the stimulating power of poetry:

Instead of being a victorious British general, Wolfe would rather have written a poem: hardly the emphatic proof of poetry’s stimulation to action Courthope imagines. Yet needless to say, Wolfe turned out in fact to be the victor on the Heights of Abraham, and this favourite anecdote was again in Courthope’s mind when he remarks in a later essay on ‘Wordsworth and Gray’ that Gray’s ‘Elegy’ ‘appeals immediately, and will continue to appeal, to the heart of every Englishman, so long as the care of public liberty and love of the soil maintain their hold in this country’. ‘We feel,’ he goes on to say, ‘that it is in every way fitting that the author of the “Elegy” should have been the favourite of Wolfe and the countryman of Chatham.’⁸ This may appear like so much anti-French patriotic bloviation (because it is), but there is also a serious point at issue here. Courthope’s qualification of liberty as ‘public liberty’ (emphasis added) is of considerable significance to the arguments that both he and Ruskin advanced against contemporary romanticism. In defending Gray against Wordsworth’s depreciation of him, that is, Courthope emphasised that ‘[t]he real question at issue between the two poets concerns the liberty of the imagination’.⁹ Whereas ‘Wordsworth and the romanticists’ take the liberty of the imagination to be ‘absolutely paramount’, Gray admits restrictions on imaginative freedom, above all concerning what subjects are (allegedly) appropriate for imaginative treatment, in order to allow to the imagination the greatest degree of ‘just liberty’.¹⁰

This qualified understanding of liberty is given more historically nuanced expression in Ruskin’s ‘Franchise’. One gets the sense from Courthope that France as such, and for all time, is the problem, whereas that is far from the case for Ruskin. It is modern France – and, indeed, modern England – that are at fault:

Anticipating the qualified versions of liberty on which Courthope would insist (‘public liberty’, ‘just liberty’), Ruskin argues that franchise is governed by law. In this, Frank and Greek are at one, though the laws by which they are governed are nevertheless distinct: that of France is ‘the law of love, restraining anger’, and of Greece, ‘the law of justice, and enforcing anger’ (117). The law of the Franks is one of generosity and boundless munificence; that of the Greeks, judgement and discrimination. Or, alternatively, the law of the Franks is romantic, that of the Greeks, classical (121). It is in invoking these terms that Ruskin shows his hand: ‘there is no appeal’ from the authority of the classics, whereas ‘however brilliant or lovely’, the romantic ‘remains imperfect, and without authority’ (122). Romantic works do have, for Ruskin, the advantage over classical ones, first, that even where they are not fully understood, they give delight, and, second, that they ‘fulfil to you, in sight and presence, what the Greek could only teach by signs’ (122). These are indeed virtues of romanticism, but for Ruskin, modern French romantic writing – exemplified above all by Victor Hugo – suffers both by its difference from Diana Vernon, the character he advances as the embodiment of a dignified romanticism in Scott’s Rob Roy, and by its similarity with Mill’s liberalism. Ruskin ends his lecture on ‘Franchise’ with a curt disparagement of contemporary French culture: ‘And what Diana Vernon is to a French ballerine [sic] dancing the Cancan, the “libertas” of Chartres and Westminster is to the “liberty” of M. Victor Hugo and Mr. John Stuart Mill’ (126).

It is in response to these characterisations of romanticism – and of France, modernity, and the political valorisation of liberty with which they are inextricably bound up – that Pater wrote ‘Romanticism’. His placement of a revised version of that essay after the end of Appreciations, moreover, retrospectively casts the entire volume as a riposte to a narrow conception of English culture and insufficiently nuanced conception of the interweaving tendencies of literary history on the ground of English literature itself. First, Pater senses that the compliment Ruskin pays to romanticism in contrast to classicism – that its works give delight even where they are not understood – is back-handed. He seeks to repay it by ascribing a particular affect to classical works:

The diminuendo here from pleasure, to tranquillisation, to the failure to displease not only makes the point that the mode of reception of classical works goes beyond the manly, no-nonsense faculty of the understanding, but also that their dissociation from feeling may have more to do with the fact that they have simply faded. But it is in defending recent French romantic writing that Pater’s response to Ruskin and Courthope is most marked. Having emphasised that romanticism and classicism ‘are tendencies really at work at all times in art’ and having described how the history of art is thus a perennial balancing act between these tendencies, ‘with the balance sometimes a little on one side, sometimes a little on the other’, Pater details how romanticism demands ‘strangeness’ before allowing its ‘passionate care for beauty’ to be fulfilled (247). It is Hugo who is the chief exemplar of this pattern of strangeness first, then beauty:

The use of the Ruskinian term ‘grotesque’, incidentally, warrants attention, since just a few sentences earlier Pater had described ‘the grotesque in art’ as the result of ‘a great overbalance of curiosity’; he then goes on to suggest that ‘a trace of distortion, of the grotesque, may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression’ (247), before, in the above passage, taking the ‘grotesque’ as a synonym for that ‘strangeness’ that is the very condition – not the excess – of romanticism. Grotesquery is thus stripped of its mischievous connotations in order to prepare the way for the defence of Hugo. In contrast both to the activist, indeed, bellicose tradition of English writing advanced by Courthope and to Ruskin’s derision of contemporary French writing typified by Hugo, Pater, in Stefano Evangelista’s words, is articulating ‘a definition and defence of a rich cosmopolitan Romanticism that he sees as a unifying cultural force in nineteenth-century Europe’.¹² Pater, then, defends romantic writing in its modern and French forms against Courthope’s ultimately anglophile denunciations and Ruskin’s preference for a past world of Gothic franchise. Implicit in this defence, as Daley has noted, is also a sympathy with the liberalism adumbrated by Mill.¹³

Two objections may be raised at this point, and both have to do with the place of romanticism in Pater’s conception of the history of art and literature. First, in the above passage, in which he adduces three examples from Victor Hugo, it is in fact with Sainte-Beuve’s definition of ‘a genuine classic’, and not with the romantic work, that Pater is concerned. Second, Evangelista’s ascription of a view of romanticism as ‘a unifying force in nineteenth-century Europe’ to Pater may be taken to suggest that Pater views romanticism as belonging to, or, at least, characterising a particular historical epoch. In response to the first of these objections, it should be noted that it is a major part of Pater’s purpose in the ‘Postscript’ to undermine the sense that classic and romantic are merely opposed: it is not a matter of assigning work either to classicism or to romanticism. As Wolfgang Iser and others have emphasised, Pater historicises the relation between classic and romantic – rendering them ‘contingent powers’, rather than normative concepts – but not (and this is where a response to the second objection raised above is pertinent) in order to affix classic and romantic to particular periods.¹⁴ So even where Pater admits that ‘in a limited sense’ the romantic spirit ‘may be said to be a product of special epochs’ (App., 250), or that, for instance, ‘[t]he last century was pre-eminently a classical age, an age in which, for art and literature, the element of a comely order was in the ascendant’, the admission is, precisely, limited, and the opposite tendency (classic or romantic) is never simply dormant. ‘Yet,’ he remarks, in a qualifying gesture typical of his criticism, ‘it is in the heart of this century [that is, the eighteenth], of Goldsmith and Stothard, of Watteau and the Siècle de Louis XIV.—in one of its central, if not most characteristic figures, in Rousseau—that the modern or French romanticism really originates’ (251). It is also typical of Pater’s writing that the parenthesis, as well as the repetition of ‘in’s and ‘of’s, should have the effect of shifting the ground of his description so that a wider focus is obtained. What is it that Rousseau is meant to be ‘most characteristic’ of? The eighteenth century? Romanticism? The fact that the answer is ‘both’ is telling.

In thus acknowledging the characteristics of epochs only within certain bounds, Pater accords individual temperament considerable significance – and indeed, the cultivation of a particular kind of temper, rather than the instilling of identifiable points of view, is a keynote throughout his writing. This accordance of significance to individual temperament was cast as typical of romanticism by T.E. Hulme in his ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, collected by Herbert Read in the volume he titled Speculations, partly in implicit response, no doubt, to Pater’s Appreciations and Wilde’s Intentions. Though Hulme nowhere names Pater explicitly, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is thoroughly informed by its reaction against Pater, not least in Hulme’s insistence that ‘no one, in a matter of judgment of beauty, can take a detached standpoint …. Just as physically you are not born that abstract entity, man, but the child of particular parents, so you are in matters of literary judgment’. This reflection on the pre-determined nature of literary judgement is extended to literary creation when Hulme avers (there is a lot of averring in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’) that ‘many acts which we habitually label free are in reality automatic. It is quite possible for a man to write a book almost automatically’.¹⁵ Hulme’s stress on the restricted and conditioned nature of both literary judgement and creation is itself, of course, predicated on a classicalist precept: ‘The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man.’¹⁶

In defiance of such a view as Hulme would go on to adumbrate, Pater focuses not only on the fact that figures such as Rousseau and William Blake (someone whose theory and practice of composition was inimical to the automisation of creation) are difficult to situate straightforwardly in their times, but on the fact that their singularity is also, in fact, a profound expression of their times in the fullness of their complexity and in contrast to subsequent simplification of them. It is not that Pater advocates the simple overflowing of limits in the manner Hulme associates with romanticism (as per his famous definition: ‘It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism, then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion’¹⁷), rather, any given historical epoch is the product or, better, forcefield of countervailing tendencies. ‘William Blake, a type of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thought the influences of that century,’ writes Pater, ‘is still a noticeable phenomenon in it, and the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in that century, early’ (App., 257). The ironically belated qualification (‘early’) in that sentence is a deft touch of Pater’s, apt to forestall any attempt to respond to his argument merely by shifting period boundaries: Rousseau and Blake are products of the later eighteenth century, such a response would go, and so we do not have to shift by much our dates for the end of classicism and beginning of romanticism. But Pater eschews the easy option of splitting the difference in this way: the tendencies of romanticism and classicism are not merely opposed, but rather depend upon one another and are thus operative throughout the history of art.

I discussed earlier Pater’s defence of French romanticism but it is worth briefly considering at this point a significant German source – one, unlike Goethe, Heine, and others, that is not actually acknowledged in his ‘Postscript’ – namely, G.W.F. Hegel. In his Aesthetics, which Pater knew well, Hegel was himself the author of a consideration of the historical relation between symbolic, classic, and romantic forms of art that cannot simply be mapped on to specifiable historical epochs. Yet it is in fact Hegel’s conception of historical process more broadly that is germane to the characterisation of the historical relation between classicism and romanticism in Pater’s ‘Postscript’. As Anthony Ward shows in his account of Pater’s thinking, Benjamin Jowett, one of Pater’s most influential Oxford contemporaries, developed what would turn out to be an influential summary of Hegel’s historical understanding:

While there are holes one could pick in this as an account of Hegel (Jowett’s evocation of ‘the eternal “now”’ is vulnerable to the critique of sense-certainty Hegel develops in Phenomenology of Spirit), the Hegelian sense of the continuity of the past in the present and of the perpetual outworking of spirit in history clearly influenced Pater’s insistence that ‘Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, is in its essential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all times, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by one, than the peculiarity of a time or a school’ (App., 256–7). Moreover, Pater’s sense that romanticism departs from classicism, but also ‘retain[s] the flavour of what was admirably done in past generations, in the classics’ (256), clearly owes something to Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung, usually translated as ‘sublation’, according to which one concept or force is both superseded and retained in a subsequent form – although, as a number of commentators have emphasised, Pater does not subscribe to the kind of determinable teleology that Aufhebung is sometimes thought to subserve in Hegel’s work.¹⁹

Yet despite his emphasis on the relative historical ubiquity, as it were, of both classical and romantic tendencies, Pater’s propensity for reverting to the eighteenth century as an instance of a classical epoch (even in order to complicate such an account) and, likewise, of exemplifying romanticism by recent works may nevertheless create the impression that classicism belongs to the past and romanticism to the present. And insofar as it stands for rebellion against fixed standards, then romanticism would seem to appear secondary. But as soon as we have granted the validity of that appearance, we must acknowledge that, insofar as it stands for the imposition of standards on excess, classicism would also seem to need to follow, rather than lead. In order to focus this question of the priority of classicism or romanticism, and, particularly, of Pater’s subtle treatment of it, it is worth paying slightly closer attention to an idiosyncrasy in his handling of a particular, although otherwise unremarkable, term. Early in the ‘Postscript’ Pater describes ‘the opposition between the classicists and the romanticists—between the adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty, and authority, respectively—of strength, and order or what the Greeks call κοσμιότης’ (App., 244). Returning to the same opposition slightly later, he makes the point in a similar way:

If we take ‘respectively’ to mean ‘[c]onsidered individually or in turn, and in the order mentioned’ (OED, ‘respectively’, adv., sense 3; emphasis added), then these are both unusual uses of the word, which reveal something important about the way that Pater handles the relation between romanticism and classicism. The mismatch between terms and what they ‘respectively’ entail is, indeed, crucial to the at once historicising but not periodising understanding of the relation between classic and romantic that Pater is seeking to articulate. His use of ‘respectively’ is a ‘tiny modification of the expected’, which are frequent in Pater and arise from his ‘constant recourse to the secondary’, his ‘act of aftering, reappraising’.²⁰

While such an ‘act of aftering, reappraising’ may be generally discernible in Pater’s works – and I agree with Angela Leighton’s implication that it is one of Pater’s strengths, however much it has often been misjudged as a weakness – it is specifically germane to the ‘Postscript’, which as I emphasised above is at once a revision of an earlier essay, a backward glance on the essays in Appreciations after which it comes, and an intimation of what might come now, after the end. Reappraisal, to borrow Leighton’s terms, is not the avoidance of appraisal and modification of the expected is not the disappointment of hopes but the transformation of convention, established order, and precedent. These reflections on Pater’s affinity with second thoughts are naturally germane to this consideration of the ‘Postscript’ and perhaps especially to the ending of the ‘Postscript’, since this is the site of Pater’s most significant revision to ‘Romanticism’ and the moment in the text where he at once conclusively and prospectively points beyond his own discussion to the task of literary and cultural criticism. To be sure, prior to the addition of what is in effect a kind of coda to the ‘Postscript’ – recourse not so much to the secondary, then, but even the tertiary – Pater had considered, in a section of ‘Romanticism’ reprised in the ‘Postscript’, the consequences of romanticism for those looking to the future. Attempting, again, to account for the ‘appeal’ of ‘the works of French romanticism’ to those who are ‘weary of the present, but yearning for the spectacle of beauty and strength’, Pater acknowledged that there is ‘a certain distortion’ in the works of Gautier and Hugo, though such distortion is, paradoxically, ‘always combined with perfect literary execution’, and mounts, via ‘grim humour’ and ‘ghastly comedy’ (App., 253), to ‘a genuine pathos’ (254). He sets out the reason for this as follows:

The argument is not so much for the temperance of justice by mercy, though that is in the background, but is aimed instead at justifying a dissatisfaction with the merely formal administration of justice understood as the maintenance and application of established standards. Romanticism’s regard for ‘quaintness or singularity’, for what lies beyond the purview of precedent, for what, indeed, is systematically excluded from consideration, is necessary to the functioning of any justice worthy of the name. Though it may be alleged that the ‘practice’ into which Hugo turns his romanticism is not action itself, but rather ‘his hunger and thirst after practical Justice !’, and hence that his practice is a thirst for practice, Pater can hardly be convicted of avoiding the articulation of a positive ethics that inheres in the just treatment of conventionally ignored beings with whom readers of Murger, Hugo, and, now, Pater share the world.

Where Pater’s attempt to derive an ethics of justice from Murger and Hugo depends fundamentally on knowledge – on, that is, ceasing to ignore ‘minute facts’ about downtrodden and neglected occupants of the world – the newly written coda to the ‘Postscript’ begins by emphasising the need for the organisation of what we already know. This, strikingly, may appear to give expression to a distinctly classical emphasis on order – ‘For the literary art, at all events, the problem just now is, to induce order upon the contorted, proportionless accumulation of our knowledge and experience’ (App., 260) – though it is perhaps also worth noting its affinity with Percy Shelley’s assertion, made as near to the beginning of the nineteenth century as Pater stood to its end, that ‘[w]e have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise; we have more scientific and œconomical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies’.²¹ Pater’s concern in Appreciations may appear literarily inward – not just in its concern with literary writers but in its cultivation of a particular literary style for criticism of them. And the ‘Postscript’, in its treatment of the relation between presiding subdivisions of literature, may appear particularly so. But its concern is, in fact, with the relation of artistic practice to ‘knowledge and experience’, which, as the reflections on Murger and Hugo demonstrate, ought to serve as the foundations of justice. ‘Romanticism’ had ended with a fairly tepid, if unimpeachable summary of the essay’s argument: ‘But explain the terms as we will, in application to particular epochs, there are these two elements always recognisable; united in perfect art, in Sophocles, in Dante, in the highest work of Goethe, though not always absolutely balanced there; and these two elements may be not inappropriately termed the classical and romantic tendencies.’²² But it is here, at the end of Appreciations as the volume necessarily begins to give way to what is beyond it, that Pater looks determinedly outside literature to that which it may affect, to what it may ‘induce order upon’. ‘For, in truth,’ Pater concludes the ‘Postscript’ and so Appreciations as a whole, ‘the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form’ (261). Stupidity and vulgarity are not offences against taste, merely, but against justice, and it is the calling of all literary art to contend against them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Pater, Oxford scholar, classicist, lover of the art of the Renaissance and other periods, author of ‘imaginary portraits’ and ‘appreciations’, might seem to belong in a different universe from that which presided over the emergence of intertextual theory in the intellectually and politically effervescent Paris of the mid to late 1960s. While his name is virtually synonymous with the idea of subjective aesthetic response, the notion of intertextuality, first named and honed at the hands of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, is, by contrast, tightly intertwined with the idea of authorial impersonality. Yet these realms and modes of style and thought are not as dichotomous as they may initially appear, however starkly distinct their critical languages. Over the decades since his death, Pater’s works have given rise to considerable comment regarding his use of source material. As such, his extensively ‘second-hand’ writing – to use a term suggested by Antoine Compagnon’s history of quotation – begs for consideration alongside the writings of those prose modernists such as Flaubert and Joyce, whose extreme citational practices paved the way for the emergence of intertextual theory.¹ While such a comparison opens up the possibility of a neutral – descriptive rather than judgemental – assessment of Pater’s sometimes surprising treatment of his sources, it also highlights the nature and scale of the difference between his compositional methods and those of these later practitioners of the second-hand.

‘Style’ is a salient case to examine in this context. The opening essay of Appreciations (1889), first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1888, is a piece which not only engages with Flaubert – whom the coiners of intertextuality placed at the origin of a new kind of citationality – but does so in ways which are both markedly intertextual and highly curious.² Indeed, Pater’s ostensible alignment with Flaubert in the piece rests upon a number of compositional peculiarities and argumentative tensions.³ On the one hand, Pater makes distinctly odd use of Flaubert’s correspondence in quotation and shrouds in silence the name of an important source of knowledge about him; on the other, he glosses over significant points of difference between their conceptions of writing.

The fact of Pater’s dependence on source material for information and inspiration is well established. As Billie Andrew Inman puts it, ‘he turned to the writings of others for substance and fire’, or, as Robert MacFarlane remarks, for Pater ‘creation was never a primary act but only a response to or renovation of pre‐existing matter’.⁴ Among many identified instances of Pater’s practice of appropriating and modifying other authors’ words, his treatment of Flaubert in ‘Style’ stands out as ‘particularly noteworthy’.⁵ In 1914, Samuel C. Chew, Jr. led the way in an article devoted to ‘Pater’s use and misuse of citations from various authors’.⁶ Chew lists among Pater’s persistent habits ‘the separation of passages joined in the original, the junction of passages far distant in the original, unnoted omissions, and, in some cases, mistranslations’.⁷ In support of these claims, he provides numerous instances of acts of textual ‘tamper[ing]’, all carried out ‘with no indication of the liberties taken with the text’ of another.⁸ At the heart of Chew’s demonstration sits the revelation of Pater’s handling of Flaubert’s letters in ‘Style’. Having checked Pater’s Flaubertian quotations against the text of the first volume of the newly published Flaubert Correspondance (which Pater reviewed for the Pall Mall Gazette three months before ‘Style’ was first published), Chew finds the result ‘really astonishing’:

In the course of his detailed analysis of these quotations, Chew itemises the components of ‘an astonishing amalgam’ consisting of sentences drawn from several letters to two different recipients and derived, in reverse order, from five different sections of the book.¹⁰ Though Chew’s amazement is clear, John J. Conlon, writing several decades later, calls this ‘conflation of excerpts’ a ‘classic case of [Paterian] mis-representation’.¹¹

As well as silently altering the verbal contents and addressees of Flaubert’s letters, Pater withholds the name of the author of the preface to the Lettres de Gustave Flaubert à George Sand, which had appeared in 1884, and on which he relies for his portrait.¹² Variously referred to as ‘a sympathetic commentator’, ‘our French guide’, and ‘Flaubert’s commentator’, the mystery source is none other than Pater’s famous if rather scandalous contemporary Guy de Maupassant (‘Style’, App., 29, 36).¹³ If Pater’s bricolage with Flaubert’s letters is relatively well known, his anonymisation of Maupassant has received little attention.¹⁴ In an essay so invested in scholarship (the writer, Pater declares, is a ‘scholar writing for the scholarly’), such choices raise compositional and ethical questions (17). To what end does Pater produce such misrepresentations and partial representations, and with what consequences?

Flaubert makes his first appearance in ‘Style’ as the author of Madame Bovary, which Pater praises as ‘a composition utterly unadorned’, without ‘removable decoration’ (19). As such, it represents the realisation of Pater’s ideal of stylistic ‘[s]elf-restraint’. ‘[A] skilful economy of means, ascêsis’, he writes, ‘that too has a beauty of its own’ (17). What matters in style, ‘as Flaubert was aware’, is to banish ‘[t]he otiose, the facile, surplusage’ in favour of ‘conscious artistic structure’ (23, 21, 24).

The central section of the essay, starting a few pages later, draws on Maupassant to sketch its portrait of ‘the martyr of literary style’ (27). In his prefatory étude to the Flaubert-Sand correspondence, Maupassant recalls that ‘a single passion, the love of letters, filled his life to his last day. He loved it furiously, absolutely, uniquely’.¹⁵ Pater, following suit, refers to Flaubert’s ‘leading passion’ for literature – one to which ‘a living person could be no rival’, and one which assumed a quasi-religious place in Flaubert’s life (28). While Maupassant mentions the sanctity of Flaubert’s writing instruments (‘as sacred to him as objects of worship to a priest’), Pater depicts his art as a ‘cloistral refuge’ (18).¹⁶

Maupassant also provides the basis for Pater’s emphasis on scholarship and revision, referring to Flaubert as an ‘insatiable reader’ and ‘indefatigable researcher’, and repeatedly wondering at his ‘formidable’, ‘superhuman’, ‘beloved’, and ‘excruciating’ labour.¹⁷ It is not surprising that Pater should have felt drawn to such descriptions. He too was an author whose work was ‘always the result of much patient and unseen labour’ and, as such, ‘a travail and an agony’.¹⁸ (‘Style’ was, fittingly enough given its celebration of literary graft, an especially demanding piece of work.¹⁹ ‘Pater once told me’, wrote Arthur Symons, ‘that the most laborious task he ever set himself to accomplish was his essay on Style’.²⁰)

For Flaubert, ‘the problem of style’ entailed a thrilling and tormenting quest for ‘[t]he one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do’ (App., 29). Here, Pater paraphrases an assertion by Maupassant which he has in fact already given in translation just above. Flaubert, states Pater’s anonymised ‘French guide’, was ‘[p]ossessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it’ (29).²¹

This obsession with the selection of the ‘unique and just expression’ is linked by both Maupassant and Pater to Flaubert’s conviction that ‘the style therefore had to be, as it were, impersonal’.²² Pater quotes Maupassant’s account of Flaubert’s theory of style:

It is in the attempt to reconcile Flaubert’s commitment to impersonality with his own contrary investment in subjectivity that Pater finds himself stating that ‘If the style be the man … it will be in a real sense “impersonal”’ (38). Though presented as paraphrase, this rewriting is framed with signs of hesitancy – the opening conditional ‘If’, the distancing quotation marks around ‘impersonal’. And for good reason, for Pater’s formulation completely alters Maupassant’s meaning, proclaiming as it does that a work’s impersonality is, in a rich paradox, a factor of the personality of its style. This idea that ‘the style is the man’ (thrice repeated in ‘Style’) encapsulates precisely the common view Flaubert opposed (35, 36, 37). As Maupassant explains:

By contrast, ‘Style’ accords a defining primacy to an author’s subjective apprehension. True art, affirms Pater, consists not in the mere transcription of fact but in the rendition of an author’s ‘sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world’ (8). ‘[F]ine art’, he continues, is such in proportion to its success in communicating the author’s ‘vision within’, in delineating ‘a specific personality’ (10). Pater’s conception of style, as it emerges here and elsewhere, is, to a significant extent, circular: both the matter of art and the style deployed to convey it are ‘the man’.²⁵ Pater’s ostensible alignment with Flaubert, then, conceals a stark discrepancy.

For Max Saunders, the apparent espousal in ‘Style’ of an impersonal aesthetic positions Pater at the source of modernism:

Yet such a reading neglects to register the contortions involved in Pater’s attempt to telescope the subjective and the objective. Far from advocating the prose equivalent of the ‘elocutionary disappearance of the poet’ evoked by Mallarmé in ‘Crise de Vers’ (1897) or the ‘depersonalization’ advocated by T. S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Pater’s essay presents style as, in Ian Fletcher’s phrase, ‘a total responsive gesture of the whole personality’.²⁷ The incompatibility of impersonality with Pater’s enduring partiality for subjectivity is indicated by the change of mind discernible in his review of the second volume of Flaubert’s letters, published the following year.²⁸ There he states that

In other words, the style is the man, and it cannot be impersonal. This revision would seem to testify to Pater’s realisation that his argument about impersonality in ‘Style’ was, as Conlon puts it, ‘an aberration from the personal note in literature and art he consistently admired and found so exciting and praiseworthy in the Romanticism of any age’.³⁰

These shifting formulations do not exhaust Pater’s fascination with the ‘im/personality’ dyad (to use Saunders’ contraction).³¹ His essay on Mérimée, published two years after ‘Style’, suggests a way in which the pair might be reconciled.³² Mérimée’s ‘superb self-effacement, his impersonality’, argues Pater, is ‘itself but an effective personal trait’ (MS, 37). Thus is impersonality redeemed as a litmus test revealing the lineaments of the very authorial personality it is intended to conceal.

Why, then, to return to our overarching enquiry, does Pater obscure Maupassant’s contribution to his portrait (while acknowledging his recourse to a source), and what, more generally, are we to make of Pater’s extensive and at least partly covert practice of the second-hand? While his copying-and-pasting of Flaubert’s letters may conceivably have been motivated by the wish to set out his notion of style ‘with a skilful economy of means’, the withholding of the name of a well-known contemporary – and a fortiori that of a man of letters like himself – is perplexing (App., 17). The case is not unique. As Inman notes, ‘Pater’s errors and omissions in regard to proper names are baffling’.³³ Any explanation is necessarily conjectural, but one plausible hypothesis is that Pater was impelled by a reluctance to risk arousing disapproval: ‘[h]e had’, as Inman states, ‘learned to engage in controversy indirectly’, and ‘would occasionally omit an author’s name or omit some suggestive details to avoid being thought decadent’.³⁴ Such a theory would fit the facts of Maupassant’s reputation in England in the 1880s.

‘Style’ was written at a time when Maupassant was beginning to receive increased attention in the English periodical press. As George Worth chronicles, he ‘emerged into the literary world in the 1880s under the dual sponsorship of Zola and Flaubert’.³⁵ Maupassant was then a far more controversial figure than Flaubert. While the connection to Flaubert worked to Pater’s benefit – the trial of Madame Bovary lay more than three decades in the past and his death in 1880 had further dimmed memories of his alleged ‘offenses against morality and religion’ – the connection to Zola and the naturalists was detrimental to his standing.³⁶ An anonymous essayist writing in 1892, for example, described the naturalists as counting ‘among the most dangerous enemies that France has nourished in her bosom’, bemoaning their irredeemable ‘brutality’ and ‘putrescence’.³⁷ It was, Worth observes, extremely common for critics to oppose form and matter in their discussions of Maupassant in this period, castigating him for what they deemed to be his salacious subjects on the one hand, and praising him for his exceptional prose style on the other.³⁸ (The perceived mismatch, if Pater reflected on it, might have made Maupassant seem a less than ideal expositor of Flaubert’s theory of style, prescribing as it does a perfect accommodation of form and matter.) George Saintsbury, for instance, deplored Maupassant’s obsession with sex (‘He can write on nothing else’), but also called him ‘a man of genius’ and ‘the most really gifted writer, both in prose and verse, that has happened in France in more than twenty years’.³⁹ Henry James published a long and influential piece on Maupassant, also in the Fortnightly Review, two months later. Referring to Flaubert as Maupassant’s ‘great initiator’, he took aim at the unremitting crudeness of his subject-matter while simultaneously dubbing him ‘a master of his art’ and ‘a writer with whom it is impossible not to reckon’.⁴⁰ James’ and others’ references to Maupassant as Flaubert’s disciple make it clear that Pater’s choice to cite his French guide under cover of anonymity comes at the cost of establishing the special authority of his source – one based on a close personal relationship and years of a ‘long and hard apprenticeship of letters’ undergone at Flaubert’s hands.⁴¹ But maybe the price seemed worth paying to avoid association with an author by whom so many were powerfully repelled.

If wariness of controversy or fear of being classed a decadent prompted the erasure of Maupassant’s name from ‘Style’, it may also explain Pater’s disalignment from Flaubert in the essay’s closing peroration. The central Flaubert-focused section of ‘Style’ manages to convey strong admiration in spite of its contradictions. The final paragraph, however, introduces a new conundrum for the reader by effecting a sharp turn away from Flaubertian principles (as indeed from views expressed elsewhere in Pater’s oeuvre).⁴² Just pages earlier, ‘the martyr of literary style’ had been quoted railing against the idea that art should have a ‘moral end’, or any end other than the creation of ‘the beautiful’ (29). But Pater’s epilogue distances itself from this ‘art for art’s sake’ position by training its sights on the definition of ‘great’ rather than merely ‘good’ art (38). Where Flaubert’s dedication to style over matter was so absolute as to engender his fantasy of ‘a book about nothing … sustained only by the inner force of its style’, Pater’s conclusion stresses the importance of subject matter, and indeed right-thinking causes, to the production of ‘great’ art.⁴³ ‘Great art’, writes Pater’, will be distinguished by its ‘dignity of interests’, ‘its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it’. If it ‘be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God’ or if ‘it has something of the soul of humanity in it’, it will also be great art (38). The vague and tautological nature of these criteria (as encapsulated by the gnomic assertion that ‘great art’ must be allied to ‘great ends’) is striking. But the listing is sufficiently flavoured with Christian language (‘redemption’, ‘ennoble’, ‘fortify’, ‘our sojourn here’, ‘the glory of God’, ‘the soul of humanity’) to suggest a thoroughly orthodox understanding of the purpose of ‘great art’. Such a stance would have been anathema to Flaubert, as Pater cannot but have known – not least because it would also have been anathema to other versions of himself.⁴⁴ As René Wellek observes:

Pater’s attitudes to his sources, whether they be considered through the prism of his misquotations or failures of acknowledgement, have aroused ambivalence in even firm admirers. Chew, ultimately a defender of Pater’s borrowings, acknowledges the discomfort caused by misquotations which verge on the ‘dishonest’. ‘[H]as the critic a right to do this?’⁴⁶ he asks, at the close of his catalogue of such discoveries. Conlon, as was mentioned above, refers to Pater’s inexactitudes and omissions as ‘misrepresentations’. About the collage of Flaubert’s letters in ‘Style’ specifically, he comments that:

Inman, meanwhile, acknowledges ‘[t]he liberties that Pater took with his sources’ and the ‘evasive strategy’ he sometimes deployed ‘as a defense against misinterpretation and criticism’.⁴⁸ Others are less ambivalent. Christopher Ricks impugns Pater’s ‘inappropriate appropriatingness’ and ‘play[ing] loose’ with other authors’ words, deploring a ‘faith to one’s meaning’ which comes at the cost of ‘faithlessness to another’s meaning’.⁴⁹

For champions of Pater, the answer to the problems raised by his less than scrupulous handling of second-hand language is to take him on his own terms – the terms, set out in ‘Style’ and elsewhere, which make the artist himself the matter of his art, and make of criticism ‘a form of creative self-portraiture’.⁵⁰ The solution, in other words, involves an adjustment of the reader’s ‘horizon of expectations’, to use Jauss’ phrase.⁵¹ Thus, for Chew, ‘when we find him transposing, omitting, re-arranging, mis-ascribing, and in a few cases even apparently substituting his own for somebody else’s ideas, there is needed but a generous interpretation of what Pater conceived to be the function of criticism, namely, that it has in it something of the creative art’.⁵² For Conlon, Pater’s procedures should be understood as intentional aspects of a project to ‘make a high art of misrepresentation’.⁵³ And for Inman, too, the problem is fundamentally generic:

As much is suggested, of course, by the title of Appreciations.

It is also relevant to recall that twentieth- and twenty-first-century notions of critical writing are misplaced in the apprehension of a piece written at the contested dawn of English Studies. The institutionalisation of literary criticism to which Pater objected (wary of literature being turned into a ‘long, pedantic, mechanical discipline’⁵⁵), and the concomitant regimentation of the essay form over subsequent decades, have fostered expectations of punctilious quotation and formal citation which were, as Inman has explored, not then as entrenched as they have since become.

How, finally, does Pater’s practice of second-hand writing compare with that of modernists whose reputation is in large part founded on their deployment of a form of sustained intertextuality designed to facilitate the apprehension of literature as a realm governed by repetition? First, it is important to note that a valuation of the second-hand had been underway for some time when Pater set to work on ‘Style’. As MacFarlane has shown, ‘from the late 1850s onwards, unoriginality – understood as inventive reuse of the words of others – came increasingly to be seen as an authentic form of creativity’. At the fin-de-siècle, ‘the idea of literary originality ex nihilo came under greater pressure than ever before’, with authors such as Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson placing ‘great emphasis upon the concept of stylish reuse’.⁵⁶ Indeed, there is evidence that Pater himself regarded second-handness as a defining feature of all writing. In ‘Style’, he makes reference to the ineluctable secondariness of the literary artist’s relationship to language itself: ‘the material in which he works’, he avers, ‘is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor’s marble’ (12). The scholar-artist, in other words, operates within the realm of the déjà, working with inherited linguistic materials, meticulously chiselling them to meet particular needs. In Plato and Platonism (1893), Pater goes considerably further, articulating a strikingly post-structuralist conception of literary originality as intertextuality:

Pater’s assertion that ‘there is nothing absolutely new’ in Plato, as well as his metaphors of the ‘palimpsest’ and ‘tapestry of which the actual threads have served before’ are remarkably aligned with statements which have become emblematic of intertextual theory. Gérard Genette, for instance, entitled his study of ‘second-degree’ literature Palimpsestes. Sarah Dillon, too, following Genette, seizes on the image of the palimpsest as a figure for intertextuality. Barthes invokes a textile metaphor in referring to texts as ‘tissue[s] of quotation’.⁵⁷ With this in mind, Pater’s handling of sources can be viewed less as the sign of suspect dependence and more as a self-conscious embrace of what he, like Barthes, recognised as ‘the truth of writing, [that] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original’.⁵⁸ Viewed in such light, Pater, too, can be cast as a forerunner to twentieth-century theory. As indeed he has been: in 1976, Hillis Miller wrote of him as ‘a precursor of what is most vital in contemporary criticism’.⁵⁹

If Flaubert, in association with whose name the notion of intertextuality emerged, can be celebrated as being, in André Topia’s words, ‘among the first to have deliberately blurred the hierarchy between the original text and the secondary text’, should Pater be eligible for similar appreciation?⁶⁰ Intertextual theory’s founding axiom that ‘any text is a mosaic of quotations’ is relevant to Pater’s case in that it has the power to parry any imputation of plagiarism or overdependence by declaring ‘absorption and transformation’ to be a universal law of writing.⁶¹ Certainly, Paterians have used the term to give a neutral assessment of the density of appropriated words and ideas in his works. Pater’s ‘attitudes toward sources and techniques of using them’, comments Inman, ‘created in his works a profound intertextuality that is essential to his remarkable style’.⁶²

That being granted, major differences obtain between Pater’s intertextual writing and that of the most radically intertextual modernists. The most fundamental relates to the nature of the intention underpinning these authors’ deployment of the second-hand. Intertextuality, in Pater’s case, appears to have been incidental rather than programmatic – a means to the end of aesthetic criticism or self-portraiture (whichever one takes to have been his aim). His objective was not to highlight the fact of second-handness as a constitutive feature of all writing, but to style his borrowings in service of his own ends. By contrast, Flaubert’s and Joyce’s final works, Bouvard and Pécuchet, the Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Finnegans Wake, were assembled through the mobilisation of extremely extensive systems of intra- and intertextual writing, as these authors’ enormous manuscript archives testify.⁶³ In these works, intertextuality becomes an end as well as a means: a compositional principle in and of itself. They were, to reprise Topia’s adverbial emphasis, deliberately designed to cultivate the reader’s sense of language and literature as realms of the déjà. This insight is proclaimed in the title of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas; narratively literalised in Bouvard and Pécuchet’s decision to devote the remainder of their lives to the manual copying-out of books; and self-referentially inscribed in Finnegans Wake’s mentions of ‘piously forged palimpsests’, ‘pelagiarist pens’, ‘borrowed plumes’, and ‘quashed quotatoes’.⁶⁴ By contrast, Pater, though a ‘scissors and paste man’ (to use words Joyce once used to describe himself), and one fully aware of the part played by repetition in language and literature, appears to have been a far more discreet, if not secretive, practitioner of the second-hand, even by the standards of his own day.⁶⁵ ‘[M]uch fin‐de‐siècle writing’, writes MacFarlane, ‘was more open about its borrowings, appropriations, and renewals than any preceding literary period of the century.’⁶⁶ Against such a background, ‘Style’ stands out for its silent alterations and at best only partial openness about its sources.

Another difference, touched upon above, pertains to the idea of impersonality. Where ‘[s]ubjectivity – the self – is … the beginning, the end, and the persisting basis in all Pater’s writings’, Joyce and Flaubert picture the author as an invisible author-god.⁶⁷ Intertextual theory was shaped by this modernist intertwining of extensive citationality and authorial impersonality – defined, from the outset, as antithetical to ideas of authorial and readerly subjectivity. As Kristeva points out in the essay in which the concept was first named, ‘[t]he notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity’.⁶⁸ And as Barthes puts it in ‘The Death of the Author’, ‘[w]riting is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost’.⁶⁹

To these discrepancies of purpose and aesthetic disposition can be added discrepancies of scale. The sheer feats of endurance involved in the deployment of Flaubert’s and Joyce’s intertexualities are arresting. Flaubert claimed to have read 15,000 books in preparation for the writing of Bouvard et Pécuchet; 3,848 pages of notes survive to testify to this labour. Joyce amassed 25,000 pages of manuscript material – many of them filled with reading notes – over the seventeen-year-long genesis of Finnegans Wake.⁷⁰ Though Flaubertian critics have wondered whether Flaubert ‘falsif[ies] the character of what he quotes’, the distortions and decontextualisations Joyce wrought on his borrowings are both far more obvious (altering the very make-up of words as his portmanteaus do) and far more numerous – so numerous, indeed, as to have prompted speculation that every single word in the Wake may be traceable to a source.⁷¹ Moreover, the effects of Pater’s derivations on the one hand, and Flaubert’s and Joyce’s on the other, are sharply distinct, for reasons relating to genre. Whatever the relative freedom of nineteenth-century essayists to gloss over their debts and ‘misrepresentations’, and whatever Pater’s ambition to ‘dissolve the critical and creative acts into one another’, expectations of careful quotation and faithful translation are nonetheless greater in the reading of discursive prose than in the encounter with that fastest-evolving and ‘most fluid of genres’, the novel; greater, too, in the experience of a personal, recognisable style than in the immersion in the kind of impersonal, unstyled textuality produced by Joyce in Finnegans Wake.⁷²

If the extremity of such writing methods paved the way for the emergence of intertextual theory, that theory has in turn given rise to new ways of experiencing literary texts – ways driven not by censoriousness but by a neutral acceptance of the second-handness of all writing. If Pater’s silences about his sources suggest a high degree of caution (about courting controversy and owning up to his debts and manipulations), it is also possible to see the idiosyncrasy of his approach as a sign of the poise of one ‘bold enough to think himself an artist to whom interfering rules of the antiquarian or the scholar did not apply’.⁷³ In that disposition, at least, he and his modernist successors are aligned. ‘[A] brilliant original who did not originate’,⁷⁴ he had the confidence to know that styling the second-hand was art enough.