Pater, Walter (Horatio) - John J. Conlon (essay date 1990)

John J. Conlon (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “Walter Pater and the Art of Misrepresentation,” in Annals of Scholarship, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1990, pp. 165-79.

[In the following essay, Conlon examines several of Pater's “artful misrepresentations” and argues that they were created to more fully present Pater's “imaginative sense of fact.”]

Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf
                    and blind;
But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such
                    a heavy mind!

—Browning, “A Toccata of Galuppi's” (1855)

One immediate problem with the issue of representation/misrepresentation in Victorian art and letters is that it is embedded within the ubiquitous question of authority in Victorian culture: who is to decide what, in criticism, is a representation or a misrepresentation of...

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