Pater Repatriated

...Yet this may have been the makingof him...

...So experience means living vicariously in the great works of art...

...He looked at an object under the sign of pleasure, not of truth...

...He had wanted to become a clergyman, saying it would be fun to do so without believing a word of Christian doctrine...

...He finds especially disastrous the constraints of democracy, religion, political correctness...

...to others, a mere purveyor of purple prose...

...that "it makes more sense to assume that the particular mot, when found, is juste to the other words in its vicinity rather than to the object in the world waiting to be named and summoned...

...Art for art's sake as a critical concept does not necessarily presuppose the life-style of Gautier or Baudelaire, Rossetti or Wilde...

...In his monograph on Pater, the poet Edward Thomas speaks condescendingly of his subject's criticism as "a kind of higher philately," and his "falsetto delicacy...

...His friends suggested a mustache, and Walter grew a big, bushy one, providing him, in William Gaunt's words, "with a distinct character not his own...

...On his first trip to Italy, "he divined from Renaissance paintings the imagery of a richer, more daring sense of life than any to be seen in Oxford...

...Though I got a good grade, I remember Tillotson saying to me afterward that I would be better off outside acade-mia, as a critic on the order of Theophile Gautier...

...the title he gave an early essay, "Diaphaneite," with that absurdly wrong grave accent at the end...

...I adduce all this to suggest that, as many have discerned, life and work in Pater are particularly closely connected...

...How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy...

...Pater is where those ladders start...

...His mild homosexual voyeurism is evoked by Richard Ellmann in a footnote to his Golden Codgers citing Pater's preference for "the activities of what he called in italics the palaestra"—in other words, watching the young men of Oxford in their athletic pursuits...

...He began to associate the Italian Renaissance with freedom, sensuous experience, 'the exercise of sight and touch' which he attributed tohis master in these fulfillments, Winckelmann...

...Initially published as a review of William Morris' poetry, it was timorously toned down in The Renaissance, then dropped altogether, and readmitted in the last revised edition in watered-down form...

...What would people think if they saw you?' He got up with a white strained face...

...Thus a book-length study by the distinguished scholar-critic Denis Donoghue is more than welcome...

...Donoghue perceives "the experience of a mind concentrated upon itself...

...Finally, in The Force of Poetry (whose findings about Pater Donoghue both praises and, for their carping tone, reprehends), Christopher Ricks notes in Pater "a greed for fineness...

...In the process, Donoghue outlines key aspects of Pater's modus operandi: "His master was Longinus...

...Fourth, "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliance of their gifts some tragic dividing of their ways is, in this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening...

...The tyranny, though, is not substantiated by anecdote...

...Unfortunately, Pater got scared of his own daring and ruined it by making "the wretched concession of saying that good art depends on its form, but great art depends on its matter...

...Not surprisingly, those three ingredients are the hallmarks of Pater's criticism, wherein strange and beautiful are twin terms...

...But Donoghue is correct in deploring that Pater "apparently concerned with style...

...How are we to see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses...

...Donoghue may dismiss Jackson's claims of a close friendship a little too cavalierly...

...Donoghue is helpful in tracing for us the many emendations and omissions Pater made in his works, and especially in this "Conclusion...

...The touch of opacity here may stem from compromise...

...Next: "Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass...

...That ties in with Pater's personal attitude cited in William Gaunt's The Aesthetic Adventure: "He could not bear ugly people...

...It can stem as readily from Pater's exhibiting "in a manner peculiar to himself, the stigmata of isolation," as Frank Kermode puts it in Romantic Image...

...When I told him I planned a term paper on Walter Pater, he was mildly taken aback...

...and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary...

...But, as Wilde failed to realize, life can influence one's work antithetically as easily as directly...

...for a stylite atop his column, action would be suicidal...

...but he remained himself a homely dog...

...Pater's generally seem to be so, too...

...Those books are Studies in the Histoid of the Renaissance and Marius the Epicurean...

...Variegated, dramatic, vital, energy, burn, flame, ecstasy—all terms that seem singularly inappropriate to Pater and his life of "luke-warm vitality," as Edmund Gosse, who knew him, described it...

...like other Paterian fictions, this one ultimately fails because Pater "thinks a character may be sustained by the ideas he or she is given to hold...

...He formulated a number of esthetic doctrines to which Oscar Wilde was to give wider popularity...

...and refined it, sending it toward some higher form of itself...

...that is how the Mona Lisa, for instance, gets away from Leonardo and becomes Pater's property, to do with as he pleases...

...Graham Hough observes that "whatever it may be to burn with a hard gemlike flame, it is something that takes place at a rather low temperature...

...Still, as Donoghue keeps reminding us, Victorian readers nevertheless managed to take umbrage at much even in Pater's toned-down writings, and T. S. Eliot opined that Pater's "view of art...

...Walter Horatio Pater's life (1839-94) is indeed almost adequately summed up in IVebster s New World Companion to English and American Literature: "Pater, Walter...

...Donoghue further points out that in the semiautobiographical story "The Child in the House" in Miscellaneous Studies, Pater keeps insisting on "a kind of tyranny of the senses" over the child, on the irresistible appeal of beauty...

...If Pater's accomplishment is mostly "the production of sentences," that does not bother Donoghue: "Style is nearly all that the literature from Pater to [Wallace] Stevens claims to achieve...

...Its subtitle...

...the principle of all the higher morality," a claim Donoghue considers outrageous: "Imagine what Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa would say to it...

...I was banished to the sybaritic Siberia of literary journalism from the higher discipline of scholarship...

...To bum always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life...

...Almost throughout Pater's work we see morality creeping back in on the brave / 'art pour I 'art stance, even in the famous Mona Lisa passage, whose lineage derives from both Leda the pagan and Saint Anne the moral Christian...

...We should read literature in the spirit in which we enter a concert hall...

...Walk-ing one summer evening in the Christ Church meadows," Gaunt relates...

...The author's reasoning is backed up by compelling stylistic analysis, and one may agree that "these techniques of delay in Pater's sentences mark his quiet refusal to live by the rhythms of public life, commerce, and technology...

...There are minor blemishes...

...It is the fault of nature in England that she runs too much to excess...

...It is also a keystone of the Paterian approach to art: not really connoisseurship, not really history, and certainly not technical knowledge...

...In a similar vein, Tillotson writes in Criticism and the Nineteenth Century of Pater's "enclosing himself in a sort of solemn effeminacy...

...That is Pater's self-description in pursuit of understanding the genius of various artists, writers and thinkers...

...Take away the object and there remain all the splendors of Pater...

...Pater has always seemed infra dig to the Olympians...

...Though Donoghue does not question the misused "irresponsible" for unresponsible, he does take issue with Eliot's charge...

...That may have been—yes—Theophile Gautier, followed closely by Baudelaire...

...There will be time for those to assert themselves...

...Still, I would like to think that there was some truth to it, and that on some occasions at least the flame in Pater burned gemlike and hard...

...Pater was more distressed by his ugliness than by his loss of faith...

...Be that as it may, in most minds Pater and Wilde were the double whammy of esthetic criticism...

...And while we are on this blind spot, what about another...

...Actually, the phrase comes from a passage about Leonardo in Pater's The Renaissance: "A lover of strange souls may still analyze for himself the impression made on him by...

...Pater also noted about "Lady Lisa" that "the eyelids are a little weary" and that her beauty, "wrought from within," is made up of "strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions...

...Bowra relates: "When Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig came back in 1919 as the commander-in-chief of a victorious army to his old college of Brasenose, he asked the Principal if hisoldtutorwas still alive, andadded that he was a man called Pater...

...his protege, the poet Lionel Johnson, "an ugly pig...

...But I fail to see why we should buy our eschatology from either Pater or Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer...

...Louis Auchincloss, in The Style Is the Man, quotes Thomas Wright's admittedly unreliable biography to the effect that Pater was a frequent visitor at Camberwell, where a rich Oxford scholar, Richard C. Jackson, owned a large estate with a private chapel...

...Nevertheless, Pater's reputation rests not so much on his body of work as on two books, more specifically on two chapters in one of them...

...I salute his brave declaration that the literature he most loves "has come from Baudelaire, Pater, Mallarme rather than from Newman, Arnold, and Ruskin"—Tillotson's boys...

...I cried: 'You must not, you really must not...

...In his biography of Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris relates how Oscar told him of sitting on an Oxford bench under some trees with his master, and talking so brilliantly that "Pater—the stiff, quiet, silent Pater?suddenly slipped from his seat and knelt down by me and kissed my hand...

...This was the unconscious Paterian critical program, very different from Ruskin's moralizing approach or Arnold's muscularly cultural one...

...It also meant, as Donoghue notes, "suffering fools gladly enough if they were handsome," and being "always interested in meeting homosexuals, but toward other people remaining distant...

...As Donoghue reports...

...Pater was the apogee of what has become known as "esthetic criticism," even ifhe was not its inventor...

...Sir Maurice Bowra (in his useful essay in Inspiration and Poetry) quotes Paul Bourget's descrip-tion of Pater as "a friend of Circe transformed into a hound...

...Every important dictionary of quotations offers Pater's celebrated homage to the Mona Lisa, with her "beauty into which the soul with all its maladies has passed...

...The point is rather to evoke in author and reader, or character and reader, an equivalent state of mind...

...To some he was a pale, gutless academic...

...Donoghue's last page is a tribute not only to Pater but also to what, on one of the opening pages, he termed "the Pater-esque, a certain tone, a style...

...it has nothing to do with green carnations and loves that dare not speak their names...

...and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants...

...Donoghue also takes us on a tour of his subject's oeuvre...

...Such juggling occurs as well in the essay on Winckelmann, where words one would use for lack, "colorless, unclassified, indifference, naive, white, characterless, immaculate," are in Pater"transvalued [into] words for abundance...

...But he goes on to list the opposite dangers: Arnold's notion of the critic as an atheist priest, a moral ideologue...

...But there is also a downright pernickety sensitivity...

...was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Queen's College, Oxford, and became a fellow of Brasenose...

...Arnold or Ruskin perhaps, but Pater...

...Some are typos, such as, most funnily, "the revolt of Jupiter" for Lucifer...

...Or Pater may simply be "unwilling to let a noun go till he has revised it...

...it must not be deemed to count for nothing...

...The one thing Pater is determined not to do," Donoghue says, "is to go directly from subject through verb to object...

...Certain flowers gave him a pain, and he could not bear to look at the Swiss lakes, those pots of blue paint, as he called them...

...This is difficult, because literature is verbal and shares with other forms of discourse a semantic capacity...

...ultimately, perhaps, on a few famous quotations...

...The Renaissance, a collection of essays, largely on painters, but on a few dragged-in Pater favorites as well, such as the 18th-century German classical scholar and homosexual Winckelmann...

...but learned and charming, too...

...His fellow Renaissance scholar John Addington Symonds found him "well dressed and ghastly...

...Its two most influential chapters are the essay on Leonardo and the famous "Conclusion...

...But there are also the genuine inelegancies, e.g...

...He is right to describe certain Pater sentences "as if set to Delius' music...

...He derived his entire sensuous and intellectual life from the experiences that gave him this pleasure...

...Consider now four famous quotations in the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance...

...Reviewed by John Simon AS A GRADUATE STUDENT at Harvard, I took a seminar in Victorian Criticism taught by an eminent visiting professor from the University of London, Geoffrey Tillotson...

...The hero of his novel of Aurelian Rome, Marius the Epicurean, is similarly drawn to Christianity and dies among ministering Christians, but is not converted...

...Well, there is just a chance that it was not all voyeurism...

...Some blame him for the excesses of his disciple Oscar Wilde, others for playing it too close to the chest and not coming out of the closet...

...like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave...

...That is the voice of a later Tillotson, who does not hold with Christopher Ricks that "Arnold's little finger is worth Pater's whole hand of little fingers...

...The answer is suggested by a footnote of Tillotson's, "The image from music, 'modulated in such delicate unison.' is nonsense...

...This is apt: Pater was always looking for the magically beautiful in art, literature, philosophy, and—if sidelong glances count—religion...

...Leonardo's genius...

...There are two more substantial wants...

...Pater exclaimed, "I am partial to the meadowsweet but on an evening like this there is too much of it...

...And in the relevant chapters of Graham Hough's The Last Romantics, we read, "It is not only Mona Lisa's eyelids that are a little weary...

...It is a bit peculiar for Donoghue to perceive Pater's view of art as having "no moral design upon us...

...In England, conventional wisdom credits the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne as significant forerunners, but in The Ringers in the Tower Harold Bloom proposes as initiator Arthur Henry Hallam...

...propagated some confusion between art and life which is not wholly irresponsible for some untidy lives...

...doesn't quote so much as a line of verse or a sentence of prose to illustrate his argument...

...not for nothing did Yeats start his Oxford Book of Modern Verse with the entire passage broken up into free verse...

...Although it was not to be, he became a lifelong adherent of the formalities of Christianity while disowning its essence...

...He tells us "Pater put all his trust in consciousness because he couldn't think of anything better to do with his time, but when he saw young men bathing or playing cricket, he could not be so sure that he had made the right choice...

...Lover of Strange Souls, sounds vaguely sensational: Are we going to be treated to strange love affairs with deviant personages...

...In his subdued way...

...I had to,' he muttered, glancing about him fearfully, 'I had to—once...

...I wish Donoghue had addressed the issue raised by Tillotson: "Pater liked pictures not as they were left by the artist, but as they had survived...

...Pater just can't win...

...Marius is, in theory at least, anovel...

...And Donoghue asserts that none of these matters of style is clarified by Pater's attention to it in the essay on "Style," and that Pater's theory of language as a correspondence between word and thing denoted is useless...

...And then this noble conclusion, scarcely less fine than Pater's celebrated one: "Meanwhile we have literature, and the best way of reading it is by putting in parentheses, for the duration of the reading, the claims the world makes upon us...

...I am sorry to hear that,' replied Haig.' I modeled my prose-style on his.'" Lastly, Donoghue may have overlooked something...

...His friends were good-looking...

...It is its evocative power that makes a word juste: accurate, proper, right...

...But the best hope of practicing it is by showing esthetic values—form, style, tone, pleasure, exercised inachieved conditions of freedom—as fundamental to the literature we care about, carry around with us, and hear whenever silence allows us to hear...

...The result was what Bowra accurately styles "the look of a retired major...

...This from someone upon whose death Wilde asked, "Was he ever alive...

...But it is curious that neither he nor anyone else I have read, despite having noted Pater's second-most quoted pronouncement, "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music," has stopped to wonder why Pater never wrote anything about music...

...Third: "A counted number of pulses is given to us only of a variegated, dramatic life...

...I would give 10 years of my life to be handsome," he said...

...The intention of the "exact word" is not to be a perfect sensuous equivalent of the object named, yet neither is it a word that merely fits in snugly with the surrounding words...

...It is as a bow to moralistic convention, too, that Pater "tries to resolve the privileging of body over mind by calling body, in the end, the bodily soul...

...Again: "Pater'ssentences ask to be read as if they wanted to be looked at, not merely to be understood...

...Art as sublimation, self-protection, surrogate experience, and escape...

...He was not much of a scholar, having taken only seconds, but at Brasenose his familiarity with German philosophy constituted adequate credentials...

...Donoghue is right to observe about Pater's reference to "brilliant sins and exquisite amusements" that "we are reading against the grain of this style if we ask what makes certain sins brilliant, certain amusements exquisite...

...Tillotson remarks that "we read him as we read Arnold, for his own sake rather than for the sake of understanding his object...

...Such a princess-on-a-pea posture may explain the over-daintiness of Pater's prose style...

...He appreciates the risks of Estheti-cism: triviality, exquisiteness, solipsism...

...It is hard to say what a poetic sense of literature entails...

...This, you will agree, is closer to prose poetry than to criticism...

...And he is good at showing the sundry devices Pater employs to delay the closure of a sentence, for which Donoghue offers diverse explanations...

...His looks heightened a timidity that made him avoid the risks of active homosexuality and find solace in total immersion in the arts, where he could indulge at least some of his emotional needs...

...and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands...

...First: "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end...

...True, Richard Ellmann in his Oscar Wilde quotes Wilde's remark to the painter Rick-etts, "Poor dear Pater has lived to disprove everything he has written...

...So are similar scattered references to music, about which Pater evidently knew nothing...

...There are numerous testimonials to Pater's unsightliness: He is "far from being as beautiful as his prose" was how Henry James put it...

...Redundant repetition, for example, may be "making delay a sign of scruple...

...High-minded words, even if those ladders seem to me to dangle a bit...

...Pater's chief concern was his pleasure in feeling alive...

...and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her...

...In turn...

...Second, it would have been of interest to show how even such a nonesthetic figure as "Butcher" Haig, as he was known for the men he needlessly sacrificed in World War I, was influenced by Pater...

...He liked them, that is, 'embrowned.' His taste, therefore, defeated what we can go so far as to call his adequate knowledge of the facts...

...Here, however, Donoghue does not seem to read Pater—or Flaubert, whom Pater is echoing—correctly...

...That certainly fits in with Pater's asserting "the end of life is not action but contemplation...

...not Aristotle...

...Donoghue quotes Henry James saying that Pater "has a phosphorescence, not a flame...

...She is older than the rocks among which she sits...

...what is the particular character of the artist such that he chose," and "Arnold's sense of Greek culture proved immensely persuasive and was only defeated in the long run, like much else besides...

...Mostly he saw in those paintings an ideal human image, the love of a man for a beautiful boy...

...But "much as he claimed that all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music, his own aspired toward the condition of tapestry...

...I am afraid that he died in 1894,' said the Principal...

...The latter, according to Donoghue, "has continued to have a shadowy life as a classic few feel themselves stirred to read...

...There "Pater was able to wear 'his heart upon his sleeve.' Jackson, handsome, young and devout, clad in the black garb of Augustine canons and calling himself 'Brother a Becket,' provided Pater, according to Wright, not only with the great love of his life but with the model for Marius the Epicurean...

...It is a criticism all impressionism, free association and cadenced prose, and it sticks in the memory...

...Surely it depends on the person: for a combat infantryman, contemplation is hardly the thing...

...This is the key to Pater's famous "antino-mian" attitude...

...Harris, who was himself quite a liar, warns his readers "that this whole incident is ripened and set in a higher key of thought by the fact that Oscar told it more than 10 years after it happened...