[In the following essay, Candido describes Pater's portrait of Jean-Antoine Watteau as radically incorporating multiple layers of perspective. Candido also discusses Pater's inclusion of himself as “editor” in order to demonstrate the impossibility of objective biography.]

An enlightening though largely unacknowledged essay by Charles Whibley, “The Limits of Biography,” appeared in England in 1897 in a periodical entitled The Nineteenth Century.¹ The essay reflects new biographical standards which marked a trend in the later part of the century toward an even more inward vision of the biographical subject than either Carlyle or the American Transcendentalists had provided, a vision not essentially moral or metaphysical (as it was for the Transcendentalists), but rather poetic and imaginative. Here is Whibley on the subject:

the biographer's first necessity is invention rather than knowledge. If he would make a finished portrait of a man, he must treat him as he would treat the hero of a romance; he must imagine the style and habit wherein he lived. He must fill in a thousand blanks from an intuitive sympathy; should he use documents in his study he must suppress them in his work, or pass them by with a hint; thus only will he arrive at a consistent picture, and if he starts from an intelligent point of view is at least likely to approach the truth.²

This statement marks a distinctly revolutionary concept of the function of biography. The genre is profoundly redefined as an “imaginary portrait” with “point of view” as preeminent. Such a concept is a telling reflection of a trend during the last decades of the nineteenth century that defied both Victorian pragmatism as regards art and the standards of “objective” realism which were often revered at the expense of beauty and aesthetic form. Walter Pater was among the most radical aesthetic reformers of his time, not only in his theory of artistic form, but particularly in his approach to biographical writing. One could maintain, for example, that the highly impressionistic portraits in The Renaissance are the full flowering of a special biographical motive which had its embryonic beginnings early in the century in works such as Landor's Imaginary Conversations and Gaskell's Brontë. Although The Renaissance is indisputably a literary work of art criticism (and has been generally treated as such), and although Pater never refers to the portraits contained in the work as biographies but rather as “studies” or “essays,” it is obvious enough that with the exception of the first essay these “studies” were written in the form of brief lives. The portraits of Pico della Mirandola and Winckelmann in particular are fully rounded biographical records. The others, though less systematic, follow in varying degrees the conventional birth-to-death pattern. Moreover, Pater expressly states in his “Preface” that it is through examination of the lives and personalities of individuals—that is, through biography—rather than through the study of the cultural habits, ideas, or artistic movements of an age that the identity and Weltanschauung of that age are most accurately revealed. Pater declares that the questions to be asked are “In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? Where was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste?”³

Pater's aesthetic principles, as he articulates them in the Preface to The Renaissance, provide an important key to his approach to biography, particularly since he never directly wrote down his thoughts about the genre in his various writings. One must conclude from these principles that, like any artistic work, biography is the heightened expression of the author's personal impression of his subject. Since genuine biography (which seeks the inner life of the subject) is necessarily subjective and personal—like all truth—the biographer's unique and individual perception must be regarded as a given. What makes it convincing and palpable is its expression. The biographer's chief aim is to make something of his perception, to capture it in an aesthetically heightened and ordered form. Perception will then become artistic vision; form and substance will become one. For Pater, artistic effect is not a vehicle for reinforcing a larger biographical purpose; it is in itself preeminent. Mode of expression, thematic structure, and tone—all emanating from the biographer's personal perspective—become the biographer's primary concerns and are his chief instruments in depicting his subject.

It is probably because of the strikingly impressionistic quality of Pater's brief lives that critics have shied away from exploring The Renaissance as biography. Indeed, many modern biographical critics would consider Pater's work too radical to be classified in the genre at all. However, Pater obviously considered his role as biographer to be visionary; he believed his vocation was to convey, in Gerald Monsman's words, “neither an artificial value system nor a set of real-life occurrences, but rather an inner vision, a complete dramatis personae of the soul … draw[ing] the same distinction as Rossetti between fact and the artist's imaginative sense of fact.”⁴ Yet, besides shaping the personalities of Pico, du Bellay, or Michelangelo, he also participates in them and in their “spiritual community.” Thus he combines the uniqueness of his own personality and of his empathic faculties with a sympathetic participation in his subject's personality to produce a wholly fresh, synthetic vision. The product is precisely what Whibley was to prescribe: an imagined portrait. Collectively, these imagined Renaissance portraits represent the visible form, the physical embodiment of Pater's ideal spiritual community; they become still points amid the flux, the “consummate type” of Pater's own cultural ideal.

But I would like to consider Pater's brief portrait of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) as revealing a further, even more radical step in Pater's contribution to visionary biography. “A Prince of Court Painters” first appeared in 1885 as a separate piece in Macmillan's Magazine and was then published as the first portrait in Imaginary Portraits (1887). Monsman argues persuasively that after The Renaissance Pater felt confined by the facts of historical personalities in expressing his vision of the ideal aesthetic personality. He needed more freedom “both with respect to external events and also inner motives,” a synthesis he could achieve more fully in completely imaginary portraits.⁵ The life of Pico, for example, has “rough edges and [does] not fit easily into a preconceived fictional pattern of dénouement. Few historical lives do.⁶ And so, Pater began to create his own fictional subjects, even though in the process he placed them in distinct historical contexts—an accomplishment reached only by continued laborious historical research. A series of short imaginary portraits ensued, including “A Child in the House” (1887), “An English Poet” (1878), as well as the full-length historical novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), and those portraits contained in Gaston Latour (1896).

These portraits of fictional personalities bear close resemblance to those in Imaginary Portraits, which also treats the mythical experience and lives of fictional characters—with the notable exception of the portrait of Watteau, the first in the collection. This portrait is unique in the volume insofar as it represents a genre somewhere between the visionary biographies of the earlier Renaissance lives and the wholly imaginary portraits contained in Imaginary Portraits.⁷ And yet, Whibley considered this portrait to be the very model of biographical form and technique. “When Mr. Pater drew his imaginary portrait of Watteau,” he writes,

he excluded from the perfected work all the sketches and experiments which had aided its composition. There was no parade of knowledge or research, and such research as discovered the quality of the artist was held severely in reserve. This, then, is the ideal of biography: an imagined portrait stripped of all that is unessential, into which no detail is introduced without a deliberate choice and a definite intention.⁸

William E. Buckler has remarked that the “essential truth” of Pater's portrait of Watteau “has been confirmed by a century of increasingly sophisticated art history and art criticism,”⁹ and Ruth Child has earlier pointed out that despite the obvious fictional elements of the portrait, one need only consult Friedrich Staub's Das Imaginäre Porträt Walter Paters to be convinced that Pater had “studied the best sources of information, and woven them together skillfully, adhering closely to the facts, and at the same time trying to penetrate the motives that lay underneath them. He has done exactly what is attempted by writers of the modern school of biography: and … has taken scarcely any more liberties than they do.”¹⁰ Child's allusion here to the “modern school of biography” undoubtedly refers to a twentieth-century trend toward rigid scholarly research into every external and psychological “fact” available. Yet it is well that Child qualifies her final statement with “scarcely,” for Pater has taken one very substantial liberty with biographical fact—one involving a major theme of the portrait which lies at the core of its dramatic structure. Pater had the fond hope and some evidence that he was a descendent of Jean-Baptiste Pater, a protegé of Watteau.¹¹ Jean-Baptiste is a prominent figure in “A Prince of Court Painters,” and more importantly, Jean-Baptiste's sister, Marie-Marguerite, is the author of the imaginary journal that comprises the formal structure of the portrait. Pater assigns to Marie-Marguerite a fictional, unrequited love for Watteau, and in so doing introduces an even more intimate connection between his family and the subject of his—or, that is, Marie-Marguerite's—portrait.

Pater thus chose not to ascribe his portrait of Watteau to himself, but rather to the invented personality of the historically real Marie-Marguerite, whose fictionalized feelings and meditations provide an effective framework for a unique perspective of what Pater himself obviously thought to be a pattern of Watteau's character. With a curious double perspective, Pater publicly relegates his own role merely to editor of the journal—the full title of the portrait being “A Prince of Court Painters: Extracts from an Old French Journal.” Although the word “extracts” may imply that the entries of the journal are merely those which remained extant at the time the editor lived, the much stronger implication is that the editor consciously extracted them from a larger body of material, regarding them as most relevant to a fictional point of view, supplanting his own with Marie-Marguerite's; yet as silent and assumed editor he admits his artistic intervention in his contribution toward the fine tuning of that point of view. The portrait thus becomes a kind of visionary biography thrice removed—a biographical portrait of a real person framed by a fictionally edited imaginary journal. Monsman maintains that since Pater makes use of these fictional elements and “distancing” techniques, his primary concern “is not with biography but with the portrayal of an imagined world.”¹² Yet it is clear, it seems to me, that Pater's portrait is an important and provocative experiment in genre, radically exploring the possibilities of artistic biography while also testing the limits of biographical truth. Given the premise, perhaps controversial, that we ought to define the limits of biography in terms of what each age has accepted as biography rather than to define its limits according to a preconceived set of standards, and given the obvious intention of Pater to demonstrate the complexities of point of view and perspective as they affect any struggle to capture a personality, we should find it useful to examine “A Prince of Court Painters” as a genuine attempt to gain insight into the spirit of the subject's life in an ordered, aesthetic form. It is interesting to note that much of the life and personality of Watteau is still shrouded in mystery—even today, despite the fact that we have a fairly complete chronology of the major events of his life. This fact provided Pater a greater challenge and rationale in offering his own version of Watteau's personality in a fashion similar to Whibley's prescription.

Like Marius the Epicurean, “A Prince of Court Painters” depicts its central character as seeking an aesthetic ideal. But unlike Marius' search, which is earnest, thoughtful, and finally consummated, Watteau's is agitated, preoccupied, and never wholly fulfilled. As Marie-Marguerite perceives him, Watteau is continually unable to synthesize the extremes of Valenciennes, his quiet and rather staid Flemish home village, and of the active, convivial, though shallow, life of Paris where he lives most of his adult life as an artist. He eventually becomes aware that great artistic expression, as well as a genuinely happy life for himself, cannot result from his experience in either of these cities alone but must be drawn from his own creative synthesis of the two. So he spends much of his life restlessly darting from one city to the other as if to draw a balance of sustenance from each. Gradually, according to Marie-Marguerite, he begins to invest the shallow elements of Parisian life (i.e., the ornate laces and antiques, the lively social gatherings, the fashionable ladies) with “a wonderful sagacity” inherited from his youthful career as a mason in Valenciennes.¹³ He imposes “an air of real superiority on such things” in his pursuit of “his dream—his dream of a better world than the real one.”¹⁴

But intellectually, Marie-Marguerite's Watteau becomes aware that this dream cannot be realized in the depiction of such superficial objects and studies, despite his abilities to deepen them and give them a “representative or borrowed worth” (256). Yet both his temperament and his love of fame have drawn him inexorably to a love of these objects; they have already become a permanent part of him and he cannot let them go. Nor can “he make a reality his long-pondered journey” (250) to Rome—the city where he would have encountered the aesthetically balanced life he sought. There, as Marie-Marguerite suggests, he would have learned how to give form and substance equal value. Instead, he becomes lost in what Monsman calls “the fragmentation of experience.”¹⁵ Watteau's unhappiness with his predicament is reflected in the restlessness not only of his life but also of his art. Always discontented with himself, he never seems to paint anything completely. Everything seems half finished. Marie-Marguerite writes in her journal: “It is pleasanter to him to sketch and plan than to paint and finish; and he is often out of humour with himself because he cannot project into a picture the life and spirit of his first thought with the crayon” (257).¹⁶

At last Watteau decides to make a journey—but to England, not Rome. Knowing that England is the “veritable home of the consumptive,” Marie-Marguerite regards his move as ominous:

Ah me! I feel it may be the finishing stroke. To have run into the native country of consumption! Strange caprice of that desire to travel, which he has really indulged so little in life—of the restlessness which, they tell men, is itself a symptom of this terrible disease! (259)

As if in fulfillment of her fears, Watteau falls ill on his return from England. Soon after, he dies “after receiving the last sacraments” and after “he had been at work upon a crucifix for the good curé of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he possessed” (262). Monsman attributes a significance to this crucifix which reflects a kind of final attainment of the Ideal: “It is large enough to encompass the soul and its dreams of a world of immortal love; in it we do not see the forms of sense struggling vainly to contain in the narrow sensuousness of the present moment some unmanageable vision.”¹⁷ Yet whatever synthesis Watteau finally does attain, Marie-Marguerite finds that it is inspired solely by the otherworldly, for he has never found contentment in this world. Marie-Marguerite articulates this pathetic fact: “For the rest, bodily exhaustion perhaps, and this new interest in an old friend, have brought him tranquility at last, a tranquility in which he is much occupied with matters of religion. … Yet I know not what there is of a pity which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so strong, turning his face to the wall from the things which most occupy men's lives” (261). Finally, he was able to find happiness only in the denial of the very things to which he had wholly dedicated his life.

Such is the portrait that Marie-Marguerite draws for the reader in her personal journal. It presents the image of Watteau that Pater himself clearly had extracted not only from his research but from his own sympathetic imagination. In order to grasp the more radical elements of Pater's portrait, however—elements that even Whibley would not have acknowledged or grasped as desirable in a biography—it behooves us to analyze the female voice and personality of the narrator as she records her meditations and intermittent encounters with her subject.

In consistently portraying Watteau as too abstractly preoccupied with his quest, too cold and distant in his character to accept close friendships and intimate contact with those around him, Marie-Marguerite suggests that he is temperamentally incapable of accepting the fact that she might be the solution to his restless unhappiness with himself, that she might be the embodiment of the Ideal for which he is seeking. He is so embroiled in the world of flux that he passes her by, along with everything else. At sudden and erratic intervals he is always departing from or returning to Valenciennes, and Marie-Marguerite poignantly sums up her perception of his fragmented relationship with her in an entry marked July 1714: “My own portrait remains unfinished at his sudden departure” (250). He never does, in fact, finish the portrait but leaves it for his protegé, Jean-Baptiste, to finish. Marie-Marguerite finds that because of his frequent and often long absences, she can observe his life only indirectly: “Well! We shall follow his fortunes … at a distance” (240), she laments early on in her diary after Watteau's first departure to Paris. She must base her knowledge of his life in Paris on such inadequate sources as infrequent letters from Watteau himself, rumor, or a few fragmented, second-hand reports from Jean-Baptiste (her vicarious point of contact with her beloved). Indeed, in Watteau's absence, her brother's art becomes “the central interest” (251) of her life. Although it is far inferior to Watteau's art, she finds satisfaction in it because it is her only tangible link to him. Eventually, Marie-Marguerite anticipates her own occasional tragic failures “even in imagination” to recreate what his life must be like in the foreign but convivial and rich life of Paris:

Antony Watteau returned to Paris yesterday. Yes!—Certainly, great heights of achievement would seem to lie before him; access to regions whither one may find it increasingly hard to follow him even in imagination and figure to one's self after what manner his life moves therein. (244)

Fittingly, whether the result of Pater's fictional editing or because Marie-Marguerite herself has ceased writing for a time, the journal entry which follows this discouraging meditation is separated by a span of four whole years.

Eventually, her frustration is so keen that she begins to express it outright—poignantly and tragically:

One's journal, here in one's solitude, is of service at least in this, that it affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience. One puts this and that angry spasm into it, and is delivered from it. (259)

It becomes evident that Marie-Marguerite is as unfulfilled as she perceives Watteau to be, increasingly convinced that if Watteau had only chosen to remain with her, away from both his family's cold and impersonal stone residence and away from the lively but shallow life of Paris, he, as well as she, might have found happiness: “It would have been better for him—he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness—had he remained here, obscure; as it might have been better for me!” (251-252). It is soon clear that each bit of information we learn about Watteau's personality, his life, and his art is told to us by a frustrated lover. We inevitably conclude that Marie-Marguerite's vision is charged with an empathic imagination, filled with fond rationalizations about the causes of Watteau's unhappiness. Is Marie-Marguerite really the “solution” to Watteau's unfulfilled yearnings? One has the strong impression that Marie-Marguerite, taking on the role of “psychobiographer,”¹⁸ on some level knows that her portrait is not merely the result of any “objective” observations of Watteau but also, to some extent, the creation and reflection of her private wishes and frustrations, for Pater persistently invests her portrait with all the impressionistic and indeterminate expressions one typically finds in a personal diary:¹⁹

“As we understand from him …”

“I could fancy myself …”

“Can it be that …?”

“Methinks I see him there …”

“As I may judge …”

“It would seem …”

“It is as if …”

“To persuade myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction …”

Through this narrative voice, which reveals what Leon Edel would regard as a dangerous kind of “transference,”²⁰ Pater has chosen to depict an aesthetically ordered portrait based on his research of a life only sketchily known by art historians. Yet, Pater would say that what Marie-Marguerite does in her diary is nothing more than what he himself or any biographer does, consciously or unconsciously, given the inevitable subjectiveness of personal perspective and of biographical truth. Hers is a highly personal but resolute and unapologetic attempt to impose some kind of intelligent order, some logical sequence and motive, some meaning on the sporadic events, reports, and contacts which pass by her. The very entries in her diary reveal at least an attempt to define and hold still for a time the flux in which she envisions Watteau entangled. While Watteau seems incapable of completing anything or of finding such still points in his own life and in his art, Marie-Marguerite successfully creates her diary as a psychological and artistic instrument of escape from the flux. But it is a positive instrument insofar as she builds a creative structuring all her own. Her personality is an ordering rather than a self-destructive one. Complementing her sympathetic portrait of Watteau, her empathic imagination shapes the events of Watteau's life in accordance with the requirements and injunctions of her psyche. In shaping these events she represents much more fully than does Watteau a positive, determined, and creative force which captures and interprets moments of time—moments in which Watteau seems so embroiled as to be “distant and preoccupied” (247) when confronting his own opportunity to order them. It is as if Marie-Marguerite were the writer to whom she refers who interprets and lends meaning to the tragedy of a bird caught helplessly fluttering from window to window within the confines of a stone church. Although she too is in a sense caught in a tragic situation in her unrequited love, she finally is able through her personal vision to invest her tragedy, as well as what she perceives to be Watteau's, with the composure of a truly aesthetic personality. While Watteau must rely for his consolation on the rites and sentiments of another world and on the creation of a religious object meant for someone else, she has created for herself a permanent, concrete monument of this world from which she can derive sustenance.

Artistically shaping the thematic emphasis, tone, and language of her portrait she lends form and beauty to her perception of Watteau—a perception, though, which the “editor” has further refined. Perhaps the real irony of the portrait is that Marie-Marguerite, an obscure permanent resident of an obscure town, unintentionally portrays herself as the central and most successful artist of the piece rather than the Prince of Court Painters. Her portrait, despite its chronological holes, is at least artistically complete (unlike Watteau's portrait of her), assuming the perhaps justifiable pretense of more palpably revealing Watteau's personality than does his own art.

It is obvious that Pater the “editor” intended the reader of this portrait to feel the kind of illicit thrill one might have in reading a diary meant to be secret—a private vision, teasingly punctuated by long periods of silence. It is a vision whose full meaning only the fictional personality of the narrator can unlock, but which the editor has attempted to interpret for us through his own art of biographical editing and thus through his own sympathetic insight into Watteau. Yet despite its tone and poetic mystery, it also irresistibly invites our own sympathetic participation into the private psyche of the narrator, into the workings of her perception of Watteau's life and personality. Through Pater's portrait, the reader finds a handle, so to speak, on the otherwise historically enigmatic personality and motives of Watteau, but only as they must be filtered through the personality of Marie-Marguerite (who, in turn, often interprets facts filtered by letters and reports from her informant, Jean-Baptiste); the resultant meditations by the narrator are then finally shaped by the supposed “editor” himself. And all of these layers of perspective, of course, are borne out of Pater's own laborious research into the “real,” i.e., historical, facts of Watteau's life. Thus, not surprisingly, our sympathetic participation in the narrator's portrait is by no means solely emotional; it is also aesthetic—detached enough from Marie-Marguerite and her subjective depiction of Watteau to leave us with as strong a sense of the work's beauty and ingeniously crafted form as of its tragedy and pathos.²¹

Clearly, Pater's experiment here radically stretches the limits of biographical truth for his time, and even for our own. Yet the portrait is in itself a testimony to and probing into the very real dilemmas of “point of view” and its relation to biographical “truth.” Pater seems only to be bringing to our attention the varied and complex layers of point of view involved in the act of capturing an inner or poetic truth. Artistically recording and analyzing the life, personality, and motives of any biographical subject involves two important responsibilities and processes of the biographer. The first is the acquiring of the “facts,” through careful research, which may very well turn out to be incomplete, sketchy, or already distilled by very subjective points of view replete with hidden agendas, transferences, or distanced perspectives. The second is the conscious artistic shaping of those distilled facts into a creative “imagined” portrait, one borne inescapably and naturally out of the biographer's own personality and private agendas (i.e., Pater's hope that he was related to Jean-Baptiste), yet one also ordered and synthesized. The editing of a biographical portrait, of course, involves yet more labyrinthine removals from any presumed conception of the “real thing.” Finally, Pater seems to want us to conclude that “the real thing” is not something to be grasped at in biography and is indeed not even a realistic desideratum of biography. Inherent in the tone of Pater's portrait of Watteau is always the unarticulated but bold assumption that the important thing is that the biographer be true to his own sympathetic and empathic perceptions in his creation of a coherent, ordered, and aesthetic vision. Pater would have considered psychological transference on the part of the biographer as natural and inevitably human—and therefore not at all an obstacle to effective biography or portraiture. On the contrary, if the transference is palpable and obvious to the reader, the human perspective and dimension it would assume would lend a further poignancy and beauty to the portrait.²²

The great achievement of Pater's experiment in “A Prince of Court Painters” is not only the unity, beauty, and poignancy of its vision of Watteau, but also the evocation of the limitless complexities of the human sympathetic and empathic imagination, as well as the layers of human perspective as they are inevitably involved in the biographer's task. As such, it is a portrait that challenges some of our own twentieth-century assumptions regarding the feasibility and even desirability of striving for “objective” or “neutral” biography—a goal which Pater must surely have regarded, finally, as chimerical.

Notes

1. (March 1897): 428-436. Charles Whibley (1859-1930) was a scholar, critic, editor, journalist, and a Tory, who was also much admired during his time as a stylist, conversationalist, and accomplished writer of belles lettres. One of his admirers, T. S. Eliot, described him as someone who “wrote chiefly for occasion, either in his monthly commentary on men, events, and current books, or in his essays and prefaces, or sometimes in a lecture” (Charles Whibley: A Memoir. The English Association, Pamphlet No. 80, p. 5). Whibley was the author of Literary Portraits (1904), Essays in Biography [Biographical sketches] (1913), Political Portraits (1914), and Literary Studies (1919), among other works. Charles A. Le Guin only briefly alludes to Whibley's essay on biography, mentioned here, in his article “The Language of Portraiture” in Biography 6:336.

2. “The Limits of Biography,” 435. A segment of Whibley's essay is also found in Biography as an Art, James Clifford, ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962) 107-110.

3. The Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry in Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance, Appreciations, Imaginary Portraits). William E. Buckler, ed. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1986) 73.

4. Walter Pater (Boston, Twayne, 1977) 137.

5. Pater's Portraits: Mythic Patterns in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1967) 63.

6. Ibid, 62-63.

7. Pater's eventual impatience with real-life subjects for his portraits is reflected interestingly also in Watteau's own “reticence about the personality of his sitter,” which Donald Posner notes in Antoine Watteau (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984) “is a reflection of [Watteau's] discomfort with the traditional constraints [i.e., of realism] and demands of portraiture. His imagination was sustained by fantasy, and it was happiest with the fictionalized doings of types,” (245) just as Pater seemed most comfortable with creating his personalities as mythical types than as subjects of “realistic” portraits.

8. “The Limits of Biography,” 435.

9. Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, 42

10. The Aesthetic of Walter Pater (New York: Macmillan, 1900) 112.

11. Paul Barolsky, in Walter Pater's Renaissance (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1987), writes: “When asked if his family was related to that of the painter Jean-Baptiste Pater, [Pater] replied: ‘I think so, I believe so, I always say so.’ The very tone and structure of this utterance—of which the point is that his speech exceeds his grasp—are a perfect emblem of Pater” (4).

12. Pater's Portraits, 100.

13. Posner maintains that it was a popular interpretation of Watteau's works in the nineteenth century to emphasize the melancholy sentiment in his paintings and sketches which “allowed one to attribute a quality of seriousness, of profundity, to images that appear on the surface trivial or pointless in subject. Thus Watteau could be said to have a ‘philosophy’ … which provided the necessary justification for a conviction that the artist has a place among the greatest painters in history” (8).

14. Imaginary Portraits in Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, 256. Subsequent references to “A Prince of Court Painters” are noted parenthetically in the text.

15. Walter Pater, 130.

16. Posner remarks on the erratic nature of Watteau's attempts to complete a work: “… Watteau, unable to satisfy himself, would sometimes efface and re-do completely finished parts of pictures. The artist normally must have had several, maybe many, paintings in different states of completion in his studio at one time. A picture begun after another may have been completed before it, and a picture reworked over a period of many months, perhaps years in some cases, as a whole reflects no precise moment in Watteau's career” (10).

17. Pater's Portraits, 107.

18. For a discussion of the psychobiographer, see Eva Schepeler's “The Biographer's Transference: A Chapter in Psychobiographical Epistemology.” Biography 13: 111-129.

19. Note Pater's own palpable tendency to reveal his private wishes concerning his possible familial connection with Jean-Baptiste Pater. Barolsky observes that in Pater's statement regarding this connection (see ff. 11), it is obvious that Pater “both believes and disbelieves what he argues” (4) just as does Marie-Marguerite here. One cannot help but note, moreover, that a number of books on Watteau must inevitably—as a result of the mystery surrounding Watteau's personal life—also make use of this indeterminate language. Posner, for example, writes this: “Our knowledge of Watteau's private life is necessarily fragmentary. … One might like to imagine him. … There is, however, no evidence of this supposition, and it seems very unlikely that …” (181), etc.

20. See Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York and London: Norton, 1984), which includes a chapter entitled “Transference,” earlier published as “Transference: The Biographer's Dilemma” in Biography 7:283-291.

21. Thomas Wright, in his biography The Life of Walter Pater (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907), writes: “Pater has wrought into the leading facts of Watteau's career a wistful tenderness, and has clothed them with ethereal beauty, forming a picture as delicate and as dreamy almost as Watteau's own beautiful work” (vol. 2, 184). Posner maintains, however, that this traditionally nineteenth-century perception of Watteau (obviously shared by Pater) is not necessarily wholly true since the core of Watteau's art, he feels, is actually “a joyful affirmation of love. … His pictures are robust and virile, full of humour, sometimes bawdy in tone, and the action in them not at all so vague or ambiguous as is usually thought” (8).

22. Leon Edel's premise in his critical writings is, of course, that objective biography is a desideratum and is essentially within the grasp of a good biographer; less effective biographers have succumbed unconsciously to the pitfalls of transference, which usually produces dangerous obstacles to faithful rendering.

    Eva Schepeler indicates, in her article, that developing transferences is almost inevitable on the part of the psychobiographer, but she suggests various practical steps for “professional” psychobiographers to take as correctives in dealing with their feelings of transference, with the hopeful result that they might attain as faithful a rendering of the subject as possible.