Download Harold Bloom, Water Pater. The Intoxication of Belatedness

Water Pater: The Intoxication of Belatedness
Author(s): Harold Bloom
Source: Yale French Studies, No. 50, Intoxication and Literature (1974), pp. 163-189
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Harold Bloom
Water Pater: The Intoxication of Belatedness
....
What is this song or picture, this
...
Why should a poem not change in
engagingpersonalitypresentedin life or in a
book, to me? What effectdoes it reallyproduce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and
if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How
is my nature modifiedby its presence,and
under its influence?
PATER ("Preface" to The Renaissance)
sense whenthereis a fluctuation
of the whole
of appearance? Or why should it not change
when we realize that the indifferentexperienceof life is the unique experience,the
item of ecstasywhich we have been isolating
and reservingfor another time and place,
loftierand more secluded.
STEVENS ("Two or Three Ideas")
1 "Aesthetic" Criticism
Pater is a great criticof a kind common enough in the nineteenth
century-Coleridge,Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey,above all Ruskinbut scarcely to be found in the twentieth.Difficultto define,this
sort of criticpossesses one salient characteristic.His value inheres
neitherin his accuracy at the direct interpretation
of meaning in
textsnor in his judgmentsof relativeeminenceof worksand authors.
Rather,he gives us a vision of art throughhis own unique sensibility, and so his own writings obscure the supposed distinction
between criticismand creation."Supposed," because who can convince us of that distinction?To adapt Shelley'sidea of the relation
between poetryand the universe,let us say that criticismcreates
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the poem anew, afterthe poem has been annihilatedin our minds
by the recurrenceof impressionsblunted by reiteration.Ruskin's
or Pater's criticismtends to create anew not so much a particular
work of art but rather the preciselyappropriateconsciousness of
the perceptivereader or viewer. This does not mean that these
greatcriticsare monumentsto the AffectiveFallacy,or that literary
historianswith formalisttendenciesare justifiedin namingRuskin
and Pater as critical Impressionists.Oscar Wilde, who brilliantly
vulgarizedboth his primeprecursors,insistedthattheirworktreated
for a new creation."
"the work of art simply as a starting-point
Matthew Arnold had asserted that the "aim of criticismis to see
the object as in itself it really is." A few years later, implicitly
invokingRuskin against Arnold, Pater slyly added that "the first
step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's
impressionas it reallyis, to discriminateit, to realise it distinctly."
Wilde, attemptingto completehis master,charminglyamended this
to the grand statementthat "the primaryaim of the critic is to
see the object as in itself it reallyis not." Between Arnold's selfdeception and Wilde's wit comes Pater's hesitant and skeptical
emphasis upon a peculiar kind of vision, with which he identifies
all aesthetic experience.
We owe to Pater our characteristicmodern use of "aesthetic,"
for he emancipatedthe word fromits bondage to philosophy,both
when he spoke of the "aesthetic critic" in his "Preface" to The
Renaissance,and whenhe named the workof Morrisand Rossettias
the "aestheticpoetry"in Appreciations.Vulgarizedagain by his ebullient disciple Wilde, and by the parodies of Wilde as Bunthornein
Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and of Pater himselfas Mr. Rose
in W. H. Mallock's The New Republic, Pater had to endure the
debasement of "aesthete" as a term,and we endure it still. Pater
meant us always to rememberwhat mostlywe have forgotten:that
"aesthete" is from the Greek aisthetes, "one who perceives." So
the "aestheticcritic"is simplythe perceptivecritic,or literarycritic
proper,and "aestheticpoetry"is preciselythe contemporary
poetry
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that is most perceptive,that is, in one's judgment most truly
poetry.
Pater's key terms as a critic are "perception"and "sensation,"
which is response to perception."Vision" for Pater, as for Blake,
is a synonymfor Coleridge's or Wordsworth's"Imagination,"and
Pater furtheremulatedBlake by questingafterthe "spiritualform"'
of phenomenaas against"corporealform."This is the "form"that:
"Every moment... grows perfectin hand or face," according to
the almost preternaturally
eloquent "Conclusion" to The Renaissance. In the marvelous "Postscript" on "Romanticism" to Appreciations,Pater traces the genesis of form:
who startwith an original,untried
... there are the born romanticists,
matter, still in fusion; who conceive this vividly,and hold by it as the
essence of their work; who, by the very vividnessand heat of their conception,purge away, sooner or later, all that is not organicallyappropriate
to it, till the whole effectadjusts itself in clear, orderly,proportionate
form; which form,after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn.
Vividness and heat purge away fromthe Romantic idea all that
is not form,and formis the reward of the aesthete or perceptive
man, if he has the strengthto persistin his purgation."In the end,
the aesthetic is completelycrushed and destroyedby the inability
of the observerwho has himselfbeen crushed to have any feeling
for it left." That dark observationis by Wallace Stevens, an heir
(unwilling)of Pater's aestheticism.A more accurate observation
of the aesthete'sdefeatcomes fromas greatan heir,more conscious
and willing,who attributedto Pater's influencehis poetic generation's doomed attempt "to walk upon a rope, tightlystretched
throughserene air." Yeats neverthelessgot across to the otherside
of the Nineties, and carried Pater alive into our centuryin Per
Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) and A Vision (1925, 1937). Pater's
vision of formculminatesin Yeat's Phase 15: "Now contemplation
and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every beloved
image has bodily form,and everybodily formis loved." Pater, for
whom the attained formdemanded purgation,an askesis (to which
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I shall return),hesitantlyheld back fromthis Yeatsian version of
a High Romantic Absolute.
To know Pater, and to apprehend his influencenot only on
Stevens and Yeats, but on Joyce,Eliot, Pound and many other
writersof our century,we need to place Pater in his Oedipal
contextin the culturalsituationof his own time. The pleasures of
reading Pater are intense, to me, but the importance of Pater
transcendsthose pleasures, and finallyis quite out of proportion
to Pater's literaryachievement,fairlylarge as that was. Pater is the
heir of a traditionalready too wealthyto have required much extensionor variationwhen it reached him. He revisedthat tradition,
turningthe Victorian continuationof High Romanticisminto the
Late Romanticismor "Decadence" that prolonged itself as what
variouslymight be called Modernism,Post-Romanticismor, selfthe art of Pound's Vortex. Though
deceivingly,anti-Romanticism,
Pater compares oddly, perhaps not wholly adequately, with the
great Victorian prose prophets, he did what Carlyle, Ruskin,
Newman, Arnold could not do: he fatheredthe future.Wistful
and elaborately reserved, renouncingeven his own strength,he
became the most widely diffused(though more and more hidden)
literaryinfluenceof the laternineteenthupon the twentiethcentury.
In its diffusion,particularlyin America,the Paterian influencewas
similarelementsin Nietzscheand Emerson,
assimilatedto strikingly
a process as indubitableas it is still largelyunstudied.When Yeats
proclaimed the "profane perfection of mankind" or Pound or
Stevens their images of the poet as a crystalman they combined
Pater withNietzscheand Emerson(both of whomhe seems to have
neglected)."Justtake one step farther,"Nietzsche urged,and "love
yourselfthroughGrace; then you are no longer in need of your
God, and the whole drama of fall and redemptionis acted out in
yourself.""In the highestmoments,we are a vision," is the antinomian counsel of Emerson. Pater's firstessay, "Diaphaneite," read
to an Oxford literarygroup in 1864, presented the artist as a
perfection,an
transparentor crystal image of more-than-human
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Apollonian hero. How often, in Modern poetry,we have heard
these strains mingled,until by now our latest poets alternately
intoxicateand eradicatethemselvesin the inhumaneffortthatmight
sustain a vision so exalted.Pater,thougha theoristof the Dionysian,
evaded the heroic vitalismof a Nietzsche or the quasi-divineselfreliance of an Emerson, declining to present himself either as
prophetor as orator.Yet his baroque meditationsupon art,hieratic
and subdued, touch as firmlyupon the ruinous strengthof our
major Modern poets as any other precursorof our sensibilitydoes.
2 PrivilegedMoments
Pater's context begins with his only begetter,Ruskin, whose
effectcan be read, frequentlythroughnegation,throughoutPaters
work.Believing,as he says in "Style,"that imaginativeprose largely
took the place of poetry in the modern world, Pater necessarily
assumed, consciously I think, the characteristicmalady of postEnlightenmentpoetry, the new creator's anxiety-of-influence
in
regard to his precursor's priority,which becomes a menacing
spiritualauthority,in a directtransferencefromthe natural to the
imaginativeworld.Ruskin,despitehis irrelevantmania forferocious
moralizing,is the major "aesthetic critic,"in Pater's sense, of the
nineteenthcentury.Stylistically,Pater owed more to Swinburne,
but stance ratherthan style is the crucial indebtednessof a poet
or imaginativeprose writer.This is Swinburne,sounds like Pater,
yet menaced him not at all:
All mysteriesof good and evil, all wonders of life and death, lie in
their hands or at their feet. They have known the causes of things,and
are not too happy.The fatal labour of the world,the clamourand hunger
of the open-mouthedall-summoning
grave,all fearsand hopes of ephemeral
men, are indeed made subject to them, and troddenby them underfoot;
but the sorrowand strangenessof thingsare not lessened because to one
or two their secret springshave been laid bare and the courses of their
tides made known; refluentevil and good, alternate grief and joy, life
inextricablefrom death, change inevitableand insuperablefate.
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Swinburneis speakingof Michelangelo,Aeschylus,Shakespeare;
mastersof the Sublime,whose masterydoes not lessen "sorrowand
strangeness."The accent here becomes Pater's (Cecil Lang surmises
that Gautier'sprose is behind Swinburne's,and Gautieralso affected
the early Pater) but the attitude,superficiallyakin to Pater's, is
profoundlyalien to the Epicurean visionary.Swinburnebroods on
knowledgeand powerlessness,but Pater cared onlyabout perception,
about seeing again what Michelangelo,Aeschylus,Shakespearesaw.
Ruskin's Biblical style was no burden to the Hellenizing Pater,
but Ruskin's criticalstance was at once initial release yet ultimate
burden to his disciple.For this is Pater's Gospel, but it is Ruskin's
manifesto: "...the greatestthing a human soul ever does in this
world is to see something,and tell what it saw in a plain way.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,but thousands
can thinkfor one who can see. To see clearly is poetry,prophecy
and religionall in one." Pater was not concerned to tell what he
saw in a plain way, but he was kindledby this exaltationof seeing.
Ruskin himself,thoughuniquelyintenseas a prophetof the eye,
belonged to the Spirit of the Age in his emphasis, as Pater well
knew. The primal source of later Romantic seeing in England was
Wordsworth,who feared the tyrannyof the eye, yet who handed
on to his disciples not his fear of the visual, nor (until much later)
his Sublimevisionarysense, but his programforrenovationthrough
renewed encounterswith visible nature. Carlyle, a necessary link
between Wordsworthand Ruskin, equated the heroismof the poet
with "the seeing eye." But a trouble, already always present in
Wordsworthand Coleridge, developed fullyin Ruskin's broodings
upon vision. Modern Painters III (1856) distinguishes: "the differencebetweenthe ordinary,proper,and true appearancesof things
or false appearances, when we are
to us; and the extraordinary,
under the influenceof emotion,or contemplativefancy; false appearances,I say, as being entirelyunconnectedwith any real power
or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us." This
imputationof life to the object-worldRuskin called the "pathetic
fallacy"and judged as "a falsenessin all our impressionsof external
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things."The greatestorder of poets, the "Creative" (Shakespeare,
Homer, Dante), Ruskin declared freeof the patheticfallacy,finding
it endemic in the second order of poets, the "Reflectiveor Perceptive" (Wordsworth,Keats, Tennyson). Himself a thoroughWordsworthian,Ruskin did not mean to deprecate his Reflective (or
Romantic) grouping,but ratherto indicate its necessarylimitation.
Like Pater afterhim, Ruskin was haunted throughouthis life and
writingsby Wordsworth's"Intimations"Ode, which objectifiedfor
both critics their terriblesense of bereavement,of estrangement
fromthe imaginativepowers theypossessed (or believed themselves
to have possessed) as children.Both Ruskin and Pater began as
Wordsworthianpoets, and turned to imaginativeprose partlybecause of the anxiety-of-influence
induced in them by Wordsworth.
Ruskin's formulationof the patheticfallacyproteststhe human
loss involved in Wordsworth'scompensatoryimagination.As such,
Ruskin's critique prophesiesthe wintervision of Wallace Stevens,
from "The Snow Man" throughto "The Course of a Particular."
When Stevens reduces to what he calls the First Idea, he returns
to "the ordinary,proper,and true appearancesof thingsto us," but
then finds it dehumanizingto live only with these appearances.
So the later Ruskin found also, in his own elaborate mythicizings
in Sesame and Lilies and related books, and in the Wordsworthian
autobiographyPraeterita,that closed his work. What Wordsworth
called "spots of time," periods of particularsplendor or privileged
momentstestifyingto the mind's power over the eye, Ruskin had
turned from earlier, as being dubious triumphsof the pathetic
fallacy.Pater, who subvertedRuskin by going back to their common ancestor, Wordsworth,may be said to have founded his
criticismupon privilegedmoments of vision, or "epiphanies" as
Joyce's Stephen, another Paterian disciple, was to term them.
The "epiphany,"forus, has been much reduced,yet stillprevails
as our poets' starting-point
for movingfromsensation to mastery,
or at least to self-acceptance:
Perhaps there are times of inherentexcellence,
...............................................................
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Perhaps there are momentsof awakening,
Extreme,fortuitous,personal, in which
We more than awaken....
But Stevens'sgood moments,as here in Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction, have receded even from the modifiedWordsworthianism.
that Pater offeredas privilegedmoments,or patheticfallaciesraised
to triumphsof perception.For Ruskin's "Perceptive" poets are
Pater's "Aesthetic" poets, not a second order but the only poets
possible in the universe of death, the Romantic world we have
come to inhabit.Joyce'sStephen,recordingepiphaniesas "the most
delicate and evanescentof moments,"is recollectingPater's difficult
ecstasy that flaresforth"forthat momentonly." The neo-orthodox,
fromHopkins throughEliot to Auden, vainlyattemptedto restore
Pater's "moments" to the religioussphere,yet gave us only what
Eliot insisted his poetrywould not give, instances of "the intense
moment/ Isolated, with no beforeand after,"the actual art (such
as it is) of Four Quartetseven as it was of The Waste Land. Pater
remainsthe most honest recorderof epiphanies,by askingso little
of them, as here in the essay on the poet JoachimDu Bellay in
The Renaissance:
a trivialthing,a weathervane,a windmill,
A sudden light transfigures
a winnowingflail,the dust in the barn door; a moment-and the thinghas
vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a
longingthat the accident may happen again.
"He had studied the nostalgias,"like his descendantin Stevens'
more qualifiedvision,and he did not pretendwe could be renovated
by happy accidents. Yet he offereda program more genuinely
purgativethan High Romanticismhad ventured:
... paintingand poetry... can accomplishtheir functionin the choice
and developmentof some special situation,whichliftsor glorifiesa character, in itself not poetical. To realise this situation,to define,in a chill
and emptyatmosphere,the focus where rays, in themselvespale and impotent,unite and begin to burn...
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This, from the early essay on "Winckelmann,"presents the
embryo of a Paterian epiphany.Here is such an epiphany at its
most central,in the crucial chapter,"The Will as Vision," of Marius
the Epicurean:
Throughsome accident to the trappingsof his horse at the inn where
he rested,Marius had an unexpecteddelay. He sat down in an olive garden,
and, all around him and withinstill turningto reverie.... A bird came and
sang among the wattled hedgeroses: an animal feeding crept nearer:
the child who kept it was gazing quietly: and the scene and the hours
still conspiring,he passed from that mere fantasyof a self not himself,
beside him in his coming and going,to those divinationsof a living and
companionablespirit at work in all things....
In this peculiar and privilegedhour, his bodily frame,as he could recognize, althoughjust then, in the whole sum of its capacities,so entirely
possessed by him-Nay! actually his very self-was yet determinedby a
farreachingsystemof materialforcesexternalto it.... And mightnot the
intellectualframealso, still more intimatelyhimselfas in truthit was, after
the analogy of the bodily life, be a momentonly, an impulse or series of
impulses,a single process... ? How oftenhad the thoughtof theirbrevity
spoiled for him the most natural pleasures of life... -To-day at least, in
the peculiar clearness of one privilegedhour, he seemed to have apprehended... an abiding place....
Himself-his sensationsand ideas-never fell again preciselyinto focus
as on that day, yet he was the richerby its experience... It gave him a
definitelyascertained measure of his moral or intellectualneed, of the
demand his soul must make upon the powers,whatsoeverthey mightbe,
which had broughthim, as he was, into the world at all...
All of Pater is in this passage. Wordsworthlamented the loss
of an earlier glory,ultimatelybecause such glorywas equal to an
actual sense of immortality.He celebrated "spots of time," not
because they restored that saving sense, but in the hope they
testifiedto his spirit'sstrengthover a phenomenalworld of decay,
and so modestlyhinted at some mode of survival. Ruskin, until
he weakened (on his own terms)insisted on the Homeric strength
of gazing upon ocean, and seeing no emblemof continuitybut only
pure physicalnature: "Black or clear, monstrousor violet-coloured,
cold salt water it is always,and nothingbut that." Pater's Marius
has been found by a skepticalbut comfortingcompromisebetween
the natural visions of Wordsworthand Ruskin. "Peculiar and
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privileged,"or "extreme,fortuitous,personal" as Stevens was to
call it, the timeof reverieabides in Ruskin's "pure physicalnature,"
yet holds together in continuitynot only past and present but
what was only potential in the past to a sublimitystill possible
in the future.The self still knows that it reduces to "sensations
and ideas" (the subtitle of Marius the Epicurean), still knows the
brevityof its expectation,knows even more stronglyit is joined
to no immortalsoul, yet now believes also that its own integrity
can be at one with the systemof forcesoutside it. Pater's strange
achievementis to have assimilated Wordsworthto Lucretius, to
have compounded an idealistic naturalismwith a correctivematerialism.By de-idealizingthe epiphany,he makes it available to the
comingage, when the mind will know neitheritselfnor the object
but only the dumbfoundering
abyss that comes between.
3 Historicisms: Renaissance and Romanticism
Pater began to read Ruskin in 1858,when he was just nineteen,
eight years before he wrote his firstimportantessay, "Winckelmann." From then until the posthumouslypublishedwritings,Pater
sufferedunder Ruskin's influence,thoughfromthe start he maintained a revisionarystance in regard to his precursor.In place of
Ruskin's full,prophetic,even overwhelmingrhetoric,Pater evolved
a partial, hesitant, insinuatingrhetoric,yet the result is a style
quite as elaborate as his master's.The overt influence,Pater buried
deep. He mentionedRuskin just once in his letters,and then to
claim priorityover Ruskin by two years as the English discoverer
of Botticelli (as late as 1883, Ruskin still insisted otherwise,but
wrongly).Ruskin is ignored,by name, in the books and essays, yet
he hovers everywherein them, and nowhere more stronglythan
in The Renaissance (1873), for Pater's firstbook is primarilyan
answer to The Stones of Venice (1851, 1853) and to the five
volumes of Modern Painters (1843-1860). Where Ruskin had deplored the Renaissance (and located it in Italy, between the four172
Harold Bloom
teenth and sixteenthcentury),elevating instead the High Middle
Ages, Pater emulated the main movementof English Romanticism
by exaltingthe Renaissance (and then anticipatedlater studies by
locating its origins in twelfthcenturyFrance). Yet the polemic
against Ruskin, here as elsewhere,remainsimplicit.One of Pater's
friendsreported that once, when talking of Ruskin's strengthof
perception,Pater burst out: "I cannot believe that Ruskin saw
more in the churchof St. Mark than I do." Pater's ultimatebitterness, in this area, came in 1885, when Ruskin resigned as Slade
Professorof Fine Art at Oxford.Pater offeredhimselfforthe professorship,but it went to one Hubert Von Herkomer,and not to the
author of the notorious book on the Renaissance, whose largest
departurefrom Ruskin was in opposing a darker and hedonistic
humanismto the overtlymoral humanismof his aestheticprecursor.
The vision of Pater's Renaissance centers upon the hope of
what Yeats was to call Unity of Being. Drawing his epigraphfrom
the Book of Psalms, Pater hints at the aesthetic man's salvation
fromthe potsherdsof English Christianityin the 1860s: "Though
ye have lain among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a
dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold"
(Psalms 68:13). The aesthetic man, surroundedby the decaying
absolutes inheritedfromColeridge-as-theologian,
accepts the truths
of solipsism and isolation,of mortalityand the flux of sensations,
and glories in the singularityof his own peculiar kind of contemplativetemperament.Pater would teach this man self-reconcilementand self-acceptance,
and so Unityof Being. In the greatfigures
of the Renaissance-particularlyBotticelli,Michelangelo,Leonardo
-Pater presents images of this Unity of aesthetic contemplation.
Ruskin, a greatercritic than Pater, did not over-idealizethe possibilities of aesthetic contemplation,not even in books as phantasmagoricas The Queen of the Air. Pater's desperation,both to
go beyond Ruskin and to receive more from art, is at once his
definingweakness in comparison to Ruskin, and his greater importance for what was to come, not just in the 1880s and 1890s,
but throughoutour century.
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In his vision of the Renaissance, Pater inheritsthe particular
historicism of English Romanticism,which had found its own
originsin the EnglishRenaissance, and believed itselfa renaissance
of that Renaissance. Between the High Romantics and Pater many
losses were felt, and of these Darwin compelled the largest. The
Renaissance is already a Darwinian book, ratherin the same way
that The Stones of Venice was still a Coleridgean book. Pater's
moral tentativenessnecessarilyreflectedhis own profoundrepressions, includinghis aversion to heterosexuality,
and the veryclear
strainof sadomasochismin his psyche.But the intellectualsanction
of Pater's skeptical Epicureanism was provided by the prevalent
skepticismeven of religious apologias in the age of Newman and
the OxfordMovement.Evolution,whetheras presentedby Christian
historicismsor by Darwin himself,gave the self-dividedPater a
justificationfor projectinghis temperamentinto a general vision
of his age's dilemmas.His later work,consideredfurtheron in this
essay, found a governingdialectic for his skepticismin the preSocraticsand Plato, but in The Renaissance the personalprojection
is more direct,and proved more immediatelyinfluential.
The "Preface" to The Renaissance outlines a cycle in the concept of renaissance,which goes froman early freshnesswith "the
charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girdingof the loins in
youth"to "that subtle and delicate sweetnesswhichbelongsto a refinedand comely decadence." The Greek word ascesis (or askesis)
originallyreferredto athleticism,but easily transferred
itself,even in
ancient time, to an exercise in spiritualizingpurgation.Paterian
askesis is less a sublimation(as it seems when firstused in the
a giving-upof
"Preface") than it is an aesthetic self-curtailment,
certainpowers so as to help achieve more originalityin one's selfmastery.An Epicurean or hedonistic askesis is only superficially
a paradox, since it is central in the Lucretian vision, that Pater
labored to attain. For Lucretius, truth is always in appearances,
the mind is a flow of sensorypatterns,and moral good is always
related directlyto pleasurable sensations.But intense pleasure, as
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Epicurus taught,is grosslyinferiorto possessinga tranquiltemperament. Pater's Epicureanism,in The Renaissance, was more radical,
and hesitates subtlyat exaltinga quasi-homosexualand hedonistic
humanism,particularlyin the essays on Leonardo and on Winckelmann.
In the essay on "Two Early French Stories," Pater identifies
his "medieval Renaissance" with "its antinomianism,its spirit of
rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the
time." Pater's own antinomianismis the unifyingelement in his
great firstbook, as he elaborately intimates "a strange idolatry,
a strangerival religion" in opposition to the Evangelical faith of
Ruskin and the revivedorthodoxiesof the OxfordMovement.The
extraordinaryessay on Botticelli,a triumphantprose poem, sees
in his Madonna "one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor
forHis enemies,"and hintsat a sadomasochisticsadness withwhich
Botticelliconceives the universeof pleasure he has chosen. In the
essay on Leonardo, whichmay be Pater's finestpoem, the visionary
centeris reached in the notorious(and whollymagnificent)
passage
on La Gioconda, which Yeats brilliantlyjudged to be the first
Modern poem, but which he proceeded to butcherby printingin
verse formas the firstpoem in The OxfordBook of Modern Verse
(1936). Yeats, in his "Introduction,"asked an insightfuland largely
rhetoricalquestion: "Did Pater foreshadowa poetry,a philosophy,
where the individual is nothing,the flux of The Cantos of Ezra
Pound, objects without contour..., human experience no longer
shut into brieflines,... the flux... that withinour minds enriches
itself,redreamsitself... ?"
Freud, in his study of Leonardo, found in the Mona Lisa the
child's defence against excessive love for his mother,by means of
identifyingwith her and so proceeding to love boys in his own
image, even as he had been loved. In one of his most troubling
insights,Freud went on to a theory of the sexual origins of all
thought,a theoryofferingonly two ways out for the gifted; either
a compulsive,endless brooding in which all intellectualcuriosity
remains sexual, or a successfulsublimation,in which thought,to
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some extent,is liberatedfromits sexual past. Is Pater, throughout
The Renaissance, and particularlyin the "Leonardo" and the "Conclusion," merelya fascinating,compulsivebrooder,or has he freed
his thoughtfrom his own over-determinedsexual nature? Some
recentstudies reduce Pater only to the formerpossibility,but this
is to underestimatean immenselysubtle mind. Here is the crucial
passage, not a purplepatch but a paean to the mind's masteryover
its own compulsiveness:
The presencethat rose thus so strangelybeside the waters,is expressive
of what in the ways of a thousandyears men had come to desire. Hers is
the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids
are a little weary.It is a beauty wroughtout fromwithinupon the flesh,
the deposit, little cell by cell, of strangethoughtsand fantasticreveries
and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white
Greek goddesses or beautifulwomen of antiquity,and how would they
be troubledby this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has
passed! All the thoughtsand experience of the world have etched and
moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make
expressivethe outwardform,the animalismof Greece, the lust of Rome,
the mysticismof the middle age withits spiritualambitionand imaginative
loves, the returnof the Pagan world,the sins of the Borgias. She is older
than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire,she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver
in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and traffickedfor
strange webs with Eastern merchants,and, as Leda, was the mother of
Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the motherof Mary; 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 moulded the changinglineaments,and tinged
the eyelids and the hands. The fancyof a perpetuallife,sweepingtogether
ten thousand experiences,is an old one; and modernphilosophyhas conceived the idea of humanityas wroughtupon by, and summingup in itself,
all modes of thoughtand life. CertainlyLady Lisa mightstand as the embodimentof the old fancy,the symbolof the modern idea.
Most broadly,this is Pater's comprehensivevision of an equivocal goddess whom Blake called "the Female Will" and the ancient
Orphics named Ananke, meaning "Necessity." Pater dreads and
desires her, or perhaps desires her preciselythroughhis dread. Desire dominates here, for the sight of her is a privilegedmoment,
an epiphany of the only divinityPater trulyworshipped.In the
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essay following,on "The School of Giorgione," Pater speaks of
"profoundlysignificantand animated instants,a mere gesture,a
look, a smile, perhaps-some briefand whollyconcrete momentinto which, however,all the motives,all the interestsand effects
of a long history,have condensed themselves,and which seem to
absorb past and futurein an intenseconsciousnessof the present."
The Lady Lisa, as an inevitableobject of the quest for all which
we have lost, is herselfa process movingtowards a finalentropy,
we have sufferedfromthe objectsummingup all the estrangements
world we once held close, whetheras children,or in history.She
incarnates too much, both for her own good and for ours. The
cycles of civilization,the burden our consciousnessbears, renders
us latecomersbut the Lady Lisa perpetuallycarries the seal of a
terriblepriority.Unity of Being she certainlypossesses, yet she
seems to mock the rewardsPater hoped forin such Unity.A powerof
ful juxtaposition,of the ancient dream of a literal immortality,
living all lives, and of Darwinianism("modern philosophy") ends
the passage with an astonishingconceptual image. The Lady Lisa,
as no human could hope to do, stands forthas a body risen from
death, and also as symbol of modern acceptance of Necessity,the
nondivine evolution of our species. She exposes, as Pater is well
aware, the hopelessness of the vision sought by The Renaissance,
and by all Romantic and post-Romanticart.
Yet, with that hopelessness,comes the curious reward of the
supremePaterianepiphany.Rilke remarkedof the landscape behind
the Madonna Lisa that "it is Nature which came into existence...
somethingdistantand foreign,somethingremoteand withoutallure,
somethingentirelyself-contained...." Following Rilke, the psychologist J. H. Van den Berg associates this estrangementof an
outer landscape with the growthof a more inward,alienated self
than mankindhad known before:
The inner life was like a haunted house. But what else could it be?
It contained everything.Everythingextraneoushad been put into it. The
entire historyof the individual.Everythingthat had previouslybelonged
to everybody,everything
that had been collectivepropertyand had existed
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in the worldin whicheveryonelived,had to be containedby the individual.
It could not be expectedthat thingswould be quiet in the innerself.
In his way, Van den Berg, like Rilke, sides with Ruskin and
not with Pater,for the implicitargumenthere is that the Romantic
innerself cost too much in solipsisticestrangement.But Pater was
a divided man, humanlywiser than he could let himselfshow as a
Late Romantic moralist-critic.
His vision of the Mona Lisa is as
much a warningas it is an ideal. This, he says,is our Muse, mistress
of Unity-of-Being.
The poets of the Nineties, includingthe young
Yeats, chose to see the ideal and not to heed the warning.The
furtherwork of Pater, afterThe Renaissance, shows the Aesthetic
Critic accepting his own hint, and turning away from selfdestruction.
One cannot leave the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance without
acknowledgingthe power which that handful of pages seems to
possess even today, a hundred years after their composition.In
their own generation,their pungencywas overwhelming;not only
did Pater withdrawthem in the second edition, because he too
was alarmed at their effect,but he toned them down when they
were restoredin the third edition. The skeptical eloquence of the
"Conclusion" cost Pater considerableprefermentat Oxford. There
is a splendidlyinstructiveletter from John Wordsworth(clerical
grandnephewof the poet) to Pater, writtenin 1873, indignantly
summingup the "Conclusion" as asserting: "that no fixed principles either of religion or moralitycan be regarded as certain,
that the only thing worth living for is momentaryenjoyment
and that probably or certainlythe soul dissolves at death into
elements which are destined never to reunite." One can oppose
to this very minor Wordswortha reported murmurof Pater's:
"I wish they would not call me a hedonist.It gives such a wrong
impressionto those who do not know Greek."
Early Pater, in all high seriousness,attains a climax in those
and the necessityof dying
wonderfulpages on the flux-of-sensations
with a faithin art that conclude The Renaissance. Writtenin 1868,
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they came initiallyout of a review of William Morris' poetrythat
became the suppressed essay on "Aesthetic Poetry." They gave
Pater himselfthe problemof how he was to write up to so fierce
a demand-of-self:"To burn always with this hard, gemlikeflame,
to maintainthis ecstasy,is success in life."
4 Fictive Selves
Pater's own life, by his early standards,was only ambiguously
a success. His work, afterThe Renaissance, is of three kinds, all
of them already presentin his firstbook. One is "imaginaryportraits," a curious mixed genre, of which the novel Marius the
Epicureanis the most important,and of whichthe best examplesare
the semi-autobiographical
"The Child in the House" and the book
called Imaginary Portraits. Another grouping of Pater's work,
critical essays, were mostly gathered in Appreciations. The last
group, classical studies proper,stand a little apart from the rest
of his work and will be consideredat the close of this essay.
"Imaginaryportraits,"in Pater's sense, are an almost indescribable genre. Behind them stand the monologues of Browningand
of Rossetti, the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, perhaps
Sainte-Beuve's Portraitscontemporains.Like The Renaissance and
Appreciations,they are essays or quasi-essays; like "The Child in
the House" they are semi-autobiographical;yet it hardlyhelps to
see "Sebastian Van Storck,"or "Denys L'Auxerrois" or "Hippolytus
Veiled" as beingessays or veiled confessions.Nor are theyromancefragments,though closer to that than to short stories. It may be
best to call them what Yeats called his Paterian stories,"Mythologies," or "Romantic Mythologies."Or, more commonly,they could
be called simply"reveries,"for even at their most marmorealand
baroque they are highlydisciplinedreveries,and even the lengthy
Marius the Epicurean is more a historicizingreverie than it is a
historical novel. "Reverie" comes from the French rever, "to
dream," and is already used in music to describe an instrumental
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compositionof a dream-likecharacter.The power and precariousness alike of Pater's reveriesare related to theirhoveringnear the
I suspectthat Pater's nearestancestor
thresholdsof wish-fulfillment.
here is Browning,even as Ruskin looms always behind Pater's
aestheticcriticism.Just as Browningmade fictiveselves, to escape
his earlier strain of Shelleyan subjectivityin the verse-romances
Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello, so Pater turned to "imaginary
portraits"to escape the subjective confessionthat wells up in his
"Leonardo da Vinci" and "Conclusion" to The Renaissance. On
this view, The Renaissance is Pater's version of Shelley's Alastor
or Keats's Endymion:it is a prose-poemof highlypersonalRomantic
quest after the image of desire, visualized by Pater in the Mona
Lisa. Turning from so deep a self-exposure,Pater arrives at his
kind of less personal reverie,a consciouslyfictivekind.
Pater had no giftsfor narrative,or drama,or psychologicalportrayal,and he knew this well enough. Unlike Browning,he could
not make a half-world,let alone the full world of a mythopoeic
masterlike Blake. Pater,who intenselyadmiredboth poets,oriented
his portraitswith more specificreferenceto the most inescapable
of Romantic poets, Wordsworth,concerningwhom he wrote the
best of his essays in strictlyliterarycriticism.In the nearly-asdistinguishedessay on "Coleridge,"Pater justlypraises Wordsworth
as a more instinctualpoet than Coleridge. Wordsworthis praised
for "that flawlesstemperament... which keeps his convictionof a
latent intelligencein nature within the limits of sentiment or
instinct,and confinesit to those delicate and subdued shades of
expressionwhich perfectart allows." Pater, too consciously,seeks
in his portraitsto be instinctualrather than intellectual,hoping
that thus he can avoid drama and self-consciousness.
Unfortunately,
he cannot sustainthe Wordsworthiancomparison,as again he knew,
for thoughhe shared Wordsworth'searly naturalism,he lacked the
primordial,Tolstoyan power that sustainspoems like "The Ruined
Cottage,""Michael," "The Old CumberlandBeggar."Yet he yearned
for such power, and would have been a Wordsworthiannovelist,
like George Eliot and Hardy,if he had foundthe requisitestrength.
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But this yearning,poignantlyfelt all throughthe beautifulWordsworth essay, was a desperate desire for his opposite. Wordsworth
lived in nature, Pater in a dream. Longing for the sanctities of
earth,Pater found his true brothersin Rossetti and Morris,poets
of phantasmagoria,and his true childrenin Yeats and the Tragic
Generation.The "imaginaryportraits"are crucialto our understanding of Pater, but as art they are equivocal achievements,noble but
divided against themselves.
5 Sorrowsof Influence
My own favoriteamong Pater's books is Appreciations.Pater
is not the greatestcriticEnglish Romanticismproduced-Coleridge
and Ruskin vie for that eminence-but he is certainlythe most
underratedmajor nineteenth-century
critic, in our own time. He
is superior to his older rival, Arnold, and to his disciple, Wilde,
both of whom receive more approval at this moment.Yet even as
a literarycritic,he is evasive, and remainsmore a masterof reverie
than of description,let alone analysis,which is alien to him. This
becomes a curious critical strengthin him, which requires both
descriptionand analysis to be apprehended.
Appreciationsbegins with the extraordinaryessay on "Style,"
which is Pater's credo as a literarycritic.As the essay urges awareness of the root-meaningsof words, we need to rememberthat
"style" originallymeant an ancient instrumentfor writingon a
waxed tablet, and having one pointed end for incisingwords, and
one blunt end for rubbingout writing,and smoothingthe tablet
down. We might also remember that "appreciations" originally
meant "appraisals." Before appraisingWordsworth,Coleridge,Rossetti,Morris,Lamb and others,Pater offersus a vision of his stylistic attitude, incisive but also ascetic. Ian Fletcher, Pater's best
scholar, reminds us that Pater's idea of style is "as a mode of
perception,a total responsive gesture of the whole personality.'
Since Pater's own styleis the most highlycolored and self-conscious
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of all critics who have writtenin English, there is a puzzle here.
Pater attemptedto writecriticismas thoughhe were style'smartyr,
another Flaubert, and his insistenceupon askesis, the exercise of
self-curtailment,
hardlyseems compatiblewith a whole personality's
total response. We do not believe that the style is the man when
we read Pater, and a glance at his letters,which are incrediblydull
confirmour disbelief.Pater's style,as befitsthe
and nonrelevatory,
master of Wilde and Yeats, is a mask, and so Pater's idea of style
and his actual style are irreconcilable.As always,Pater anticipates
us in knowingthis,and the essay "Style" centersupon this division.
Prose, accordingto Pater, is both music's opposite and capable
of transformationinto the condition of music, where form and
matterseem to dissolve into one another.Pater's subject is always
the mysteryof utter individualityin the artisticpersonality; his
style strives extravagantlyto award himself such individuality.
Whetherin matteror style,Pater has thereforea necessaryhorror
of literaryinfluence,forto so desperatea quester afterindividuality
all influenceis over-influence.
Pater's subject matteris also Ruskin's
and Arnold's; his style is also Swinburne's,or ratherone of Swinburne's styles. Unlike Emerson and Nietzsche,who refusedto see
themselvesas latecomers,Pater's entirevision is that of a latecomer
longingfor a renaissance,a rebirthinto imaginativeearliness.The
hidden subject of Appreciations is the anxiety of influence,for
which Pater's remedyis primarilyhis idea of askesis. "Style" urges
self-restraint
and renunciation,which it calls an economyof means
but which in Pater's actual style seems more an economyof ends.
Ruskin, threateningprecursor,was profuse in means and ends,
masterof emphasis and of a daemonic,Sublime style,which in his
case was the man. SwervingfromRuskin, Pater turns to Flaubert
in "Style," seeking to invent a fatherto replace a dominantand
dangerous aesthetic parent. But guilt prevails,and Pater's anxiety
emergesin the essay's long concludingparagraph,whichastonishingthat has come
ly seems to repeal the special emphasisof everything
before. "Good art, but not necessarily great art," Pater sadly
murmurs,suddenly assuring us that greatness depends not upon
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style but on the matter,and then listingDante, Milton, the King
James Bible, and Hugo's Les Miserables, which seems rather exposed in this sublime company,and hardly rivals Flaubert in its
concern with form.By the test of findinga place in the structure
of human life,Hugo will receive the palm beforeFlaubert,Ruskin
beforePater, Tennyson(secretlydespised by Pater) beforeRossetti
and Morris.The finalaskesis of the championof styleis to abnegate
himselfbefore the burden of the common life he himselfcannot
bear.
In the essay, "Wordsworth",Pater has the happiness of being
able to touch the commonalthroughthe greatestmediatingpresence
of nineteenth-century
poetry.The essays on Wordsworthof Arnold
and, contra Arnold, of A. C. Bradley, have been profoundlyinfluentialon rival schools of modern Wordsworthianinterpretation,
and Pater has not, but a reading of the three essays side by side
will show Pater's superiority.His Wordsworthis neitherArnold's
poet of Nature nor Bradley's poet of the Sublime,but rathera poet
of instinctualpagan religion.Wordsworthwould have been outraged
by Pater's essay, and most modern scholars agree that Pater's
Wordsworthis too much Pater's Marius and too littleWordsworth.
Against which, here is Pater's account of Wordsworth'sactual
religion,as a poet:
Religious sentiment,consecratingthe affectionsand natural regretsof
the human heart, above all, that pitifulawe and care for the perishing
human clay, of which relic-worshipis but the corruption,has always had
much to do with localities,with the thoughtswhich attach themselvesto
actual scenes and places. Now what is true of it everywhere,is truestof
it in those secluded valleys where one generationafter anothermaintains
the same abiding place; and it was on this side, that Wordsworthapprehended religion most strongly.Consisting,as it did so much, in the
recognitionof local sanctities,in the habit of connectingthe stones and
trees of a particularspot of earthwith the great events of life,till the low
walls, the greenmounds,the half-obliterated
epitaphsseemed full of voices,
and a sort of naturaloracles,the veryreligionof those people of the dales,
appeared but as anotherlink betweenthemand the earth,and was literally
a religionof nature.
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What is most meaningfulforPater are those voices comingfrom
low walls, green mounds, tombstones.These thingsremain things
in Wordsworth,yet whollyotherthan ourselves,but we are deeply
affectedby what emanatesfromthem.Pater was convertedby them
to the only religionhe ever sincerelyheld, "literallya religionof
nature." Just as the spots of time gave Wordsworthnot a sense
of the Divine, but precise knowledgeto what point and how his
own mind displayed a masteryover outward sense, so for Pater
the spots of timehe located in worksof art gave a preciseknowledge
of the limited efficacyof the great Romantic programfor renovation. The Romantics, as Pater understood and Arnold did not,
were not nature-poets,but rather exemplars of the power of the
mind, a power exerted against the object-world,or mere universe
of death. Like Ruskin, and like Yeats and Stevens, Pater is a
Romantic criticof Romanticism.WhetherPater writeson Giorgione
or Winckelmann,the mythof Dionysus or Plato and the Doctrine
of Change, Rossetti or Wilde, he writes as a conscious postWordsworthian,and his true subject is the partial and therefore
tragic (because momentary)victorythat art wins over the flux of
sensations.The step beyond Pater is the one taken by his disciple,
Yeats, who insists on the tragic joy of art's defeat,and who in his
savage last phase celebratesthe flux,exultingin his own doctrine
of change.
Pater, withdrawingin Appreciationsas in Marius fromhailing
the Heraclitean flux, is most moved by Wordsworth'squiet and
primordialstrength,the instinctualpower of "impassionedcontemplation." The eloquent and compassionate essay on "Coleridge"
begins fromPater's recognitionthat Coleridge lacked this strength,
and goes on to reject Coleridge'stheologicalrelianceupon outworn
Pater pioneers in rejectingthe Organic
Absolutes. More strikingly,
Analogue that Coleridge popularized. The motto of Pater's essay
on Coleridge mightwell come fromNietzsche: "But do I bid thee
be eitherplant or phantom?" Coleridge,Pater suggests,bid us be
both,and so "obscuredthe trueinterestof art,"whichis to celebrate
and lament our intolerablygloriousconditionof being mortalgods.
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Beyond his steady defence of art's dignity against metaphysicaland religiousabsolutes,Pater's nobilityand uniquenessas a
nineteenth-century
literarycritic stem fromhis insistencethat the
later nineteenth-century
poet "make it new," even as that poet (like
Pater himself)remains fullyconscious of the inescapable sorrows
of influence.Such a poet wanders in the half-lightsof being a
latecomer, trailing after the massive, fresh legacy of Goethe,
Wordsworth,
Blake, Hugo, Keats, Shelley,Baudelaire,Browning,even
as Pater trailed afterDe Quincey,Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge,Arnold
and the inescapable Ruskin, quite aside from Swinburneand the
unmentionedEmerson and Nietzsche. Pater is still the best critic
pre-Raphaelitepoetry has had, largely because he understood so
well the anxiety of influenceconsciously present in Rossetti and
unconsciously at work in Morris. The great essay on Morris,
"Aesthetic Poetry," properly close to the "Conclusion" to The
Renaissance which he quarried fromit, presentsPater's most unguarded vision of poetic experience,so that Pater inevitablysuppressed it:
... exotic flowersof sentimentexpand, among people of a remote and
unaccustomedbeauty,somnambulistic,
frail,androgynous,the light almost
shining throughthem.... The colouringis intricateand delirious,as of
"scarlet lilies." The influenceof summeris like a poison in one's blood,
with a sudden bewilderedsickeningof life and all things.... A passion of
which the outlets are sealed, begets a tension of nerve, in which the
sensible world comes to one with a reinforcedbrilliancyand relief-all
redness is turnedinto blood, all water into tears.... One characteristicof
the pagan spiritthe aestheticpoetryhas... -the sense of death and the
desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickenedby the sense of death...
Remarkably hinting that sadomasochistic yearnings and the
anxiety of being a late representativeof a tradition are closely
related, Pater implies also that the heightenedintensityof Morris
and Rossetti (and of Pater) compensatesfor a destructivelyexcessive sexual self-consciousness.
The sensibleworld becomes phantasmagoria because one's own nature is baffled.A critic who understands the dialectic of style, as Pater magnificently
did, is in no
need of psychoanalyticreduction,as these essays on Morris and
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Rossetti show. Appreciations,which influencedWilde and Yeats,
Joyce and Pound, and more covertlySantayana and Stevens, has
had little influenceupon modern academic criticism,but one can
prophesythat such influencewill yet come. In a-letter (8 January
1888) to the youngpoet ArthurSymons,Pater recalled the marvelous dictumof Rossetti: "Conception,my boy FUNDAMENTAL BRAINWORK, that is what makes the differencein all art." Pater's apt
purpose in this recall was to urge Symons,and the poets of his
generation-Yeats, Dowson, Lionel Johnson-to make it new again
throughthe fundamentalbrainworknecessary to overcome anxHere is the prophecy,addressed to the Paterian
ieties-of-influence.
poets of the Tragic Generation,which Pound and his Modernists
attemptedto fulfill:
I thinkthe presentage an unfavourableone to poets,at least in England.
The youngpoet comes into a generationwhichhas produceda large amount
of first-ratepoetry,and an enormousamount of good secondarypoetry.
You know I give a high place to the literatureof prose as a fine art, and
thereforehope you won't think me brutal in saying that the admirable
qualities of your verse are those also of imaginativeprose; as I think is
the case also with much of Browning'sfinestverse.
The Poundian dictum,that verse was to be as well writtenas
prose, initially meant Browningesque verse and Paterian prose,
as Pound's early verse and prose show. That literaryModernism
ever journeyed too far from its Paterian origins we may doubt
increasingly,and we may wonder also whethermodern criticism
as yet has caught up with Pater.
6 Centrifugaland Centripetal
In the importantessay on Romanticismthat he made the "Postscript" to Appreciations,Pater insisted that: "Material for the
artist, motives of inspiration,are not yet exhausted.. ." yet he
wonderedhow "to induce order upon the contorted,proportionless
accumulation of our knowledge and experience,our science and
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history,our hopes and disillusion.. ." To help induce such an order
seems to be the motive for Plato and Platonism (1893) and the
posthumouslypublished Greek Studies (1895). The Plato of Walter
Pater, is Montaigne's Plato (and probably Shelley's), a skeptical
evader of systems,includinghis supposed own,whose idea of order
is the dialectic: "Just there,lies the validityof the method-in a
dialogue, an endless dialogue,with one's self." Clearly this is Pater
more than Plato, and we need not wonder why Pater favoredthis
above his otherbooks. In the chapter,"The Genius of Plato," Pater
gives us anotherreverie,an idealized imaginaryportraitof what he
would have liked the mind of Pater to be. A comparison with
Emerson's Plato (also influencedby Montaigne) is instructive,for
the Plato of RepresentativeMon is criticizedfor lacking"contact,"
an Emersonianqualitynot farremovedfrom"freedom"or wildness.
Unlike Plato the author of the Dialogues, Walter Pater's visionary
indeed lacks "contact," even as Pater severely made certain he
himselflacked it.
Pater gives us the author of The Republic as "a seer who has
a sort of sensuous love of the unseen," and whose mythological
power bringsthe unseen closer to the seen. This Plato is possible
and possibly even more than marginal,yet he does seem more
Ficino or Pico della Mirandola than he was Plato, for he is more a
and more of a solipsisticRealist
poet of ideas than a metaphysician,
than an Idealist. Above all, he is Pater's "crystal man," a model
for Yeats's vision of an antitheticalsavior, a greater-than-Oedipus
wha would replace Christ,and herald a greaterRenaissance than
European man had known.
From reading both Hegel and Darwin, Pater had evolved a
curious dialectic of history,expounded more thoroughlyin Greek
Studies,using the terms"centripetal"and "centrifugal"as the thesis
and antithesisof a process always stoppingshort of synthesis:
All throughGreek historywe may trace,in everysphereof the activity
of the Greek mind,the action of these two opposingtendencies-the centrifugal and centripetal... There is the centrifugal,the Ionian, the
Asiatic tendency,flyingfromthe centre... throwingitselfforthin endless
play of undirected imagination; delightingin brightnessand colour, in
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in poetry,in philosophy
beautifulmaterial,in changefulformeverywhere,
its restlessversatilitydrives it towards... the developmentof the individual in that which is most peculiar and individualin him... It is this
centrifugaltendencywhich Plato is desirous to cure, by maintaining,over
against it, the Dorian influenceof a severe simplification
everywhere,in
society,in culture...
The centrifugalis the vision of Heraclitus, the centripetalof
Parmenides,or in Pater's more traditionalterms fromthe "Postscript" to Appreciations,the centrifugalis the Romantic,and the
centripetalthe Classic. Pater rathernervouslypraises his Plato for
Classic correctiveness,
for a conservativecentripetalimpulseagainst
his own Heraclitean Romanticism.Reductively,this is still Pater
reacting against the excesses of The Renaissance, and we do not
believe him when he presentshimselfas a centripetalman, though
Yeats was partiallypersuaded,and reliedupon Pater's dialecticwhen
he created his own version of an aesthetic historicism in A Vision.
Pater, in his last phase, continued to rationalize his semiwithdrawalfromhis own earliervision,but we can doubt that even
he trusted his own hesitant rationalizations.We rememberhim,
and read him, as the maker of criticalreverieswho yielded up the
great societal and religious hopes of the major Victorian proseprophets,and urged us to abide in the mortaltruthsof perception
and sensation. His great achievement,in conjunction with Swinburne and the pre-Raphaelites,was to emptyRuskin's aestheticism
of its moralbias, and so to purifya criticalstance appropriateforthe
apprehensionof Romantic art. More than Swinburne,Morris,Rossetti, he became the fatherof Anglo-AmericanAestheticism,and
subsequently the direct precursor of a Modernism that vainly
attemptedto be post-Romantic.I venture the prophecy that he
will prove also to be the valued precursorof a post-Modernisin
still fated to be anotherLast Romanticism,anotherintoxicationof
thisancestorof our own sensibility
belatedness.We can judge,finally,
as he himselfjudged Plato:
His aptitude for thingsvisible, with the gift of words, empowershim
to express,as if for the eyes, what exceptto the eye of the mind is strictly
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invisible, what an acquired asceticism induces him to rank above, and
sometimes,in terms of harshest dualism, oppose to, the sensible world.
Plato is to be interpretednot merelyby his antecedents,by the influence
upon him of those who precededhim,but by his successors,by the temper,
the intellectualalliances, of those who directlyor indirectlyhave been
sympatheticwith him.
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