“It is not what Pater says but how he says it that both secures his place in critical history and marginalizes him in the discipline of English”, writes Kate Hext (March 29) in her robust review of Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies (edited by Charles Martindale, Lene Østermark-Johansen and Elizabeth Prettejohn). I took down Richard Aldington’s The Religion of Beauty (1950) to see whether Aldington was of the same view. Hext says that Pater was “concerned with the style and form of nonfiction, and its place in the world”. Aldington says the “present disfavour clouding Pater’s fame is due chiefly to the violent repudiation of all aestheticism of his gentle Epicurean kind”.
In journalism today overdecorated prose risks the ire of the editor; witness the New Yorker’s regular warning “No fine writing, please”. In the same way, to the layman at least, Pater’s prose sits uneasily in the world of literary criticism. To the modern ear it’s too circuitous – too Proustian, dare I say – and fails to hit the mark first time. I tried to read some of Pater’s work after I read Hext’s piece, but, sadly, couldn’t quite burn with a “hard, gemlike flame”, as Pater said we should to succeed in life.
Incidentally, Aldington describes poor Pater as “sluggish, timid, almost furtive in manner”, a “wary, blinking batchelor, for whom two spinster sisters kept house”; and he is represented by one of Ruskin’s disciples (W. H. Mallock) as a dangerously seductive sensualist.
Kate Hext quotes Christopher Ricks as saying that “[Matthew] Arnold’s little finger is worth Pater’s whole hand”. Luckily, poets and novelists of the modernist era thought Pater’s criticism worthy of their attention, and the evidence is there in the works of such diverse authors as Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens.
His influence on James Joyce is particularly apparent. There is an emphasis in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on epiphanic moments, and they have much in common with passages such as this one from Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance:
To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off – that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Here we have the seed bed of that stream-ofconsciousness technique one finds in Joyce and in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. English studies over the years would have been in severe straits if authors of this calibre had not found their way into the Great Tradition.
Churchill and Brexit
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