SOURCE: “Opening Conclusions” in Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism, Cornell University Press, 1989, pp. 11-37.

My choice to begin with the “Conclusion” is not an empty gesture, though it is a familiar and almost traditional opening gesture in discussions of Pater's work. My reason has little to do with the fact that the “Conclusion” to the 1873 first edition of Studies in the History of the Renaissance was, and is, Pater's most controversial piece, that it inaugurated the career of public notoriety which he both invited and evaded, and that it established him as the inspiration of an elite counterculture whose further elaborations often shocked him, precipitating his lifelong recoil into less and less vivid restatements of his original positions. The “Conclusion” might have been more readily understood (or at least less radically misunderstood) if it had been positioned as an introduction or invocation to the volume, and therefore I want to begin by exposing the several senses in which the essay serves more properly as an introduction than as a conclusion to the volume.

Of course, the “Conclusion” was never written to conclude Studies in the History of the Renaissance—it was written originally to conclude another work altogether. It first appeared in 1868 as the last few paragraphs of Pater's review essay “Poems by William Morris” and was therefore written before all but one of the other essays in the Renaissance volume.¹ But the “Conclusion” should be read as an introduction to Pater's work for reasons more profound than its priority in the chronology of his publication record. Though Pater strategically positions it at the end of his first published volume, and though its title claims the rhetorical function of conveying in summary fashion what has been logically or experientially derived from the volume as a whole, its conclusions instead prefigure and enable all of Pater's “aesthetic criticism,” including the Renaissance studies.

It was necessary for Pater to arrive at these conclusions before even beginning the series of “studies” whose fundamental value depends on circumventing certain philosophical problems that threaten to make any study of history virtually impossible. Before approaching a consideration of history, in other words, Pater had to answer several questions raised in his mind by modern physical science and epistemological philosophy. His particular version of aestheticism is then formulated in the “Conclusion” as Pater's answer to the problems posed by what he there calls “modern thought.” The volume of Renaissance studies, and the inaugural moment of Pater's literary career, are founded on the theoretical position taken in the “Conclusion”: that the problems of modern thought could be solved only by fully acknowledging them, confronting them, and regulating their effects.

Pater's “Conclusion” is still regarded as the major theoretical statement in English of nineteenth-century aestheticism, and yet it is still frequently misunderstood.² The stock literary-historical view of Pater's career has always taken his “Conclusion” as if it represented in its entirety Pater's own conclusions, and perhaps this is as good a reason as any for us to begin there. The popular misreading still takes the essay to be Pater's impassioned statement of his belief in relativism, subjectivism, nihilism, and hedonism—when it is nothing of the kind. Instead, in the “Conclusion” Pater briefly but painstakingly outlines the material and epistemological conclusions drawn by “modern thought,” and then he devotes the full force of his rhetorical, figurative, and philosophical energies to proposing an alternative stance. His formulation of aestheticism is that alternative stance.

It is an irony of literary history that Pater has been repeatedly accused of propounding the very philosophies he meant to expose and combat, but it is an irony with its own interpretable significance. Pater had so thoroughly assimilated the most dangerous “modern thought” of his day that his vigorous and subtle defenses against it, as well as his profound desire to assimilate it to the traditional past of his culture (and therefore to domesticate it), were often missed. In Pater we find a quintessentially “transitional” figure who holds together in an unstable equilibrium ideologies from both sides of what will later come to be seen—and to a great extent was seen even at the time—as a historical divide. Pater is a deeply conservative writer whose conservatism nevertheless had a radical effect, in part because it engaged so closely with its dialectical counterpart. His aestheticism can be fully understood only if we see it in its role as a dialectical response, operating both within and against the forces he outlines in paragraphs one and two of the “Conclusion.”

In these initial paragraphs, Pater distills and generalizes two strands of argument within “modern thought,” embodies them in lushly figurative language, and takes the implications of each to its extreme limits, to the point where the argument dissolves at the boundaries of the articulate. Pater stages in these paragraphs the “passage and dissolution” of mind, body, soul, self, and text. But the rhetorical position he takes toward these paragraphs is neither straightforward nor even simply ironic, but oblique in another way, for he is engaged in conveying the full entangling force of these “modern” arguments while remaining at a distance from them—representing and at the same time disowning the train of thought represented. As Richard Wollheim has correctly suggested, the first two paragraphs of the “Conclusion” should be read as if they were enclosed in quotation marks.³ But whom, then, is Pater quoting, or pretending to quote, and to what end? Why is he engaged in this form of ventriloquism, and what do the projected voices say?

The opening paragraphs of the “Conclusion” are known to more readers, perhaps, than any other passage from Pater's work. In the following two sections I pursue a close reading of these paragraphs in order to recall some already-established territory in Pater studies as well as to introduce a few of the central concepts and strategies of reading that will guide this book.

1. “THAT WHICH IS WITHOUT”

… To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibers, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways. (R, 233-34)

Although it serves generally to frame the essay in its place at the end of the volume, Pater's epigraph, from the Cratylus, must be understood more particularly in relation to what it immediately precedes. Plato characteristically represents the words of Socrates, but in this case Socrates's words themselves quote a fragment of Heraclitus: “Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are moving along and that nothing stands still.” Pater gives the epigraph in its original Greek, inviting translation by the initiated and implying at the same time that he himself is chief among them, for the first two paragraphs of the “Conclusion” in effect “translate” these words of Heraclitus into their nineteenth-century English equivalent. The dense and explicit intertextuality of the epigraph condenses a whole history of voices: Heraclitus and Socrates subsumed, contextualized, and voiced by Plato, whose words in turn are given by Pater as a prefiguration of his own. In this small prefatory gesture, opening with an ancient fragment in order to interpret “modern” thought, Pater almost ostentatiously displays his command of the entire history of Western philosophy, positioning himself at one and the same time at the latest and at the earliest verge of his tradition's written record.

But even more important than Pater's tacit claim to mastery of the tradition is the hint that “modern” thought is not so thoroughly new, but is in many ways only a “modernization” of the classical tradition. The epigraph quietly shows, to those who read Greek, that Pater believes the threat of “modern” thought to be an ancient, a persistent, even a traditional threat. For the present study, this epigraph will serve as a brief introduction to Pater's habit of finding “mythic” recapitulations in the history of thought, since here the latest findings of science and philosophy suggest to him an analogue in Heraclitus.⁴ The epigraph enacts, moreover, one characteristic Paterian strategy of quotation, although the first two paragraphs of the “Conclusion” make use (as we will see) of another, more subtle and pervasive intertextual strategy.

After the first sentence of paragraph one—which briefly and simply announces the subject under scrutiny—Pater begins to explore the extremes of this “tendency of modern thought” by presenting summary arguments meant to characterize entire intellectual disciplines. In the first paragraph, he represents the extreme conclusions of modern physical science, as in the second he will represent the extremes of epistemological philosophy. Here in the first paragraph, life is shown reduced to its “physical basis.”⁵ Within the terms of this discourse, the complexities of life become mere biological “processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.” Here Pater highlights the relation between the methods of a discourse and its effects: the analytical practices of “science” both mimic and describe the perpetual fragmentation of bodies into their constituent “elements.” That sense of perpetual reduction and fragmentation is accompanied by an equally pervasive sense of instability, of constant movement, the Heraclitean “flux” of phenomena in time. The particular form of “perpetual motion” set forth in this first paragraph is the never-ending process of physical bodies “wasting and repairing.”

This paragraph represents the discourse of “objectivity.” To view “life” as purely physical or material—to view “life” as an object of scientific study—depends upon establishing a certain distance between the viewing subject and the object of observation, a figurative “distance” that expresses in spatial terms the disciplinary practices necessary to establish “factual” or “scientific” knowledge. But here this analytical distance is extended by the “long view” of late Victorian, post-Darwinian science. That extremely distant perspective regards change over such vast periods of time that the solidity of physical objects seems only an illusion of our limited, transitory, and human perspective. Transformations taking a lifetime or more may be imagined as happening incrementally at every moment. Within this view there is no small oasis of stability; each moment rushes by, full of decay. In this particular configuration of space and time, distance and speed, we can perhaps see the clash of classical physics and chemistry with evolutionary geology and biology, each with a different view of the constitution of the object of study, the latter involved in a profound contemporary redefinition of historical change.

From the perspective of Pater's immediate literary tradition, it is as if Wordsworth's visionary image of monumental permanence in continuity, the “woods decaying, never to be decayed,” from Book 6 of The Prelude, were represented not as a stable visual image but in an accelerated, time-lapsed moving picture, with each momentary frame implicated in the dissolving process of the whole. Looking back at paragraph one from paragraph two, Pater does seem to see the Wordsworthian illusion of permanence preserved within the discourse of objectivity: “the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest” (R, 234). But here in the midst of paragraph one, Wordsworth's vision is revealed as wishful thinking, the illusion of permanence shattered by a discourse in which physical appearances are not allowed their common deception. Despite “apparent” rest, the truth is “perpetual motion”; all is wastage and dispersal, decomposition and reformation. The elements, forces, “threads” of which each of us is composed, “extend beyond us,” for human life is but a “flamelike” and momentary “concurrence” of forces soon to be dispersed. Despite the allusive literary memorialization granted past life by “the springing of violets from the grave,”⁶ all of human “gesture” is reduced to the one word lodged between “birth” and “death.” Human life occupies a very small space within this view of things; after all, only “a few out of ten thousand combinations” ever result in human form.

The only concept of continuity preserved in the vision of paragraph one lies in the regeneration implicit in nature's constant recycling of elements, but that concept of regeneration makes any particular physical body only an arbitrary and passing combination. The stoic faith—that dead bodies, dispersed into their constituent elements, constantly recombine to form new wholes—can operate as comfort only from a cosmic or a scientific perspective. But from the perspective of Christian humanism—against which this post-Darwinian view contends here—a new body can be no comfort unless it is the same body, for reformation implies as well a change or loss of content, and in the realm of incarnational poetics the “content” of a human body is its soul. Like a scientific version of mythic recurrence, this reincarnational vision of continuity involves so much transformation that it undermines the value of individual identity. In this discourse, any notion of the “self” disappears as irrelevant. This discourse, then, represents a crucial destabilization of the incarnational view, for visible bodies are themselves so unstable that they cannot be confidently seen to “contain” selves or souls.

In other words, the scientifically objective view of physical bodies in time has both epistemological and aesthetic consequences, for it implies that visible form can no longer be trusted to mark stable content. The “outline” of an object marks only our mental effort to believe in permanent form, to “group” elements together momentarily while nevertheless “far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast,” to “fix” the play of forces in some fictive combination we can recognize, “an image of ours,” a figure in the carpet whose “actual threads … pass out beyond it.” These metaphors attempt to implicate two incompatible forms of incoherence: atomism and inextricable interrelation, one as old as Lucretius, the other a characteristic formulation of late Victorian aesthetics and social analysis.⁷ Whether every element or particle is separate from every other, or whether every fiber or thread is woven into an inextricable texture with every other—within the logic, that is, of either metaphor—discrete form is understood to have been imposed by the eye, not to be inherent in the object. Together the metaphors suggest that what the eye can see is the merest mask for the unseen truth: that the chief activity of the world is its speedy decomposition.

With an eye to behold it, the world becomes a text to be read and deciphered, but a text understood to have been written in the very act of reading, composed by the will to envision design. Within the terms of paragraph one, the perception of form has been relegated to the status of personal wish or aesthetic illusion, a myth that modern science dispels with its brutal truth.

2. “THE INWARD WORLD OF THOUGHT AND FEELING”

In the objective framework of paragraph one, then, subjectivity is cast in the role of irrelevant illusion, but in paragraph two the tables are turned. There the experience of the individual perceiving self is taken as primary, but the consequences are the same: the object again loses its definition, and the notion of a stable, unified self dissolves as well. Taken together, these opposite and interlocking discourses seem to suggest that “modern thought” in general—regardless of the specific mental processes or the particular disciplinary methods enforced—tends to dissolve subject and object in relation to one another, correlatively. Pater himself made this destructive correlation vividly clear, in a passage that originally followed paragraph two and thus framed his discussion of “modern thought”:

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.⁸

But the correlative relation of the two paragraphs should be clear even at the beginning of the second paragraph, where a rhetorical turn signals that a different position will be taken toward “modern thought” and prefigures Pater's demonstration that another modern discourse leads to essentially the same conclusions. The blatant parallelism opening each paragraph—“Let us begin … Or if we begin …”—seems unmistakable, yet it has often been missed, along with its important implication that the two opposed discourses present parallel and interlocking hypothetical cases of “passage and dissolution.”

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, and fading of color from the wall—the movement of the shoreside, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest—but the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflection begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—color, odor, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm 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. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting of such moments gone by, 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. (R, 234-36)

To move us “inward” at the beginning of paragraph two, Pater first stages a loss of distance in relation to physical objects. As distance is lost, the definitive marks of the object's “objectivity”—its externality and its wholeness—are perforce lost as well. Without distance between observer and object, there can be no perceivable definition, no “outline”; nor can there be the sense of a “sharp” and “importunate” external reality “outside,” ready to “[call] us out of ourselves.” This is the discourse of the “inside,” of extreme subjectivity. If paragraph one took the extreme long view, paragraph two takes the extreme close view, in which subject and object are one, as the mind becomes the object of its own self-reflexive regard.

With his usual keen attention to etymological nuance, Pater reminds us of the literal significance of “analysis” and of a certain sense in which the scrutiny of mental operations must always tend to “break up” or “loosen” the coherence of the mind and its objects. When “reflection begins to play upon those objects,” they are “loosened” into their separate sensory attributes; their coherence seems to be “suspended like a trick of magic.” Again, as in paragraph one, but here even more explicitly, language “invests” objects with a solidity and coherence they would otherwise lack; names counteract “analysis” by creating the illusion of an overarching wholeness even where none can be directly experienced.

Reflection's “trick of magic” is also a trick of time. As in paragraph one, tropes of fragmentation, reduction, and acceleration express the connection Pater draws between the distance taken on an object and the resulting sense of time. In this case the crux of the equation is the notion of “impressions,” the middle term between mind and object. United in the notion of the impression are the effects of fragmentation and speed, for like the “elements” of paragraph one, the “impressions” of paragraph two represent parts of objects in the perpetual motion of dissolving and “reforming.” And this is a temporal, not spatial, phenomenon: “each of them is limited by time, and … as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also.” Impressions are problematic, in other words, not only because they are mental phenomena rather than physical objects, and not only because they are representatives of parts rather than wholes, but also because they pass so quickly they cannot be grasped. Faster than the “currents” of paragraph one, their passage here is “still more rapid,” the “race of the midstream.”

Behind the words of this paragraph lie the empiricist epistemologies of Locke and Hume, but also and more immediately the critiques of Berkeley and Kant.⁹ Pater seems to grapple here with the difficult notion that the long tradition of empiricist epistemology has undergone a dialectical reversal: a discourse instituted to counteract the classical form of idealism by relying on the evidence of the senses seems to have circled back to enunciate another, subjectivist form of it. And again the clue to this doubleness is the particular notion of the “impression” found in paragraph two. The empiricist sense-impression has been replaced by a subjectivist, idealist “impression” that has only a “relic” of “a sense” left in it, a distant reminder of the sensory experience that stimulated it in the first place. The difference between the empiricist “impression” and the subjectivist “impression” has to do with the one’s relative attention to the object and the other's relative absorption in the mind's own processes. Another way to draw this distinction would be to characterize the traditional empiricist project as an attempt to balance the claims of object and mind through the mediating agency of the “sense-impression.” But here Pater portrays a notion of “impressions” very far from their stimuli in the world of objects. It is true that elsewhere in Pater the notion of the “impression” retains a greater degree of fidelity to the evidence of the senses. In other words, in Pater's explicit unfolding of his own theory of impressionism, the impression retains its empiricist role as the crucial mechanism of internalization from a real outside.¹⁰ But here in paragraph two, where Pater's goal is to portray the extremes of subjectivism, the impression has accordingly lost touch with its objective source.

This second paragraph presents Pater's famous late romantic restatement of the anxious agonies of solipsism. In attempting to provide another response to this problem, the “Conclusion” falls squarely in the philosophical and literary tradition of Johnson kicking a rock to prove Berkeley wrong, of Wordsworth grasping for dear life at the wall.¹¹ Once again Pater places his words at the end of a modern tradition (which itself recapitulates a classical tradition, as his epigraph vigilantly insists). As Wordsworth is more anxious than Johnson, Pater is more anxious than Wordsworth, and at the same time Pater is more familiar with the anxieties of self-consciousness, which are by now a traditional part of his late romantic literary culture. He pushes the literary tradition of romantic epistemology further toward its limits by figuratively expressing the danger as even more acute, reflexive, and involuted.

In Pater's representation of “modern thought,” the mind can no longer resort to a physical, bodily, or common-sense solution: in the first paragraph the “physical basis of life” provided no solid ground, and here in the second no solid object can even be imagined for long. The Wordsworthian wall cannot be reached for its steadying influence, for it is no longer figured “outside,” at the objective distance that makes it available to be grasped. Instead, in the famous Paterian figure, the wall is represented as constitutive of subjectivity, and “personality” has consequently become a figurative prison. The passage in which Pater gives us “the thick wall of personality” behind which each mind keeps “as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world” probably characterizes the extreme subjectivist position as vividly as any in English literature. But it is therefore crucial to recognize that if Pater uses this paragraph to enact his profound understanding of—perhaps even his temptation toward—the position of epistemological nihilism, he holds that position at a hypothetical distance from his own.

What are the consequences of figuring the “wall” as constitutive of subjectivity? Once the wall is figuratively located inside, its effect is to articulate another inside and outside, both figuratively contained within the internal territory of the mind. In the words of the figure, each individual mind is a walled-off, isolated “narrow chamber,” and then inside each already-isolated mind is the solitary figure of a prisoner, a figure for the mind's dream of a world outside. The figure, in other words, is metafigural in structure and content: it depicts multiple and recapitulatory layers of containment, and it represents in spatial form, as a place or “scene,” the essentially figural, aesthetic act through which the mind recreates the world. If the usual account of literary figuration represents the metaphorical figure as having an inside and an outside, a meaning conveyed by a linguistic vehicle or contained in a covering layer, Pater's figure (of the chamber) has another figure (of the prisoner) “inside” it, and that inner figure is a figure for the act of figuration (the mind's “dream of a world”). In bringing the Wordsworthian wall “inside,” making it constitutive of subjectivity instead of a sign of the stabilizing world of external objects, Pater makes a figure for the mind in the act of constructing itself and the world together: both inside and outside have been recontained, both are now understood to be inside. Mind and object in relation to one another—the mind together with its object—is now the object of the mind's representations. Subject and object together have become the revised content or object of consciousness. This important Paterian figure, in other words, represents the tradition of romantic epistemology as metafigural discourse.

This move of metafiguration—in which the mind figuratively steps outside itself in one further self-reflexive gesture, to represent itself in the act of representing itself and the world—provides Pater with a way to slip out of the “prison” of solipsism. On the level of meaning, the gesture is tantamount to the bracketing admission that every perception as well as every utterance is already an aesthetic creation, and on this level the metafigural figure has frequently been associated with literary modernism. Both paragraphs include this modernist avowal that the perception of form is generated in the eye of the beholder, or by language itself. But the figure of the prisoner is metafigural in a particularly spatial way, a figure of what I will be calling “recontainment.” And it will be possible to see why this strategy of recontainment might be appealing when we note that the alternative model of mental activity at work in this paragraph—consciousness figured as “stream”—presents, in several senses, a much graver danger.

Of course, the metaphor of the “stream” of consciousness is the quintessential figure for the temporality of mental experience. As Pater's evocation of Heraclitus reminds us, you cannot step into the same stream twice. But paragraph two of the “Conclusion” gives us the passage of temporal experience in a vastly accelerated version, the “race of the midstream,” moments of experience “in perpetual flight.” By the end of the paragraph, all of experience has been reduced to “a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.” Throughout these first two paragraphs, Pater uses the word “passage” to characterize the Heraclitean “flux,” the perpetual motion of physical and mental phenomena in time, but when the “passage of the blood” succeeds to the “passage and dissolution of impressions” here in paragraph two, the double and triple implications of the word begin to resonate. Here the word calls attention to the inability of the mind to grasp its own experience as that experience passes into the past.

In a certain sense, the problem is the very opposite of solipsism. When the mind turns to reflect upon itself, all it can observe are these “passages” of impressions, until the mind itself seems nothing more than the site of their passage. What, then, is the mind? Can it exert any control over this “drift”? Or is it capable only of registering the impressions as they pass? Is it a site at all, a location, a place? Are there depths below the surface of the “stream,” where invisible things are stored away from the drift? As these questions indicate, this model too has potentially spatial implications as well as temporal ones. Pater described the Kantian issue of the “substantial reality of mind” this way:

What remained of our actual experience was but a stream of impressions over the (supposed but) wholly unknown mental substratum which no act of intuition or reflexion could ever really detect.¹²

“Substantial” and “substratum” suggest the attempt to rationalize a metaphorics of depth to describe mental process, but those implications are more or less refused in paragraph two of the “Conclusion,” where the “relic” of sensory experience floats on the surface of the current as “a tremulous wisp … reforming itself on the stream.” What is really at issue here is the mind's questionable ability to “grasp” or “apprehend,” to “hold” or “contain” anything at all.

Given the problems implied in the figure of the stream in its passage, it may be possible now to see how the figure of the prisoner might be relatively appealing to Pater. Even though that figure represents the “outside” as conjectural, unreal, and dreamlike, still the metafigural logic of the metaphor permits the faith that there is an outside into which the dreamer might wake, the prisoner be freed. The discourse of the “outside” in paragraph one admits of no such more objective realm, whereas the alternative metaphor of the stream in paragraph two questions the ability of the mind to hold or to grasp anything at all. By contrast, the figure of the prisoner depicts the mind in the act of holding on to the faith or “dream” of another world, an outside, objective world.¹³ If it portrays the mind completely isolated and cut off from the world, it also portrays the mind keeping its dream or faith securely inside, as content.

Of course, the figure of impressions in their passage on the stream of consciousness has its own version of this doubleness: if it portrays the mind with no control over what passes through it, it also portrays the mind free, unrestrained, and mobile—the very opposite of solipsistic, immobilized, and imprisoned. The two metaphorical systems are in many ways incommensurate. As in paragraph one, where we found contradictory figures for the incoherence of the material world—atomism and inextricable interrelation—paragraph two reveals contradictory figures for the impossibility of knowing: solipsism and mania, radical containment and radical noncontainment, the metaphorics of the “prisoner” and those of the “passage.” The problem that nothing stays in the mind for very long seems to be the opposite of the problem that nothing can get out, and their juxtaposition and doubleness indicate a confusion about the relation of these models. On the other hand, the ability of each to articulate, at one and the same time, both impediment and capacity suggests the sense in which they may overlap or dialectically interact (on the question of depth, for example). Each model has its aesthetic consequences, but in the largest sense they may be made to work together, each correcting the other in a model of mental activity that escapes the perils of “modern thought.” In the next section of this book, I shall show how Pater constructs this alternative model in elaborating his own discourse of aestheticism.

Finally, it must be noted that Pater stresses the inextricable inter-definition of subject and object not only in the figures for self-consciousness that dominate paragraph two, but also in the relationship that obtains between the two paragraphs. There are two discourses represented here, but together they form one argument, the parts of which interlock logically as well as rhetorically.¹⁴ By relating every subject to its uneasy grounding in “the physical basis of life,” and every object to its uneasy grounding in an isolated and ephemeral subject, Pater presents scientific objectivity and romantic epistemology as two opposing but correlative modes of deriving the radically relativist position at the extremes of “modern thought.” The inevitability of material annihilation makes the self irrelevant; epistemological nihilism makes the world of objects—and finally the mind itself—unknowable. Without at least a provisional outside, there is no inside; without solid objects, there can be no subject; without a provisional other, there is no certainty of “our own elusive inscrutable mistakable self.”¹⁵ Pater's simultaneously late romantic, late Victorian, and early modern position in the English literary tradition may be seen in this intensified awareness that the problem of “objective” knowledge and the problem of “subjectivity” are intractably one and the same problem.

3. AESTHETICISM

Many years later, in writing Marius the Epicurean, Pater attempted to explain more fully the thoughts suggested by his “Conclusion.”¹⁶ At that point he wrote into Marius's character the “peculiar strength” of having “apprehended,” from the very beginning of his career, the possible consequences of “what is termed ‘the subjectivity of knowledge’”:

That is a consideration, indeed, which lies as an element of weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw, at the very foundation of every philosophical account of the universe; which confronts all philosophies at their starting, but with which none have really dealt conclusively, some perhaps not quite sincerely; which those who are not philosophers dissipate by “common,” but unphilosophical, sense, or by religious faith. The peculiar strength of Marius was, to have apprehended this weakness on the threshold of human knowledge, in the whole range of its consequences. (ME I, 137-38)

Certainly Pater understood Marius's “peculiar strength” to be his own. In this section of my argument I want to ask how Pater's aestheticism functions as an “apprehension”—both as grasp, or understanding, and as arrest or halting—of this “weakness” and how it responds to this “weakness” with its own “peculiar strength.” If the problem of “objective” knowledge and the problem of the “subjectivity” of knowledge are, for Pater, correlative problems, then they must be solved correlatively. That is exactly what his theory of aestheticism attempts to do. And the solution depends upon reconstituting, upon new grounds, a provisional objectivity.

Aestheticism, as the suffix implies, proposes itself as a systematic attitude of self-consciousness, a coherent stance or perspective on things, a method of attention. Whether the word accurately refers to a coherent “movement” or not,¹⁷ a coherent account of the method was propounded in English both by Pater and by Wilde. I want to describe here, as succinctly as possible, how I see the method working. I continue to focus on the “Conclusion,” but I shall also begin to range freely among the other essays in which Pater specifically addresses himself to articulating theoretically the function and operation of “aesthetic criticism.”

The “Conclusion” presents an extraordinary texture of metaphorical doubleness and transformation. All the dominant figures of paragraphs one and two are reworked and transvalued in paragraphs three through five. This is one way the discourse of aestheticism answers modern thought in its own terms—figuratively—and the instability of figures here is evidence both of the problem and, dialectically, of its solution. In the “Conclusion,” the systematic transvaluation of figures enacts on the level of form what has been clearly announced on the level of theme: Pater's commitment to engage with and assimilate “modern thought” and then to turn it against itself under the auspices of aestheticism. In his original introduction to the paragraphs that eventually became the “Conclusion,” Pater made it quite clear that the essay would discuss the response provided by “the desire of beauty” to the destructive tendencies of modern philosophy. The “desire of beauty,” Pater wrote, in another of his graphic characterizations of modern thought, is “quickened by the sense of death.”¹⁸ That phrase resonates with his description at the end of the “Conclusion” of the goal and end of the aesthetic attitude: a “quickened, multiplied consciousness.” The essay was framed, then, by phrases describing the aesthetic attitude as “quickened,” which Pater uses to mean both “enlivened” and “accelerated.” And indeed, quickness (as mental mobility) is closely associated with the sense of “life” promised by aestheticism, just as the rapidity of dissolution was associated in the first two paragraphs with “the sense of death.” If we follow a few of these doubling, transformative turns for a moment, we will be able to find out what Pater imagines in a “quickened” and “multiplied” consciousness.

The “moment,” for example, which in paragraphs one and two signified only impermanence, temporal fragmentation, and the vertiginous speed of decay, is transformed in paragraph three into the culmination of a temporal sequence in which beauty and, above all, form is finally achieved:

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,—for that moment only. (R, 236)

Here form is taken at its face value, not dismissed as illusion; it may be accurately perceived, but it is alive and changing every moment, so it must be pursued actively. In the terms of modern thought, experience was portrayed as drastically ephemeral, “all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it”; but Pater's aestheticism proposes that we may in fact “apprehend” that moment if we will only speed up and “fasten” our attention:

How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? (R, 236)

Recommended here is a mental “quickening” that would enable us to keep up with moments in their passage by “passing” along with them, so that our attention could coincide with their brief points of focus. But in addition to the rush to “be present”—in spatial and in temporal terms, to be “there” and to be in the present moment—Pater's aestheticism also promises an active, prehensile and formative capacity to grasp and focus those moments as they pass:

While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment. (R, 237)

Pater's exhortation here means not only that “we may as well” grasp but also that we may do it well—that is, skillfully—though through the years most readers have heard Pater resignedly making the best of a bad situation and have missed the overtone promising skill and strength. This active, prehensile attention, which “may well grasp” and “fix on” moments before they pass, is one answer to the “passage and dissolution” of modern thought.

This notion of mental attachment in the moment allows for tropes of reduction and contraction to be revalued as concentration and stillness—the answering opposite of the rapid mental dissolution of paragraph two. The famous injunction “to burn always with that hard, gemlike flame” may be seen, then, as the culminating moment in Pater's transvaluation of “modern thought.” This figure portrays mental life as intense, concentrated, and pointedly organized, not as fragmentary, chaotic, and dissolute. Because the discourse of modern science in paragraph one had represented the passage of our physical life as “flamelike,” and the discourse of modern philosophy in paragraph two had described impressions that “burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them,” this well-known Paterian figure might literally be said to fight fire with fire. Gerald Monsman, wittily recognizing Pater's gesture of responsiveness here, has remarked that the “hard, gemlike flame” evokes “the spirit of the Bunsen burner” no less than “the spirit of the waxen candle in a holy place.”¹⁹

On the other hand, the aesthetic stance promises not only concentration in the “moment” but also—paradoxically—expansion as well. As a response to the brevity of life, “our one chance lies in expanding that interval”; in that attempt “we may well grasp” at anything “that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment.” In this apparent contradiction, we may once again recognize Pater's attempt to imagine a response to the seemingly opposite problems of modern thought: fragmentation and solipsism. Tropes of contraction and intensity respond to the speed of the “stream” in its “passage,” while tropes of expansion “set the spirit free” from its figurative imprisonment. The paradoxical joining of contraction and expansion is resolvable only in temporal terms, not in spatial terms, as experience—or as literature—not as philosophical systematics. The key here is mobility or movement, shifts in attention that temporalize what was before, invidiously, conceivable only as the spatial figure of the prison. The mind in the act of passing “swiftly from point to point” constantly moves “outside” or “beyond” its former frame of awareness. There is a sense of freedom in this constant activation of a self-consciousness that is now no longer fixated, immobilized, and spatially “contained,” but is constantly moving outside itself, away from one point in time and toward another moment and another point of view.

Pater is proposing a dynamic of attention in which mobility or “quickening” plays off against fixation, “grasp,” or “apprehension.” What we find here, in the terms of our earlier discussion, amounts to a transvaluation of the “passage” as an activity of the shaping mind, interrupted by moments that have themselves been redefined as moments of active focus. As a description of an epistemological strategy, we can begin now to hear in the word “passage” both its musical and its textual senses, for this mental strategy involves a regulated articulation of time's passage in which extended phrases of play are punctuated by moments of “apprehension” or fixity. Responding to the mental chaos engendered by “modern thought,” Pater has created an order by distinguishing the “moments” from their correlative, ongoing, overarching “passages.” This model has the double advantage of marking out brief points of stillness and yet also liberating those moments of focus from any sense of permanent immobilization because they are constantly taken up in an overarching mobility. Both “moment” and “passage” are endowed, in this model, with the conscious shaping power of aesthetic formation.²⁰ And this transvaluation of “moments” and their “passages” (each in itself and in relation to the other) has consequences also for the figure of the “prisoner,” as we have just seen. For now the spatial metaphorics of solipsism can be transformed in successive moments of ecstasy, as consciousness evades entrapment by continually moving outside or beyond its former point of view.

“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” The aesthetic “ecstasy” recommended here—in its literal sense of “standing apart from (oneself)”—is as important to “maintain” as the intensity and concentration of the “hard, gemlike flame.” We may note in passing that this figure of ecstasy also involves an important metaphorical transvaluation of “modern thought”: the essential self as “prisoner” has been succeeded and joined by an overseeing self, standing outside itself. Thus this passage is important because it offers us a way to see what Pater imagined as the “multiplied” consciousness. In one sense I am simply pointing to Pater's embrace of the figure of self-division familiar from romantic epistemology and poetics, but Pater turns it into an active, operating principle with new consequences. Not only does it represent to him a stance that can be actively chosen, taken and retaken moment by moment, rather than suffered, however passionately, but it also creates a space of difference, a figurative gap within consciousness across which an object may be perceivable again. This attempt to recreate a sense of objectivity places Pater directly in the mainstream of Victorian poetics, but his temporalizing of the ecstatic stance represents one of his crucial shifts toward the “modern.”

What is at stake here is recreation of the sense of distance—a figurative and internal distance, to be sure, but one that will serve to reconstitute the grounds of a provisional objectivity. In his description of the aesthetically mobile, experimental state of mind, Pater describes a rhythm of identification and detachment that is, in effect, the mobilization of this internal distance. He cautions, for example, against any “interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves.” But he also warns against static fixation on any one object: “what we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions”; we must “gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded,” and then we must pass on, detaching from one object in order to be receptive to another. At first the object, in its state of “identification” with the self, is practically invisible. But through a process of discrimination it can be distinguished from the perceiving consciousness, and it is through these oscillations in internal distance, these successive acts of identification and detachment, that the object is “objectively” perceivable again. Thus aesthetic experience permits a revised form of knowledge.²¹

We may see in this procedure the embrace of further self-consciousness as a dialectical “remedy” for the ills of self-consciousness itself, and in this sense it is a typically romantic gesture—here especially interesting in its historical sequence after one strain of romantic (Carlylean) and Victorian (Arnoldian) anti-self-consciousness.²² But a better way to specify the literary-historical moment of this strategy would be to take Pater's own cues from the “Conclusion,” where aesthetic “ecstasy” appears as an internalization of “objective” distance. Aestheticism, then, appears as an ironic transvaluation of the stance of scientific objectivity. Not only does the distance established by self-division serve, epistemologically speaking, to reconstitute any object as an “aesthetic object,” but also historically speaking, Pater has blatantly presented his solution after a summary representation of the specifically contemporary ills it was designed to cure. In other words, he marks this particular “solution” explicitly as a return to rethink romantic self-consciousness and the role of art “after”—meaning “later in time,” as well as “in imitation of” and “against or in reaction to”—the specific developments of contemporary science and philosophy.²³ We can see the sense in which his version of “aesthetic distance” is offered as a figurative simulacrum structured on the model of scientific or “objective” distance, and his aesthetic method of representing knowledge of an object is modeled as a cross between the methods offered by skeptical scientific empiricism and epistemological philosophy.

This provisionally objective stance enables an object to be perceived once more, but the object has now been relativized, reconstituted in relation to the subject. According to this model, the “aesthetic object” is “aesthetic” largely because it is admittedly recreated within the perceiving consciousness. This explains the curious circularity of one tenet of aestheticism: that any object can become an “aesthetic object” when regarded in the “aesthetic attitude.”²⁴ We can see all this clearly in the following passage from the “Preface,” where Pater's revision of Arnold figures prominently:

“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 toward seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals, music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life, are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces; they possess, like natural elements, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? … How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realize such primary data for oneself, or not at all. … The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, analyzing it, and reducing it to its elements. (R, viii-ix)

The sly subversion of Arnold here has frequently, and “justly,” been noted as the very linchpin of Pater's revisionary, aesthetic procedure.²⁵ However, his introductory claim to be following Arnold's dictum is not a simple pretense but a complex and dialectical gesture. For one thing, it is in ways like this that Pater signals his awareness of his own particular historical moment, the proximate source or immediate precursor of his position, and his own critical difference from that precursor. In turning away from the “aim” of objectivity, he does not turn away entirely, and he puts in its place not the subjectivism with which he is continually—and wrongly—associated, but a regulated process, a method of recreating a provisional objectivity through a dynamic of internalization and discrimination within.

To answer the famous question “What is this … to me?” is not Pater's final “aim,” after all, but only the “first step” in a dialectical model of self-consciousness, whose aim is finally to discriminate the object again by analyzing its “influence” within the aesthetic critic:

The function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyze, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element. (R, ix-x)

Those “adjuncts” are partly in the object and partly in its context, which is, in this frame of reference, the mind of the observer. The “disengagement” of the object's “power” or “virtue” is a second-order process: first the aesthetic object must be distinguished from its context in the self—through its “impression” and the way that pressing force shifts the internal shape of things—and only then can one quality of the object be distinguished from another. And if the experiences of its effects on the subject are the “original facts” or “primary data,” then the knowledge of the object would be a “secondary” result of this analysis. This process of “disengagement” is modeled here on the process of chemical analysis, and that explicit analogy tacitly assigns to the aesthetic critic the function of answering the “analysis” of one science with a scientific analysis of his own.

This line of thought suggests that Pater's particular “impressionism” should be more rigorously identified as a late romantic model of the correlation of poetic imagination, science, and philosophy. Above all, his impressionism must be understood in the plastic sense of “impression,” for it represents a mode of renewed belief in the possibility of internalizing the experience of real objects from a real outside.²⁶ (One result of this reconstituted and aesthetic “objectivity” may be seen in a related shift in the notion of “content.” Though objects are still called “receptacles,” they contain not “content” but the “powers or forces” of “influence.”²⁷ Impressed with an object from the outside, the critical consciousness then scrutinizes itself for the “influence” of the object on its own “modified” configurations. Pater will use a wide range of figures for this relation, especially figures of backgrounding and foregrounding, in which the object is figuratively cast into “relief” against the background of an experiencing or observant subject.

Aesthetic “objectivity” remains provisional. It is always to be regarded as figurative, not “given” by the object as data but “made” from the object's effect on the subject, not absolute but relative, and continually in the process of being reconstituted through this dialectic of identification and detachment. By asking the crucial question—“what does it mean to me?”—an aesthetic, analytical, observant aspect of the subject differentiates itself from the receptive, vulnerable, “impressed” aspect of the subject laboring in the toils of experience. At any given moment, in other words, the aesthetic stance of self-division stops the uncontrolled “flux” with a sense of fixated attention. And, as we have seen, this very activity also seems to reduce the experience of time to fragments, isolated moments “with no before and after,” as T. S. Eliot would later complain. However, when this same stance is mobilized in time, figured in temporal terms, it gains an operational value of another kind, for the aesthetic method is not only a method of positioning attention in such a way as to recreate the object. In Pater the romantic “ecstasy” of self-division also establishes an instrumental position from which an organized and totalized sense of the experiencing consciousness may be restored. The aesthetic, “critical” division within the subject is mobilized in time so that it may precipitate the sense of continuous identity, the sense of “self.”

How does this work? With each self-conscious move “outside” or “beyond” itself, the subject establishes a still point, a present moment from which the “passage” of experience will then be regarded in the past. In other words, the gap constructed between one part of the self and another is refigured as the space of difference between present and past. By the time it is discriminated from the subject and perceivable as an object again, the object has already been reconceived, reconstituted, remembered. Analogously, that aspect of the subject which had been “impressed” has now been reformed; the “impression” records a former state of being, now remembered. Mobilized in time, as one moment of self-division succeeds another, the aesthetic position becomes the federating power of memory. In the mobility of these recreative self-divisions, both object and self are correlatively reconstituted as distinct and whole—but in the past and as the past.

The interrelated dynamics of attention I have been discussing as the method of Pater's aestheticism—both the dynamic of mobility and fixation (figured as the passage punctuated by moments of focus) and the dynamic of romantic self-division (figured as “impression” followed by detachment or “ecstasy”)—reconstitute the self in relation to its objects as a function of retrospection. It should be possible now to see the conservative force of Pater's aestheticism—and to begin an approach to his historicism. When cast in temporal terms, these dynamics of attention project the “passages” of experience into an ideal, overarching continuity of attention, a personal identity in time. Put another way, Pater uses the language of temporality to recontain the self as a whole. Perhaps it is clear that these operations yield not the “substratum” Pater wanted to intuit from Kant, but rather a decentered, “outer” layer of awareness always in the process of reforming. Describing Goethe as the type of his aesthetic attitude, Pater wrote that “such natures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves” (R, 229). That “former” self is also the “formed” self, from whom the reforming self, in its continually reconstructed present moment, continually flees away.

Nevertheless, though Pater theorizes this decentering flight into an absolute present, he does so from within the traditional commitment to a central self. In fact, he finally does so in order to conserve its centrality and wholeness in a sense of history or continuity.²⁸ Surely this is one reason that Pater should be reexamined in our current critical moment. In an effort to preserve its wholeness, this aesthetically or critically divided self is continually in the process of projecting a transcendent identity to oversee its own passages of experience. That the metaphysical implications of this projection are undergoing a rigorous critique today should make Pater more, not less, interesting to us.²⁹ Pater is explicitly aware of his aesthetic projection of identity—as I shall show in discussing Marius the Epicurean—and aware also that the projection of an overarching history is its necessary corollary. Throughout his work, Pater employs a transformed, secularized version of Bunyan's “House Beautiful” as an image of the transcendent place where disparate moments of individual and cultural time are gathered together and restored. Of course, this end point, the result of Pater's aesthetic dialectic, is Hegelian and sublationary—as is so much of Pater, including all the formal techniques explored in this brief section: his dialectical transvaluation of metaphor, the subsumption of distinct moments in their “passage,” the notion of memory as the overarching re-collection of successive moments of self-division.

Pater's attempt to reread the figurative “distance” of self-consciousness as a difference between present and past should remind us that in the nineteenth century the notion of scientific objectivity was often conceived as historical distance. It is within the historical realm that the already-made thing, the work of art, becomes the exemplary instance of Pater's aesthetic solution. As the quintessential relic from the past, the work of art is effective because it is definitively and already “different” from the self in the present. …

Notes

1. For dating of the essays, see Samuel Wright, A Bibliography of the Writings of Walter H. Pater (New York: Garland, 1975). “Winckelmann” was published in 1867 and therefore antedates “Poems by William Morris.” Inman has forcefully argued that Pater originally intended to conclude the volume of Renaissance studies with his essay on Wordsworth. See Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater's Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References, 1858-1873 (New York: Garland, 1981), pp. 264-66.

2. For a recent example, see Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 114-15, and Inman's response to Meisel in “The Intellectual Context of Walter Pater's ‘Conclusion,’” Prose Studies 4 (May 1981), 13.

3. Richard Wollheim, “Walter Pater as a Critic of the Arts,” On Art and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 161-64: “Without in any way being seduced by the theory, we are made to feel its seductiveness; and we are made to feel it not the less but the more so for our comparative detachment or distancing. Initially we might take the passage … as though it asserted the very theory it was about: but, as we read on, the passage puts itself into inverted commas for us. … [W]e do right to take the passage obliquely and not literally. It does not address us, we overhear what it says.” See Graham Hough's partial recognition in The Last Romantics (1947; reprint, London: Methuen, 1961), p. 140: “But Pater does not really mean it.”

4. Cratylus 402a. I have used the unidentified translation given by Gerald Monsman in Pater's Portraits: Mythic Patterns in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 4. On Pater's similar response to the Thaetetus, see Inman, “The Intellectual Context of Pater's ‘Conclusion,’” p. 19. For the figurative comparison of “mythic” recapitulation in the history of thought to “translation,” see Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

5. Huxley's famous essay “On the Physical Basis of Life” was not published until 1869 in the Fortnightly Review, but for the sources of Pater's vision of modern science, see Inman, “The Intellectual Context of Pater's ‘Conclusion,’” pp. 13-16; Inman, Pater's Reading, pp. 182-92; and Donald Hill's textual and explanatory notes to Pater's The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 451-54 (hereafter, Hill's notes). Inman points out that this scientific vision entailed a redefined understanding of identity.

6. Hamlet, 5.1.

7. On atomism, see Harold Bloom, introduction to Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. xv: “Pater's strange achievement is to have assimilated Wordsworth to Lucretius, to have compounded an idealistic naturalism with a corrective materialism.” On the Victorian concept of inextricable interrelation, see Josephine Miles, Poetry and Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 126; and John Holloway, “Thought, Style, and the Idea of Co-Variance in Some Mid-Nineteenth-Century Prose,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 8 (Fall 1975), 1-14.

8. Hill's notes, p. 273.

9. And many others. In addition to Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, Inman mentions Fichte, Bacon, Hegel, and Plato (Walter Pater's Reading, pp. 182-92); see also Hill's notes, pp. 454-55.

10. For my reading of Pater's impressionism, see below, Part One, sec. 3; and Part One, sec.7.

11. For a recent treatment of these anecdotes and of the romantic responses to the anxieties of solipsism, see Charles Rzepka, The Self as Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

12. Hill's notes, p. 455.

13. For variations on the figure of imprisonment and the desire for a “sense of escape” or a “sense of freedom,” see, e.g., “Aesthetic Poetry” (B, 190, 193) and “Winckelmann” (R, 231).

14. Inman sees here two separate discourses and a “central inconsistency” between them (Inman, “The Intellectual Context of Pater's ‘Conclusion,’” p. 13), but Meisel notes their crucial interrelation, though he misses the obliquity of the two paragraphs (Perry Meisel, The Absent Father [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980], pp. 114-15).

15. Pater's formulation, in Hill's notes, p. 455.

16. He makes this clear in the famous footnote restoring the “Conclusion” to the third edition of The Renaissance, after its suppression in the second. For the wording of that footnote, see below, Part Three, sec. 2.

17. For the ongoing argument about whether aestheticism should be understood as a “movement,” see Ruth Z. Temple, “Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Fin-de-Siècle,” in English Literature in Transition 17, no. 4 (1974), 201-22; and Ian Fletcher, “Some Aspects of Aestheticism,” in Twilight of Dawn: Studies in English Literature in Transition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), pp. 1-31. Germain d’Hangest assigns Pater “the decisive role” in the aesthetic movement in “La Place de Walter Pater dans le mouvement esthétique,” Études anglaises 27 (April-June 1974), 158-71.

18. This passage is rarely seen, having never been reprinted after its 1868 publication in the Westminster Review, n.s. 34 [October 1868], 300-312, until Hill's 1980 edition of the 1893 Renaissance. Following these words, the first two paragraphs of the “Conclusion” appear quite clearly as an exercise in the ironic ventriloquism of “modern thought”: “One characteristic of the pagan spirit these new poems have which is on their 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. ‘Arriéré!’ you say, ‘here in a tangible form we have the defect of all poetry like this. The modern world is in possession of truths; what but a passing smile can it have for a kind of poetry which, assuming artistic beauty of form to be an end in itself, passes by those truths and the living interests which are connected with them, to spend a thousand cares in telling once more these pagan fables as if it had but to choose between a more and a less beautiful shadow?’ It is a strange transition from the earthly paradise to the sad-coloured world of abstract philosophy. But let us accept the challenge; let us see what modern philosophy, when it is sincere, really does say about human life and the truth we can attain in it, and the relation of this to the desire of beauty” (Hill's notes, p. 272). David DeLaura explained this setting of the “Conclusion” in Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 224-25.

19. Monsman, Pater's Portraits, p. xvi.

20. The articulation of this systematic relation marks Pater's revision of the Wordsworthian “spots of time.” As all revisions are, his revision was both an advance (toward Joyce's “epiphanies” and Woolf's “moments of being”) and a return (for this systematic relation is embodied throughout The Prelude). For a short history of the epiphanic moment, which unaccountably slights Pater's pivotal role, see M. H. Abrams, “Varieties of the Modern Moment,” in his Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 418-27; and Bloom, introduction to Pater's Selected Writings, pp. x-xv. Bloom argues that Pater “de-idealizes” the epiphany by effecting a return to Wordsworth after Ruskin's critique of the pathetic fallacy.

21. This internal distance is related to but different from what is commonly called “aesthetic distance,” which is usually taken to mean the adoption of an “aesthetic attitude” toward an object or event that might under most circumstances seem to demand a more practical response. See Edward Bullough's 1912 essay, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” in Marvin Levich, ed., Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 233-54. Though Bullough mentions the dynamics of internal “distance” or self-division, the essay concentrates on the “outward” consequences of that assumed distance, in the turning away from utilitarian or practical considerations. The initial example given (which incidentally recalls the aesthetics of Ruskin, Turner, and Whistler) involves appreciating a fog at sea for its beauty rather than exerting oneself actively in the pursuit of safety.

22. The locus classicus is Geoffrey Hartman's essay “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness,’” revised and expanded in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 46-56. For an excellent critique of this romantic self-characterization, see Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 40-41.

23. D’Hangest also argues that Pater's aestheticism was “based … directly on the contemporary disenchantment; he derived it from that very disenchantment and presented it as a remedy, the only one possible, for the confusion in which scientific progress had plunged Victorian spirits” (quoted in Hill's notes, p. 451).

24. On this circularity and the general dilemma of the “aesthetic attitude” in relation to the constitution of an “aesthetic object,” see Monroe C. Beardsley, “Aesthetic Objects” and “Postscript 1980,” in Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958; rpt. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1981), pp. xvii-74.

25. On the complex relation of Pater to Arnold, see David DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England. On Pater in relation to Arnold's “object,” see Richard Ellmann, The Critic as Artist: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. xi-xii. “There are not two but three critical phases in the late nineteenth century, with Pater transitional between Arnold and Wilde. … In 1864 … Arnold declared … that the ‘aim of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is.’ … Nine years later Walter Pater [pretended] … to agree with Arnold's definition. … But Pater's corollary subtly altered the original proposition; it shifted the center of attention from the rock of the object to the winds of the perceiver's sensations. … [E]ighteen years later … Wilde rounded on Arnold by asserting that the aim of criticism is to see the object as it really is not.” Bloom (introduction to Pater's Selected Writings, p. viii) repeats this formulation in 1974 and adds: “Between Arnold's self-deception and Wilde's wit comes Pater's hesitant and skeptical emphasis upon a peculiar kind of vision.”

26. The best discussion of critical impressionism in its Swinburnean sense may be found in Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 14-23. Pater's style is deeply influenced by Swinburne throughout, and he does of course engage in famous passages of this sort of impressionism—for example, in his reading of the Mona Lisa. But as Wellek pointed out, these passages are rare in Pater and are not representative of his method (René Wellek, The History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, vol. 4: The Later Nineteenth Century [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965], p. 382).

27. Crinkley points out that the notion of the object in “eternal outline” gives way to the notion of the object as “receptacle.” See Richmond Crinkley, Walter Pater: Humanist (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970), p. 9.

28. For a discussion of the conflict between modernity and the concept of history, see Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1971; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 142-65.

29. The names Foucault and Derrida will suffice to indicate the broad outlines of that critique, but I mean specifically to call attention here to their stress on the correlative projections of the unitary subject and of an overarching history. Thus Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 12: “Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject—in the form of historical consciousness—will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought.” Derrida makes a similar argument toward the end of his “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 291: “It could be shown that the concept of epistèmè has always called forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a becoming, as the tradition of truth or the development of science or knowledge oriented toward the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self.”