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

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

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

One immediate problem with the issue of representation/misrepresentation in Victorian art and letters is that it is embedded within the ubiquitous question of authority in Victorian culture: who is to decide what, in criticism, is a representation or a misrepresentation of Leonardo's “Mona Lisa” or, in painting, of a rocket falling in the night sky above Cremorne Gardens? In Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854) an approving Inspector of Schools agrees with Bitzer's standard definition of a horse and wrathfully explains to the cowering children of the Gradgrind School why they would not paper a room with representations of horses: “horses do not walk up and down the sides of rooms in reality” and “you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact” (Dickens, 51). Such artistic representations of horses and their arrangement in a room are, it seems, misrepresentations.

Dickens here anticipates an aesthetic dogma set down by another Inspector of Schools, Matthew Arnold, in “On Translating Homer” (1862):

Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is. (Arnold, I, 140)

At the risk of laboring the obvious: criticism following Arnold's tenet presents accurate representations; that which does not, misrepresentations.

Poised against both School Inspectors is Walter Pater (1839-1894) who, subverting Arnold and the School of Fact, asserts:

“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step toward seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. (Pater, Renaissance, xix)

For Pater, the modification of Arnold's phrase and stance allows for true representation in criticism and Arnold's unmodified posture becomes the vehicle for misrepresentation since it denies the instrumentality of the critic, the role of the critic's personality in shaping a representation, and, as Pater was to outline and Oscar Wilde was to name, the place of the Critic as Artist.

With the decline and near demise of Pater's critical importance and reputation in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks to Paul Elmer More, T. S. Eliot (Arnold's ephebe, in Harold Bloom's locution) and the prophets of the New Criticism, the critical field has gone to Arnold and the illusion of objectivity (Bloom, 13). For decades, then, as Bloom characterizes it, “Most of what the Academy considers acceptable critical style is of course merely a worn-out Neoclassical diction, garlanded with ibids, and civilly purged of all enthusiasm” (Bloom, ibid.). In deference to Arnold's victory and conventional, received authority, I will treat Pater's art as one of misrepresentation although it may indeed turn out to be a true or truer representation as we find it approaching the condition of fine art.

Pater's art of misrepresentation has not fared well in the past century. Various writers have expressed consternation, dismay, opprobrium, amusement and condescension upon their discovering lapses, errors and “misrepresentations” in the work of this most important of late Victorian critics. In Pater's own time, to use one representative instance, Mrs. Mark Pattison argued that the title of his first volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), was inappropriate; Pater seems to have inappropriately agreed with her and changed the title, more, perhaps, to avoid argument than to alter his method. This alteration amounts to a self-misrepresentation since his work, historically based, is indeed a series of studies in the history of the Renaissance. When, early in this century, Samuel C. Chew found himself entangled in those of Pater's quotations culled from various sources and presented as unified discourses, he upbraided Pater for misleading his readers and misrepresenting his sources. Helen H. Law, in a monument of philological scholarship, cleared Pater of Chew's charges in his handling of classical Greek texts, although Paul Shorey had earlier noted some “fanciful” translations and interpretations of phrases from Plato's Republic. T. S. Eliot, though not at all averse to borrowing key concepts and phrases from Pater, derided him for his alleged misreadings/misrepresentations of Shakespeare and others. More recently, Christopher Ricks joined the chorus of complaint about Pater's quotations as misrepresentations, a complaint Gerald Monsman effectively answered by claiming that Pater's project is a lifelong essay in “criticism-as-creative-self-portraiture” in which he “modifies his readers' conception of the past and creates his precursors anew in his own self-image” (Monsman, Autobiography, 13). Without disagreeing with Monsman's persuasive rebuttal of the literal-minded, I would elaborate a parallel project I find in Pater, one that springs from the very starting-place Monsman takes, and assert that in his works Pater is seeking to create artful misrepresentations and to make a high art of misrepresentation, one that extends to the art of self-misrepresentation.

If, as Harold Bloom asserts, all strong reading is misreading, then one ramification of this dictum is that all strong representation is misrepresentation (Bloom, 16). Writing of authentic instances of the voice of the critic Bloom observes: “The great theorist of voice as voice remains Oscar Wilde, when he reminds us, following Walter Pater, how important it is that the critical imagination never fall into careless habits of accuracy. We must see the object, the poem, as in itself it really is not, because we must see not only what is missing, but why the poem had to exclude what is missing” (Bloom, 13). As Monsman puts it, “For Pater the act of autobiography begins with a question about his subjective or personal response to artistic presentation: ‘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? Does it give me pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence and under its influence?’” (Monsman, Autobiography, 13; Pater, Renaissance, xix-xx). Citing Pater on the critical method of Charles Lamb, in particular the interpretation of the charm one feels in considering art or life and conveying that charm, Monsman continues to quote from Pater: “he seeming to himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of which for them he is really the creator—this is the way of criticism” (Monsman, Autobiography, 13; Pater, Appreciations, 112). Criticism, then, in Pater's hands becomes something quite different from the mimetic objectification some would claim for it and indeed becomes a rival creation, a fine art Pater sought to figure forth in “Style.” In what follows as I examine several instances of Pater's “misrepresentation,” one of my objects is to illustrate the unity of his thought in the modifications he brought to bear upon his “objects” as they presented themselves to be modified by him. Another is to point out some instances of revision as self-revision and self-misrepresentation, again in keeping with the unity of his thought.

To trace the history of Pater's art of misrepresentation throughout his thirty-year career as a writer is to attempt to grasp all of Western culture and to relate it to his consistent, determined effort to draw it into his circle of consciousness and to express it in a form of discourse rippling outward from the center of that consciousness. Further, one must grant his premise, as most critics prior to the 1950s did not, that he is bodying forth in language his aesthetic representation of what those things he writes of mean to him. To elaborate Monsman's trope, Pater's work is his song of himself as a consciousness integrating and synthesizing disparate elements of knowledge and experience.

Pater's first volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), implicitly challenged the most prominent and prolific art critic in Victorian England, John Ruskin, who, out of anxious propriety, had dismissed (and thus misrepresented) the Renaissance as a merely pagan, sensuous era. For Pater, however, the luxuriousness was attractive and the sense of decay alluring; both elements present in much Renaissance work seemed important to a right understanding of preceding and subsequent cultural phenomena and of himself. In effect, as Pater makes clear in his “Preface” (Renaissance, xix) the many attempts to define beauty in the abstract as Ruskin, his readers would recall, had done in the early volumes of Modern Painters amount to misrepresentations since the only true representation must be a relative one.

Pater's Renaissance is a curious mix of representations, the “history” of which Mrs. Pattison found lacking because she missed the point of Pater's projects: the studies in history and the history of studies are precisely what Pater had in mind and presented. The “history,” culled from the works of Jules Michelet, Giorgio Vasari, Stendhal, Edgar Quinet, Claude Charles Fauriel and others, is not the accumulation of dates, facts and events but their interpretation by a writer who today might be called an historian of ideas, bent upon pursuing those ideas, their representations, trends of emphasis and continuity. Pater's studies in history resemble not the scientific method Jules Michelet had authentically albeit spuriously proclaimed as his object but the actual practice of Michelet as interpreter of history. The lack of what she and the majority of her contemporaries regarded as accurate documentation appeared to Mrs. Pattison to support her judgment that Pater's “history” was misrepresentation; and this judgment itself misrepresents Pater, who is out to transform the presentation of history by writing his interpretation of it, what it means to him. Nonetheless, stung by varied hostile criticism of his work, he changed its title in its second (1877) and subsequent (1888; 1893) editions to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry and suppressed its “Conclusion” in 1877, an act he later mis/represented as arising from delicacy.

Among the patent “misrepresentations” in the book's first essay is the tale of Heloise and Abelard, one which Pater treats in typically romantic fashion, allying Abelard and Tannhäuser (a forerunner of Winckelmann, and both of Pater himself) and celebrating the triumph of the human spirit in the letters that pass between Heloise and her teacher/lover. Yet Pater passes lightly over Abelard's punishment, as he does over Tannhäuser's humiliation, as merely the unsympathetic responses of “adherents of the poorer and narrower culture” (Renaissance, 6). A larger, more controversial “misrepresentation” is his celebration of a French “Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the Middle Age itself” (Renaissance, 1). One clue to Pater's larger design appears in this essay when, in a key passage, he elaborates a scheme of cultural continuity that will recur in the majority of his work:

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of the emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms of some well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. The opposition of the professional defenders of a mere system to that more sincere and generous play of the forces of human mind and character, which I have noted as the secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed always powerful. But the incompatibility with one another of souls really “fair” is not essential; and within the enchanted region of the Renaissance, one needs not be for ever on one's guard. Here there are no fixed parties, no exclusions: all breathes of that unity of culture in which “whatsoever things are comely” are reconciled, for the elevation and adorning of our spirits. And just in proportion as those who took part in the Renaissance become centrally representative of it, just so much the more is this condition realised in them … the painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred, lives in a land where controversy has no breathing-place. They refuse to be classified. (Renaissance, 20-21)

Just here is the edifice of art, the House Beautiful Pater had already identified in his review (1872) of Sidney Colvin's “Children in Italian and English Design,” and repeated it later in his discussion of Wordsworth (1874) and in his wonderful misrepresentation, “Romanticism” (1876). This House Beautiful, unlike Tennyson's anxiety-filled Palace of Art, is a “home” to the various writers, artists and exemplars of “accomplished forms of human life” Pater sought to represent as living together harmoniously. It is also a trope for Pater's own consciousness, a consciousness he represents in his essays as it has already “modified” the person or object it has contemplated. These strong representations, of Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, the Pleiade, Pico, Winckelmann (the subject of the book's last essay, there to close the circle begun with the allusion to Tannhäuser in its first) may, perhaps must, be misrepresentations since Pater has already prepared for them a dwelling place in his House Beautiful of consciousness, ringed round, we discover in the “Conclusion,” by a “thick wall of personality.”

Pater adds to his House Beautiful in “On Wordsworth,” an essay that had seven iterations, including one in Appreciations (1889) where it serves as an illustration of criticism as a “fine art” Pater established in that volume's lead essay, “Style.” In discussing Wordsworth, Pater traces a “chapter in the history of the human mind,” the growth of which is typically French—from Rousseau to Chateaubriand to Hugo—and includes writers “as unlike each other as Senancour and Théophile Gautier” and George Sand in a Wordsworthian context (Appreciations, 43; 52). These, surely, are partially appropriate connections, but, as I have observed elsewhere, are less than usual associations and are not without a tinge of the sensational (Walter Pater and the French Tradition, ch. 3). When he discourses on the origins of the Romantic tradition, the pagan culture that brought forth the Greek gods, and mentions the many strange aftergrowths of that culture, we begin to see the holistic Pater linking the ancient past to the immediate past and both to the present, the present consciousness representing the link to the past in a proleptically Joycean vicus of recirculation (Appreciations, 47-48). This circle includes, somewhat unexpectedly, “Saint Catherine of Sienna, who made the means to her ends so attractive that she won for herself an undying place in the House Beautiful, not by her rectitude of soul only, but by its ‘fairness’—by those different qualities which command themselves to the poet and the artist” (Appreciations, 60-61). Well!, as Pater sometimes writes, here is a jumble of mis/representations, of Wordsworth's guilt by association with George Sand and Gautier, of the innocence of all by association with Saint Catherine as we recall the passage from The Renaissance (cited above) concerning the House Beautiful in which “the saints too have their place.”

So, too, in “Romanticism” we are confronted with manifold mis/representations. In describing the limited utility of distinctions between “classic” and “romantic” for aesthetic criticism, he supports his argument with an appeal to the authority of Sainte-Beuve to demonstrate that the “classic” is healthy and the “romantic” is sick, the former, “énergique, frais, et dispos,” the latter, “faible, maladifs ou malades.” Pater asserts that

what in the eighteenth century is but an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve and discretion only at rare intervals, in the habitual guise of the nineteenth, breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness, an incomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experience to some degree, but yearning also, in the genuine children of the romantic school, to be énergique, frais, et dispos, for those qualities of energy, freshness, comely order; and often, in Murger, in Gautier, in Charles Baudelaire, for instance, with singular felicity attaining them. (“Romanticism,” 67)

On one level Pater has engaged in a misrepresentation I do not believe is conscious: he has attributed to Sainte-Beuve words that the French critic actually translated from Goethe. This factual misrepresentation, possibly unnoticed by Pater, was not corrected in his later reprinting of “Romanticism” as the “Postscript” to Appreciations, a reprinting that I discuss below as an act of self-misrepresentation. A far deeper misrepresentation, of course, is his assertion that the work of Murger (in a later incarnation popularized by Puccini as La Bohème), Gautier and Baudelaire are “classic.” This misrepresentation is again tied to Pater's pursuit of an appreciation of art and literature that transcends the “opposition of the professional defenders of a mere system” and ends when “all breathes of that unity of culture in which ‘whatsoever things are comely’ are reconciled” (Renaissance, 20-21). We have returned again to the House Beautiful.

One further effort of the 1870s deserves attention in light of Pater's artful misrepresentations, his “The School of Giorgione” (1877; included in the third edition of The Renaissance). Here Pater engages in a classic misrepresentation we fuss over today as an “attribution problem.” In fact, as Patricia Clements has brilliantly demonstrated and as I have briefly noted, Pater's central focus in the essay is drawn from the writings of Charles Baudelaire in a series of internally undocumented translations from the French writer: he presents Baudelaire's thought and work as his own. Pater's object here, unlike that in “Romanticism,” was not to win for Baudelaire an English readership that could regard him as a “classic” writer; instead, his aim was to explore what the paintings he discusses mean “to him” in respect to their musical qualities and as modified by his knowledge of aesthetic theories promulgated by Baudelaire. As in earlier and subsequent “misrepresentations” of his sources, Pater was less concerned about seeing his objects as in themselves they really were and more interested in presenting them as modified by his own consciousness, desiderative, expectant, as he might put it. So, for example, when Pater describes but does not name synesthesia, he is leaning heavily upon Baudelaire's statements as he modified them. And when he writes of all art aspiring to the condition of music, he is applying his knowledge of Baudelaire to announce an aesthetic of harmony he wishes his readers to contemplate.

What are we to make of these associations in the harmonious House Beautiful? Who is represented and who is misrepresented by inclusion within it? Who must be misrepresented, traditionally speaking, to gain entry? Again I return to Monsman's idea of “criticism-as-creative-self-portraiture” to help explain what Pater is about, modified by my idea of “criticism-as-creative-misrepresentation” that evolves into creative self-misrepresentation as I trace some of Pater's next steps. While one could easily multiply examples of Paterian misrepresentation in the 1870s and in subsequent decades, four examples from the last several years of his career seem particularly noteworthy as representative of his artistic aims and practice—his handling of “Style” and Flaubert's place in it, his singular representation of Plato as the father of “art for art's sake,” his odd handling of the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, and his revisions in and of Appreciations. Each is a curious study in misrepresentation from an artistic point of view. Some amount to self-misrepresentation as Pater sought, on the one hand, to soften his public image and, on the other, in Plato and Platonism (1893), to solidify it through the time-honored appeal to authority.

“Style” provides several keys to Pater's thought and practice since it contains his carefully constructed argument in favor of prose style as a fine art and an articulated example of aesthetic criticism from the perspective he set down in the “Preface” to The Renaissance. In the first of the essay's three sections Pater is again at work blurring distinctions and denying their validity as he argues against treating poetry and prose as mutually exclusive forms of artistic expression. As he had done with “classic” and “romantic,” so here he insists on a breadth of perspective that allows for an interpenetration of the realities that those terms seek to isolate. As is his custom, he seeks in his critical method a vehicle for the expression of personal meaning: with a logic internal to his method, he draws a distinction not between prose and verse but between the literature of power and the literature of knowledge, between the former which embodies an imaginative sense of fact and the latter as a mere reproduction of fact.

This expression of an imaginative sense of fact is the basis of his art. In a sentence that is retrospective to his procedure in The Renaissance, Pater writes: “Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something that comes not of the world without but of a vision within” (Appreciations, 9). Further, he writes, “For just in proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art” (Appreciations, 9-10). Once again we are asked to consider the nature of the representation of the self in selecting and transcribing its own sense of phenomena and are made complicit, should we be persuaded by Pater's argument, in substituting self-representations or imaginative senses of facts for Gradgrindian Facts. His formulation of an alternative to the traditional representation of fact he terms “soul-fact.” His criterion for judging the worth of literary art is its fidelity to the representation of one's imaginative sense of fact: “It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being only one department of such literature and imaginative prose, it may be thought, being the special art of the modern world” (Appreciations, 11).

Allied to Pater's sense of the necessity of “soul” in style is his vision of “mind,” an “architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigor, unfold and justify the first …” (Appreciations, 21). The unity of work Pater has in mind finds its expression for him in “the word that is associated with its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations” (Appreciations, 21). One must recall, nonetheless, that signification in Pater's universe is modified or conditioned signification: what does it signify to me?

“By mind,” Pater recapitulates in the last paragraph of the essay's first segment, “the literary artist reaches us through static and objective indications of design in his works, legible to all. By soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact” (Appreciations, 25). This summary and the examples in the discussion that follows it provide a more than adequate basis for considering the whole essay, its subject and its content, as self-reflexive in both Monsman's autobiographical sense and my self-representational sense: as Pater elaborates his critical perspective he presents an example of the special art of the modern world, an example of fine art, in the very text he presents.

The second portion of the essay contains a classic case of mis-representation that involves, as I noted some years back, a conflation of excerpts from Flaubert's letters to several other correspondents (Maxime du Camp, Ernest Chevalier, Alfred le Poittevin) and their presentation as letters to the famous Mme. X., Louise Colet. This is clearly the sort of editorial and authorial practice we would find unacceptable in contemporary research, a practice that would earn a deserved rebuke for its flagrant misrepresentation. Such a modern response would be entirely appropriate in the exposition of shoddy scholarship since we have, as Bloom himself reminded us above, both explicit and implicit expectations of those who engage in academic discourse and of their work. Just here is the telling difference: Pater has prepared us not for fact but for an imaginative sense of fact; and we, as readers, choose an eccentric response should we hold him to the production of the literature of knowledge instead of the literature of power, if we demand of him “mind” without “soul.” This, of course, is a common error in reading Pater's prose—it has surely been my error repeated in print over many years—to seek knowledge untempered by an imaginative sense of fact therein. I suggest that Pater's actual misrepresentation of Flaubert's addressees has, must have, another point.

That point, I believe, is embedded in Pater's references not to Louise, whose name he, of course, knew since it was both an “open secret” and also part of Maupassant's biography of Flaubert from which Pater translates and quotes without attribution, but to Mme. X. Subtly, in a way that has escaped detection for a century, Pater is the artist practicing the special art of the modern world by arranging fragments of letters, phrases, sentences, and addressing them from his “soul” to the “soul” reading the essay, the new Mme. X. It is she to whom Flaubert and Pater's sense of him, Pater's creation, “Flaubert,” speaks his “mind” through Pater's design and arrangement. We are not, then, to focus upon facts but upon soul-facts: and to do so in no way diminishes either Flaubert's counsel or Pater's integration of it into his art work. That it is, objectively speaking, sheer misrepresentation leads me back to my notion of Pater's developing misrepresentation into an art, the special art of the modern world.

Before turning to what I call Pater's art of self-misrepresentation, the artful concealment of thought by suppressing its expression or altering its expression to further his own ends, it is useful to look at a glaring act of misrepresentation that adds to an appreciation of Pater's art. In Plato and Platonism, a series of lectures Pater claims were first delivered in 1891-1892 but may have existed prior to that academic year, he expropriates several elements of Plato's thought while attributing to Plato, in the process Monsman has characterized as creating his predecessors anew in his own image, some of his own notions. One idea in particular appears in Pater's “Plato's Aesthetics” in which he states that Plato, perhaps a weightier authority for Pater's contemporaries than for succeeding generations, is the ultimate source for the phrase “art for art's sake”:

Before him, you know, there had been no theorizing about the beautiful, its place in life, and the like: and as a matter of fact he is the earliest critic of the fine arts. He anticipates the modern notion that art as such has no end but its own perfection,—“art for art's sake.” (Plato, 267-268)

Even those only cursorily acquainted with Plato's Republic and a vague recollection of its treatment of poets (Book X) would find this odd. Paul Shorey notes this (I, 58) among other of Pater's “fanciful” citations in his translation of the Republic and renders Plato's text, “Is there, then, for each of the arts any other advantage than to be as perfect as possible” (I, 59). Is Pater misrepresenting Plato? Literally, his is a fanciful misrepresentation, particularly since the phrase, “art for art's sake” had a very specific connotative burden in Pater's work and in his era. Yet Shorey, an enthusiastic reviewer of Plato and Platonism upon its publication (Dial, April 1893), makes room in his lifelong work on Plato for just such “fanciful” readings/misreadings:

The right way to read Plato is fairly indicated by casual utterances of such critics as Renan, Pater, Emerson, and Emile Faguet. The captious attitude of mind is illustrated by the set criticism of Aristotle, the Christian Fathers, Zeller, De Quincy, Landor, Spencer, and too large a proportion of professional philologists and commentators. “As the poet too,” says Emerson, “he (Plato) is only contemplative. … All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythological with the intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colours, his thought.”

This disposes at once of all criticism, hostile or friendly, aesthetic or philological, that scrutinizes the Republic as if it were a bill at its second reading in Parliament, or a draft of a constitution presented to an American state convention. (Republic, I, xxxii-xxxiii)

In short, Pater's reading of Plato's statement as that of an advocate of art for art's sake, while not explicitly condoned by Shorey, is yet indicative of a direction in the interpretation of Plato's thought Shorey finds acceptable and appropriate. Shorey, like Pater, can allow for an imaginative sense of fact; and Pater, in his commentaries on Plato, is putting that sense of fact to work in the production of the literature of power that makes use of what we recognize in the literature of knowledge as misrepresentation.

Pater's use of Plato as a proponent of art for art's sake in February, 1893 is also a salvo in his Twenty-Five-Years'-War at the barricades of l’art pour l’art, the last shot of which he would fire from camouflage as “art for its own sake” in the fourth edition of The Renaissance (December, 1893). It is the camouflaged version that I take to be one element in his art of self-misrepresentation, a self-defensive art he began to practice immediately after the first publication of The Renaissance in 1873. Apparently sensitive to adverse criticism, he not only altered the book's title in its second edition (1877) but also eliminated the “Conclusion” in which he had made the case for “art for art's sake.” Restored to the third edition (1888) along with what may well be a misleading note, the essay was purged of such words as “religion” and “morality” but still contained the phrase central to the aesthetic creed. In this note Pater wrote that he had omitted the “Conclusion” from the work's second edition “as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall” and had made “some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning” (Renaissance, 186). These changes, however, are cosmetic and not substantive except insofar as they remove the essay further from Pater's original meaning by toning down its radicalism and thus contributing to Pater's calculated self-misrepresentation.

Pater's art of self-misrepresentation may well be an attempt to mask himself from hostile criticism, to temper not his thought but its expression, to avoid controversy without sacrificing his aesthetic principles. What had begun with his changes to The Renaissance in its various forms also occurred, to some extent, in his handling of the novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), as he excised segments from the first edition in preparing the second, and, to a greater and more telling extent, in his alterations to Appreciations. Appreciations, with an Essay on Style is composed of a series of essays on English literature, a subject then under discussion for inclusion in the curricula of Oxford and Cambridge Universities; that is the original plan and the format of the first edition. As noted above, the volume holds within it exercises in artistic misrepresentation; it also embodies Pater's art of self-misrepresentation in at least two notable instances.

Just as “Romanticism” set forth misrepresentations of the classic/romantic question, so its edited version as the “Postscript” to Appreciations gives further evidence of Pater's art of self-misrepresentation. In the essay's first iteration he had manipulated the words of Goethe and Sainte-Beuve to place Baudelaire in his House Beautiful. Baudelaire's was a controversial name in the 1870s and, even though, following Pater's lead, George Saintsbury's first published essay was on Baudelaire, it remained a controversial one on the eve of the nineties. It was also one thing to praise Baudelaire in a literary journal and quite another to include his name in a published volume. Pater, in a frame of mind Monsman identifies and elaborates as something of a crisis at mid-life (Autobiography), removed all references to Baudelaire from the revised version of the essay as his “Postscript,” at one point substituting Victor Hugo's name for Baudelaire's. This substitution vitiates, in one sense, the burden of Pater's earlier, more daring position and misrepresents, through mis-labeling, his advocacy of the patently shocking Baudelaire by turning it into a polite acceptance of the acceptable Hugo, the writer who had been lionized in death and accorded the highest of public obsequies in 1885.

A second concealment that amounts to a more serious act of self-misrepresentation appears in the differences between the first (November 1889) and the second (May 1890) editions of Appreciations. The first edition contains a more subdued version of his early review, “Poems by William Morris” (1868), as “Aesthetic Poetry.” In the second, he replaced it with one of his weakest, least inspired reviews, “Feuillet’s La Morte” thereby weakening the design and unity of the volume while, compensatorily, widening it to extend its subjects beyond English writing. One explanation for Pater's alteration of the book comes from Michael Field in the person of Katherine Bradley who noted the change in her journal for August 25, 1890, as reported by Samuel Wright: Pater “has struck out the Essay on Aesthetic Poetry in Appreciations because it gave offence to some pious person—he is getting hopelessly prudish in literature and defers to the moral weaknesses of everybody. Deplorable!” (Wright, 89). This may well be a self-masking to avoid controversy, a self-misrepresentation not unusual in Pater. The essay may indeed have been mildly off-putting to those with the moral weakness of propriety, though this is doubtful. More to the point, I think, was Pater's conscious decision to dissociate himself from the “aesthetic” production he knew of and would soon see in print in Lippincot's Monthly Magazine (July 1890), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. As Laurel Brake has suggested in speaking of Pater's association with Wilde in the period from 1888 to 1891, they disagreed about the novel and their disagreement may account for Pater's lukewarm review of the republished version (1891), too short on praise and too late to help, may form part of Pater's public retreat from the new aestheticism Wilde promulgated (see Conlon, “Brasenose,” 29). My premise is that “Aesthetic Poetry” was withdrawn from Appreciations partly for its content and partly for its title. It is not, as I have shown, that Pater retreated from the formulation of “art for art's sake” or “art for its own sake.” Rather, he engaged in an evasive self-misrepresentation both in the revised format of Appreciations and in his tepid review of Wilde's novel for motives that may have involved prudery, a mid-life turning, a sense that Wilde had gone too far in art, a fundamental disagreement over the reality of epicureanism. In any event, Pater muted the possibility of controversy by choosing to alter his public image but not, it seems, his actual intent.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago Gerald Monsman, in bringing a new perspective to the study of Pater's mythic patterns, suggested that we see all of Pater's writing in terms of the ultimate image of the circle (Monsman, Portraits, esp. ch. 7). His useful remarks have guided many readings of Pater's works as they help explain the Dionysian/centripetal and Apollonian/centrifugal motifs not only in Pater's fiction but in all of his writing. In this context Pater's image of the self which Monsman had cited early in his study emerges with heightened meaning:

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. (Renaissance, 188)

Monsman also suggested that in fiction “Pater's typical hero traces out a sort of mental pilgrimage through time and space” (Portraits, 165), returning spiritually to that first home which he had been “ever seeking to regain” (Marius, I, 22). “That vision of home,” Monsman continues, “at which the hero finally arrives is depicted in Pater's thought as the Perfect City—Olympus, Civitas Dei, the Kingdom of Heaven, Utopia, the Personalistic Community of Selves” (Portraits, 213).

I suggest that the critic's search for home and centeredness helps account for the reconciliations of opposites and the building of a House Beautiful of all the arts ringed round by that thick wall of Pater's own personality. The advocate of public culture, Arnold, would have seen this, as his sons and heirs have seen it, as a futile quest and a building founded upon misrepresentation. For Pater and those who look to him as the original architect of their criticism, this is the only possible way of achieving authentic representation that artfully widens and contracts the circle of consciousness. It is in the artistic representation of his imaginative sense of fact that Pater has created artistic misrepresentations and it is in the act of self-concealment that he applied his art to the creation of self-misrepresentation. To cite another master of misrepresentation:

One and two are not one; but one and nothing is two;
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.
(Swinburne, “The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell”)

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. “On Translating Homer” (1862) in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Vol I.

Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Chew, Samuel. “Pater's Quotations.” Nation, 99 (1914), 404-405.

Clements, Patricia. Baudelaire and the English Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Conlon, John J. “Brasenose Revisited: Pater in the Eighties,” ELT [English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920], 32:1 (1989), 27-32.

———. Walter Pater and the French Revolution, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1982.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times (1854). London: Penguin, 1988.

Law, Helen H. “Pater's Use of Greek Quotations.” MLN, 58:8 (1943), 575-585.

Monsman, Gerald. Pater's Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.

———. Walter Pater's Art of Autobiography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Pater, Walter. Appreciations (1889; 1890). London: Macmillan, 1910.

———. Marius the Epicurean (1885). London: Macmillan, 1910.

———. Plato and Platonism (1893). London: Macmillan, 1910.

———. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; 1877; 1888; 1893). Ed. Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

———. “Romanticism.” Macmillan's Magazine, 35 (November 1876), 64-70.

Pattison, E. F. S. “Art.” Westminster Review, NS 43 (1873), 639-640.

Ricks, Christopher. “Pater, Arnold and Misquotation.” TLS [Times Literary Supplement] (25 November 1977), p. 1384.

Shorey, Paul. “Plato and Platonism.” Dial, 14 (1893), 211-214.

———. Trans. Republic (1930). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Wright, Samuel. A Bibliography of the Writings of Walter H. Pater. New York: Garland, 1975.