SOURCE: “Pater's Apprenticeship in Critical Prose” in Walter Pater: The Critic as Artist of Ideas, New York University Press, 1987, pp. 1-35.

[In the following excerpt, Buckler traces Pater's aesthetic development as evidenced in his works.]

That Walter Pater is our premier exponent and exemplar of aestheticism has long been generally accepted. In the climactic words of Iain Fletcher, Pater “created himself for us in his oeuvre as a permanently significant symbolical figure: the most complete example, the least trivial, of the aesthetic man.”¹ What has not been so readily perceived even by some who have written about him with sympathy and insight is that he is much more than that—that in Pater's handling of the subject art becomes as large as human life is in itself capable of being. Pater did not, like some of his more flamboyant disciples, leap prematurely to an art-for-art's-sake creed and then spend his energy and gifts demonstrating with what brilliant virtuosity he could defend it. He was a thoroughly scholarly, serious-minded man who undertook a rigorous regimen of historical, philosophical, and literary study as an integral part of a deliberate process of spiritual or intellectual self-formation that only gradually led him to the conclusion that art considered under its ideal aspect was for him the practical means by which success in life, “at least among ‘the children of this world,’”² could be achieved.

Once that conclusion assumed a controlling place in his valuation of things, it retained its special potency, but as it had been conscientiously won, it was carefully, even ascetically, used. More than anything else, art enabled Pater to achieve a positive view of life, to see the continuity and promise of human history in the permanent creative constituents of the human mind or spirit.

That Pater resisted too ready a commitment to an art-for-art's-sake position is clear from his earliest extant essay, “Diaphaneitè,” a paper he presented before Old Mortality, an Oxford literary society, soon after being elected a probationary fellow at Brasenose College (1864). His effort there is to draw out the lineaments of, to picture to the mind's eye, an ideal that might serve “as a basement [or foundation] type” of humanity, a type that, if it ever gained majority status, would result in “the regeneration of the world.”³ The ideal envisaged in the essay excels art, sanctity, and speculative thought, although the artist, the saint, and the philosopher—indeed, all persons of genius—aspire to it and experience recurrent moments when it has a self-validating presence in their intellectual, moral, and spiritual consciousness. It is the ideal of which Dante created an image in “the Beatrice of the Commedia” and of which Raphael made his very life exemplary; it has close kinship with Plato's imaginative vision of a permanent, preexistent Ideal Reality and partakes of Wordsworth's “wise passiveness.”

Such a nature is discontent with the world as it is but invokes no violence against it; it is indifferent to the accidents of time and place, not because it is neutralized by them, but because it recollects the cycle through which life has passed and will pass again. It is possessed of “… that pride of life, which was to the Greeks a heavenly grace,” and since its goal is simply to fulfill the law of its own being, it “instinctively” keeps itself open or transparent to whatever light from without may contribute to its self-illumination and development and lives in the serene unbroken faith that, undistracted by aggression in any form or degree, the cycle will harmoniously complete itself. Its motto being unity with itself and simplicity, the Christ of the Imitation supplies one example, as the Hermaphroditus of Plato supplies another. Though its very “wholeness of nature” may make it appear impotent and ineffectual from a competitive viewpoint, it has “a divine beauty and significance of its own.”

One would not claim, of course, that “Diaphaneitè” represents Pater as a mature thinker or as a master of style. It is a mood piece in which incantation threatens to take precedence over analysis, and the intellectual dexterity or logical structure that Pater would come to see as indispensable to good prose is subordinated to a degree of free associationism not surprising in a self-conscious young writer's transition from verse that has ceased to work for him to prose that is not yet fully working. One can, however, make several substantial claims for the essay: that the ideal Pater is articulating is sufficiently comprehensible despite its inherent evanescence; that he conceives of the ideal in terms of both a real and an imaginary human type that enables him to make appropriately refined inclusions and exclusions; and that his basic compositional goal is to create a single image around which to order the various implications, the “suggestiveness,” of what he has to say. Central to the present argument, moreover, is the careful way in which Pater positions art in relation to this ideal intellectual, moral, spiritual type. The latter is clearly primary, whereas the former is valued for its manifestation of the artist's extraordinary capacity to feel the charm of the human ideal and to aspire to its realization in his work or in himself, even if, as in the case of Goethe, one must “disentwine” it from the “tumultuary richness” of his “nature.”⁴

Nothing Pater says in his later works contradicts this order of priorities; indeed, in his last volume, Plato and Platonism, he so elaborately reconfirms it that the book assumes the symbolic character of a fulfilled myth of the return, Pater acknowledging toward the end of his life the debt he owed to the novice-master of his soul. The inference from this is clear and crucial. The ideal human reality, that is, the highest type of life man in his earthly estate can actually form an image of and aspire to, was the overarching motive for Pater's critical-creative labors—“rather as a longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend.”⁵ To that, even art itself was secondary, an activity in which, paradoxically, means and ends become one in the service of an end of which it is itself only the most approximate example. Through a process of inclusions and exclusions demanded by the nature of his perceptions, Pater concluded that for him and the other “‘children of this world’”—those who believe that any paradise they may find will be an earthly paradise with earthly bounds—“the love of art for art's sake” was the activity, among “various forms of enthusiastic activity,” that promised most in the way of self-illumination and development and threatened least the openness or transparency upon which the fulfillment of the law of their being depended.⁶

“Diaphaneitè” was not published during Pater's lifetime, and although it is now an important marker in his total career, he was quite right not to offer it to a largely anonymous public. Its style, like its sentiments, is private, self-referential, ruminative rather than expository. One may wonder that he chose to present to a small fellowship of more or less fraternal spirits in Old Mortality its intensely personal self-projection, especially in light of the almost total absence from even his friendliest letters of anything like the confessional quality we find, for example, in Matthew Arnold's letters to Arthur Hugh Clough. Pater treated private, self-reflexive writers like Sir Thomas Browne and Charles Lamb with admirably appreciative critical empathy, and the chief motive of his fictional pieces or imaginary portraits was to enter “by all sort of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of other minds.”⁷ That is the quality that gives them their extraordinary interest and strength.

But Pater never again wrote anything so directly and transparently personal and self-confessional as “Diaphaneitè.” He was throughout his works intimate by critical calculation and design—intimate by well-considered strategy, engagé for effect—as well as by nature and conviction. The distinctive new quality Pater brought to his criticism and creations was not so much autobiography as self-referentiality. He adopted the classical principle of the primacy of self-knowledge and extrapolated it along classical lines. All knowledge being a form of self-knowledge, one must not only know oneself but also “value” such knowledge “at its eternal worth.”⁸ That means seeing oneself imaginatively or symbolically rather than literally, seeing oneself sub specie aeternitatis; it means seeing “beyond the facts”⁹ of the recollected spars and fragments of one's historical existence to their inner significance. Only the imagination can know and make constructive use of that knowledge, and the more unobstructed and successful the process, the more likely even the most historical personal details are to be impersonal, representative, universal. The conversion of personal intimacy into impersonal, imaginative self-referentiality was perhaps the most precarious and rewarding of Pater's critical-creative achievements. By transforming Romantic self-consciousness into classical self-awareness, he opened the history of the human mind to the history of his own mind and freed himself from the impediments of an artificial Romantic-classical dichotomy, enabling him to accept the fact and meet the challenge of modernism without feeling cut off from the master workmen of antiquity and their successors. With the admirable reserve characteristic of him, Pater had the courage to know, accept, and be himself in the belief that only thus could he hope to understand critically and creatively the reism or existential reality of others.

The critical agenda inherent in such a viewpoint began to emerge readily enough, though a critical craftsmanship equal to it took time and much effort. The three essays Pater published anonymously during the next four years—“Coleridge's Writings” (1866), “Winckelmann” (1867), and “Poems by William Morris” (1868)—show him struggling toward rather than fully achieving representative self-objectification. The Coleridge essay is an extraordinary initiation into critical analysis and evaluation, and the essays on Winckelmann and Morris are still the best of their kind substantively. However, the unifying image and formal architecture—the fusion of intuition and treatment—that characterize such masterpieces as “Leonardo da Vinci” and “Wordsworth” are not fully working yet, and the relationship of the narrator to the narrative is more apparent than transparent, self-conscious rather than fully symbolic. The language is much more specific and the expository lines much firmer than in “Diaphaneitè,” and there is a traceable progression through the three essays in making the narrative persona's angle of vision representative as well as idiosyncratic, the Morris essay being notably more successful in this respect than the Coleridge piece. Still, the struggle for authorial self-definition has not yet yielded to artful self-mastery. The three essays are fully characteristic of Pater, but of Pater the conscientious apprentice, and this gives them a special relevance and importance to the student of Pater's emergence as the finest critic of his generation. Pater is still one of a half-dozen indispensable critics in English; from, say, 1880 to 1920, he was without equal.

Implicit in “Coleridge's Writings” is the tough-mindedness with which Pater was determined to pursue a career as a critic. Coleridge was an enormous if somewhat vague and shaggy presence in the critical consciousness of the mid-1860s; he was the pedestal figure in the new philosophical criticism introduced early in the century, having contributed more than anyone else to the freeing of literary study from the aesthetic conventions of the previous age. Through him, the revolution launched by the German Romantic philosophers and men of letters had become naturalized in England, and he had restored to contemporary relevance such classical lines of thought as those represented by Plato and Plotinus. It was mandatory, therefore, that a young man with unusual critical ambitions take careful measure of Coleridge and decide to what degree he might serve as a model.¹⁰ Pater was himself an informed student of the German Romantics, and his lifelong interest in Plato was already well advanced. Hence, he no doubt brought to his investigation of Coleridge the expectation that he would find there qualities of considerable practical value to himself.

The fact that Pater found little in Coleridge's critical prose to adopt should not distract one from the value to him of the investigation of the subject and the formulations it enabled him to make. He was in the process of determining just what sort of man of letters he was going to be. He had already despaired of being a poet, and he had little sympathy for or interest in, as he had no apparent talent for, the robust, sensational, roughly crafted, intellectually superficial popular “entertainments” called the contemporary novel. He had a highly developed sense of self, and the realistic appraisal of his creative gifts as genuine but distinctive, coupled with a keen interest in the various ways in which generously endowed persons had used their imaginative powers to leave an exemplary mark on human history, made it inevitable, perhaps, that criticism in some form would be his medium. That, however, left the specific premises of his work undetermined, and his study of Coleridge became in large part an exercise in self-definition.

Pater expresses great empathy for the image Coleridge presents to the mind—that of a magnificently gifted “philosophic critic” who, from some inner discord or disease of the spirit, fought a heroic but futile battle against the imperatives of the emergent Zeitgeist. Coleridge defended the untenable against the inevitable, and though his subtlety and strength served to refine the issues at the heart of the conflict, he became alienated from his own genius, which was for poetry and insights of a poetic character, and left a prose canon that is philosophically partisan and stylistically chaotic. Coleridge was a great original, and the intuition at the center of his philosophy, fueled largely by his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the German Romantics, has correspondences in the Idealist formulations of the pre-Socratic Greeks and in the writings of Plato and Plato's successors. But what remained for Plato and the prephilosophical Greek animists upon whom he drew an endlessly fascinating poetic intuition became for Coleridge a fixed idea that he strove to put into place in defiance of “the lords of change.”¹¹ His idealism had a degree of cold-bloodedness about it that resulted in too rigid, one-sided a view of the complex nature of the intellectual life and lost him his influence on the future while largely depriving him of the personal rewards of his extraordinary gifts.

Pater's evaluation of Coleridge as a “philosophic critic” is historically significant. Along with Arnold's handling of the same subject in Essays in Criticism, it is a useful corrective to the general impression left by John Stuart Mill's characterization of Coleridge as one of the two great seminal minds of the century.¹² However strongly one may disagree with Arnold's and Pater's estimates, the fact that neither of them could find in Coleridge the guidance that each sought there cannot be ignored. Both were inclined to adopt serviceable critical direction wherever they found it, and neither found it to any significant degree in Coleridge.

The negative side of Pater's criticism of Coleridge is well compensated for by the positive self-construction he evolved from it. He was himself one of those persons whose thoughts had been clarified, refined, and strengthened by contact with Coleridge's rigorous philosophical reasoning even though he did not admire its manner and was not persuaded by its matter. Pater was enormously attracted to the conception of an Ideal Reality and succumbed very early to the poetic beauty with which Plato had reached imaginatively from the finite forms of things to an image of things as they may be conceived of in their perfect and permanent form, but he resisted the conversion of such an imaginative mode of regard into a definite theory of ideas. Its charm for the philosophic critic lay in the imaginativeness of its initiating intuition and in the artistic process by which it was put into place; once it became an argument in a philosophical treatise, it assumed a secondary order of interest for the philosophic critic, whatever it might be for the professional philosopher.

Thus, he faulted Coleridge for both his matter and his manner. Coleridge had adopted premises that the modern observational sciences were daily making less credible, had asserted an idealist, metaphysical view of life when the particular form of idealism that depends on metaphysics was everywhere being deconstructed. As a philosopher and critic, he had accepted as a fact what was in fact being returned to solution, and because he had become an advocate rather than a scientific or philosophic critic indifferent to particular outcomes, he failed to be attentive enough to the need constantly to clear the organs of observation and analysis. He did what he did brilliantly, and what he did has had so many correspondences in mankind's mind in every age since the pre-Socratic Greeks that it must be seen as representing a constituent or permanent part of the human mind. However, the one-sidedness of Coleridge's view of life and art and the violence of his advocacy of that view make him something of a modern philosophical ruin with whose heroic image one may deeply empathize while taking from it no significant guidance except caution.

As Coleridge had renounced the path to the future being mapped by the observational sciences, Pater embraced it as both inevitable and inherently exciting. It redefined rather than scuttled idealism and made the past available under an entirely new aspect. The modern spirit is a spirit born of the observational sciences according to which nothing can be known “except relatively under conditions.”¹³ All relations are affected by this relative spirit, “the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and necessity.”¹⁴ Our relation to the world thus becomes one of “fine gradations and subtly linked conditions,”¹⁵ we ourselves undergoing perpetual change even as the world we inhabit is perpetually changing. The “subtleties of effect” resulting therefrom are the most “precious” objects of the modern spirit's interest, subtleties that make it essential that the philosophic critic constantly clear “the organs of observation” and be forever attentive to the “perfecting of analysis.”¹⁶ Insight and language, truth and expressiveness, are the things the modern critic must be acutely responsive to if he would be truly philosophic, ready to sacrifice classical “precision of form” for modern “intricacy of expression.”¹⁷ A willingness to redact one's view of the world is part of it; a willingness to redact one's view of oneself redacting, though not an absolutely greater part, is both indispensable and primary.

The new idealism implicit in Pater's critical position has yielded up all its traditional metaphysical underpinnings. It is an idealism of types, of actual human types. The gods of his idolatry are those persons who have used their unusual gifts to create things both more magnificent and more lasting, namely, images of the heights to which the human spirit can reach in the circumstances in which it finds itself, forms that exceed matter as such by converting matter into imaginatively compelling emblems of an eternity that, though reality-bound, is wholly equal to man's needs in his earthly interval. Thus relieved of all metaphysical necessities, human history assumes a different sort of engagement for the philosophic critic of the type envisioned. The style of an argument becomes more important than its conclusions, to which one becomes essentially indifferent; what one is and, under his immediate influence, enables others to become in the here and now merits our best attention. How a poet, philosopher, scientist, or holy man mastered his particular environment being the really significant thing, the environment must be thoroughly understood.¹⁸ But besides the environment, there is also the person, poet, philosopher, scientist, or holy man, and the imaginative process by which, in contradiction to an almost infinite number of failures, he created a simple and unified image of nonmetaphysical transcendence—what he proved about mankind's wholly human possibilities—is the true object of critical fascination. History, like poetry, means “beyond the facts” in such a context; one must bring to it an imaginative sense that largely dissolves the stubborn illusions of time and space and makes the past and present intricate illuminations of each other.

It would probably be easier at the present time to make a credible argument for the soundness of Pater's overall dissatisfaction with Coleridge as a philosophic critic than at any time in the last hundred years. At no previous moment has the critical determination to deconstruct metaphysics been stronger, while much of the Coleridgean revival of the last forty years has, paradoxically, been fueled by a renewed romance with metaphysics among academic critics. However, such an argument would be digressive. The primary inference to be drawn from Pater's maiden essay in criticism is a developmental inference—that it facilitated his own process of critical self-definition in a firm and lasting way. It enabled him to declare fully and enthusiastically his critical alignment with the spirit of the modern observational sciences and to acknowledge a humanistic rather than a fideistic interest in the strong recurrent tendency of the human mind to seek out and subscribe to metaphysical explanations; to endorse unabashedly a relativist epistemology, according to which nothing can be known absolutely and the quality of any observation is so dependent on self-awareness as to make all knowledge essentially a form of self-knowledge; and to postulate the values to be derived from critical indifference to material or substantive outcomes, including especially the freedom to notice the manner rather than the matter, the how rather than the what, of things and to experience something of that transformation of spirit that an awareness of such exemplary or ideal forms effects in us as perennial imitators of life-styles.

The clear, firm critical advance Pater makes in “Coleridge's Writings” over “Diaphaneitè” pales somewhat by comparison with the quantum leap he achieves in “Winckelmann.” All things considered—the singularity of its subject, Pater's youth and relative inexperience at the time of writing it, the far-reaching implications of its critical substance and manner, the inner authority it continues to manifest—“Winckelmann” is one of the truly extraordinary critical essays in English. It was placed last among the essays on art history in The Renaissance, but it is not only much the longest and most critically elaborate of the essays in the book; it is also the essay that establishes the strongest implicit connection between what has been (history) and what may yet be (poetry). To the degree that one can identify with, or participate in, the renewal of the human spirit that these “studies in the history of the Renaissance” implicitly suggest—in their “parabolic drift,” so to speak¹⁹—the self-re-creation of Winckelmann and through him of Goethe is the book's most representative revelation, as, in all probability, it was its initiating intuition and sustaining motive. What we all need most in the “bewildering toils” of modern necessity is the “equivalent for a sense of freedom.” That is what Winckelmann needed desperately, and the fact that he achieved it, becoming something that all the forces in his personal circumstances and in the imperious culture of his place and time seemed to dictate that he should not become, makes him “the last fruit of the Renaissance” and his personal history a “striking” explanation of the “motives and tendencies” of Pater's book about it.²⁰

The evidence in the “Winckelmann” essay that Pater has achieved a quantum leap in his development as a critic goes far beyond the essay's chief substantive movements—Winckelmann's personal history, the relationship between art and religion, the necessary distinctions to be drawn between and among the various arts, the gulf that exists between Hellenism and modernism. The fact that each of these topics is recognized as germane to the essay's essential subject and that each is exemplarily treated would, in ordinary circumstances, be sufficient to sustain such a thesis. The circumspection with which the subject is conceived, the originality with which it is analyzed, the order in which it is displayed, and the language by which it is illuminated and made pleasurable (what Pater called “expressiveness”) demonstrate that a critic of unusual courage and capacity is rapidly emerging. He is not only making rapid advances on his critical monitors (on Arnold, for example, and Hegel); he is also making rapid advances on himself. Moreover, he is developing in a direction not ordinarily taken by philosophic critics and certainly not taken by Coleridge. Besides attempting to refine his critical skills, his “organs” of observation and analysis, of insight and language, he is beginning to give criticism itself a new character.

Though “Winckelmann” is not itself a work of art of the finely finished kind represented by “Leonardo da Vinci” and “Wordsworth,” it is artistic in that Pater has conceived of and attempted to execute his subject creatively. It is thoroughly critical in being about something other than itself, but it also has its own subject which that “something other than itself” is made to serve without any sacrifice of its integrity as criticism. In other words, the critical subject matter, though wholly intact, has been transformed into a creative subject, and criticism has been thereby made a form of literary art with its own special necessities of construction and diction. Fact remains authentically fact, but through imagination it has been made to “mean, beyond the fact, / Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.”²¹ Moreover, the critic-creator's “imaginative sense of fact”²² is the decisive factor in the essay's architecture and language.

One quick, practical way of confirming the delicate conversion Pater is effecting in his essay is to stand back and view it as a whole, the way one views a picture. Then its real subject is seen to be not how one comes to terms with art but how one comes to terms with life, how one succeeds in making his life a work of art, complete, serene, indifferent to “the chain of circumstances” that threatened it along the way. This is the force of the metaphor by which Pater firmly justifies his critical enthusiasm for Winckelmann and by which, in the last half-dozen paragraphs, he harvests the fruits of his critical endeavor: “to place Winckelmann in an intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the foreground.”²³ These painterly metaphors are then reinforced by an image eminently visual and stirring—“the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe conceives him, on the crags, in ‘splendour of battle and in harness as for victory,’ his brows bound with light” (p. 181). This child of the marriage of Faust and Helena is said to be “the art of the nineteenth century,” and though art in the specialized formal sense is certainly not excluded, the contextual image is much too large for that; it refers rather more importantly to the art of living on higher ground, above modern life's “fatal combinations” and with a “nobler … attitude” (p. 185).

That life is itself the ultimate work of art, its creation the purpose of all the “reflected, refined light” of “a great education” (p. 181), is not only where the essay ends but also where it begins. Goethe speaks of Winckelmann “as of an abstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already into the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life. He classes him with certain works of art …” (p. 141). At the heart of the essay, supplying the “key” both to Winckelmann and to Pater's underlying purpose, is a quotation from Hegel's Aesthetik that celebrates the Greeks' superb “sense for the consummate modelling of divine and human forms.”²⁴ Their poets and orators, historians and philosophers—Pericles, Phidias, Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, Socrates, and so forth—“are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould, works of art, which stand before us as an immortal presentment of the gods” (p. 175). On the two sides of this extended quotation from Hegel, who has been cited along with Goethe in the opening paragraph, are two images. On one side is that of “the adorante of the museum of Berlin,” a work of Hellenic art whose subject is “a youth who has gained the wrestler's prize, with hands lifted and open, in praise for the victory.” Like the youths of the Panathenaic frieze, he expresses a supreme “indifference” to all that is “relative or partial.”

Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of man as he springs first from the sleep of nature, his white light taking no colour from any one-sided experience. He is characterless, so far as character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life. (pp. 174-175)

On the other side is Winckelmann. Though he was born into a “tarnished intellectual world,” was compelled to accommodate himself to the shabbiest, most judgmental provincialism, compromised even self-respect as ordinarily understood to the higher goal of self-realization, was impeded for what must have seemed a generation by adversity in the form of poverty or in the disguise of respectability, that antique sense seems to have maintained itself deep within him, and when the opportunity came, it sprang forth in a remarkably pure form. Undisturbed by “interests not his, nor meant for him,” unattracted by “formal principles, [which are] always hard and one-sided,” disinclined to become “one-sidedly self-analytical,” Winckelmann devoted himself to “perfecting himself and developing his genius,” to “refining his meaning into a form, express, clear, objective” (pp. 175-176, emphasis added).²⁵ In short, he crafted a work of art out of his own life.

That is, admittedly, a heightened, symbolic, parabolic way of regarding Winckelmann, but there is no denying the careful logical structure, the intellectual dexterity, with which Pater accomplishes it. In at least a preliminary way, it confirms the judgment that Pater's way of proceeding was informal but not unmethodical and that his primary effort was to express “the irrepressible because almost unconscious poetry” of his critical insights.²⁶

As our capacity to see the subtle, reserved, intuitively proportioned way Pater is working increases, so does our sympathy, and this brings us to an additional dimension of the parable of the piece, what can perhaps fairly be called its Goethe-Hegel-Winckelmann-Pater equation. Goethe is clearly Pater's great modern exemplar of “life in the whole,” of that spiritual beauty that comes of having divested oneself of partial and relative truths even the most “precious” and of having molded one's life according to an ideal of “artistic perfection,” unwilling to settle for the one-sided genius of more limited men. Goethe “illustrates a union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty,” and emphasizes the “preponderance” in that union of Hellenism (p. 181). Goethe, therefore, represents a cultural ideal to which Pater aspires but that he despairs of actually reaching. Hegel, on the other hand, represents a more attainable goal.²⁷ What Goethe saw in Winckelmann, despite the opaqueness of his prose and such limitations of experience as might have crippled a lesser man, was, in Hopkins's phrase, his “one fetch”—that single-minded, intuitive devotion with which he went straight to the heart of Hellenism and, like a pagan after a long exile returning to his natural home, made of himself an authentic work of art, an embodiment of “an inexhaustible gift of suggestion” (p. 141). What Hegel saw was of a more limited, less poetic order: Winckelmann “‘is to be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit’” (p. 141). To have done that, says Pater, “is the highest that can be said of any critical effort,” and it is on those specific terms that he begins his critical exposition. But while Hegel unquestionably supplies much of the “philosophic” ballast of the essay, much of its “historic” line of argument, he provides none of the spiritual “modelling” that made the study of antiquity so self-transformational for Winckelmann and, through his conversion of its “true essence” into personal “form,” made him such a powerful influence on Goethe's own spiritual modeling.

A sentence from the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, that part of the work closest in date of composition to the “Winckelmann” essay, is relevant here. “What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own” (p. 189). Coming in so crucial and concentrated a context, Pater's reference to one on whom he had drawn so heavily as representing a “facile orthodoxy” against whose blandishments one must be perpetually on one's guard has perplexed many commentators, but such perplexity on one level may be illumination on another. Pater's inclusion of himself in the list is the clue to be followed up—“facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own.” An important part of him was attracted to Hegel; he frequently found correspondences between the way his mind worked and Hegel's. And from a purely critical point of view, the comparative results were distinctive enough and persuasive enough to be adopted as a characteristic idiom—even sufficient perhaps to enable him, in the England of his day, “to initiate a new organ for the human spirit,” as Comte had seemed to do among a certain order of minds. But as the example of Goethe showed, that would be an offense to “the proper instinct of self-culture” and hence to true culture itself and the exigent modern need for it; that would mean to abandon one's quest for “the supreme, artistic view of life” and to settle for “one special gift,” one brilliant “form of culture,” and to limit thereby one's “capabilities” (p. 183).

In future contexts comparably oblique, Pater will reinforce a reservation about Hegel already implicit in the “Conclusion” and in the “Winckelmann” essay: for all his “historic” or “philosophic” gift, Hegel lacked what Goethe and Plato not only had but had full, unfailing faith in, namely, the poetic instinct. Hegel was one of the most brilliant and trustworthy treatise-makers in the arena of modernism, but a treatise-maker nonetheless, the best of the systematists, perhaps, but still a systematist. Orthodoxy is generally thought of as something “out there” among the other conventions of an age, but in its subtlest form it takes place “in here.” It takes root within the individual spirit when his ideas become customary and to that degree petrified, routine rather than adventuresome, and he has too easy (“facile”) an access to their use. They are to criticism what Parnassianism is to poetry, examined and characteristic rather than continuously reexamined and inspired. Pater seems to have seen his face in Hegel's mirror and to have recognized what could become a personal tendency if he did not keep before his spiritual eye the supreme example of Goethe. By such a standard, the highest of critical goals, that of “initiat[ing] a new organ for the human spirit,” was merely a most “precious” impediment to that cultural open-endedness, that perpetual process of becoming, from which one's very successes can distract one.

Many commentators on “Winckelmann” have noted a strong current of self-identification in the essay. Kenneth Clark calls it “the decisive piece of self-identification” and elaborates the point as follows:

The hunger for a golden age, the austere devotion to physical beauty, the feeling of a dedication to art and to the unraveling of its laws, “the desire” as Pater says “to escape from abstract theory to intuitions, to the exercise of sight and touch”—all the characteristics which Winckelmann had united with a burning clarity, Pater recognized as half-smothered fires in his own being. Even those elements in Winckelmann's character which seem more questionable, his formal acceptance of the Catholic faith as the price of a ticket to Rome, and his passionate love affairs with young men, corresponded to impulses which Pater felt in his own character and increased his feelings of sympathy.²⁸

The sort of “self-identification” spoken of here is a very different matter from the self-referential aspect of Pater's creative mind and method cited earlier and addressed below, but one can accept without quibble the general proposition that Pater probably had strong autobiographical feelings for the human image of Winckelmann. However, Winckelmann's place in our Goethe-Hegel-Winckelmann-Pater equation is a formal, textual issue, as are Goethe's, Hegel's, and Pater's. He is both a historical and a symbolic figure, and he is being formally ordered or processed as a part of a poetic parable.²⁹

As Goethe is the maximum modern example of an authentic Hellenism, Winckelmann is the minimum but still genuine example, and therein lies his peculiar virtue for latter-day questers after self-culture like the Pater of the piece and those he is trying to reach. Goethe, of course, was the Olympian modern: “possessing all modern interests, ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern thought, he defines, in clearest outline, the eternal problem of culture—balance, unity with one's self, consummate Greek modelling” (p. 182). Winckelmann was “infinitely less” than that (p. 181). He was not modern (“he could hardly have conceived of the subtle and penetrative, yet somewhat grotesque art of the modern world,” p. 178), and he had no experience of “that bolder type of [Greek art] which deals confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil” (p. 178).

And yet, Winckelmann's longing, dedication, talent, and manner were such that “from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few faces cast up sharply from the waves,” he “divine[d] the temperament of the antique world,” yielded entirely to it and, through his effect on Goethe, tendered self-redemption to the modern world. Winckelmann, then, is an example of how much can be done with how little if one yields to the “demand of the intellect … to feel itself alive” and seeks to find even in a fragmentary knowledge of a supreme spiritual culture the sources of one's “own strength” (p. 183). So if Pater despaired of becoming a Goethe and desired to become something different from a Hegel, he had in Winckelmann both the self-modeling and the promise of possible success.

Pater's entry into the complexities of his subject through a deft use of the biographical mode (pp. 141-157) is itself symbolic. He was not an abstractionist, though he constantly searched out and was exhilarated by the discovery of those patterns of the human mind that were continuous at varying levels of visibility both in human history and in himself. Informed intuition was his chosen instrument, and “the exercise of sight and touch” (p. 147) was both his test of authenticity and the source for him of the keenest spiritual pleasure. But as he had early learned to mine his own experience, he had an extraordinarily sympathetic way of mining the experience of others.³⁰ He wanted to discover things for himself both as to fact and as to form. Therefore, his initial question has three parts—“what kind of man” “under what conditions” led to a particular result?—and though he was not so naive as to suggest that, on the basis of such isolated evidence, one could make an easy inductive leap, he was employing the empirical method symbolically, as a matter of formal structure, rather than quantitatively—imaginatively rather than literally. The authority of Goethe and Hegel was a given as to the result, and that was instructive, but the “kind of man” and “conditions” were at the heart of the struggle for self-realization and were thus the focus of a true humanistic interest and the source of any personal strength one might draw from it.

Moreover, the barely sixteen pages that Pater devotes to Winckelmann's life and works, themselves interspersed with many illuminating general observations along the way, are symbolic, distilled metaphors of a man's contest with adversity rather than a biographical account as such. He prefaced the essay as it appeared in the Westminster Review with the titles of two books—Otto Jahn's Biographische Aufsätze (1866) and G. H. Lodge's translation of Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1850)—but he made no references to them in the essay itself,³¹ signaling thereby that, though dependable quantitative erudition lay behind his highly select metaphors, he was engaged in a quite different kind of imaginative undertaking. Still, the biographical symbolism is significant: Winckelmann was, like us, a human being trying to cope with particular conditions, and the fruit his life bore was deeply rooted in his longing for, and recognition of, an ideal of completeness. The essential unity with himself and the simplicity that he preserved in the seed he finally came to enjoy and to see celebrated in the flower.³²

Pater's motive for the next three movements of the essay—on art and religion, on the necessary distinctions to be drawn between and among the various arts, and on the gulf between Hellenism and modernism—is a fusion of matter and manner, of adequate substance and adequate artistry. He has the “infinite” distance to travel between Winckelmann and Goethe, between an isolated, relatively obscure, even morally suspect eighteenth-century German art historian and the colossus of modern Paneuropean culture whom Matthew Arnold had used throughout Essays in Criticism as the “manifest centre” of modern Europe's intellectual and spiritual life—its critical and creative liberator. To accomplish this in a satisfactory way, he must gradually enlarge and deepen his subject matter, must create an imposing historical, philosophic context that takes the eye off Winckelmann, who was inadequate to it, while providing suitable opportunities to show how the gift of nature that Winckelmann so assiduously cultivated—“itself like a relic of classical antiquity”—was relevant to it and in fact “laid [it] open by accident to our alien, modern culture” (p. 175). Thus, Pater brings to his handling of Winckelmann some of the “quick tact,” in Arnold's phrase, that he found in Winckelmann.

The formal aspects of this process are further reinforced by the essay form itself. In Essays in Criticism, Arnold had used the critical essay in an exploratory, experimental sense—as an “attempt—specimen”³³—and Pater's use is comparable. However, Pater has provided us with a far more detailed idea of what the essay form meant to him, and though his specific formulation is of a much later date (Plato and Platonism, 1893), there is no reason not to believe that even in the mid-1860s he had so conceived the idea. In the second part of the chapter “The Doctrine of Plato,” entitled “Dialectic” (pp. 174-196), Pater comments on the three forms or methods of philosophical writing. “The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the personal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of literary form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth.”³⁴ At the heart of the poem is intuition, of the treatise dogma, of the essay tentativeness or experimentation. Pater says that the dialogue as used by Plato is the ancient equivalent of the modern essay, and since he sees all authentic literary dialogue³⁵ as essentially a dialogue of the mind with itself, as all knowledge is ultimately self-knowledge, it seems fair to apply the conditions he sets for literary dialogue to his ideal of the essay, including his own essays. It is a process; its ultimate means and ends combine in the person involved in the process; the process must be free, varied, elastic, informal, easy, and natural enough really to make the inclusions and exclusions that the nature of the subject suggests to the mind in such an uninhibited “journey” after truth. Its method must be truly “one” and “cover the entire process, all the various processes, of the mind, in pursuit of properly representative ideas, of a reasoned reflex of experience”; thus thoroughly prosecuted, it becomes “co-extensive with life itself—a part of the continuous company we keep with ourselves through life”; rather than a “system of propositions,” it forms a “temper” that humbly recognizes the limits of knowledge (What do I know? Who ever really knows?).

While it would be extravagant to press such a catalogue on “Winckelmann” in a literal-minded way, the spirit of it is there. As the essay ends in the celebration of a very personal process (“self-culture”), so it embodies at an empirical as well as a symbolic level a process. It moves back and forth between the general and the particular, experimenting, testing, verifying. On the one hand, it is conscientiously scientific in its care for distinctions and in the way it makes its inclusions and exclusions. On the other hand, it takes the most adventuresome chances, its boldness of subject and assertion being saved from amateurish dogmatism by its emotional and intellectual dexterity—aptness of illustration, precision of argument, generosity of spirit, ingratiation of language, a tone of exigent reserve, all leading to the sober but inspiriting conclusion that modern man can not only survive but prevail. By having Winckelmann touch Goethe so conversionally and by having Goethe acknowledge that “‘One learns nothing from him … but one becomes something’” (p. 147), Pater opens endless possibilities of spiritual reciprocation between the very great and the relatively small.

The unorthodox argument by which Pater attempts to absolve Winckelmann of the sin of “insincerity”³⁶ in his profession of Roman Catholicism—that in him “the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic” (p. 149)—parallels his dissent from the “orthodoxy of taste” (p. 157), the “standard of artistic orthodoxy” (p. 159), of which Raphael is offered as the touchstone and Newman the spokesman.³⁷ Though Pater was the gentlest, most urbane of dissenters, never appearing to relish controversy as Arnold did and remaining generally faithful to the stern principle of intellectual “indifference,” the integrity of his view of Hellenism's relevance to modern man's spiritual plight was so inherent in this issue that one might charge him with being gentle at the cost of clarity and emphasis. Yet he knew how fundamentally subversive his argument was and how easily his effectiveness as a man of letters could be destroyed if, like Nietzsche, he let “the hammer” speak.³⁸

The orthodoxy from which Pater was dissenting was both cultural and religious, historical and philosophic, and his choice of Newman as the spokesman for it was strategic. To see “‘the classical polytheism’” as “‘gay and graceful, as was natural in a civilised age’” (p. 159) was to take a “partial” view of Hellenic culture—to see it, in the orthodox post-Raphaelite way, “on the sharp, bright edge” of its highest point and thus to ignore a large portion of its human representativeness—the “sadness” that filled its mind and tempted it to take refuge in “thoughts beyond itself.” It was also to beg the question of its suitability as a solution to the human dilemma and to make medieval Christianity's solution seem eminently more suitable because infinitely more reflective of the human condition and of human nature itself. That is the partial view, the imbalance, Pater undertook to correct. His purpose was not to attack the Christian solution but to give a fairer view of the total Greek experience and thus to rehabilitate its solution. However, the nature of his subject required certain “acts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’”³⁹ that were implicitly critical of Christianity's enormous satisfaction with itself. Those he did not ignore, though he was as agreeable as honesty would allow.

Pater's line of argument is crisp and clear enough. All religions—pagan, Christian, Eastern—grow from human seeds in human soil and represent human efforts to find human solutions to human problems. Their ritualistic systems, despite the sharp differences resulting from the vastly different conditions out of which they grew, are alike natural or “pagan.” The essential differences between them—for example, between the Greek religion and Christianity—are determined by the “cycle of poetical conceptions” that become attached to these ritualistic systems and keep them culturally alive. In Greece those conceptions “derived from mythology,” which did not have a religious source and developed along purely human lines. In an age earlier than what we think of as the stage of Hellenic culture, Greek religion had its “worship of sorrow”: “Scarcely a wild or melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by polytheism!” (p. 162). But the Greeks happily found their solution in the “Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chastened, debonair” (p. 162), and their religion was thereby enabled “to transform itself into an artistic ideal” (p. 163). As a result, “the thoughts of the Greeks about themselves, and their relation to the world generally, were ever in the happiest readiness to be transformed into objects for the senses” (p. 163).

At a later stage, beyond its zenith, Greek religion became “too inward,” began to “boast its independence of the flesh,” to absorb “everything with its emotions,” to reflect “its own colour everywhere,” to move toward an “exaggerated idealism” that would inevitably plunge it “into the depths of religious mysticism” (pp. 164-165). That, too, may have been an inevitable development, mankind being what mankind is, but it does not detract from Pater's central point that Hellenic culture at its height struck “a sharp edge of light across [the world's] gloom” and became thereby a constructive model for modern man.

Pater does not emphasize the implications for Christianity of the contrastive structure of his exposition, but diplomacy does not obscure his criticism. Christianity suffers from an attitudinal problem in its thoughts about itself and its relationship to the world, a vestigial medieval attitude that modern thought is rapidly undercutting and making a part of the modern problem rather than an aid to its solution. Though he is careful not to describe Hellenism as a dispensation, calling it rather a matter of luck, of “some supreme good luck” (p. 165), he presents it as one of man's happiest spiritual achievements that perpetually beckons his return.

The next and last major movement of the essay before the peroration, that on the characteristic differences between and among the arts and on the breaking point between Hellenic and modern art (pp. 167-181), is as analytically “indifferent” as the peroration itself is ardently so, and the paradox is significant. Though Arnold and Pater represent a broad continuity of concern over the issue of modern cultural regeneration that their differences of style, emphasis, and critical-historical perspective do not disturb, Pater shared little if any of Arnold's anxiety over the state of modern poetry or his efforts in the 1850s and 1860s to set it on a new track. More Hegelian in this respect than Arnold, Pater applied the principle of historic, philosophic necessity to the new poetry of the nineteenth century and, having more imaginative sympathy for what it was trying to create out of conditions it had not created, he showed more imaginative capacity than Arnold to understand its constructive aesthetic ideals and to identify both its distinction and its linkages with the poetry of the past. Though many of the metaphors with which he described the modern era were similar to Arnold's and were perhaps borrowed from him,⁴⁰ Pater was less spiritually resistant to his times than Arnold was and more critically curious and detached about its art. Rightly or wrongly, he was much less inclined than Arnold to make even an implicit, parabolic case for a true Judeo-Christian renascence.

It would be capricious to emphasize Pater's critical advances on Arnold at the expense of Arnold, ignoring the subtly different Zeitgeists in which they flourished and the enormous contribution Arnold had made to the critical climate Pater inherited, but the temperamental differences between them were real, and temperament, as Pater repeatedly asserted, plays a large part in both the making and the liking of literature. Also, Pater's application to criticism of the creative principle of “art for art's sake” enabled him to see an age's spiritual culture mirrored in its poetry at the distance of the individual poet's talent, the poet's distinctive response to the age being in crucial respects very different from the age's more conspicuous demands, while recognizing that poetry, especially the best poetry, has internal laws and legacies that are quite independent of a particular age. On both of these matters, Pater is both more explicit and more insistent than Arnold.

It is useful to refocus one's view of the Arnold-Pater connection as one approaches this celebrated movement in the “Winckelmann” essay for two reasons. First, though they read many of the same aesthetic theorists, both were practical critics with little faith in the application of systematic theories of art to art itself. Second, like Goethe, Pater did not allow his advances on, or divergences from, Winckelmann to eclipse his recognition of Winckelmann's importance as a critical founder or of his own enormous spiritual debt to him, and one can reasonably speculate that he felt similarly toward Arnold.

When he called the “Winckelmann” essay “the earliest and … the most sustained of all [Pater's] writings on aesthetic theory,”⁴¹ Kenneth Clark had in mind this movement on the various arts, and though the general intent of the assertion may seem unexceptionable, it raises one of the subtlest issues the critic working in today's climate must face, namely, the difference between “aesthetic theory” as the term is regularly applied to Pater and theory in its stricter, more systematic sense. In the latter sense, Pater can hardly be said to have had any aesthetic theories. Earlier in the “Winckelmann” essay, he had said with unmistakable irony, “Lessing, in the Laocoon, has theorised finely on the relation of poetry to sculpture; and philosophy may give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture should be the most sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal” (p. 147). However, he himself does not adopt such reasons and goes on to applaud Winckelmann's “happy, unperplexed … concrete” way of “finding … Greek art.”⁴²

One must be careful, then, not to impose a twentieth-century need for theory on a nineteenth-century need for empirical discovery and verification. Pater's criticism depends, not on abstract theory, but on informed imaginative intuition; though he was fully cognizant of Lessing's theory, he clearly opted for Winckelmann's practice. He formed aesthetic conclusions, not aesthetic theories; his hypotheses or generalizations were the result rather than the condition of his experience of art. Pater viewed art historically in a double sense—the history of its becoming in time (“criticism must never for a moment forget that ‘the artist is a child of his time,’” p. 158) and the history of its becoming in his own critical consciousness.

Even if one extracts the irony from “theorised finely” and the scepticism from “may” in the comment on Lessing, the difference is both real and important, as real and important as the potential influence of art on our lives. The finest theory establishes a relationship between us and the art object that is simply different from the relationship cultivated by an empirical approach. What it ends up verifying is the beauty and excitement of the theory rather than of the art; it trains us in abstract system-making, not in practical aesthetics. The “exercise of sight and touch” (p. 147) trains us in art, in the ideal way in which the artist “has gradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form” (p. 176), his “blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements … with the possibilities of a whole world closed within it” (p. 174). The strongest impression Pater as an exponent of this informal but not unmethodical approach makes is of having stood before representative works of art and actually looked at them with the kind of spiritual attitude that they could not resist, compelling them, like deep answering to deep, to give up their secrets. An eye, an attitude, and a language monitored by complete loyalty to the object as it really is and to his impression of the object are the instruments he brings to his endeavor. They are also the instruments he passes on.

“The arts,” Pater says, “may … be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a series of developments in the human mind itself” (p. 167). By “the human mind” Pater means the mind in history and the mind in himself. Therefore, he examines the work of art both objectively, as a historical development, and subjectively, as an object having significance to the degree that he discovers its correspondence in his own imaginative intellect. This has the effect of setting up a perpetual, active exchange between the impersonal past and the personal present with the result that the very highest premium is put on a maximally developed consciousness that, to a critically useful degree, personalizes the past and depersonalizes the present.

Adding to this dismantling of the conventional objective-subjective dichotomy the observation that “different attitudes of the imagination have a native affinity with different types of sensuous form” (p. 167), Pater projects himself along the historical continuum and, by a combination of his own and history's perspectives, concludes that what each age did in the way of art was what it could do best. From this, in an orderly but unschematic progression, he moves to the critical issue of how each age has done or is doing its characteristic work and from representative examples draws a link between antique or classical art and modern or Romantic art as roughly the period of the creation of the late classical or Hellenistic Laocoon.

Nor can Pater's analysis of the distinguishing strengths and limitations of the various arts, especially of classical sculpture and modern poetry, be considered theoretical in the current sense. They are brilliant deductions from specific examples—what Bacon called a “Table of Discovery”—and are persuasive only to the degree that the examples are sufficiently inclusive and the deductions adequately drawn. Their critical strength lies in the implicit parameters⁴³ Pater establishes (e.g., “discourse and action” in poetry, “motion,” “pure light,” and “pure form” in sculpture), the specific illustrations he uses, and the power of those illustrations to draw to the support of his argument the many unnamed examples that individual readers of the essay may know. Throughout he is being concrete rather than abstract, practical rather than theoretical, and what he says of the complexity of the Browning poem he cites (p. 117) it just as particular as are his comments on the simplicity of the Greek marbles.

In his ascent from the subject of the various arts to the subject of Goethe and Goethe's magnificent regenerative relevance to modernism, Pater acknowledges Winckelmann's inadequacy in an area of Hellenism in which Goethe was supreme—that bold tragic vision that confidently wrought serenity out of terrifying evil and turbulent conflict. In the very act of doing so, however, he takes an oblique, ironic glance at the moralistic rigidities that in a modern Christian culture are customarily associated with evil—the superficial morality that “makes the blood turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual world about us” (p. 177). That is enough, he says, to make us “regret” ever having “passed beyond” the “Hellenic ideal, in which man is in unity with himself, with this physical nature, with the outward world” (p. 177).

Basically, he is talking about the part the denial of his sexuality plays in modern man's distress, the denial of sexuality being only the most tangible metaphor of a general malaise of the spirit resulting from a refusal to accept the world as it in fact is and to be “complete” on those terms. Even if Winckelmann's experience did not comprehend the grandest achievement of the Greek spirit and he did not, like Goethe, become an Olympian-like victor over the truly terrifying realities of human life, he was yet free of this turbid, feverish, superficial sexual morality; being without “any sense of want, or corruption, or shame” in his contact with sensuous pagan truth, he was rewarded with a paganlike joy, “shameless and childlike” (pp. 176-177).

To be thus subversive of Christian morality as he had been subversive of Christian metaphysics took courage, and Pater has not always been given the credit he deserves for courage. One of the least confrontal of men outwardly, he was one of the most radical inwardly. His career as a critic is roughly contemporaneous with that of Nietzsche, with whom he shared the same classical and modern intellectual legacy. Their temperaments, literary manners, and worldly situations were very different, and there is nothing in Pater's story to correspond with the Continental campaign Nietzsche made of his dissent. Nietzsche, like Luther, posted the grounds for his dissent in public in a spirit of both popular defiance and popular appeal. Pater addressed a much more limited audience even than Newman and Arnold spoke to and depended on a more indirect, subterranean influence. Still, there are many critical parallels between Pater and Nietzsche that need to be studied in the context of their temperamental, artistic, rhetorical, and cultural differences. A historian of impeccable conscientiousness, a philosophic critic who was so original that he sometimes seems naive, a lover of art who was “one entire medium of spiritual expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew, with inward excitement” (p. 168), and, at the same time, a person who so prized reserve that he disciplined himself according to an ascetic ideal of “indifference” or “passionate coldness” at which he could not wholly succeed, Pater's radicalism comes to us almost in the disguise of loyalty to language.

But inherent in that language is a loyalty to subject more than equal to it, and therein lies one of the practical choices facing the contemporary critic of Pater. Even after one has made his fascination with Pater's language adequate to it, something of the subject still remains. At that point, the critic's choice is between staying with the limits of language and going beyond language—between standing firmly on language's outer edge, so to speak, and trying to harvest everything the language itself actually points to or implies, on the one hand, and, on the other, assuming that the really challenging subject is what the language does not point to or imply, does not “say,” and giving one's critical attention to that. As usual in criticism, it is a choice between the several varieties of formalism and one of the many alternatives to it.

Pater was himself too much of a self-examined formalist not to be acutely aware of its many fascinating alternatives. Indeed, that is his subject in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance. He begins: “To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought” (p. 186). He then goes on to admit what both the inward and outward facts of life confirm: “That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it” (pp. 186-187). Nevertheless, he concludes that, among the alternatives available even to a thoroughly modern consciousness, art in the disciplined, formal sense is the best: “For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake” (p. 190). In other words, simply by being what it is and not something else, art is man's quintessential spiritual resort and refuge, art being defined by an extension of the meaning assigned to poetry as “all [imaginative] production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter” (p. 184). There is no challenge here to the fact that the “actual threads” with which the artist makes his designs “pass out beyond” those designs and to follow them on their ongoing course can be fascinating, but Pater suggests that we should call them something other than art and the study of them something other than aesthetic or literary criticism.

The reader may wonder why, in the face of so extensive and basically constructive a commentary on the strengths and strategies of the “Winckelmann” essay, it is still necessary to insist that it is not a fully finished work of art. The reason can be made sufficiently clear, perhaps, only by a comparative recognition of the aesthetic advances Pater has still to make in “Leonardo da Vinci” and “Wordsworth.” All the conditions of art are present in “Winckelmann”; it is the actual accomplishment that awaits realization. Pater's problem at this point is not intellectual richness or artistic intention but workmanship, “the translation of ideas into images.”⁴⁴ Like Leonardo, he is in the midst of his own “struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the senses, the desire of beauty.”⁴⁵ What he needs and has not quite achieved is a style adequate to an abundance of ideas.

In some respects, “Winckelmann” may be called Pater's most varied and comprehensive single critical essay and in that sense his most important. It certainly dwarfs even the positive characteristics of “Coleridge's Writings,” introducing a host of quite fresh aesthetic considerations and revealing in a thoroughly exciting way how criticism can reach beyond itself toward independent artistic creation. What he has not quite succeeded in doing is converting ideas to images, discursiveness to autonomous, self-validating form. What Winckelmann achieved under untoward circumstances and passed on to Goethe is the heart of the parable, but the parable is not singularly enough the heart of the essay. The various movements of the essay enlarge and illuminate their creator's subject rather than contributing to a unity of effect that makes its outcome inevitable and complete. Pater's manner of treating Winckelmann in his historical, critical, and spiritual context has not quite proved that he has one subject in hand rather than three or four.

Unity of effect, on the other hand, seems to have been an object of special endeavor in the next essay, “Poems by William Morris,” and the curious result enables us to pinpoint an important tension in Pater's struggle to perfect his distinctive style. Unity of effect is a term more regularly applied to works of art than to works of criticism. Whatever high claims one might make for the originality, rigor, and fundamental soundness of Coleridge's criticism, one would not, I think, want to fault Pater's judgment that it is written in a fragmentary, discontinuous style that neglects manner in favor of matter—that its style lacks in itself a genuine literary motive. To think of a poem's “unity of effect” is so natural, in fact, that a young writer attempting to bring that quality to criticism would almost inevitably be tempted to write “poetic” prose. Something of this conflict between the proprieties of poetry and prose appears to have been central to Pater's struggle to create artistic criticism, and although he had gradually moved away from the premature poetic style of “Diaphaneitè,” he reverted toward it to some degree in “Poems by William Morris.” Though he may have been reasonably well satisfied with “Winckelmann” as a comprehensive statement of his critical position and as an adequate illustration of his ability to bring several diverse topics into logical coherence with each other, he yet recognized it as predominantly discursive rather than experiential, its “mind” being more in evidence than its “soul.”⁴⁶

Pater was soon to acknowledge, as he already certainly knew, that the terms Romantic and classical applied to critical prose as well as to other objects of critical endeavor and therefore that good prose depended on more organic qualities than mood, incantation, verbal mesmerism for its poetic character—that, as in sculpture, “line” took precedence over “color.” However, in “Poems by William Morris” he suspended what are really quite admirable structural lines in an atmosphere of verbal sound and private association reminiscent of “Diaphaneitè,” though the later essay is distinctly superior in depth and clarity of insight and in precision of phrase. Of course, “Poems by William Morris” was Pater's first essay in criticism of poetry, and its style can in part be accounted for by the “fine mimicry” he would regularly practice, absorbing into his own style some of the identifying marks of the work being criticized. On the other hand, the style of “Poems by William Morris” is one to which he would never return, and the two pieces he mined from it, the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance and “Aesthetic Poetry” in the first edition of Appreciations, continued ever after to evoke from him ambivalent feelings that may have had as much to do with the style in which they were written as with the thoughts they expressed, “style” including the voice he had used and the way he had positioned himself in relation to their subjects.

“Poems by William Morris” mirrors an important moment of self-illumination and is more ecstatic or epiphanic than Pater usually allows himself to be—franker in its use of artifice, more intense in its self-referentiality. The “Conclusion” to The Renaissance was the original essay's peroration, and that accounts for its heightened perorative style. “Aesthetic Poetry,” on the other hand, records a moment of insight, a perceptual victory, without which The Renaissance would have lacked a clear and sufficient motive. Thus, one may say that the “Conclusion” has an organic relationship to “Aesthetic Poetry” and an emblematic relationship to The Renaissance. It is a natural outgrowth of the former and was used as a codalike celebration of the personal significance of the latter. “Aesthetic Poetry” implicitly acknowledges Pater's debt to Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites for their contribution to his emergence as an aesthetic critic. The “Conclusion” is a carefully crafted song of himself, a celebration of self-discovery and affirmation, that is “poetic” by analogy with such dramatic lyrics as Dover Beach and Come into the Garden, Maud.

“Aesthetic Poetry” describes the poetry that from his incapacity as a poet Pater did not write, aesthetic criticism being the alternative available to his particular talents. Like Morris's (and Rossetti's) poetry, Pater's criticism is dedicated to the art-for-art's-sake principle, accepting frankly the artifice inherent in striving to idealize an ideal in which the spontaneity of so-called natural feeling has already been formalized and distanced, and putting the highest premium on the style in which it is executed. Shared attitudes of so basic a character made Pater an extraordinarily insightful critic of the poetry of Morris and Rossetti. No successor has ever come closer to seeing what their poetic goals were, how those goals worked in the making of their poems, and what the essential difference between them is. Despite the late date officially assigned to the Rossetti critique, it belongs stylistically to the same period as “Poems by William Morris,” the intense years between 1867 and 1869 when Pater was experiencing a climax of aesthetic self-discovery. Pater brought to his study of them an enthusiasm excited by his knowledge of Winckelmann's hold on Goethe, an enthusiasm for the liberating effects of the Hellenic ideal. He saw that ideal working in Morris in a poetically salutary way, and through seeing how it worked there, he discovered how it should work, on what terms any imaginative ideal of the past can be brought into the service of present imaginative need. Rossetti, on the other hand, never fully found the secret of the Hellenic ideal. In consequence, he was imprisoned in a refined medieval ideal, and though he crafted out of its weightiness of outlook and “grandeur of literary workmanship” a “great style,” he suffered the defect of its quality and was unable to liberate himself from what ultimately became a malignant force in his imaginative life.

Following “Winckelmann” by a year, “Poems by William Morris” contained an answer to the troublesome question that stood between the very special kind of self-modeling achieved by the eighteenth-century protohellenist Winckelmann and passed on by him to the Olympian Goethe, on the one hand, and, on the other, the more general and widely accessible, the archetypal, renaissance of the spirit that could and finally did supply the motive for The Renaissance. It was a question of “revival.” Past environments could not be revived; nor could the particular ways in which master spirits had dealt with the conditions prevailing in their moments in history. However, the sustaining human ideal that they had realized in their lives and works others could also realize if they would identify the choice element in their common humanity instanced there and “be divided against themselves”—that is, struggle against their humanity's baser inclinations—in trying to revive that. “We cannot truly conceive the age: we can conceive the element it has contributed to our culture: we can treat the subjects of the age bringing that into relief.”⁴⁷ That is what Pater found in Morris's poetry, and it showed him how to open the idealized past to the most thoroughly modern of idealizing presents and gave him a creative mission, in the best sense a religion, to which he could be forever faithful and in that faith flourish. It would require exercises of an Ignatian rigor, but it made a wholly secular ideal clear and worthy, showing him that what he had the greatest sympathy and capacity for could be one with the intellectual and moral meaning of his life.

Notes

1. Iain Fletcher, Walter Pater (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), p. 37.

2. “Conclusion,” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry/The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 190.

3. “Diaphaneitè,” Miscellaneous Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 247-[254].

4. Ibid., p. [254].

5. Ibid., p. 251.

6. “Conclusion,” The Renaissance, ed. Hill, p. 190.

7. “Postscript,” Appreciations/With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 254.

8. “Diaphaneitè,” p. 248.

9. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), XII, 862.

10. Arnold as Professor of Poetry at Oxford probably played a significant part in turning Pater's attention to Coleridge at this particular time (1864-1866). In his lecture on Joubert, he had described Joubert as “a French Coleridge,” and whether or not Pater actually attended the lecture, he certainly read it either in its magazine version or in Essays in Criticism (1865).

11. “Diaphaneitè,” p. 251.

12. Mill's choice of Bentham and Coleridge as the two great seminal minds of the nineteenth century in England has generally gone unchallenged for almost a century and a half, though the essays—“Bentham” (1838) and “Coleridge” (1840) reveal more about Mill's own mind than about the mind of the century.

13. “Coleridge's Writings,” English Critical Essays of the XIX Century, ed. Edmund D. Jones (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), p. 493.

14. Ibid., p. 494.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., pp. 494-495.

18. Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 125.

19. The term is one Tennyson created to describe the particular species of allegory at work in Idylls of the King.

20. “Preface,” The Renaissance, ed. Hill, p. xxv. This adaptation of Pater's words on his subject to his treatment of his subject is, I think, implicitly authorized by Pater himself. He is using the essay's very incongruity to “tell a truth / Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, / Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.” See Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Altick, XII, 855-857.

21. Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Altick, XII, 862-863.

22. Throughout the essay “Style,” Pater distinguishes between “the literature of fact” and “the literature of the imaginative sense of fact.” See, for example, Appreciations, p. 8.

23. Throughout this discussion of “Winckelmann,” page references are to the Hill edition of The Renaissance and are given in parentheses in the text.

24. I have drawn freely and gratefully on Hill's “Critical and Explanatory Notes” to his edition of The Renaissance, which are excellent on Pater's use of Hegel.

25. As used here, “meaning” has the extended spiritual content Newman gives it in the “Preface” to the Apologia as he ponders Kingsley's question, “What, then, does Dr. Newman mean?”

26. Plato and Platonism, pp. 159-160.

27. See, besides the several important references to Hegel in the text itself, Hill's “Critical and Explanatory Notes” to the “Winckelmann” essay in The Renaissance, pp. 410-441.

28. “Introduction,” The Renaissance, ed. Kenneth Clark (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1961), p. 13. Though Clark's phrasing raises as many critical questions as it seeks to answer, his introduction is fascinating in itself and a landmark in the updating of Pater's reputation among art historians and critics.

29. The role of the audience in Pater's prose is itself a subject of critical interest. Pater was through much of his life a lecturer, and it is customary to note the “lecture effect” on Plato and Platonism, the only complete example in his canon of a series of undergraduate lectures given book form. But the audience issue is deeper, more systemic than that. The dialogues of Plato are perhaps the literary model that most influenced him, but the care for an imaginary audience was part of the poetic fabric of his age, and the internal evidence that he absorbed it into his own literary manner is highly suggestive. He did not have the dramatic literary sense of Browning, but he was a monologuist who accepted the interpenetration between his role and that of those he wanted to affect. The issue is also related to Pater's desire to give his life as well as his writing artistic form.

30. In the “Postscript” to Appreciations (originally entitled Romanticism, 1876), he articulated this as a general principle: “the habit of noting and distinguishing one's own most intimate passages of sentiment makes one sympathetic, begetting, as it must, the power of entering, by all sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of other minds. …” See Appreciations, p. 254.

31. The Renaissance, ed. Hill, pp. 410-411.

32. Pater's characteristic use of the biographical mode—his persistent habit of seeing ideas as emanating from the spirits of various particular kinds of men working under different but specific conditions—has its correspondence in what he describes as Plato's strong temperamental tendency to perceive ideas as something very like “persons,” “to be known as persons must be [known]” and “to be loved for the perfections, the visible perfections … of their being” (Plato and Platonism, p. 166). It is also cognate with his view of the tensions in mankind's spiritual history as the result of different kinds of men working under different conditions as well as with his view that various universal ideas are reflections of patterns and tendencies of the mind itself, to be verified by reference to one's own mind if one can remain sufficiently detached and observant.

33. See Matthew Arnold's Books: Toward a Publishing Diary, ed. William E. Buckler (Geneva: E. Droz, 1958), p. 66.

34. Plato and Platonism, p. 175.

35. As distinct, that is, from got-up dialogue or dialogue manqué, which, as used by such persons as Bruno, Berkeley, and Landor, is merely the giving of a popular form to essentially dogmatic ideas.

36. Though Pater does not actually use the word sin, he could hardly have avoided thinking it, and he was quite capable of the buried pun with its sophisticated ironic playfulness.

37. Though Pater does not mention Arnold, Arnold is large in the background. Besides his general position as the age's most articulate spokesman for classical literary ideals, Arnold had delivered a lecture at Oxford, printed in the Cornhill in April, entitled “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment.” The lecture-essay stimulated both Pater's thinking and his courage on the subject, including the kind of corrective and courageous thinking that Pater often applied to Arnold after close study. David J. DeLaura takes the closely argued but, in my judgment, over-emphatic position that Pater's essay is “centrally a response” to Arnold's. Pater's essays seem to me to have a quite different “center” which is obscured by DeLaura's emphasis. See David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 202-222.

38. Pater's line of thinking here and later in the essay (pp. 177-179) moves in a direction to be passionately developed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872). From that point of view, Winckelmann, who “did not enter” into “this stage of Greek achievement” (p. 178), was himself the exponent of the sort of orthodoxy Pater is criticizing, indeed, is said by some to have been its originator.

39. Plato and Platonism, pp. 159-160.

40. For example, he seems to echo “The Scholar-Gipsy” when he says, “for us of the modern world, with its conflicting aims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience …” (p. 182), though he could also be echoing the beginning of chapter V in Newman's Apologia.

41. “Introduction,” The Renaissance, ed. Clark, p. 14.

42. One is reminded of Arnold's declaration that “the cardinal rule” of his critical inquiry is “Hypotheses non fingo” (I do not invent my hypotheses). He takes the “rule” from Isaac Newton and means by it that he “finds” his critical hypotheses empirically. See Literature and Dogma in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), VI, 275.

43. He is much more explicit in this regard in the opening pages of “The School of Giorgione.”

44. “Leonardo da Vinci,” The Renaissance, ed. Hill, p. 88.

45. Ibid.

46. Pater makes the distinction between the “mind” and the “soul” of good prose in his essay “Style.” See especially Appreciations, pp. 25-27.

47. “Charles Lamb,” Appreciations, p. 113.