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ESCAPE FROM AESTHETIC CONFINEMENTt
FINDING THE WAY BACK OUT OF PATER'S TRANSFIGURED WORLD

BY

Marilyn R. Brouwer

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Englieh

1993

ABSTRACT
ESCAPE FROM AESTHETIC CONFINEMENT:

FINDING THE WAY BACK OUT OF PATER'S
TRANSFIGURED WORLD

Marilyn R. Brouwer

The dissertation is an investigation of a problematic aestheticism
located in the writing of Walter Peter and transmitted to contemporary
critical discourse via the canonized Modernists who inherited Peter's
aesthetic: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Lawrence, among
others. It proceeds from a recognition that the unresolved
epistemological problem at the center of Pater's aeethetic has enormous
consequences both for constitution of the Modernist canon and for the
procedures of academic criticism sanctioned by Structuralism and
Deconstruction. A view that nothing can be known but one's own
perceptions gives rise to an aesthetic of denial and projection in which
the idealising distortions shaped by the impulses of the desiring
subject are substituted for historical reality.

Charting the development of Peter's aesthetic in his essay on
Pichte's “Ideal Student,” 'Diaphaneité," "Coleridge's Writings,”
'Winckelmann,‘ "Poems by William Morris,“ the “Conclusion“ to The
Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean, the imaginary portraits, and Plato
and Platonism, I read in that history of Pater's writing a process of
defensive and compensatory denial ending in capitulation and defeat.
Situating Peter's two most tellingly confessional and autobiographical
portraits, “The Child in the House“ and “Emerald Uthwart,” in a larger
material history, I use the conceptual tools of historical materialism
to identify the impinging forces in response to which Pater's defenses
are activated. My history of Pater's work reveals the consequences of
unresolved conflict between the fear of vulgarity driving him to seek
sanctuary in the repressive order of Oxford life and longing for an

ideal amounting to emancipation of the life of the body.

Given the limits of his Positivist-historicist ideology, I
demonstrate Peter's inability to resolve that conflict because he lacks
the systematic terms by which to identify and counter the forces which
constrain him. Although Baudelaire reverts from a materialist aesthetic
of revolutionary practice to a visionary idealism, unlike Pater he
retains the theological categories by which to write a poetry that
"contradicts fact” in such a way as to release the revolutionary
potential of the aesthetic response. Whereas Pater and the Modernists
who succeeded him could only reject and transfigure a world disfigured
by capitalism, Baudelaire unleashes the force of Romantic irony to
indict a disfigured world at the same time that he holds with determined
resistance to his vision of a transfigured world.

The House Beautiful of art to which Pater has retreated becomes a
hospital in which “appetite grows cold." As the impulse to freedom is
thwarted by the repressive order of Victorian empire, Pater's desire for
homosexual and social liberation sickens into necrophilia and
sadomasochism. Coming to identify with the ruling order which has kept
him tormented, Pater in turn becomes tormenter as the hospital in turn
becomes an imperial fortress and, at last, an asylum for the criminally
insane. Having surrendered the terms of resistance to the “modern,
relative spirit,“ Pater undergoes a reactionary conversion.

Peter's failure to write a poetic prose which “contradicts fact“
in such a way as to release the revolutionary energy generated by the
tension between ideal and real informs the subsequent failure of
Modernism to find in private metahistory--or the mythical method--any
alternative in history to fascism. His movement from capitulation and
defeat to protofascism is typical of the course taken by Modernism.

The consequences of the Paterian fixation on forms and surfaces
can be seen in the manipulative techniques of commercial advertising by
which children are driven to kill each other for a pair of brand-name
tennis shoes. Having deconstructed the categories by which to resist

such invasions, academic theorists playing indiscriminately with

techniques properly specific to Structuralism, Deconstruction, Freudian
psychoanalysis, or even Marxism leave human beings defenseless against
the onslaughts of technology privately held hostage to the profit
motive. The way out of confinement to idealizing aesthetic distortions
and back onto a historical ground where effective human agency is again

acknowledged cannot be forged by critics whose techniques render them
socially blind.

Copyright by

MARILYN R. BROUWER
1993

DEDICATION

Por my father, whose courage was
equaled only by his compassion,

and my mother, who has stood fast

vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people without whom this work could not have been
completed: my director, Victor N. Paananen, who introduced me to Marx
and knows what it means to enable people; his wife, Donna, who got me
work; Reade and David Dornan, who gave me shelter; Robin Bolig, whose
energy in preparing the manuscript was unfailing; Jim Grasman, whose
generosity has been a mainstay; Minaz Jooma and Russell Angrisani, whose
vitality brought infusions of pleasure to the task; and Larry Manglitz,

whose imagination has been a cherished port of call.

vii

Chapter

I.

II.
III.

IV.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Problem of Aesthetic Bistoricism: Walling
Out the Werld

Wall-Building: Bricks and Mortar
House Beautiful
Hospice: The Immense Nausea of Advertisements

The Worst of All Possible Worlds: Indeterminacy
within a Closed System and a Discourse of Impotence

Works Cited

viii

Page

42
90
142
187

198

Although Pater remains deeply rooted in the nineteenth century,
and so is usually classified as a Late Romantic, there can be no doubt
that his work prefigured the problems that have become dominant in our
time. And the parallels between his fin de siecle and our own fast-
fading century make it all the more fitting that he should now emerge
again from the shadows to which his aesthetic label has so long confined
him.

--Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment (x)

Chapter I. The Problem of Aesthetic Historicism:
Walling Out the World

The technology of reading distributed by Deconstruction dictates
the uses of mind in relation to texts, limiting those uses to what the
technology can do. A reading, like a test, can only measure what it is
designed to measure; what it cannot measure it does not record: the sum
of its measurements is false. Or as Terry Bagleton reminds us in his
Literary Theory: An Introduction,

What you have defined as a ‘literary' work will always be
closely bound up with what you consider ‘appropriate' critical
techniques: a ‘literary' work will mean, more or less, one
which can be usefully illuminated by such methods of enquiry.
. . . what you get out of the work will depend in large
measure on what you put into it in the first place. . . . (80)

In Transfigured World: Walter Peter’s Aesthetic Historicism,‘ Carolyn
Williams' reading capacities have been severely, and symptomatically,
circumscribed by the critical technology she has opted to use. While
the buttons on her touchtone phone have accessed certain insights, her
reliance on that mode of access precludes what she might have observed
if she had chosen to walk around the block instead. This is what
Williams’ critical techniques have enabled her to see. I take the
terminus of her book as the limit of her vision. The point at which she
stops is the point at which she can see no more.

On the “side“ of historicism, Pater begins by
acknowledging epistemological difficulties that are
structurally similar to those involved in the procedures of
“aesthetic criticism." He begins, in other words, with the
moment of identification between subject and object.
Projected into the field of historical inquiry, this
identification constitutes the epistemological problem we
today call ”cultural relativism." Pater was acutely sensitive
to this problem--as in his aesthetic criticism-~yet while he
insists that the moment of identification is the necessary
”first step,'.he also insists that it is only the first
step. . . . In the effort to restore a sense of objectivity,
he proposes an aesthetic solution in which the sense of
historical difference is recreated from within the present

 

1Published in 1989, it is a revision of the author's 1977 doctoral
dissertation, Pater's Typology (U of Virginia).

1

2

subject as a representation. "We cannot truly conceive the
[past] age: we can conceive the element it has contributed to
our culture: we can treat the subjects of the age bringing
that into relief". . . . The lines of "relief” separating
subject and object are drawn provisionally, of course; this
operation manages to provide not objectivity but only the
”sense of” objectivity, together with the tacit
acknowledgement that such a ”sense“ is an aesthetic
reconstruction. An awareness of the skeptical dimension of
historicism, in other words, returns us to the aesthetic.
Pater's historical representations are all bracketed by this
awareness.

This sort of perspectivism concentrates on the present
moment not as the ideal “now," but as the end point of a long
history, the retrospective position from which the past may be
totalized, its continuity may be constructed, and its
differences may be gathered up into an identity. There is, in
other words, a "kind of inconsistency" in Pater's treatment of
the ideal present moment, which becomes in his work both the
figure of radical discontinuity and the figure of
retrospective totalization. If the impulse toward "modernity"
may in several senses be considered the opposite of the
impulse toward "history,“ Pater holds the two together in a
radically conservative, dialectical relation. I have argued
that it is Pater's strength to have practiced this "kind of
inconsistency” as well as to have theoretically examined its
consistent practice. (284)

The view from such a point is negligible. Having looked at the
fundamental epistemological problem ”we today call ‘cultural
relativism'" and noted that Pater's "aesthetic solution" restores not
objectivity but only a “sense of' objectivity which is in fact an
“aesthetic reconstruction" suitably attended by "awareness of the
skeptical dimension of historicism," Ms. Williams is content to observe
that the consequence of this “sort of perspectivism” is a "kind of
inconsistency' in Pater's treatment of the ideal present moment." To
establish that there is this inconsistency, and that it becomes a figure
both of “radical discontinuity“ and of “retrospective totalization,‘ by
which Pater holds the impulses toward modernity and history in a
“radically conservative, dialectical relation,“ is innocuous enough, if
apparently gratuitous inasmuch as Williams does not explain why it is
important to note that fact. But to argue that it is Pater's "strength“
to have “practiced this ‘kind of inconsistency'" is to make a virtue of
avoidance. To conclude so is to leave off precisely where the problem
begins, without appearing to acknowledge that the consequences of its

irresolution have been both enormous and enormously counterproductive.

3

The attitude enacted by such a procedure trivializes the problem. If
one is told that the consistent practice of inconsistency is a strong
response to a problem, one is inclined to wonder: what difference does
it make?

The problem is manifested in clearer as well as more insistent
terms in the passage from Marius the Epicurean to which Williams' key
phrase alludes:

And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who had taken for
his philosophic ideal the A0 Yd’XPoYo‘J 50W): of Aristippus—-
the pleasure of the ideal present, of t e mystic now--there
would come, together with that precipitate sinking of things
into the past, a desire, after all, to retain ”what was so
transitive.” Could he but arrest, for others also, certain
clauses of experience, as the imaginative memory presented
them to himself! In those grand, hot summers, he would have
imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers. (127-28)
One must first recall that the reason why Marius has ”taken for his
philosophic ideal . . . the pleasure of the ideal present" is his
reductive view of the epistemological problem. Nothing can be known
with any certainty but one's own perceptions, one's own aesthetic
experience, to which one is thus confined and by which one is thus
carried along, like a piece of flotsam and jetsam, in the stream of
one's lonely consciousness, from moment to transitive moment. One can
then begin to delineate the problem of aestheticism in fairly simple and
concrete language. _

The longing to ”retain" and “arrest, for others also,“ certain
highly pleasurable but necessarily transitory qualities of experience
which are felt so deeply and intensely at moments that they seem to
approach the ideal--moments when actual experience coincides with what
is oftener only imagined--is really quite common. The pleasure of
eating an ice cream cone on a hot day, after all, has been described as
heavenly. Most people discover, however, that the pleasure of eating
that ice cream cone cannot be prolonged by making up yet another and
another cone, for pleasure will give way to satiety and discomfort.

More importantly, most people do not mistake the heavenly sensation of

eating that ice cream cone for reality, “the real life" ("for ever and

4

ever,‘ according to the Schlegel sisters in B.M. Porster's Howards End).
They may say, settling into a deck chair after mowing the lawn and
relishing every bite of a double-dipper, "This is the life," but they do
not conclude that "life is this“ and yearn for a way to prolong that
illusion. Aesthetes do, and that is the problem.

Aesthetes substitute art for the ice cream cone and finding
themselves at a loss between artistic experiences, since they have
concluded that life is just the experience of art, seek to construct a
continuous sequence of such experiences, which they then call the
history of art. The "rule" that Pater "urges upon his readers," William
Buckler writes in his Introduction to Walter Pater: Three Major Texts,
is “adopted from Saints-Beuve and is as secular as it is practical: ‘To
confine themselves to knowing beautiful things at first hand, and to
nourish themselves thereby as discriminating amateurs, as accomplished
humanists" (12). As Wolfgang Iser formulates the "rule," the
“individual does not need to set himself any goals or to make any
decisions; the only response required of him is an uncommitted
enjoyment" (139).

To the extent that aesthetes are successful in prolonging the
illusion, moreover, they are exceedingly lonely people, always longing
for someone to enter their illusory world and share with them the
pleasure of ice cream cones, macaroons, second movement crescendos, play
of light and shadow, cool breezes, or whatever sensory phenomena have
provided the basis for their heightened experience of the “ideal
present,“ the "mystic now.“ But since few people are willing to sit, as
it were, for another man's or woman's vision, even when the aesthete
induces someone to come into his tableau vivant, he is usually
disappointed. The intruder will not sit still, insists on talking at
the moment of musical climax, fails to observe the particular angle of
the shaft of light; in short, disrupts the fluid but stable form of the

aesthete's vision and leaves him lonelier than he was before.

 

5

Part of the problem here is that since the ”juncture" marked by
Burke, when ”aesthetic feeling frees itself from given rules and
aesthetic objects and becomes a subjective quality of the percipient'
(Iser 6), there are "no longer any aesthetic objects with an existence
of their own--there are only aesthetic potentials in the empirical world
which must each be realised individually" (Iser 64). For this reason,
Iser notes, Oskar Becker "calls the structure of the aesthetic sphere
‘Beraclitan":

i.e. the ‘same' experience by the ‘same' person in relation to
the ‘same' aesthetic object cannot be repeated with any
certainty. And so ultimately the aesthetic is to be found
only in the extremely vulnerable ‘momentary' experience of
what in turn is an extremely vulnerable and also merely
‘potential' object. This is what conditions the ‘fragility'
of the aesthetic. (64)
Becker is putting the extreme case, however, and forgetting that what
"conditions the ‘fragility' of the aesthetic" is not located solely in
the consciousness of the beholder. Shifts in mood, the passage of time,
and a world of historical experience filling that passage of time will,
of course, alter the 'percipient's" orientation to the object. Still,
one bite of a macaroon can release potent memories of the original
experience. More to the point, the same experience by different persons
in relation to the same aesthetic object cannot be shared with any
certainty. What seems beautiful to one person may not seem so to
another. Bel canto to one listener may be shrieking to another. Hence
the great desire, often frustrated, for intimacy.'

Similarly, on the other hand, the aesthete has trouble negotiating
fields of consciousness and activity emanating from sources outside
hhmself, especially since his sense of identity is of a piece with his
aesthetic perceptions. Per Pater, after all, the ”highest function of
art is to help us to become something, the ultimate aesthetic ideal to
make life itself a work of art' (Buckler 4). The aesthete does, in
fact, sit for his own visions, becomes unsure of who or what he is on

standing up and walking out of the field of consciousness in which the

highly charged forms of his tableau have figured. The pleasingly cool

6

breeze in someone else's environment may feel like a chilling draft to
him, may even ruffle his hair and make him feel unkempt, blowing him off
balance and threatening his composure. Not to mention the possible
effects of a cross-town ride in heavy traffic on the color of his mood
or the configuration of his person. Experiencing the ”insecurity” of a
life "orientated” solely by art, the aesthete is driven to seek modes of
ideal continuity that transcend such annoying disruptions as soot,
fumes, jostling conveyances, and unwelcome winds.
Iser quotes Dolf Sternberger as summing up ”very vividly the
emotions vibrating behind the propagation of hypostatised art”:
These rambling, errant and sensitive nerves, these senses,
which ceaselessly grope for and follow contours and
consistencies--cool and ‘heartless' gems, metals, the velvety
or taut or thin and translucent skin of the female body--they
search as if with a wishing wand for the hidden sources of a
life that must be lived and perhaps also must be patterned on
the far side of inherited conventions. (32)

Having made his way cross town to his hostess' drafty rooms, the

aesthete is not likely to find scope for his sensual appetite in tea and

cakes and polite conversation. Rumpled and discomfited, he is more

likely to be thinking, in a vaguely troubled way, "This is not it.

This is not what I had in mind.”

So far the problem seems inconsequential enough, confined to a few
gluttons whose fate, whatever it be, they must deserve. It gets bigger,
however, when these same people substitute the history of art for human
history itself, crown themselves emperors of ice cream, and deny that'
anything else is worthy of their attention, neither the lawn mower nor
the lawn nor the person who mowed it. Harold Bloom notes, for example,
that when Wallace Stevens "reduces to what he calls the First Idea, he
returns to ‘the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us,’
but then finds it dehumanizing to live only with these appearances”
(xii). What needs to be remembered, of course, is that the initial

reduction is even more dehumanizing--certainly to the person who is seen

mowing the lawn or, as it may be, pushing the red wheelbarrow.

7

But if an aesthete's life must be "patterned on the far side of
inherited conventions," as “autonomous art“ it "cannot be subjected to
any normative concepts" (Iser 4). Pater "was a dedicated student of
history and philosophy," Buckler tells us,

but in his valuation of things, they were, though
indispensable, ancillary, subordinate in interest and
importance to art's manifestations of the capacity of the
human spirit to master its environment by creating for it an
ideal form that was rooted in matter but infinitely more
significant. (1)
If art is hypostatised as the "capacity of the human spirit to master
its environment" by devising a ”scheme of some higher and more
consistent harmony," as Pater understands transcendence to mean (McGrath
146-47), the need to ”legitimise autonomous art" springs from the
“instability" of such an existence (Iser ix). The aesthete seeks, then,
in history and myth the "hidden sources” or types by which to "pattern”
a life that must be lived on the ”far side of inherited conventions,"
ordinary appearances, normative concepts, and the actual environment in
which he is rooted. A tall order. To "this end,” Pater "mobilised the
entire past”:
Bis invocation of history and myth sought to elevate the
intensified moment into a life-line for the aesthetic
existence, thus indicating a change in the function of
legitimation. In the past, world pictures provided the
orientation, whereas Pater sets out to justify both the
transitoriness and the in-between state of the aesthetic
existence by making the totality of the human past subservient
to this end, thus inverting the idea of legitimation. Instead
of providing a framework to which cultural and social
activities have to be subsumed, legitimation new applies
itself to private longings. (Iser ix)

Per the aesthete the pleasures of a new ideal history are all that
really exists. Art gives “binding form to an inner world that draws its
life from experience and yet at the same time transcends it, and this
form is to stand level with, if not above, the real world" (Iser 27).
And since the only acknowledged threat to his enjoyment of those
pleasures seems to be his own aging and death, he becomes obsessed with
the idea of life's brevity and the question of how either to pack as
much pleasure as he can into so short a span or, somehow, to escape,

transcend, or countermand its limits. Art is "conceived as the

countervailing power to the temporality of human existence. Its basic
definitions are given in negative turns owing to the fact that time and
death are its frames of reference“ (Iser 31).

Its capacity, however, to 'transmute the fugitive moment into
enraptured ecstacy' makes it the ”ultimate value of human existence."
Thus it is "hypostatised," and the "slogan of ‘art for its own sake' is
meant to indicate that it is not subservient to any overriding reality.
On the contrary, by constantly selecting from the pageant of existence
the precious, the incomparable and the inimitable, it endows human
existence with a seeming perfection which in reality it lacks“ (Iser
31).

Unwilling or unable to contend with human existence as it is,
fraught with imperfection, the aesthete turns away. Disgusted,
frustrated, dissatisfied, he leaves his hostess' party, goes home to his
rooms, and turns back to his art. Bis art ”creates a haven resembling
an earthly paradise” which no hostess' salon, however sumptuous or
socially select, can match. In doing so he renounces much, however. If
art 'idealises secular life," “contains its own criteria within itself,”
and is ”thus ‘fulfilment everywhere," it is also fulfillment nowhere.
In hypostatising art as autonomous, the aesthete has cut himself loose,
we recall, from inherited conventions, ordinary appearances, normative
concepts, and the imperfect social environment in which he is grounded.
Though not “conceived as a form of protest by Pater,“ autonomous art
does nevertheless “represent a detachment from and a contradiction to
man's ordinary modes of existence, and these negative qualities are
integral to a definition of art in the Paterian sense“ (Iser 32).

The question emerges: how can such an impulse be given
expression? How “can this ever-changing, fragile quality be given
objective expression without having an idea imposed upon it?“ (Iser 66)
Pater finds his first tentative answer in history, for

Art records the different phases of the individual's struggle

for unity with himself and the world, and so its history is a
constant tailoring of the world according to the needs of

9

human self-representation, turning the world finally into an
aesthetic phenomenon. (Iser 75)

But that answer is obviously problematic in at least two ways. In the
first place, admission of the need to ground art in something outside
itself undermines the claim of aesthetic autonomy. To ”consider history
as a sanction betrays an inherent weakness in the l'art pour l'art
concept, for whatever is absolute ought to carry its own legitimation
within itself.“ In the second place, history has undergone a
precipitate conversion into art:
As the claim of art's autonomy could not be sustained, Pater
propped it up with history. This, in turn, made his
perception of history lopsided. If history is meant to
sanction the autonomy of art, it suffers a severe reduction by
being confined to the history of art. This shrinkage of
history bears witness to the fact that art as the ultimate is
eéolaim that cannot be substantiated but only posited. (Iser
Having cut himself loose from an imperfect world, the aesthete's
existence is extremely precarious, but he cannot recover in human
history a firm foundation for his free-floating island of imagined
perfection. "The search for earthly paradise in experience can only be
successful by way of a Utopian fantasy that either negates or overcomes
the menaces of reality” (Iser 92). .
What I have been calling the problem of aestheticism may still
seem inconsequential unless or until one adds that the same people who
are ready to reduce history to history of art--a ”constant tailoring of
the world according to the needs of human self-representation"--are in
fact installed in institutions where they function as arbiters of
cultural values and influential participants in the processes which
determine, set limits on, the actual lives of diverse members of entire
societies.
One can catch a glimpse of what that in fact means in William
Buckler's quite sincere, not in the least ironic, description of Pater's
Hellenism. It was, Buckler tells us, 'metaphoric rather than literally

historical." Already it is evident that Pater is not alone in his

impulse to confuse art with history. Buckler's scrupulous

10

discrimination between the two is, after all, a mere detail. It doesn't
appear to modify the possibilities inferred. Pater's Hellenism, says
Buckler, was 'metaphoric rather than literally historical, an ideal
representation of what modern man might make of his life if he accepted
his earthly estate as what is and used his creative human resources to
become what the example of the classical Greeks shows he can be" (7).
Presumably, Buckler means to contrast ”modern man's" ”earthly estate”--
the "what is'--with the false expectation of a heavenly estate in the
"what comes after,” but the fact that he doesn't notice the
contradiction he is left with indicates the extent to which this
humanist stops short of a thorough going materialism. "Modern man" is
encouraged to accept one ”estate" and yet desire another. So,
presumably, he can be a taxi driver and yet be in the process of
becoming a demigod. Or perhaps he can be an accountant and yet think
like a demi-god; sell insurance by day and be a demi-god by night? To
borrow a phrase from Raymond Williams, it is time this bluff was called.
It's the same bluff by which Positivists such as John Morley,
editor of the Fortnightly Review and one of Pater's first publishers,
conceived of the project of democratizing art. “In an address in 1887
to the students of the London Society for the Extension of University
Teaching on the then controversial subject of the study and teaching of
English literature,“ Franklin E. Court reports,
Morley called their attention to the great need to bring
literature and the other arts to the people, to the common
man. ‘Our object is,’ he told the students, ‘--and it is that
which . . . raises us infinitely above the Athenian level--to
bring the Periclean ideas of beauty and simplicity and
cultivation of the mind within the reach of those who do the
drudgery and the service and rude work of the world. . . . And
it can be done without blunting or numbing the practical
energies of our people.’ (81)
Court's Approving comments confirm that he is not about to call the
bluff. With Morley, he is quite ready to assess Pater's contribution in
positive terms:
That Pater attempted to bring the merits of art down to the
world of daily existence and to show the spectator or the

reader, whoever or wherever he might be, how to savor the
pleasure independently, on his own terms, without absolute

11

pronouncements or the instructive prescription of the

specialists, is Morley's most permanently valuable critical

ogeervation on Pater's contribution to the democratization of
Morley's being the “only critic at the time who seems to have recognized
that particular virtue in Pater's work” (Court 81) tells us rather more
about Morley's progressive social agenda than it does about Pater's
procedure.

Court's commentary offers a convenient, and very familiar, example
of the form Paterian aestheticism has taken in the institutions of
higher education which have been the purveyors of culture in capitalist
democracies. ”Morley was addressing himself," says Court, "to a
timeless and particularly important objective of students and teachers
of literature” (81). Periclean ideas of ”beauty and simplicity and
cultivation of the mind” can be brought “within the reach of those who
do the drudgery and the service and rude work of the world” without
“blunting” their ”practical energies." Data processors will have read a
bit of Joyce. Dental technicians will have heard of Yorick's skull.
Behavior treatment specialists will know that Robert Burns was once
moved to write that his love was like a red, red rose. Such cultivation
will be had for its own sake, allowing for a few flowers among the weeds
of workaday life. Quality of life will be enhanced; substance of life
will be unchanged--or if changes come, they will originate in quite
another sphere than the “timeless” world of art.

Students will be encouraged to refresh and ennoble themselves by
occasional excursions into the artistic realm of wish-fulfillment.

"When shall we set sail for happiness?“ asks Baudelaire. "There is no
frigate like a book,“ writes another poet, less revered, "to take us
miles away.“ “Expression implies correction of the world, and it will
only reproduce these parts of experience that accord not with the
patterns of outside reality but with the secret wishes of the expresser'
(Iser 27). Aesthetic expression has become projection. The question
is, whose wishes will be given expression and which expressions will be

purveyed as timeless art, exposure to which is deemed ennobling? “What

12

modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the
details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the
spirit.“ Art is packaging. “And what does the spirit need in the face
of modern life?“ The question is asked again and again. Prom liberal
humanists, the answer comes back, again and again: “The sense of
freedom“ (Iser 34, emphasis mine). Artistic production becomes a
massive industry of denial, the real power of which is nowhere more
evident currently than in television advertising. The world requires
enhancement, “correction.“ The “details of modern life“ do not “satisfy
the spirit.“ The techniques of cultural production are so quickly
applied to fill the gap, there is no room to stand and ask why? What's
wrong with the world, that it requires correction? Will rearranging the
details fix it? Why does the spirit lack satisfaction? Why is its
greatest need in the face of modern life a sense of freedom?

What is our attitude toward the questions, that we rush in to
cover them over with abstractions? L'art pour l'art “means the triumph
of art over reality. The aim is not imitation but transformation of
life, and the aim of this in turn is not to present the ideal but to
relieve man of the burden of his finiteness“ (Iser 35). Death; being
and nethingness; temporality: are these the most basic terms, both of
the questions and of the answers? Is mortality what the aesthete seeks
to transcend, death the insurmountable limit in the face of which “the
modern spirit“ so tenaciously creates a “sense of“ freedom?

“That the end of life is not action but contemplation,“ writes
Pater:

--being as distinct from doing--a certain disposition of mind:
is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher
morality. In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true
spirit at all, you touch this principle, in a measure: these,
by their very sterility, are a type of beholding for the mere
joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art, is to

make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to
encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art

and poetry.
Yes, runs Iser's argument. Pater's aesthetic procedure liberates the

spirit from the burden of finiteness. “Art removes the ‘end' from life,

13

in both senses, and by dispensing with all teleology it not only
relieves the burden of finiteness, but also liberates those elements of
life that would otherwise be only ‘means' to the end“ (Iser 35). If
nothing is undertaken, presumably, nothing can be cut short,
interrupted. “The beholder is released from activity and may bask in
aesthetic quietism.“ If nothing is desired, nothing can be lost. Prom
heightened experience we have come to art as complete renunciation of
experience, sheer spectatorship, voyeurism. “Thus art becomes a kind of
privileged world to which are devoted ‘the wisest, at least among “the
children of this world“’“ (Iser 36).

The terms of the argument have brought us to the moment in
literary history of Henry James and Robert Browning as they have been
read by Modernist critics. All that is left to art are perceptual
perspectives, with no “normative concepts“ by which to make sense out of
a whole so assembled. It is but a short step from that situation to
Pound's Vorticism:

The aesthetic attitude as an answer to the existing challenge
was promulgated as the new horizon encompassing all the
remnants of former conceptualisations of life. An atmosphere
had to be distilled out of these fragments, formed neither by
laws of dogma nor concepts of philosophy, but by the
contingency of association. (Iser 37)
The trouble with Vorticism, of course, as with Impressionism before it
and Surrealism after, is that it “lift[s] appearances out of their
defining contexts and so frees them from the normative interpretation
imposed on them in different cultural periods“ (Iser 37), not to mention
different cultures and different social formations within and across
cultures. Assemblages created by wrenching people, objects, symbols out
of their defining social contexts have no validity outside the logic of
the assemblage itself: a reductively subjective and random logic which
reflects, nonetheless, the socially constituted consciousness of the
assembler. “When all systems have fallen apart,“ runs the argument, the
aesthete's “last chance of capturing the inner vision--even if only

indirectly and cryptically--lies in the word“ (Iser 50). Desire to

“transcend the vulgarity of the world by artificial means“ culminates in

14

the “mannered style“ which Nietzsche identified as the “hallmark of all
literary decadence“ and characterized as the “page as life at the
expense of the whole.“ It is the means by which the “artist's manner
triumphs over the non-subjective world“ (Iser 51-52).

But of course all systems have not actually fallen apart,
certainly not the one that Maynard Keynes, at the height of the
Modernist moment, stepped in to help save. The artist has chosen not to
acknowledge them as binding, or defining. And many surviving
Modernists--Robert Motherwell, for exampleL-are still at it, capturing
the inner vision as the page, or the canvas, at the expense of the
whole, despite the fact that they and their work have been completely
assimilated by the largest and most binding system of all. Why they are
still preoccupied with the reductive terms of being and nethingness--
confrontations of white and black, in Motherwell's case-—is an important
question requiring much deeper probing. That they haven't wearied of
the endless journey into themselves is surprising, but they are entitled
to the taedium vitae of such self-absorption; it is harmless. What is
not harmless, is objectionable, is the process by which teachers and
critics, as purveyors of cultural values, perpetually appropriate what
the “autonomous subject arrogates to itself“ in the reductive “page as
life at the expense of the whole“: “not only the richness of nuances
sedimented in the word, but also the compelling stringency of logic and
the fervent ardour of religion, in order to equate itself with the
impact it is able to exercise“ (Iser 54).

Somewhere along the line, Iser's argument has taken a mysterious
turn. What began as a renunciation of ends so as to liberate oneself
from the effects of “terminality“ has turned into a means of arrogating
possible meanings, logic, crypto-religious fervor, and power to depict,
not what people should de--for they shouldn't, precisely, do anything--
but what people should be. Teach people to desire to be something

 

2Robert Motherwell died in the summer of 1991. Per all its
limitations, I have always found his work compelling.

15

totally at odds with what it falls within their means to do and they
will labor unceasingly to acquire the symbols of such being, without
ever acquiring the power to do anything except harness their labor-power
to the machinery of capitalist production. At the same time, one is
wrenching the recipients of such education out of their own defining
social contexts and directing them to have their being in the elaborate
projections of “autonomous subjects“ who have neglected to acknowledge
the systems which support them.

The problem of “aesthetic historicism,“ then, and the consequences
of Pater's and subsequent literati's failure to break out of it, is a
very big problem. The critical techniques deemed appropriate by a
network of second and third string deconstructionist functionaries are
not equal to it. t I

A reading practice which contents the reader with an act of
foregrounding does indeed provide relief. It lets one off the hook,
allowing one to substitute oxymora of dubious value--“radically
conservative“--for meaningful articulations of the consequences of
unresolved conflict, simply folding the “relieved“ conflict back into
the discourse of scholarly observation. That procedure calls to mind
Pater's conception of the essay as the “form of formlessness,“ a form
which “deconstructs itself in order to represent open-endedness,
unrelatedness and endlessness as facts of experiential reality.“ Like
the essay so conceived, Ms. Williams' is a “discourse simultaneously
reneuncing a discursive tackling of its findings, thereby casting doubts
on the efficacy of discursive thinking“ (Iser 19). The last best
defense of this sort of academic discourse seems to be impotence
rationalized as a strength. But it is not a strength of mind to be
hobbled with inconsistency, nor a particularly strenuous exercise of
critical powers to identify it as such. Consistent inconsistency is not
to be confused with dynamic dialectic. It contains tension; it does not

generate movement.

16

Wolfgang Iser, the one reader of Pater who has discerned most
fully in his oeuvre the dimensions of the problem--and on whose insights
I have been drawing from the inception of this study--understands the
distinction.
Per Pater . . . the driving force is one of reconciliation,
not of rupture, for the latter would imply conceptualising the
new beginning, which would be totally alien to Pater with his
deep distrust of any kind of philosophical concept. . . .
Reconciliation was not a dialectic movement towards synthesis;
it was, rather, an interaction of opposites, a telescoping of
incompatibles, resulting in a syncretic and synchronic
perception of what was and what had been. . . . Through the
. co-existence of opposites, reconciliation makes it feasible
for the vast variety of human possibilities to be embraced,
and this is the meaning of art, which, however, can only open

up this play of possibilities in a realm that lies beyond
challenging realities. (39)

Iser's analysis of Paterian aestheticism is the most penetrating to
date. Worked out in a study published in 1960 as Walter Pater: Die
Autenemie des Asthetischen, it was translated by David Henry Wilson and
published in 1987 as part of the Cambridge University Press series,
lurepean Studies in English Literature, under the title, Walter Pater:
The Aesthetic Moment. Iser's comments there on the contradictory
impulses--toward modernity and history--registered in Pater's aesthetic
historicism do not “relieve“ the problem those contradictory impulses
represent only to fold it back into the issueless discourse of scholarly
observation.

Recognizing that, as Williams says, “awareness of the skeptical
dimension of historicism . . . returns“ Pater “to the aesthetic,“ Iser
identifies therein the “decisive reason for Pater's'preoccupation with
myth“ 8

It is a prehistoric region in which man could still view the
world as a whole. History merely records the aimless
changeability of things, whereas in myth all changes relate to
a perceivable totality. History unfolds itself in temporary
mediation of opposites, whereas in myth the opposing forces
converge into an overarching meaning. . . . Such an experience
elevates and purifies the emotions, and so has a healing
effect on the modern mind entangled in confusions and
contradictions. (113)

Leaving aside for the moment Iser's marking of Pater's recognition of

the futility of any attempt to recover a mythic mode of consciousness as

17

the way to restore vitality and coherence to modern experience, one is
tempted to draw in what Iser says about the function of myth overagainst
history an analogy with the function of Deconstruction's exclusive
preoccupation with the structure of a text.
Myth fulfils Pater's longing to view the whole--a longing
which for him could not be fulfilled by history, as this would
have demanded action and commitment, inconceivable for the
quietism inherent in the aesthetic attitude. Myth, however,
corresponds to this disposition: it is poetry, requiring no
more than aesthetic contemplation, without the need for
ethical decision. (113)
Prom Paterian aestheticism to Derridean and derivative modes of
deconstructive practice, there is a continual shrinkage: from history,
to history of art, to myth as the equivalent of art (and vice verse), to
linguistic structures/systems, to texts. Per the “modern mind entangled
in confusions and contradictions,“ Deconstruction reduces “the whole“ to
a text, satisfies itself with identifying the “inconsistencies“ it
contains, and commends the practice of a “radical conservatism.“ If
myth satisfies the desire to see “opposing forces converge into an
overarching meaning,“ relating historical changes to a “perceivable
totality,“ Deconstruction satisfies the desire to dismantle an
“overarching meaning“ understood to be oppressive or authoritarian by
confining “opposing forces“ within the “totality“ of a text. To exceed
that function would demand “action and commitment, inconceivable for the
quietism inherent“ in the deconstructionist “attitude.“ If we call the
first procedure “radically conservative,“ we might call the latter
procedure “conservatively radical.“ Deconstruction too “corresponds“ to
the quietist “disposition“: it is textuality, requiring no more than
linguistic scrutiny, without the need for moral commitment or political
action.
But we've had enough of this confounding of terms and opposites.
The important point is that both procedures are, in effect, chimerical.
That Ms. Williams arrives at her inconclusive conclusion using the

techniques of Deconstruction demonstrates the inadequacy of those

methods of inquiry. More importantly, it points to the consequences for

18

contemporary criticism of the problems passed down from Paterian
aestheticism. The problems have been transmitted via the
institutionalized version of Modernism and contained by academic
critical practice. Though it actually offers readers a choice of the
extremes of determinism or indeterminacy, it ignores the
irreconcilability of those extremes and plays indiscriminately with the
methods specific to each.

The absence of a middle ground between those extremes, both of
which exclude the possibility of meaningful human agency, is part of the
legacy of Paterian aestheticism. The unacceptability of that situation
supplies the impetus for this study. The skepticism--or in its newer
formulation, indeterminacy--inherent in historicism confines the scholar
to “aesthetic reconstructions.“ The consequences of that confinement
are not only crippling, but finally self-destructive, regardless of
whether one chooses, from within the confinement, to speculate about how
it has been constituted (Structuralism) or to identify the aporia by
which it is said to collapse (Deconstruction). J. Hillis Miller writes
that

Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful
and circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth. . . . The
deconstructive critic seeks to find, by the process of
retracing, the element in the system studied which is
alogical, the thread in the text in question which will
unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the
whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the
ground on which the building stands by showing that the text
has already annihilated the ground, knowingly or unknowingly.
Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text
but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.
(“Stevens' Rock“)
Once large numbers of readers housed by academia have become comfortable
with the idea that “any literary text, as a ceaseless play of
‘irreconcilable' or ‘contradictory' meanings, is ‘indeterminable' or
‘undecidable'. . . [and] hence, that ‘all reading is misreading'“
(Miller, “Walter Pater“), it is easy enough for young scholars taking

instruction there to conclude that the consistent practice of

inconsistency is a strength.-

19

Initially this mistake is felt to be liberating, a throwing off of
the yoke of authority, an eluding of the “hierarchical categories“
enforced by vestiges of the “absolute spirit.“ Whereas the “absolute
spirit reduces the world to a set of hierarchical categories,“ the
“relative spirit registers an expansion of things and an obliteration of
dividing lines“ (Iser 15). As Jerome McGann says in one of his Trinity
College, Cambridge, lectures, “experience always outruns conception“
(ix). We shall gain rather than lose by “surrendering human life to the
relative spirit“ (Iser 16). Poetry is, after all, the “discourse which
lays bare, which makes it possible to understand, how all texts--
including the text we call ‘the world'--function.“ And the “heteronomy
which Bakhtin . . . postulated of fictional discourse . . . is itself a
tool, a signifier, by means of which human beings, as individuals and as
groups, define the possibilities of their lives“ (McGann, “Marxism,
Romanticism, and Postmodernism“ 630). “What the moralist asks,“ Pater
writes, is:

Shall we gain or lose by surrendering human life to the
relative spirit? Experience answers that the dominant
tendency of life is to turn ascertained truth into a dead
letter, to make us all the phlegmatic servants of routine.
The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on the more
fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking
through a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and
giving elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an
intellectual finesse of which the ethical result is a delicate
and tender justice in the criticism of human life. (Iser 16)
The idea of the efficacy of this “delicate and tender justice in the
criticism of human life“ is predicated, however, on the assumption of a
Montaignesque tolerance which amounts to quiescent spectatorship on the
arena of human activity.

In Marius the Epicurean, Pater discovers that attitude to be
sickeningly disjunctive with the fact of forced combat and slaughter
presided over by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Stoic detachment
from the celebration he has authorized awakens in Marius an inarticulate
outrage. In that context, no amount of “heteronomy“ could have been

sufficient a “tool“ to contravene the effect of an imperial sign. Per

the signified in that arena, no amount of signifying would have availed

20

to “define the possibilities“ of his or her life. But the relative
spirit is “ranked above philosophical dogmatism because it grasps the
dynamism and the associative multiplicity of experience“ (Iser 16). The
Roman jeux generated a good deal of energy, excitement, jouissance. The
absolute spirit is a killjoy--like Rilman in Mrs. Dalloway, and unlike
Clarissa, who would “not say of herself, I am this, I am that“; for
“there she was,“ mistress of ceremonies: to have chosen “this“ or
“that“ would have been to shut out so many lovely possibilities, none of
which is realized, however.

Because it “has to impose a rigid pattern of cognition upon it,“
the absolute spirit “cannot allow for this all-important flexibility of
experience.“ So when the civic ritual ceases to be charming
--the “beauty of holiness“ conspicuously absent--Marius the aesthete
simply takes his departure, sorrowing, to seek other forms of pleasure
than blood lust or the abusive exercise of power on a massive scale.

One cannot call them higher forms of pleasure, exactly, because one has
thrown off the oppressive “hierarchical categories“ by which one could
rank modes of experience. Finding such displays distasteful, the
aesthete does not display the bad taste of protesting that these games,
whatever anyone else may call them, are morally repugnant. Such
“dogmatism“ would “impose a structure on the world,“ and reality is “at
best approached, not with a compulsive imposition of norms, but with a
keen sense of observation, catching the multifariousness of its
experiential nature“ (Iser 16).

The “unpredictable road of experience“ is Marius' “sole route to
knowledge“ (Iser 17). When it carries Marius into contact with
Cornelius and the community of Christians, it does not lead him to
embrace a set of “idealising distortions“ (Iser 21). It simply exposes
him to a quality-~whether sensation or idea, it would be hard to
specify--that is satisfying to his spirit. The quality is hope: what
the spirit needs in the face of modern life, a sense of freedom, a sense

of the possibility of liberation from the limit imposed by the fact of

21

death. It invests Marius' death with the same liminality that has
saturated every experience of his life.

The sceptical, relative spirit . . . is a countervailing
force, subverting and undoing all frameworks set up by the
filing system of the human mind. It releases the facts from
their subservience to general principles to which they have
been yoked by the absolute spirit. In undercutting all
normative ordering, it highlights open-endedness as the
hallmark of experience. The relative spirit is no longer
committed to a cognition of reality, but mobilises the human
mind to face up to an open future, so that it will follow the
unpredictable road of experience as its sole route to
knowledge. . . . It is the polemics against closed systems
which throw the liberating impulse of the relative spirit into
proper relief. Pater's scepticism is negative (rejecting the
norms of the absolute spirit) and positive (bringing to light
the undefined and undefinable). (Iser 17)

Therein lies the problem central to aesthetic historicism, the
problem which has dogged every version of historicism ever since. Once
the “facts“ have been “release[d)“ from their “subservience to general
principles,“ their import is diminished. One does not know how to
interpret them, let alone toward what ends to use them. In the
commitment only to “open-endedness,“ both the Socratic and the Marxian
ends of dialectic are lost. One is left with negative dialectic,
advancing neither toward truth nor toward effective change. One
achieves, instead, merely a “temper,“ a disposition, an attitude of
receptivity. Pater writes in Plate and Platenism:

The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philosophy
begins with an axiom or definition: the essay or dialogue, on
the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not
necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long
dialogue with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be
co-extensive with life. It does in truth little more than
clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental
tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing,
perhaps: it does but put one into a duly receptive attitude
towards such possible truth, discovery, or revelation, as may
one day occupy the ground, the tablet,—-shed itself on the
purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system
of propositions, but forms a temper. (188)
Inasmuch as Pater's aesthetic empiricism equates the “ground“ with the
“mental tablet,“ however, the dialectic process is ultimately confined
to the mind processing the data of experience. And since the aesthete
is disposed to admit only the data which he finds pleasing, exchanging

history for the history of art, even though it is a “vital function of

22
scepticism to protect man from all idealising distortions, and so man is
no longer set above reality but is placed in association with it“ (Iser
21), the reality in which he is placed in association is a highly
selective one. The attitude of receptivity is shaped or guided by the
impulses of the perceiving subject. In shaping experience to satisfy
its impulses, it does not escape “idealising distortions.“ As Iser
observes, private longings provide the framework for all of historical
reality, instead of the other way around. Since history does not in
fact support such idealising distortions, “art becomes the legitimate
continuation of myth“ (Iser 119).

So far from remaining receptive to reality, the aesthete “lives in
contradiction to reality.“ Iser observes that “herein lies the
revolutionary aspect of his attitude, for his approach breaks up
existing, solidified forms of life“ (168-69). Because he is “unable to
devise new forms and ideals,“ however, the aesthete “can go no further
than this negative contradiction“ (Iser 169).

That Pater understands this aesthetic impasse his imaginary
portrait of Sebastian van Storck makes clear. In the portrait the road
of aesthetic experience finds its destination in the void. Aware that
“Poeticising the world will not change man's basic experience,“
Sebastian's “only solution is to detach himself, but this in itself is a
negative reaction to the world, depending on the very situation it seeks
to escape from, and so detachment cannot generate a new ideal.“ Iser
considers that “Theoretically the void may be the ideal, since the
reaction is one against what Pater calls ‘fulness,'“ but goes on to
assert that “a void is absence, not presence, and life is presence“
(Iser 163). What he does not consider is precisely the historical
ground from which Sebastian recoils. If Sebastian detaches himself from
it, Iser ignores it, substituting the abstraction “fulness“ for its
historical referent: the material prosperity and physical energy of
social life in seventeenth-century Holland, the earliest seat of venture

capitalism in Europe.

23

The aesthetic impasse explored in “Sebastian van Storck“ is an old
problem. It is the problem Samuel Johnson explores in Rasselas, the
moral tale in which Johnson sets his protagonist marching between
vacuity and the moral entanglement which immediately ensues upon taking
a step out of vacuity. What is new, or specific to Pater, is the
absence of normative concepts by which to surmount the vacillation
between vacuity and entanglement. For Dr. Johnson, the fear of
entanglement involved the recognition that with activity and involvement
comes moral error; in Johnson's “closed system,“ the fact one termed
sin. It was Johnson's extreme sense of his own inadequacies--
exacerbated by his ungainly appearance and lack of physical self-
control--that disposed him to doubt that the Christian dogma of
forgiveness could extend to him. Hence his dread of moral error, and
the great relief he experienced when, after fervent prayer, the symptoms
of his dropsy abated, convincing him of God's mercifulness to him.

For Pater, however, the fear of engagement is experienced very
differently. What is at risk is not moral error, but identity.
Aesthetes such as Sebastian van Storck withdraw from the social world
because they fear contamination by the forces which might threaten their
compensatory self-image. It is their very incapacity to negotiate the
social world which drives them to project a transfigured world, one in
which they can act out the imaginary drama of a transfigured self.

Finding ample materials in the ever—enlarging world of “culture,“
they can avoid, defer indefinitely, confrontation with a ground of
experience just outside the history of culture; can confound
indefinitely history and history of art.

Likewise, Deconstructionists, having an ample supply of texts, can
confound indefinitely history and textuality. The confusion of terms in
J. Hillis Miller's description of Deconstruction is symptomatic of a
larger confusion.

Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful
and circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth. . . . The

deconstructive critic seeks to find, by the process of
retracing, the element in the system studied which is

24

alogical, the thread in the text in question which will
unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the
whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the
ground on which the building stands by showing that the text
has already annihilated the ground, knowingly or unknowingly.
Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text
but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.
Miller equivocates about whether it is the deconstructive critic or the
text which does the dismantling; also about whether it is the structure
or the ground on which it stands that is annihilated. There are two
obvious confusions here. Who or what is doing what to what? Structure
is confused with agency and ground is confused with structure. The
reason is really rather simple: deconstructive critics ignore the two
fundamental issues of human agency and historical ground. That is
apparently why they generally fail to be bothered by the fact that to
say one has deconstructed something by which one continues to be
confined is meaningless. To reveal the faults or flaws in a structure
is neither to pull it down nor to blast away the ground on which it has
been erected, presumably by human agency. To speak of the structure
dismantling itself is to invest it with an agency it does not possess, a
gesture which exhibits a forgetting of the concept of agency altogether.
My purpose here is to seek the way out of aesthetic confinement
and back onto a historical ground where human agency is again made
visible; where human agents can engage with determinate facts which
“aesthetic reconstructions“ can only transcend. The first steps of that
expedition take direction from Wolfgang Iser's insights into the problem
of aestheticism. What makes Iser's analysis the most penetrating to
date is his emphasis on the fact that Pater's aestheticism was not just
a mode of literary or art historical criticism, or of literary
production, but an existential hypothesis.
“An analysis“ of Pater's “work,“ he writes in the 1985 Foreword to
Wilson's translation,
. . seemed to promise experience of what it meant to make
Art the ultimate value of finite existence. Such an
experience would bring to light the problems which New
Criticism could not cope with, since it was no longer

concerned with the consequences of the autonomous object.
Pater dealt precisely with these problems, because for him Art

-r'-

25

was an ultimate value, enabling man to forget the pressure of
finite human existence. For Pater autonomous Art and real
life joined hands, as it were, under the table--a relationship
that could only be anathema to the basic principles of New
Criticism. (vii-viii)
First ventured in Pater’s essay on “Aesthetic Poetry“ (1868 [1889]) and
given definitive expression in the “Conclusion“ to Studies in the
History of the Renaissance (1873), the hypothesis was tested out in
Pater's historicist criticism and beyond that in his strangely inert
fiction, where the logic of the hypothesis could only, finally, be
imagined. As Iser puts it, “Where cognitive criticism comes to an end,
literature begins, for fiction alone can stage that which is
inaccessible to referential discourse“ (x).

Though Iser explains that his aim was to explore the intrinsic
dynamics of the aesthetic mode of existence imagined by Pater, he is
aware that its failure as a paradigm for aesthetic autonomy presumes the
immediacy of extrinsic forces. On the one hand, “by analysing Pater's
work,“ he “hoped to uncover what had been glossed over by New Criticism
and had thus ultimately caused its demise as a paradigm of
interpretation.“ Acknowledging that the “aesthetic existence,
narcissistically turned in upon itself and yet unable to sustain this
fixation, seems to require viewing from standpoints outside itself,“ he
supposes, on the other hand, that “to do this would mean blotting out
all inherent problems--especially if one were to use the Rierkegaardian
reference of the ethical decision or the religious renunciation of self,
not to mention the condemnation the aesthetic existence would have
suffered if viewed from a sociological angle“ (viii). He is right, of
course, insofar as outright condemnation tends to preclude careful
scrutiny, and it was his willingness to explore the problem from within
the subjective experience recorded by Pater's writing that allowed him
to penetrate so deeply into the active process of denial at work there.

At the same time, however, the fact that the process being viewed is one

of denial requires, at some point, equally careful scrutiny of the

26

impinging forces in response to which the aesthete's defenses are
activated.

That Iser's conception of the problem is limited to an “either/or“
choice of focus on “inherent problems“ or “extrinsic references“ is
indicative of his position in the history of criticism. As he writes in
his Foreword almost thirty years after the book was originally written,

In historical terms . . . my monograph may be taken to reflect
the problems of literary criticism in the 1950s. On the one
hand, I was trying to free literature from being taken as
evidence of anything other than itself . . . on the other, I
wanted to show through Pater's work what was entailed in the
concept of autonomous art. (viii-ix)
It does indeed “reflect the problems of literary criticism in the 1950s“
that Iser could conceive of his study in those terms: that he could be
“trying to free literature from being taken as evidence of anything
other than itself“ at the same time that he was engaged in a
thoroughgoing exposition of the impossibility of aesthetic autonomy.3
That stance follows in part from Iser's rejection of a “historical
approach“ whose characteristic focus on “motives, parallels, and
influences“ doesn't include “criteria that would enable us to assess
Pater's work comprehensively.“ Refusing the limits of a critical
approach which is “for the most part descriptive“ and “uses categories
inherited from the positivistic tradition“ to define, in the case of
Pater, a “form of writing whose main thrust is to break down all
cognitive pigeon-holing,“ Iser is looking for a “new and more adequate
method“ by which to explore problems that have “scarcely been touched on

in earlier studies“ (4).

 

’ See Bloom's attack on Blackmur in the essay, “Lawrence, Eliot,
Blackmur, and the Tortoise,“ in The Ringers in the Tower, in particular
his contention: “That the imagination needs support can perhaps be
argued; that a structure properly conservative, classical, and Catholic
enough is its necessary support is simply a social polemic, and
irrelevant to the criticism of poetry.“ The essay was written in 1958.
Bloom's position is that the question of what sort of “structure of
support“ a poem “may be taken as evidence of“ is “simply a social
polemic,“ which is “irrelevant to the criticism of poetry.“ What he
ignores is the ideological basis of his own canon-making; his choice of
“strong“ poets/poems and the “structure of support“ implied by the
imaginative dramas they enact, which is not “properly conservative,
classical, and Catholic,“ but liberal, Romantic, and Protestant.

27

His concern is to “work out the nature of aestheticism, asking
first what were the conditions that led to art being hypostatised and
endowed with ultimacy, and then how to conceive of the autonomous art
which arose out of this transfiguration“ (4). What limits the results
of that effort is the extent to which he is still caught in the
historicism he is trying to exceed: his willingness to participate in
the movement to “break down all cognitive pigeon-holing,“ on the one
hand; his readiness to find the “conditions that led to art being
hypostatised“ in the history of art itself rather than the structures of
support which art “may be taken as evidence of“ in a larger material
history, on the other. That he is grappling with the difficulties he is
hhmself, precisely, entangled in, however, gives his study impressive
force and intellectual urgency.

Iser's purpose closely parallels my own. “In examining the nature
of Pater's ideas,“ he explains, “we shall not merely be interpreting but
will also be striving after an analysis of the aesthetic. Indeed, since
Pater's writings are representative examples of aestheticism, we shall
be aiming for a definition of the aesthetic whose validity will extend
beyond Pater“ (5). Given his finding, however, that “Human life . . .
orientated by art will experience the insecurity of this basis through
continually changing moods which will only resolve themselves in death“
(4-5), one can no longer conceive of “striving after an analysis of the
aesthetic“ on the assumption that intrinsic and extrinsic forces can be
separated.

The aesthetic response is a response. To understand it one must
really probe what it is a response to. To be satisfied with words and
phrases like Heraclitean flux, disorder, chaos, change, pedestrian life,
temporality, or even death-~which seems so absolute an event as to bear
no further probing, but insofar as it is actually feared, as the
ultimate form of dissolution, compels a good deal more probing--is to be

complicit in the process of denial the response represents.

28

The very recognition that, in Pater's “representative examples of
aestheticism,“ “Art and real life joined hands“ precludes the
possibility of blotting out the “external references“ informing the
“inherent problems,“ much less that of “freeing literature from being
taken as evidence of anything other than itself.“ The insecurity of a
life “orientated by art“ derives not only from the absence of sanction
or legitimation, as Iser suggests, but from the futility of the impulse
to deny the external forces which threaten its fragile internal
integrity.

What the aesthete fears most is dissolution of self, of identity,
and if identity is socially constituted, it is not ladies on the lawn at
Oxford that Pater fears, as such, but the threat they pose to his
socially constituted self. The modes of relation enforced by capitalist
production make reciprocity, mutually constitutive relations, impossible
except to a limited degree within classes and smaller formations. But
there, too, one is ever in danger of falling out of self, as it were,
from one class or group to a lower. The fear of death and the fear of
becoming declasse are deeply connected. Becoming declasse is, for many,
a fate worse than death, to which actual death, suicide, is preferable.

Not only must one compete for material and social survival, but
one must also become a commodity oneself in order to be allowed to
compete, the constitution of which must continually be adjusted. That
necessity encourages, in fact enforces, a continual process of
narcissistically turning in on oneself, not just to reenact a fixation,
but actually to reconstitute oneself as an appealing social commodity.
The more marginal to the mainstream of flourishing social exchange one
is, perhaps, the more intense, obsessive, this defensive, and to a large
extent compensatory, mechanism becomes.

Central to Iser's analysis of the problem of aestheticism is his
reading of the way in which Pater's fictional aesthetes are unable to
enact their vision of a heightened reality. Marius, Watteau in “A

Prince of Court Painters,“ Denys l'Auxerrois, Sebastian van Storck, and

29

Duke Carl of Rosenmold are the figures Iser takes up. None can negate
social reality with sufficient force to realize or sustain his vision of
a heightened reality. Already one can hear the voice of Gudrun in the
opening paragraphs of Women in Love: “Nothing materialisesl Everything
withers in the bud . . . . everything--oneself--things in general.“ And
to Iser's catalogue one should add Emerald Uthwart. He will become the
paradigm for WOolf's vacant, and finally absent, hero in Jacob's Room.
Of Pater's Imaginary Portraits Iser writes,

If ‘portrait' denotes a picture of a person, ‘imaginary'
makes it clear that the picture does not aim at likeness, but
is fashioned by an overmastering fantasy, which is bound to
reveal a good deal about the ‘artist' himself. This is all
the more remarkable as Watteau, Dionysus and an eighteenth-
century duke are historical figures and not purely invented
characters. Since these are portrayed to the dictates of
Pater's imagination, the moment of crisis into which all of
them are plunged must be seen as a paradigm of the aesthetic
existence. The outcome of this crisis may be one of two
possibilities: either life is experienced as suffering--in
which case the account will lay bare the nature of suffering--
or there will be an attempt to act by leaping into the dark in
order to gain what suffering denies. Both tendencies are
discernible in Imaginary Portraits. As suffering, however,
prevails, failure inscribes itself into the aesthetic
attitude. Yet failure, in turn, has to be given expression,
and it is here that Pater's fantasy finally triumphs, not by
making the characters fall short of what they had envisioned
as the ideal, but through the ensuing mood of deep melancholy.
A mood--whatever its colouring--indicates that the split
between subject and object is obliterated, opposites have
interpenetrated and are thus dissolved. For once the subject
can be at one with itself. Pater, however, leaves no doubt
about the price to be paid if the aesthetic attitude is
sustained; it finds its paradoxical fulfilment in continual
failure. (154)

The mood, “whatever its colouring,“ is the emotional resolution of the
conflict in which the aesthete has been defeated. Of course the “split
between subject and object“ is not really “obliterated.“ In the mood of
the subject a vestige of the object is incorporated. The aesthete's
“sense of“ it is savored, but only as a residue, as sorrow is the
residue of pain or grief the residue of loss, those emotions being all
that is left of contact with the object. In the emotional resolution
the aesthete finds a way to convert failure into a “kind of“ triumph.
Again, however, “opposites“ have not really “interpenetrated“ or

been “dissolved.“ The dualism Iser has left in place prevents him from

30

pushing beyond the level of abstraction here. Having failed in his
attempt to make contact or engage with, much less subdue, an object or
another subject, the aesthete is simply returned to himself. If he
feels riven by the experience, his emotions are the glue with which he
melds the pieces of himself back together, his mood the complement of
his sense that he has reestablished integrality. Agitation subsides
into more comfortable quiescence as the effort to derive satisfaction of
the pleasure principle from interaction with an unyielding reality is
abandoned.

But all this talk of subject and object obscures the process we
are actually investigating. The “continual failure“ in which the
“aesthetic attitude . . . finds its paradoxical fulfilment“ can't be
understood within the confines of subjectivity. We can't know what the
failure is unless we get at the interaction between the aesthete and the
“pedestrian life“ he turns from, defeated but with identity intact, and
so “melancholy“ but in “a sense“ triumphant.

Iser rightly observes that the “moment of crisis into which“
Pater's fictional aesthetes are “plunged must be seen as a paradigm of
the aesthetic existence. The outcome of this crisis may be one of two
possibilities: either life is experienced as suffering--in which case
the account will lay bare the nature of suffering--or there will be an
attempt to act by leaping into the dark in order to gain what suffering
denies.“ What is all this suffering? Do Pater's accounts, or Iser's
readings of them, in fact “lay bare the nature“ of the suffering? Why
does the aesthete find “pedestrian life“ so painful? Why does he appear
to feel that to live in the actual world is to be forced to tolerate the
intolerable? That is the question one must bring to a subsequent
reading of Pater's portraits.

The abstractions which have been allowed for so long to stand in
this sphere of inquiry seem to indicate that more than a handful of
effete aesthetes have agreed to obscure it with something akin to what

T.E. Hulme disparaged in Romanticism as so much “circumambient gas.“

31

The extent to which any really probing inquiry has been avoided is
evident in the prevalence of just such metaphors as “pedestrian life.“
It is a feature of the legacy of Paterian aestheticism that the whole of
the real world, as opposed to the world of art or the history of art, is
so frequently and unregretfully dismissed as “pedestrian.“ Similarly,
in the discourse of that arch-humanist, Harold Bloom, the world of
actual men and women is shrunk down to a word, “embattled,“ and quickly
elided so that the humanist can get on with his investigation of that
imaginatively more compelling figure, the “central man“ or “crystal
man,“ dreamt of, his every nuanced facet explored, by the likes of
Emerson, Nietzsche, Ranke, Dilthey, and Collingwood. If the actual
world is dismissed as “pedestrian,“ and the actual people living and
working in it are dismissed as “embattled,“ what are we to make of the
condition Iser gathers up into the word “suffering“? Scattered
references to the condition may clarify the nature both of the suffering
and of the evasion.

Writing an appreciation of Pater's career as an art critic,

Buckler speaks of “art's manifestations of the capacity of the human
spirit to master its environment by creating for it an ideal form that
was rooted in matter but infinitely more significant.“ Such “aesthetic
reconstructions,“ as Carolyn Williams calls them, or “supreme
d6nouements,“ as Peter calls them, are, he continues, “formal artistic
proofs of man's ability in each age to create unified, self-validating
alternatives to a life otherwise lacking in any substantial solace.“
These “artistic proofs“ were the “objects of study“ Pater “found
worthiest of devotion“ (Buckler 1).

The nonchalance with which Buckler dismisses all the possible
sources of solace in a human life is as remarkable as the ease with
which he condenses the sources of pain and trouble into a single phrase
taken up from Pater. Pater's “imaginative creations,“ Buckler explains,
“show through mythic example-how the spirit enmeshed in the ‘bewildering

toils' of modern life can find at least the ‘equivalent for a sense of

32

freedom.'“ What those “bewildering toils“ are, or how they are specific
to “modern life,“ Buckler does not pause to consider. One surmises that
that is because, following Pater's example, he is inclined to believe
that “Only by attaining for his life in this world some degree of the
distance from the chaos of detail, some degree of the ideal modeling,
that form or style in art symbolizes can modern man experience some
equivalent to the sense of freedom that he needs.“‘ The implications of
the distancing are obvious, and one need not belabor them. Buckler
construes it as one of Pater's great merits that “From beginning to end
. . . [he] showed the keenest awareness of the spiritual condition of
man in his modern situation; he acknowledged it as his own situation and
accepted it as the ‘environment' within whose imperatives he had to
work“ (6). The habit of distance wears too comfortably to stimulate
effort to discern what sort of order the “chaos of detail“ might
actually compose.

Of course that is not Buckler's purpose. His object of study is
the ideal orders art has composed. But because his object is so
limited, the connection between Pater's “modern situation,“ between the

“‘environment' within whose imperatives he had to work,“ and “man's

 

4The language of Buckler's Introduction, written in 1986, is
reminiscent of the discourse, and the ideology, of New Criticism. One
hears echoes in that last passage of Blackmur in “A Critic's Job of
Work“: “The arts serve purposes beyond themselves; the purposes of what
they dramatize or represent at that remove from the flux which gives
them order and meaning and value; and to deny those purposes is like
asserting that the function of a handsaw is to hang above a bench and
that to cut wood is to belittle it.“ Clearly, however, Blackmur does
not limit the critic's job to appreciation of form. “But the purposes
are varied and so bound in his subject that the artist cannot always
design for them. The critic, if that is his bent, may concern himself
with those purposes or with some one among them which obsess him; but he
must be certain to distinguish between what is genuinely ulterior to the
works he examines and what is merely irrelevant; and he must further not
assume except within the realm of his special argument that other
purposes either do not exist or are negligible or that the works may not
be profitably discussed apart from ulterior purposes and as examples of
dramatic possibility alone“ (380). Nor does Blackmur at any time
confuse “dramatic possibility“ or formal realization with actualization.
Blackmur is not interested in loose equivalences. Nevertheless, he is
more attentive to dramatic achievement than to ulterior purposes, and
his emphasis upon the “limits appropriate“ to any “given approach“ (379)
stems from a respect for the art object limiting the “sum“ of the
critic's “best work“ to the “pedagogy of elucidation and appreciation“
(378).

33

spiritual condition“ is simply not examined. That it isn't examined is
not remarkable; all studies are selective. What is remarkable is that
the connection seems to have been entirely forgotten. The habit of
ignoring it has become so confirmed that the capacity to recognize it
has been seriously diminished.

Likewise Bloom is not inclined to consider what conditions dispose
Wallace Stevens to see the actual world as populated by “things,“ nor
why he reduces things to “appearances,“ much less why he finds it
“dehumanizing“ to live only with the “‘ordinary, proper, and true
appearances of things to us'“ (xii).

As a Positivist with a progressive social agenda, Morley sees in
the “doctrine of ‘art for art's sake'. . . no impediment to positive
social change.“ Nor does his interpreter, Franklin Court. As Buckler
follows Pater, and Bloom follows Stevens, Court follows Morley in
supporting the idea of “art for art's sake.“ Says Court, “It was an
idea that . . . [Morley] thought should be supported for it was, like
the Oxford Movement out of which he believed it grew, ‘equally a protest
against the mechanical and graceless formalism of the modern era . . .
and . . . a craving for the infusion of something harmonious and
beautiful about the bare lines of daily living'“ (78). As a myth of
“the modern“ enlarges, it obscures the world it disparages. Hardy's
sense of the “coming universal wish not to live“ (Jude the Obscure 266)
recorded in the episode of “Father Time's“ suicide--Baudelaire tells a
similar tale in Paris Spleen (“The Rope,“ dedicated to Edouard Manet)--
has referents that phrases like “mechanical and graceless formalism“ and
the “bare lines of daily living“ simply do not address.

As “modernity“ envelope its inhabitants, it becomes less not more
visible. Neither Pater nor Morley nor Court can “protest against“
forces they too steadfastly wish not to see. In Forster's Howards End,
on the other hand, the Schlegel sisters are finally forced to see the
new apartment building in which Mr. Wilcox takes a flat. They can in

fact no longer see anything else because the new building, with its

34

utilitarian and “graceless“ form, blocks their view of both the
surrounding neighborhood and the sky. Woolf is critical of Forster for
failing to achieve symbolic integration of subjective state and
objective environment. The soul is caged in a red brick villa, she
wants us to perceive, but in writing a prose which creates beautifully
irradiated objects--red brick villas so charged with subjective energy
that they are transfigured-~she obscures our vision of the bricks.
Forster looks at the bricks. Moreover, he knows that they exist
independent of his gaze, as bricks.

Pater wished to see only enchanted bricks when he wrote “The Child
in the House.“ He wrote it partly to seek “self-understanding,“ Iser
comments. Posing the question, “What is to be obtained from this self-
understanding,“ Iser replies that “‘A sense of freedom' is Pater's
answer.“ That “sense of freedom,“ he observes, is the means by which
the “subject disentangles itself from the enchanted web of necessities
in which it has been trapped“ (75). He is absolutely on target. His
understanding of the subjective process by which “art contradicts vulgar
experience“ is wonderfully acute (60). But he is only just willing to
acknowledge the exigency of the bricks. Bricks are vulgar. To describe
the realities which both define and trap the subject as an “enchanted
web of necessities“ is already to retreat from contact with such vulgar
trivialities as bricksfi’ Iser's abstractions leave the enchantment
undispelled. What the “web of necessities“ consists of remains as much
a mystery as the question why anything as solid and binding as the word
“necessity“ implies should be called “enchanted.“

The distancing such abstractions effect prevents one from
exchanging metaphors for vulgar material facts. The import of the most
straightforward statements of fact is obscured, as in Pater's confession

in “The Child in the House“ that with the “desire of physical beauty

 

’Bven Hawthorne, from his peep-hole under the eaves of his mother's
and sisters' house, saw not an “enchanted web“ but an “iron tissue“ of
necessity when he imagined the enigmatic movements of a fellow he called
Wakefield, having read an account of his strange behavior in the

newspaper.

35

mingled itself early the fear of death--the fear of death intensified by
the desire of beauty.“ In these lines as in much of Pater's intricate
prose, a literal reading is the most revealing. Pater was an
unattractive boy. His father operated a surgery in East London before
he died of a fever, while Pater was yet a young child. Hence Pater was
made early conscious of the realities of disease, morbidity, and death.
That he was said to resemble a frog did not ease his departure from the
house of his mother and sisters in the “enchanted“ suburb of anield to
the village near Canterbury where he began life as a day boy at King's
School. That the family had very modest means did not mitigate the
entrapment Pater felt at King's School, with its religious and patriotic
traditions, rigid discipline, and codes of manly behavior which allowed
for such forms of bullying as the vicious kicks to Pater's lower back
which caused permanent damage to his spine and added slight deformity to
ugliness.

Poor, physically unappealing, and homosexual, unlike Maurice in
B.H. Forster's own most confessional work, Pater had no alternative to
scholarship. He would have to succeed at school or forfeit any hope of
rising in the world. Seen in this context, the fact that he invented a
familial connection with the French painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater, is not
in the least surprising. The candor with which he responded, when asked
whether the lineal connection did exist, “I think so. I always say so,“
indicates how habitual it was for him to blur the line between reality
and wish. Pater would have to use his imagination to disentangle
himself from the “web of necessities“ he was placed in. But it wasn't
the necessities that were “enchanted.“ Nothing material was going to
break the spell of ugliness and limited means, kiss the frog with good
fortune, and turn him into an aristocratic prince.

Pater was not fit to be a soldier, as his brother William became,
for a brief period. Given his temperament--strong odors, crudity,
vulgar commotion made him feel sick--he was hardly likely to view the

prospect of becoming a doctor, as his brother William did, also dying at

Wua‘t- L.

36

a relatively young age, with anything short of revulsion and panic.
Deeply fond of religious ritual, he was disposed to take orders in spite
of his student forays into skepticism. But that avenue was closed when
one of his more scrupulous friends at Oxford denounced him as an
agnostic in a letter to the Bishop of London. His ungainliness made
attempts to cut a figure, such as wearing an “apple-green“ silk tie, apt
not to come off, nor did he have the money to play the dandy on a grand
scale. Again, his lack of physical beauty made romantic encounters
unlikely. It is not hard to see that Pater took just about the only
tolerable course open to him.

So entrapped by his circumstances, Pater became a peculiar cross
between a dandy and a don. Whatever bohemian impulses he may have had
he had no scope for acting out. It's no wonder he was envious when his
aesthetic perceptions--appreciation of Botticelli's peculiar
excellences, for example--were attributed to Ruskin, or that, feeling
himself unfavorably compared to Ruskin, he made the impatient protest:
“I cannot believe that Ruskin saw more in the Church of St. Hark than I
do.“ Sensations, ideas, perceptions, appreciations: they were all his
store of worldly possessions and prospects. People who remarked with
surprise on the plainness of his rooms at Oxford, the house on
Bradmore Road he later took with his sisters Hester and Clara, or the
modest little house they occupied for a few years in London apparently
overlooked the minor detail that small means do not purchase large
displays of aesthetic taste. The experience of art provided the means
of transfiguration; criticism offered the means of social ascent.

Simple recognitions such as these put Pater's influence on
succeeding generations of aesthetes in a mildly and sadly ironic
perspective. Pater asked much of art largely because he had so little
else. The “lines of his daily living“ were in fact so “bare.“ It was

left to others more giftewmeith artistic talent, good looks, or money

 

‘See Baudelaire's prose poem in Paris Spleen, “The Faeries' Gifts.“

37

--to act out the existential mode of Pater's aesthetic hypothesis in a
more voluptuous way.

Works such as Lionel Johnson's poem, “The Dark Angel,“ which
Harold Bloom in his characteristically insistent way pronounces
“Johnson's masterpiece, both the most representative and the best poem
of the 'Nineties“ (720), bear witness to the failure of the existential
mode of Pater's hypothesis for those more amply equipped or well
positioned to test it out. With the example of aesthetes like Johnson
and Ernest Dowson before him, Yeats had sufficient intellectual force,
and discipline, to recognize that “one must choose,“ between “perfection
of the life and perfection of the work.“ For the legatees of Paterian
aestheticism who escaped the “disaster“ of Yeats' friends--the fate of
those who had found it impossible to walk with their “feet upon a
swaying rope in a stonm“’(xeefe ll9)--the emphasis shifted back from
the life to the work. The aestheticism of Pater's criticism, which
turned for its support to history and myth, rather than his fiction,
which sought sanction in the plenitude of heightened experience itself,
became the enduringly operative mode, of which Flaubert was the supreme
exemplar.

Crucial to a deeper analysis of that mode is a recognition of the
implications of one of Pater's favorite metaphors: economy, in
particular the economy of means and ends. Ms. Williams' book testifies
to the inadequacy of the critical techniques Pater's own language
invites. In a disheartening extension of Pater's conservative economy,
Williams uses, to borrow a phrase from Thoreau, “improved means to
unimproved ends.“ Her methods of inquiry do not incline her to consider
that Pater's economy appoints style the most efficient means to an
unimproved end: the grandeur of a world erected to contradict the
existing world, a world transfigured by aesthetic vision; in short, the

“grandeur of nothingness“ (Renaissance, “Joachim Du Bellay“ 144).

 

’Pater himself had no such difficulty, cloistered as he necessarily
was.

38
Pater's aesthetic economy, by which means and ends are identified,‘
substitutes the artifact of contemplation, or aesthetic reconstruction,
for the object of actual sight. The end is the means: style. The
“relative spirit“ “registers an expansion of things and an obliteration
of dividing lines“ (Iser 15), but these are circumscribed by style,
which effects formal unity.

Thus we arrive at the worst of all possible literary critical
worlds: indeterminacy within the closed system of the stylistic
construction, meaningless form, form pregnant with potential meaning but
no outlet, no expectation of issue. The greatest feat of this aesthetic
economy is that it elides, seals over, the necessity of action. It is,
however, as precarious as it is apparently effortless.

As the experience of Pater's fictional aesthetes reveals,
moreover, it is instituted at great cost, at the cost of death. For
those who adopt the existential mode--dandies and bohemians--death is
literal. For those who revert to the literary mode, death is social.
Using the askesis of a rigorous style to forge matter into art, the
aesthetic writer dies to the existing world in order to construct a
transfigured world. The humanist, then, he who “possesses the complete
culture“--and because it must be a scholar and scholarship has only been
possible for men, it must be a “he“ (Appreciations 397)--can dwell in
that world, shrunk now, in the city which is its habitation, to the size
of a house: “House Beautiful,“ as Pater imagined it. Thus the
nightmare of history is transfigured and contained by the conservative
aesthetic economy. Artifacts representing its ideal moments are
installed in appropriate niches of the beautiful house, the views from
which are framed by windows.’

But woe unto him who actually ventures out of doors. Duke Carl of

Rosenmold, having clarified through much scholarship the terms of a

 

'“Justify rather the end by the means,“ Pater writes in his essay
on Wordsworth; whatever may become of the fruit, make sure of the
flowers and the leaves.“

’See Baudelaire's “Windows“ in Paris Spleen.

39

cultural renaissance in Germany, is trampled to death on the doorstep of
his cottage retreat and the threshold of his new cultural order by a
battalion of soldiers rushing forth to do battle in the “war-torn life
of the present.“ The moment was not propitious. It is typical of the
Paterian aesthete that he achieves internal harmony only by escape or
transcendence and so is eventually shocked to discover his complete
disjunction with the external order of things. The price of aesthetic
success is confinement, and confinement breeds a terrible and constant
anxiety.

The price of living in an illusory world is, of course, a vague
fear of anything and everything which might break into it, or shatter it
from within, not least of which one's own consciousness or one's own
body. As Gilles Deleuze observes in his Foreword to Jacques Donzelot's
The Policing of Families, “‘Having a room of one's own' is a desire, but
also a control. Inversely, a regulatory mechanism is haunted by
everything that overruns it and already causes it to split apart from
within.“ An unpleasant thought, a bad memory, a painful sensation can
send the aesthete reeling. Like a grain of sand in the oyster's shell,
there is always the tension caused by the dim awareness of discrepancy
between illusory and actual, ideal and real. Inasmuch as the aesthete
figures in his own fictions, the insecurity of his mode of existence
reaches deep into the recesses of his own psychosomatic life. The
insecurity which drives the aesthete to seek what Iser calls sanction or
legitimation for the artistic experience, which is supposed to be an end
in itself, is more pervasive and profound than Iser allows.‘o It
necessitates continual reassurance, continual denial, incessant
construction of the transfigured world. It is that tension which drives

the aesthete to go on making pearls.

 

”See Baudelaire's Journaux Intimes: “Hany friends, many gloves--
for fear of the itch“ (38): “The Dandy should aspire to be
uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror“
(56).

40

The stylus of the aesthete's pen becomes, as Harold Bloom’s bit of
etymology only suggests, not so much a finger in the dyke holding out
the world but a magic wand with which he tries, obsessively, to fix the
materials of his life and work--both “aestheticized.“ The impulse to
fix leads to another obsessive impulse, a response to the isolation
which is the result of aestheticization. That response is the impulse
to intersect, to touch, to make contact with a world of people and
activity which the artist has frozen himself out of. The hand that has
fixed is the hand that longs to touch. One hears the voice of D.H.
Lawrence in his “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through“: “If only I am
keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge/Driven by invisible
blows,/The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find
the Hesperides.“

But precisely because it longs to touch, to trace as it were the
outlines of the world it has frozen out, it is rendered incapable of a
genuinely creative literary activity. It desires to touch, not to
engage with, the living forms it perceives. As a desire to touch what
it has first stilled, it is not only a form of fetishization but also a
form of necrophilia.

Conversely, having removed himself from the impact of external
forces which might threaten his fragile internal reconstruction, the
aesthete forgoes fecundation and becomes sterile. Having identified
means and ends, ritualistically making “sure of the flowers and the
leaves,“ the aesthete cannot produce fruit. He has sacrificed ends for
means, can conceive no real ends: no outlet, “no exit,“ no future.
Hence the aesthete's decadent reconstructing of the past, on the one
hand, his somewhat more shocking subliminal longing for violent
penetration, on the other.

If Lawrence dreams of coming through, in Plato and Platonism
Pater's defensive and compensatory desire for an order that will fix the
“flux“ becomes so obsessively rigid that it betrays itself to a more

deeply repressed desire for violently intrusive sensation. Bloom has

41

made reference to a strain of sadomasochism in Pater, but never offered
an explicit rationale for the suggestion. Robert and Janice A. Keefe's
excellent reading of the Lacedaemon chapter of Plato and Platonism
provides the basis for a systematic analysis of that element.

It is significant, however, that as the Keefes point out, in
Pater's last essay, “Apollo in Picardy,“ violent penetration exceeds
Pater's apparent pleasure in the flogging routinely inflicted on the
young men of Sparta. The mind of the aesthete is overwhelmed by
disordered flashes of psychotic insight. Mind and body together are
invaded, as Pater nears his own death, by forces which can no longer be
shut out. Among them are wildly prophetic glimpses of the future. But
the revelations are naturalistic and apocalyptic, and confined to the
monastic cell of Prior Saint-Jean. To the end of Pater's work, the
social world is eclipsed; and Pater's impulse to keep it walled out is

overwhelmed by forces he cannot even bring himself to name.

Chapter II. Wall-Building: Bricks and Mortar

The Dark Angel

Dark Angel, with thine aching lust
To rid the world of penitence:
Malicious Angel, who still dost
My soul such subtile violence!

Because of thee, no thought, no thing
Abides for me undesecrate:
Dark Angel, ever on the wing,
Who never reachest me too late!

When music sounds, then changest thou
Its silvery to a sultry fire:
Nor will thine envious heart allow
Delight untortured by desire.

Through thee, the gracious Muses turn
To Furies, O mine Bnemy!
And all the things of beauty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy.

Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering-place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears.

When sunlight glows upon the flowers,
Or ripples down the dancing sea:
Thou, with thy troop of passionate powers,
Beleaguerest, bewilderest me.

Within the breath of autumn woods,
Within the winter silences:
Thy venomous spirit stirs and broods,
0 master of impieties!

The ardour of red flame is thine,
And thine the steely soul of ice:
Thou poisonest the fair design
Of nature, with unfair device.

Apples of ashes, golden bright:
Waters of bitterness, how sweet!
0 banquet of a foul delight,
Prepared by thee, dark Paraclete.

Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
The hinting tone, the haunting laugh:
Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
The minstrel of mine epitaph.

I fight thee, in the Holy Name!
Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith:
Tempter! should I escape thy flame,
Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death:

42

43

The second Death, that never dies,
That cannot die, when time is dead:
Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
Eternally uncomforted.

Dark Angel, with thine aching lust!
Of two defeats, of two despairs:
Less dread, a change to drifting dust,
Than thine eternity of cares.

Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
Dark Angel! triumph over me:
Lonely, unto the Lone I go;

Divine, to the Divinity.

--Lionel Johnson (1893)

Materialism must insist on the irreducibility of the real to
discourse. . . .

--Terry Bagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Towards A
Revolutionary Criticism (51)

44

Lionel Johnson's poem “The Dark Angel“ recounts a history which
aptly serves to introduce a history of the work into which Pater
sublimated the existential hypothesis of aestheticism, first in his
criticism, then in his fictions. Because he did sublimate passion into
the work of writing, Pater arrived at the destination of Johnson's poem
directly, avoiding the dangerous passage between: “Lonely, unto the
Lone I go; Divine, to the Divinity.“ The source of the poem's tag has
been noted by Harold Bloom as well as Ian Fletcher. It was Fletcher who
identified its source in Plotinus' Enneads VI, ix, the passage which
translates: “This, therefore, is the life of the Gods, and of divine
and happy men, a liberation from all terrene concerns, a life
unaccompanied with human pleasures, and a flight of the alone to the
alone.“

What the poem opens up at this juncture is a startling
proliferation of deaths. It is important to note at the outset the
presence of so many forms of death, and to bear it in mind as one
observes--at no great risk of oversimplification, I think--that those
concluding lines of Johnson's poem sum up the history of Pater's life
and work. Pater began in loneliness and inclined toward divinity. He
was at work on an essay on Pascal in the months before his death in July
1894, at the age of 55. His grave in Holywell Cemetary, Oxford, was
marked with a large marble cross. The epitaph he had chosen was “In te,
Domine, speravi.“ In between is a history of possibilities explored
through discourse and foreclosed in discourse. What those possibilities
were is the stuff of Pater's aesthetic hypothesis. How and why they
were foreclosed, and what sorts of deaths the foreclosures entail, is
the stuff of this history.

One additional point should be kept in mind as one makes one's way
through Pater's discourse. For various reasons which I trust will
become apparent, Walter Pater had in his youth and retained in maturity
extremely self-referential habits of mind. He was often as oblivious of

his impact on other people as he was of the extent to which his

45

perceptions were distorted by his own physical, emotional, and
psychological needs. More sharply to the point here, Pater was unaware
of the extent to which his utterances were expressions of his
insecurities.

When once one understands how habitually Pater projected his
subjective states as empathetic observations, one has found the key with
which to unlock the secrets of his discourse. All of Pater's writing
was confessional: even his critical appraisals were projections. Iser
remarks of evolving aestheticism itself, “Seeing is no longer
perceiving, but is projecting.“ With respect specifically to Pater, he
quotes Somerset Maugham's “gently ironic words, ‘Walter Pater is the
only justification for Mona Lisa'“ (45).

Harold Bloom observes that Pater found in Darwinian and
historicist theories of evolution a “justification for projecting his
temperament into a general vision of his age's dilemmas“ (Selected
Writings xvii). Bloom argues that Pater turned from “so deep a self-
exposure“ as characterized his essays in The Renaissance, where the
“personal projection is more direct,“ to a “less personal reverie“ of a
“consciously fictive kind“ in the imaginary portraits. It “hardly
helps,“ he says, “to see ‘Sebastian van Storck,’ or ‘Denys l'Auxerrois'
or ‘Hippolytus Veiled' as being essays or veiled confessions“ (xvii,
xxii). He prefers to call the imaginary portraits “reveries“ because he
is more concerned to find a way of characterizing their genre than-he is
to ascertain what they reveal about the material process of aesthetic
production. He is also disposed to call them reveries, however, because
he recognizes that, as dreams," their “power and precariousness alike
. . . are related to their hovering near the thresholds of wish-

fulfillment“ (xxii).

 

"See the “Conclusion“: “Bxperience, already reduced to a group of
impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of
personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to
us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in
his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of
a world“ (195-96).

46

Citing passages from Pater's essays on “Style,“ “Wordsworth,“ and
“Aesthetic Poetry,“ Bloom holds that a “critic who understands the
dialectic of style, as Pater magnificently did, is in no need of
psychoanalytic reduction“ (xxviii). By dialectic of style Bloom means
the dynamic of compensation at work in the interaction between artist
and actuality, what Yeats called the “daily antithesis“ that art effects
and Wallace Stevens called, defining poetry, the “daily necessity of
getting the world right.“ As evidence of Pater's understanding of that
dialectic Bloom instances Pater's implication in “Aesthetic Poetry,“
which Pater “suppressed“ as his “most unguarded vision of poetic
experience“ (xxvii), that the “heightened intensity of Morris and
Rossetti . . . compensates for a destructively excessive sexual self-
consciousness“ (xxviii). Bloom's vague phrasing backs away from that
particular dynamic, however. What he means by “destructively excessive
sexual self-consciousness“ is anybody's guess. Given Bloom's critical
preoccupation with the insights he attributes to Pater, especially the
suggestion that “sadomasochistic yearnings and the anxiety of being a
late representative of a tradition are closely related“ (xxviii), I am
inclined to think Bloom gives Pater some credit properly belonging to
Bloom.

Bloom is more concerned with death--the only necessity he is
inclined to recognize--than he is with life. He is too narrowly focused
on the dialectic of literary structures erected against the necessity of
death to contend with the necessities of life and living. His
willingness to probe the implications of Freud's theory of the sexual
origins of human thought is limited in this context. Recognizing that
Pater's work may indeed represent a “compulsive, endless brooding in
which all intellectual curiosity remains sexual“ rather than a
“successful sublimation, in which thought, to some extent, is liberated
from its sexual past“ (xviii-xix) need not involve one in psychoanalytic
reductions. It may, on the other hand, enable us to decipher the

material meaning of such gestures as Pater's definition, in “Leonardo“

47

and the “Postscript (Romanticism)“ to Appreciations, of Romantic art as
a coupling of “curiosity“ and the “love of beauty“ which leans toward
the “grotesque“ when not kept in balance; askesis, or self-curtailment,
a principle of restraint, serving always as the corrective to imbalance,
or excess. Bloom's reading of literary history as a history of
successful sublimations may impose premature limits on our understanding
of the process by which sexuality, especially a sexuality of which the
“outlets are sealed,“ drives and directs intellectual curiosity.

It is a matter of interesting conjecture whether Pater consciously
knew how confessional, or transparent, his writing was; and to what
degree he felt he could rely on the obtuseness of his readers for
protection. His wry complaint, “I wish they would not call me a
hedonist. It gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know
Greek,“ was either a perverse evasion or an indication that despite his
continual self-probing, he remained in some ways more veiled to himself
than to others. Defenders of Pater, Bloom among them, do not want
readers to “underestimate an immensely subtle mind“ (xix). Pater did
indeed have an immensely subtle mind. More often than not, I think,
however, contemporary readers took his meaning all right, letting the
refining subtleties fall away. Wordsworth's grand-nephew, John
Wordsworth, has been scorned for writing Pater a letter expressing his
distress with the “Conclusion“ that “no fixed principles either of
religion or morality can be regarded as certain, that the only thing
worth living for is momentary enjoyment and that probably or certainly
the soul dissolves at death into elements which are destined never to
reunite“ (xxi). One may not be in sympathy with John Wordsworth's
dogmatic indignation, but one cannot fault his comprehension. The same
can be said of those who called Pater a hedonist.

When readers grasped his meaning only too clearly, Pater went
underground, so to speak, eventually resurfacing with elaborately
refined modifications. How the refining subtleties elaborated more than

they sharpened Pater's perceptions this study aims to explore. What

48
they were elaborated to deny, contradict, or resolve is what we seek to
determine. That the process by which they were elaborated cannot be
understood in narrowly phenomenological, textual, or psychoanalytic
terms is a fundamental premise.

Pater's “Conclusion“ to the series of essays he initially titled
Studies in the History of the Renaissance is, of course, his signature
piece. Drawn from the 1868 essay-review of William Morris' poetry which
was retitled “Aesthetic Poetry,“ published in the first (1889) edition
of Appreciations, and excluded from all subsequent editions during
Pater's lifetime, it was the manifesto that was to resonate down the
'70s, '80s, and '90s into the new century. That Pater understood the
work of those essays to be historical studies reflects the predominance
of Hegelian and Diltheyan versions of historicism12 in his conception of
history. His alteration of the title to The Renaissance: Studies in Art
and Poetry for the second, 1877 edition was a concession to Emilia
Pattison's criticism of his impressionist method, one which her own
Positivist assumptions, acquired from her husband, the rector Mark
Pattison, whose scholarly rigor she sedulously emulated, precluded her
recognizing as any sort of method at all. Pater altered his title
rather than his method, however. His method never substantially
changed. What did change was the situations he used it to explore, as
the problematic implications of his aesthetic hypothesis made themselves
felt over the course of his career at Oxford. It was a career
characterized by a peculiar mixture of celebrity, opprobrium, and
obscurity.

Many readers of Pater have concluded that since neither his method
nor his basic set of preoccupations changed very much, the order in
which one reads his work doesn't matter very much. Iser remarks that

since “aestheticism is not an ordered phenomenon“ and his own readings

 

“Aside from the classics, Pater was most widely read in German
philosophy and Romantic literature. Of the three national literary
traditions, English, German, and French, he was most deeply drawn to the
French simply because it was the most profoundly Romantic.

49

“deal successively with ideas that preoccupied Pater simultaneously,“
the chronology of Pater's writings is of “minor significance“ (5). What
interests Iser is the Gestalt he discerns in the total textual record of
Pater's aesthetic impulses.

Perry Meisel makes much the same claim in The Absent Father:
Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. He holds that since the thought of
neither Woolf nor Pater underwent any significant development, one
should concentrate on the drama of influence in which Woolf appropriated
Pater's dispersal of self, or as Meisel calls it, “deindividuation,“ so
as to reconstitute herself as the preeminent practitioner of a Paterian
literary aesthetic. What that drama reduces to is “finally, only a myth
or fable of identity“ (xix).

More traditional literary historians such as Gerald Monsman have
provided very useful chronologies of biography and literary production.
Robert and Janice A. Keefe have taken a large step toward closing the
gap between those parallel chronologies, integrating matters of
biography, literary production, theme, and social history in such a way
as to open up new prospects of knowledge in The Gods of Disorder.

Others have abstracted materials pertaining to such features of
Pater's discourse as Hellenism, Positivism, empiricism, historicism, the
influence of French literary and philosophical traditions, and so forth
from the larger body of his work for the purpose of analyzing those
elements in relation to Victorian cultural history. Some, such as Paul
Barolsky, have noted, in very unsystematic gestures of appreciation,
scattered evidence of Pater's pervasive influence on modern poets,
novelists, and art historians--xenneth Clark preeminent among the last
group.

In his Introduction to a collection of essays on Baudelaire, Bloom
names Victor Hugo as Baudelaire's “Romantic precursor.“ In focusing on
the relation between Baudelaire and Hugo, Bloom points to a possibly
significant consideration: that Pater and Baudelaire have in common, if

not a single Romantic precursor, the nonetheless profound influence of

50

Hugo. The impress of a long procession of French writers on Pater goes
deeper than John J. Conlon's book, Walter Pater and the French
Tradition, penetrates to. Yet many of Pater's writings seem to skim the
surface of that tradition. Why the influence of Rousseau,‘3 Hugo,
Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Baudelaire, among others, is only obliquely
expressed in Pater's work is a question the extant criticism of Pater
does not fully address.

It is possible, as Bloom's insights suggest, that Pater made
oblique, tangential references to French writers in the process of
avoiding reference to Ruskin and more contemporary rivals among the Pre-
Raphaelites in England. But it is more likely, I think, that fuller
confrontations with the French hommes des lettres whom Pater picks up at
crucial turnings in his own discourse would have overwhelmed the
aesthetic defenses against a world teeming with flesh and color, motion
and breath, adventure and social shiftings that his own etchings kept
out.“ The answer can only be determined by a genuinely historical
reading of Pater's discourse: one which attempts to close the gap
between material forces and literary production.

The place to begin a historical reading is Pater's own account of
his origination. In “The Child in the House“ Pater purports to trace
the process of “brainbuilding“ by which his personality was created. If
we situate that process in a larger material history, we can begin to
see the bricks and mortar that went into construction of the manifesto
in which Pater succeeded--triumphantly, ecstatically, momentarily--in
walling out the world. That achievement was, precisely, an attitude.

It allowed Pater to celebrate his life in a world from which all
impediments to self-realization had been purged. Of course, it could

not be sustained.

 

”The early chapters of Rousseau's Confessions must have had a
disturbing resonance for Pater, in particular Rousseau's confession of a
masochistic fixation on spanking as his earliest (conscious) source of
sexual pleasure.

“Woolf says, in hrs. Dalloway, “one scratches on the wall“ (293).
Oscar Wilde says, “one abandons the surface at one's peril“ (Keefe 10).

51

In “Emerald Uthwart“ (as well as Gaston de Latour and Plato and
Platonism), Pater explored the process not of brainbuilding but of
social selving, the two of which, at the crucial transition from home to
school, were at odds. By way of “Child in the House“ and “Emerald
Uthwart“ we can come at the question of who it was that matriculated at
Queen's College, Oxford, was elected to a classical fellowship at
Brasenose College and membership in the “radical“ Old Mortality Society,
shocked its members with his first two papers,” had the audacity to
call S.T. Coleridge “sick“ (“Coleridge's Writings,“ 1866), wrote a
seminal essay-review of “Poems by William Morris“ (1868), and went on to
shock a larger audience with his “Conclusion“ to The Renaissance in
1873.

The rest of our history will probe how Pater's discourse, in
working out the problematic implications of the infamous manifesto,
reveals a continual foreclosure of possibilities and a proliferation of
deaths. Though effected in and by Pater's discourse, those foreclosures
and deaths are in fact enforced by Pater's situation during the years
between 1858, when he went up to Oxford on a King's School scholarship
(60 pounds a year for three years), and his death of a heart attack on
30 July 1894.

“The Child in the House“ (1878)

I write unto you, little children, because your sins are
forgiven you for his name's sake.

I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that
is from the beginning. I write unto you, young men, because
ye have overcome the wicked one. I write unto you, little
children, because ye have known the Father.

. . . . Love not the world, neither the things that are
in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the
Father is not in him.

 

“The essay on J.G. Fichte's “Ideal Student“ and “Diaphaneite“ were
both written for and delivered to the Old Mortality Society in 1864. It
was founded by John Nichol, flourished during the decade 1856-66, and
numbered among its thirty-five members Algernon Charles Swinburne, John
Addington Symonds, Thomas Hill Green, Edward Caird, and James Bryce;
also Ingram Bywater and Charles Lancelot Shadwell, Pater's two closest
friends in the group (Monsman 26).

52

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and
the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the
Father, but is of the world.

And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he
that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

I John 2: 12-13, 15-17

Walter Horatio Pater was the second son and the third of four
children born to Maria Hill and Richard Glode Pater: William, Hester,
Walter, and Clara. He was born Sunday, 4 August 1839, at No. 1 Honduras
Terrace on Commercial Road in Stepney. What Sir Thomas More had 300
years earlier called the “pleasant prospect“ of Stepney was in 1839 a
slum grown up around the docks of East London. Commercial Road was a
broad route cut from the docks to the city in the first decade of the
nineteenth century. On the south side of Commercial Road, Honduras
Terrace was the most respectable neighborhood in the district, but the
“rim“ dividing it from the stench and squalor of Vinegar Lane was a
“thin“ one (Levey 26).

It was the rapid development and concomitant need for medical
treatment in Shadwell that probably prompted John Thompson Pater to move
from Highgate and set up as a surgeon and male mid-wife there some time
prior to 1808. “T. Pater . . . Surgeon“ died young, but that was not
unusual. By 1842 statistics had been collected showing the average life
expectancy in Stepney to be twenty-two for laborers, servants, and their
families; twenty-seven for tradesmen and their families; and forty-five
for professional men and gentlemen. Both Pater's father, Richard Glode
Pater, and his uncle, William Grange Pater, followed their father's
example and became surgeons. They were, that is to say, general medical
practitioners, a cut above apothecary but below the rank of physician,
and the title of Doctor reserved to it. Living a few doors down at
6 Hardwick Place, William shared his older brother's practice. Both men
died, at their residences in Stepney, at the age of forty-five: Richard
on 28 January 1842, William on 19 September 1845. The cause of
lRichard's death was certified, probably by his brother, who was in

53

attendance, as “affection of the brain“ (Levey 29). William's death was
caused by a “shock to the system“ sustained in a fall down stairs (Levey
30).

Pater was three and a half when his father died. His mother, left
with four children under the age of ten and an estate valued at 5,000
pounds, sold the Stepney House and moved with her mother-in-law and
sister-in-law to the village of Enfield eleven miles north of London.

It was the same country village in which Charles and Mary Lamb had lived
up until ten years before. There the family remained, making periodic
visits to Fish Hall near Hadlow in Kent, the home of Pater's godmother,
Mary Susanna May, until 1852. Though their inheritance was not paltry--
twice what Pater would leave at his own death some fifty years later--it
was probably all there was to support four children and three women for
the rest of their lives (Levey 33). Theirs was a modest, quiet life.
Its placidity was disturbed by simple, elemental events: the deaths of
Pater's uncle, William, news of which rent the household, and on

21 February 1848, his grandmother, Hester Pater, aged 84. If we can
take Pater's comment in Gaston de Latour as a reflection of his own
remembrances, it was she “to whom he had always turned for an affection,
that had been as no other in its absolute incapacity of offence“ (Levey
38). The Enfield house was vacated in 1852 and what was left of the
family-—Pater's elder brother William having gone off at the age of
fifteen to take a clerk's job by l851--removed to the village of
Harbledown near Canterbury so that Walter could enroll as a day boy at
King's School, probably on the advice of the Enfield Grammar School
headmaster.

The Pater family was of Dutch descent. There is no evidence to
support the notion of French descent--from Jean-Baptiste Pater, only
Papil of the French court painter Watteau, or any other French folk.
The connection was purely associational: nor was the surname which gave
rise to it as uncommon as the Pater family supposed. Richard Pater's

grandfather, Thompson Pater, had married Mary Church, daughter of a

54

Roman Catholic family in Norfolk. Hence Thompson Pater's children were
baptized as Roman Catholics, and though the majority of the members of
that branch of the family may have stayed in the Catholic Church,
Pater's father--possibly like his father before him--made a break with
that tradition. He had no particular church affiliation when he married
Maria Hill, but all of their children were brought up in the Anglican
Church. The vicar of St. Andrew's, Enfield, had High Church leanings
which caused hot dispute in the parish a few years after the Paters had
left. Pater attended the Enfield Grammar School, where his classmates
called him “Parson Pater“ (Levey 46). His brother William had left
school and taken a clerk's position in a merchant's office by 1851,
either in Enfield or, more probably, in London. He may have been aided
in that move by members of the extended family descending from Pater's
great-grandfather and the younger brother of his grandfather, John
Church Pater. Trading, mercantile, and financial interests
characterized that branch of the family, some of whom held clerkships in
the Bank of England, others of whom settled in Liverpool and became
prosperous merchants (Levey 39). It was a vocational traditionvwhich
John Thompson Pater had broken with when he pursued a career as a
surgeon, establishing that tradition for his own descendants. His was a
tradition to which Pater's brother William eventually returned, gaining
admission to the Royal College of Surgeons at Canterbury in 1857. By
1859, when Pater was an undergraduate at Oxford, he had joined the army,
probably as a medical officer, but he didn't remain there. There was
some talk of his going out to Brazil with a Liverpool cousin, but in the
end he found his place as assistant medical officer at the Fareham
Lunatic Asylum, eventually being promoted to a more senior post in the
asylum at Stafford (Levey 39, 45).

Pater enrolled at King's School, Canterbury, 3 February 1853, on
Candlemas morning during an unusually severe winter frost. His mother
died only a year later, 25 February 1854, while away on a visit to Fish

Hall and when Pater was not yet fifteen. She had made her will in 1851,

55

appointing three trustees for her children: her sister-in-law, Hester
Elizabeth Maria (Bessie) Pater, a Stepney surgeon named Charles Sturges,
and a lawyer, John Pendergast, in Commercial Road (Levey 49). When
Pater went up to Oxford in 1858, his Aunt Bessie took Hester and Clara
to Heidelberg to complete their educations. She died in Dresden in
1862, leaving them to shift for themselves for several years in Germany,
possibly finding work as governesses. Hester and Clara outlived both of
their brothers. Suffering from heart disease and dropsy, William died
in his rented rooms in Paddington, where he had come to be looked after
by his sisters during their residence in Kensington, in 1887. He was
fifty-two.

Pater wrote “Imaginary Portrait. The Child in the House“ when he
was thirty-nine. First published in Macmillan’s Magazine in August
1878, it does indeed offer the “largest clue“ to Pater's work, his
“criticism and imaginary portraits alike“ (Bloom 15). Bloom is right
about that. All of Pater's defining predilections are present.

Even a cursory reading, however, makes it hard to understand why
Bloom would choose to see in Pater's imaginary portraits “successful
sublimation“ rather than a “compulsive, endless brooding in which . . .
intellectual curiosity“ remains deeply rooted in its sexual origins.

The reverie is, moreover, less a “hovering near the thresholds of wish-
fulfillment“ than a brooding which, though hardly factual, is
necessarily confessional. How “veiled“ the confession is depends on how
conscious Pater was of the process he was reproducing.

Dreamlike though the portrait is, it is tightly structured and not
hard to schematize. Pater's brooding shapes itself around five crucial
elements. First is the sealed enclosure which is home. Second is the
road outward, from which come hints of both pleasure and pain. Third is
the death of the child's father. Fourth is the discovery that children,
also, sometimes die. That discovery is accompanied by a realization
that the dead do not figure abroad as sublime, protective bodies, but

moulder in the ground, and may not rest, but may come back to menace

56

those who remain, loving the world which has been lost to the dead.
Fifth is a subsequent impulse to sanctify the “love of the world,“ for
“If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.“

The fundamental opposition in the portrait is that between the
house and the road outward. How Pater resolves it is determined by the
other key forces bearing in upon it. Unlike the schoolboy portrayed in
“Emerald Uthwart,“ the child growing up in the charming old house which
stood “not far beyond the gloom and rumours of the town, among high
garden-wall, bright all summertime with Golden-rod, and brown-and-golden
Wall-flower,“ experiences what will constitute ever after his “ideal, or
typical conception, of rest and security“ (3, 5). There as nowhere else
he enjoys a “sense of harmony between his soul and its physical
environment,“ which becomes, “for a time at least, like perfectly played
music.“ The life he “led there“ is “singularly tranquil and filled with
a curious sense of self-possession“ (5). The “love of security“ it
engenders comes to act as a “salutary principle of restraint in all his
wanderings of spirit“ (6).

Sensations of pleasure and pain disturb the peace and provoke
“wanderings of spirit.“ Although the “sense of security could hardly
have been deeper, the quiet of the child's soul being one with the quiet
of its home, a place ‘enclosed' and ‘sealed,'“ wanderings of spirit are
stimulated by “streams of impressions“ which drift insidiously into the
small suburban citadel. “There came floating in from the larger world -
without, as at windows left ajar unknowingly, or over the high garden
walls, two streams of impressions, the sentiments of beauty and pain.“
The responsive child develops an “almost diseased sensibility to the
spectacle of suffering“ and a “more than customary sensuousness, ‘the
lust of the eye,'“ as the Preacher says“ (6). He would recoil from the

spectacle of suffering--as he may have done earlier in the rooms

4*

“See Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis a nu,“ XCV: “Even when quite a
child I felt two conflicting sensations in my heart: the horror of life
and the ecstasy of life. That, indeed, was the mark of a neurasthenic
idler“ (88).

57

attached to his father's surgery in Stepney--and revel in the sheer
absence of pain, as he did when the “passion of sudden, severe pain“
(10) inflicted by a wasp's sting subsided into blessed relief. As for
the other “sentiment,“ “beauty“ being an abstraction of the more basic
feeling of pleasure, it would lead him far down the road away from home,
that “fascination“ with “bright colour and choice form--the sweet
curvings, for instance, of the lips of those who seemed to him comely.“
But the way would be a “weariness“: “Could he have foreseen the
weariness of the way!“ (6).

The child in fact was not “comely.“ Pater's own mouth had a
“curious malformation“ (Monsman 20), and at Oxford he was advised to
grow a mustache to cover it. His form was not “choice.“ Pater was
“slightly humpbacked“ and developed a “peculiarity of gait“ after
getting a “dreadful kick“ from one of a small gang of boys who attacked
him at school. It may have caused an “acute slip of the femoral growth
plate and consequent bone degeneration“ (Monsman 21). Personal
accounts, drawings, portraits, and photographic representations vary,
and allowances must be made for the fact that Thomas Wright,
collaborating with Pater's old schoolmate, John Rainier McQueen, seemed
determined to portray the subject of his two-volume biography as
grotesquely ugly. Simeon Solomon's drawing of Pater at Oxford in 1872
brings out the resemblance between Pater and his strikingly beautiful
sister, Clara. It does not agree with McQueen's description of the boy
he first met at King's School, whom he recollected as having a
“prematurely whiskered, impassive, froglike face“; an “overhanging
forehead, brown hair, deep-set mild eyes near together, a nose very low
at the bridge, a'heavy jaw, [and] a square chin“ (Monsman 20). Neither
does it agree, however, with other drawings of Pater less expressive of
idealized sentiment. Though Pater's sense of his own physical
deficiencies was undoubtedly heightened by unfavorable comparison with
the dashing good looks of his older brother and by the thoughtless

comments of schoolmates inclined to exaggerate any feature out of the

58

ordinary, by far the bulk of the evidence supports the conclusion that
Peter learned early to overcome matter with manner. Unfortunately, even
the ingratiating mannerliness was off-putting to some, such as the
Reverend George Wallace, headmaster at King's School, for whom Pater's
earnest scholarship and hard-won honors did not compel the sort of
unreserved affection elicited by more ordinary, artless, unself-
conscious boys. But the fact of the matter is that Pater's unpleasing
appearance was a social impediment which he had to negotiate all his
life. A drawing by William Rothenstein produced for publication in
March of 1894 forced him to negotiate the issue once again. To the
artist he was generous, calling the drawing a “clever likeness.“ To his
close colleague, the Rev. Frederick W. Bussell, he expressed
exasperation, bursting out with the question, “Do I look like a Barbary
ape?“ Hester and Clara came to his support and vetoed publication of
the drawing. Though he necessarily came to terms with his social face
and figure, and was able to joke to a friend's sister coming to Oxford
to see a performance of Aristophanes' Frogs that she must come to see
him--and “Look on me as one of the Frogs“--they were clearly a cross
that he had heavily to bear at every step of the way (Levey 201).

It is impossible to tell to what extent his own deformities
aroused the “pervading preference in himself for a kind of comeliness
and dignity, and urbanity literally, in modes of life, which he
connected with the pale people of towns, and which made him susceptible
to a kind of exquisite satisfaction in the trimness and well-considered
grace of certain things and persons he afterwards met with, here and
there, in his way through the world“ (3-4). But it seems clear that a
compensatory identification with the stylish appearance of sophisticated
city dwellers is at work here. “In music, sometimes,“ moreover, the
“two sorts of impressions“--of beauty and pain--“came together, and he
would weep, to the surprise of older people“ (6). It seems likely that
at least some of Pater's precocious Weltschmerz came from grief over his

own unloveliness, even though, in the security of home, he had not felt

59

yet more sharply the disharmony between what he was, in the flesh, and
what he most desired, and desired to be one with: the beauty, and
narcissistic pleasure, of the flesh as well as the “eye.“

It was his fate, surely, to observe the movements of those trim
and stylish figures--from the garden gate or, later, his “Spartan“ rooms
at Oxford, which he could not afford as an undergraduate to decorate--
not to fall briskly in step with them, or to mingle with them
comfortably in elaborately gracious surroundings, much less to wrestle
with them in the “sweetness and strength“ of embrace he so admired in
Michelangelo's art. As a don he enjoyed the spectacle of undergraduate
escapades, never reprehending the more privileged young men's lack of
seriousness and affecting himself a certain flippant insouciance. For
him, of course, they remained a spectacle. There was no question of his
being able to participate, though he did try, on occasion, to put off
the cloak of the don, showing up at a Royal Academy function in a top
hat and “apple-green“ silk ascot." Not long after he was made a junior
fellow at Brasenose in 1864, he was asked whether he found his college
duties burdensome. As the story goes, he replied, “‘Well, not so much
as you might think. The fact is that most of our young men are fairly
well-to-do, and it is not necessary that they should learn very much.
At some Colleges I am told that certain of the young men have a genuine
love for learning: if that were so here, it would be quite too
dreadful'“ (Monsman 27). If that were so, one may surmise, they would
be rivals in the one area where he could successfully compete, and
maintain superiority. It's interesting that when he lectured he
apparently did not look at his listeners, but kept his forehead pressed
against his hands. Conversely, it was generally the good-looking,

sporting undergraduates that he and his colleague Frederick Bussell

 

l7That icy shade of green seems to have been one of his favorite
colors: it's the color he had the walls of his sitting room at Brasenose
painted. The other favorites were red and blue. He liked blue pots
filled with red rose petals.

60

entertained, enjoying their contact along with a slightly malicious
mockery of their presumed stupidity.

That the child of the portrait was enticed by the lust of the
flesh to wander beyond the wall and out upon the roadway a feverish
dream makes manifest. Having walked out and then beheld, through a
neighboring garden gate usually closed, “a great red hawthorn in full
flower,“ a “plumage of tender crimson fire out of the heart of the dry
wood,“ he dreams of “loiter[ing] along a magic roadway of crimson
flowers which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh masses about his
feet, and fill softly all the little hollows in the banks on either
side“ (8). Thereafter, summer upon summer, the “blossom of the red
hawthorn . . . seemed to him absolutely the reddest of all things.“ He
never forgets the “flame in those perishing little petals,“ nor their
perfume, nor the “inexplicable excitement“ they aroused in him. The
excitement is disturbing. It mingles with “regret or desire“ and a
“longing for some undivined, entire possession of them“ (9). The
impulse to satisfy desire, aroused within his small circle of “perishing
little petals“ but leading outward toward a greater profusion, is
thwarted by the pressure of other forces.

The world of sense is so much with the child, he cannot--as is
true of children generally--conceive of abstractions except as embodied.
Hitherto he has imagined the resurrected body of his father, whose
“death in distant India“ is announced by a “cry on the stair, sounding
bitterly through the house, and struck into his soul for ever“ (7), as
“still abroad in the world, somehow, for his protection--a grand, though
perhaps rather terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's things, like the
figure in the picture of Joshua's Vision in the Bible“ (11). One
summer's day, however, while walking with his mother in a fair
churchyard, he comes upon a grave freshly dug for a child's burial. He
realizes then that children as well as fathers sometimes die, and that
the dead, laid in the ground with “black mould“ heaped upon them, do not
figure sublimely abroad for his protection. They may in fact, he hears

61

people say, come to call the living hence. They may become revenants,"
leading a “secret, half-fugitive life in their old homes, quite free by
night, though sometimes visible by day, dodging from room to room“ and
with “no great goodwill towards those who shared the place with them“
(12).

Enjoying the tender ministries of his grandmother, aunt, and
mother, the child no longer feels the lust of the flesh without
something more intense than “regret.“ Of the father what lingers now is
“No benign, grave figure in beautiful soldier's things . . . abroad in
the world for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones, and above
them, possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see.“ From
Pater's brooding sentences the figure emerges somewhat more distinctly:
“All night the figure sat beside him in the reveries of his broken
sleep, and was not quite gone in the morning--an odd, irreconcilable new
member of the household, making the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly
and suspect by its uncertain presence. He could have hated the dead he
had pitied so“ (12).

Florian's reveries are broken and take a “soberer tone“ now that
the “uncertain presence“ has installed itself in the “sweet familiar
chambers,“ making them feel “unfriendly and suspect.“ This is not a
figure of abstract death. Pater has told us that the child could not
conceive of abstractions except as embodied in real men and women. It
is worth recalling here, therefore, that Pater's father had worked with
great dedication among his patients in East London. Having built up, in
partnership with his brother, a busy medical practice, he had refused to
follow the advice of friends and relatives that he move to a more
fashionable neighborhood. Only after his death was a move made, if not
to a more fashionable at least to a more genteel suburb.

Florian--and if there is any wish-fulfillment going on in the
portrait, it is precisely there: Walter Pater was no flower of English
boyhood--“could have hated the dead he had pitied so.“ A conflict

 

“An idea Woolf takes up from Pater in her story, “A Haunted House“

62

appears to have opened up between the two “sentiments,“ of pleasure and
pain. As the boy progresses from an Oedipal phase of sexuality toward a
period of latency, pity reasserts itself with a vengeance, turning from
“regret“ to guilt and dread. Anxiety is now mingled with “regret or
desire“--Pater's ambivalence is recorded in the phrase--and the longing
for “entire possession“ of those flame flowers blooming in such
profusion, absolutely the reddest of all things. At “any time or place,
in a moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be
breathed around him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint
smile, the straight, stiff feet, slid itself across the air upon the
bright carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with
himself“ (12) . 4

Under that darkening influence, the bright things of the world
undergo a transformation. “Love of the world, and the things that are
in the world“: “human life and its familiar or exceptional incidents,
birth, death, marriage, youth, age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking,“
are sacralized. A “constant substitution of the typical for the actual“
is effected in the child's thoughts. Religion serves as the mirror in
which the vanity of earthly pleasures is idealized, transforming even
“daily meat and drink“ into a “kind of sacred transaction.“ The vanity
is not renounced but transfigured, for without its stimulus there would
be only dullness. Under the pressure of guilt and dread, Florian uses
religion to sanctify his natural hedonism. Religion becomes for Florian
“what it ever afterwards remained“ for Pater: a “sacred ideal,“ a
“mirror, towards which men might turn away their eyes from vanity and
dullness, and see themselves therein as angels, with their daily meat
and drink, even, become a kind of sacred transaction--a complementary
strain or burden, applied to our every-day existence, whereby the stray
snatches of music in it re-set themselves, and fall into the scheme of
some higher and more consistent harmony“ (13). That way the “stray
snatches“ of “music“ are not only “re-set,“ transposed from an illicit

to a legitimate key, but “more consistent.“ They can be sustained,

63

prolonged. Satisfaction is deferred, but excitement is maintained in
modes consistent with the demands of daily life. The rituals of
domestic life are eroticized.

As the pleasures of the flesh are transformed into “sacred
transactions,“ the figure which has aroused the child's anxiety--a
tension between the pleasure principle and the reality principle--is
also transformed. From a revenant with a “secret, half-fugitive life“
and maybe “no great goodwill towards those who shared the place“ with
him, the figure of the father--a composite in the child's mind of all
who make undeniable counter-claims to that of his sole satisfaction--is
converted into a “sacred double“:

A place adumbrated itself in his thoughts, wherein those
sacred personalities, which are at once the reflex and
the pattern of our nobler phases of life, housed
themselves; and this region in his intellectual scheme
all subsequent experience did but tend still further to
realise and define. Some ideal, hieratic persons he
would always need to occupy it and keep a warmth there.
And he could hardly understand those who felt no such
need at all, finding themselves quite happy without such
heavenly companionship, and sacred double of their life,
beside them. (13)

That the composite image of the father, uncle, and elder brother,
who had not died in their sensuous beds but of sickness allied to their
soldierly struggles against disease and its conditions, would indeed be
the “reflex and the pattern“ of the “nobler phases“ of Pater's life
other “fictions“ bear out. So does Pater's lifelong vacillation between
the claims of Dionysus and Apollo, Romanticism and Classicism, and his
final grappling with Plato and Platonism. It is at the bottom of the
split, in the essay on “Style,“ between the fascination with form and
the ultimate concession to great matter as the primary constituent of
great art.

For now, however, in the phase of Pater's development “Child in
the House“ seeks to trace, religion has become, not a belief system
undergirding ethical imperatives, but a palliative of a particular kind:
a defense against guilt in the conflict between hedonism and the demands

implied by confrontation with reality. An “ideal, hieratic person“ now

64

presides over the sanctified life of the household. In the house of the
child's thoughts, anxiety is kept at bay and warmth is restored as
feverish heat is subdued.

Thus the sins of the child are expunged, the wicked one is
overcome, and the father is “reconciled“ to the household. Having
seemed to submit to the internalized will of the father by sanctifying
his pleasures, the child may abide unharmed. But already a substantial
price has been paid for a provisional security. “For all that is in the
world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of
life,“ has been subdued. Primary colors have been brushed with dust or
frost: crimson turns to dusty rose, vibrant green to a cooler shade;
blue is the color of sky, approaching either to light of day or
midnight, depending on its depth. The father abides as a “heavenly
companion“ and the child abides as an “angel.“

The first of many small deaths has occurred. By the time the
child actually leaves home and sets forth on the roadway, he is already
overwhelmed, not with excitement at the prospect of pursuing his desire,
gathering the red blossoms along the way, but with sickness over his
loss. Running back to collect the pet bird left behind in its cage, in
a turmoil of pity for the bird's imagined distress, Florian is overcome
with homesickness. The vacant white rooms reflect the loss of unalloyed
pleasure and vitality he has sustained. They are the sepulcher of his
lust, which has been sealed up in the purified, ghostly chambers. The
will of the father has prevailed.

In five years, at Oxford, Pater will begin to defy that will.
Writing in “Aesthetic Poetry“ of Morris's progression from The Defence
of Guenevere (1858) to The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The
Earthly Paradise (1868-70), Pater notes the “change of manner wrought in
the interval . . . almost a revolt“ (194). He identifies, then, the
“transition which, under many forms, is one law of the life of the human
spirit, and of which what we call the Renaissance is only a supreme

instance.“ “Complex and subtle interests,“ Pater observes with great

65

insight, “which the mind spins for itself, may occupy art and poetry or
our own spirits for a time; but sooner or later they come back with a
sharp rebound to the simple elementary passions--anger, desire, regret,
pity, and fear“ (195). They will for him. For now, however, the child
has been well prepared to submit to the more austere discipline of the
King's School, to which a larger, and for the most part higher, class of
fathers has traditionally banished its sons. “[Llife-long imprisonment“
and “banishment from home,“ Pater notes in “Child,“ are “a thing
bitterer still“ than death (5).

Pater was in the habit of making notes on small scraps of paper.
One of them read, “Child in the House: voila, the germinating,
original, source, specimen, of all my imaginative work“ (Monsman 80).
The terms used indicate the influence of Darwin and Huxley on Pater's
thinking about human development. At King's School he would be immersed
in the study of culture--and indeed the culture itself--that would
inform his critical work and enlarge the matrix of his imaginings. At
Ring's School his sensibilities would be, not too successfully,
socialized.

Readers who focus on the cultural order they assume Pater to be
constructing see in his resolution of the tensions explored in “Child“
an enlarging movement from the confining world of the senses to the
liberating and ultimately empowering world of culture, Wordsworthian
escape from the “tyranny of the eye“ into a mastery exerted by the
collective mind. The Wordsworthian echoes in “Child“ are certainly loud
and clear. I think it is more useful, nevertheless, to view the
transition as one from family structure, in which sexual forces are
mediated by physical environment and family history, to larger social
structures, in which sexual forces are subsumed in the workings of more
complex material forces.

That physical forces are active in a fundamental way a passage
from the Lacedaemon chapter of Plato and Platonism makes clear:

A young Lacedaemonian, then, of the privileged class left
his home, his tender nurses in those large, quiet old

66

suburban houses early, for a public school. . . . If a

certain love of reserve, of seclusion, characterised the

Spartan citizen as such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of

that wrench from a soft home into the imperative,

inevitable gaze of his fellows, broad, searching, minute,

his regret for, his desire to regain, moral and mental

even more than physical ease. (220-21)
Of course Pater had not enjoyed complete seclusion at Enfield. But
attendance at Enfield Grammar School had not exposed him so completely
and relentlessly to the “broad, searching, [and] minute“ “gaze of his
fellows,“ driving a wedge of self-consciousness into the “self-
possession“ and “harmony“ he had experienced there. If there a conflict
had opened up between the pleasure principle and the reality principle,
at King's School another split opens up: that between his idealized,
narcissistic self-image and the reality of how he is seen by others.

Even at Enfield, looking out upon the “coming and going of
travellers to the town along the way“ and the “great church, with its
giddy winding stair up to the pigeons and the bells,“ the child had seen
in the bell-tower a “citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble“ (3).
All the life of London, “the town,“ is reduced to three words: “gloom,“
“rumours,“ and “trouble.“ “Gloom“ refers, presumably, to darkness,
dinginess, and squalor. fiRumours“ are talk about “trouble.“ While
admiring the trim forms of travellers coming and going to the town,
Pater wants to be well out of it.

Pater cites a passage from Hugo's Les Hiserables in the
“Conclusion,“ as well as the episode of Rousseau's bout with fear of
mortal sickness in The Confessions. Together, they allude to conditions
to which Pater had had some exposure: poverty, squalor, disease, and
death. Escape from those conditions may have made him as content with
the relative peace of Enfield as he imagines Charles and Mary Lamb to
have been with the quiet aftermath of catastrophe. But other passages
from Rousseau and other works by Victor Hugo spoke to Pater's experience

also, in ways which make it surprising that he could bring himself to

allude to them at all. A boy who, on the one hand, avoided successful

6?

resolution of Oedipal conflict by sanctifying his desires" and thus
neutralizing his fears, playing at being a priest, and was, on the other
hand, better fitted to the role of Quasimodo than that of a Florian or
an Emerald, was not likely to figure as the dashing lover of any
exquisite damsels (though it is interesting that Marius the Epicurean
shares his name with the lover of Cosette in Les Miserables). Fearing
the demands of a menacing world-~Violet Paget remembered Pater as a man
admittedly “afraid of just about everything“--and feeling himself unable
to negotiate them on terms gratifying to himself, he was more likely to
fixate on a desire to be the exquisite one: flower, jewel, lovely and
beloved; victim of a hopelessly frustrated narcissism: divided beauty
and beast. Pater cites both Quasimodo and Gwynplaine, as well as
Rousseau's “strangeness or distortion“ (215), as examples of French
Romanticism's tendency to run to an excess of curiosity in the desire of
beauty. For one so constituted as he, they were bound to exercise an
appeal, but also to provoke recoiling denial. Drawn as he was to their
experience, he would not want to court their fates. The “love of
security“ acted as a “salutary principle of restraint“ on his
“wanderings of spirit.“

In the “Postscript (Romanticism)“ to Appreciations, Pater displays
a profound understanding of Romanticism in general, French Romanticism
in particular. Of Rousseau's relation to history he writes: “A storm
was coming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and they helped
to bring it down.“ By 1815, he observes, the “storm had come and gone,
but had left, in the spirit of ‘young France,’ the ennui of an immense
disillusion.“ In the two books cited in Edgar Quinet's Revolution
Frangaise as “characteristic of the first decade“ of the nineteenth
century, Pater “detects“ both the “disease and the cure“ of the modern
Romantic period: the “indifference“ suffused throughout Senancour's

Obernann and the impulse active in Chateaubriand's Genie du

 

l’Not an uncommon story, especially familiar to Irish Catholics, as
Joyce's “Araby” recounts

68

Christianisme to take “refuge from a tarnished actual present, a present
of disillusion, into a world of strength and beauty in the Middle Age“
(215).

Given Pater's own attraction to French Romanticism, one is bound
to read his interpretation of its appeal as indicative of his own
situation. “It is to minds in this spiritual situation,“ he writes,
“weary of the present, but yearning for the spectacle of beauty and
strength, that the works of French romanticism appeal.“ Pater's own way
was a “weary“ one, we know. That it confined him, for the most part, to
the role of spectator, we also know. Although he equivocated about
setting a “positive value on the intense, the exceptional,“ as he goes
on to say the works of French Romanticism did, he was drawn to it in
part because a broader, more ordinary via media was not open to him. He
comments that a “certain distortion is sometime noticeable“ in those
works, as in “conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, or Gwynplaine,
something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre, as the French
themselves call it“ (215).

Style was a means of curtailing that impulse. The qualities of
intensity, “the exceptional,“ and grotesque distortion, he is quick to
add, are “always combined with perfect literary execution, as in
Gautier's La Marta Amoureuse, or the scene of the ‘maimed' burial-rites
of the player, dead of the frost, in his Capitaine Fracasse--true
‘flowers of the yew'“ (216). The language in his reference to Gautier's
Capitaine Fracasse is evocative of “Emerald Uthwart.“ It too contains
“maimed“ burial-rites. Its players too die, in a strange way, of the
frost. It too is a literary “flower of the yew.“

The influence of Gautier on Pater has been well documented. Pater
and Swinburne, contemporaries at Oxford, shared a high regard for
Mademoiselle de Maupin. When one remembers that Sainte-Beuve's
Portraits contemporains may well have offered the precedent Pater needed
to write in a mode suited to his literary abilities, as Montaigne's

Essais were the handsel of his critical writings, one begins to see how

69

pervasively the French tradition informed his projects. One can also
begin to identify a particular configuration of mentors common to Pater
and Baudelaire: Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and Gautier. One might further
venture to suggest that nearly all of Pater's writings were attempts to
discover what Baudelaire called for celebration of in the Salon de 1845,
the heroism of modern life. The difference is that whereas Baudelaire
discovered the anti-hero, in a movement from flowers of yew to fleurs du
mal, Pater could only describe defeated heroes, more pitiable than
fierce. That is surely what he describes in “Emerald.“ The story he
spins in that portrait can explain the peculiar process by which the
conflicts opening up in Pater at home and at school determined the

course that would lead him to seek out those mentors.

“Emerald Uthwart“ (1892)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
WOrld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(1877)

--Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God's Grandeur“

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

(1917)

--Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est“

70

And do the fathers bid the sons be either
soldier or priest? Out of the heart of the dry
wood, crimson flowers flame, shine for one
brief moment, and'then bleed.

The extent to which scholars have been disposed to follow out
Pater's idealizations is astonishing, especially since Pater was very
much aware of the morbid realities festering beneath bright dreams of
synthetic, “renaissance“ culture; culture burdened with the weight of
death and rebirth, illusions died out and resuscitated: weariness of
the way of cultural reincarnation.

In “Emerald Uthwart“ we can follow the weariness of the way
outward from the not quite perfectly sealed enclosure which was home. A
thoroughgoing if repressed Romantic, Pater was fond of that image of the
road. The first place it led him to, however, would abruptly challenge
him to “systematise“ his “vagrant self“ (349).

“If at home there had been nothing great,“ at King's School “one
seem[ed] diminished to nothing at all“ (350). Amidst the placidity of
domestic life, almost vegetable in its stillness, there had been only
one token of greatness: the gravestone of Emerald's father. “Sunday
after Sunday,“ Emerald had read, “wondering, the solitary memorial of
one soldierly member of the race, who had,--well! who had not died here
at home, in his bed.“ To the boy, youngest son but not the youngest
child and feeling at times neglected, it had seemed “wretched“ yet
“fine,“ his father's fate; “inconceivably great and difficult,“ but “not
for him!“ (345). That exception, “but not for him!“ would be sounded
again and again.

We know from “Child in the House“ how “rumours“ of the father's
death had been threaded into the boy's consciousness: “The child had
heard indeed of the death of his father, and how, in the Indian station,
a fever had taken him, so that though not in action he had yet died as a
soldier; and hearing of the ‘resurrection of the just,’ he could think
of him as still abroad in the world, somehow, for his protection--a

grand, though perhaps rather terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's

71

things, like the figure in the picture of Joshua's Vision in the Bible--
and of that, round which the mourners moved so softly, and afterwards
with such solemn singing, as but a worn-out garment left at a deserted
lodging“ (11).an As the child had eventually realized that the father
had not escaped the grave, there is now no escape for him. Having come
from a place so small to a place so large, amid “‘great matters,’ great
stones, great memories out of reach“ (347), the impressionable child is
not merely aroused by sensations of pleasure and pain, so intense and
disturbing that at times he “half longed to be free“ of them, but
positively invaded by forces whose authority is unchallengeable. On the
contrary, they challenge him: “to make moral philosophy one of [his]
attainments, if [he] can, and to systematise [his] vagrant self; which
however will in any case be here systematised for [him]“ (349), as the
phrasing of that clause confirms. The first of the Uthwarts to pass
under the yoke of a classical education, he will never throw it off.
Resistance is unthinkable. Emerald “yields wholly from the first“
(349), so wholly that “it was reported, there was a funny belief“ about
him, as there was about Pater, that he “had no feeling and was incapable
of tears“ (351-52). Monsman writes that Pater “enjoyed a temperamental
placidity unruffled by depression“ and quotes Samuel Wright's report
that he was “absolutely and always the same“ (37). It's an ironic
characterization of someone aware of “Heraclitean flux“ in himself to
the verge of ego disintegration. Emerald's apparent impassivity is a

mask.”

 

anThe figure threaded into the portrait is a composite of Pater's
own father, who had died of a fever in the course of his duties as a
surgeon among the population grown up around the docks which launched
the East and West India trade, his Uncle William martyred in the same
cause, his brother William, who had hopes of becoming an army surgeon
while Pater was at King's School, and his friend McQueen's father, an
officer stationed at the Canterbury garrison and on active duty in the
Crimean War, which was fought and won during Pater's years at King's
School (1854-1856).

2'As Pater's two friends at King's School, John Rainier McQueen and
Henry Dombrain, could have testified. They called themselves The
Triumvirate and “spent their time talking incessantly and playing
boisterously in the ancient forest between Canterbury and Faversham“
(Monsman 20). Of the two, Pater had the greater affinity with McQueen.

72

“Submissiveness!“ Pater writes, “--It had the force of genius with
Emerald Uthwart“ (355). It “made him . . . unlike those around him; was
a secret: a thing, you might say, ‘which no one knoweth, saving he that
receiveth it'“ (355-56). It's a response typical of someone trapped in
oppressive circumstances, reminiscent of Hamlet's guarded protest: “I
have that within which passes show.“ “Thus repressible, self-
restrained, always concurring with the influence, the claim upon him,
the rebuke of others, in the bustle of school life“ (356), Emerald
protects and preserves his vagrant self. So outnumbered and
overwhelmed, he avoids any clash with invading forces and lies low.

In his seventeenth year, however, in those protected fibres of the
self, a new passion germinates, intellectual as well as sensuous.
Emerald finds out, “almost for himself,“ the “beauty and power of good
literature, even in the literature“ he “must read perforce.“ And he
knows, because though lying low he has been awake, that “this, in turn,
is but the handsel of a beauty and power still active in the actual
world“ (356).

It is “one of the effects we look for from a classical education,“
Pater writes: the “sense of authority, of a large intellectual
authority over us, impressed anew day after day, of some impenetrable
glory round ‘the masters of those who know' . . . --that, and a full
estimate of the preponderating value of the manner of the doing it in

the thing done; which again, for ingenious youth, is an encouragement of

 

On Speech Day, 5 August 1858, both he and Pater received prizes and
commendations from the headmaster, Reverend George Wallace. Pater had
won his exhibition at Oxford and matriculated at Queen's College in
June. McQueen was also going up to Oxford, to Balliol. In “Emerald“
James Stokes is drawn from elements of McQueen, Joseph Haydock, an
aristocratic, handsome, rough boy whom Pater was said by McQueen to have
“almost adored“ and who may have been associated in Pater's mind with
his older brother. However that may be, the significance of the twins
and doppelgangers in Pater's works derives less from their resemblance
to real attachments—-such as Charles Lancelot Shadwell, whom Pater
admired later at Oxford, made the subject of his Old Mortality essay,
“Diaphaneite,“ and toured Italy with in the summer of l865--than from
their identity as alter egos. Apparitions of what Pater admired and
longed to be, they are first incorporated and then killed off. As alter
egos, they remain secondary to Pater's prior ego, the distinctness of
which, in writing, Pater manages both to preserve and to assert as
ultimately superior.

73

good manners on its part: --‘I behave myself orderly.'“ And it is
“Just at those points“ that “scholarship attains something of a
religious colour“ (355).
For Emerald, however, the burden, “But not for me!“ such greatness
“too high for me!“ which has kept him low, serves as a means of eluding
the claims of a classical education. Submissiveness has the force of
genius with Emerald because it leaves him, potentially, free to pursue
another course. The Romantic in Emerald evades a delimited place in the
order which would “systematise“ his “vagrant self,“ whether it be the
system of Horatian utterance or religion. “What he felt in Horace was
the sense, original, active, personal, of ‘things too high for me!'“
But that sense was “not really unpleasing to him.“ Likewise the sense
that religion, “as a thing immeasurable,“ was “surely not meant for the
like of him“ allows him to resist its “high claims, to which no one
could be equal: its reproaches“ (355). Thus though his “intellectual
capacity“ is discounted by the “‘masters of those who know,'“ it is
relatively unfettered, and free, at last, to waken with a “leap“
something like the “coming of love“ (356).
For now, however, the second passion, of the mind as well as the
eye, the intellect as well as the flesh, is subdued. With intellectual
passion kindles intellectual ambition: “ambitious thoughts . . . sweeten
[his] toil,“ but
he is frankly recommended to put them aside, and
acquiesces; puts them from him once for all, as he could
do with besetting thoughts and feelings, his preferences,
(as he had put aside soft thoughts of home as a
disobedience to rule) and with a countenance more good-
humoured than ever, an absolute placidity. It is fit he
should be treated sparingly in this matter of
intellectual enjoyment. He is made to understand that
there is at least a score of others as good scholars as
he. He will have of course all the pains, but must not
expect the prizes, of his work: of his loyal, incessant,
cheerful industry.

The pleasure of intellectual work must be subjected to the pains of

scholarly competition. The “status of a freeman in the world of

intellect can hardly be for him“ (356). The will of the fathers again

74

prevails, and the boy plods on under the yoke: placid, good-humored,
loyal, incessantly industrious.

“But only see him as he goes.“ Something besides “plod“ makes
“plough down sillion shine.“ The sense of access to a beauty and power
still active in the actual world makes this boy radiant. “It is as if
he left music, delightfully throbbing music, or flowers, behind him, as
he passes, careless of them, unconsciously, through the world, the
school, the precincts, the old city“ (356). ‘By the genius of submission
he has successfully defied the limits of his humble origins. Only the
“foolish“ and the “ignorant,“ mere pedants, “who have pigeon-holes for
their impressions,“ thought of him as a “Young Apollo!“ (357). He
resists classification. He is better than that, more like a real young
Greek.

His handsome face is “ennobled now, as if by the writing, the
signature, there of a grave intelligence, by grave information and a
subdued will, though without a touch of melancholy in this ‘best of play
fellows'“ (357). Through knowledge he has acquired access to the
father's greatness. A subdued will has purchased him the information
buried in the father's grave: how to rise. Melancholy has been
shuffled off. Surmounting a sense of loss of the mother, he begins to
feel that the inconceivable greatness of the father is not beyond the
likes of him.

Oblivious of the social world which might gainsay this new-found
sense of upward mobility, the young man has succeeded in reconstructing
his self-image and rewriting his social identity. By appropriation of
the texts which have awakened both his intellectual passion and his
intellectual ambition, he is rewriting himself. His is not that of the
“somewhat unmeaningly handsome facial type of the Uthwarts, moulded to a
mere animal or physical perfection through wholesome centuries“ (357).
Though not yet a freeman in this imperial city of culture, he hopes to
exceed the mere yeoman status of his brother, already independent and

vigorously active in the actual world. Not yet come into a “wholesome,“

75

robust manhood, he has nevertheless acquired distinction. His face has
been redrawn by all the diverse “touches, traces, complex influences
from past and present . . . crossing each other in this late century“
(358).

Like the culture in which he lives, he is undergoing a complex
transformation, already becoming what Pater will later perceive in
Leonardo's Mona Lisa. But his face is not contorted by the changes it
is registering. It is not grotesque, for it is unified by the “simple
law of the system to which he is now subject“ (357). “A school is not
made for one,“ after all. “The aim of a veritable community, says
Plato, is not that this or that member of it should be
disproportionately at ease, but that the whole should flourish; though
indeed such general welfare might come round again to the loyal unit
therein, and rest with him, as a privilege of his individual being after
all“ (350). Though “some of his own tendencies and inclinations“ might
“die out of him through disuse,“ no drop of his sublimated passion will
be spilled in this “system of fixed rules“ (351). There is a place for
everything and everything is in its place. Regardless of his actual
place in this civic scheme, this “loyal unit“ has become, in his
“individual being,“ the vortex of the cultural cross-currents here
unified as the ideology of empire. Not the flower at his mother's
breast but the jewel in Victoria's crown, he is well on his way to
becoming Fichte's “Ideal Student“ and the diaphanous hero of the history
of art. The unity of the system by which his own integrality is upheld
is more fragile, however, than the solid grey stone walls would suggest.
It is both subject and alert to threats. The jewel will not sit easily
in place.

we will track Pater's history. The question here is, what becomes
of Emerald? In this imaginary portrait, blend of wish-fulfillment and
not so very veiled confession, even not so very covert protest, how does
Pater conceive of Emerald's fate? What way from the stone citadel of

moral and intellectual authority opens outward into the actual world,

76

where the pleasure and power active in great literature may also be felt
and exercised?

Because the boy submits, he is allowed to rise.22 Meanwhile, his
“soldier-like, impassible self-command“ and “sustained expression of a
certain indifference to things“ awaken “all the sentiment, the poetry“
hitherto latent in the prefect James Stokes, Emerald's “immediate
superior.“ “[S]omething of genius“ emerges in that “seemingly plodding
scholar“ too, and “therewith also something of the waywardness popularly
thought to belong to genius“ (352). Emerald acquires in this young
ruler, James, who, drawn to Emerald's flame, in turn stokes it, a new
“celestial companion.“ He is admired and sought after. Family and
friends find in the loss of his presence cause for regret. And he is
marked for a soldier. “They tell him, he knows it already, he would ‘do
for the army.'“ Once the identification is made, it “defines also the
vague outlook of James Stokes, who will be a soldier too“ (358).

Evading the “reproaches“ of religion, the two young geniuses,
flowering out of the heart of the dry flint, set themselves toward the
path to shining glory. After all, “uniforms and surplices were always
close together here,“ where a “military tradition had been continuous“
from the “days of crusading knights“ (358). Still yoking genius to
discipline, they undergo final preparation for the University and carry
off the prizes. At the end of the term they are “found bracketed
together as ‘Victors' of the school, who will proceed together to
Oxford“ (359).

College is merely a “strange prolongation of boyhood.“ The
“veritable plunge from youth into manhood,“ Emerald discovers, would not

 

”Unlike Baudelaire, whose life as a d6class6 began with his “sudden
expulsion from the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in 1839,“ the year of Pater's
birth in Stepney. The headmaster accused Baudelaire of “sneering“ when
he ripped up and swallowed rather than surrender a note passed to him by
a classmate. The master wrote to General Aupick that “though the boy
was ‘certainly endowed with outstanding abilities' he was being
dismissed for his bad influence on school discipline“ (Scarfe 15).
According to La Forgue, with his sledgehammer psychoanalysis, and
Sartre, with his free-floating existentialism, this was a fate
Baudelaire brought on himself, much as he deliberately got himself
infected with syphilis, as a punishment for his foul Oedipal desires.

77

come until “one passed finally through those old Gothic gates, from a
somewhat dreamy or problematic preparation for it, into the world of
peremptory facts.“ Though the “contrast between his own position and
that of the majority of his rivals already at the business of life
impressed itself sometimes with an odd sense of unreality in the place
around him,“ his “schoolboy's sensitive awe for the great things of the
intellectual world“ was nonetheless “at its height here amid this larger
competition“ (360).

He is still reading books “prescribed for him by others.“ A tutor
notes that when he reads, “He holds his book in a peculiar way . . .
holds on to it with both hands; clings as if from below . . .“ (360).
But also now he has some leisure to indulge his preferences. He reads
other books of his own choosing. What he likes most are accounts of the
history of the place where he now finds himself and of the “military
life that [had] intruded itself so oddly, during the Civil War, into
these half-monastic places, till the timid old academic world scarcely
knew itself“ (361).

In these quarters too, as they would for Prior Saint-Jean in
“Apollo in Picardy,“ scents and glimpses of an antecedent natural
revelry come to Emerald from “beyond the Oxford meadows,“ carrying
“thoughts from the garden at home“ which are “half-repellent.“ It is a
male world Emerald occupies now, and though the “scheme of black, white,
and grey“ to which the ancient buildings are attuned sometimes seems
hard and forbidding, it is neither softness nor placidity he yearns for.
What relieves the stark setting is any incident discovered in his
unprescribed reading which “connects a soldier's coat“ with a feature of
the place. The beauties peculiar to the place count for less now. His
attention is drawn to the dry flowers, fritillaries, growing alongside

the streamlets where the oarsmen splash. Rude people call them snakes'

78

heads, “for their shape.“” To Emerald they seem to grow “from some
forgotten battlefield, the bodies, the rotten armour“ (361).

Like Emerald himself, the blossoms flanking the road leading to
and away from home have undergone a transformation. The color of
“rusted blood,“ they are yet “delicate, beautiful, waving proudly.“

Each contains a “drop of dubious honey.“ They appeal to Emerald with an
.immediacy and intensity that the black, white, and grey beauties of
Oxford cannot hold for him. Though the “memory of Oxford made almost
everything he saw after it seem vulgar,“ he feels that its local pride
is not proper to him. It is proper “only for those whose occupations
are wholly congruous with it: for the gifted, the freemen who can enter
into . . . [and] possess the liberty“ of the place. There is a
“reproach in it for the outsider, which comes home to him“ (361).

As he has ducked the reproaches of religion, he dodges the
reproach in this stronghold of intellectual authority. Though clinging
with both hands, as if from below, to his classics, he seeks a
distinction unsullied by reproach and uniquely proper to him. Occupying
a small place in the scheme, he does not feel secure in it. His “own
quaint rooms on the second floor just below the roof“ (361) offer him
the spectacle of Oxford life, with its “slim, quaint, black, young
figures“ crossing the green square on the way to chapel, but neither
access to what he actually seeks nor inviolable sanctuary. What, as
aestheticism, Iser identifies as an “in-between state“ is in material
fact Emerald's condition, as it was Pater's.

Pater's occupation was, to say the least, not wholly congruous
with the institutional life of Oxford. Pater took a second class B.A.
in Literae Humaniores (in 1862) largely because his classical studies
were dissipated by extracurricular reading. What he in fact liked best

was contemporary French literature: works by Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert

 

9As a child Pater developed a horror of snakes. Knowing of his
fear, his brother William (four years older) had once wrapped a snake
around a door-handle and, as recounted by Thomas Wright, Pater “nearly
died of fright“ when he realized what he had grasped (Levey 45).

79

(Madame Bovary came out in 1857), Gautier, Baudelaire, and later, Hugo.
After his friend McQueen betrayed him, intervening to block his access
either to ordination and a London curacy, on the one hand, or to a
clerical fellowship (he had received prizes in Latin scholarship and
ecclesiastical history at King's School), on the other, his only
remaining alternative was to try for a classical fellowship. He twice
unsuccessfully competed for a clerical fellowship, first in January 1863
at Brasenose and again in the summer of 1863 at Trinity, before he was
chosen in February 1864 from among a group of twelve candidates who
presented themselves for a classical fellowship at Brasenose. Wright
suggests that his knowledge of German philosophy was a deciding factor.
Certainly there were others whose classical erudition was superior.
Even the character of the college where he found the niche he needed to
survive was out of Pater's character. The atmosphere of Brasenose was
traditionally “hearty and sporting“; Pater appeared “quiet and retiring“
(Levey 93). There installed as a classical fellow, Pater had, finally,
no particular aspiration to classical scholarship.

In relation to his ostensible functions, classical tuition and
moral guidance, he was a second-class citizen. Aspiring to a
distinction necessarily outside of his proper sphere, the actual sphere
of his aspirations was wholly incongruous with the functions of the
institution which housed him. The distinction he sought could not but
bring him further reproach--as it happens for Emerald--even though it
was the only sphere in which he could aspire to real distinction, first-
class citizenship undegraded by reproach. That was the concrete
contradiction in which Pater was to remain locked for the rest of his
“career.“

“Emerald Uthwart“ is an imaginative exploration of that dilemma,
shedding light both on how Pater conceived of its outcome and on the
question of what sort of “distinction“--shining--it was that he aspired
to from deep within the only partially understood wellsprings of his

desire. In this portrait as in all of Pater's writing, whether critical

80

or imaginative--the distinction is ultimately unsustainable--he is
trying to understand himself by projecting himself into situations that
can clarify the prolonged crisis that was his life. What, then, does he
find out in the process of writing “Emerald Uthwart“?

In a bid to participate in a beauty and power still active in the
actual world, Emerald's “vagrant self“ keeps its shining link with his
“celestial companion,“ James Stokes, and takes once again to the road.
His instinct, “original, active, personal,“ is to try the one course to
greatness for which there is, irreproachably, a precedent in his yeoman
family.

Sudden outbreak of war with Napoleon's imperial France
precipitates the young men's departure. Their departure is cause for
regret: Stokes for his “high academic promise,“ Uthwart for a “quality,
or group of qualities, not strictly to be defined.“ It is immeasurable
because it is varied and vague, a potential. It's what the headmaster
at King's School had sensed in Pater, what Jowett had sensed as his
tutor at Oxford, what had prompted the selection committee at Brasenose
to award him the fellowship: unusually wide reading, a certain acuity
and originality of thought, an imaginative seriousness that seemed to
imply maturity of mind; but an elusive quality that could bode well or
ill, suggest the promise of distinction or rouse suspicion of some less
wholesome potential. Whatever it is, since it eludes measurement or
definition, it can be felt by its possessor to be “indispensable“ (359).
So far from feeling a little neglected by a somewhat languid mother at
home, the boy, breaking past the Gothic gates into manhood, has
achieved--subjectively--a condition of indispensability to the entire
Oxford community.

Of course an important aspect of the drama being imagined here is
Pater's tracing out of what Leo Bersani identifies in Baudelaire as the
“discovery of psychic mobility, of unanchored identity.“ The same
psychic process which enables Emerald to elude classification and

reproach produces the anxiety symptomatic of the extent to which his

81

sense of secret inner sanctuary is unbuttressed by solid social
supports. But if Emerald's impulses--to withdraw, lie low, submit in
order to rise while preserving the potential for revolt (a leap
something like the coming of love), cling from below or fling himself
out--belong to a system of psychic movement symptomatic of a more
general structuring of experience in terms of binary oppositions, as
Bersani argues in his deconstructive study of Baudelairean and Freudian
texts,“ it will not produce much in the way of real knowledge to
explore the “tensions produced by an opposition between certain
realities presumed to be ‘given' and a heroic effort to go beyond the
limits of a centered, socially defined, time-bound self“ from the
premise that the “antagonism between social reality and individual
aspiration is itself one of the dualities formulated by the idealistic
imagination“ (2).

It is the peculiar idiosyncracy of this sort of thinking that it
resists confrontation with historical and empirical realities only
“presumed“ from within the prison-house of language to be “given.“ It
wants to put reality in quotation marks, confined as it is to the
“ontological floating“ it seeks to analyze. Its reductio ad absurdum
can perhaps be most readily exposed if applied to the psychic process
giving rise, say, to the American vernacular phrase “in the house,“
which is understood by the African Americans who use it to mean
“Everything's cool.“ The excluded middle term of the metaphor is the
social reality that in America's urban ghettos people who leave their
houses or apartments stand a good chance of getting blown away by a
bullet. If users of that phrase were informed by the “masters of those
who know“ that the “antagonism between social reality“ and their
individual and collective aspirations not merely to survive but to feel
relaxed, secure, comfortable, and happy was a “duality formulated by
their idealistic imaginations,“ they might respond with sufficient force

 

“Bersani calls them texts, but it's ideas he's actually working
with, ideas anchored only in “textuality,“ applied to textuality from a
metaphysical position prior to textuality.

82

to convince their interpreter of the practical reality of certain
“givens.” Occlusion of the middle term, the social ground, is a no less
reductive procedure when applied to other metaphors of place or
position, lateral as well as vertical, common to the speech of people
living at different points in the socioeconomic class structure (split-
level houses, say, in suburban tracts). And if Jimi Hendrix, feeling
unable to move, moans, “Oh there ain't no life nowhere,“ it's no use
telling him, oh yes there is, there is life everywhere, if only he's
willing to decenter himself; diversify his personal portfolio, so to
speak.”

Were it not for the faithfulness to social reality with which
Pater tracks the movement of Emerald's desire, the portrait would reduce
to an exposition of adolescent and regressively infantile fantasies.
Bersani argues that though the opposition between social reality and
individual aspiration does in fact exist, and may even serve as a basis
for revolutionary social action, the “type of heroic individuality most
familiar to us has frequently been doomed to a romantic impotence“
because “such transcendental yearnings obliquely express a cultural
compulsion regarding coherent structures and intelligible limits“ (2).
The logical consequence of that argument, however, is abandonment to the
very impotence it seeks to address. Psychically displacing oneself, one
alters one's psychic relation to an obstacle; the obstacle remains in
place. Bersani's procedure dismisses from view the material reality,
and rigidity, of the structures impeding the effort to move--literally--
out of impotence into effective action.” One cannot talk meaningfully
about effective action--as distinct from “effective desire“--except in

relation to something real the absence of which impels movement. What

 

”Which is what the more cheerful Beatles advised: “When you find
yourself in the thick of it/Help yourself to a bit of what is all around
you, silly girl“ (“Martha My Dear,“ The Beatles' White Album, Part 1).

“See Pater's comment, in Marius: “We need some imaginative
stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope and
transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without
disgust, through the routine work which is so large a part of life“
(Levey 130).

83

that is in the context of Pater's discourse is something so far
identified only as access to a beauty and power still active in the
actual world. How it is thwarted in “Emerald Uthwart“ and continues to
be thwarted in Pater's other portraits, critical and imaginary--perhaps
the most accurate term for all of Pater's essays is identifications--
will help us to discern more clearly what it is. Suffice it to say here
that when alternative structures are not extant or accessible, sustained
movement is not conceivable.

There's a folk saying: Sometimes you just have to get off the
train even if all you do is get on another train. But if all trains
depart from the same cosmopolitan station, and all lines in fact lead
back to it, the only conceivable escape from the “coherent structure“
those lines lay down in iron, is to fling oneself off once and for all.
Short of that, one may keep changing trains. Or one may choose to stay
on one of them, ignore its actual course and concentrate instead on
one's private, psychic movement--“ontological floating“ (Bersani 4). It
is to break out of the condition of ontological floating to which
Emerald has resorted in order to resist the limits imposed by the
structure of moral and intellectual authority rigidly operative at
Oxford that he propels himself past the Gothic gates. Sadly, what he
attains as a result of his journey down the road along which crimson
blossoms have been transformed into dry flowers the color of rusted
blood and metal, containing a single drop of lethal sweetness, is only
more reproach, then a whispered glory which comes like an after-thought,
inseparable.from defeat and death.

There is, of course, one more alternative: subversion of the
system. And Bersani is right that whereas “Baudelaire's work gives us
images of . . . psychic fragmentation,“ it does “at the same time
document a determined resistance to all such ontological floating.“
That tension does account for “much of the interest of Baudelaire“ (4).
It's also the difference between the interest of Pater and the interest

of Baudelaire. In Pater all desire moves toward defeat. Baudelaire

84

meets all movement toward defeat with “determined resistance.“ Through
resistance he is able to assert himself in defiance of his antagonist,
and to subvert the system which constrains him even if he cannot
annihilate it as tidily as deconstructionists “annihilate“ the “coherent
structure“ of a text. .

But to do so one must recognize one's antagonist. Baudelaire
knows who and what (“Hypocrite lecteur“) his antagonist is and coopts
the terms of its religious ideology to fire back at it. Pater never
penetrates to the economic system which the system of moral and
intellectual authority supplies the governing ideology for. His
fellowship--literally, his rooms--keeps him insulated from the immediate
effects of that economic system. Hence he identifies the governing
ideology itself as his antagonist, and without systematic terms of his
own, he cannot fire back--only insinuate, undermining not the system
which constrains him but only his position in it. Unarmed, he must
conciliate and eventually capitulate.

Baudelaire is not so insulated. If Pater's rooms are not
impervious to the anxiety generated by the necessity of conciliating the
masters, his landlords, Baudelaire has to vacate his again and again,
running one step ahead of his creditors. He also has to sell himself
and his wares on the open market--a situation giving new meaning for the
poet to the word agoraphobia. When Pater sent the manuscript of what he
at first called “The House and the Child“ to the editor of Macmillan's
Magazine (in April 1878), he called it a portrait and explained that it
was meant to “prompt in its readers the sort of speculation that might
be prompted by seeing a painted portrait: ‘what came of him?'“ (Levey
159). The conclusion of “Emerald“ gives us one of Pater's speculative
answers to that question; one vision of his own fate should he attempt
to abdicate his dubious sinecure.

Joining a regiment in Flanders which has just seen successful
action, the twin stars of Oxford are promptly embraced by the

camaraderie of what is still for them an unearned glory. They chafe

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under the weariness of waiting for the next advance. As once before, at
King's School, Emerald is seduced from entire submission into
dereliction of duty by his friend but social superior, James Stokes.
Having flamed out of the great grey stones of Canterbury with a secret
passion, they shine now in an act of vagrant heroism. Though their
skirmish” is successful, they return to their posts to find that the
regiment has moved on. Apparently, they were not indispensable.

Stokes is summarily executed for desertion. Uthwart is spared,
but dishonorably discharged and left, quite destitute, to make his way
back from Flanders to the rose garden from whence he had long ago come.
For a time there he is the center of the family's attentions. They've
been sent word of his disgrace, but also of the mitigating
circumstances. When the war ends, the case of the modern day Dioscuri
is reviewed, and they are exonerated. But, somewhat ironically, it was
Emerald not Stokes who had actually been wounded in honorable action. A
bullet has been lodged in the heart muscle. Though Emerald attains

briefly to an erstwhile wholesome freshness, he dies of “lingering

 

”“Skirmishing“ is what The Triumvirate used to call its games in
the woods on the rim of Canterbury. McQueen liked to play ruler of
imaginary kingdoms and indeed better enjoyed lording it over people the
older and more substantial a figure he became. He once summoned a
carriage and ordered his wife to depart the premises of his domestic
kingdom. It was as self-appointed protector of Anglican Christendom
that he alerted Dombrain and the Reverend John Bachelor Kearney, a
King's School master, among others, of the impending travesty of an
agnostic being ordained as an ‘Anglican deacon.’ McQueen consulted
Henry Parry Liddon, a rising young High Churchman who was later to
decline Arthur Penrhyn Stanley Dean of Westminster's repeated
invitations to preach in Westminster on the grounds that Stanley had
previously permitted the Socialist F.D. Maurice to preach there.

Liddon, in residence at Christ Church as was Stanley at the time,
advised McQueen to write to the Bishop of London, since it was a London
curacy Pater intended to apply for. He did so, referring the Bishop to
Kearney for clerical corroboration; Kearney apparently did so as well.
The upshot of McQueen's busy-bodying was that the Bishop, Archibald
Campbell Tait, soon to become Archbishop of Canterbury, received two
letters of “denunciation about an obscure candidate for ordination who--
it emerged--had not so far applied to be ordained.“ McQueen also wrote
to Pater to inform him of what he had done. Sadly, that shock was soon
followed, in December of 1862, by the news of his Aunt Bessie's death in
Dresden. Bereaved, homeless, Pater was now “fearfully uncertain of the
future--except that to try for a curacy in London would now be to risk a
humiliating rebuff“ (Levey 91).

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sickness, in disgrace, as he fancied, while the word glory came to be
softly whispered“ of him and his “celestial companion“ (353).

Though he is still beautiful in death, his burial-rites are
“maimed“ by autopsy. A surgeon extracts the musket-ball from his heart.
Having left the rose garden to pass into the imperial city, on a frosty
morning, Emerald has glimpsed a way to equal his father's greatness,
even perhaps to surpass it. He winds up dying of heartsickness,
ministered to by a “celestial companion“ whose enduring presence
displaces that of Stokes; a surgeon not a gallant soldier. He is
mourned as his father was mourned. His departure is now permanently
regretted. He has never gathered the red passion flowers; has made
instead a trail of “red footsteps“ “side by side“ with those of his
fate--one of the number of Khi/9, the Destiny of people who will have
an “extraordinary and sanguinary death“ (352).

The polyvalence of this discourse is not susceptible to
biographical or psychoanalytic reduction. The second to last of Pater's
completed portraits, “Emerald Uthwart“ was begun after Pater paid a
visit to King's School on Speech Day, 30 July 1891, and published, in
two parts, in June and July 1892 (Levey 190, 193). It was composed with
ample benefit of retrospection as well as introspection. Michael Levey
calls it less a prophecy than a summing-up. Perhaps it is both. Either
way, as Levey says, it is “personal and indiscreet“ (194). Moving from
autobiographical reverie to existential hypothesis, the richness of
nuance sedimented into its brooding sentences gives one an appreciation
of what Pater had in mind when he said to the young Oscar Wilde, “Why do
you not write in prose?“ The autobiographical component, confession of
how things were interwoven with how he wished them to be--and how
fearful might be the consequences of wishes actively fulfilled--is not
easy to sort out.

This much one may venture. One more possibility has been
foreclosed, another death incurred. First the lust of the flesh was

subdued and sacralized, in deference to the prior claims and imagined

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reproaches of the malingering father (who had had a mission but no
religious calling). Sublimating his desire for sexual pleasure, the boy
unites the idea of mission and manly social responsibility with the
desire for heightened, ritualized, sensuous experience in the figure of
the priest: someone who cares for both bodies and souls. The goal of
priesthood sustains him during the difficult days at school, and serves
as the link between him and his classmates--Dombrain and McQueen at
King's School, Stokes in the portrait. But the element of sexual desire
is still strongly present in that link, as is the fact of social
inferiority, both sources of reproach. The claims and reproaches of
religion and scholarship are resisted as intellectual passion awakens
with a leap like the coming of love. Finding in the Greek classics
precedent for a passion both sexual and intellectual--and both
heterodox--the hero of this intensely subjective drama begins to throw
off both hitherto defining roles: that of manly healer and that of
priest. What that passion implies is access to a world of pleasure and
power still active in the actual world. What the hero actually aspires
to is the “condition of music“: pure, strong, unsullied sexual
lyricism. But that “vague hope,“ to have outlet, must be shaped into
“effective desire“ by a course of action. Soldiering appears to offer a
way of giving definition to the hero's desire. It defers to the
priority of three models: that of the father, that of the brother--who
combines sexual appeal, manly mission, and soldierly vigor--and that of
the priestly comrade.” Given the fact that what is actually desired--
sexual lyricism--ie by no means necessarily linked to any of those
defining roles, the course tried is bound to disappoint. For in each of
the defining roles, the actual desire must be sublimated if the role is
to be played successfully. To deviate from what the roles require is to
risk precisely the fate Emerald incurs. Having resisted the yielding to

colorless conformity demanded by the role, Emerald is seduced by desire

 

juAe the suite of music to the film Henry the Fifth bears out, it
is a tremendously seductive ideal.

to shine with his comrade, share a moment of ecstatic potency, into
dereliction of duty, the consequence of which is heartsick disgrace and
one long dying. When the consequences of the seduction are seen,
Emerald reverts to a safer persona, his first defense against guilt for
hedonism, identification with the father. But by this time it is too
late to reclaim the role of the father. McQueen has blocked the path to
a London curacy, and Pater is stuck with himself.

It is impossible to determine whether McQueen's action was
motivated by a sense, however deeply repressed, of sexual rejection by
Pater, who had made himself aloof from McQueen as he tired of McQueen's
efforts to lord it over his spiritual welfare, the state of his soul.
What is clear is that if McQueen had not written to the Bishop of London
to prevent Pater's ordination, Pater would probably have followed the
precedent set by his father and taken a London curacy. When McQueen
barred that path, Pater, requesting from Pendergast, his executor on
Commercial Road, the last 30 pounds of his share of his mother's estate,
was forced to apply for the sinecure at Brasenose which would keep him
trapped in an aesthetic “in-between state“ for the rest of his life.

“Sinecure“ is precisely the right word: “without care/cure: a
church office that pays a salary without involving cure (care) of
souls.“ It is probably just as well that McQueen “did his duty.“ Pater
had ever more care for bodies than for souls. On the other hand, he
would never push past the Gothic gates into an independent professional
life. He understood, moreover, that souls are lodged in bodies. He
might have found a way to integrate his love of beauty with the call to
minister to the needs of embodied souls, fulfilling the role of priest
cum physician. His fringe existence at Oxford was the sort of life
Jowett--himself a “bold and non-conforming figure . . . suffering under
‘Establishment' suspicion of his religious orthodoxy“ before he became
Master of Balliol (Levey 66)--spoke of with disapproval. In the months
preceding Pater's election at Brasenose, John Addington Symonde was

also, like Pater, living in lodgings while seeking a fellowship. He

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noted that Jowett “talked about fellowships and . . . staying up at
Oxford.“ “He calls it living in a hothouse,“ Symonde wrote, “and says
men get braced in London“ (Levey 92).

Of course that was easy for Jowett to say, and Pater had nowhere
else to go. Having escaped from the intractable realities of Commercial
Road at the age of three and a half, Pater would never get “braced“ by a
return. Androgynous, longing both for a mother's generous affection and
for a father's approval, he would fester in a hothouse of flowering and
forbidden fruit. His desire for a sensitive and sensuous but
nonetheless vigorous masculinity in his life would never find an outlet.
It would never blossom into a mature “sweetness and strength.“ Instead
it became increasingly perverted, sweetness turning sickly, strength
turning severe: necrophilia at one extreme, sadomasochism at the other;
a yearning narcissistic boy in between.

Disgusted by foolish infighting between High and Low Church
factions, repelled by blockhead Establishment orthodoxy and the absurd
scrupling of its repressive Hebraism, Pater was attracted to the
sweetness and witty, urbane light of Matthew Arnold's Hellenism rather
than the moralistic thunderings of Ruskin's art qua religion gua social
reform. Pitting an Apollonian persona against an overbearing Hebraism,
he would discover the inadequacy of Arnold's liberal Victorian

conception of that ideal to the depths of human experience.

Chapter III. House Beautiful

The aim of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is.
--Matthew Arnold
The first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know
one's impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it
distinctly.
--Walter Pater

The primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it
really is not.

--Oscar Wilde
I saw life as it really was and it turned my heart to stone.
--Oscar Wilde from Reading Gaol

Poetry runs the risk of no longer being poetry, if it does not
constantly contradict fact.

--Charles Baudelaire

9O

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Soon after Pater's election to the fellowship at Brasenose in
February of 1864, he took occupancy of the two modest rooms on the first
floor of the college, “with a direct view of the Radcliffe Camera and an
oblique one of St. Mary's Church“ (Levey 93), which were to be his for
the rest of his life. As Michael Levey observes, his career had begun
and “in certain official university ways it had--as a career--already
ended.“ For Pater “there was to be no progress to a professorship, not
even the Slade Professorship of Fine Art, and no college preferment“
(93). As with Baudelaire, the defining circumstances of Pater's life
were early set. Given the incongruity of his aspirations--“original,
active, personal“--with his institutional role, the role itself could
.hardly serve as a vehicle for the realization of those aspirations.
Pater was never to have, Levey notes, “a secure, still less a great,
reputation as a scholar.“ He had “been searching, it might seem, merely
for a retreat“ (94). In fact he had sought a livelihood and acquired a
small sanctuary, but he was soon to discover how uncomfortable the
condition of sanctuary must necessarily be. His life was to be that of
the sheltered fugitive. Two modest rooms offered but a thin buffer
between himself and the entrenched forces of moral and intellectual
authority.

Similarly, after Baudelaire's return from the voyage to Mauritius
in 1843, the conspiracy between General and Mme. Aupick and Baudelaire's
half-brother Claude to deny him access to his inheritance (some 75,000
francs) combined with the forces enmeshed in its consequences to
assemble by the middle of 1844 “all of the elements of Baudelaire's
future torment.“ The “web of circumstances“ by then “woven round him by
himself and his family was only broken with his death“ (Scarfe 17).

Enjoying the pursuits of his bohemian friends in the Latin Quarter
(among them the poets of the so-called “Norman School“), indulging his
extravagant tastes, writing impressive poems, displaying an acute if
erratic and immature critical appreciation of all the arts, expecting to

cultivate the favor of editors and publishers with his social status and

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prodigality, exploring the ecstasies and degradations of his adventurous
liaison with Jeanne Duval, he seemed to be advancing with heady momentum
toward the proverbial “brilliant career“ when he was “suddenly flung
into a poverty from which he was never to recover“ (Scarfe 17-18) and
forced to earn his living by his pen. Dogged by debts, without access
to capital, he was reduced to the status of wage-slave and faced with
the prospect of having to become a hack. He was probably also already
infected with syphilis. Two years before his death in 1867, he told
Catulle Mendes that he had earned from his writing, over the course of
his entire life, only fifteen thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two
francs, sixty centimes (Scarfe 11).

Pater's sanctuary may have been both confining and insecure, but
Baudelaire was to have recourse to no sanctuary at all. Obliged to
“flit“ to escape his creditors, he was unable to occupy the same lodging
for more than a few weeks or months at a time. If Pater's precarious
situation was that of a sheltered fugitive, Baudelaire was a fugitive
without shelter. At Oxford Pater could avert his eyes to avoid the
reproachful glance, but Baudelaire had always either to fight or to
flee: to fight with the reading public, the publishers, and the courts
on which his ability to earn francs depended; to flee the creditors to
buy his freedom from which francs were needed. If Pater insinuatee his
aspirations into his discourse, Baudelaire by turns flattered, deceived,
mocked, bludgeoned, and vituperated his readers--cultivating the paradox
which Pater also used to baffle and undercut in conversation, though not
in his tensely controlled and serious writing, and which Wilde was to
exploit outrageously in his own writing. By no means as cloistered,
Baudelaire's life was, like Pater's, one protracted crisis.

Pater's university career may have ended in some respects when it
began, but his career as an aeethete--a sequestered fugitive--was about
to take off. Rumours got about that, as Humphry Ward (come up as an
undergraduate at Brasenose in October 1864) put it, Pater had a “new and

daring philosophy of his own, and a wonderful gift of style“.(Levey 95).

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Intimations of that “philosophy“ were first made public at meetings of
the Old Mortality Society to which Pater was elected in 1863 or 1864.

Founded in the mid-1850s by John Nichol, a Balliol undergraduate
who later became a professor of English literature at Glasgow, it was,
according to Gerald Monsman, in “literature, art, politics, and religion
. . . avowedly ‘radical.'“ Its members were “dedicated to social
amelioration, liberty of thought, and the ultimate validity of human
reason in matters secular and sacred“ (Monsman 26). Michael Levey
interprets its name as indicative of its founder's concession to death
as the “governing fact of human life“ and speculates that it carried
“rationalistic, free-thinking overtones“ as well as reference to its
original members' “fragile health“ (100).

Both emphases would, clearly, have appealed to Pater. The Society
appears to have been an important forum for him. It provided the
occasion for formulation of his aeethetic hypothesis, not only in his
first two papers, some of the language of which was incorporated in
later work, but also in the first three essay-reviews” he later
published anonymously in John Chapman's Westminster Review. The
journal's Positivistic materialism constituted a challenge to Oxford
orthodoxy.

Pater's dissatisfaction both with rationalism and with death as
the “governing fact of human life,“ however, and his impulse to escape,
transcend, or countermand the limits of both, is already evident in the
first essay he read to the Society, two weeks after becoming a fellow,
on 20 February 1864. The essay itself has been lost. Reconstructions
of its import are varied, based on the documented reactions of Pater's
listeners, who confided in others outside the Society as well, provoking
wider comment.

S.G. Brooke wrote in his diary that Pater's paper was “one of the

most thoroughly infidel productions it has ever been our pain to listen

 

:”“Coleridge's Writings“ (1866), “Winckelmann“ (1867), and “Poems
by William Morris“ (1868)

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to“ (Levey 100). He was sufficiently outraged by Pater's rhapsodies on
the theme of “Subjective Immortality“ evoked by the topic, J.G. Fichte's
“Ideal Student,“ to present a rebuttal the following week and then
withdraw from the Society. It is significant of Pater's procedure that
the essay has in effect two titles: one that of his ostensible
scholarly subject; the other reflecting his personal impulses. Pater
scholars refer to it by one or the other title depending on their own
agendas. My aim is to integrate the two elements interwoven in Pater's
essay.

Aside from its patent denial of the immortality of the soul, what
disturbed Brooke was Pater's advocacy of a “self-culture“ founded “upon
eminently selfish principles, and, for what to us appeared, a most
unsatisfactory end“ (Levey 100). “To sit in one's study all [day] and
contemplate the beautiful,“ Brooke concluded, “is not a useful even if
it is an agreeable occupation, but if it were both useful and agreeable,
it could hardly be worth while to spend so much trouble upon what may at
any time be wrested from you. If a future existence is to be
disbelieved the motto ‘Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die,’ is
infinitely preferable“ (Monsman 30). Exactly so; but of course, not
being an aesthete, Brooke could not understand the impulse to valorize
just such an existence: that of a sequestered and sublimated hedonism
in part a defense against death, in part a defense against life's
pleasures, desire to partake of which was thwarted by the “fell clutch
of circumstance.“

Michael Levey infers from Brooke's reactions that what members of
the Society actually heard was a first draft of the language Pater later
used to conclude both the essay on Morris' poetry and The Renaissance
(101). He may be right, but in leaping to that summary conclusion he
dismisses the matrix out of which that language emerged as expressive of
Pater's aspirations. Pater's extracurricular reading had included works
by Winckelmann, Lessing, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Goethe.

Holidays spent in Germany with his sisters and aunt had stimulated

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interest in German culture and strengthened his knowledge of the
language. Whereas Brooke heard an “infidel production“ whose argument
for the idea of subjective immortality he found an unconvincing hedge
against annihilation, Edward Caird remembered Pater's first paper as a
“hymn of praise to the Absolute“ (Monsman 26). If Pater had denied the
immortality of the soul, he had done so in the context of Fichte's
metaphysical speculations, set forth in a series of lectures on “The
Nature of the Scholar,“ that
. . . the Divine Idea lies concealed behind all natural
appearances [and that] a certain part of the meaning of this
Divine Idea of the world is accessible to, and conceivable by,
the cultivated mind. . . . In every age, that kind of
education and spiritual culture by means of which the age
hopes to lead mankind to the knowledge of the ascertained part
of the Divine Idea, is the Learned Culture of the age; and
every man who partakes in this culture is a Scholar of the
age. . . . The true-minded Scholar will not admit of any life
and activity within him except the immediate life and activity
of the Divine Idea which has taken possession of him. . . .
His person, and all personality in the world, have long since
vanished from before him, and entirely disappeared in his
effort after the realization of the idea. (Monsman 32)
What Pater meant by subjective immortality was simply the idea that one
lives on in the minds of one's friends. Clearly, he had personal
grounds for supporting such an idea. Though Pater's father had died
when Pater was only three and a half, his memory had been kept alive as
an integral part of the atmosphere of the somewhat conventual household
in which Pater's consciousness developed. As his brooding in “Emerald
Uthwart“ makes clear, he often himself, “feeling a little neglected,“
hoped to be so remembered and “regretted.“

His “hymn to the Absolute,“ then, is a characteristic effort to
assuage personal pains and longings using the medium of cultural
products to which he had gained access with his education. Having early
defended against anxiety generated in the conflict between “regret“ and
“desire“ by sacralizing his desire, he was not as comfortable with
agnosticism as his witty jibes at the smugly orthodox suggested. If one
has renounced the both comforting and threatening thought of a loving

and just father-god whose omnipresence is emotionally interpreted as a

“celestial companion,“ one will both feel the loss and celebrate one's

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independence. Pater typically incorporates what is lost or unavailable
to him, thereby consolidating his autonomy, celebrating himself as that
which unites and contains all.

“The Divine Idea,“ Monsman comments, “is accessible through the
culture of an age, and he who is most truly cultivated is most perfectly
possessed of the divine. This explains the significance of ‘self-
culture' in Pater's essay“ (33). It is precisely this habit of
abstraction accruing to the practice of idealist historicism which
allowed the Modernists to develop a cult of personality at the same time
that they scrupulously, fastidiously, and utterly disingenuously made
critical currency out of the program of refining themselves out of
existence in a universe consisting of nothing other than their own
omnipotent subjectivities. In the context of Fichte's metaphysics,
Pater substitutes what is for him now the more intellectually
respectable “Divine Idea“ for the more emotionally appealing orthodox
Christian father-god. Since what he in fact desires is not in fact
accessible through the culture of his age and no amount of cultivation
will enable him to come into perfect possession of it, he will execute a
maneuver common among aesthetes and Romantics. He will project what he
most desires into select instances of cultural production and then
refashion them as his own. That is the autoerotic reward of the
aesthete's study about which the sturdily rational Mr. Brooke could not
have known.

Pater's next essay, “Diaphaneite,“ will be a more transparent
exercise in such autoeroticism. Having incorporated what he imagines
Charles Lancelot Shadwell to be, Pater will make love to himself and
give birth to the aesthetic hero which Harold Bloom has been extolling
ever since.

Monsman observes, “That Pater may have been trying to compel
Positivist and Idealist views to tentative levels of correspondence by
an insistence upon the continuity of the self-cultured mind within the

empirical context of history doubtless escaped Brooke.“ His attempt so

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to situate Pater's impulse to carve out a place for an aesthetic hero
rivaling “Carlyle's tyrant and Nietzsche's superman in significance,“
and to defend Pater against charges of hedonism, however, leads him to
the wholly indefensible position that the “perfection of the moral life
through the idealization of sensuous beauty“ which was the “goal of
Pater's humanism“ constitutes a “sounder ethical basis than the
moralistic theories“ of Ruskin (33).

In the Fichtean version of historicism, Pater found a prop and a
cover for his own peculiar aspirations as a “Scholar.“ What Edward
Caird heard as a “hymn to the Absolute“ was an encomium to Pater's own
expanding personality. Eager to chart his own vagrant course in the
“Learned Culture of the age,“ Pater could substitute a “Divine Idea“ for
a deity in which to submerge his passion.

In the language of Fichte's proposition that the “true-minded
Scholar will not admit of any life and activity within him except the
immediate life and activity of the Divine Idea which has taken
possession of him“ one can hear a harbinger of Pater's proposition in
the “Conclusion“ to The Renaissance:

The theory or idea or system which requires of us the

sacrifice of any part of . . . [our] experience, in

consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or

some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or

of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. (198)
It inverts Fichte's proposition, giving ultimate priority to the
aesthetic experience of the individual personality, from which any so-
called Divine Idea is no longer distinguishable. Likewise the effort to
realize personality takes precedence over Fichte's self-effacing “effort
after the realization of the idea.“

Now that Pater has found a sinecure (without care/cure of souls)
and a secular pulpit, “a certain part of the meaning of . . . [the]
Divine Idea of the world is accessible to . . . his cultivated mind“ all
right. In the process of reconstructing his self-image and rewriting
his social identity as the “focus where rays . . . unite and begin to

burn“ (Renaissance 179), he seems, at the outset of his “career,“ to

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stand on the threshold of an intoxicating freedom: the “liberty of the
place“ at Oxford, access to a “beauty and power“ active in the world of
“Learned Culture,“ psychic mobility, perhaps even social currency. Is
he not holding his listeners spellbound with a prose in which his
“speculative imagination seemed to make the lights burn blue“? (Monsman
26)

His next paper focuses with even more incandescence on that
“certain part of the meaning of the Divine Idea“ to which his
“cultivated mind“ craved access, giving an even more elevated status to
the personality of which the Modernists who came after would make a
cult. He will kick away the Fichtean metaphysical prop: “Coleridge's
Writings“ will not be susceptible to interpretation as a hymn to the
Absolute. He will lower the cover as well, subtly but unmistakably
adverting to homosexuality in “Winckelmann.“ “Poems by William Morris“
will place the “condition of music“ to which “all art aspires“ in the
nervous system at the same time that it traces to the Renaissance the
resurgence of elementary passions which is the true meaning of “the
modern spirit“ for Pater, and the source of whatever appeal Positivistic
materialism may have held for him. Pater is not interested in the
evolution of the species or the progress of human society. It is the
evolution of the passions that compels his curiosity. Pater's tour of
Italy with Charles Shadwell during the summer holiday of 1865 will
kindle a search in The Renaissance for facets of Pater's imaginative
experience not accessible in the culture of his age. To coopt the
language of Bersani, “desire travels“ might have been its most accurate
subtitle. It was dedicated to Shadwell. In its “Conclusion,“ the
language of which had been sequestered among his small circle of friends'
at Oxford for almost ten years, Pater would go public with his true
aspirations. Its reception would reduce the rest of his “career“ to a
slow burn.

Delivered to the Society in 1864, “Diaphaneite“ was included in

the volume of Miscellaneous Studies published a year after Pater's death

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by Shadwell, who acted as Pater's literary executor. Shadwell inserted
it there, as he wrote, “‘with some hesitation . . . as the only specimen
known to be preserved of those early essays of Mr. Pater's, by which his
literary gifts were first made known to the small circle of his Oxford
friends'“ (Levey 102). Presumably, Shadwell had the manuscript to
produce because Pater had presented it to him at some point after its
delivery (the MS. is dated “July 1864“ and initialled “W.H.P.“).

Also a member of the Society, Shadwell was only eighteen months
Pater's junior and among his first pupils. He became a fellow himself
in 1864, at Oriel, and “grew into . . . almost a caricature of an old-
style university don: a bachelor, fond of chess problems . . . devoted
to every detail of the history of his college, of which he became
provost and a munificent benefactor, dignified, rather forbidding, and
expecting from his juniors a deference which even pre-1914
undergraduates were no longer accustomed to accord“ (Levey 103). He is
another of the figures of which Emerald Uthwart is a composite. Thomas
Wright reports that those among Shadwell's acquaintance declared him to
be “‘undoubtedly the handsomest man in the University--with a face like
those to be seen on the finer Attic coins'“ (Levey 102).

In identifying him (after A.C. Benson) as the “real subject“ of
“Diaphaneite,“ Levey supplies a useful corrective to the more scholarly
interpretations of Pater's crystalline aesthetic hero as the “perfected
outcome of what for Fichte was a continuous struggle by which the self
transcends its lower forms and identifies the external world as no
longer foreign, but as its own and as that in which its life consists“
(Monsman 34). As with Pater's essay on Fichte's “Ideal Student,“
however, Levey ignores the way in which Pater appropriates the language
of “Learned Culture“ to achieve personal ends. Nor does he attend to
the dynamics of desire by which Pater appropriates Shadwell as well.
Though the language drawn from the discourse of Fichte, Schiller,
Carlyle, and Arnold certainly informs the substance of Pater's advocacy

of the ideal of the artist as a “Renaissance man“ whose “refusal to be

100

‘classified' by any narrow, one-sided philosophy or discipline makes him
a ‘reconciler of opposites, a harmonizer'“ (Monsman 35), the dynamics of
the argument are unintelligible apart from the material conditions of
the essay's composition.

At the time of its writing, Pater had identified in Shadwell the
object of his desire for an ideal companion. Essential to an
understanding of the dynamics of Pater's desire for Shadwell is a
recognition of what was for Pater the defining attraction. Shadwell
appeared to be the antithesis of himself. Once one grasps that simple
fact, one can discern in the essay an attempt to harmonize, to hold in
equipoise, the libidinal life instincts and the death instinct. Monsman
does not know what tip of the iceberg he has glimpsed when he observes
that “Although contrasting the violence of Carlyle's Charlotte Corday
with the harmonious revolutionism of the Aesthetic hero, Pater finds in
Carlyle's heroine that intensity-death equation that his later work will
characterize as the prelude to renewal“ (35).

This is the radical conservatism to which Ms. Williams' discourse
pointed: “harmonious revolutionism“ is a contradiction in terms; the
only renewal it allows for is resurgence of the desiring self through
the endless process of evasion and imaginative self-reincarnation; the
reshaping of “vague hope“ into “effective desire.“ Confinement to that
process, which can terminate only in defeat and death, is what Iser's
recognition of the aesthetic life as an “in-between state“ points to.
The only means of escape from confinement to that weary way is
intersubjective engagement, a possibility declined by the attitude that.
any interest, idea, or theory “into which we cannot enter“ or which “we
have not identified with ourselves . . . has no real claim upon us.“

The absolutely compelling question is why that possibility is so fraught
with difficulty that it seems to be unthinkable.

The Apollonian ideal Pater articulates in “Diaphaneité' is a
forged resolution of the conflict between the two antithetical forces he

later discovers to be present in a unity which the cultivated Victorian

101
mind has split into two poles: Dionysus and Apollo. It corresponds to
the split between Satan and God in the mind of Baudelaire in the Paris
of the Second Empire. Thinking he can choose the latter by affirming
the Arnoldian values of humane liberal culture, the cultivated Victorian
scholar ignores the “beast“ which is, of course, present and active in
his own quarters, but which he will not be compelled to recognize until
it erupts in such a way as to threaten the integrity and viability of
the entire nation-state in 1914. For the time being it is thought
merely to prowl the “gloom“ of city streets, which is, like the red
death in Poe's “Mask,“ shut out both in the citadels of enlightenment
and by the “sweetness and light“ of culture there produced. In fact it
does prowl the city streets, where predation is unsweetened by the
polish of genteel civility. And of course the cultivated mind is not
untroubled by suspicions that the beast is closer than it would like to
think, but those suspicions only fortify its vigilance. The voices of
prophets like F.D. Maurice can be silenced simply by demotion.

Pater had flirted with Broad Church Socialism during his
undergraduate days. He learned early what became of people who were not
“harmonizers,“ who ran to “extremes“ and moved among the peripheries of
Adam Smith's commodities and behavioral exchange. Sympathetic
understanding, which Smith posits in The Theory of Moral Sentiments3° as

the basis of human morality, did not extend to marginal figures. Like

 

Inhelville's critique of which is appropriately set in Wall Street
in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,“ an allegory of Melville's preference not
to write for a public whose capitalized Christian values are embodied in
the narrator. (Its actual tastes ran to travelogues offering thrills
not unlike those offered by Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom: tales
of missionaries being cannibalized in which their own baser appetites
were projected onto South Sea islanders, as in Types and amoo.) For
Bartleby too there is no escape but death. He could no more go home
with the lawyer-narrator than Baudelaire could become the sort of son
General Aupick would approve. Like Baudelaire, Melville knew his
readers, though they could not--did not want to--know him, because they
were unwilling to be entertained by any interest, idea, or theory they
could not identify with their own interests. The story has remained a
conundrum for readers because the class consciousness of the narrator
can conceive of no world into which Bartleby's interests might enter and
so offers no solution. Unwilling to partake of the lawyer's interests
if the cost is commodification of himself, Bartleby “lives without
dining.“ The story makes a curious companion piece to Kafka's “The
Hunger Artist.“)

102

fathers who refused to move to the suburbs, and like aesthetes who did
not sublimate their passion--Simeon Solomon's fate was the warning to
Pater's and Swinburne's generation that Wilde's was to the next--they
died, either literally or effectively. They were rendered inactive,
inert, like the figures in Pater's portraits as well as Baudelaire's
“Tableaux parisiens“ in Les Fleurs du mal and the prose poems in Paris
Spleen.

The Dionysian “beast“ is a life-preserving libidinal instinct
which has been contorted by the culture of acquisition and accumulation.
(Anthropologists confirm that sexuality becomes an instinct subject
primarily to control--“thou shalt not“--at the time when human societies
are forming around agricultural enterprises.) Useful as Bersani's
insights are into the dynamics of desire, they acknowledge no other
context than the originary family: the original constellation of
“objects“ from which the subject's desire moves outward into fantasy.
Bersani does not consider the interpenetration of the economic system
within which the family drama of desire is enacted and interpreted, or
the propelling value of that system within which the proliferation of
fantasy consumption is set in motion.

Apollo is the god of light and order, a static radiance which can
momentarily quell the restlessness of desire and induce a state of
quiescence akin to the inorganic oblivion for which Baudelaire at
intervals so longs.

There is, however, another god, conspicuous by his absence. The
absent god is a principle of generosity: generous sharing out of self
as opposed to relentless pursuit of all that the self is made to feel it
lacks, let alone consolidation of all that it has acquired. It is the
absence of that god, or the marginalization of that god to the fading
aristocracy (with its tradition of noblesse oblige), which forces
Baudelaire to return again and again to Satan, looking for the source of
energy he cannot find in God as a principle of light and order because
it has been coopted by the generals of the bourgeoisie; General Aupick,

103

for one. Even in Baudelaire's mother, Caroline hrchimbaut-Dufays,
affection is withheld because it needs to be reinvested in General
Aupick for a better return; since step-father and son are rivals for
that measured resource, the boy must be shipped off to lycées, pensions,
en voyage. He who pays commandeers affection.

Plumbed as he is by Bersani's psychoanalysis, Baudelaire intuited
something Bersani doesn't find “interesting“ or “worthy of our
attention“ because it doesn't satisfy his own traveling desire for ever
more complex psychic conversions, transactions, exchanges: one
construct exchanged for and absorbed by another till the whole complex
ganglion of psychic transactions becomes a huge conglomeration of
psychic agency which contains all instincts and explains none. In a
society captured by the bourgeoisie--its culture dominated by the_
interests of the bourgeoisie, its cultural practitioners having their
recourse to other interests and values slowly sucked out of the
atmosphere in which they live and breathe and work (like oxygen
‘withdrawn from a flame) by the naturalization of bourgeois interests--
“God is a prostitute“ because generosity, the practical consciousness of
the idea that “God is love“ (a holy spirit, if you will), is despised by
the bourgeois.

Henceforth, one can never give, or receive, without having a price
put on the transaction. Pater and Baudelaire are both trapped because
they are prevented from sharing out of themselves without reprobation.
The libidinal instincts are to expend energy: the death instinct is to
cease expenditure once and for all, achieve a condition akin to that of
a capital fund to which dividends may accrue, like worms or ornaments on
a dead, undesiring body. Baudelaire was denied access to his
inheritance because it had become apparent to General and “me. Aupick
that he was disposed to spend it. Henceforth he could not commit the
sin of spending without incurring the guilt of debt. Having sinned in
his youth, spending not only francs but semen, he had early incurred the
“wages“ of sin in both debt and syphilis. So weighted, he could aspire

104

no longer to the bourgeois ideal of capital investments yielding
voluptuous returns, but only to the petit bourgeois ideal of a sort of
static solvency, a balanced budget; equilibrium: so much coming in, so
much going out, with hopes of making a modest profit sufficient to
maintain an Individual Retirement Account. As a wage-slave receiving
irregular supplements insufficient to meet the costs of living, he was
to find even that lowered expectation impossible. In his reduced
circumstances, the ideal of the dandy as the embodiment of extravagant
liberality is converted into a principle of conservation (“Many friends,
many gloves: for fear of the itch“): trimness: order; hygiene.

Without Satan he had recourse to no other ideal than the ennui and
vacuity of such a condition. Only Satan could redeem him from that
fallen state, the beast reawakening in him with sporadic “leaps“
something like the “coming of love,“ urging him to revolt and sin again.

As Benjamin observes,

Baudelaire could have adopted Plaubert's statement, ‘Of all of
politics I understand only one thing: the revolt.’ It could
then have been understood in the sense of the final passage in
a note which has come down to us together with his sketches on
Belgium: ‘1 say “Long live the revolution!“ as I would say
“Long live destruction! Long live penance! Long live
chastisement! Long live death!“ I would be happy not only as
a victim; it would not displease me to play the hangman as
well--so as to feel the revolution from both sides! All of us
have the republican spirit in our blood as we have syphilis in
our bones: we have a democratic and a syphilitic infection.’
(13-14) .
What such expressions of Baudelaire's “mystery-mongering“ amount to is
what Benjamin calls the “metaphysics of the provocateur“ (14). The key
question they pose Benjamin is astute enough to ask: “what impelled
Baudelaire to give a radical-theological form to his radical rejection
of those in power“ (24). It is the crucial question raised by an
inquiry into the relation between Pater and Baudelaire. However the
answer may finally be determined, it holds the key to the difference
between Pater's defeat and Baudelaire's more than Pyrrhic victory.

Pater desires Shadwell because he is different from himself:

rich, handsome, of distinguished family. Beyond that, as Levey puts it,

105

Shadwell was “simple where [Pater] was complex, innocent and untroubled
where he was only too aware not merely of death but of ambiguous desires
and that ‘tension of nerve' he wrote of as arising from frustrated
emotions. Above all . . . [Shadwell] was physically different from
[Pater], yet as he longed to be: perhaps also as his brother William
was and conceivably as he supposed their father to have been. Handsome,
healthy, animal-like schoolboys and good-looking if intellectually null
undergraduates cannot have done much to satisfy a yearning to give and
receive affection“ (103-04). Yet Pater desired them, desired Shadwell,
because Shadwell appeared neither to need nor to need to give affection:
self-sufficient: autonomous: steady as a rock, innocently radiant as
crystal.

Pater's “Diaphaneite“ is not, as Levey suggests, a hymn to
Shadwell, but a hymn to Pater's idealized self. Having incorporated the
qualities he finds attractive in Shadwell, Pater makes love to that
persona in order to possess himself of that deadness which has all the
appeal of the commodity and none of the pain of his own restless,
desiring life. Pater desired corpses because he wished to have their
Apollonian beauty untroubled by signs of Dionysian life. The fruit of
his union with the corpse he desires in Shadwell is the aesthetic hero
who holds in equipoise, like a balanced budget, the life and death
instincts. That is the significance of Pater's “self-culture.“

The essential characteristic of the ideal type Pater creates in
“Diaphaneite“ is “neutrality.“ That crystalline quality is not a
reflection of the “colourless uninteresting existence“ of the man who
has been neutralized by “suppression of gifts,“ but the prismatic
radiance of those among whose talents there is a “just equipoise.“ In
such individuals, Pater writes, “no single gift, or virtue, or idea, has
an unmusical predominance.“ Only by absorption can such “gifts“ elude
definition and classification and be preserved for the purposes of
lyricism, by which they are transfigured. “The proper instinct of self-

culture“ projects itself into every form of genius and

106

. . . struggles with those forms till its secret is won from
each, and then lets each fall back into its place, in the
supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate
coldness, such natures rejoice to be away from and past their
former selves, and above all, they are jealous of that
abandonment to one special gift which really limits their
capabilities. (Monsman 34)
Levey notes that, as was typical in Pater's life, the friendship with
Shadwell cooled, though no definite break occurred (102). In Pater's
“Winckelmann“ essay, his first Renaissance study, written three years
later, in 1867,3| the aesthetic hero is further developed and refined as
the personality which responds to “the modern age's“ demand for “life in
the whole“ by living “not only as intense but as complete a life as
possible.“ One may surmise that after Pater's trip to Italy with
Shadwell in the summer of 1865, having “won“ from him the “secret“ of
his “genius,“ Pater let Shadwell “fall back into place.“ Having wrested
from Shadwell the coldness in the “passionate coldness“ attaching to the
“supreme, artistic view of life“--one in which the spectral personality
of the “eye“ recoups the totality of human society splintered by
industrial processes into divided streams of forms and figures coming
and going about their separate businesses and disciplines--Pater turned
his attention elsewhere, as Shadwell no doubt had already more casually
done.

Shadwell could not have known the “intensity of Pater's
concentration on him“ (Levey 103). The very unresponsive dignity and
enigmatic reticence which had been part of Shadwell's appeal for Pater
kept him “harmonized as by distance,“ in the language of “Diaphaneite.“
If Pater had done the unthinkable and communicated his feelings to
Shadwell, he would have received a rebuff that would have put him back
in his place in no uncertain terms, giving the lie to the illusion of
unlimited capabilities or “gifts.“

Identifying with Winckelmann as an instance of the Renaissance man

“whose refusal to be ‘classified' by any narrow, one-sided philosophy or

 

3‘The year of Baudelaire's death in Paris

107

discipline” makes him a reconciler of opposites, a harmoniser“ (Monsman
35), Pater again eludes both definition and reproach by retreating to
the inner sanctum. There, in the isolation of his rooms, as in
“Winckelmann,“ he reconstructs his self-image and rewrites his social
identity by reinscribing the mission (“effective desire“) of the
aesthetic hero. His purpose is “to define, in a chill and empty
atmosphere, the focus where the rays, in themselves pale and impotent,
unite and begin to burn.“ Unable to engage or align himself, at the
deepest levels of sexual or intellectual passion, with anyone at Oxford,
he compensates for his alienation by defining his aesthetic mission as
the cultivated ability to “pass swiftly from point to point, and be
present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces
unite in their purest energy.“ Connecting with none, he will
incorporate all, and “burn with a hard, gemlike flame.“ Only his all-
encompassing self is the “focus where the rays, in themselves pale and
impotent, unite and begin to burn“ (Monsman 35).

It must be a refining fire, however, if it is to be creative
rather than consuming. Hence Pater's effort to appropriate Heraclitus'
transmuting fire for an ethic of aestheticism. It is a “supreme moral
charm“ which emanates in the aesthetic hero from that “fine edge of
light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the
burning point“ (Monsman 35).

The difficulty of demonstrating such an ethic is evident in the
dissonances of Pater's next essay. In “Coleridge's Writings“ he wanted
to justify his impulse to celebrate the aesthetic hero as the
“embodiment of the transmuting fire“ and the “epitome of harmonious,
musical transition within history itself“ who is as such the “herald of
‘renaissance'“ and renewal. But the claim that “A majority of such
would be the regeneration of the world“ (Monsman 35) will be impossible
to prove. The desire to do so and the difficulty of doing so are

recorded in “Coleridge's Writings.“ There, for the first time, really,

 

32Shadwell's discipline was law.

108

he grappled with the relation between art and morality in “the modern
age.“ What he wanted to see in the modern age is what he yearned for in
his own lifetime: that rebound to the “elementary passions“ which he
equated with renaissance and renewal. Nowhere is his failure to
confront what elicited Baudelaire's radical-theological critique more
evident or more crucial. On that failure turns the ultimate defeat of
the aesthetic hero echoed in Wilde's lament in De Profundis: “I saw
life as it really was and it turned my heart to stone.“

“Coleridge's Writings“ was published anonymously in John Chapman's
Westminster Review in January 1866. Like the fortnightly Review edited
by John Morley, the Westminster Review was a leading “liberal“ magazine,
and Chapman, a self-styled “radical,“ was more than willing to give
Pater space for the deconstructive exercises in self-justification” he
needed to clear the ground for his aesthetic here. An example of
Pater's “harmonious revolutionism,“ his sympathetic renunciation of
Coleridge as metaphysician was nicely consonant with the predominantly
Positivist philosophy of the Westminster Review.

Pater wrote “Coleridge's Writings“ during the same year in which
Arnold published his Essays in Criticism. It was a time when Pater was
cultivating what Levey aptly terms a “moral dandyism“ (113). Pater's
friend and.fellow Society member, Ingram Bywater, remembered it as a
“period of . . . great unrest at Oxford.“ The “famous Oxford movement
had spent itself,“ Bywater wrote, “and the Essays and Reviews [of the
Broad Church seven, including Jowett, written in 1860) were influencing
the minds of the young men, who were immersed in Herbert Spencer and
Hill and Hegel“ (Monsman 25). ‘

Gerald Monsman suggests that the empirical-scientific strain in
Pater's earliest published essays “owe[d] much to his reading of
J.S. Hill, Sir William Hamilton, and G.H. Lewes on Comte, as well as

T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, St. G. Hivart,

 

:nxenneth Clark neatly assessed Pater's Harius the Epicurean as a
“prolonged piece of self-justification“ (Monsman 156).

109

W.R. Clifford, and any number of other scientific contributors to the
more intellectual and progressive periodicals“ (28). He also speculates
that “owing to the abstractions of its subject,“ the Coleridge essay was
“stylistically not far from the arid and complicated prose of Herbert
Spencer“ (156). He rightly qualifies his inference of Positivist
influence on Pater's writing, however, with a recognition that Pater
himself “qualifies somewhat Positivism's mechanistic and necessitarian
conception of natural law not by positing some teleological explanation
of reality, but by utilizing the empirical authority of Darwinian
evolution to confirm as the central historical fact the continuity of a
conscious, purposeful process of cultural change and growth“ (29).

The “central historical fact“ for Pater, however, was Pater, and
the continuity of his “change and growth.“ It was not “ideas as such
that he wrote about,“ Levey remarks, “but personalities.“ Turning from
Shadwell to the historical literary figure of Coleridge, Pater found in
the subject of his first article an opportunity to “practise, there
still tentatively and vaguely, a form of identification
--the more patent parts of which were, significantly, to be struck out
when he reprinted an expanded, heavily revised version of it“ (Levey
127). The revised version was written in 1880 and included in the
volume of Appreciations published in 1889. Appreciations was reviewed,
at Pater's suggestion, by Wilde in 1890. 1

One need not belabor the points of Pater's identification with
Coleridge. Pater was twenty-five when he was preparing the article, the
same age as the Coleridge with whom he identifies. That Coleridge, he
wrote, “left Cambridge without a degree, a Unitarian. Unable to take
orders . . . he determined to devote himself to literature. When he
left Cambridge there was a prejudice against him which has given rise to
certain suspicions“ (Levey 127). Both had had a childhood of “delicacy
. . . sensitiveness, and passion.“ Both had been “driven from life in

motion to life in thought and sensation“ (Pater, Appreciations 433).

110

There, however, the two begin to diverge. “Thrust inward upon
himself,“ Pater wrote, Coleridge was “driven from ‘life in thought and
sensation' to life in thought only“ (Appreciations 437). Despite
Pater's attraction to Coleridge's voluptuousness, eloquence, capacity to
charm, alternating intellectual restlessness and lassitude, aspiration
toward “something fixed where all is moving“ (456), and ultimately the
brilliance of his “failure“; for Coleridge the emphasis fell on life in
thought, for Pater on life in sensation. Pater's exaggeration of those
qualities--“inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness, that
endless regret“ (455)--with which he identifies but wishes to throw off
for a more “Greek spirit“--with an “engaging naturalness“ that is
“simple, chastened, debonair“ (456)--leads him to characterize Coleridge
as a “true flower of the ennuye“ (455).

He blames that disposition on Coleridge's “hunger for eternity.“
The ennui of an insatiable hunger he attributes to Coleridge's heroic
but doomed “struggle against the relative spirit.“ From his “strong
native bent towards the tracking of all questions. . . . to first
principles“ (432), Coleridge failed to come back with a sharp rebound to
the stuff of art. “What constitutes an artistic gift,“ Pater wrote in a
passage dropped from the later version, “is first of all a natural
susceptibility to moments of strange excitement, in which the colours
freshen upon our threadbare world, and the routine of things about us is
, broken by a novel and happier synthesis“ (Levey 127). Coleridge's
imaginative vision, drawing as it does on idealizing principles to
impregnate what it sees with meaning, has not yet been reduced to the
Paterian version of aesthetic vision. In demystifying the aesthetic
vision as a “novel and happier synthesis“ of images, Pater anticipates
Henri Bergson and T.H. Hulme.

In trying to “‘apprehend the absolute,’ to . . . attain . . .

‘fixed principles' in politics, morals, and religion . . . refusing to

111

see the parts as parts only““ (455), Coleridge “limited the operation
of his unique poetic gift“ (432). Pater's characterization of that gift
reads like an exoneration of his own: “A warm poetic joy in everything
beautiful, whether it be a moral sentiment, like the friendship of
Roland and Leoline, or only the flakes of falling light from the water-
snakes . . . such is the predominant element in the matter of his
poetry, as cadence is the predominant quality of its form“ (454). In
reaching via German transcendental philosophy after a comprehensive
system of knowledge, however, Coleridge's thought sickened with a
disease which T.S. Eliot would trumpet as the “dissociation of
sensibility“ for which a new classicism would supply the cure in the
“mythical method“ first “adumbrated by Hr. Yeats“ and pursued by Mr.
Joyce.” That the art of Plato, whom Coleridge “claims as the first of
his spiritual ancestors,“ was also directed toward discovery through
thought (dianoia) of a comprehensive system of knowledge (episteme)
Pater manages to dismiss with a gesture toward Plato's blithe
nonchalance. Plato was a “true humanist“ who held his “theories
lightly“ and whose “classical feeling“ (433) Pater reconstrues as a sort
of eighteenth-century intellectual dandyism.

Pater's impulse to liberate himself from the entrenched forces of
moral and intellectual authority has already begun to take a reactionary
turn. Levey surmises that Pater “wanted the freedom of travelling
lightly, if not positively with levity, unburdened by any luggage of
moral preoccupations, political or philosophical systems, or
speculations on the nature of art“ (115). In the atmosphere at Oxford
described by Ingram Bywater, Pater does indeed appear to have absorbed
'the Spencerian lessons of social Darwinism. In the environment where

Pater had to compete for literary and intellectual currency, “fittest“

 

:uThe rearranging of parts into a “novel and happier synthesis“ is
a prescription for Modernist aesthetic practice, the ordering principle
being association.

:”See Eliot's review of Ulysses for the Dial (November 1923).

112
meant best equipped to defend against attack. At twenty-five Pater did
not want to be a brilliant failure: he wanted to shine. The best
defense, then as now, was a good offense, and Pater's weapon was wit.

To preserve the “freedom of travelling lightly,“ he may have
“unburdened“ himself of the “luggage of moral preoccupations, political
or philosophical systems, or speculations on the nature of art“ which
ran counter to his own aspirations and impulses, but he picked up the
luggage of Regency dandyism. There was one lesson he had learned at
King's School which he would exploit for his own ends: mannerliness,
the “preponderating value of the manner of the doing it in the thing
done.“ His impulse to kill off that aspect of Coleridge with which he
did not want to identify because it did not advance his own interests,
and indeed may have spoken to his weaknesses in the area of systematic
thought,” prompted him to begin the essay with a facile criticism of
Coleridge's excessive “seriousness“ which, adding supercilious insult to
injury, he faulted for its “misconception of the perfect manner“ (432).

Lacking, amidst the “great unrest“ at Oxford, systematic terms
with which to make a case for his interests, Pater avoided argument.
Levey says that Pater's “ancien regime interpretation of good manners
and good-mannered dissent“ avoided pushing to extremes, mitigating the
“sting of criticism with raillery,“ and “avoided argument, as it avoided
earnestness“ (115). But it cuts both ways, that observation. Paradox
is a shield as well as a weapon. Bpigrammatic wit excludes an opponent.
Only those who understand its terms can enter into the joke; others are
simply put off. Though Pater seemed to hold a liberal political stance,
he never stated his political opinions, let alone systematic grounds for
them. His attitude toward Napoleon III appears to have been received
from the “enthusiastic hatred of the emperor expressed by Swinburne and
Victor Hugo.“ His foppish comment on the political situation in France,

“I hepe we shall soon arrive at a time when no one will be so vulgar as

 

inThough Brasenose made him a lecturer in philosophy, his lectures
were known for the dubious distinction of seldom so much as naming a
single philosopher.

113

to want to go and live at the Tuileries“ (Levey 116), is indicative of
the extent to which he required protection from the thrust of criticism
delivered with a force of argument he could not parry. Mr. Brooks had
had no difficulty exposing the fallacy in Pater's argument for
“subjective immortality“ by observing, simply, that since one's friends
die, the memory of oneself dies with than. Logic was not Pater's forte;
understandably, since the force of his art was directed not toward
analysis or enunciation of positions derived from demonstrated
conclusions, but toward the achievement of “novel and happier syntheses“
assembled to obscure fundamental premises.

Pater accuses Coleridge of diminishing the complexity of human
life by seeking to “arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix
thought in a necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a
classification by ‘kinds,’ or genera“ (431). The delicate and fugitive
details which the inductive sciences are capable of distinguishing
would, under the influence of a mind like Coleridge's, be lost in “vague
scholastic abstraction“ and reduced to some mystic absolute, some
“colourless, formless, intangible, being.“ Pater holds up Goethe as the
alternative model for the aesthetic hero. Goethe, as one “to whom every
moment of life brought its contribution of experimental, individual
knowledge; by whom no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion
was disregarded,“ is a “true illustration of the speculative temper“
(432). Man is the “most complex of the products of nature.“ His
“physical organism is played upon“ both by the “physical conditions
about it“ and by “remote laws of inheritance.“ He is not defined solely
by those forces, however, “for the mind of the race, the character of
the age, sway him this way or that through the medium of language and
current ideas.“ It is the “truth of these relations,“ then, “that
experience gives us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertained once
for all“ (431). Experience “bids us,“ by a “constant clearing of the
organs of observation and perfecting of analysis,“ to “make what we can“

(432) of these relations.

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What Pater makes of these relations, however, reduces from
“subtleties of effect“ and “intricacy of expression“ to the “colour or
curve of a rose leaf“ (432). That Pater derives so little from such
expanding possibilities of knowledge--the “spirit“ invading “moral
philosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences“ to generate “new
analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and
necessity“ (431)--sheds some doubt on the credibility of his protest, “I
cannot believe Ruskin saw more in the Church of St. Hark than I do“
(Levey 116).

The terms by which he clings to High Church ritual in “Coleridge's
Writings,“ moreover, cast doubt on Pater's grasp of what Arnold's Essays
in Criticism were driving at. If the aim of Arnold's criticism was “to
see the object as in itself it really is,“ without the mystifications of
Christian dogma, Pater's rendering of the suggestion that faith in dogma
might be replaced by cultural affirmations of certain humane values
offers grounds for further doubt that his impulse to “discriminate“ his
impressions was in fact a “first step“ toward that aim or already a
perverse adherence to an intention which Wilde correctly interpreted:
“to see the object as in itself it really is not.“ This is what
Arnold's cultural agenda shrinks down to in Pater's terms:

There are aspects of the religious character which have an
artistic worth distinct from their religious import. Longing,
a chastened temper, spiritual joy, are precious states of
mind, not because they are part of man's duty or because God
has commanded them, still less because they are means of
obtaining a reward, but because like culture itself they are
remote, refined, intense, existing only by the triumph of a
few over a dead world of routine in which there is no lifting
of the soul at all. If there is no other world, art in its
own interest must cherish such characteristics as beautiful
spectacles. Religious belief, the craving for objects of
belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they must leave
their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness, behind.
(Monsman 24)

Arnold's Apollonian ideal of cultural sweetness and light may have
been inadequate to the real totality of human experience in the
industrialized, imperial nation-state. As Pater's impulse to see the

object as in itself it really is not was submerged in the stated

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intention to discriminate his impressions, so the impulse to harmonize
the interests and claims of a class antithetical to one's own was
submerged in the intention, stated with curious frequency over the
course of a century, “to see life steady and see it whole.“ But
Arnold's cultural activity did not go so far as to reduce art as
“criticism of life“ to incense.

In the discourse of Pater's 1866 essay, the epistemological
possibilities offered by Positivism reduce to the precious “colour or
curve of a rose leaf,“ and the epistemological possibilities offered by
historicism reduce to “precious states of mind“ which allow a select
“few“ to savor the refined and chastened residue of a “craving for
objects“ of sublimated desire.

Pater's aesthetic hero is a victim of bovarysme. His claim that
“A majority of such would be the regeneration of the world“ is so
absurdly out of touch with the truth of determining relations, it is
indicative of just how defenseless its adherents must be. So far from
effecting a “harmonious revolution,“ such a hero is likely, if he is
lucky, to fade with a certain pitiable debilitation into a “flower of
the yew.“ Or, if he is audacious enough to make a counterclaim on such
illusory grounds, he is likely to get himself sentenced to hard labor in
Reading Gaol.

Pater's turn to history for support for his ideal of the aesthetic
hero in “Winckelmann“ reveals a denial of the forces undermining that
ideal which is at work in all of the essays collected in The
Renaissance. Only that denial allows Pater to preserve the illusions
evident in his move to cap the whole sequence of “visions“ with the
aesthetic manifesto first written in his most unguarded “vision“ of all:
“Poems by William Norris.“

Ultimately positioned as the last of the studies published under
the rubric of Renaissance in the volume dedicated to “C.L.S.“ in
February of 1873, “Winckelmann“ was the first to be written. Its
composition in 1867 followed Pater's exposure to Italian art during his

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tour of Italy in the company of Shadwell. Together they had visited
Ravenna, Pisa, and Florence. The extent to which Pater sublimated his
“sympathy with a certain aspect of Greek life,“ as Ingram Bywater
phrased his intimation of what might be “noticed“ in the essay on
Winckelmann, may be inferred from Pater's characterization of
Winckelmann's “romantic, fervid friendships with young men.“ “Such
attachments,“ Pater wrote, contained “of passion, of physical stir,“
“just so much as stimulates the eye“ (Levey 99).

That stimulus received in Italy was shaped into a larger response
in 1866, when Pater read Otto Jahn's biography of Winckelmann. Pater
had known of Winckelmann from his reading of Goethe and Hegel, but the
power of identification was not released in him until he became more
intimately acquainted with Winckelmann's life. As Gerald Monsman puts
it, Pater “recognized in the career of this German humanist sojourning
in Italy the pattern of his own quest for an ideal beauty revealed in
physical form“ (48).

Given the Positivist-historicist method Pater ostensibly brings to
his inquiry into the life and work of Winckelmann, it is important to
note how Pater's private longings in fact inform the project. The first
paragraph of “Winckelmann“ adverts to the intellectual priority of
Hegel's lectures on the Philosophy of Art. From the citation of Hegel's
work, Pater proceeds to frame the substance of his inquiry with the
questions identified in “Coleridge's Writings“ as definitive of the
“relative spirit's“ epistemological procedures: what sort of man was
Winckelmann and under what conditions did he make his peculiar
contribution to culture? Keyed to the intention of discovering the
defining relations evident in Winckelmann's work, the questions do not
so much lead to inductive analysis as they become the pretense for
idealizing distortions predicated on Pater's desire. The antique spirit
Winckelmann is singled out as having intuited Monsman describes as one
that “liberated the religious-moral side of man by subordinating it to
the artistic world of the senses“ (48).

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Despite Pater's impulse to articulate an ethic of aestheticism, he
is unable to conceive of a morality which is not primarily a matter of
sentiment infused with religious mysticism or mythos. No imperative
other than that of conscience--truth to self--is acknowledged in
“Winckelmann.“ Winckelmann's one sin against the private law of
conscience in making a false conversion to Roman Catholicism so as to
gain access to the libraries of Rome is readily forgiven for the sake of
the larger imperative of cultural renewal: “a spirit that liberated the
religious-moral side of man by subordinating it to the artistic world of
the senses.“ Mystic love of God is thrown off so as to liberate profane
sexual love. No other sort of love seems conceivable to Peter; where a
larger human love is approached, it is always through the sentiment of
pity.

The claims of sensibility and sentiment take such absolute
precedence that no other claims can be acknowledged. The conundrum such
a condition represents is one into which Honsman's discourse also
enters. How is one to explain the obtuseness of his assertion of a
Hellenistic spirit liberating the religious-moral side of man by
subordinating it to the artistic world of the senses? Clearly,
“liberation“ cannot be effected by “subordination.“

Arthur Symonds' comments in his Introduction to The Renaissance
are relevant here:

Pater liked people to be enthusiastic, but, with him,
enthusiasm was an ardent quietude, guarded by the wary humour
that protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue
earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which
the artist is bound to go on a wholly “secret errand,“ as bad
form, which shocked him as much in persons as bad style did in
books. He hated every form of extravagance, noise, mental or
physical, with a temperamental hatred: he suffered from it,
in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less dislike of
whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words
which he often used to express his distaste for things and
people. He never would have appreciated writers like
Verlaine, because of what seemed to him perhaps unnecessarily
“sordid“ in their lives. It pained him, as it pains some
people, perhaps only because they are more acutely sensitive

than others, to walk through mean streets, where people are
poor, miserable, and hopeless. (xvi)

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One can only surmise that, apart from a genetic component, the
frustrated sexuality which led Pater to interpret the artist's quest for
perfection of form as a “secret errand“ enforced such a tension of the
nerve that he simply could not bear to take in any horrors that would
further strain his already overwrought condition.

Hence, for Pater, sexual liberation becomes an absolutely
essential prerequisite to any larger human liberation. Such liberation
not being accessible through the culture of his age, the prerequisite
was never met, and a larger humanism not conceivable because not
possible. A situation comparable to that played out in Porster's Where
Angels tear to Tread, it is a peculiar confinement to one's own
“interests.“ It makes the difference between Pater's art for art's sake
and Lawrence's art for life's sake; though Lawrence's art, for all its
thrustings toward sexual liberation, is a much more exclusive world than
that of Hardy's Arabella in Jude the Obscure, whose crude sensuality he
was so taken by. Where one cannot spend, conservation becomes the only
conceivable ideal.

Monsman writes that “Those qualities of Winckelmann's character
worthy of emulation also could be found, Pater realized, in the artists
of the Renaissance. Prom this time onward, he appears to have thought
of the Renaissance as that period when aesthetic, religious, and
practical concerns were harmoniously balanced, when wholeness and unity
of spirit were restored after the limits imposed by the asceticism of
the Middle Ages on the heart and imagination had been destroyed“ (48).
In so conceiving of the Renaissance, Pater was engaging in a good deal
more wish-fulfillment than historical analysis. Like Buckler's
distinction between the literally historical and the metaphorical,
Pater's nods toward the historical facts of Winckelmann's experience are
made only to get them out of the way.

Despite Pater's sympathetic identification with various aspects of
Winckelmann's life--its poverty, gloom, lack of access to scope of

opportunity, the constraints of routine teaching duties on personal

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scholarly aspirations, a repressive Protestantism in Germany and an
inquisitorial imperial Catholicism in Rome, among others-~he but glances
at those conditions so as to gain access to Winckelmann's projections.
To Winckelmann, Pater writes, “closely limited except on the side of the
ideal, building for his dark poverty ‘a house not made with hands' . . .
[the antique world] early came to seem more real than the present.“

What Winckelmann sought in the antique world Pater interprets as “rather
a wistful sense of something lost to be regained, than the desire of
discovering anything new“ (Renaissance 149). The assessment applies as
much to Pater as to Winckelmann and belies the ostensible purpose of his
Positivist-historicist procedure.

Part of what interests Pater in Winckelmann is his injection of a
strain of French literature into the German. Of the early French
revolts against mysticism and asceticism in which Pater correctly
locates the beginnings of the Renaissance, Pater exclaims: “On a sudden
the imagination feels itself free. . . . How mistaken and roundabout‘
have been our efforts to reach . . . [a more liberal mode of life] by
mystic passion, and monastic reverie; how they have deflowered the
flesh; how little have they really emancipated us!“ (153).

That a distinction must be made between freedom and freedom of the
imagination, however, Winckelmann's long-desired arrival in the Eternal
City rudely confirms. It is not what his imagination had configured.

In Rome Winckelmann was “perplexed with the sense of being a stranger in
what was to him, spiritually native soil.“ “‘1 have come into the world
and into Italy too late'“ (157) is Winckelmann's lament.

Nevertheless, he is able to pursue his excavations of the antique
spirit and to give expression, in a way Pater never could, to his
temperament. Not “merely intellectual,“ Winckelmann's “affinity with
Hellenism“ was interwoven with a temperamental susceptibility to
“romantic, fervid friendships with young men“ (159) which, despite a
tempestuousness that makes Winckelmann resemble a homosexual Heathcliff,

Pater manages to rationalize in aesthetic terms. For a Hellenist such

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as Winckelmann, Pater asserts in terms reminiscent of Baudelaire's
misogynist aesthetic, the ideal of male beauty is that of a more than
mere natural beauty. Responsiveness to male beauty is a sign of
susceptibility to art, not nature; and the “beauty of art, like tears
shed at play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be reawakened and
repaired by culture“ (160).

In this aesthetic, the supporting ideology of which is the
apotheosis of an autonomous individuality undisturbed by “interests not
[its] own“ (183), the “eternal problem of culture--balance, unity with
one's self“ (190) is solved by production of an ideal of “sexless
beauty“: fetishization of the commodity. It is the same ideal Pater
elaborated in “Diaphaneite,“ some of the phrases of which he savored
again in “Winckelmann“: the “sexless beauty“ of Greek statues; the
“moral sexlessness“ of the aesthetic hero who is possessed of a “kind of
impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty
and significance of its own“ (Levey 101).

That Pater finds in Winckelmann the materials for production of
such an ideal flies curiously in the face of Goethe's judgment that the
works of Winckelmann “are a life, a living thing, designed for those who
are alive“ (161). But it is not surprising, if what the “intellectual“
in “the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled
interests . . . so bewildering“ (189), “demands“ is “completeness“--the
artifice of unity, a contrived totality. He prefers the ennui of an
ideal attainable only by the imagination to the painful conflict of
“rival claims“ (185). And he embraces an aesthetic which “excludes that
bolder type of [art] which deals confidently . . . with life, conflict,
evil“ (186). Such an exclusive “conception of art“ is what Pater will
sing in “Aesthetic Poetry“ and what Eliot will celebrate in Yeats' and
Joyce's “mythical method.“

Art is a poeticization of any and all aspects of life the purpose
of which is “to produce [happy literary] effects“:

The basis of all artistic genius lies in the power of
conceiving humanity in a new and striking way, of putting a

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happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world
of our common days, generating around itself an atmosphere
with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming,
recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice
of the imaginative intellect. (178)
Unfortunately, art so conceived by design insulates the artist--and the
consequences as opposed to the “effects“ of his work--from the
determining relations which are the conditions of his life and work.

Winckelmann is so busy excavating the “true spirit“ of antiquity
in eighteenth-century Rome that he is oblivious to the less noble forces
by which his own life is suddenly strangled out of him. Ingenuously
displaying his gold medallions to a fellow traveler on the journey from
Rome back for a visit to Germany, Winckelmann is robbed and murdered.
Even his death is aestheticized. More importantly, entire civilizations
are aestheticized. Pater observes that since Winckelmann lacked access
to authentic artifacts of earlier Greek culture, his “conception of
Greek art tends . . . to put the mere elegance of the imperial society
of ancient Rome in place of the severe and chastened grace of the
palaestra“ (162).

It is important to note that Pater does concede that Winckelmann's
“conception of art excludes that bolder type of it which deals
confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil“ (186)--as in Greek
tragedy--but the limits set on Pater's powers of insight and analysis by
the Positivist-historicist ideology of empiricism and relativity confine
him, even in the sphere of a “bolder type“ of art, to “natural laws“
(193). It's a confinement we are well acquainted with in the works of
George Eliot, against which Emily Bronte, in her fevered isolation,
revolts.

Such “natural laws,“ Pater writes in the concluding passage of
“Winckelmann,“ “we shall never modify, embarrass us as they may.“ So
determined, the aesthete has no alternatives but the ennui of yearning
in the ideal world and inevitable defeat in the real world:

Natural laws we shall never modify . . . but there is still

something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which we
watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe

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and Victor Hugo . . . this entanglement, this network of law,
becomes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of noble
men and women work out for themselves a supreme Denouement.
Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of
circumstance which endows one at the end with those great
experiences? (193)

If the only alternative to fatalism is escape, one must fly the

“conditions of time and place“ (l65)--moving, in Pater's case as in

Joyce's and Eliot's, from historicism and naturalism to mythos.

Pater is no more ripe for fatalism at this early stage of his life
than was Joyce when he fled Ireland. He is ripe for the only sort of
revolt of which he can conceive. Poised to leap free of the
restrictions of Christianity in pursuit of artistic rejuvenescence, he
is after a “true freedom . . . in the life of the senses and the blood--
blood no longer dropping from the hands in sacrifice . . . but . . .
burning in the face for desire and love.“ As Levey remarks, “What began
with Winckelmann's revolt ends with Pater's“ (133). It is revolt taking
the form of escape which constitutes the appeal of William Morris' poems
for Pater.

In Pater's third Westminster Review essay, it was not the
personality of the artist whose work comprises the subject of study that
engaged Pater's “imaginative intellect.“ The author of the poems is not
confronted; on the contrary, he does not emerge from the poems at all.
Pater does not ask, who is this man and what are the conditions under
which his work has been produced? The pretense of using a Positivist-
historicist method to discover new possibilities of knowledge is dropped
until the end of the essay, when the paragraphs later shaped into the
“Conclusion“ to The Renaissance are adduced. In the essay-review
proper, Pater's emphasis shifts from Positivism to historicism as he
charts in the “change of manner wrought in the interval“ between Morris'
Defence of Guenevere (1858) and The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) a course
which “illustrates one law of the life of the human spirit“

(Appreciations 524-25).

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What Pater identifies with in Morris' poems is precisely that
course. Having elaborated in “Winckelmann“ an aesthetic defining the
“basis of all artistic genius“ as the power of “putting a happy world of
_its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common days,“ Pater
was bound to be receptive to the poetry of Morris, for the “atmosphere“
on which its happy effects depend “belongs to no actual form of life,
but to a world in which the forms of things are transfigured.“ In
Morris' expression of a late Romanticism those already idealized forms
are elevated into “another, still fainter and more spectral world, which
is literally an artificial or ‘earthly paradise.'“ The secret of its
appeal is the “inversion of homesickness“: the “incurable thirst for
the sense of escape“ (520).

What distinguishes Morris' Defence of Guenevere, Pater argues, is
its appearance as the “first typical specimen of aesthetic poetry.“ As
such it is a refinement upon the imaginative medievalism which evolved
with Victor Hugo in France and Heine in Germany. The substance of
Morris' refinement on that medievalism which “recreates the mind of the
Middle Age“ in the same way that Winckelmann recreated the mind of
antiquity is the “mood of the cloister taking a new direction“ (521).

As a mood of reverie sets in in the cloister, the medieval mind
takes the art of “directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose
natural direction is towards objects of sense“ (522), which it has
learned from religion, and bends it “as by miracle or magic to the
service of human passion“ (523). A “fatal descent“ is set in motion:
from reverie, to illusion, to delirium. A “love defined by the absence
of the beloved,“ and “full of the forms of vassalage“--among them the
“subtle luxury of chastisement“ (522)--begets a “wild, convulsed
sensuousness.“ In the body of the dreamer, a “passion of which the
outlets are sealed, begets a tension of nerve“ and a consciousness “in
which the sensible world comes to one with a re-enforced brilliancy and

relief“ (523).

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There is even less attempt to locate the subjective processes
Pater describes in a network of clearly discernible relations here than
there was in “Winckelmann.“ The vagueness of the subjects of Pater's
sentences allows his own consciousness to define the boundaries of his
discussion. Likewise, his own consciousness directs the shift of focus
from the “atmosphere“ evoked by The Defence of Guenevere to that evoked
by The Earthly Paradise. What the “change of manner wrought in the
interval“ signifies for Pater is both “characteristic of the aesthetic
poetry“ and characteristic of Pater's identification with it: escape
from the cloister into experience of the “great primary passions under
broad daylight“ (524).

Gone for the moment is the aesthetic of artifice, rationalization
of desire for beauty in the flesh as desire for the more than merely
natural--exquisite refinements the artistic beauty of which, “like tears
shed at play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be reawakened and
repaired by culture“ (Renaissance 160). The shift from the “sombre
atmosphere of [the monk's] cloister“ to the “natural light,“ and with it
the rebound to “simple elementary passions,“ makes, Pater remarks, a
“strange contrast to the sought-out simplicity of Wordsworth.“ “Desire
here is towards the body of nature for its own sake, not because a soul
is divined through it“ (525).

One might translate that statement into a comment on Pater's
discourse here, which is directed toward the desire embodied in poetry
for its own sake, not because the craftsmanship of a sensibility other
than his own can be analyzed through it. What had aroused Pater's
response to Morris' medievalism was the “mood of the cloister taking a
new direction, and winning so a later space of life it never
anticipated“ (521). Using Morris' poems as a point of departure fer his
exploration through discourse of the possibilities opened up by pursuit
of that new direction, Pater has won for himself a space of life he had

anticipated but was unable to realize except through discourse: escape

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from the sombre atmosphere of his cloister into the broad daylight where
desire is directed simply toward the natural body for its own sake.

He has no further need of, or use for, Morris. As the subject
providing the next vehicle for a desire so directed, he will turn to
Leonardo da Vinci, whose Mona Lisa he had seen at the Louvre during his
trip to Paris with his sisters over the summer vacation of 1866, when he
may well have gone to the Morgue as well. Gracefully returning to his
ostensible subject, Pater closes off his appreciation of Morris' poems:
“It is precisely this effect, this grace of Hellenism relieved against
the sorrow of the Middle Age, which forms the chief motives of The
Earthly Paradise“ (527).

The aesthetic poetry to which Pater's next observation refers is
his own. “One characteristic the pagan spirit has, which is on its
surface--the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the
shortness of life. This is contrasted with the bloom of the world, and
gives new seduction to it--the sense of death and the desire of beauty:
the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death“ (528).

Having cleared the ground of those “complex and subtle interests
which the mind spins for itself“ and made his way forward through the
discourse which is the sole route of access to a desire cleanly viewed
in the light of day--as opposed to the morbid light of the Paris Morgue-
-Pater winces with a thrill of anxious urgency. Life is short. Father
and uncle having died at forty-five, Pater at twenty-seven may well
consider that half of his lifespan is already behind him. In the teeth
of the odds, the limits, the opposition, he will have his ecstasy; break
into pagan song and issue his proclamation.

In the paragraph which made the transition from the appraisal of
Morris' poems to the rhapsodic search for a way out of his predicament
that became the “Conclusion“ to The Renaissance, Pater forged a link
between the discoveries of the inductive sciences and his own aesthetic
impulses. Whereas the modern spirit demands that poetry apply

scientific principles to pressing social problems, modern science has

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demonstrated the impossibility of arriving at any fixed principles.
Given that state of affairs, Pater responds, “Let us accept the
challenge, see what modern philosophy, when it is sincere, really does
7 say about human life and the truth we can attain in it, and the relation
of this to the desire of beauty“ (Monsman 57).

As Levey comments, the final paragraphs of the 1868 essay, some of
the substance of which may first have found expression in Pater's 1868
essay on Fichte's “Ideal Student,“ “no longer deal with Morris or with
poetry; they ask what modern philosophy tells about human life“ (96).
They answer that the elements of which we are composed receive some
clear outline only as an image of the fleeting perceptions to which all
our experience is reduced. “To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-
forming itself on the stream . . . what is real in our life fines itself
down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of
impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off--that
continual vanishing away, that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving
of ourselves“ (Renaissance 196).

In the 1868 essay that sentence is followed by a paragraph omitted
from the 1873 “Conclusion“:

Such thoughts seem desolate at first; at times all the
bitterness of life seems concentrated in them. They bring the
image of one washed out beyond the bar in a sea at ebb, losing
even his personality, as the elements of which he is composed
pass into new combinations. Struggling, as he must, to save
himself, it is himself that he loses at every moment.

(Monsman 156)
Strangely, the language borrowed from the discourse spawned by the
Positive sciences is used both to analyze and to obscure Pater's real
predicament, as determined by the defining relations between his
material self and the conditions of time, place, and culture.
“Struggling, as he must, to save himself, it is himself that he loses at
every moment.“ It is a formulation that might aptly be applied to Clive

Durham's condition in Porster's Maurice. Pater's “analysis leaves off“

with a modern scientific version of Heraclitean flux because, given the

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culture of his age, it can go no further without trespassing the limits
of what is not only acceptable socially, but thinkable and speakable.

In fact he had already gone too far. Pater was not in a position
to exercise the freedom with which Swinburne, who could retreat to his
villa, flaunted his contempt for prevailing codes of sexual and
religious thought, speech, and behavior, as in the “medieval carol“ he
sent as a Christmas greeting to Rossetti: “Hark, the herald angels
crow/Here's a boy--but not for Joe!“ (Levey 110) Pater dropped the
version of the 1868 essay retitled “Aesthetic Poetry“ from the second
and all subsequent editions of Appreciations because, as Lionel Johnson
reported Pater's explanation, “‘There were things in it which some
people, pious souls! thought profane, yes! profane'“ (Levey 185).
Though with his next essay, on Leonardo, Pater began publishing in John
Morley's Fortnightly, which printed the names of its contributors--
including Swinburne, J.A. Symonds, Meredith, and Morris--Pater made
public his defiance of the claims of any creed requiring the “sacrifice
of any part of [our] experience“ at greater risk than many of the other
contributors.

Given the constraints of his position at Oxford, struggling to
save himself from dissolution on the threshold of self-realization as
one of Voltaire's “children of this world,“ Pater embraces art perforce
as the medium of his being. Lest “all redness turn to blood, all water
into tears,“ art will be the outlet for release of that “tension of the
nerve“ in which the “sensible world comes to one with a re-enforced
brilliancy and relief“ (Levey 96).

“I don't say you are it but you look it,“ Lord Queensberry would
say to Wilde (Levey 19). In his first “conclusion,“ Pater articulated
the apologia for a life on the threshold of self-realization. In
choosing art as the medium by which passion could come, “professing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to [his] moments as they
pass[ed], and simply for those moments' sake,“ he could celebrate his
life in a world from which all impediments to self-realization had been

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purged because he had traded a menacing world for a beautiful house. He
had exchanged the natural world--that space in the light of day at which
he had struggled to arrive in the 1868 essay--for the artifice, not of
eternity, but of a sequence of moments “with no before or after“ except
as an idealized history could contrive. The cruel irony of that
celebratory moment is that at the instant the proclamation is issued, it
is also a cry of self-denial and imprisonment: I say I am but I am not;
simultaneous self-liberation and self-negation. The aesthetic
hypothesis is false at its originary foundation. In the instant of its
articulation, art for life's sake becomes art for art's sake, for life
is confined to art.

Monsman argues that what Pater set out to prove in the
“Conclusion“ he formed out of the final paragraphs of the 1868 essay was
that the “Aesthetic life can actually be a life lived in accord with
scientific formulations and that l'art pour l'art is premised on the
most up-to-date theories“ (57). If that were so, the 1873 “Conclusion“
would already have been a denouement, for it is quite beside the point.
Pater does not care about theories; he cares about the “fruit of a
quickened, multiplied consciousness“ (Renaissance 198).

The move to embed his desire for the fruit of a quickened
consciousness in the language of empirical and cultural relativity does
not prove liberating. As the unfolding discourse of Marius the
Epicurean reveals, the choice of a life in which “Not the fruit of
experience, but experience itself, is the end“ (Renaissance 197)
confines one to a weary way along which multiplying assaults upon a
quickened consciousness trying vainly to prolong the happy effects of
the synthetic moment, but unable to sustain its denial of what resists
synthesis, make one prey to anxiety, paranoia, and desolation.

The desolation experienced as the result of prolonged solipsism
finally drives Marius to seek the comfort of community. The “community“
of Christians--fined down to Cornelius and the woman, Cecilia, to whom

Marius' intimacy with Cornelius is forfeited--in which Marius seeks to

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slake his thirst for human companionship is a counterhegemonic force in
the imperial Rome governed by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. But the
party of Christians to which Marius' adversion is a conciliating, though
sincere, concession on Pater's part is entrenched in the hegemonic
forces governing imperial Britain. Misunderstood where he is not
censured, censured or ridiculed where he is understood, a disappointment
to more “radical“ disciples who could not know the restraints under
which he had labored to clear a space for them, Pater reverts--mildly in
Marius, with greater severity in Plato and Platonism—-to that imperial
system which had upheld his fragile ego integrality at King's School
rather than give up the only consolation and modus vivendi he has ever
known and throw in his lot with the counterhegemonic forces with which
Morris aligned himself. By the 1880s, their directions had radically
diverged, Pater moving toward Plato and Platonism, Morris toward News
from Nowhere.

Despite Pater's really painful confessions in the Sunt Lacrimae
Rerum chapter (XXV) of Marius, his failure as a poet of prose is,
ironically, a failure of identification. The passion of other relations
than that between his precarious social identity and his desire of
beauty never awakens in him with a “leap“ something like the “coming of
love.“ Like Marius, Pater dies still never having crossed the threshold
of desire for personal realization into a mature capacity for human
intercourse and solidarity. Trapped by his own frustrated interests, as
an artist he could only project and incorporate; he could not admit the
interests of others and make the connection between his oppression and
theirs which would have offered neither sanction nor sanctuary, but
access to human community.

Turning away from what did not p1ease--“life, conflict, evil“--
Pater failed to see his interests in others who stood in different
relations to the modes of production for which the moral and
intellectual authorities provided cultural sanction. Nor did the

ideologies of Positivism and historicism teach him to look., Historicism

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directed him to consider cultural “laws“ unanchored in material
conditions. Positivism directed him to consider natural laws
determining social conditions. Consideration of natural laws brought
him to naturalism, and naturalism disposed him to pity.

Not finding his interests addressed in those aspects of Morris'
work which might have won for him a new direction closing the gap
between Hegel and Comte, he failed to gain access to a system which
could have supplied him with the terms of effective revolt. Lacking
those terms, he found the pity too painful to bear without recourse to
counterhegemonic action. Unable to join ranks with the pitiable, he
became merely pitiable himself; like Quasimodo, bewildered and
wondering, “why?“

House Beautiful turns out to be Baudelaire's “hospital where every
patient is obsessed by the desire of changing beds“ (Spleen 99) and
“appetite, be it for real or ideal“ (Marius the Epicurean 341) grows
cold. “For a moment the whole world seemed to present itself as a
hospital of sick persons“ (341), Marius writes in his diary.

At last, out of a long suffering, Pater's “moral sense“--
“something new and true, fact or apprehension of fact“--is “educed“ in
Marius as compassion. The “power of sympathy“ is “something to hold by,
even in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of self,
which is, for every one, no less than the dissolution of the world it
represents for him.“ Pater's account of how Marius arrives at the one
“principle, perhaps, to which we may always safely trust“--the capacity
for suffering and the capacity for sympathy with it--reveals in very
poignant confession just how weary the way has been:

Nearly all of us, I suppose, have had our moments, in which
any effective sympathy for us on the part of others has seemed
impossible; in which our pain has seemed a stupid outrage upon
us, like some overwhelming physical violence, from which we
could take refuge, at best, only in some mere general sense of
goodwill--somewhere in the world perhaps. And then, to one's
surprise, the discovery of that goodwill, if it were only in a
not unfriendly animal, may seem to have explained, to have
actually justified to us, the fact of our pain. There have
been occasions, certainly, when I have felt that if others

cared for me as I cared for them, it would be, not so much a
consolation, as an equivalent, for what one has lost or

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suffered: a realised profit on the summing up of one's
accounts: a touching of that absolute ground amid all the
changes of phenomena, such as our philosophers have of late
confessed themselves quite unable to discover. (349)

At long last a middle ground between mystic love of God and profane
sexual love has been touched. Pater has even come so far as to glimpse,
as it were from a window, that “To some, perhaps, the necessary
conditions of my own life may cause me to be opposed, in a kind of
natural conflict, regarding those interests which actually determine the
happiness of theirs“ (344). Like Lear exposed, Marius begins to sense
that he has taken too little heed. Yet still the limits of Positivist
thinking are in place; the conflict is conceived as both natural and
necessary. And Marius, again like Lear, is too full of pain himself to
fling open the door and seek egress from the tragic conditions of his
own life.

“On the alert now“ for scenes of suffering, he “yet of necessity
pass[es] them by on the other side,“ prays that a “stronger love might
arise in [his] heart“ (344), and hopes that in some great divine heart
“behind the vain show of things“ all the suffering might find refuge and
recompense. Marius' conviction of “man's radically hopeless condition
in the world“ (350) leads him to interpret the one imperative of human
society as a “standing force of self-pity“:

For there is a certain grief in things as they are, in man as
he has come to be, as he certainly is, over and above those
griefs of circumstance which are in a measure removable--some
inexplicable shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of
nature itself--death, and old age as it must needs be, and
that watching for their approach, which makes every stage of
life like a dying over and over again. Almost all death is
painful, and in everything that comes to an end a touch of
death, and therefore of wretched coldness struck home to one,
of remorse, of loss and parting, of outraged attachments.
Given faultless men and women, given a perfect state of
society which should have no need to practice on man's
susceptibilities for its own selfish ends, adding one turn
more to the wheel of the great rack for its own interest or
amusement, there would still be this evil in the world, of a
certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in
proportion to the moral, or nervous perfection men have
attained to. And what we need in the world, over against
that, is a certain permanent and general power of compassion--
humanity's standing force of self-pity--as an elementary
ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we are to live in it
at all. (348)

132

Again a fatalism reflecting Pater's own defeats--possibilities
foreclosed and a series of incremental deaths--drives him to seek
transcendent escape from the “griefs of circumstance“ in an aesthetic
denouement.

Finding in the fact of compassion a point of contact with “the
eternal,“ Marius' “moral sense“ is satisfied in the moment it is
touched. The fact of compassion “removes that appearance of unkindness
in the soul of things themselves, and assures us that not everything has
been in vain“ (349-50). That thought recalls the synthetic moment when
“by some gracious accident--it was on a journey--all things fell into a
more perfect harmony than is their wont. Everything seemed to be, for a
moment, after all, almost for the best“ (350).

This is the Modernism of Henri Bergson, and it comes very close to
returning to the ideology of High Romanticism. It is a vertiginous
place, a tightrope of moments strung out in time and space with dizzying
chasms in between. The anxiety it breeds is ultimately unbearable. The
human “unit“ so suspended must needs be borne up, finally, collapsing
out of sheer nervous exhaustion, by the net of things as they are.
Terrified of falling, the tightrope walker clings at bottom to the very
net from which he has sought to escape.

. . . it was of perfection that Marius . . . had been
really thinking all the time: a narrow perfection it might be
objected, the perfection of but one part of his nature--his
capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical impressions, of
an imaginative sympathy--but still, a true perfection of those
capacities, wrought out to their utmost degree. . . . He too
is an economist: he hopes, by that “insight“ of which the old
Cyrenaics made so much, by skillful apprehension of the
conditions of spiritual success as they really are, the
special circumstances of the occasion with which he has to
deal, the special felicities of his own nature, to make the
most, in no mean or vulgar sense, of the few years of life.

. . He has a strong apprehension . . . of the beauty of the
visible things around him; their fading, momentary, graces and
attractions. His natural susceptibility in this direction,
enlarged by experience, seems to demand of him an almost
exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of things; with
their esthetic character, as it is called--their revelations
to the eye and the imagination: not so much because those
aspects of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as
because to be occupied, in this way, with the esthetic or
imaginative side of things, is to be in real contact with
those elements of his own nature, and of theirs, which, for

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him at least, are matter of the most real kind of
apprehension. As other men are concentrated upon truths of
number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the
pleasures of appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that
full stream of refined sensation. And in the prosecution of
this love of beauty, he claims an entire personal liberty,
liberty of heart and mind, liberty, above all, from what may
seem conventional answers to first questions. (218-20)

This illusory liberty, what Conrad identifies in Lord Jim as the “longer
scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life“ reeled out to “your
imaginative people“ (168), is a prescription for insanity. Lest the
cable break and the psyche snap, Pater hangs onto the ropes of empire

just as Clarissa Dalloway does:

But, without him there is a venerable system of sentiment
and idea, widely extended in time and place, in a kind of
impregnable possession of human life--a system, which, like
some other great products of the conjoint efforts of human
mind through many generations, is rich in the world's
experience; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one lets in a
great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were with a
single step, a great experience of one's own, and with great
consequent increase to one's sense of colour, variety, and
relief, in the spectacle of men and things. The mere sense
that one belongs to a system--an imperial system of
organization--has, in itself, the expanding power of a great
experience, as some have felt who have been admitted from
narrower sects into the communion of the Catholic church; or
as the old Roman citizen felt. . . .

A wonderful order, actually in possession of human life!
--grown inextricably through and through it; penetrating into
its laws, its very language, its mere habits of decorum, in a
thousand half-conscious ways: yet still felt to be, in part,
an unfulfilled ideal; and, as such, awakening hope, and an aim
identical with the one only consistent aspiration of mankind!
In the apprehension of that, just then, Marius seemed to have
joined company once more with his own old self; to have
overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to Rome, with
absolute sincerity, on the search for perfection. It defined
not so much a change of practice, as of sympathy--a new
departure, an expansion, of sympathy. It involved, certainly,
some curtailment of his liberty, in concession to the actual
manner, the distinctions, the enactments of that great crowd
of admirable spirits, who have elected so, and not otherwise,
in their conduct of life, and are not here to give one, so to
term it, an “indulgence.“ But then, under the supposition of
their disapproval, no roses would ever seem worth plucking
again. The authority they exercised was like that of classic
taste--an influence so subtle, yet so real, as defining the
loyalty of the scholar; or of some beautiful and venerable
ritual, in which every observance is become spontaneous and
almost mechanical, yet is found, the more carefully one
considers it, to have a reasonable significance and a natural
history.

And Marius saw that he would be but an inconsistent
Cyrenaic, mistaken in his estimate of values, of loss and

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gain, and untrue to the well-considered economy of life which
he had brought with him to Rome--that some drops of the great
cup would fall to the ground--if he did not make that
concession. . . . (220-21)

Recognizing that in the “perfection of but one part of his nature“
is no “wholeness,“ no “harmonious balance“ of “aesthetic, religious, and
practical concerns,“ Pater shifts his focus from what Bergson would call
the intensive to the extensive manifold of perception, seeking to
achieve, not unity of being, but homeostasis. He will be a well-
adjusted part of the whole.

At the moment of complete capitulation and incorporation, a firmer
sublimation is forced than Pater had ever before felt constrained to
achieve. Submitting to the “manner, the distinctions, the enactments of
that great crowd of admirable spirits“ who have, after all, civilized
Europe in the cultural evolution “identical with the one only consistent
aspiration of mankind“--the preservation and propagation of the species
in a reasonable “natural history“ of social progress--Pater consents to
sublimation of the libidinal instinct in the drive toward imperial
conquest. Accepting for the moment the authorities' denial of
“indulgence,“ he is prepared to trade in an economy of scale: “under
the supposition of their disapproval, no roses would ever seem worth
plucking again.“

Marius' “apprehension“ of a “wonderful order“ defines “not so much
a change of practice, as of sympathy,“ however. In exchange for “some
curtailment of his liberty,“ he receives, not access to the system to
which he belongs, but only an increase to his “sense of colour, variety,
and relief, in the spectacle of men and things.“ It is merely a larger
world through which he moves as a spectator. He has traded a smaller
for a larger sublimation, and acquired merely a larger self-negation, a
larger abnegation of capacities, a larger and more complex confinement.
“Struggling, as he must, to save himself,“ he only loses more of

himself; more of experience is sacrificed to the system which claims

entire possession of him.

135

This reconsidered economy by which repressed desire finds the
receptacle for unspent energies not in art but in the great cup of an
imperial system does not yield an increased profit, a larger fruit of
experience, or a greater potency. The “great tide of experience“ let in
by Marius' decision to accept his place in an “imperial system of
organization“ is not experience, but a spectacle in which he is unable
to participate except as a functional unit: in himself incomplete,
impotent, and dehumanized. These are the terms of Pater's defeat;
likewise the terms of Baudelaire's “determined resistance.“

In the Sunt Lacrimae Rerum chapter of Marius, Pater records the
foreclosure of possibilities and proliferation of deaths consequent upon
the limitations of the aesthetic mode of life in view of the
insurmountable “griefs of circumstance.“ The threshold discovered in
the discourse of “Poems by William Morris“ is never crossed. Lacking
systematic terms with which to battle the “pedestrian world“ which
confined him, Pater could only suffer under its weight. In retreat, he
could not muster a determined resistance to a world--“life, conflict,
evil“--he declined to be “braced“ by. He forfeits the puissance of
Romantic irony unleashed by the fierce tension which both ravaged
Baudelaire's life and informed the triumph of his work.

Drawing support precisely from unrelenting confrontation of
historical reality, Baudelaire's poetry triumphs where Pater's fails
because its force is sustained by positive resistance. Reactionary, and
idiosyncratic, as Baudelaire's Catholicism is, it signifies his
retention of the categories by which to identify the mal underlying the
malaise and to write a poetry that contradicted fact in such a way as to
release the revolutionary potential of the aesthetic mode of perception.

Peter has forfeited those categories to the Positivist-historicist
ideology by which the philosophers, “amid all the changes of phenomena,“
confess themselves “quite unable to discover“ any fixed principles or
“absolute ground“ of critique. Unable to discover and get hold of a

principle in history to support his yearning for emancipation of the

136
life of the body, Pater's aesthetic hypothesis, tested out in his
imaginary portraits, collapses under the weight of a historical reality
the ground of which he has been unable to find in the ideology of
empirical and cultural relativity.

In each of their lives, for one brief period, both Pater and
Baudelaire touched the threshold of a materialist aesthetic: Pater in
“Poems by William Morris,“ Baudelaire much more fully in his Preface to
Pierre Dupont's Chants st chansons. Given the chastening and subduing
backlash Pater felt, however, and Baudelaire's experience of the
backturn of a once militant bourgeoisie on the proletariat in the face
of whose “rival claims“ it compromised its revolutionary principles,
turning hypocrite under the regime of Louis Napoleon, both retreated to
an aesthetic of the artificial, the inutile, and the sterile: l'art
pour l'art. Following Napoleon's coup d'etat of December 1851, in March
of 1852, Baudelaire wrote to his guardian, Ancelle, that the “second of
December had physically de-politized“ him (Hyslop 50). It had the same
effect on his aesthetic.

But for a few years, catching fire from the rhetoric of Proudhon
and the revolutionary activity upsurging around him, Baudelaire was able
to locate his aesthetic in the life of a vigorous body politic. He met
Pierre Dupont, son of a Lyons blacksmith, through his friend the
painter, Emile Darcy, and wrote the Preface for the 1851 edition of
Dupont's Chants et chansons. There he identifies the importance of
Dupont's poetry in the “public sentiments“ of which it “is a symptom,
and of which Dupont has become the echo.“ Briefly, he credits the
“Romantic School“ with the performance of certain services. “It brought
us back to the truth of the image, it destroyed academic conventions,“
and it made linguistic innovations undeserving of the pedants' scorn
(Hyslop 51). But, he goes on quickly to say, “by its very principle,
the Romantic insurrection was doomed to a short life,“ for by “excluding
morality and often even passion the puerile Utopia of the school of art

for art's sake was inevitably sterile“ (Hyslop 52).

137

In contradistinction, Dupont's is the work of a poet “who is in
continuous communication with the men of his time“ (Hyslop 52) and “must
make a living with his tools.“ Dupont's first book of poems, Les Deux
anges, for which a subscription was get up, was used to buy a
replacement for him in the infantry. “Thus,“ Baudelaire writes, “Pierre
Dupont began what may be called his public life by buying himself out of
slavery with his poetry“ (Hyslop 55). Thereafter Dupont wrested his
freedom from the Academy “as he had done with the banking establishment“
where he had been imprisoned in employment. When he went on to publish
Les paysans, chants rustiques, says Baudelaire,
Everyone was grateful to the post for having finally
introduced a little truth and naturalness in these songs
destined to delight many an evening party. It was no longer
that indigestible mixture of sugar and cream with which
uneducated families indiscreetly stuff the memories of their
young daughters. It was a truthful mingling of naive
melancholy and boisterous, innocent joy with, here and there,
robust accents of working-class virility.

And when Baudelaire heard Le Chant des ouvriers which was published in

1846, he was “awed and moved“: “We had been waiting so many years for

some solid, real poetry!“ (Hyslop 56)

Having heard in Le Chant des ouvriers “that sighing and
languishing throng to which the earth owes its marvels, which feels
flowing in its veins an ardent red blood, which looks long and sadly at
the sunshine and shadows of the great parks and, for its only comfort
and consolation, bawls at the top of its voice its song of salvation:
Let us love one another . . .“ (Hyslop 56), Baudelaire finds there
“Dupont's great secret“ and an answer to the question, “what explains
the admiration that surrounds him?“ They are his “love of virtue and
humanity,“ his “boundless enthusiasm for the Republic,“ and “something
else.“ The “something else“ is a quality Baudelaire never celebrated in
his poetry or his criticism except during the few short years between
1846 and 1852: “It is joy!“ (Hyslop 59)

With these qualities, the substance of his “great secret,“ Dupont
“first broke Open the door.“ “Axe in hand,“ he “cut the chains of the

drawbridge of the [academic] fortress“ and made “popular poetry

138

acceptable.“ Under the influence of the public sentiments of which
Dupont's poetry was a symptom and an echo, Baudelaire is not an ennuye.
He is inspirited to bid Romantic melancholy be gone:
Take flight then, deceptive shades of Rene, of Obermann, and
of Werther; vanish into the mists of nowhere, monstrous
creations of idleness and solitude; like the Gadarene swine,
go and plunge yourselves, sheep attacked by the romantic
vertigo, into the depths of enchanted forests, whence you were
drawn by enemy faeries. The spirit of action no longer leaves
room for you among us. (Hyslop 60)
Three years after he had stood on a street corner brandishing a rifle
and shouting, “Down with General Aupick!“ Baudelaire still has
sufficient energy to defy the killing will of the father. He is still
sufficiently emancipated to feel that “Loud imprecations, deep sighs of
hope, cries of never-ending encouragement are beginning to create hope,“
and that “All this will turn into literature, poetry and song, in spite
of all resistance.“ It does in Baudelaire's Preface, and the aesthetic
it engendered there:

Great is the destiny of poetry!

Joyous or sad, it always bears in itself a divine Utopian
character. It runs the risk of no longer being poetry, if it
does not constantly contradict fact. In prison it becomes
revolt; in the hospital window the burning hope of being
cured; in the dilapidated and dirty attic it adorns itself
like a faery of luxury and elegance; it not only records, but
it redeems. Everywhere it becomes the negation of iniquity.

Go singing into the future, providential poet; your songs
are the luminous reflection of popular hopes and beliefs!
(Hyslop 61)

Far cry from the aesthetic of a prismatic autonomy Pater articulated in
“Winckelmann,“ what Baudelaire sings here is an aesthetic of
revolutionary practice. Though the second of December “physically de-
politized“ him, and other voices and sentiments than those of Dupont's
paysans and ouvriers were echoed in his reversion to a residual ideology
of aristocratic Catholicism, that fall-back position can be traced to
the “something else“ emerging here.

As the dominant “men of his time“ changed, and the “popular hopes
and beliefs“ were diverted from the course of the 1848 Revolution, the

ideals sung by Dupont lost their sway. The course of Baudelaire's

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aesthetic was diverted from a visionary realism to a visionary idealism.
An aesthetic of revolutionary practice precluded a realism limited to
“servile imitation of nature“ which was “not a new method of creation,
but a minute description of trivial details.“ Under the conditions of
Napoleon III's regime, Baudelaire was forced to redefine poetry as “what
is most real, what is completely true only in another world. This world
[is] a hieroglyphic dictionary“ (Hyslop 21).

The crucial question raised by that redefinition, of course, is
“where?“ Where is the other world: in the past, the future, or an
eternal present transcending historical time? Baudelaire was too much
the realist, the analyst, the critic, to be satisfied with Hugo's facile
confidence in human progress. Seeing in his lifetime after the second
of December no evidence of real progress as he understood it--
“diminution of the signs of original sin“--he yet sought the stuff of
poetry in all three realms: the lost Eden of the past; a future reached
for by unquenchable desire; and a spiritual transcendence made possible
by the tenacity of the imagination. Despite the redefinition he was
forced to make, however, his commitment to the heroic possibilities of
modern life reflected an inescapable drive to find it, as well as its
“hieroglyphs,“ in the present world too.

Baudelaire's commitment to the epic as well as lyric possibilities
of modern life kept him alert to the “great secret“ of poetry
everywhere. In the Salon de 1846 he had encouraged the artists of his
day to emulate the brilliant visionary realism of Balzac. If for
Baudelaire “dandyism was a means of cultivating beauty in ‘natural' and
hence imperfect man,“ and “art was a means of transforming the
banalities and ugliness of the natural world into beauty“ (Hyslop 14),
both were more than a defensive social posture or a reactionary
throwback to strutting, or strolling, aristocracy. They were the
idealist revision of the revolutionary aesthetic which enabled
Baudelaire to say to the city of Paris in his unfinished epilogue to Les

Fleurs du mal: “You have given me your mud and I have turned it into

140

gold.“ That the poet who had done that was reduced, by the time of his
brief exile in Belgium, when he was writing Mon coeur mis a nu, to a
state of mind defined by the sacrament of the toilet and the rosary of
francs, testifies just how murderous to the aspirations of a lyric post
the Second Empire was.

Having lost all points of reference outside his own stream of
consciousness except the system which both confined and ultimately
defined him, Pater clung to the ropes of empire. Baudelaire retained in
a theological system the points of reference--a transcendent vantage
within history--by which to resist confinement to a merely psychic
mobility. Thus he retained also the strength to look steadily at the
horrors which resisted synthesis in happy literary effects, no matter
how violent or shattering the psychosomatic shock.

Enraged by the pain of the conflicts by which he was torn, he was
able to identify his own suffering, anger, and interests in the other
figures moving through the crowd. Though he speaks of the intoxication
of the crowd, that intoxication is only the arousal of desire to
overcome the overwhelming sense of isolation felt in the crowd.
Deformed, befouled, weary, but also eloquent, courageous, resourceful,
the bodies and faces of the proletariat remain visible to him.
Sparagmos of the bourgeoisie, the members of the proletariat are
emblematic of his own division and dismemberment.

Symptomatic of that division is the splitting of his theology into
two gods: the one who redeems from original, “natural“ sin, and the one
who instigates crime. If the first is the savior he ultimately clings
to, final refuge in poverty and sickness, the latter becomes the
alternative muse to the Chants et chansons of Dupont. In the years of
ennui setting in after the second of December, Baudelaire's aesthetic
finds its symbolic embodiment in Satan--“as Milton conceived him.“ As
the desire for escape is an inversion of homesickness for a lost Eden,
Baudelaire's visionary idealism is an inversion of the materialist

aesthetic which came briefly into being around 1846. When the ideals of

141

Dupont are forced underground by the bourgeoisie, as the proletariat was
forced underground beneath the gratings of the Tuileries dungeons, they
become Satanic. When the god of love is usurped by a murderous order,

he must be recouped by the god of revolt.

Chapter IV. Hospice: The Immense Nausea of Advertisements

Life is a hospital where every patient is obsessed by the
desire of changing beds. One would like to suffer opposite
the stove, another is sure he would get well beside the
window.

--Charles Baudelaire, “Anywhere Out of the World,“ Paris
Spleen

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table. . . .

--T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay? . . .

--T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion“

What will the aesthete do when the beautiful house of an idealized
history turns out to be a hospital where every patient is obsessed by
the desire of changing beds? Suspend the operations of his desire? It
was Goethe who first diagnosed the problem in those terms. Irving
Babbitt factored it into his penetrating analysis of “Romantic
Melancholy.“ “All these poets,“ Goethe confided to Eckermann of the
Romantics writing in 1830,

write as though they were ill, and as though the whole world
were a hospital. . . . Every one of them in writing tries to
be more desolate than all the others. This is really an abuse
of poetry, which has been given to make man satisfied with the
world and with his lot. But the present generation is afraid
of all solid energy; its mind is at ease and sees poetry only
in weakness. I have found a good expression to vex these

gentlemen. I am going to call their poetry hospital poetry.
(Babbitt 793)

142

143

That Goethe should call for the exercise of “solid energy“ (much
as Arnold would do at the end of the century) in the creation of poetry
understood as a donnee whose purpose is to make man satisfied with his
lot in the world is indicative of the extent to which the project of
disseminating culture has not yet been raised “infinitely above the
Athenian level,“ to echo John Morley. Firmly ensconced in the state
apparatus as well as the artistic and intellectual life of Saxe-Weimar,
Goethe cannot yet conceive of the project in terms of democratization.
What he observes in the Romantics of 1830, however, from his own .
position in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, is telling. Hospital
poetry issues from poets who “write as though they were ill,“
representatives of a “generation . . . afraid of all solid energy,“ a
collective mind which is “at ease and sees poetry only in weakness.“ It
is the work of a generation of poets who, like Pater, have been
chastened and subdued. They are writing at a time when the so-called
principle of legitimacy has been reconstructed as the principle
governing the disposition of the several states of Europe.

It is worth remembering here that Goethe has been claimed by both
Romantics and would-be neo-Classicists. As everyone knows, Goethe was
himself a reluctant Romantic, who had to be revealed to himself as a
Romantic by Schiller. Like the Modernists, he started out as a
Romantic, producing in The Sorrows of Young Werther one of the most
virulent strains of hospital literature ever let loose, then defined
himself as an anti-Romantic over the course of his career. His
criticism of hospital poetry comes just two years before his death in
1832. His reconstruction of a Classicism toppled less than half a
century before, along with the heads of the ancien regime in France,
testifies just how relative to the machinations of the state the
autonomy of culture really is. That is the feature of historical
dialectic which Pater's Hegelian conception of history as a harmonious

revolutionism, a blending of opposites, fails to recognize. “The best

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of the poetry of [Goethe's] maturity tends,“ Babbitt writes, “like that
of the ancients, to elevate and console“ (793).

At the beginning of the century, Goethe had done what T.E. Hulme
called for at the end, and what Eliot signalled in the work of Yeats and
Joyce. Pater had read Goethe as well as Winckelmann. He took the same
course Goethe took: away from the sorrows, disappointments, and
languorous discontentments of lived experience; toward the power of myth
and myth-making to “elevate and console.“ The turn was not a
renunciation of what Babbitt aptly phrases “infinite indeterminate
desire“ (792), however.

The turn toward myth which Pater makes in his imaginary portraits
is driven by the same frustrated search for satisfaction that had
directed his quest for the “superlative thrill“ of the heightened moment
he had sought to situate in an idealized history. Still suffering from
“homolepsy,“ failing in “pursuit of the ‘impossible he'“ (Babbitt 792),
Pater cum Marius capitulates to the march of the weevil. Imperial
legions overtake him like a plague. He sickens and dies.

Having died in history, Pater is resurrected in myth. It is not
death as such that he dodges, however, but the death of “effective
desire.“ In myth he seeks renewed vitality of desire. That possibility
is also foreclosed, and with results more disastrous than mere fever,
weakening, and death.

Eliot had no use for Pater. He dismissed Pater as incapable of
sustained reasoning. Had he read Pater's forays into the “mythical
method“ with more insight, he might have injected a cautionary note into
the November 1923 review of Ulysses which he issued in the Dial as an
advertisement for his own Modernist version of nee-Classical
restoration. “In using the myth,“ Eliot wrote,

in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity
and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others
must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of
controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance
to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by

Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to
have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a

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method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology
(such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or
serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to
make possible what was impossible even a few years ago.
Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical
method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the
modern world possible for art, toward that order and form
which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those who
have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a
world which offers very little assistance to that end, can be
of any use in furthering this advance.
As Robert Langbaum explains,” Eliot is “[t]aking issue with Richard
Aldington's condemnation of Joyce as a ‘prophet of chaos.'“ Langbaum
wishes to emphasize that Eliot calls Ulysses “‘the most important
expression which the modern age has found' precisely because Joyce has
shown us how to be ‘classical' under modern conditions. He has given us
the materials of modern disorder and shown us how to impose order upon
them“ (10-11).

The break with narrative method, then, coincides with a departure
from history for myth as metahistory. The mythical method amounts to
systematic distortion of history so as to make it expressive--not of the
collective experience of a human community, its hopes, fears, and shared
knowledge of how to negotiate the conditions of its survival--but of an
order won by the discipline of an individual talent whose quest for
perfection of form is a “secret errand.“ The Modernists cannot be said
to have been going, in the secret of their disciplines, on the same
errand. Certainly one cannot confuse Eliot's errand with Joyce's.

What we are concerned with here is the errand which led Pater out
of the march of imperial history back to a very different sort of rose
garden from the one Eliot finally chose to enshrine as the ultimate
order of human experience. That order would serve as a paradigm both
for what R.P. Blackmur would call the “rationally constructed

imagination“ and for a social order endorsed as the objective

correlative of Eliot's conservative, Anglo-Catholic ideology.

 

31in The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern
Literary Tradition (U of Chicago P, 1985).

146

Beyond that, and more importantly, we are concerned with the fact
that Pater's search for liberation from a repressive order brought him
to the brink of holocaust. From that brink he recoiled in horror to the
safety of his monastic cell. Finding no poetry in a weakness so extreme
as to make him susceptible to complete ego disintegration, he fell back
in step with a Dorian mode in Plato and Platonism.

The implications of his failure to find in myth or myth remaking a
ground for any other resolution of the conflict raised by frustrated
desire than protofascism are of enormous consequence for Modernism.
Irrespective of their diverse errands, none of the Modernists was able
to discover, in private metahistory, a ground for any other outcome in
history than fascism.” In other words, all flights of private fancy
lead to Rome: the imperial self as mirror of the imperial center.

The spider spinning his web of desire becomes a weevil consuming
the objects of desire. Art as projection--the mythical method--becomes
the basis for an aesthetic of fascism: desire unrestrained,
degenerating only too quickly into sadomasochistic perversion. There is
no way out of the vicious circle of mutual exploitation but emergence
from the infantile, imperial self into a community of shared interests,
intersubjective engagement in the processes of human provisioning.
Unless or until those shared interests are recognized, one man's
gratification will be another man's objectification, commodification--
even consumption.

All this Peter trembles on the verge of understanding by the time
he writes “Apollo in Picardy“ in the fall of 1893, less than a year
before his death in July 1894. But to comprehend how Pater arrived at
recognition of the futility of using the mythical method to restore
vitality and coherence to modern experience, one must track the history
of his discourse in the imaginary portraits.

The first of Pater's portraits, of course, was the piece

originally titled “The House and the Child“ which Pater sent to Sir

 

3‘Futurism is a case in point.

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George Grove, editor of Macmillan's Magazine, in April 1878. In it, we
know, Pater saw the “germinating, original, source, specimen of all
[his] imaginative work.“ It appeared five years after Studies in the
History of the Renaissance had been received, to Pater's surprise and
dismay, as the work of a “demoralising moraliser,“ in the phrase
attributed to Jowett.

The insidious power of Pater's dark poems in prose stemmed from
their expression of his longing for certain features of experience
discernible in the culture of the Renaissance: “the care for physical
beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which;
the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the
imagination“ (Levey 136). Previous to their publication, as Levey
neatly observes, “Only occasional flashes of exasperated wit or repartee
[had] hinted at how violently [Pater] rejected almost everything to
which the routine of his existence constrained him“ at Oxford (137).
With the revelation of just what sort of freedom Pater preferred to the
conventional morality of Victorian Christendom, Oxford was scandalized
and Pater was mortified. Though he published numerous essays and
reviews in the interval, among them the pieces comprising Greek Studies
and Appreciations, no other book saw the light of day for twelve years.

In “The Child in the House,“ however, Peter had found a way both
of exploring why he was the way he was and of writing about what
fascinated him without giving offense. Despite the freedom afforded by
the rubric of imaginary portrait, Pater wished his first imaginary
portrait to be published anonymously. Having made that first delicate
probe in “Child,“ he was able to bring the germ to full development in
Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas.

Even as Marius recorded his own death--first in the person of
Flavius, then in the person of Marius--it effected his social
redemption. Published in 1885, the book was a success, running to a
second edition after only four months. The battle won with himself in

completing it gave Pater the confidence to leave Oxford for London. He

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kept his fellowship (having earlier resigned his lectureshiP): however,
and the necessity of shuttling back and forth between London and Oxford
served as an excuse for avoiding unwanted social engagements during his
residence at No. 12 Earl's Terrace, Rensington. He retained the 1
Kensington house for eight years, until the summer of 1893.
Oddly enough, Pater's second imaginary portrait, “A Prince of
Court Painters,“ was published only a few months after Pater's move to
the city where he might, for the first time, actually cut a figure
resembling the trim forms he had admired as a boy at Enfield. Many
people remarked the difference between his appearance in London and at
Oxford, and especially the faintly military look about him in his top-
hat, dog-skin gloves, and gold-topped umbrella. I say oddly, though,
because the portrait does not bode well for Pater's new life in the
metropolis. Of the court painter Antony Watteau, Pater has the sister
of his student write in the journal by which his story is told,
Himself really of the old time . . . he dignifies, by what in
him is neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the
essential insignificance of what he wills to touch in all that
[gallant world of powdered ladies and fine cavaliers],
transforming its mere pettiness into grace. . . . For in truth
Antony Watteau is still the mason's boy, and deals with that
world under a fascination, of the nature of which he is half-
conscious methinks. . . . You see him growing ever more and
more meagre, as he goes through the world and its
applause. . . . He will never overcome his early training; and
these light things will possess for him always a kind of
representative or borrowed worth, as characterising that
impossible or forbidden world which the mason's boy saw
through the closed gateways of the enchanted garden. Those
trifling and petty graces, the insignia to him of that nobler
world of aspiration and idea, even now that he is aware, as I
conceive, of their true littleness, bring back to him, by the
power of association, all the old magical exhilaration of his
dream--his dream of a better world than the real one.
(Imaginary Portraits 256)
At the very outset of his London residence, Pater seems to have brooded
over the futility of an attempt to escape his condition. “He has been a
sick man all his life,“ the portrait concludes. “He was always a seeker
after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or
not at all“ (262).
Though the success of Marius repaired Pater's reputation,

consolidated his position as a man of letters, gave him the courage to

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quit OxfOrd, and stimulated the continuous literary activity by which he
quietly became famous over the next five years, it did not avert the
blow that came when he was passed over for the Slade Professorship of
Fine Art after Ruskin finally resigned. Sir Hubert von Herkomer, a
German-born Associate of the Royal Academy who had founded the Herkomer
School of Art, held the Professorship for the duration of Pater's life.
But while Sir Hubert was occupying the Professorship, Pater was using
his new-felt freedom to visit the National and other art galleries.
Levey notes that “virtually a rush . . . of interest in painting
. . . seems to follow the move from Oxford“ (175). According to Thomas
Wright, it was a visit to the Dulwich gallery, where the single work by
Watteau accessible to public view in England, Les Plaisirs du ball, was
on exhibit, which prompted Pater to write the portrait. But as the
mentor of Jean-Baptiste Pater, Watteau had long been a part of Pater's
imaginative life; and the portrait offers another occasion for Pater to
indulge in a mixture of reverie, wish-fulfillment, and confession like
that which characterized his first.
Coming as it does at the beginning of Pater's stay in London, it
makes for a disturbing prophecy. “A Prince of Court Painters,“
subtitled “Extracts from an Old French Journal,“ is indeed a piece of
hospital literature. With it we exchange Baudelaire's metaphor of life
as a hospital where every patient is obsessed by the desire of changing
beds for the metaphor of life as an issueless, captive, circling flight.
Jean-Baptiste Pater's sister writes in her journal:
I am just returned from early Mass. I lingered long after the
office was ended, watching, pondering how in the world one
could help a small bird which had flown into the church but
could find no way out again. I suspect it will remain there,
fluttering round and round distractedly, far up under the
arched roof, till it dies exhausted. I seem to have heard of
a writer who likened man's life to a bird passing just once
only, on some winter night, from window to window, across a
cheerfully-lighted hall. The bird, taken captive by the ill-
luck of a moment, retracing its issueless circle till it
expires within the close vaulting of that great stone church--
human life may be like that bird too! (244)

With that central metaphor of the portrait, too, we are given Pater's

corroboration of the critique offered by Baudelaire's “determined

150
resistance“ to “ontological floating.“ Pater cites both Watteau and his
student, Jean-Baptiste Pater, for their inability to produce truly great
art. The student never equals the master. Except in moments quite
literally of panic, when J.-B. Pater is animated by sudden fear of
poverty, he is capable only of mimesis:
He approaches that [delicate] life [of Paris], and all its
pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own; and
beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain,
produces a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways.
(252)
But the master is dissatisfied with his own work as well, because in it
he has idealized the images of a world he despises. Despite the purity,
the light, and the grace with which he has infused his scenes of
aristocratic life, his visions are revealed as inadequate, though they
are all the rage in Paris and at court.

Watteau is the son of a provincial mason. From the beginning his
talent was a “marvellous tact of omission . . . in dealing with the
vulgar reality seen from one's . . . window.“ Born and raised in the
now French but once Flemish village of Valenciennes, he had a knack for
sketching a scene “to the life, but with a kind of grace.“ With
remarkable ease, he can make “trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine
seem like people in some fairyland“ (238). J.-B. Pater's sister notes
in her journal, however: “he has, my father thinks, too little self-
approval for ultimate success. He is apt, in truth, to fall out too
hastily with himself and what he produces.“ It is the very “tact of
omission“ that makes his work facile--gracefu1, but lacking in real
vitality. Watteau sketches what he desires, for the “rudeness of his
home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces of life into a
physical want, like hunger or thirst,“ which, the diarist considers,
“might come to greed“ (239). He “overvalues these things“ perhaps.

The obscure village and its quiet ways cannot hold him long.
Watteau's knack for ornamenting the world gains him access to the

“delicate enjoyments of the . . . wealthy and refined.“ When he writes

his parents, he tries to soften the contrast between his new life and

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“that bald existence of theirs in his old home.“ But the diarist
discerns that what the letter “really discloses“ is a “life, agitated,
exigent, unsatisfying!“ As Watteau's “gift expands,“ so does his
“incurable restlessness.“ It seems the only real gratification afforded
by his success is the “thought of the independence it has purchased him
so that he can escape from one lodging-place to another“ (246).

When Watteau returns home for a visit, he stays not with his old
parents but with the Pater family. It is apparent that he “hasn't yet
put off . . . his distant and preoccupied manner.“ Pater is at pains to
clarify that that reserve, “the same to every one,“ is “certainly not
through pride in his success.“ It is “rather as if, with all that
success, life and its daily social routine were somewhat of a burden to
him“ (247).

What he values, after all, is not the “dainty world“ he has been
“privileged to enter.“ And he has “but little relish for his own
works,“ which J.-B. Pater's sister has “so thirst[ed] to see“ (246).
When he undertakes to ornament the walls of her family's sitting room,
she is at last able to understand “what it is he enjoys, what he
selects, by preference, from all that various world we pass our lives
in.“ Aside from that “wonderful lightness which is one of the claims of
his work,“ she is struck by the “purity in the forms and colours of
things“ (249). She has misgivings, however, about whether the actual
life of Paris can be as pure as its relish for Watteau's work would
suggest.

The message conveyed by the presence of the Monseigneur le Prince
de Cemhrai at vespers in the Cambrai cathedral seems to confirm her
doubts. “Omnia vanitas! he seems to say, yet with a profound
resignation, which makes the things we are most of us so fondly occupied
with look petty enough“ (249). By “natural gift and the favour of
heaven,“ the monseigneur is a “true grand seigneur or grand sonargue.“
Though he might have “made his own all that life has to bestow“ (250),

he has passed his life in a quiet dignity of provincial exile. He was

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never to be seen at court, and the diarist speculates that “Great Ring
Lewis“ himself might have been jealous of him as a natural superior.

Likewise she wonders whether Watteau might have been happier--as
might she--if he had stayed at home. For his “discontent with himself
. . . keeps pace with his fame.“ His fame has come of his talent for
painting “so excellently“ what he despises. Like the grand
ecclesiastical seigneur in exile, Watteau has a natural grace
transcending rank. It allows him to understand the “delicate life of
Paris.“ “Those coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be
rendered so perfectly,“ J.-B. Pater's sister writes, “only through an
intimate understanding of them.“ But for Watteau, “to understand must
be to despise them.“ The trouble is, “he nevertheless undergoes their
fascination. Hence that discontent with himself, which keeps pace with
his fame“ (251).

As with “Child in the House“ and “Emerald Uthwart,“ it is
impossible to separate the strands here of deliberate fiction, brooding
reverie, autobiographical confession, and existential hypothesis--
wonderings not only what became of Watteau, but what will become of
Pater. Suffice it to say that the identification between Pater and the
characters in the portrait is strong. Again, how veiled the confession
is depends on how conscious Pater was of the process he was describing.
When he has his narrative persona pinpoint Watteau's problem--“For him,
to understand must be to despise them; while . . . he nevertheless
undergoes their fascination“--he inserts a parenthetical suggestion:
“(I think I know why)“ (251). He does not enlarge upon it, however,
which leads one to wonder whether he actually does, though it should be
obvious.

Why Watteau undergoes the fascination of those petty graces and
coquetries of high society is as obvious as the popularity of Lives of
the Rich and Famous: the appeal of beauty, the money which protects it,
and sex. It's the appeal of Brideshead and Sebastian Flyte for the

moneyless artist, Charles Ryder. (Waugh's father was among Pater's

153

admirers during the London period.) Even F. Scott Fitzgerald, no mental
giant, was able to figure out what the gold in Daisy Buchanan's golden
voice quite literally was. But neither Pater nor his narrator seems
quite able to name the fact of class envy. Pater needs to mystify it
because he cannot bring himself to expose so baldly what keeps him
captive in flight: desire for a “vast, vulgar, and meretricious
beauty.“
Like the court painter with whom he identifies in the portrait,
Pater endeavors to transcend it with those infusions of light, purity,
and grace. Just so Lady Marchmain endeavors to justify and transcend it
with injections of light, purity, and grace filtered through her
stained-glass theology; elements which sanctify it at the same time that
they suck the real, pleasurable life out of it. (A “real femme fatale,“
Sebastian calls her; “she killed whatever she touched.“ The combination
of piety, wealth, and power gave her the Midas touch.) The result of
those endeavors for Watteau is art comprised of idealizing distortions
which, however appealing, are false. Its “tact of omission,“ moreover,
generates the old anxiety. What is left out makes for a peculiar
feeling of menace: reality may break in and shatter the artifice of
tranquility.
Pater's narrator seems only partially conscious of that dynamic
when she writes in her journal,
Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself
always saying to myself involuntarily, ‘The evening will be a
wet one.’ The storm is always brooding through the messy
splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns,
where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the
secular trees themselves will hardly outlast another
generation. (255)

Pater cannot escape from aesthetic confinement, or rid himself of the

anxiety its breeds, because he cannot bring himself to name the forces

whose fascination he undergoes. To do so would be to shatter his

defenses against an insidious shame. He reverts to the aesthetic

formula which represents the limits of his own art as well as Watteau's.

154

Close as his narrator comes to exposing it, she cannot shake herself'
free of it, at last snaps back to reaffirmation:
Yes! Besides that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes,
these persons, which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a
poetry, in those persons and things themselves, close at hand
we had not seen. He has enabled us to see it: we are so much
the better-off thereby, and I, for one, the better. The world
he sets before us so engagingly has its care for purity, its
cleanly preferences, in what one is to see--in the outsides of
things--and there is something, a sign, a memento, at the
least, of what makes life really valuable, even in that.
There, is my simple notion, wholly womanly perhaps, but which
I may hold by, of the purpose of the arts. (255)
In an afterthought, Pater tries to factor into that formula a historical
component; to give his “dream of a better world than the real one“
social substance as well as “cleanly“ form. Unable to resolve the
contradiction she has identified as Watteau's problem, the diarist
attempts to find justification in a progressive social impulse
reminiscent of John Morley's. Puzzling how contempt can be a “condition
of excellent artistic production,“ she tries to write herself out of the
problem:
People talk of a new are now dawning upon the world, of
fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a novel sort of social
freedom in which men's natural goodness of heart will blossom
at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars disappearing
from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of life--yes!
perhaps of infinite littleness also. And it is the outward
manner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through
pure intellectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together
with a flattering something of his own, added thereto. (255)
But the argument is unconvincing. Immediately she reasserts that
Watteau is “himself really of the old time.“ He “dignifies“ by
melancholy the “essential insignificance“ of all that to which he lends
a “fallacious grace.“ He is “in truth . . . still the mason's boy who
deals with that world under a fascination, of the nature of which he is
half-conscious“ (256). There is, moreover, already the fear that with a
larger “ease of life“ the grandness will be diminished. It's the fear
of so many Modernists who can conceive of no alternative to nations of
shopkeepers--or worse, as in Brideshead, Hoopers--once the last vestiges

of aristocratic hegemony have been torn down by bourgeois capital.

155

Pater's diarist acknowledges that there is in her brother's fates
champdtres “more real hilarity“ because “more truth to life,“ but
concludes that there is “therefore less distinction.“ She is very ready
to sacrifice real hilarity for the distinction of a dream--all its
“power of association“ and “magical exhilaration.“ “Yes!“ she affirms
to her lonely end,

the world profits by such reflection of its poor, coarse self,

in one who renders all its caprices from the height of a

Corneille. (256)
That is her way, and Pater's, of compensating for the absence of real
pleasure and vitality in their lives--an absence that the move to London
would not fill for Pater or his two chaste sisters, Hester and Clara.
“That is my way,“ she writes, “of making up to myself for the fact that
I think his days, too, would have been really happier, had he remained
obscure at Valenciennes“ (256).

The Pater family had not been able to remain at Enfield. They had
moved to accommodate Walter's advancement. The children's mother had
died not long after the move, and the two young women had been taken to
Heidelberg, first to “finish“ their educations and then, probably, to
take jobs as governesses--something about which they never spoke at
Oxford. Their Aunt Bessie had died while Welter was still an
undergraduate. Their home had been broken up early, and the three of
them had had to make their way precariously balanced between frightening
poverty and literal homelessness, on the one hand, upward mobility by
means of acquired refinements, on the other. Their dream of home would
always be colored by certain social requirements. They compensated for
the lack of opulence with obsessively exquisite taste. Hester's and
Clara's experience would depend on Walter's, and he would “never
overcome his early training.“ Those “light things“ he'd been exposed to
at school and in wealthier boys' homes would “possess for him always a
kind of representative or borrowed worth, as characterising that
impossible or forbidden world“ which the surgeon's widow's boy had
glimpsed “through the closed gateways of the enchanted garden.“ Seeking

156

access to an impossible world transfigured by his imagination, Pater
would discover that the social world no longer inaccessible to him only
made him uncomfortable. What he actually sought was something he had
only really enjoyed at home, something there, in the larger social world
beyond, “in no satisfying measure, or not at all“ (262).

Though he understands so much, what Pater fails to grasp is that
what makes for genuinely creative art is a genuinely potent interaction
between the artist and the world: neither “servile imitation“ nor
increasingly decadent refinement, let alone outright denial, but the
force of a visionary realist such as a Huge, a Balzac, a Baudelaire--or
a Ruskin. The creative product of such an interaction is a synthesis.
What the visionary realist produces is not notes toward a supreme
fiction, but the negation of a negation. In the process, a
revolutionary consciousness is forged.

Pater's failure of understanding was deeply rooted in his
temperament. The diarist of the portrait identifies in herself a
“certain immobility of disposition . . . to quicken or interfere with
which is like physical pain“ (252). But it is that failure of
understanding which keeps Pater locked in flight between the Apollonian
and Dionysian extremes, circling back and forth like the bird in the
cathedral. To put the problem in terms of Pater's metaphor, it must at
least occur to the observing artist that with sufficient effort and a
marshaling of available forces, the bird could be rescued. With such a
realization, the artist is released from enthrallment to such piteous
scenes and symbols of hopeless, helpless suffering._ As filmmaker
Antonioni realized in the making of Blow-Up, however, he must rouse
himself to active intervention, and that is difficult when the artist's
own sense of helplessness is a function of the forces which keep him
immobilized.

Like Watteau, Pater is initially entranced by the images borne in
upon his mind from the natural and social world. At a distance, he

idealizes them, and incorporates them in the “brain-building“ process by

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which he evolves an idealized ego-identity. But when he draws closer to
them, he discovers the gap between his vision and the original forms
which inspired it. On discovering the banality of the empirical and
social reality, his impulse is to retreat, to redistance himself from
the imperfect world so that he can reconstitute the idealized version.
He is dependent on the original, however, and the necessity of
“correcting“ it without ever actually acting upon it is what exhausts
his mind and debilitates his body. Again, this dynamic is a
prescription for insanity. If the conflict between ideal and real
becomes too unremittingly intense, the mind will be driven to flee the
site of conflict altogether, and cut itself loose from the intolerable
irritant reality.

Peter never draws support from “bracing“ confrontation. He has,
perhaps, “too little self-approval.“ But having surrendered all moral
and cognitive categories to the modern, relative spirit, he also lacks
the terms by which to articulate a resistance. He has tried to find
those terms in art and failed. A fragile vessel in which material
forces converge, all sensibility, he lacks the moral and cognitive
sinews that might bind him together as a stable force in his own right.
Lack of determinate substance keeps him fixated on form. When beauty of
form is corroded by ugliness of substance, he can only recoil. He can
identify no definite course of action by which to restore beauty to
form.

Yet the tension caused by the discrepancy between reality and
idealized form drives him, obsessively, first to reconfigure the
deformed reality and then, out of sheer exhaustion, to seek stasis. It
is to “absolute zero“ that Sebastian van Storck is irresistibly drawn.
Then, terrified by the void in “Sebastian,“ Pater is driven to the
opposite extreme, a Dionysian excess of vitality, frenzied activity,
wildly centrifugal energy.

A Pythagorean via media of balance between Parmenidean oneness and

‘Heraclitean flux eludes Pater because he is not in harmony with a social

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world which declines control by aestheticization. A “marvellous tact of
omission“ will not actually remove any blight upon the scene viewed from
the window, though a picturesque window box may obscure it. The
dynamics of power relations contaminate form. Indeed, they defeat Pater
by his own measure. His own form does not please. The forms of his
domestic establishment are not sufficiently stylish or imposing to exert
compelling appeal. In short, the will to beautify is subjugated by the
reality of power, and the wealth that wields it.

Having entered at 12 Earl's Terrace, Kensington, the threshold of
a “life, agitated, exigent, unsatisfying,“ Pater recoils from all
activity in “Sebastian van Storck,“ seeking relief from “incurable
restlessness“ of mind in absolute stasis. Published in May 1886, the
portrait opens on a winter scene. Its subject, Sebastian van Storck,
has returned from studies abroad to his home in seventeenth-century
Holland. After its long struggles with the sea and its warfare with
Spain, the country is enjoying a “hard-won prosperity“ and a “short
period of complete wellbeing“ (Imaginary Portraits 282-83). The family
mansion of the Storcks is, “in its minute and busy wellbeing, like an
epitome of Holland itself with all the good-fortune of its ‘thriving
genius' reflected . . . in the national taste“ (284). Sebastian the
elder is a prosperous landowner and statesman. He admires those who
“get on“ in the world and has been himself “almost from boyhood in
contact with great affairs“ (283). His son has not returned to play an
influential role in affairs of state, however.

Sebastian is a young man driven “more by curiosity than by care
for truth.“ He suffers from a “searching quality.“ In his presence
people feel an “agitation of mind“ at variance with his outward
composure. Given a certain “intellectual rectitude or candour“ in his
character, it has become apparent to his mentor at university that
“theorems will shape life for him, directly.“ He will “always seek the
effective equivalent to his line of thinking“ (282).

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Sebastian has come home to recover a “certain loss of robustness“
resulting from too strenuous wrestling with intellectual questions. The
winter landscape to which he has returned in Holland suits him. He
likes the winter season best “for its expression of a perfect
impassivity, or at least of a perfect repose.“ Winter is preferable to
summer for Sebastian because summer sets “free a crowded and competing
world of life“ (281) which Sebastian finds suffocating.

Artists hang about the Storck family mansion. “Creatures of
leisure--of leisure on both sides--they [are] the appropriate complement
of Dutch prosperity.“ But whereas Sebastian the elder could “almost
have wished his son to be one of them: it was the next best thing to
being an influential publicist or statesman“ (284), the arts are a
matter Sebastian the younger can “but just tolerate.“ Though he is a
connoisseur of the arts by virtue of the fact that he is surrounded by
them, any impulse on his part to be an artist is frustrated by a
plaguing question: “Why add, by a forced and artificial production, to
the monotonous tide of competing, fleeting existence?“ (285).

Like Pater, Sebastian finds himself compelled instead to determine
which art best suits his own “characteristic tendencies.“ Though he
refuses to travel, his most basic tendency is a love of the distant. He
enjoys the “sense of things seen from a distance, carrying us, as on
wide wings of space itself, far out of one's actual surrounding.“ Hence
his preference for “those prospects 3 vol a'oiseau—-of the caged bird on
the wing at last--of which Rubens had the secret, and still more Philip
de Roninck.“ Four of de Roninck's “choicest works“ hang on the four
walls of Sebastian's chamber. They are “visionary escapes, north,
south, east, and west, into a wide-open though . . . somewhat sullen
land“ (285).

Sebastian seeks his freedom from the “whole talkative Dutch world“
in a “kind of empty place.“ In a room remote from the activity of the
household, he finds a space where he can feel that “all had been

mentally put to rights by the working-out of a long equation, which had

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zero is equal to zero for its result.“ In this monastic cage, “one did,
and perhaps felt, nothing: one only thought“ (286).

In_the simplicity of Sebastian's increasingly ascetic existence
there is “certainly nothing democratic“ (286). Nor is there any concern
for the theological disputes that will break into civil strife in
Holland. Sebastian is unmoved by them “as essentially a strife on small
matters.“ His indifference to them anticipates, Pater notes, a “vagrant
regret“ that the “old, pensive, use-and-wont Catholicism“ had been taken
from the country (290).

That wistful regret is but a minor tendency, however, in one whose
“mortal coldness of . . . temperament“ and “intellectual tendencies“
seem to “necessitate straight-forward flight from all that [is]
positive“ (291). Sebastian, in fact, seems in love with death. Indeed,
he loves it with a resolute fixity amounting to passion.

So peculiar does his rejection of “all the elegant
conventionalities of life in that rising Dutch family“ (291) seem to the
members of his social set that he is suspected of treason. Their
suspicion intensifies the desire to withdraw in one “who was so anxious
to expose no writing of his that he left his very letters unsigned“
(292). While a slight flirtation leads to presumed courtship, Sebastian
is “coming to an estimate of the situation“ and recognizing that it is
the “ideal of a calm, intellectual indifference“ of which he is the
“sworn chevalier“ (293). There will be no wedding for him.

Under the influence of Spinosa's philosophy, Sebastian is working
out the implications of the idea, which “pure reason affirmed,“ that
“the world is but a thought, or a series of thoughts“ and that “it
exists, therefore, solely in mind.“ Though he cannot shake himself out
of obsessive reasoning, he is aware that something other than “pure
reason“ is at work in him. On the one hand, pure reason “shOwed him, as
he fixed the mental eye with more and more self-absorption on the
phenomena of his intellectual existence, a picture or vision of the

universe as actually the product . . . of his own thinking power--of

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himself, there, thinking: as being zero without him: and as possessing
a perfectly homogeneous unity in that fact“ (295). On the other hand,
he is partially conscious that he is not drawn to “the oneness of which
all things beside are but passing affections“; rather, “by some
inherited satiety or fatigue in his nature, to the opposite issue of the
practical dilemma“ (296). The opposite issue is not oneness; it is
nothingness.

The alternative to a life “agitated, exigent, unsatisfying,“ and
fatiguing is, in this next portrait, a “restoration of equilibrium,“ a
retreat into the “calm surface of the absolute, untroubled mind,“ and a
return to tabula rasa “by the extinction in one's self of all that is
but correlative to the finite illusion--by the suppression of ourselves“
(296). The alternative, then, is not liberation but death: suppression
of self and denial of “all impediments“ to a perverse negation of
desire. For Sebastian, the “one abstract being“ is like the “pallid
Arctic sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacial, a barren
and absolutely lonely sea.“ In his seeking to lose himself in that “one
abstract being,“ the “lively purpose of life“ is “frozen out of it.“
Himself but a passing thought in the mind of this abstract deity, even
should he love it, Sebastian “cannot expect to be ‘loved in return'“
(296-97).

The impulse to extinguish oneself in some metahistorical order or
theorem or abstraction becomes in turn a self-absorption in which one
neither loves nor is loved in return. All affections are seen as
attempts to assert one's own identity. If one's consciousness is all
that exists, then all response to “passing affections“ is but a “trying
to be, to assert [oneself], to maintain [one's] isolated and petty self,
by a kind of practical lie in things“ (297). And if one's “proper
'function [is] to die,“ then, as it seems to Sebastian, “the world and
the individual alike [are] divested of all effective purpose“ (298).

Though Sebastian is “actually proud at times of his curious, well-
reasoned nihilism“ (298), he knows that he has become the victim of a

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disease. The crowded, competing, and fleeting yet monotonous world of
life subjected to a forced and artificial production has made him sick.
He is aware, too, that the treatise he has been closeted away writing is
the product of an unhealthy mind. His writings fall within the genre of
hospital literature.

1 Pater intimates with a curiously incidental interpolation that
this fanaticism of Sebastian's--this “adherence to a duty to restore the
equilibrium of consciousness,“ or the “restoration of the primary
consciousness to itself“--is all really a “vehement assertion of his
individual will“ (298). This resolute flight from the positive to a
condition of absolute negation is an impulse “to forget.“ Its
consequence, however, to be forgotten, is not so appealing.

Like so many of Pater's writings, the portrait describes a course
of infantile regression in its subject. Sebastian is like a child who
shuts himself in his room when he cannot have his way. But just how
Sebastian has been thwarted is not disclosed, for he is given all that
Peter lacks--youth, beauty, wealth, social currency, suitors, and great
prospects--and yet he throws it all away.

The motivation Pater supplies for that renunciation is pride.

“The moralist,“ Pater writes, “might have noted that a meaner kind of
pride, the morbid fear of vulgarity, lent secret strength to the
intellectual prejudice, which realised duty as the renunciation of all
finite objects, the fastidious refusal to be or do any limited thing“
(299). Sebastian has been sinking deeper and deeper into the condition
LukAcs terms “bad infinity.“ Unable to realize his ideal self-image,
Sebastian disdains to undertake any endeavor which might give proof of
his limitations or imperfections. But at the root of the pride is
shame: the pride is a morbid fear of vulgarity. It makes Sebastian,
like Mr. James Duffy in Joyce's Dubliners, a “painful case.“

It also keeps Pater uncomfortable amidst the “thriving genius“ of
London life. Pater's resolution of this “practical dilemma“ is telling.

Sebastian's body follows the lead of mind and will. Intellectual breeds

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physical consumption. Sebastian flees to a desolate house on the
seashore. There he could “make ‘equation' between himself and what was
not himself, and set things in order, in preparation towards such
deliberate and final change in his manner of living as circumstances so
clearly necessitated“ (300). Seeking to extricate himself from the net
of circumstances which have effected an intolerable disequilibrium in a
once happy child, Sebastian retreats to an even greater distance. It is
a last-ditch attempt to wall out the world and restore an original
equilibrium. But a storm rises, the rain comes, and the walls of
Holland are threatened. hs Pater writes, the effect of the storm “was a
permanent one: so people might have fancied that an enemy had indeed cut
the dykes somewhere“ (300). The storm which Pater's Renaissance had
unleashed had cut a permanent gash in his defenses.

When the storm subsides, Sebastian is found dead in an upper room
of the house, with a living child swaddled in his heavy furs. The
reader is given to understand that Sebastian lost his life in saving the
child. Typically, Pater does not bother with the realistic details of
how Sebastian could have carried the child to safety if he had himself
been drowned in the flood. He ends with an equally mysterious smear of
pathos worthy of Gautier. The family doctor comforts Sebastian's mother
that her child would have died anyway, ere many years had passed. He'd
have been consumed by a “disease then coming into the world . . .
begotten by the fogs“--waters “not in their place“ but displaced “above
the firmament“--on “people grown somewhat over-delicate in their nature
by the effects of modern luxury“ (300).

Again, how much of Pater's brooding he fully understood is
impossible to say. Bloom's remark that anyone who understood the
dialectic of style as magnificently as Pater did needs no psychoanalytic
reduction is worth recalling here. The frequency with which Pater
alludes to the “transmutation of forces“ would seem to bear Bloom out.
Pater's wide-ranging knowledge of the French tradition, moreover, his

reading of Swinburne and Rossetti, and his exposure to the writings of

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his own more daring disciples might argue for a very subtly crafted
consciousness in such polyvalent language. Again, however, I am
inclined to think that Pater's elaborate refinements functioned as much
to obscure as to probe his intuitions. To that extent, they do indeed
hover at the threshold of wish-fulfillment. But to admit into
consciousness the full significance of such phrases as “waters not in
their place“ but displaced “above the firmament“ would be to allow for
precisely the sort of inundation Holland's dykes are constructed to
prevent. The symbolic point of the portrait's conclusion is not self-
discovery, I think, but selfepreservation: the salvation of the child
from the rising tide of competing forces, both sexual and social, that
no amount of distance or defensive reasoning could effectively shut out.

Certainly the point is not, as Iser asserts, that inasmuch as all
of the subjects of Pater's portraits who act to end their suffering die
in the moment of taking action, action offers no effective solution to
the problem of aesthetic alienation. On the contrary, the insight which
emerges from the portraits is that no amount of thinking, imagining, or
reconfiguring alone can release the aesthete from confinement. As
Sartre's existentialism would confirm, it is only by acting that the
aesthete ceases to be passively defined by forces outside himself and
begins, positively, to realize a determinate identity in response to
those forces-—come what may. The aesthete must act either to extricate
himself from oppressive circumstances or to save himself from the void
of isolation. Sebastian's action is both evasive and, ultimately,
effective. Not quite the gratuitous action which liberates, it is
rather the necessary action which frees him from obsessive self-
absorption and realizes a bond of human affection and responsibility
that cannot be reduced to self-assertion. Though it kills the diseased
Sebastian, it liberates the healthy child.

That the fears which consumed Pater, and against which he erected
his intricate walls, have not been killed his next portrait makes

abundantly clear. Published in October 1886, “Denys l'huxerrois“ begins

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with a questioning of the value of any attempt to restore a mythical
consciousness to people who, after all, must live not in myth but in
history, and are in fact defined by their historical consciousness.
Though Pater begins by questioning the “advantage of the return to us of
a condition of life in which, by the nature of the case, the values of
things would, so to speak, lie wholly in their surfaces, unless we could
regain also the childish consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, in
ourselves, to take all that adroitly and with the appropriate lightness
of heart“ (Imaginary Portraits 263), the qualified phrasing of the
question anticipates the answer. Quite aside from the fact that Pater
is perpetuating a modern misapprehension of pagan myth as a matter of
“unconscious“ surfaces, in the case of Denys l'huxerrois, the return,
after a brief interlude of rejuvenation, has catastrophic results.
Pater's exploration of the possibility of return betrays both a longing
for release from the constraints imposed by historical consciousness and
a deep fear of the rising tide of sexual and social forces which the
coming of Dionysus swells to rupture the feudal order in thirteenth-
century huxerre. Turning from history to myth for a legitimizing
principle to support his yearning for heightened experience, Pater's
aesthetic hypothesis, tested out in the portraits, collapses under the
weight of historical reality. In the discourse of “Denys l'Auxerrois,“
Pater seeks and forecloses yet another possibility. Circling back from
an Apollonian ideal of quiescence which has proved arid and entropic
rather than radiantly static, Pater is driven to the opposite extreme in
Dionysian activity. But just as stasis gives way to entropy, since no
condition can escape the law of change, Dionysian energy devolves into
frenzy, satiety, and finally melancholy. The social forces released in
that devolution, however, prove fatally dangerous.

If the impulse to extinguish all vexatious energies and affections
in the one, absolute, untroubled light of mind has frozen the lively
purpose out of life in “Sebastian,“ Pater's narrator in “Denys“ first

encounters the figure of Dionysus frozen in a “large and brilliant

166

fragment of stained glass“ (266). The fragment is part of a series of
scenes also depicted in a set of tapestries owned by a priest in a
neighboring village. They include the building of an organ, and the
figure of Dionysus is that of the organ-builder, called Denys. He is
introduced as a “flaxen and flowery creature, sometimes wellnigh naked
among the vine-leaves, sometimes muffled in skins against the cold,
sometimes in the dress of a monk, but always with a strong impress of
real character and incident from the veritable streets of Auxerre“
(267). From the beginning, Pater means to keep his mythic figure firmly
situated in history. That is the point of the portrait: to test out
the Dionysian possibility in history.

Even before the narrator pieces Denys' story together, we are
given one salient fact. The figure is a tortured one. From the notes
in the priest's library and study of the tapestries, the narrator is
able to reconstruct the events which took place in Auxerre at the time
of the god's return. Those events coincide with completion of the
building of the cathedral of Saint Etienne. The reliefs which adorn its
western portals display a “feeling for reality . . . caught . . . from
the ardent and full-veined existence then current in [the] actual
streets and houses“ of Auxerre. What they reflect is a political
movement breaking out in various French towns and threatening to turn
“their narrow, feudal institutions into a free, communistic life.“ This
political stir is closely connected with the “assertion of individual
freedom“ and long after associated with the figure who “was the very
genius . . . of that new, free, generous manner in art, active and
potent as a living creature“ (268). From the unearthing of a Greek
flask redolent with the “riotous and earthy heat of old paganism
itself,“ a sort of golden age begins. The triumphant completion of the
church coincides with a series of remarkable wine seasons. Even in
“poor men's cottages,“ “fine and abundant“ wine is stored up. A new
beauty and gaiety branch out from the arts into a “reign of quiet,
delighted labour“ (268-69).

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Pater equivocates about whether the arrival of the god is a cause
or an effect of the renascence in Auxerre. Clearly, however, it is into
a receptive atmosphere that he comes. The child of a country girl
impregnated by the Count of Auxerre who flees the manor during a storm,
gives premature birth, and is killed by a strike of lightning, Denys
makes his appearance at an ecclesiastical ceremony in the church. With
his arrival and participation, the ceremony turns into a spirited game.
Men and women, old and young alike, catch Denys' spirited playfulness
and freewheeling charm. A “revolution in the temper and manner“ of the
individual citizens of Auxerre concurs with the movement then afoot “for
the liberation of the commune from its old feudal superiors.“

Gradually, Denys turns the “grave, slow movement of politic heads into a
wild social license“ (271).

An “unrivalled gardener,“ Denys keeps a stall in the town and
heads up processions in which, eventually, the “little people,“ the
“discontented“ and the “despairing,“ speak their minds. As “one man
engaged with another in talk in the market-place,“ a “new influence came
forth at the contact; another and another adhered“ until “at last a new
spirit was abroad everywhere“ (271).

At the height of a social scene suggestive of utopian socialism,
however, this agent provocateur's troubles begin. We are told that his
sympathy for odd, misshapen children and animals of all kinds turns upon
him, though we are not told how exactly. The fairness and freshness
preserved by simple living are corrupted by an appetite for “dark wine
and brown meat“ (273). Denys makes strange disappearances, flees
briefly to Marseilles when winter approaches, and returns the more
corrupt for his exposure to port life there among the sailors. Though
the artists of Auxerre have learned from him an “art supplementary to
their own,--that gay magic, namely (art or trick) of his existence“
(274), over him a darkness has grown. He has lost something of his
gentleness, and there is speculation that he will make himself Count of

Auxerre, by marriage to the widowed Countess.

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A wise monk of the town remembers reading about how the wine-god
has his “dark or antipathetic side; was like a double creature, of two
natures, difficult or impossible to harmonise“--like the wine of
Auxerre, at its best Chainette, at its worst Higraine (274). As Denys
becomes, for “all his flaxen fairness,“ more and more “manifestly a
sufferer,“ the townspeople degenerate into coarseness, satiety, and
savagery. Crimes occur of which Denys is suspected. The monk, Hermes,
now recalls that the wine-god was said to have been in hell. After the
fat years, lean years come. In a “time of scarcity“ now, the “working
people might not eat and drink of the good things they had helped to
store away“ (275).

At last a plot is contrived to ambush and kill Denys for a
sorcerer. He eludes capture, but another remedy is concocted by the
clergy. A neglected patron saint is to be exhumed and a shrine provided
for it. Important church dignitaries gather and King Lewis himself
arrives for the exhumation. Sight of the shrunken body shocks the
madness out of Denys, but he is left a “subdued, silent, melancholy
creature“ and retreats to sanctuary among the monks of Saint Germain
(276).

The craftsmanship of the monks reflects the three successive
phases of Denys' “humours.“ There is first “wild gaiety, exuberant in a
wreathing of life-like imageries, from which nothing really present in
nature was excluded“ (276). That gives way to “obscure regions of the
satiric, the grotesque and coarse.“ And from that second phase emerges,
“with no loss of power or effect, a well-assured seriousness, somewhat
jealous and exclusive, not so much in the selection of the material
. . . as in the precise sort of expression that should be induced upon
it“ (277).

That characterization might as well be applied to the course of
Pater's writing. On his own descent into those “obscure regions of the
satiric, the grotesque and coarse“ Pater had imposed a sort of “well-

assured seriousness“ which maintains “jealous“ control of the impression

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it will give. In Pater's discourse as in the monks' embellishments of
the church facade, it is “as if the gay old pagan world had been blessed
in some way“ (277). The blessing is all effect, however, and the
synthetic result is precisely what the monks are crafting: a facade.

Again, erotic impulses--along with social “licentiousness“--have
been sublimated and sacralized. While the monks are crafting their
refinements, Denys is working to “attain the instruments of a freer and
more various sacred music than had been in use hitherto“ (277). Though
it is in a sacred music that Denys seeks to combine the three “humours“
or “modes,“ it is still a condition of musical fluidity that the god
aspires to. And it is still the music of reeds and pipes--the music of
nature, not of disembodied mind or spirit as in the music of strings.
Indeed, Apollo, “lord of the strings,“ seems to “look askance on the
music of the reed, in all the jealousy with which he put Harsyas to
death so cruelly“ (278). In building his organ, Denys combines “first,
the simple and pastoral, the homely note of the pipe . . . [and] then,
the wild, savage din, that had cost so much to quiet [in] people . . .
[and had driven] excitable people mad.“ These he “composes“ to “sweeter
purposes“ (277), creating an unmistakably new music. It's the music of
Modernism, sublimated impulses to sexual and social liberation, “all the
various modes of the power of the pipe, tamed, ruled, united“ (278).
Out of potential anarchy, this Dionysian figure has constructed harmony.
The “obscure regions“ have been safely submerged in a new cultural
order. And now the progress of the town can advance unimpeded.

Thus occupied, Denys has seemingly been forgotten by his enemies.
In the town, the bishop has come to bless the foundation of a new
bridge. In the midst of this enterprise, the skeleton of a child is
uncovered as a vestige of the superstitious belief that, “by way of
vicarious substitution, its death would secure the safety of all who
should pass over.“ It prompts those present at the invocation to look
for a similar “pledge of security,“ which is found just then in the

sight of Denys on a rock above the river. He plunges to safety in the

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river, and though the townspeople think him now gone forever, he is in
fact back at work “upon his house of reeds and pipes“ (278). When the
old “fits“ come on, he digs graves and is sometimes glimpsed weeping
over his work.

Meanwhile, with the marriage of the Lady Ariane of the house of
Auxerre to the heir of the house of Chastellux, the feudal order is
restored and assured. Unbeknownst to the people, Denys makes the
organ's debut in the church. Author and performer are forgotten in the
people's delight with the music. A civic festival follows the religious
ceremony and Auxerre welcomes its new lord.

In a “rude popular pageant“ which is to conclude the festival at
nightfall, Denys takes upon himself the part of Winter, to be hunted
blindfold through the streets. Though his identity is unknown to the
people, the narrator interpolates, “It might restore his popularity:
who could tell?“ In donning the rough clothes, however, Denys scratches
his lip on a “point of haircloth.“ The “sight of the blood trickling
upon his chin transports the spectators with a kind of mad rage.“ He
must be the scapegoat for the impulses released and then frustrated.
Denys is torn to pieces. Shreds of his flesh are stuck in the men's
caps, fixed by hairpins borrowed from the women. Thus a piece of that
figure long after associated with the movement to turn “their narrow,
feudal institutions into a free, communistic life“ is appropriated by
the various individuals. All that is left is his heart, brought by some
sympathetic person to the monk, “still entire.“ Hermes buries it “under
a stone, marked with a cross, in a dark corner of the cathedral aisle“
(280).

Such is the fate of the mythic wine-god resituated in a French
town at the beginning of the Renaissance. Expelled in the interests of
civic order, agricultural prosperity, and commercial progress, his
sacrifice contemplated as a “pledge of security,“ he is finally devoured
by the “evil passions“ earlier unleashed by his influence on the people.

The moral is clear: better to forgo liberation for oneself than to

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legitimize the impulse to throw off the constraints imposed by
historical consciousness in the people. “So the figure in the stained
glass explained itself“ (280).

Another possibility has been foreclosed, another death incurred.
The tone of Pater's conclusion is wistful. “To me,“ the narrator
confesses, “Denys seemed to have been a real resident at Auxerre.“ Like
Sebastian van Storck, Pater has always lived out his ideas--if only in
his writing. “On days of a certain atmosphere . . . I seemed actually
to have seen the tortured figure there--to have met Denys l'Auxerrois in
the streets“ (280). Pater has never written about any figure with whom
he did not deeply identify. In projecting himself into those streets,
he has reconfigured his own drama. He is the tortured one; he has known
the torment of one accused of misleading the young men of the nation.

For the sake of harmony and stability, moreover, he has in the end
been sacrificed. Though Denys is not buried alive entire, like the
child of an earlier time, his dismemberment is a “pledge of security“
inasmuch as it expels the threat of anarchy from the community. Though
a piece of him has indeed been dispersed among the young men about to
cut a figure in the artistic scene of the 1890s, Pater has in fact been
torn apart by his own conflict: between the “fitful“ desire to escape
his confinement, on the one hand, a “morbid fear of vulgarity“ and of
the vulgar masses, on the other. All that has been left intact is the
yearning heart. It, very sadly, is buried away under a stone, its pagan
joy marked with the heavy cross of chastened suffering, and secreted in
a dark corner of the cathedral aisle, for “pedestrian“ feet to walk
upon. And in the end, his entire figure is frozen in stained glass.

Again, now in the realm of myth, Pater's aesthetic hypothesis
collapses under the weight of historical reality. In the fourth
portrait written during the first two years of Pater's residence in
London, Duke Carl of Rosenmold will be unearthed to try one more avenue
of escape: enlightenment and cultural renewal in eighteenth-century

Germany. What the discourse of that portrait discloses, however, is

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that programs for cultural renewal conceived in the secret discipline of
the private study are not effective, let alone transformative.

With foreclosure of that last possibility, Pater's interment will
be sealed. A “passion of which the outlets are sealed“ will indeed, by
the law of the “transmutation of forces,“ become perverted. Pater's
necrophiliac tendencies are fully evident in the subjects who linger
long and lovingly over the corpses of young men beautiful in premature
death. The most overt expression of that tendency appears in “Emerald
Uthwart,“ not written until 1892. In the Lacedaemon chapter of Plato
and Platonism, as in the unfinished Gaston do Latour and several other
essays and reviews, Pater's sadomasochistic tendencies are clearly
discernible as well.

In his last portrait, “Apollo in Picardy,“ however, something even
more disturbing emerges. Those “obscure regions“ triumphantly submerged
in “Denys“ erupt again, this time in the “Northern Apollo“ whose light
Duke Carl had been unsuccessful in spreading. The idea of a mythical
method by which order can be imposed on the materials of modern disorder
is exposed as profoundly problematic. Under the influence of the
“Northern Apollo,“ the repressive order erected against the Dionysian
potential for sexual frenzy and social anarchy is shattered. Fear of
anarchy unleashes the demon of fascism. Licentiousness breaks forth not
in the vulgar masses, but amongst the watch-dogs of the people.

Pearsome desires projected onto the people are unleashed among those
licensed to keep the people in line. Again, art as projection--the
mythical method--becomes the basis for an aesthetic of fascism: desire
unrestrained, degenerating into sadomasochistic perversion.

Having undergone a reactionary conversion, Pater at last explodes.
The facade of “well-assured seriousness“ is finally ruptured with
destructive rather than liberating force. The spider spinning his
defensive web becomes the weevil consuming the objects of repressed
desire. Reaction gives way to regression, and Pater's infantile,

imperial self emerges to mirror the imperial center with which he has

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come to identify, though it has been his tormenter. Fear of the masses
drives him into the embrace of the iron master. Unable to escape the
torturer, he identifies with it and in turn becomes the torturer as well
as the tortured.

Nor is there any sight to shock the madness out of Prior Saint-
Jean. Though his defenses are shattered, his visions are too
frightening to allow for lucidity. The last alternative to death--
actual, sexual, or social--the future, is inconceivable. The will to
blindness fractures insight. The totality will be denied.

“Duke Carl of Rosenmold“ was published in Hacmillan's Magazine in
Hay of 1887. It is not one of Pater's more successful efforts. The
conclusion reads like an addendum explaining what he had meant to do.

He had “tried to embody in the portrait“ the aspirations of all those
obscure precursors to Goethe whose desire for the “Aufklfirung“ was a
sort of “forecast of capacity“ awakening others to the “permanent
reality of a poetic ideal in human life“ (Imaginary Portraits 320-21).
But as he reduces Arnoldian cultural ideals to incense in “Coleridge's
Writings,“ he reduces the “age of genius . . . centered in Goethe“ to an
“amiable figure.“ The figure is admired in a scene witnessed by
Goethe's mother and related to a friend:
There, skated my son, like an arrow among the groups. Away he
went over the ice like a son of the gods. Anything so
beautiful is not to be seen now. I clapped my hands for joy.
Never shall I forget him as he darted out from one arch of the
bridge, and in again under the other, the wind carrying the
train behind him as he flew.
Pater is simply hovering there on the edge of wish-fulfillment, enjoying
the prospect. His last sentence reads, “In that amiable figure I seem
to see the fulfilment of the Resurgam on Carl's empty coffin--the
aspiring soul of Carl himself, in freedom and effective, at last“ (321).

“Duke Carl,“ then, is a portrayal of longing, not free and not
effective. What keeps Carl's aspirations fettered and ineffective is
his incapacity to act beyond the realm of surfaces. Carl imagines that

he can transform the oppressive duchy of Rosenmold by altering its

cultural accoutreuents. The disposition of his remains, uprooted

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together with a great tree in a storm, tells a different story. It
confirms the fate of the young duke who had tried to bring the
Aufklfirung to Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He
had disappeared from the world “when a great army passed over those
parts, at a political crisis, one result of which was the final
absorption of his small territory in a neighbouring dominion“ (301).

Carl's story is that of a quest. A Sapphic ode discovered in-
Conrad Celtes' 1486 work, Ars Versificandi, gives expression to Carl's
aspiration: “Ad Apollinem, ut ab Italis cum lyra ad Germanos veniat“
(303). Celtes' verses bring for Carl a “beam of effectual daylight to a
whole magazine of observation, fancy, desire, stored up from the first
impressions of childhood“ (304). Carl's mission is to be the instrument
.of Apollo's coming. The medium is art. With respect to art, however,
Carl has a “large appetite and little to feed on“ (306).

Initially, he feeds on the florid, artificial, and “perhaps third-
rate“ art of France and the court of “Lewis the Fourteenth.“ In the
music of Sebastian Bach he hears the first notes of an art not borrowed
from France. Though he “gladdens others by an intellectual radiance“
and displays his cultural ideal in an operatic production featuring the
“hyperborean Apollo, sojourning, in the revolutions of time, in the
sluggish north for a season,“ the borrowed light ceases to “mean warmth
or animation for himself“ (309). It is still to be sought--in France,
in Italy, above all in Greece. Longing to travel thence prompts him to
ever more wide-ranging expeditions into the German countryside. Despite
its wholesome influence, Carl has fits of gloom caught from the funereal
court. “Yes! people were prosaic,“ he feels, “and their lives
threadbare“ (310).

As his discontent deepens, people begin to think him a little mad
and he grows suspicious of flatterers, wishing to test their sincerity.
That impulse engenders a scheme to fake his own death and witness his
own funeral. An elaborate charade is staged. “The lad, with his full

red lips and open blue eyes, coming as with a great cup in his hands to

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life's feast,“ revolts from the heavy trappings of death “as from
suffocation“ (311). Death seems to him the enemy that dogs his
footsteps; not death simply, however, but death “from assassination“
(312).
To elude that enemy, he undergoes the artifice of death and is
thus free to pursue his cultural ideal. The faked death has a real
consequence, however. The young duke “would never again be quite so
near people's lives as in the past.“ Thereafter he would be a “fitful,
intermittent visitor-~almost as if he had been properly dead“ (313). In
awakening to the elusive ideal, he has died to the real people around
him. In going underground himself, Pater had cut himself loose to roam
the precincts of his imagination.
Fleeing the world from which he has thus alienated himself, Duke
Carl gets no farther than the Rhine country before he realizes that, for
him, the light of France, of Italy, and Hellas is “here!“--in his own
country--and in the recognition of its own “untried spiritual
possibilities.“ The “ideal land“ is transferred “out of space . . .
into future time, whither he must be the leader.“ The real need is for
an “interpreter--Apollo, illuminant rather as the revealer than as the
bringer of light“ (315).
Carl thus comes into Pater's vocation as critic. And Pater here
defines the role John Morley saw him as playing in Victorian society.
The way to be instrumental in ushering in a new classicism is by the
action of informing thought upon the vast accumulated material
of which Germany was in possession: art, poetry, fiction, an
entire imaginative world, following reasonably upon a deeper
understanding of the past, of nature, of one's self. To
understand, would be the indispensable first step towards the
enlargement of the great past, of one's little present, by
criticism, by imagination. (316)

Carl's aspiration now is to find in those cultural materials the

“historic soul of Germany“ and to create a new national culture. He

suffers for want of “coadjutors,“ however, and is as yet unaware of the

central tenet of Pater's aesthetic historicism: that any “historic

soul“ he might discover would be “but an arbitrary substitution, a

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generous loan of one's self“ (316-17). Thus history is again reduced to
projection of the art historian's own desires. He will find what he is
looking for in himself, and project it into history.

The same will be true of his efforts to interpret the “mystic soul
of Nature,“ the next task to which Carl turns. While thus engaged, out
upon the mountain slopes, he is met by court functionaries carrying the
news of his grandfather the grand-duke's death. Already on his way home
spiritually, he hastens home for real now, with real longing for the
“homeliness of true old Germany!“ (318).

He returns also to the true German “wild-grown beauty“ and
“natural majesty“ of the beggar-maid he will make his consort in a
gesture toward his “new poetic code: ‘Go straight to lifel'“ Thus he
has found his way to Pater's own aesthetic hypothesis. The new
classicism is, after all, yet another romanticism. Life and love are
the “real adventure,“ in comparison with which his previous efforts at
artistic renewal “seemed childish theatricalities, fit only to cheat a
little the profound ennui of actual life“ (318-19).

Testing out his new code, Carl puts his betrothed to a little
love-test taking her out to a supposedly haunted grange, where he joins
her to await the priest who will marry them. Meanwhile, however, some
of those people from whose real lives he had removed himself are
involved in quite other plans. In “actual life,“ “traitorous old
councillors“ at court are “discussing terms for the final absorption of
the duchy“ with the commanders of a “victorious host making its way
across Northern Germany“ (320).

Time passes. What comes at last to the grange is not the priest
and certain select companions to witness the ceremony. What comes is
the “storm of the victorious army.“ Out of their “intolerable
confinement and suspense,“ the lovers “flee into the tumult . . . dead-
set upon them“ (320). The values which Pater had in common with the
Bloomsbury Group--pursuit of intellectual truth, aesthetic emotion, and

interpersonal relationships--prove inadequate to the situation, as the

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children of Bloomsbury found them to be when Hitler invaded
Czechoslovakia in 1938. The weight of history not factored into Carl's
cultural equation quite literally crushes the lovers to death, mangling
their comely forms. Not looked for, it was not foreseen. As Pater's
final portrait confirms, the consequences of such selective vision can
be catastrophic.

It is important to be aware that “Apollo in Picardy,“ published in
November 1893, follows completion of Pater's Plato and Platonism: A
Series of Lectures, published in February 1893. The four portraits
written between 1885 and 1887 were collected and published as Imaginary
Portraits in 1887. Pater moved back “home“ to Oxford in 1893. Plato
and Platonism earned Pater congratulations and a degree of acceptance
from Jowett, the man who had labeled him a “demoralising moraliser.“
The book ends with a recommendation to love the “intellectually
astringent, well-drilled, patiently achieved ‘dry beauty' that it shows
Plato himself to have recommended and, against the instincts of his
temperament, achieved“ (Levey 197). The emphasis on patience is an
allusion to Flaubert's definition of genius. Pater referred to it
often. The recommendation is that mode of Pater's aesthetic hypothesis
taken up by the Modernists in the wake of the disastrous experience of
the aesthetes of the '90s.

It is ironic, however, that a work such as Plato and Platonism
should have been condoned, if not acclaimed as a piece of classical
scholarship, whereas The Renaissance had unleashed a storm of
reprobation. Its very austerity might be said to represent the apex of
perversion in Pater. The repressive order it sanctions is what had
driven Pater to the brink of frenzy in “Denys l'Auxerrois.“ Sanction it
as he did in Plato and Platonism, Pater nevertheless found it
unendurable.

From its imperial center, Pater was driven back to the garden
which was his personal and spiritual home but which truly was

inaccessible to him except in the most violently distorted forms

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conceived by a diseased imagination. Roses are displaced by mangled
bodies and blue hyacinths. The Dionysian potential erupts in the
“Northern Apollo“ who must rather slay than love the desired Hyacinth.
Revealing him as still locked in violent conflict between the Apollonian
and Dionysian extremes, Pater's discourse also reveals that protofascism
and frenzy are but two sides of the same coin, as are Eliot's order and
Lawrence's “hysteria.“ A repressive order nurtures the very desires it
is intended to constrain.

The lecture on Lacedaemon included in Plato and Platonism
represents the moment when capitulation and defeat for Pater become the
absorption of his little duchy by a larger and more powerful dominion.
The walls of his sanctuary have become thin and porous. He has begun to
identify with the imperial forces ranged against him at Oxford.
Outsiders--women and “Hoopers“--pose a greater threat to the polity than
the masters do to the slaves who labor there. Oxford is, Pater seems to
say, an ideal order after all, really resembling the “Platonic City of
the Perfect.“

Plato's City of the Perfect, Pater asserts, would have begun where
Lacedaemon had left off. And so he invites the reader to see Lacedaemon
for himself, the better to “realise . . . the physiognomy of Plato's
theoretic building“ (Plato and Platonism 202). House Beautiful is
undergoing yet another, and more alarming, transformation--from hospital
into imperial fortress. Unfortunately, it bears a strong resemblance to
Victorian England in general, the English public school system in
particular.

The country in which Lacedaemon is centered, Laconia, is a
“country carefully made the most of by the labour of serfs.“ It is a
land where the slavery is “far more relentlessly organised according to
law than'anywhere else in Greece“ (203). The slaves are not foreigners
but Greeks, countrymen, and they enjoy “that kind of well-being which
. . . [comes] of organisation, from the order and regularity of system.“

In fact, they thrive, “under something of the same discipline which had

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made [their] masters the masters also of all Greece“ (204-05). Thriving
is a risky business, though, since the young nobles of Lacedaemon, who
seldom see the slaves otherwise, have a tradition of making night-time
expeditions into the countryside to murder any slave who, “under a
wholesome mode of life, was grown too tall, or too handsome, or too
fruitful a father, to feel quite like a slave“ (205).

This sort of thing is to be excused, however, inasmuch as the
young lords are as hard on themselves as they are on the slaves. The
polity itself is

before all things an organised place of discipline, an
organised opportunity also, for youth, for the sort of youth
that knew how to command by serving--a constant exhibition of
youthful courage, youthful self-respect, yet above all of true
youthful docility; youth thus committing itself absolutely,
soul and body, to a corporate sentiment in its very sports.
(205-06)
Although a self-denying humor prevails among Lacedaemonians with respect
to sensuous experience and hence to aesthetic influences, it is not
because they are insensitive to such pleasures. Rather, they subject
the aesthetic response to a Doric mode which is both martial and
religious. Thus all deities here “put on a martial habit“ (213). This
Doric style reflects the polity's geographical situation. Though the
landscape is perhaps the “loveliest in Greece,“ the “expression of a
luxurious lowland is duly checked by the severity of its mountain
barriers“ (207). A “half-military, half-monastic spirit“ prevails in
this “so gravely beautiful place“ as a result of its formerly
beleaguered position (218).

Now that the polity has grown strong, however, and no longer feels
threatened by outside forces, it maintains its Doric mode of life--its
“moral and political system,“ its slavery, “its discipline, its
aesthetic and other scruples, its peculiar moral flea S“ “--as an “end in
itself,“ in short, as “an ideal“ (218). That ideal informs Lacedaemon's
educational system in particular. It is a “strictly public education,“

one with a “very clearly defined programme, conservative of ancient

traditional and unwritten rules, an aristocratic education for the few,

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the liberales--‘liberals,'“ Pater says, “in that proper sense of the
word“ (219). This education aims “aesthetically at the expression“ and
“ethically . . . at the reality“ of “reserved power“ (221). In line
with that aim, the youth are taught to govern themselves. In a system
of government by monitors, whips and rods have a great part. The pain
thus inflicted is “dignified by rules of art.“ The effect of ritualized
flogging is a kind of refinement. Pater's phrasing here is also
characterized by a kind of refinement. Pain dignified by rules of art
makes the young aristocrats “observant of the minutest direction in
those musical exercises, wherein eye and ear and voice and foot are all
alike combined“ (206). Presumably, then, it sharpens the sensitivity
required for delicate coordination. Elsewhere, however, Pater speaks of
“pain-fugues“ played on the nerves.

Even so, this Doric ideal, maintained like an art, for its own
sake, belongs to a “cheerful“ as well as a martial and religious people.
“More closely even than their . . . scrupulous neighbors,“ they
associate that state which the educational system serves with a
“religious sanction“ (226). And their religion is “above all a religion
of sanity,“ sanity consisting of a “harmony of functions.“ Hence
Apollo, “sanest of the national gods,“ is the tribal god of Lacedaemon
(227). The Lacedaemonian Apollo is one whose mental powers are exalted.
Youthful and unmarried, he is also the god of a people whose unsurpassed
beauty is a distinctly male beauty, “far remote from feminine
tenderness“ (222). What Apollo's worship amounts to for the citizen of
Lacedaemon, Pater concludes, is “Honour, friendship, loyalty to the
ideal of the past, [and] himself as a work of art!“ (232-33).

It's an encomium worthy of Charles Shadwell as provost. It's a
harmony Pater rescued from the threatening undercurrents of “Denys.“
It's a worship of “proportion“ that drove Septimus Smith out of a window
and Clarissa Dalloway to a chaste, narrow privacy in a room of her own.
It's a sanity that nearly drove Pater mad. And it's an ideal that Pater

could not endure.

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Yet endure it he did. In enduring it not only, but submitting to
it and identifying with it--largely out of fear, fear of character
assassination within the citadel, fear of coarseness and vulgarity
without--he laid himself open to precisely what the “Northern Apollo“
experiences in “Apollo in Picardy.“ That last portrait takes a good
look at the “northern sun-god“ revered by the Lacedaemonians when he
travels northward in actuality, carrying within himself a “titanic
regret.“ What the Apollo in Picardy portrays is a god with “titanic
revolt in his heart, and [a] consequent inversion at times of his old
beneficent and properly solar doings.“ “For his favours,“ Pater writes
in the opening paragraphs, “his fallacious good-humour, which has in
truth a touch of malign magic about it, he makes men pay sometimes a
terrible price, and is in fact a devil!“ (Imaginary Portraits 373)
Behind the facade of a martial mode tempered by religious sanctity and
cheerfulness, a malign magic lurks.

In this final portrait, Pater abandons the surface, indeed at his
peril; really descending into the depths of his prolonged neurosis. The
blaze of new light this Apollo brings reveals “a hundred truths
unguessed at before, yet a curse . . . to its receiver.“ From the
moment of Apollo's approach, the Lacedaemonian ideal of sanity is
threatened. The truths revealed are a curse to their receiver “in
dividing hopelessly against itself the well-ordered kingdom of his
thought“ (374). And the doubts cast on the treatises being written in a
medieval recess doubly fortified by town and monastic walls read like a
commentary on Pater's own lectures in Plato and Platonism.

From the summit of the monastic tower, one can glimpse the “green
breadth of Normandy and Picardy,“ feel on one's face the “free air of a
still wider realm beyond what was seen,“ and catch sight of the flowers.
Though some ordinary monkish souls are stirred with desire to be sent on
duty there, Prior Saint-Jean shudders at the view and is glad he has

never been exposed to the “tricks of nature“ written about by the “whole

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crew of miscreant poets“ such as Ovid (37S). Thither, however, he is
sent, and he does indeed undergo metamorphosis.

Sent to Picardy to repair his health, taxed by long devotion to
the abstract sciences, the Prior takes with him Hyacinth, pet of the
monastic community, and together they descend into the valley. Though
it is November, the scent of “surviving summer blossoms“ is in the air,
and the pair's arrival is marked by thunder and northern lights which
seem to score the sky with brilliant music. Unable to sleep, the Prior
climbs a stair to the solar where the farm produce is stored and
discovers the sleeping form of a “lordly” serf, roughly dressed but
accoutred also with harp and bow.

A sense of holiday irregularity releases in the Prior a boyish
health and gaiety. A tonsured porter explains that the remarkable
peasant is not a bond-servant, but a hireling who comes and goes as he
pleases. His name is Apollyon, and the music of his harp keeps the
“hard taxed workmen literally in tune“ (379). Superintending completion
of a great monastic barn, the Prior finds his taste in architecture
changing under the influence of Apollyon. The structure of his body
changes too. The temple which had “housed his cunning, overwrought and
excitable soul“ acquires both health and, beyond that, a “positive
force“ (380-81).

“Regulars,“ “creatures of rule,“ the Prior and young Hyacinth have
in fact for the first time in their lives “come into contact with the
power of untutored natural impulse“ and “natural inspiration“ in
Apollyon (381). For his part, though he abhors the spectacle of
distress and demonstrates healing powers, Apollyon is nevertheless also
a thief, a “homocide,“ and a spreader of infection. The touch of his
hand is deathly cold. His healing powers are unnatural. The villagers
have seen him scattering seeds of disease till his serpent-bag is
emptied.

Under his influence, Hyacinth acquires a boyish appetite for
sport. With Apollyon's silver bow, he shoots a bird on the wing,

 

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shedding blood for the first time. Apollyon also enjoys such sport. He
plays roughly with the wild creatures, and breaks them when he tires of
his play. Though a marvelous shepherd, he is too wild to resemble the
“good shepherd“--too much a part of the “irredeemable natural world“
(383) the Prior had earlier dreaded exposure to and is now coming to
terms with.

When Apollyon wantonly, savagely, and cruelly kills the birds in
the monks' pigeonhouse--leaving “broken backs, rent away limbs, pierced
. . . wings“ and his silver harp “lying broken . . . on the sanded
floor, soaking in the pale milky blood and torn plumage“ (383)--the
Prior frees the great bell and summons the devout to midnight Mass. The
sanctuary is filled with unnaturally blooming flowers, however, which
later seem to have grown into and over the Prior's brain, “degrading the
scientific and abstract outlines of things into a tangle of useless
ornament“ (384). Though Apollyon comes as a penitent, he brings a lamb
for an offering and his harping of the Gloria is so seductive that the
Prior breaks off the service, leaving the sacred office unconsummated.

Prior Saint-Jean and his young assistant get back to work on the
final book of his twelve-volume treatise. When Apollyon joins them in
the scriptorium, however, he astonishes them by leaping ahead of their
thoughts: “from facts to luminous doctrine“ (385). He knows the
classical language as living speech. Now all the Prior's abstract laws
desert him. He begins to see phenomena directly in the physical
universe, unmediated by canonical concepts. Trying to get down his
insights in writing, he finds the lightning flashes too intense. They
flit capriciously, are baffling strokes, flashes of blindness--giving
wings to flowers and human limbs and faces to stars. He is transported
to the point of exhaustion.

Meanwhile, the heat of summer has come on suddenly. In the hands
of a dead villager Hyacinth finds a discus. “Devil's penny-pieces“ the
people call them (387). Apollyon knows their use. He challenges
Hyacinth to strip in the night heat and sport with him. As the dead

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villager is carried to his grave, the night changes, growing moonless
and cold. The discus, let fly in the night, “saws through the boy's
face, uplifted in the dark to trace it,“ and crushes in the “tender
skull upon the brain.“ For a moment, the boy's “immense cry“ seems to
restore the immense power of the “half-extinguished deity“ (388).
Fearing suspicion himself, Apollyon departs the next day, leaving
the Prior to bear the suspicion. Blue flowers after the night's rain
are like “remnants of the blue sky itself“ fallen into the valley.
Officers of justice come to apprehend the Prior. He is accused of
murdering Hyacinth in a fit of mania induced by dissolute living. “One
hitherto so prosperous in life would, of course,“ Pater interpolates,
“have his enemies“ (389). Monastic authorities intervene, however, and
treat the Prior for madness in a cheerful apartment from whence he can
still see the country. Despite the tragic course of events there
unfolded, the one desire which occasionally reanimates the Prior is to
return to the scene of “his“ crime.
Ostensibly at work on the final volume of his great work, the
Prior never again sets pen to paper, for he is “consistent and clear now
on nothing save that longing to be once more at the Grange, that he may
get well, or die and be well so“ (389-90). Some of the brethren liken
him to the “damned spirit . . . saying ‘I will return to the house
whence I came out.'“ “Gazing thither daily for many hours,“ Pater
concludes the portrait,
he would mistake more blue distance, when that was visible,
for blue flowers, for hyacinths, and wept at the sight; though
blue, as he observed, was the colour of Holy Mary's gown on
the illuminated page, the colour of hope, of merciful
omnipresent deity. The . . . permission [to return] came with
difficulty, just too late. Brother Saint-Jean died, standing
upright with an effort to gaze forth once more, amid the
preparations for his departure. (390)
Having, through the borrowed agency of Apollyon, slain Hyacinth in
an orgiastic moment of brutalizing desire, the Prior dies in effect
saying “Give me my sin again.“ Having identified with the Lacedaemonian

lords in Plato and Platonism, both as rulers and as receivers of the

refined pleasure of whips and rods, Pater has reached an extreme of

 

185

wish-fulfillment taking him to the verge of manslaughter here. Eight
months before his death in July 1894, the course of his imaginative
explorations has run from desire for liberation to culmination of the
sadomasochistic tendency: identification of torturer and tortured. For
the dull ache of longing is substituted the sharp thrill of pain.

It is not a pretty conclusion to the history of Pater's aspiration
to dwell in the House Beautiful of art. House Beautiful has become, by
turns, a hospital, an imperial fortress, and at last an asylum for the
criminally insane. There is lodged a “damned spirit . . . saying ‘I
will return to the house whence I came out.'“ But though Pater had
ventured that far in “Apollo in Picardy,“ he could still see no more
than his own torturously frustrated desire.

Baudelaire understood the dynamics of sadomasochistic desire in a
way that Pater never could and never would. Whereas he met the logic of
ontological floating, outward from subject to endlessly displaced
object, with a determined resistance rooted in theological categories,
Pater's relativistic “modern spirit“ left him “consistent and clear
. . . on nothing“ save longing tempered by insipid hope in the color of
Hary's blue gown, whilst he wept with more self-pity than remorse.

It is a pathetic conclusion to a sadly thwarted life. Had Pater,
the aesthete--one who perceives--been able to see more than his own
endlessly deferred desire, the desire he tracked so obsessively to its
twisted conclusion, he might have become more aware of how the forces
emanating from the imperial center had directed, thwarted, and perverted
his desire from childhood onwards. He might have been able to escape
aesthetic confinement and find his way out of what Lawrence calls the
“narcissus-masturbation enclosure“ into that larger breadth of a world
he had always been impelled to seek. He might have been able to make
himself at home in that world had he not been locked in the conflict
that made his own body a prison and a place of torment.

The important point now, however, is that the imperial centers a

century later have more invasive and more pervasive media than classical

 

186

studies and art by which to manipulate desire and keep the subjects of
that manipulation so uncomfortable with themselves as they are or could
be--potent forces in their own right--that they are unable to see just
how they actually figure in a world of competing polities and corporate
bodies. It is the culmination of Pater's fixation on forms and surfaces

in our own contemporary history that makes his history important.

Chapter V. The Worst of All Possible Worlds: Indeterminacy
within a Closed System and a Discourse of Impotence

He was so foolish, so wasteful, never at peace with himself. And
now where would he go? And what did he care that he wasted her?
He had no religion; it was all for the moment's attraction that he
cared, nothing else, nothing deeper. . . .

He shook hands and left her at the door of her cousin's house.
When he turned away he felt the last hold for him had gone. The
town, as he sat upon the car, stretched away over the bay of
railway, a level fume of lights. Beyond the town the country,
little smouldering spots for more towns--the sea--the night--on
and on! And he had no place in it! Whatever spot he stood on,
there he stood alone. From his breast, from his mouth, sprang the
endless space, and it was there behind him, everywhere. The
people hurrying along the streets offered no obstruction to the
void in which he found himself. They were small shadows whose
footsteps and voices could be heard, but in each of them the same
night, the same silence. . . . He could not bear it. On every
side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a
spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be
extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out,
beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went
spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace,
there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny
and daunted. . . .

“Mother!“ he whispered--“mother!“

She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all
this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. . . .

But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked
towards the city's gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his
mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the
darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming,
glowing town, quickly.

--D.H. Lawrence, “Derelict,“ Sons and Lovers (1913)

I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
Orphic, delicate
Dionysos of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment's orgasm of rupture,

Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning,

And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
A new gasp of further isolation,

A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,
The fibres of the heart parting one after the other

And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied
Like a flame blown whiter and whiter

In a deeper and deeper darkness

Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

187

188

So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples
The distilled essence of hell.
The exquisite odour of leave-taking.
Jamque vale!
Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.
Each soul departing with its own isolation,
Strangest of all strange companions,
and best. . . .

--D.H. Lawrence, “Medlars and Serb-Apples“ (1921)

Never trust the artist, trust the tale.

--D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American
Literature (1923)

In Pornography and Obscenity, written in 1929, a year before his
death in 1930, D.H. Lawrence comes very close to forestating my thesis.
He identifies there the problem of enclosure within the “narcissus-
masturbation circle.“ At the center of the circle is the “dirty little
secret“ of sex which afflicts “perhaps the most fatally and nervously,“
Lawrence suggests, the “most high-flown sex-emancipated young people
today.“ Many people do not want to get out of the “vicious circle of
self-enclosure,“ Lawrence argues, for if they did “there would be
nothing left to come out“ (459).

For those who do, Lawrence urges two ways. The first anticipates
comedian Lenny Bruce. One must “fight the sentimental lie of purity and
the dirty little secret“ wherever one meets it, inside oneself or in the
world outside. The second is, in the “adventure of self-consciousness,“
to discover the limits of oneself and become aware of something beyond
oneself. “A man must be self-conscious enough to know his own limits,“
Lawrence writes, “and to be aware of that which surpasses him“ (459).

Here Lawrence and I begin to diverge, for Lawrence identifies that
which surpasses the self as a mysterious life force urging him to “smash
up the vast lie of the world“ so as to make the “very great reality“ of
freedom possible. Lawrence is right: freedom is a very great reality:
and it does mean “freedom from lies.“ But the vast lie of the world is

not so easily smashed, no matter how strong Lawrence's infantile

 

189

impulse. More importantly, Lawrence does not fully confront the
historically specifiable forces in the social world which perpetuate the
lie of oneself and of one's “all-importance.“ Kill the vast lie of the
social world, Lawrence argues, the “lie of purity and the dirty little
secret,“ and all the other monstrous lies which lurk under the cloak of
that “one primary lie“ will be disarmed, including the “lie of money“
(460).

What Lawrence does not reckon with here is just how profitable the
lies are. In a time when the names of popular magazines reflect a
narrowing of consciousness from Life to People to Us to Self, we have
seen the lies perpetuated by their enormous profitability and the
expanding network of communication systems available to extend their
profitability. Bovarysme has become the stuff of paranational
industries. Even as I wrote that sentence, the telephone rang and a
strange man, purporting to have dialed the wrong number twice, intimated
his frustration at having to defer satisfaction yet a third time.
Clearly, in some ways--albeit distorted and often indirect--the “dirty
little secret“ is out. Killing the “purity lie“ has not rendered the
“money-lie“ defenseless.

Despite Lawrence's determination to fight the fight for freedom,
moreover, he was himself unable to escape the vicious circle of self-
enclosure. The only alternative he could conceive to the “intoxication
of loneliness“ was one in which he would remain the privileged term in
the binary opposition of man and woman, both reduced to mysterious life
forces essentially indistinguishable from the great life force which
surpasses them--and into which each, having fused, lapses out again.
Here we must let Lawrence go. He is part of the problem, not the
solution.

At the end of Sons and Lovers, picking up quite where Pater's
aesthetic historicism leaves off, Lawrence cum Paul Morel sets himself
walking toward the “city's gold phosphorescence.“ There, he too offers

a determined resistance to the lure of ego disintegration in Heraclitean

190

flux or ontological floating. He will not float off into space, but
walk resolutely and “quickly“ toward the town, its “humming“ activity as
well as its “glowing“ lights.

He does not find there, however, the kinds of connections he had
lost when he made the turning from his family home and Miriam's door.
He will find only what he is looking for: a mate, a complement to his
searching psyche desiring to ground itself not in the social world but
in his own body and, beyond that, the great life force. He and Frieda
will “come through“ the boundaries of their two selves to maintain a
dynamic “twin star equilibrium“ like that of the Dioscuri Pater looked
to in “Emerald Uthwart.“ The two of them together will play house in
various settings, but never cease to be “derelicts,“ twin stars in
traveling exile.

Neither their marriage nor Frieda's tolerance of Lawrence's
theoretical adventures will cure him, however, of the addiction he
shares with other Modernists going on different adventures in different
forms and styles: that impulse to follow down the “strange lanes of
hell, more and more intensely alone.“ To Pater's manifesto in the
“Conclusion“ Lawrence gives but a small twist when he yearns to journey
on alone, his “soul . . . ever more vividly embodied/Like a flame blown
whiter and whiter/In a deeper and deeper darkness/Ever more exquisite,
distilled in separation.“ As we have seen, to embrace loneliness is to
elude definition. It is also indicative of the sort of discomfort with
oneself displayed in Lawrence's split self-portrait in Lady Chatterley's
Lover, the wheelchair-ridden Clifford giving the lie to Lawrence's
idealized self-image in Mellors. If Lawrence is seeking escape from
self-enclosure, he is going the wrong way.

In the work of Lawrence too, then, where the “obvious marks of
modernism“ (310) are absent if one construes it as Frank Rermode does
mainly in terms of technical innovations, the “physical embodiment of a
decisive modern consciousness“ (Raymond Williams 2) is present. Kermode

remarks that Lawrence's “poems are not like Eliot's, he knew but did not

 

191

imitate the Futurists, he largely ignored the kind of experiments with
presentation and time sequence found in Conrad, and he hated Joyce.“
Whereas the “revolutionary tactics of Dada and the dream images of
Surrealism had no effect on him,“ he “made his own innovations, and
discovered his own tradition.“ The Rainbow and Women in Love are
“closer to George Eliot and Hardy than to the other great experimental
fiction of the time-~Joyce's, Proust's, Rafka's“ (Rermode 310). Though
of course it is necessary to discriminate modernisms, a myopic focus on
form and stylistic innovation tends to make critics insensitive to all
but the most “radical“ breaks with the narrative method native to
Realism. In privileging stream of consciousness over defining social
and historical circumstance, Lawrence takes enormous liberties with
presentation and time sequence, as does Virginia Woolf.

Lawrence figures among the other great names of Modernism,
moreover, in the shift defined by Herbert Read as that from
representational to perceptual or conceptual order. In that shift,
marked by Pater in particular, Impressionism in general, two of the
fundamental features of Modernism are present: the break from
historical time to metahistorical temporality; and the preoccupation
with a fractured inner space which is the subjective correlative of the
discontinuities enforced by the conditions of modern city life, on the
one hand, the conscious repudiation of tradition, on the other.

“There was no Time, only Space,“ Lawrence writes in that
concluding passage of Sons and Lovers. What is left of time is what
space has become there: an extension of consciousness. Both spatial
and historical frameworks are swallowed up in consciousness. And time
specifically is reduced from history to temporality or duration
experienced as variable intervals of consciousness. Again now, not only
history but phenomena existing in space, and indeed human beings
themselves, have been obviated by projection. Consciousness is all.
The mimetic as well as the narrative method has been exchanged for a

mythical method amounting to projection: a rearranging, necessitating

 

192

an erasing, of the details of actual life so as to record the highly
selective or express the highly exclusive needs of consciousness: “what
did he care that he wasted her?“

As Raymond Williams has long reminded us, it is in the experience
of the modern city that that decisive modern consciousness has its
beginnings. Repudiation of that experience as one of “struggle,
indifference, loss of purpose, loss of meaning“ takes an anti-bourgeois
stance in discursive modes destabilizing the “fixed forms of an earlier
period of bourgeois society“ (Williams 239, 130). The “haunting ideal
of a poetic prose“ which was born, for Baudelaire, out of the
“exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable
interrelations“ (Paris Spleen x), gives way to frustration, disgust,
alienation, and ennui. The intoxication of the crowd yields to the
intoxication of loneliness: each soul traveling the strange lanes of
the city, fusing in moments of recognition or identification and
unfusing again in its own isolation, “strangest of all strange
companions, and best.“ The impulse to seek defining and upholding
connections embodied in Paul Morel's resolute movement toward the town
is thwarted by that crowded, competing, and fleeting yet monotonous
surge of life subjected to a forced and artificial production which so
repelled Sebastian van Storck.

Baudelaire's resistance to the destabilizing intoxication is
evidenced perhaps in the tight formal structures by which he turned mud
into gold, mal into fleurs. Destabilization of such fixed forms may
have expressed radical rejection of a life “agitated, exigent,
unsatisfying,“ but no such resistance. From Rimbaud (and Malcolm Lowry)
to T.S. Eliot, resistance gives way to abandonment, defeat, retreat,
finally outright denial and the Pyrrhic triumph of transfiguration: a
“higher and more consistent harmony,“ in Pater's words, the order
achieved by what Blackmur calls the “rationally constructed
imagination.“ Thus art as myth yields to a new Classicism by which

order is imposed on the materials of modern disorder. Using the

 

193

materials of art and art history, the new Classical or mythical method
is “simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and
significance“ to contemporary history dismissed as an “immense panorama
of futility and anarchy.“

The irony of the Modernist discontinuities, of course, is
nostalgia: after the turning away from home and the repudiation of
tradition, the yearning backwards, and that “aesthetic reconstruction“
of the past to which we have been referring as aesthetic historicism.
That tightrope stretched by the avant-garde between moments with no
before or after makes, as we have seen, for an insupportable vertigo.
Fear of falling makes the Modernist cling--if not, as in Pater's case,
to the net of things as they are, albeit idealized-~to the net of things
as they were, also idealized. Hence the “cultural pessimism“ that
Raymond Williams identifies arising from “a conviction that there is
nothing but the past to be won“ (124).

Hence too the process by which the practitioners of “radical“
critique revert to conservative fatalism even as their “radical“
innovations and avant-garde attitudes stabilize as a new orthodoxy. As
we have seen in Pater's case, however, the reversion is often more
extreme than the lame sort of “conservative radicalism“ Carolyn Williams
demonstrates in her commendation of Pater's “radical conservatism.“ The
avant-garde, insulated from the worst shocks of economic crisis, is
seldom forced to confront let alone to engage in “active struggle with
the concrete problems“ of social and economic survival (Caudwell 317).
It is not surprising, then, that as Christopher Caudwell saw more
clearly than Raymond Williams, the Modernists could not take the
“difficult creative road--that of refashioning the categories and
technique of art so that it expresses the new world coming into being
and is part of its realization“ (319).

When real conflict erupts, as Bernardo Bertolucci demonstrates so
clearly in his epic film 1900, the avant-garde will simply go home

again, there to take up the rights and privileges it has traditionally

194

enjoyed. It will seek the sanctuary of its own real defining interests.
That is what Marx's theory of history as the history of class struggle
means. Caudwell ought well to have predicted that, as Victor Paananen
observes in his review of Williams' Politics of Modernism, “Modernism
would give birth to a body of critical theory that would stop progress
toward new art--and thereby impede progress toward ‘the new world'--both
by being canonized as the new orthodoxy in the universities and by
generating a socially blind or even consciously reactionary body of
critical theory“ (499). Thus the practitioners of “radical“ critique
fall back from the avant-garde not merely to “cultural pessimism,“ but
to reaction and retrenchment.

That is how we have arrived at the impasse which Modernism as a
literary mode and the “non-historical fixity of post-modernism“ in
critical theory have represented, and which Williams has attempted to
remove in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (35).
Victor Paananen's review provides a useful recapitulation of Williams'
argument. Picking up where he left off in The Country and the City,
Williams explores the history of Modernism as a literary mode produced
by writers who, having left behind “relationships in depressed,
declining and narrowing communities“ (Williams 131), arrived in the city
as exiles and recorded in their work the experience of the City as a
“loss of belief in the possibility of any meaning or hope for the
future“ (Paananen 496). The techniques which they used to record that
experience, initially innovative and radically anti-bourgeois,
stabilized both as the “most reductive versions of human experience“
ever purveyed‘and as a “determined refusal of any genuinely alternative
social and cultural order“ (Williams 130, 124). Given their position as
exiles, or simply as marginalized bourgeois, the Modernists were not
inclined to see the very real networks of relationship being forged in
neighborhoods, work places, and community centers of all sorts. Their

solipsistically distorted visions, however, ultimately gave rise to a

195

body of critical theory which has dominated thinking in the academy for
several decades now. Williams discriminates that body of theory as
a version, now increasingly false and misleading, of Saussure
in linguistics; a version of individualist human sources and
intentions from Freud and psychoanalysis; a rationalized
abstraction of autonomous systems, which had been the
theoretical defense of those bourgeois dissidents who had
primarily constituted the avant-garde, against not only
bourgeois society but the claims of any active, self-making
(including revolutionary) society. (171)
The effect of Althusserian Structuralism, then, and of Derridean
Deconstruction, as practiced in the academy, has been to preclude the
claims of human agents active in history. What the critical techniques
given currency by the academic industries of Structuralism and
Deconstruction have excluded, Williams argues, is the “socially and
historically specifiable agency of [the] making“ of a text (172).

That is what I have tried to include in my own history of Pater's
discourse because, as I have argued, the problem of aesthetic
historicism there disclosed is too large and too consequential to be
addressed by a discourse of impotence disseminated by academic theorists
“unified,“ like Weimar intellectuals, “only by [their] negations“
(Williams 175). The way out of aesthetic confinement and back onto a
historical ground where effective human agency is again acknowledged
cannot be forged by critics whose techniques render them socially blind.

That a way out be found is imperative, however, for the
consequences of Paterian aestheticism can be seen and need to be
articulated in shocking terms. Children living on the margins of
flourishing social and sexual exchange are driven to kill each other for
a pair of brand-name tennis shoes. Using the techniques of avant-garde
cinema, Madison Avenue advertising producers rearrange the details of
modern life to substitute an idealizing distortion for the reality of a
ghetto basketball court and invade their young viewers' minds with the
viciously seductive message: “You've got the love [of the game], all
you need is the shoes.“ Women are willing to lose all sensation in

their breasts so as, by means of implants, to simulate perfection in the

eye of the perceiver. By comparison, adulteration of the Verdi Requiem

196

to accompany a gentrified suburban jogger who assaults the viewer thus--
“I'll make it real simple. These cushions [in her shoes] get rid of
these cushions [on her thighs]“--is a very minor deformation. What is
at stake here is not high or bourgeois culture, but human agency.
Technology privately owned by shareholders united by their very
positive and very effective resolution to profit by such manipulations
quite literally has the power to control people's minds and possess
people's bodies. Having deconstructed the categories by which to resist
such invasions, academic theorists, playing indiscriminately with
techniques properly specific to Structuralism, Deconstruction, Freudian
psychoanalysis, or even Marxism, leave human beings defenseless against
the onslaughts of technology privately held hostage to the profit
motive.
We cannot even know what is happening to us, let alone how to
fight back. For, as E.P. Thompson writes in his vigorous polemic
against Althusserian Structuralism, The Poverty of Theory,
the advances of historical materialism, its supposed
“knowledge,“ have rested—-it turns out--upon one slender and
rotten epistemological pillar (“empiricism“); when Althusser
submitted this pillar to a stern interrogation it shuddered
and crumbled to dust; and the whole enterprise of historical
materialism collapsed in ruins around it. Not only does it
turn out that men have never “made their own history“ at all
(being only trfiger or vectors of ulterior structural
determinations) but it is also revealed that the enterprise of
historical materialism--the attainment of historical
knowledge--has been misbegotten from the start, since “real“
history is unknowable and cannot be said to exist. (194)
As if the annihilation of history by ideology were not a sufficient
negation, Deconstruction pushes us one step further toward the abyss by
assuring us that as a linguistic construct ideology is in fact no more
than textuality and is, like a text, undecidable. T.S. Eliot need fear
no more: no human voices will wake us; we can drift in peaceful
oblivion. We are all determined by linguistic systems any expression of
which means too much to be deciphered with any determinacy. We are
determined by that which is indeterminable. It is a sad pass to which
the history of Western thought has come--one which looks very much like

a rationale for doing, and indeed saying, nothing.

197

It is the factitiousness of that impasse which Williams seeks to
reveal in The Politics of Modernism and which Thompson explodes in The
Poverty of Theory. In identifying the consequences outside the academy
of the canonization of a reductive version of Modernism within the
academy, Williams both clarifies the problem and points the way toward a
solution. As Paananen summarizes those consequences,
The great cities which produced the Modernist consciousness
became the centers for the creation and transmission of
television programming; what had been the practice and content
of the art of the few major figures of Modernism has, with the
endorsement of the educational system, become the norm for the
media industry. . . . What had been avant-garde practice in
the cinema has returned in the highly effective manipulative
techniques of advertising. What is billed as the “global
village“ of television is nothing of the kind; it is the
domination of a few centers which transmit the modernist
outlook for large profits. (497)

What that Modernist outlook is should require no restatement here.

As for the way beyond it, one must look not only to the
theoretical resources provided by Voloshinov's Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language, Bakhtin's and Medvedev's The Formal Method in
Literary Scholarship, but to the example of critics who, refusing to be
hobbled by chimerical restraints, simply attempt to do what the New
Conformists say cannot be done. The challenge is not to participate in
what Thompson aptly calls “revolutionary psychodramas (in which each
outbids the other in adopting ferocious verbal postures)“ (195). There
is no such thing as a revolutionary criticism. The challenge is, as
Paananen puts it, “to write an applied Marxist criticism“ (498). What
that means, Williams says, is “to see how, in the very detail of
composition, a certain social structure, a certain history, discloses
itself“ (185). What that implies, let me add, is that literature has

something to tell us about our shared historical experience: how we can

both confront and surmount the limits it has placed upon us.

 

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