SOURCE: “The Prose Architecture of Mental Abodes: The Presence of Inhabitable Language” in Tombs, Despoiled and Haunted: “Under-Textures” and “After-Thoughts” in Walter Pater, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 40-55.

[In the following excerpt, Fellows analyzes the nature of Pater's prose, describing it as stationary yet penetrating.]

The wind, persistent, the mantle, purple, the blond hair in the persistent wind against the chiselled features. Like a corpse, a mummy wrapped in a winding sheet, bound against that persistent wind which “for many years … had its dwelling among the mountains, [and] came as a stranger, darkly. Persistent now.”

—Pater, anonymously unwritten, in an act of sabotage based on baseless animus

At twilight he came over the frozen snow. As he passed through the stony barriers of the place the world around seemed to curdle to the center—all but himself, fighting his way across it, turning now and then right-about from the persistent wind, which dealt so roughly with his blond hair and the purple mantle whirled about him.

—Pater, “Denys l’Auxerrois”

When you speak of me to cathedrals, I cannot but feel touched at the evidence of an intuition which has led you to guess what I had never mentioned to anyone, and here set down in writing for the first time—that I once planned to give to each part of my book a succession of titles, such as Porch, Windows in the Apse, etc. … so as to defend myself in advance against the sort of stupid criticism which has been made to the effect that my books lack construction, whereas I hope to prove to you that their sole merit lies in the solidarity of their tiniest parts. I gave up the idea of using these architectural titles because I found them too pretentious, but I am touched at finding that you have dug them up by a sort of intelligent divination.

—Marcel Proust, letter to Comte Jean de Gaigneron

Like the often antithetical Ruskin before (and during) him, Pater is, or would have one believe him to be, a kind of optical system that receives visual impressions and translates them back verbally into what J. Hillis Miller calls “linguistic design”¹ and what Pater calls “pictorial form” (R, 149), as of the Center-Circumference dynamic in Plato and Platonism. Pater's other sensory apprehensions of the world are significantly more felicitous than Ruskin's, who will live, desire, go mad, and die by the eye, even as he will often, especially later, smell the “mephitic,” hear bells that are infernal, and touch, essentially, only shovel and possessions. But with apparent delight, Pater, or his personae, will smell, hear, and touch, even or especially the forbidden. The young, mnemonically revisited Florian, from “The Child in the House,” receives impressions or “recognitions of [the] visible, tangible, audible loveliness of things” (MS, 181).

Still, most of all, Pater, even as he hears those urgent and exiled voices of absence, is essentially an existential phenomenologist of sight. The autobiography of his linguistic consciousness will be shaped, to an extraordinary degree, by what he sees. As with Raphael, so, though less ambitiously, with his commentator: “By him [Raphael] large theoretic conceptions are addressed, so to speak, to the intelligence of the eye” (MS, 57). With both Pater and Ruskin, the optical “intelligence” is especially worth noting because it is, apparently, uncharacteristic of the English temperament and its sensory bias. Writing ostensibly about Steele, in the essay “English Literature,” Pater tells us at least as much about himself: “It was one of his [Steele's] peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye far more than any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps in an Englishman)” (EG, 181).

Yet “peculiar” Englishmen who “live by the eye” do not necessarily possess an optical intelligence. At times, it would seem that what might be an Italian or Greek intelligence translates into an English, perhaps Evangelical, “lust.” Such a “lust” leads Florian, the “Child,” from his “House” at a considerable, though necessarily inevitable, cost—the cost of loss:

He could trace two predominant processes of mental change in him—the growth of an almost diseased sensibility to the spectacle of suffering, and, parallel with this, the rapid growth of a certain capacity of fascination by bright colour and choice form—the sweet curvings, for instance, of the lips of those who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the things they said or sang—marking early the activity in him of a more than customary sensuousness, “the lust of the eye,” as the preacher says, which might lead him, one day, how far! (MS, 181)

From the mnemonic perspective of the adult, the Child might have been pleased, or at least interested, to have seen farther at first—the presbyopia of eventual anteriority that becomes increasingly significant in “after-thoughts.” But “prediction,” the desired farsightedness of youth, is not often possible even for those whose eyes may already be old. The future may be Pater's most conditional tense—one that frequently slips into a past which “might have been”: “Could he [Florian] have foreseen the weariness of the way” (MS, 181). Anticipated, future repetitions can only be seen by later eyes.

Before, as well as later, close to Pater's corrective end, the result of his weary “way,” there is an optically informing Plato. If Pater's Plato is neither Pater in the manner of Marius, nor an autonomous Plato, what emerges from a reading of Plato and Platonism is a Paterian version of Plato. Pater may in fact be more “at home” in his Greece of Plato than in the England of Victoria—an England where it is unusual “to live by the eye,” though perhaps more common after Ruskin than in the time of Steele. Discussing “The Genius of Plato,” Pater alludes both to visibility and to its receptive audience: “Like all masters of literature, Plato has of course varied excellences; but perhaps none of them has won for him a larger number of friendly readers than this impress of visible reality” (PP, 129).

As Pater understands visible illustration, there is, for example, Plato's version of the end of Socrates:

Sometimes, even when they are not formally introduced into his work, characters that had interested, impressed, or touched him, inform and colour it, as if with their personal influence, showing what purports to be the wholly abstract analysis of some wholly abstract moral situation. Thus, the form of the dying Socrates himself is visible. … When Plato is dealing with the inmost elements of personality, his eye is still on its object, on character as seen in characteristics, through those details, which make character a sensible fact, the changes of colour in the face as of tone in the voice. … What is visibly expressive in, or upon, persons, … it is always more than worth his while to make note of these. (PP, 130-31)

Pater's Plato possesses “the delicacy of the artist, the fastidious eye for the subtleties of colour as soul made visibly expressive” (PP, 133). Further, “when Plato speaks of visible things it is as if you saw them” (PP, 135). Essentially, Plato's genius is to make what might be a “chilly abstraction” (PP, 49) visible, perhaps as colored as a soul incarnate: “He gives names to the invisible acts, processes, creations, of old. As Plato speaks of them, we might say, those abstractions too become visible living creatures” (PP, 141).²This Plato, more phenomenological than Platonic, may not be easily recognized, but he is undeniably Plato the way Pater would have him, and thus an important nexus of the “metamorphoses of … [Pater's own] mind.” With obvious reluctance, Pater admits the Plato of “harshest dualism”: “His aptitude for things visible, with the gift of words, empowers him to express, as if for the eyes, what except to the eye of the mind is strictly invisible, what an acquired asceticism induces him to rank above, sometimes, in terms of harshest dualism, opposed to, the sensible world” (PP, 143).

If the “lust of the eye” takes the Child far (“how far”?) from his House, it is a cultivated and “fastidious eye” that accompanies Plato on his journeys: “A traveller, adventurous for that age, he certainly becomes. After the Lehr-jahre, the Wander-jahre!—all round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as Sicily. Think of what all that must have meant just then, for eyes that could see” (PP, 147). If the Child, impelled by his eyes, quits the House with a mixture of lust and reluctance, Plato, whose eyes see as fully as the Child's, leaves with different emotions: “If those journeys had begun in angry flight from home, it was for the purposes of self-improvement they [the journeys of essentially visual apprehension] were continued” (PP, 147).

Whether fastidious or lusting, Pater's eyes are most “at home” “in” the home, despite his need to make intimacy distant. His Marius will “keep the eye clear [if more experienced than innocent] by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling place” (ME1, 33). Pater's own favorite observation of the completing or fulfilling return, which will carry him, through his personae, back to that original “dwelling place,” is as immaculate as a clear eye devoid of “lust” that has been erased by the act of arrival.

He is ready to explore the perceptions of the eye in a way that, translated to the fine arts, goes against an accepted, single-minded orthodoxy. More specifically, Pater will make the Platonically “visible” something either more or less than a scene for the educated eye, whether that eye be lustful or fastidious. It is a situation he will approach obliquely, with characteristic qualification and subordination. In his essay “Sandro Botticelli,” Pater points out that “Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending with naive carelessness or pictorial propriety, three phases of the same scene into one plate” (R, 52). Here, it is as if, before the structures of Lessing's Laocoon, we were to confront the emblems, for instance, of George Whither (A, 119), with painting aspiring not toward the condition of music so much as toward the condition of narrative. Pater describes Botticelli affectionately as “before all things a poetic painter, blending the charm of the story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium of abstract painting” (R, 52).

Pater is himself neither naïve nor deaf to those admonitions of Lessing, but he will refer, in his well-known passage from “The School of Giorgione,” to other “German critics” whose aesthetics come closer to satisfying his ideals. He makes his case by beginning tentatively, antithetically, as if to guard his flanks, with a sophisticated “but although” that, precluding innocence, is on the opposite side of the sentence's ending and essential point:

But although each art has thus its own specific order of impression, and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben—a partial alienation from its own 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)³

Later, in the same essay, the doubled Pater, perhaps anticipating an instinct toward integration, will have the “twin born … imaginative reason” moving toward the unity of a “single effect.” It is ironic that one whose final condition is itself a conflict that is more accommodated than resolved should be the one to break down the barriers of categories that may now strike us as false. Nevertheless, it is Pater as “embodied paradox,” who points out that

art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their union or identity; present one single effect to the “imaginative reason,” that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol. (R, 138)

Theory would become the incarnation of presence, as Pater moves from the implicit toward practice and example. The ideal example of vitalizing reciprocity between the visible and the verbal is dependent upon the selection of a subject that will be compatible with “pictorial form”:

It [Giorgione's] is the school of genre, and employs itself mainly with ‘painted idylls,’ but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matters as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete expression by drawing and colour. For although its products are painted poems, they belong to a poetry which tells itself without an articulated story. (R, 149)

Employing a “pictorial form” without painting an “articulated story” is a form that itself tends to elude Pater, whose talent with language is other than that of chronological narrative. In fact, as well shall see, Pater is perhaps as picaresque in return as he is not in decentering pilgrimage. “The School of Giorgione” predicts the once-erased “Conclusion” to The Renaissance in its apprehension of a time that is essentially nonsequential:

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 motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously coloured world of the old citizens of Venice—exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fullness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life. (R, 150)

With “The School of Giorgione,” we are far from the “naive carelessness” of Botticelli, who would charmingly flirt with isolated moments of extended serial time, instead of selecting “ideal instants” as privileged, almost epiphanic condensations.

Yet Pater's aesthetics, more phenomenological than metaphysical (though the relics of a discredited logocentricity linger, as in the case of Sebastian, who defies easy dismissal, even as he himself dismisses everything but “nothing”), cannot be reduced by the anthologizing mind that would take aphoristic statement for exclusive meaning. One might affirm that Pater, at least as the early linguistic autobiographer's double creature of “immature radiance,” is himself not only “twin-born” but that his later existence, even in a consolidating and condensed present of epiphanic moments, is still double. In his essay on Raphael, first delivered as a lecture some years after the appearance of “The School of Giorgione,” Pater, still hunting for origins, though he “must be content to follow faint traces” (GS, 111)—those “faint traces” being like infirm vantage points that would reveal the anteriority of perpetual regression—notes a “narrative power” that is not grounded in those economically “ideal instants”: “Now, Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period at Rome, exhibits a wonderful narrative power in painting; and the secret of that power—the sources of developing a story in a picture, or a series of pictures—may be traced back from him to Pinturicchio” (MS, 45).

Still, Pater is not simply a mirror of his Giorgione or Raphael. Perhaps he is “twin-born,” and then later of Janusian accommodation. Though capable of the affiliation of “appreciation,” he is not using a painter's brush to tell a story. Rather, he is writing about looking. His looking, unlike Ruskin's, appears limited to canvases, as if in the reflex of “modern subjectivity” he were anticipating Ortega's regression of the focal point, where the “owned body” of Paul Ricoeur might be owned by a self that had broken from objectivity. Similar to his version of Plato, Pater would make language itself visible. He writes as if he were painting, while avoiding the genre of word pictures, and, significantly, without the “narrative power” that Raphael implicitly borrows from the orthodox usage of language.

Pater's prose, in fact, appears even more stationary than the canvases of the painters he describes. At times his narrative thread might be described as a series of superimposed repetitions surrounding a kind of coil, or concentric palimpsest. (The shrill wind, the harmattan, undoubtedly, whistling down from the mountains, and then, as if never heard before, without truth, utterly, it seemed, triumphant … the shock to my auditory canal, my acoustic meatus, my tympanum, my anvil played with arrogance, the whistling, the rutting, the infernal percussion. … Inevitable. The Repetitions. As always, and the alien corn ripped by that ruthless wind.) Perhaps with some impulse toward reciprocity or balance, his prose aspires toward a form of illustration that is without essential or convincing movement. Occasionally, as if impelled by a will toward “Anders-streben” that defines his own alienated relation to aspects of himself, words become pictures. Those pictures, it is apparent, will be closer to statuary than either murals or Siennese narrative paintings. Beginning “The Bacchanals of Euripides,” Pater is content to say, “So far, I have endeavoured to present, with something of the concrete character of a picture …” (GS, 53).

Yet if words should contribute to pictures that are as stationary as statues, these pictures/words should also, it seems, be suitable for framing. Often Pater's Imaginary Portraits appear to possess the impulse of a certain centripetence, as if directed toward a Center that either seems to evade location, as with “Denys,” or one that is located firmly in its centricity, as with “The Child”—a centripetal movement that is to become characteristic of the fulfilling Pater of “return.” This situation is reminiscent of some of the short stories of Ernest Downson, whose “portraits” are themselves enclosed, or framed in a setting that is also a defensive vantage point for a kind of regressive departure—a departure turned toward enclosing spaces of interior liminalities.

If “The Child” is mnemonically framed, we recall that, to arrive at a portrait of “Denys l’Auxerrois,” both the reader and the reluctant “To me” / “I” are guided, as if by thresholds of spiralling interiorities, through a landscape reminiscent of Turner, to a stained glass window, and finally to a series of tapestries, where, with the “help of certain notes,” “the story shaped itself at last” (IP, 54). In the case of “Denys,” as has been suggested, the frames may be a cage. The circumferential vitality of relative immediacy, of something approaching the visceral activity of the present tense, has been filtered through concentric layers of a variety of the arts informed by “pictorial form,” to become, finally, a subverted narrative of spatial form. This language does not so much work, in an orthodox sense, in its dissonance, as it does in its cultivated idiosyncrasy, precisely because of the juxtaposed, not to say Janusian, spatialized “dissonance”⁴ of a kind of “included difference.” Dionysian performance, essentially circumferential, is controlled by a framing imprisonment that separates Pater and his reader from the excesses of frenzy. All this may only be the work of a writer engaged in the displacement of certain aspects of linguistic consciousness, who, somewhat equivocally, desires to protect his personae from the full consequences of a dangerous psychic exhibitionism that takes place on the inner surface of a framing Circumference.

Essentially, neither movement nor narrative is encouraged in a language that, as if of concentric repetitions surrounding a cylindrical palimpsest, would achieve the stability, even while describing a world of evanescence, of a framed portraiture that, in turn, would be like, say, the figures on the tombs of Michelangelo's Night and Day, The Twilight, and The Dawn, as described by Pater (R, 94). “Twin-born” “creatures of immature radiance” might be reborn into stones of immutability. Most often, when there is a primitive form of narrative movement in Pater's fundamentally synchronic fiction, it will be concentrically, which is to say safely, surrounded and removed from the presence, or vitality verging on frenzy, of the present tense of those full, epiphanic moments that, paradoxically (and therefore characteristically), are enthusiastically advertised, especially in “The School of Giorgione,” the “New Cyrenaicism” chapter from Marius, and the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance.

Further, despite the fact that Sebastian van Storck is a kind of “diagonally antithetical” Paterian persona, even for the Amielian or Giorgionesque-informed “twin-born,” Sebastian's beginning is caught in space with time an extracted dimension—a condition typical of the Paterian bias for frames that enclose thresholds which themselves both stabilize and effect liminal transition. The exterior world, in this case the world of Sebastian, is defined as an example of art—a world that, caught and framed, only permits an optical exit or entrance which is rendered safe by virtue of its framing: “It was a winter-scene, by Adrian van de Velde, or by Isaac van Ostade” (IP, 81).

Still, the transformation of the arts—Pater's version of “Anders-streben” taken to an extreme degree—is, significantly, not complete; it is yet to be frozen in a “winter-scene” that will never thaw. While Pater would freeze the forward motion of an always-weary temporal narrative thread (though not, perhaps, the daemonic energies of the nihilistic circumferential nightmare, “that deep undercurrent of horror which runs below” [GS, 78]) by a variety of framing devices, he would also, with the apparent contradiction we shall come to assume, introduce the Euclidean world of three dimensions. This world of shifting mutability includes the temporal dimension of distance-as-depth (and death), of the “how far” (MS, 173) necessary for the act of return (or arrival, as it will seem)—an act that is, of course, documented even as a form of retrospective-as-narration-as-“after-thought.” And even portraits that are imaginary might well cast shadows, as though from the statues examined by Winckelmann: “The art of sculpture records the first naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself” (R, 213). Those shadows are of the third dimension of a temporally implicated depth.

Pater's language is horizontally frozen or framed, with its lateral, left-to-right narrative element as static or “frozen” as one might expect from a language of “pictorial form” fundamentally outside of the sense of time that it is nevertheless informed by. Still, this language appears to penetrate (later we shall see how important that word/concept is to Pater) or invade the limitations of a two-dimensional page—even, perhaps, the canvas as palimpsest, which is the characteristically encrusted Paterian surface. It does this by travelling beyond the page's immediate surface into the territory of distance-as-depth and time, which is the prospective and reflexive territory of “departure” and “return” that is also a version of “loss” and “regain,” located “within” the language of the page. This sense of travelling into the page helps shape “the relieving interchange” (ME2, 106) of Paterian metalepsis. With the impression that the end is merely superimposed over the beginning, rather than off to the side, substitutions become inevitable to even the stationary eye.

Winckelmann's appreciated statuary, more “concrete” (certainly less diaphanous) than the “character of a picture,” can be said to predict, if not living people, concrete living spaces—or “abodes”—for the living. Such “dwelling places,” or “homes,” reflect a verbal style that has surpassed the “partial alienation from its own limitations” by breaking away from the two-dimensional discourse of lateral narrative to the shadow-casting substance of three dimensions. Here, the third dimension is temporally implicated in the “how far” of a recessional space of almost inevitable reversal. Pater's style, as if aedicularly shaped by statuary that itself predicts both “mental” and “physical” “abodes,” reflects the substitution of the depth of Euclidean space, with its superimpositions, in place of the serial procession of the horizontal or lateral in what amounts to a shift of orthodox emphasis in syntactic procession.

Significantly, Pater, in his essay “English Literature,” borrows from George Saintsbury the concept of “architecture,” with its implicit occupation of Euclidean space, as a model for what he calls “prose structure” (EG, 6). In his “Joachim du Bellay” essay, Pater, bringing shadows to language, establishes a relation between architecture and poetry. He notes that the audiences of the Pleiad “love a constant change of rhyme in poetry, and in their houses that strange, fantastic interweaving of thin, reed-like lines, which are a kind of rhetoric of architecture” (R, 170). And with a broader concept of poetry, Pater, as if recalling Ruskin's The Poetry of Architecture (1837-38), as well as the effects of those “golden stains of time” from The Seven Lamps of Architecture's (1849) “The Lamp of Memory,” observes that there is a “poetry also of memory and of the mere effect of time, by which architecture often profits greatly” (R, 134).

In the essay “Sir Thomas Browne,” Pater will observe, with a dubious first glance (and we shall come to know what Pater thinks of “first sights” uninformed by “after-thought”), the absence of precisely that sense of “pictorial form” which becomes an architecture of language: “And all is so oddly mixed, showing, in its entire ignorance of self, how much he, and the sort of literature he represents, really stood in need of technique, of a formed taste in literature, of a literary architecture” (A, 126-27). Nevertheless, Pater, whose “second sights” are more final—and eventually primary—than his “first sights,” has immediate second thoughts that result in his considering, as a literary model, the possibility of a highly idiosyncratic “prose structure.” This almost inhabitable, aedicular architecture of modular “mental abodes” is, in fact, a home of linguistic consciousness:

And yet perhaps we could hardly wish the result different in him [Browne], any more than the books of Burton and Fuller, or some other similar writers of that age—mental abodes, we might liken, after their own manner, to the little old private houses of some historic town grouped about its grand public structures, which, when they have survived at all, posterity is loth to part with. (A, 127)

The syntax of “mental abodes” is a “literary architecture” worthy of survival precisely because it is both authentically of a linguistic autobiography and reflective of its context: “For, in their absolute sincerity, not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves (‘the unique peculiarity of the writer's mind,’ being, as Johnson says of Browne, ‘faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his work’) but, even more than merely professionally instructed writers, they belong to, and reflect, the age they live in” (A, 127).

Closer to the architecture of the Paterian home that is itself a model for “literary architecture,” Florian Deleal, in “The Child in the House,” is an architect of autobiographical consciousness, involved as he is “in that process of brain-building by which we are, each one of us, what we are” (MS, 173). And the Child's “brain-building,” part of the “metamorphoses of the mind,” is Pater's construction of one of those “mental abodes” that is, in fact, a syntactical place of three dimensions in which to abide. It is as if one—or one's soul—might live within, or “occupy,” one's own “prose structure” in a condition of Ricoeur's “owned body” that had transcended objectivity—a “prose structure,” at least stylistically, of presence or “grace.” As though daydreaming, Florian, in that “half-spiritualized house” of his self-referential consciousness,

could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul which had come to be there—of which indeed, through the law which makes the material objects about them so large an element in children's lives, it had actually become a part, inward and outward being woven through and through each other into one inextricable texture—half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows how far. (MS, 173)

The process of leaving, whether for the Child's first time or for the adult's dream-impelled “mental journey” (MS, 174), informed by eyes of memory that are either lustful or fastidious—though, in either case, presumably “intelligent”—is a departure that takes one neither horizontally right nor left, in a series of explicit diachronic narrations. Rather, it ventures “into” the recessional distance/depths of a Euclidean world organized about concentric repetition, in a characteristic act of “penetration.” Yet the model architecture-become-“mental abodes”-become-House for a Child is a place, even if origins are problematic, to which one always returns. Florian Deleal, after what amounts to an act of centrifugal decentering from a fictional, if “effective,” Center, returns to the framing “prose structure” of the first page. There he greets an awaiting reader who knew that the ending would be in the beginning, as in the repetitions of “a certain distance.” The origin is Pater's final destination, though with the implicit rebeginnings of oscillation.

Figuratively, one might reconstruct that first paragraph of “The Child” as a model for the Paterian text, just as one takes “the House,” less figuratively, as a model for “literary architecture”—a model as a framed page of superimposition, rather than of lateral series, that creates depth for a “literary architecture” that is the result of an extensive transformation in the arts. Language, dissatisfied with itself (perhaps with the burden of meaning-as-information that is less evident in music or architecture), has passed beyond “pictorial form” to construct an “abode” whose exit is its entrance. It is as if the first and last pages have been laminated together in order that they might hold beginnings and endings simultaneously. This page of “The Child,” as the text becomes what will later be called an “abiding place,” with the Paterian self inhabiting the public texts of his own linguistic autobiography, might be seen as a trope—in Pater's self-divided and reciprocally re-created, frozen world of “Anders-streben”—for the hypothetically frozen music of a “literary architecture.”

That autobiographical architecture may even have been part of that “winter scene by either Adrian van de Velde or Isaac van Ostade” (IP, 81). (Scum-knelling, closer, a dandy? le beau … ? of the dandy fever? a handy dandy fever?—or more to the purpose? Scum-belling closer, like thunder and lightning, the leprous here and now. Eventually. Inevitable. In due course. The evacue. Ishmael called to be recalled. In undue course? Perhaps an ill wind will in fact blow … ill. …) Perhaps, in fact, it is a scene of frozen time, as though the day of the winter solstice had been caught in oils, showing unfrosted ice over blood-covered snow—a sense that might turn out to be a version of Pater's imaginary portrait of himself, in his Dionysian aspect, as both “the hunter and the spoil” (GS, 79), doubled in self-alienation to be reintegrated in purposeful, if daemonic, performance as the finally dislocated Apollo of decidedly eccentric centripetence, who inhabits this text's complementary “Post-Face.” In that autobiographical “literary architecture,” which is the “mental abode” for the autobiography of linguistic consciousness, Pater's essential, if antithetical, self may occupy a textual depth of shadows within the pair of “imaginary portraits” that are of first and final frames. Pater himself becomes more substantial than diaphanous, with the laminations of superimposed “after-thoughts” providing substance if not nourishment. But then, as with a nostalgia that would take a disowned body for home, one remembers that doomed creature of “immature radiance,” who may be claimed, perhaps redeemed, if not resurrected, in the immaculately white antecedence of the Paterian self, whose misremembrance is a metamemory, as from the ashes—or rather shards—of a buried urn (A, 152) to be reconstructed, a mosaic or relic that might show the way to a condition, itself a “persistent after-thought” (GdL, 42), that might have been of a paradisiacal anteriority, and might be again, in a world of repetitions both Platonic and uncanny, even if only after the fact.

Pater's shaping impulse, as he might say after the “after-thought,” is “ex post facto” (GdL, 83), as one might also say, finally, of all of Pater's finished art.

Voice of Conjecture: For a moment—for more than a moment—one wonders whether, “ex post facto,” “second sights” would be the “normal” sight of the jaded eye—if, in fact, they can perceive what “might have been” in the reconstitution of paradisiacal relics, traces. But then, in Pater, “loss” is for the sake of “re-gain,” just as “departure” will be for the sake of a nostalgically impelled “re-turn”: “This, to begin and end with” (R, 140). Is that moment or more of “vain puerilities”? It is not, perhaps, yet of white indeterminacy.

The Epistolary Voice:

September 19, 18—

My Silent Confidant: (Mr. X, Esq.?) two cheers for you, who have nothing to lose. Oh, some who see my protest for what it is not may say, sagaciously, what Basilio says of Figaro. Who can blame them? But I, even if not much more than a lackey or two, a leech who was once so much more, of military verticality, reduced to the state of a—lightning, blinding, maddening—an avaricious parasite, have had everything to lose, and though the thunder closes I am not myself (I do not have much faith in this thunderstorm. And just whom have I deceived?). I may not myself entirely be this kowtower, this abject truckler, even if, or especially if, I would write so that only the initiated would understand, like Clement of Alexandria—the thunder even closer. Is it possible, R. = : Reconciliation? A Repetition? Does one dare?

Devotedly and anonymously yours. Soon to be pseudonymously yours, if dares prove too daring. And then, what’s the point, anyway?

Notes

1. J. Hillis Miller, “Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait,” Daedalus (Winter 1976): 97-113.

2. The importance of the audible in conjunction with the visible should be underscored in Plato's perception of the world. There is “the delicacy of eye and ear” (PP, 133); further, there is the “secret of the susceptible and diligent eye, the so sensitive ear,” as well as “those finer intimations, to eye and ear” (PP, 134). Plato's “intimate concern with, his power over, the sensible world” is the result of “indulging, developing, refining, the sensuous capacities, the powers of eye and ear” (PP, 135), of “carrying an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses, of the eye and ear” (PP, 139).

3. Previously, I have said that there is an important auditory Pater, and Pater is himself apparently certain that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (R, 135). But the problem is more complicated than the epigrammatic quotation suggests and cannot at length be discussed here. Gerald Monsmon has added an apt corrective, suggesting the spatializing—and pre- or posttemporality—of Pater's usage of language: “Music, for the most part, has a driving, linear movement. It goes places. But Pater's style, with its interminable qualifications and afterthoughts, with its parallelisms and antitheses, with its connotative richness and frequent ambiguity, is certainly anything but fluid. It is static, pictorial. It resembles the highly inflected structure of the classical languages in that it permits a more arbitrary order of words so that the sentence seems to present to the reader all of its parts simultaneously” (Pater's Portraits [Baltimore, 1967], p. 57).

   “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” The Paterian aphorism repeatedly leads to elaborated footnotes, further qualifications and complications—a densely chiasmal structure. Music, as Pater is very much aware, does more than simply go places. J. Hillis Miller points out that Pater's 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 [italics mine], 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 (A, 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” (“Walter Pater,” p. 103).

   At the least, one might say that Pater's “thread,” coiling, is one of echo, rebound, and repetition that, like much music, goes backward even as it goes forward.

4. See Ellen Frank's convincing Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition (Berkeley, 1979), which makes a further case for the embryonic notion of ut architectura poesis. The chapter on Pater is excellent and the more theoretical chapter, “The Analogical Tradition of Literary Architecture,” is most provocative.

A Note on Sources

Almost all references to the works of Pater refer to what might be called the Library Edition (London, 1910) and will appear in parentheses after quotations. Abbreviations in the text are as follows:

A	Appreciations
A/89	Appreciations (1889 edition)
EG	Essays from the “Guardian”
GdL	Gaston de Latour
GS	Greek Studies
IP	Imaginary Portraits
ME1, ME2	Marius the Epicurean (volume 1 or 2)
MS	Miscellaneous Studies
PP	Plato and Platonism
R	The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

The Letters of Walter Pater, introduced and edited by Lawrence Evans (Oxford, 1970), and Imaginary Portraits by Walter Pater, introduced and edited by Eugene J. Brzenk (New York, 1964), which includes the unfinished “An English Poet,” are noted without abbreviation. …