SOURCE: “Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait” in Walter Pater (Modern Critical Views), edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp. 75-95.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1976, Miller examines Pater's thoughts on such topics as time, virtue, personality, uniqueness, repetition, form, meaning, and subjectivity; he also contends that the various and contradictory readings of his positions are irreconcilable.]

Walter Pater is, along with Coleridge, Arnold, and Ruskin, one of the four greatest English literary critics of the nineteenth century. He is also, of the four, the most influential in the twentieth century and the most alive today, although often his influence can be found on writers who deny or are ignorant of what they owe to him. Pater is effective today as a precursor of what is most vital in contemporary criticism.

Pater may be placed in various lines or triangulated on various topographical surfaces. A slightly different perspective on him is gained through each of these various mappings, genealogies, or filiations. He is the nearest thing to Nietzsche England has, as Emerson is Nietzsche's nearest match in America. This could be put less invidiously by saying that Nietzsche is the Pater of the German-speaking world, Emerson the Pater of America. The three together form a constellation, with many consonances and dissonances among the three stars. Toward the past, Pater belongs to the line of English Romanticism, moving from the great Romantics—particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge, in this case—through Tennyson to the Pre-Raphaelites, among whom, along with Ruskin and Swinburne, Pater is a major critical voice. Another affiliation would link Pater to the English Protestant and empirical tradition going back to Locke and to the Puritan autobiographers of the seventeenth century, with their emphasis on private witnessing as the only genuine test of truth. The “aesthetic critic,” in Pater's definition of him, must ask first and last, “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?” Pater is also, however, one of the most important “translators” into Victorian England of Hegelian thought and of German idealism generally. He won his fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford, as much for his first-hand knowledge of German as for his ability as a classicist. More important than all these associations, perhaps, is the filament that connects Pater with that strand of Western tradition which has been most antithetical to Plato: Heraclitus, the atomists, Epicurus, Lucretius, Joachim of Flora, Bruno, Spinoza, and Goethe.

In the other direction, toward the future, Pater's progeny also form more than one genetic line. Pater's influence on Yeats and, less obviously, on Wallace Stevens was decisive. This influence spread to other poets and novelists of the twentieth century: Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and many others. By way of Proust and the critics of the Nouvelle Revue Française, Pater is one of the progenitors of modern subjectivistic, “impressionistic,” phenomenological criticism, the so-called “criticism of consciousness” of Georges Poulet and his associates. Another line, however, antithetical to that one, might be called “allegorical” criticism. This line leads from certain aspects of Ruskin through Pater and Wilde to Proust, and beyond Proust to Walter Benjamin and to the rhetorical or “deconstructive” criticism of our own moment in literary criticism. Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom in their different ways exemplify this.

How Pater could produce such diverse “children,” like a genetic pool containing potentially both blue-eyed and brown-eyed offspring, my reading of Pater will attempt to indicate. It must be remembered, however, that the figure of genetic “lines” is a trope. Like all figures it is not innocent; it begs the question it assists in raising. In literature, lines of influence go by leaps and swerves, with gaps and deviations. Sudden unpredictable mutation is the law, not the exception. That all reading is misreading is as true of the traditions of criticism as of literature itself. Influence works by opposition, so that the child is a “white” parody or travesty of the father, a mocking “double” or “second.” Pater uses this figure in a curious passage at the beginning of Chapter Two of Marius the Epicurean (1885). The red rose, he says, came first, the white rose later, as its pale repetition. White things are “ever an after-thought, the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material” (Marius the Epicurean, 2 vols. London, 1892. I, 14). The question of the relation between the uniqueness of the individual entity and the way it exists as the recurrence of elements which have already been configured in previous ones is one of Pater's pervading concerns. Pater's own work may provide his interpreter with assistance in formulating his multiple relations to those who came before and after.

The remarkable early pages of Marius the Epicurean are half autobiographical no doubt, but autobiography veiled, displaced. Pater's early life is translated figuratively into the life of a Roman boy of the second century after Christ. Among the first things the reader learns of Marius is that the “old country-house, half farm, half villa” (ME 5), where he passed his childhood, was famous for a “head of Medusa” (ME 21) found nearby. The head was Greek work in bronze with golden laminae. An emblem there? The reader also remembers the passage in the essay on Leonardo da Vinci in The Renaissance (1873) where Pater cites Vasari's disturbing anecdote of the Medusa “painted on a wooden shield” (The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. London, 1922. 105), which the young Leonardo prepared as a “surprise” for his father. This “childish” work was proleptic, Pater says, of the great Medusa of Leonardo's adult years:

It was not in play that he painted that other Medusa, the one great picture which he left behind him in Florence. … What may be called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat flits unheeded. The delicate snakes seem literally strangling each other in terrified struggle to escape from the Medusa brain. The hue which violent death always brings with it is in the features; features singularly massive and grand, as we catch them inverted, in a dexterous foreshortening, crown foremost, like a great calm stone against which the wave of serpents breaks.

(R 106)

What Sigmund Freud made of the Medusa one knows from “Das Medusenhaupt,” written in 1922 and first published posthumously in 1940. The Medusa, says Freud, is hieroglyph for the fear of castration and for its veiling or supplementary assuaging. The Medusa head is a sign for the discovery of the absence of the maternal phallus. It also offers in the snakey locks of the Medusa frightening yet secretly reassuring proofs for the existence of that phallus. The Medusa's power to petrify, to turn a man into a column of stone, also offers frightening yet secretly reassuring proof of the spectator's masculinity. As Pater says, the Madusa of Leonardo is “the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death” (R 106). All of Pater's most characteristic “portraits,” including Marius, are of gifted young men doomed to an early death which is also somehow a fulfillment. Was Pater “phallogocentric,” frozen like Leonardo himself at a Narcissistic or adolescent homosexual stage? Or did he liberate himself, accommodate himself to the absence of the Logos, head or chief source of meaning and power? Such a Logos fathers all later power but also renders it impotent. Did Pater remain fascinated with longing for a lost completeness which can only be obtained metaleptically, replacing early with late, the lost bliss that never was with the death that he imagines over and over for his various personae? Is Pater's work centered or acentered, and, if centered, what is its center, its origin, ground, or end?

A cluster of motifs in the early pages of Marius the Epicurean reinforces the motif of the Medusa head to form a hieroglyph of Pater's own. This composite emblem gathers many of the elements that recur throughout his work. Marius, the reader is told, had lost his father in early childhood, as did Pater himself. Marius's sorrow was “crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman law gave to the parent over the son” (ME 18). Alas, the sense of liberty was only a momentary illusion, for the dead father has become one of the many genii of the place, “a genius a little cold and severe” (ME 11). The dead father, along with many other local gods, is the object of a religion of fear for Marius. Such a religion of propitiation and superstitious awe is still alive among children today, as in the singsong of urban sidewalk taboo: “If you step on a crack you’ll break your mother's back; if you step on a line you’ll break your father's spine.” “A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily life—that conscience, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and observance” (ME 5). Conscience becomes ascêsis, an instinctive habit of renunciation, a dainty fastidiousness, a willingness to give up, even a masochism, a pleasure in self-imposed suffering, with apotropaic motives. “Had the Romans a word for unworldly?” asks the narrator.

The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the spirit in which [Marius] prepared himself for the sacerdotal function hereditary in his family—the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such preparation involved.

(ME 27)

Marius's mother had devoted herself to keeping her dead husband alive in her memory, and the boy Marius loves her devotedly. There is an odd episode, however, at the time of her death, which occurs, as did the death of Pater's mother, while the son is still a schoolboy, the mother going away from home to die. “For it happened,” says the narrator, “that through some sudden incomprehensible petulance there had been an angry childish gesture, and a slighting word, at the very moment of her departure, actually for the last time” (ME 45).

Fear of the dead father and a universalization of that fear in an uncanny sense of unseen powers requiring constant propitiation and love for the mother combined with some inexplicable resentment of her—these come together disguised as Marius's fear of snakes. This odd fear is described but not wholly explained. Fear of snakes is the embodiment of Marius's “sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps” (ME 25). Its primal version is in fact a primal scene: “One fierce day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and ever afterwards he avoided that place and its ugly associations, for there was something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards” (ME 25). The same sense of uncanny distaste recurs when, sometime later in Pisa, Marius sees “an African showman exhibiting a great reptile” (ME 25), and later still in Rome, “a second time,” he sees “a showman with his serpents” (ME 26). The motif recurs once more, in case the reader has not already perceived its importance, in Marius's fear of the “great sallow-hued snakes” kept in the temple of the healing god Aesculapius (ME 33).

Why did Marius, or, one guesses, Pater himself, so irrationally fear snakes? And why snakes coupling? Why did this disturb his pleasure in food and sleep? The narrator's answer is oblique:

He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have killed or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the very circumstances of their life, being what they were.

(ME 25-26)

The elements associated with the Medusa head recur here and are covertly interpreted. Parents coupling become snakes coupling, viewed with a combination of fascination, aversion, and pity. It is the pity of unawakened sexuality for the burden of the bestiality of sex combined with fear of the absent father and of his power of reprisal. The “unexplored” evil dogging Marius's footsteps becomes embodied in the snakes' breeding. This scene is proof that the phallus is still there, though the father is dead, as with the snakes on the Medusa's head. The phallus is there even as an attribute of the mother, for in the mouth of the old garden-god there is a sluggish viper, as there are snakes surrounding the open mouth and the dead face of the Medusa in the painting in the Uffizi. This repugnant yet somehow pleasurable discovery is displaced from Marius to “one of his companions,” who, like Marius, has “no particular dread of a snake's bite.” The act of impiety toward the god or of violation of the mother is not performed directly by the hero, except in that moment of petulance and in that slighting word at the time of her death. Presence and absence of an original fathering power, a paternal potency which yet must be an attribute of the mother, presence and absence both feared and desired in the tension of a double double bind—these are the pervasive Paterian elements brought evasively and unostentatiously together in the account of the childhood of Marius.

Is such a reading of a few fragments of Marius the Epicurean a clue to the rest of Pater? Is this cluster a valid synecdoche for the whole, standing in the same relation to all his work as, in Pater's own criticism, a representative figure such as Leonardo or Michelangelo stands to the Renaissance as a whole? What relation might there be between this repugnance for the coupling snakes, yet pleasure in rousing the viper in the mouth of the garden god, and Pater's methods as a critic, the themes and ideas which organize his work? Is all his work oriented by the dread and desire for a proof that the lost father is not really lost? Only a reading of the whole work could tell. The complexity and suggestiveness of the bits examined so far indicate that Pater must be read not so much for what he tells the reader about the artists and works he criticizes but a literary text demanding the same scrupulous decipherment, phrase by phrase, as the texts of Marcel Proust or of Walter Benjamin, two later writers in Pater's line who similarly require interrogation.

Pater's writing offers the same fascination to the reader as that of any major author, the fascination of a complexity which works, which hangs together, which may be “figured out” or resolved. His work has that consonance, those unexpected echoes of this passage with that passage, those hidden resonances and harmonies which Pater saw as the ideal of a musical form that would have absorbed all its matter into that form. Nevertheless, if, as Charles Rosen affirms, the basis of musical expression is dissonance, the critic must, in Pater's case, take note also of disharmonies, contradictions, omissions, hiatuses, incongruous elements which precisely do not “work.” In such places the words seem to have exceeded the writer's apparent intention. Such dissonances may be the most important aspect of Pater's work, in spite of his claim in “Style” that the fire of a unified “sense of the world” will in the great writers have burned away such surplusage (Appreciations. London, 1889. 16). In the something too much, the something left over, the odd detail which may not be evened in a musical form, the snake in the mouth of the garden god, the critic may find the clue and loose the thread that will unravel all that fine fabric of Pater's prose, with its decorous echo of pattern by pattern. The secret revealed by this unraveling may be not so much the hidden center of a personality as an enigma exceeding personality, a secret intrinsic to the materials Pater worked with—language and its concepts, figures, and narrative forms, myths or legends, legenda, “things for reading.”

The apparent beginning of spiritual life for Pater is the moment, the intense and wholly individual instant of experience. As Pater says in the famous passage in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, each momentary experience, each “impression,” is cut off by virtue of its uniqueness from all moments before and after. It is also entirely private: “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” (R 235). Moreover, each moment lasts but a moment, the blink of an eye, and then is gone. Time is flux, an endless stream “of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them” (R 235). The inevitable goal of each sequence is death, a final end anticipated and rehearsed in the little death of each moment as it flies. For Pater, the imminence of death and the intensity of experience are always only two sides of the same coin, “the sense of death and the desire of beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death” (A 227), as he puts it in the admirable essay on William Morris, “Aesthetic Poetry.”

It would seem that the entire program of Pater's criticism follows from these solipsistic premises. Each man must concentrate all his attention on each moment as it passes, for that moment is all there is and all he has. He must purge by that effort of refinement or ascêsis, as essential in Pater's procedure as in the lives of those whose portraits he sketches, all impurities in the moment, all irrelevant associations, all false idealisms, such as those which, in Pater's understanding of Coleridge, weakened that great poet-critic's force (see “Coleridge,” A 64-106). The moment in its uniqueness or the critic in his experience of it may, then, shed all dross, burn with that “hard, gemlike flame” (R 236). Criticism is the exact recording of what Pater calls the unique “virtue” of each moment, meaning by “virtue” the power or energy specific to the elements concentrated in that moment. Virtue is “the property each [moment] has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure” (R ix), as Pater puts it in the Preface to The Renaissance, where such a strategy for criticism is most eloquently and exactly defined.

The function of aesthetic criticism is clear. The true critic has sharper impressions than others. He is more able than other people to discriminate the exact “virtue” of a given personality or work of art. He is also more gifted than others in his power of expression, as gifted, ideally, as the great writers themselves. He uses his gift of expression not to transmit the truth of his own personality, but to translate into his own language the unique virtue of the work or person he criticizes. He thereby transmits to his readers impressions they might otherwise miss, or, rather, he transmits subtly displaced repetitions of those impressions. Far from being, as is sometimes said, at liberty to make the work mean anything one likes, impressionism is rigorously bound by the work it describes. It is bound as much as the work itself by that truth of correspondence to a particular personality which Pater makes his ideal in “Style.” The writer must translate accurately his inner vision. The critic must translate accurately that translation, as is done by that ideal translator of Plato who reproduces him “by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after word, as the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper” (A 11). The goal of this translation, however, is the transmission of the exact flavor or quality of the consciousness behind the work.

The focus of all Pater's writing is personality, the personalities of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others in The Renaissance or in Appreciations (1889), the personalities of fictional characters in Marius the Epicurean, Imaginary Portraits (1887), and Gaston de Latour (1896), the personalities of mythological figures in certain of the Greek Studies (1895). Subjectivity—the self—is, it seems, the beginning, the end, and the persisting basis in all Pater's writings. In Pater's work, as in one important strand of the Western tradition generally, subjectivity is the name given to the Logos, paternal origin, goal, and supporting ground. Subjectivity is the measure, ratio, or “reason” for all the interchanges of person with person, by means of art, which Pater's work explores. As the word itself suggests, subjectivity, the subject, is what is ‘thrown under’ and therefore underlies all the fleeting impressions which make up what is. There is, after all, a snake in the mouth of the garden god. Pater's religious moments, for example in Marius the Epicurean, are an extrapolation from his positing of personality as a reassuring, ubiquitous Logos. His religion is “a sense of conscious powers external to ourselves” (ME 5, emphasis added).

The critic's effort to identify precisely the unique virtue of a single impression or personality leads to an unexpected discovery. This discovery makes of Pater's criticism something quite different from what his stress on personality would make it seem to be. The moment, it turns out, though unique, is not single. Each “impression” is in fact “infinitely divisible” (R 235). It is divisible because it is self-divided, an Andersstreben, or striving to be other than itself, as he calls it in “The School of Giorgione” (R 134). The moment is in battle against itself in a way that recalls the Heraclitean flux, cited as an epigraph for the Conclusion, or the Parmenidean polemos, cosmic warfare. Perhaps it is also to be associated with that sadomasochistic element so evident in Pater's sense of human life and of relations between people.

The flame produced by the purification of an ascêsis is kindled by the bringing together of divided forces which burst into flame by their antagonistic proximity. That flame is “the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy” (R 236). The first example Pater gives in the Conclusion of the intense instant of sensation is “the moment … of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat” (R 233). Such a conjunction is the locus “of forces parting sooner or later on their ways” (R 234), as brilliancy of gifts in an individual arises from “some tragic dividing of forces on their ways” (R 237).

The uniqueness of each momentary impression is a result not of its singleness but of its special combination of contradictory forces. These flow into it from the past and are destined to divide again, each to go its separate way into the future. This means that the moment, which was at first seemingly so isolated, is in fact connected by multiple strands to past and future. Pater speaks of this, sometimes using a metaphor of streams meeting and dividing and sometimes of weaving and unweaving. If the moment is the meeting place of divided forces—the forces of a whole life, of an age, or of all the ages in their sequence (as in Pater's celebrated interpretation of La Gioconda)—then that moment in all its sensible vividness and uniqueness can stand for the life, for the age, or for all history. It can stand for these because it contains in concentrated essence forces universally distributed in time and space, meeting and dividing and meeting again. The validity of synecdoche is based on substantial participation. This conception of the moment as both individual and representative lies behind a splendid passage from “The School of Giorgione,” anticipating both Joyce's “epiphany” and certain passages in T. S. Eliot:

Now it is part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instant, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment, into which, however, all the motives, all the interest and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present … exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life.

(R 150)

Pater's materialist notion of impersonal forces underlying each personality involves a specific theory of repetition. This theory denies the possibility of finding any fixed origin for any person or impression. Such denial has important consequences for criticism. It means that the critic can never find an inaugural point for any idea or for any given hieroglyph of forces. There are no fathers, each apparent father being himself, often unwittingly, the heir of forces that have come together and then separated many times in the past. Whatever the critic reaches as an apparent beginning, a solid ground on which to base an interpretation, dissolves on inspection into a repetition. It is another gathering of elements of immemorial antiquity. As in Nietzsche, so in Pater, a sense of vertigo is generated by this infinite regression into the past, each “source” having another “source” behind it, and so on ad infinitum. No doctrine, no seemingly unique collocation of elements in a personality can be said to be a beginning or to have one.

The notion that the singular personality is Pater's version of the Logos is, it seems, exploded by his concept of repetition. What is, is the perpetually woven and rewoven anonymous elements or atoms, forces that have divided and come together for all eternity and that have an eternal future of rebirth and death. In place of the subject as Logos, Pater seems to put another equally traditional idea of the metaphysical ground. This idea, too, goes back to the Greeks, though more to Heraclitus, to the atomists, to Lucretius, or even to Aristotle than to Plato. The Logos is a ubiquitous and multiple force, energy, energeia. This energy is that paternal snake at the originless origin, perpetually born and reborn in the mouth of the god.

Paradoxically, it is apropos of Plato that Pater, in a splendidly eloquent passage at the beginning of Plato and Platonism (1893), most fully expresses his intuition of a universe without determinable origin. In such a universe, atoms are combined and recombined, world without end, in perpetual repetition in difference. “Plato's achievement,” says Pater, “may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of the mind's history,” but “in the history of philosophy there are no absolute beginnings” (Plato and Platonism. London, 1893. 2, 1). Far from being a beginning, Plato, in Pater's view, was a decadent, or at least he lived in a decadent world. Its decadence is defined, in phrases characteristically Paterian in their weary cadence, as the presence everywhere of already used atoms of thought. There was a kind of intellectual pollution of the Greek air at the moment of its greatest cultural splendor:

Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.

(PP 2)

Pater uses four different metaphors to express the way these “off-cast atoms” of thought enter into the intimate texture of Plato's language. All these figures express the notion of tiny particles which make the, so to speak, cellular structure of Plato's thought. These are in no sense superficial borrowings which could conceivably be detached. One metaphor is of the grain of stone, another of parchment with multiple layers of writing, another of woven fabric, another of an organic body, but a similar structural image is in question in each case:

Some of the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone, are of the structure of his philosophy. They are everywhere in it, not as the stray carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here or there amid the new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic life in the very stone he builds with … [I]n Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original productions of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times.

(PP 2, 3)

This image of a repetition not exterior but woven into the genetic structure of Plato's thinking leads to a powerful vision of an infinite regression back in time and outward beyond Western culture in an ever wider and deeper unsuccessful search for the beginnings of ideas whose immemorial antiquity deny Plato any status as an origin. Plato was not the inaugurator of an Occidental civilization merely, as Whitehead said, a “footnote” to his work. He was himself already a latecomer, an after-thought. He was a belated footnote to still earlier footnotes, themselves footnotes to footnotes, with nowhere an original text as such:

The central and most intimate principles of [Plato's] teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not merely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master—to Socrates, who survives chiefly in his pages—but to various precedent schools of speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these into that age of poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic apprehension had hardly understood themselves; beyond that unconscious philosophy again, to certain constitutional tendencies, persuasions, forecasts of the intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the older civilisations of India and of Egypt, as they still exercise their authority over ourselves.

(PP 2-3)

No element in Plato is new, not one speculative atom. What is new is the way of putting these elements together. In Pater's doctrine of recurrence, repetition is always with a difference. The difference lies in the way old forces are brought together once more in a slightly changed way and under new conditions. Pater's term for this novel way of assembling new materials is “form.” Plato's originality lies in his brilliant novelty of form:

Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.

(PP 4-5)

Form is everything, matter nothing. Here is another point of overlapping with Nietzsche, who in the preface of 1886 to the second edition of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882) praises the Greeks for stopping at the surface (bei der Oberfläche) and for believing in forms, tones, words (an Formen, an Töne, an Worte). What is Pater's concept of form? What is his critic to make of the abundance of metaphors which are essential to his expression of his thought—threads, forces, writing, and so on? What is the exact status of these figures, and why does he need more than one to express the “same” idea? In “Style,” Pater attempts to deny insofar as it is possible the figurative basis of language. He wants language to be the transparent reflection of a personal thought which preceded it and which could, or so it seems, exist without it. He wants the word to be identical with its meaning or with the thought it transmits. In The Renaissance, he several times praises the subjects of his essays for creating images that are saturated with their meaning, so that there is no discernible difference between sign and referent, word and meaning. In Greek art, for example, “[t]he mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an allegory, but saturates and is identical with it” (R 205-06). The material basis of spiritual meaning is wholly sublimated in that meaning.

Nevertheless, the full exploration of Pater's concept of form will deconstruct once more the apparent end point reached in the interpretation of his work. Such an exploration puts in question both the notion that for Pater subjectivity is the Logos and the notion that for him material energy is the Logos. Alongside those ideas, overlapping them, folded inextricably into them, contradicting them, and yet necessary to their expression is a notion that is properly literary or semiotic. This incipient theory of signs is a thread which will unravel all the fastidiously patterned fabric of Pater's thought. It can hardly be called a fully developed “theory.” It is more an implicit assumption in all Pater's practice with words. This “theory” in all its dimensions involves the categories of difference and discontinuity.

Meaning or significance in a personality, in a gem, a song, a painting, a piece of music is always defined by Pater as a force, as the power to make an impression. This power is not single, nor is it a harmonious collocation of energies making a unity. A “virtue” always results from antagonistic forces, sweetness against strength in the case of Michelangelo, strangeness against the desire for beauty in Leonardo, and so on. The meaning is in neither of the two forces separately, nor in their sum. It arises in the space between them, out of the economy of their difference.

The sign thus constituted by two enemy forces does not draw its meaning solely from its own internal differentiation. It also carries within itself the echo, across the gap of a further difference, of earlier similar gatherings of forces. These lateral resonances form that “chain of secret influences” of which Pater speaks in the essay on Leonardo (R 116). Each virtue is an assemblage of divided energies, and it draws its meaning from its reference to other virtues of which it is the rebirth. The present moment, which, in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, seems, in its evanescence, to be all there is, carries “a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by” (R 236). The vestige in the present sign of past signs, as the passage quoted from Plato and Platonism confirms, is intrinsic to the form of the present sign. The past is an inextricable part of the meaning of the present. The rejection of fixed origin is a necessary component of this insight. The past moment of which the present moment contains the relics was itself a system of differentiated traces referring back to a still earlier moment of division, and so on.

Another discontinuity in each sign or virtue is the relation of meaning to its material embodiment. Pater always insists, correctly enough, on the necessity of a material carrier for artistic meaning. “All art,” he says, “has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound” (R 209). In spite of his desire to have this material basis saturated with its meaning, Pater recognizes a perpetual residue of non-saturation in the sign. There is always a margin of incongruity between the meaning and its sensuous embodiment.

This distance reveals itself in various ways in Pater's work. It is present in his occasionally explicit recognition of figure, as in the assertion in “Style” that each word carries its weight of metaphor and so is a displaced expression of its meaning. “A lover of words for their own sake,” says Pater,

to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant observer of their physiognomy, [the writer] will be on the alert not only for obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it. Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements or particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first that occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the resources of expression.

(A 17)

A word has a virtue, and like any such power it is made of antagonistic particles in combination. These minute forces make up “all that latent figurative texture in speech” (A 17). This Andersstreben means that we cannot say what we mean without being in danger of saying something else implicit in the elementary particles or self-contained tropes in the words we use. Pater's own writing is heavily dependent on figures which are obviously figures: the images of the gemlike flame, of woven fabric, of the relics of long-dead minute organic life in stone, and so on. In all such cases, Pater's “literal” meaning is some linguistic or artistic expression, not fire, cloth, or stone at all. In a similar way, all his work depends on the problematic validity of the trope of synecdoche, a momentary confluence of “forces” in Pico, for example, standing for the whole Zeitgeist of the Renaissance. Pico is only in figure a “quintessence.” Even the apparently objective word “force” is a figure, since there is no energy as such in the innocent black marks on a page of Wordsworth or Hugo.

The discrepancy between embodiment and meaning is also present in Pater's notion that each form of art attempts to transcend itself, to sublimate the matter in which it is forced to work by that striving to be other than itself whereby each form of art borrows from others, “a partial alienation from its limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces” (R 133-34). It is through this effort that all art, in Pater's famous phrase, “constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (R 135). The condition of music is pure form, the spiritualization of the material substratum so that no referential dimension is left. In music the meaning arises entirely out of the differential relation between note and note, element and element, force and force. In the condition of music, matter has become form, or the form is the matter:

That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation—that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

(R 135)

Nevertheless, insofar as this Andersstreben remains an aspiration, not an achievement, as Pater implies it always does, some element of unspiritualized matter remains.

This discrepancy between incarnation and meaning is, finally, present in all those imaginary portraits of men born out of their time, an Apollo or a Dionysus in Christian Europe, as in “Apollo in Picardy” or “Denys l’Auxerrois,” a presage of the Enlightenment in still half-barbaric Germany, as in “Duke Carl of Rosenmold.” The tragedy of all these figures is in the incompatibility between the meanings they carry and the material conditions within which they are forced to embody them. This incompatibility, as much as the tragic division of forces within themselves, destines them to obscurity and early death. Their triumph is that they do reenact the old pattern, for the gods in exile are gods still, and the story works itself out anew in the changed conditions. Even so, Pater's portraits are always of those who do not wholly embody their meaning. They are gods born out of their time. This incongruity dramatizes a universal condition of artistic expression in Pater's view of it.

A remnant of non-saturation is always present, a part of the body left over, some matter not wholly absorbed into form. Its existence leads to the recognition that art for Pater is generated only in the interval between forces. This is not that other kind of Logocentrism which sees the Logos as energy rather than as subject. It involves a different notion, more difficult to grasp, in fact ungraspable. It is the ungraspable as such, an ungraspable which for Pater, with his sense for nuance, is essential to literature and to art generally. This notion is ungraspable because it cannot be thematized or conceptualized. It can only be glimpsed fleetingly, out of the corner of the eye, in the interplay between images. This non-conceptual insight, perpetually in flight, is the notion of meaning constituted by difference. Such meaning is not a correlate of force, whether that force is subjective or objective, self or matter. Such meaning is always in excess of the material substratum which embodies it. It appears momentarily in the openings between, and it is always in league with death. Such a notion might be called the uncanny, but it is not the uncanny as the occult presence of some ur-force which has differentiated itself and works as fate. It is the uncanny as the absence of origin. It is the mouth of the garden god with no snake in it.

Is this not that idea of “the disembodied spirit,” rather than some more conventional notion of immortality, which Pater formulates in a splendid passage about Michelangelo's “predilection” for those who die young and for all the imagery of death? Here the absence of any definable origin becomes transferred, in a metalepsis, to the absence of any fixable image for that future which is created by life but which lies beyond death. The relation of a dead body to the meaning it contains by not containing it is the most extreme form of that discrepancy between the material image and its meaning which governs all Pater's insight into artistic signs. Here for once Pater is oriented not toward the past but toward the future, though the structure of material signs creating something which exceeds them, a “new body,” body not body yet possible only in relation to some body, remains the same. To call Michelangelo's four famous sculptured figures Night, Day, The Twilight, and The Dawn, says Pater, is far too definite for them. Rather they “concentrate and express,”

less by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix and are defined and fade again, whenever the thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions and surroundings of the disembodied spirit.

(R 95)

Then follows an extraordinary description of the “range of sentiment” in relation to death, of which, says Pater, Michelangelo is “the poet still alive, and in possession of our inmost thoughts” (R 95-96), as if Michelangelo's “new body” were, by some kind of transmigration, our own:

—dumb inquiry over the relapse after death into the formlessness which preceded life, the change, the revolt from that change, then the correcting, hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in the wind.

(R 95-96)

The most fully conceptualized expression of this third aspect of Pater's work, implicit denial and deconstruction of the other two, is a passage in the key essay of Greek Studies, “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone.”This essay was written in 1875, in the poise between euhemeristic, cosmological, and linguistic theories of myth, in such scholars as Max Müller, and the appearance in 1890 of the first two volumes of Frazer's The Golden Bough. Pater's essay is almost exactly contemporary with Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Like Nietzsche's essay it has both a particular interest in relation to the thought of its author and a more general importance as the expression and exemplification of a theory of interpretation. The passage also, by way of its reference to Giotto's frescoes in Padua depicting Virtues and Vices, links itself to a “chain of secret influences” that binds together a series of crucial texts. This series extends from the places where Ruskin discusses those paintings by Giotto through Pater to a passage in Proust, which echoes Ruskin, to critical essays by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man on Proust.

Pater begins by distinguishing between the abstract personification by modern artists of such entities as “wealth” or “commerce” and the “profoundly poetical and impressive” personifications of Giotto and other early masters. The reader may expect that Pater is going to discriminate between modern concoctions in which there is no intrinsic relation between the meaning and its embodiment, “mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech” (Greek Studies. London, 1895. 98), and, on the other hand, genuine symbolism, in which the meaning saturates its material vehicle. Matters are not so simple in this passage. Giotto, or other artists like him in the modern period, Blake or Burne-Jones, or that old artist who designed the stained glass of the Apocalypse at Bourges, produce “something more than mere symbolism” (GS 98). This is achieved by “some peculiarly sympathetic penetration, on the part of the artist, into the subjects he intended to depict” (GS 98). The word “subject” here has an odd and unexpected meaning. It refers not to that “ethical” or “allegorical” theme of the work but to the material carrier of that theme. The artist's sympathetic penetration is into that embodiment in its peculiar relation to its ethical meaning. This carrier is presented literally, with full mimetic specificity. It is pictured as “realistically” as a Victorian novelist copies, with scrupulous fidelity, the details of daily life:

Symbolism as intense as this is the creation of special temper, in which a certain simplicity, taking all things literally, au pied de la lettre, is united to a vivid pre-occupation with the aesthetic beauty of the image itself, the figured side of figurative expression, the form of the metaphor. When it is said, “Out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword,” that temper is ready to deal directly and boldly with that difficult image, like that old designer of the fourteenth century, who has depicted this, and other images of the Apocalypse, in a coloured window at Bourges. Such symbolism cares a great deal for the hair of Temperance, discreetly bound, for some subtler likeness to the colour of the sky in the girdle of Hope, for the inwoven flames in the red garment of Charity.

(GS 98-99)

This admirable passage, like the similar passages in Ruskin, in Proust, in Benjamin, and in De Man, calls attention to the paradoxical self-cancelling effects of such literalism in allegorical representation. On the one hand, as Proust observes, the intense literalism of such allegory greatly increases the “aesthetic beauty” of the work of art which employs it.

[P]lus tard j’ai compris [says Marcel] que l’étrangété saisissante, la beauté spéciale de ces fresques tenait à la grande place que le symbole y occupait, et que le fait qu’il fût représenté non comme un symbole puisque la pensée symbolisée n’était pas exprimée, mais comme réel, comme effectivement subi ou matériellement manié, donnait à la signification de l’oeuvre quelque chose de plus littéral et de plus précis.

On the other hand, an exactly opposite effect is produced by taking literally what is after all “only” a figure of speech, so that a sword literally goes out of the mouth of the Christ of the Apocalypse or, in the curiously parallel example Proust gives, Giotto represents Envy with a swollen protruding tongue like an illustration in a medical text for some ghastly disease. Whether or not the parallel here would support a claim that Proust had read the passage in Pater has little importance, but the examples both give are similar cases of a grotesque literalism incongruous with its abstract significance. Both examples involve the organ of speech, that snake in the mouth of gods and men which is the father of lies, that is, of “figurative expression.” In both examples, the realism with which the figured side of the figure is represented only intensifies the incompatibility between tenor and vehicle in the metaphor. It calls attention to the fictive or verbal aspect of the expression, even to its absurdity. There is no substantial similarity between the abstraction and its material embodiment, though they may seem plausibly enough connected in the purely linguistic expression. The embodiment can be represented. The more vividly and literally it is pictured, the more beautiful the work of art. Nevertheless, the more literally it is represented, the more it brings into the open the fact that the “ethical” meaning—Temperance, Hope, or whatever—has, as Proust observes, not been represented at all. It has only been indirectly named in a metaphor. This metaphor confesses in its intense literalism to its inability to be anything but itself, a mouth with a sharp sword going out of it, flames, the blue of the sky, the hair of a discreet woman, neatly bound. At best the painter can translate into visual images the equivalents of verbal metaphor, painting flames on the garment of Charity, the blue of the sky on the girdle of Hope. The allegorical meaning vanishes in the realism with which its vehicle is represented. That meaning is shown to exist only as names, as an interplay of displaced words which are the basis of the visual representation.

Even so, Pater returns at the end of the paragraph to the idea of a people for whom the powers governing the universe were seen as real persons. For such a people the false equations of metaphor were literally true. When they talked of the return of Kore to Demeter, for example, they were “yielding to a real illusion; to which the voice of man ‘was really a stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist’” (GS 100). Pater's mode of expression here, however, to turn back to the other side once more, demystifies such ways of seeing and returns them to the verbal figures which they take literally. To a vision of such a temper the “illusion” was “real,” hence not an illusion. To Pater it is an illusion, a voice not a stream, beauty not an effluence, death only figuratively a mist.

Back and forth between these various contradictory readings of the passage its reader is forced to go. Each reading depends on others which contradict it and it contradicts the others in its turn. The passage, in its insistence that only a “special temper” is capable of the “real illusion” of allegory au pied de la lettre, can be taken as reaffirming Pater's subjectivism. In its suggestion that the stratum below the play of allegorical representation is material forces, flame or sky, the passage may be seen as congruent with Pater's objectivism, his materialism of “inwoven” forces. In its recognition that both of these notions are generated by a play of language, the passage may be taken as congruent with the third reading of Pater I have proposed. The god's mouth is empty or is filled only with that uncanny simulacrum of a snake born and dying and born anew in the interaction of the signs men make. In this third interpretation, the reader is seen as intervening actively in any interpretation. Meaning is produced in an act of deciphering which can never reach the original or intrinsic meaning of any text. An “impression” is as much an act as a passion. It is the stamping of crisscrossing forces with a momentary stillness in one reading. Another critic of another “temper” will produce a different reading of the same text. No judge will be able to arbitrate between them, since the text is “undecidable,” incapable of being encompassed in a single total reading.

All three of these readings, and other variations on them, are present not only in this paragraph from “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone” but also intertwined throughout Pater's work as a whole. The last reading sees the subject of Pater's writing as ultimately, whatever its ostensible theme, writing and reading themselves. Reading is a further writing, and all writing is a palimpsest. The critic produces an additional inscription over an earlier inscription in the flesh, that necessary material basis of all art, though art always exceeds its fleshly incarnations. This fact, however, may only be experienced in the flesh, in a literalism which defeats itself. The critic is, like Leonardo da Vinci, homo minister et interpres naturae (R 98), but the minister and the interpreter are perpetually caught in a dance of antagonism, each denying the other and yet dependent on him. Pater's writings, like those of other major authors in the Occidental tradition, are at once open to interpretation and ultimately indecipherable, unreadable. His texts lead the critic deeper and deeper into a labyrinth until he confronts a final aporia. This does not mean, however, that the reader must give up from the beginning the attempt to understand Pater. Only by going all the way into the labyrinth, following the thread of a given clue, can the critic reach the blind alley, vacant of any Minotaur, that impasse which is the end point of interpretation.

Pater's work, then, is heterogeneous, dialogical, or antilogical. Dialogical and antilogical come, in fact, to the same thing, since the doubling of the Logos is a sign of its absence. Each reading in the interchange of overlapping voices may be worked out with full cogency, though it is impossible to have all at once. All three cannot be simultaneously “true.” Moreover, they may not be related to one another dialectically or in some kind of hierarchy. My necessarily narrative or sequential development falsifies their implications upon one another, just as the apparent historical development in Pater's theory of myth makes, as Pater himself says, a fictitious narrative of what are in fact simultaneous members of a single system. In all its dimensions, in Pater's interest in the impressions made or felt by the “unique” personality, in his art of portraiture, in his essays on sculpture, in his studies of mythical figures and of an allegorical art that is “more than mere symbolism,” Pater's work can be defined as an exploration and deconstruction of the problematic trope of personification, that turn of language or art which gathers impersonal forces under a human figure. Is subjectivity a fixed point of origin from which all else follows, or is personality a fragile receptacle within which impersonal energies are momentarily brought together, or are both the person and the forces gathered within it linguistic fictions generated by the interchange of sign with sign in the productive workings of art or literature?

My three readings of Pater's use of the trope of personification may not be reconciled in any way. They form a bewildering oscillation in which each reading will lead to the others if it is followed far enough, though the others contradict and cancel it out, while at the same time being necessary to its expression. To put this in Pater's terms: If the magical appearance of unity to which we give the name “person” is always produced differentially, by the division or combat of contradictory forces, and yet exceeds anything which may be identified as in those forces, as the “new body” exceeds the dead body, then the momentary poise in a personification will always be divided against itself, folded, manifold, dialogical rather than monological. It will always be open, like all the master tropes of the great texts in the Western tradition, to multiple contradictory readings in a perpetual fleeing away from any fixed sense.