Art vs. aestheticism: the case of Walter Pater
by
On a new biography of Pater by Denis Donoghue.
In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life
is almost colourless.
For most of us, the Victorian essayist Walter Pater survives chiefly
as a kind of literary aroma punctuated by a handful of famous
phrases. Having grown up with the astringent qualms of
modernismwhich ostentatiously defined itself in opposition to the
earnest aestheticism of writers such as Pater we are likely to find
that aroma a bit cloying. Few serious modern writers indulged
themselves in prose so effulgently purple as did Pater. His
meticulous adumbrations of mortal things quickened into beauty by
death will strike most contemporary readers as quaint, neurasthenic,
or both. Perhaps the notion that All art constantly aspires towards
the condition of music, as Pater wrote in The School of
Giorgione, is sufficiently abstract and elusive still to occasion
productive meditation. But the idea another of Paters
nuggetsthat Leonardos Mona Lisa is older than the rocks among
which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and
learned the secrets of the grave seems little more than a set-piece
of timid fin-de-siècle morbidity. Even the celebrated apothegm from
the conclusion of The Renaissance, Paters first and most famous
book, is troublesome: To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,
to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life maybe, but for most of
us the scintillations will long ago have been quenched by
too-frequent repetition.
It is a matter of some curiosity, then, that the well-known literary
critic Denis Donoghue should have undertaken a critical biography of
Walter Pater.
Although he has written on a wide range of topics and
figures, including Swift, Emily Dickinson, and the critic R. P.
Blackmur, Donoghue is familiar to most of his readers as a champion of
high modernism and its decidedly un-Pateresque ambitions.
At least, we might have thought them un-Pateresque. It is part of
Donoghues purpose in this book to restore Pater to his place as an
important, though largely unacknowledged, precursor of modernism.
Pater, he writes, gave modern literature its first act. The major
writers achieved their second and third acts by dissenting from him
and from their first selves.
It is not, Donoghue thinks, so much a question of influence as of
presence. He sets out to show that Pater is a shade or trace in
virtually every writer of significance from Hopkins and Wilde to
Ashbery.
In addition to those just named, his roster of Paters literary heirs
includes James, Yeats, Pound, Ford, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Aiken, Hart
Crane, Fitzgerald, Forster, Borges, Stevens, and A. R. Ammons. The
first poem in Yeatss eccentric edition of the Oxford Book of
Modern Verse (1936) is a versified snippet from Paters
expostulation on the Mona Lisa. The mature T. S. Eliot would take
sharp exception to Pater and everything he stood for; indeed, his
essay Arnold and Pater, from 1930, is a locus classicus in
modernisms attack on Victorian aestheticism; but early works such
as Preludes, Portrait of a Lady, and The Love Song of
J. Alfred
Prufrock are instinct with a Pateresque languor, brimming as they
are with personages measuring out lives with coffee spoons while they
come and go talking of Michelangelo.
Similarly, the early Stevens is full of Pateresque themes and
aspirations. Pater certainly does not hold the copyright on the idea
(as Stevens put it in Sunday Morning) that death is the mother of
beauty. But taken in conjunction with complacent peignoirs, late
coffee and oranges, and the holy hush of ancient sacrifice, the
identification of mortality as the condition of beauty assumes a
distinctly Pateresque coloring. Again, Pater was hardly the first to
favor evocation over declaration; but his style of embracing
intimation echoes plainly in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird:
If Donoghue is right, Paters presence
is more than a collection of echoes
and insinuations. Whatever we mean by modernity, he insists, Pater
is an irrefutable part of it.
His first published essay, on Coleridge, in 1866 sounds the
distinctive, disabused note: Modern thought is
distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the relative
spirit in place of the absolute.
To the modern spirit
nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under
certain conditions.
Then, too, Paters interest in French
literature and German aesthetics helped to make English literature
more cosmopolitan, more worldly. And the French element, especially, opened up
exotic new avenues of feeling. In brief, Pater instigated for
English letters something like what such writers as Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, Verlaine, Huysmans, and Mallarmé did for the French. He made
the forbidden, the outlandish, the silent a central literary
preoccupationthough he did so quietly, with the greatest possible
tact. If he was a lover of strange souls (Donoghues subtitle comes
from Paters
essay on Leonardo in The Renaissance), if strangeness and beauty
was his favorite conjunction,
it was for him
a matter of discriminating delectation not
abandonment.
In this respect, he betrays a kinship
with Mallarmé, who advocated painting not the thing itself, but the
effect that it produces, and who once defined poetry as a brief
tearing of silence.
Paters route to exquisiteness was not through absinthe,
hashish, sexual extravagance, or conscious blasphemy, but via a diffident
voraciousness of appreciation.
Nevertheless, despite Paters enormous reserve, there is a direct
line of descent from The Renaissance (which was first published in
1873) to Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
and other such turn-of-the-century manifestations of arty decadence.
Mario Praz was right (in The Romantic Agony, his classic study of the
literature of decadence) to identify Pater as the forerunner of the
Decadent Movement in England.
Not for nothing did Pater expatiate on the fascination
of corruption and the poetic aspects of a countenance tinged with a
deathly pallor. Algernon Swinburne was not only a friend but also a
spiritual brother. Especially in his early years, Pater liked to
think of himself as a champion of pagan virtues. But an underside of
pagan vices clings firmly to Paters prose. G. K. Chesterton
perceptively noted the duality that accompanies the championship of
paganism: A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and
amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for
her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did
the Wise Men of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day,
he is bathing in hot bulls blood, as did Julian the Apostate.
Donoghue duly registers this aspect of Paters legacy,
but he shifts the emphasis: It was Pater, more than Arnold,
Tennyson, or Ruskin, who set modern literature upon its
antitheticalhe would have said its antinomiancourse.
That is to say, Donoghue highlights those elements of Paters achievement
that anticipate the critical, Romantic side of modernism: the side
that exalted art as spiritual armor suited to a secular age
and that found expression (for example) in
Nietzsches dictum that we have art lest we perish from the truth.
(Or Nietzsche againOnly as an aesthetic phenomenon is life and
the world eternally justified.) As it happens, Pater claims us
less through his ideas than through his sensibility, his style. He was
not, Donoghue notes, really learned in the history of art or in any of the
subjects he took upGreek myths, English poetry, Greek philosophy.
Indeed,
Mr. Donoghue has segregated the biographical portion of his story in a
brief life of some seventy pages at the beginning of the book. In
some ways, it is remarkable that he was able to draw it out as long
as he did. Pater extended his discretion even into the minutiae of
his biography: his was a life notable above all for its lack of
incident. We do, however, have the usual official signposts. We know
that he was born Walter Horatio Pater near Stepney in 1839, the
second son and third child of Richard and Maria Pater. A fourth
child, Clara Ann, was born in 1841. Paters father, a surgeon who
catered to the poor, died shortly after Claras birth at the age of
forty-five. The family then moved to Enfield and, later, to
Canterbury. In 1854, Paters mother died, leaving the children in the
care of their aunt Elizabeth. Pater was educated at the Kings
School, Canterbury, and then at Queens College, Oxford, where he
read widely but took an indifferent degree in 1862. While at Oxford he
studied with the great Platonist Benjamin Jowett and came under the
influence of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. He also, like so many
university students then and later, used his college years as an
opportunity to shed his religious faith. By 1859, Donoghue reports,
Paters attitude toward Christianity was frivolous. He was, for
example, overheard to say that it would be great fun to take Holy
Orders without believing a word of Christian doctrine. His effort to
put this scheme into effect was prevented by a friend who wrote to
the Bishop of London, acquainting him with the state of Paters
beliefs.
In 1862, Paters aunt Elizabeth died, and he set up house in London
with Clara and his elder sister, Hester. In 1864, he won a
provisional fellowship to Brasenose College, Oxford. The fellowship
was confirmed the following year, and Pater settled into the
pattern he would maintain for the rest of his life. Cared for by his
maiden sisters, he shuttled quietly between Oxford and London, made
occasional trips to the continent, and devoted himself to reading,
writing, teaching, and aesthetic refinement. His circle of friends included
Edmund Gosse, Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward, the classicist Ingram
Bywater, as well as the influential Oxford don Mark Pattison and his
young wife, twenty-seven years his junior, who are generally thought
to have provided George Eliot with her models for Mr. Casaubon and
Dorothea in Middlemarch. Paters first visit to Italy, in the
summer of 1865, was a revelation. He found in the Renaissance
paintings he saw in Ravenna, Pisa, and Florence the imagery of a
richer, more daring sense of life than any to be seen in Oxford. It
was then that he began to associate the Italian Renaissance with
freedom
and abundant sensuous life. In effect, the Renaissance for Pater
named not a historical period but a state of mind, a promise
of fulfillment.
It is here, just as Paters career is about to begin, that things
get difficult for the biographer. Like his image of Botticelli,
Paters life was almost colourless. Donoghue notes that most people who
write about Pater assume that he must have had more life than
appears, since otherwise he would have to be deemed a freak of
nature. But the record shows that by comparison with his grand
contemporaries, he seems hardly to have lived. Thomas Hardy,
meeting Pater
in London in 1886, noted that his manner was that of
one carrying weighty ideas without spilling them. Deliquescence was
as much a theme in his life as in his work. There are, Donoghue notes,
weeks
or even months in which he seems to have taken his favorite theme of
evanescence and drifted away. We assume that he is still alive, but
the evidence for his breathing is meagre.
Although he was clearly homosexual by disposition, Paters fastidious
naturewhat Christopher Ricks called his greed for finenessforbade
anything so obvious as a
love affair or a sex life.
He was, as Edmund Wilson put it,
one of those semi-monastic types
that the English universities
breed: vowed to an academic discipline but cherishing an
intense originality, painfully repressed and incomplete but in the
narrow field of their art somehow both sound and bold.
In the event, Pater
contented himself with a few passionate friendships and an ardent
contemplation of youthful male beauty wherever it chanced to present
itself. It was a great sorrow to him, a lover of elegance, that he
was himself physically unprepossessing: bald, bulky, and bushy in his
formidable mustachios. Nonetheless, beginning in 1869 Pater dressed
the part of a dandy. Donoghue equips him with top hat, black tailcoat,
silk tie of apple green, dark-striped trousers, yellow gloves, and patent
leather shoes. Pater appears as Mr. Rose in W. H. Mallocks satire The New
Republic (1877): a pale creature, with large moustache,
looking out of the window at the sunset
. [H]e always speaks
in an undertone, and his two topics are self-indulgence and art.
In 1894, the last year of his life, Pater was invited to meet
Mallarmé, who was then lecturing at Oxford. Mallarmé taught English
in a lycée; Paters French was excellent; but the two connoisseurs
of intimation apparently thought it too vulgar actually to speak.
According to one account, they regarded each other in silence, and
were satisfied.
Pater was not entirely without gumption; only he tended to hoard
it for his imagination. The infamous Frank Harriseditor of
the Saturday Review, sexual braggart, and
author of the pornographic fantasy My Life and Loves (four
volumes)is notoriously an unreliable witness. But his anecdote
about Pater has the ring of authenticity:
Not that the change of title really addressed Mrs. Pattisons
criticism. The book, another contemporary reviewer warned,
is not for any beginner to turn to in search of
information. Facts and historical accuracy are not the coin
in which Pater traded. For him, history was a mine to be worked for
the frisson of insight; a certain amount of poetic license only
aided the process.
Perhaps the chief instance of poetic license
concerned the term Renaissance. That Paters conception
of the Renaissance was idiosyncratic is clear first of all from the
topics that he aggregated under the rubric. The book includes
essays on such bona fide Renaissance figures as Pico della Mirandola,
Leonardo, and Michelangelo; his essay on Botticelli did much to
introduce the relatively unknown painter to the public. But the book
also includes pieces on the medieval philosopher and ill-fated lover,
Abelard, and the eighteenth-century art historian and impresario for
the glory that was Greece, Johann Winckelmann.
Pater notes that although interest in the Renaissance mainly lies in
fifteenth-century Italy, he understands the term in a much wider
scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote
that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century. For
him, the Renaissance is a distinctive outbreak of the human spirit
whose defining characteristics include the care for physical beauty,
the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle ages imposed on the heart and the
imagination. Thus it is that although Winckelmann (who had long been
one of Paters culture heroes) was born in 1717, Pater concludes that
he really belongs in spirit to an earlier age by virtue of his
enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for
their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to
the Greek spirit. For Pater, Renaissance was shorthand for a
certain species of aesthetic vibrancy.
It was not necessarily a wholesome vibrancy. Part of what made
Paters debut scandalous was the hothouse atmosphere that he reveled
in: the ripe, over-ripe sensorium that was so distant from the brisk
admonitions of such pragmatic partisans of culture as Matthew Arnold.
Paters fascination with violence and death, with the
interpenetration of death and beauty, was part of that ripeness. In
his essay on Michelangelo, for example, Pater tells us that that
great artist, like all the nobler souls of Italy, is much
occupied with thoughts of the grave, and his true mistress is
deathdeath at first as the worst of all sorrows and
disgraces;
afterwards, death in its high distinction, its detachment
from vulgar needs, the angry stains of life and action escaping fast. For
Pater every genuine love was a kind of Liebestod.
But it was not only the atmosphere of Paters book that shocked
readers. Even more important was the blithe, aesthetic paganism that
was implicit throughout The Renaissance and that Pater explicitly
set forth in his conclusion. Dilating on the splendour of our
experience and its awful brevity, he recommended seizing the moment,
regardless of the consequences: Not the fruit of experience, but
experience itself, is the end. Since a counted number of pulses
only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life, our one chance
lay in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as
possible into the given time. Neither morality nor religion figured
in Paters equation. What mattered was the intensity, the ecstasy of
experience. Consequently, we must grasp at any exquisite passion,
or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to
set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses,
strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the
artists hands, or the face of ones friend. For Pater, the measure
of life was not its adherence to an ideal but the perfection of
self-satisfaction. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to
maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Pleasure, not duty, was
the cardinal imperative. Life was not a continuously unfolding whole
but a series of lyric moments: In a sense it might even be said that
our failure
is to form habits.
Aesthetes embraced Paters expostulation. The young Oscar Wilde
declared that The Renaissance was the golden book of spirit
and sense, the holy writ of beauty. Others were not so enthusiastic.
The Rev. John Wordsworth, a colleague of Paters at Brasenose,
acknowledged the books beauty of style and felicity of thought.
But he objected that the fundamental message of the book was immoral:
I cannot disguise from myself, he wrote in a letter to Pater,
No one was more shocked by the scandal that The Renaissance
precipitated than Pater himself. He did not abandon his aestheticsm.
But he did attempt to modulate it. In the second edition of The
Renaissance he dropped the conclusion altogether. Later, he restored
it, but with cosmetic modifications and a note informing readers that
he had worried that it might possibly mislead some of those young
men into whose hands it might fall. When The Picture of Dorian
Gray was published, Pater took the opportunity to distinguish his
version of Epicureanism from Wildes:
Pater attempted to provide a portrait of the true Epicurean in
Marius the Epicu-
rean (1885), an overwrought, somewhat ponderous
autobiographical novel that describes the spiritual journey of
its hero from paganism to the threshold of Christianity. (Pater much
preferred hovering on the threshold of commitment to actually
embracing any definite faith.) According to Donoghue, the main reason
[for writing the book] was to refute the charge, levelled against
Studies in the History of the Renaissance, that he was a hedonist,
an epicurean andthe implication was clearthat he instructed his
undergraduates at Brasenose to live for pleasure alone.
In fact, Pater did believe in living for pleasure alone. But he
thought that careful discrimination among pleasures redeemed his
aestheticism from vulgar hedonism or immorality.
Did it? In part. Pater would certainly have recoiled in horror from
the crude narcissism and decadence that his work helped to inspire.
But it is not at all clear that George Eliot was mistaken in
castigating his false principles of criticism and false conceptions
of life. Donoghue wishes to resuscitate Pater partly because he thinks
that a Pateresque aestheticism encourages readers to deal with art
on its own terms, as affording an experience valuable in itself.
There are, he writes, some experiences which are best approached
on the assumption that their value is intrinsic. This is certainly
true. And it may be that Paters view of art, as Donoghue claims, can
help to immunize art from ideology. Because he held that art has no
moral design upon us, Pater would have had no patience with efforts
to subject aesthetic experience to politicsor any other external
value.
In its primary aspect, he wrote in The Renaissance, a great
picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play
of sunlight and shadow for
a few moments on the wall or floor.
Yet this is not the whole story. Donoghue writes that the purpose of
art is to offer the distressed soul release, however temporary.
This is not a new theme for him. In his book The Arts Without
Mystery (1984),
for example, Donoghue worried that our commitment to
scientific rationality had drained the arts of their power to enchant
and to kindle the imagination.
He sought to reinstate mystery into
the arts while at the same time distinguishing mystery from mere
bewilderment or mystification. For Donoghue, the artist is most truly
himself when he stands in an antagonistic or (one of his favorite
words) antinomian attitude toward society. Yet this Romanticism is
sharply qualified by prudence, the most un-Romantic of virtues. He
understands that the main business of society cannot countenance the
extravagances that the artistic imagination furnishes.
In his preface to The Renaissance, Pater begins by
seeming to agree with Matthew Arnolds famous definition of
criticism, but he then slyly inverts Arnolds meaning:
Donoghue
rightly notes that Pater looked at an object under the sign of
pleasure, not of truth. He approvingly quotes another critic who
spoke of the disjunction of sensation from judgment in Paters
work. The Paterian imagination, he writes, seeks relations
instead of duties. It follows that Pater practised consciousness
not as a mode of knowledge but as an alternative to knowledge
.
One of the ways in which Pater was antinomian was in his being ready
to think that understanding wasnt everything.
Indeed, his chief concern was his pleasure in
feeling alive. Aesthetic criticism in Paters sense deals not
with objects, works of art, but with the types of feeling they
embodied
. Ontology is displaced by psychology.
Ontology is displaced by psychology: in
other words, what matters
for Pater are states of feeling, not truth.
At the end of his book,
Donoghue acknowledges the risks of aestheticism: triviality, exquisiteness,
solipsism. An additional risk is losing the weight or reality of ones
experience.
T. S. Eliot criticized Pater for propounding a
theory of ethics in the guise of a theory of
art. What he meant was that Paters conception of aesthetic
criticism offered not
a principle of criticism but a way of life. At
the center of that way of life is the imperative to regard all
experience as an occasion for aesthetic delectation: a seemingly
attractive proposition, perhaps, until one realizes that it depends
upon a narcissistic self-absorption that renders every moral demand
negotiable. The sense of freedom is indeed the essence of
aestheticism; but it is the cold and lonely freedom of the isolated
individual. This was something that Kierkegaard exposed with great
clarity in his anatomy of the aesthetic mode of life in Either/Or.
Donoghue tells us that
the part of Aestheticism which should now be recovered
is its concern for the particularity of form in every work
of art.
The problem is that although aestheticism begins by emphasizing form,
it ends by dissolving form into the pleasurable sensations and
pulsations that Pater so valued. In this sense, aestheticism is the
enemy of the intrinsic. Donoghue criticized Eliots essay on Pater as
extravagant and cruel. But Eliot was right: the theory of art
for arts sake is valid in
so far as it can be taken as an exhortation to
the artist to stick to his job; it never was and never
can be valid for the spectator, reader
or auditor.
Notes
Walter Pater, Sandro Botticelli
If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of
the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and
mendaciousness that now comes to us through sciencethe realization
that delusion and error are conditions
of human knowledge and
sensationwould be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead us to
nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our
honesty that helps us avoid such consequences: art as the good will
to appearance.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
he was not an original thinker: virtually every idea he
expressed can be traced to a source in English, French, or German
writers. He is a force in the criticism of these subjects because he
devised a distinctive style of writing about them: the Pateresque, a
new color in the palette.
Donoghues book is an effort to define and nurture that new color, to
recommend it anew as a compensation for the diminishments and losses of
modernity. It is a measure of his eloquence that he succeeds in
rendering the Pateresque at least momentarily plausible; it is a
measure of the limitations of his chosen subject that that
plausibility remains momentary, episodic.
He seemed at times half to realize his own deficiency. Had I
So-and-sos courage and hardihood, he cried once, Id have.
Suddenly the mood changed, the light in the eyes died out, the head
drooped forward again, and with a half smile he added. I might have
been a criminalhe, he, and he moved with little careful steps
across the room to his chair, and sat down.
The problem with Harriss anecdote is that it traps Pater in his
caricature. It may be true; but it is not the whole truth. Such
stories make it difficult to understand the genuine boldness of
Paters work:
to appreciate, for example, the enormous scandal that The
Renaissance caused when it was first published in 1873. Originally
titled Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the slim volume
consists of nine essays, some of which had been already
published in one form or another,
plus a brief preface and (in most editions) a
conclusion. As Paters friend Mrs. Mark Pattison noted in an
otherwise friendly review of the book, the
title is misleading because the historical element is
precisely that which is wanting
. [T]he work is in no wise a
contribution to the history of the Renaissance. Pater took the
point. In subsequent editions it was called by the title we know
today, The Renaissance; Studies in Art and Poetry.
that the concluding pages adequately sum up the philosophy of the
whole; and that that philosophy is an assertion 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.
Nor were Christian clergymen the only critics of Paters hedonism.
The book was widely regarded as an invitation to moral frivolity.
George Eliot spoke for many when she wrote that it was quite
poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions
of life.
A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development
of mans entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for
instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as [does] Mr. Wildes
herohis heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they
canis to lose, or lower, organisation, to become less complex, to
pass from a higher to a lower degree of development
. Lord
Henry, and even more the, from the first, suicidal hero, loses too
much in life to be a true Epicurean.
The arts are on the margin, and it doesnt bother me to say they are
marginal. What bothers me are the absurd claims we make for them. I
want to say the margin is the place for those feelings and
intuitions which daily life doesnt have a place for, and mostly
seems to suppress
. With the arts, people can make
a space for themselves, and fill it with intimations
of freedom and presence.
Pater would have agreed.
What modern art has to do in the
service of culture, he wrote in his essay on Winckelmann,
is so to rearrange the details of modern life, so
to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the
spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom
.
The chief
factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the
intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order.
For us, necessity is
a magic web woven through and through us,
like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating
us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in
it the central forces of
the world. Can art represent men and women
in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least the
equivalent for the sense of freedom?
The real question, for Donoghue as well as for Pater,
is whether that equivalent for the sense of
freedom is anything more than illusion. Does
Paters philosophydoes any
thoroughgoing aestheticismreally leave room for intrinsic value as Donoghue
claims?
To see the object as in itself it really is, has been
justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in
aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing ones object as it
really is, is to know ones own impression as it really is, to
discriminate it, to realise it distinctly
. What is this song or
picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to
me?
[T]he picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in
life or in a book
are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in
speaking of an herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of
affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure.
For Pater, ones own impression trumps meaning. And it is a
curious irony, as the critic Adam Phillips has observed, that
although Pater insists on the value of discrimination and accurate
identification of the critics impressions, his vocabulary is
notably vague. Thus it is that he exploited the invitation of
inexact words: sweet, peculiar, delicate, and above all
strange.
Go to the top of the document.


Comments