Other Literary Forms
Walter Pater (PAYT-ur) is principally remembered as a critic. His most influential work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1877, 1888, 1893), decisively changed the Victorian conception of art as a vehicle for the expression of uplifting sentiments or edifying ideals. Pater, whose unnamed antagonist was John Ruskin, argued that art is preeminently concerned with the dextrous elaboration of its own sensuous ingredients. Form, color, balance, and tone: These are the elements of which art is constituted. Hence, the imposition of a moral upon a painting, a poem, or a musical composition subverts the integrity of the work and distorts the function of criticism. The genuine critic begins with an analysis of the impression that a painting or a poem communicates and then endeavors to trace that impression to the structural elements of which the work is composed. Ultimately, as the notorious conclusion to The Renaissance makes clear, art is chiefly to be cherished as a means of enhancing, expanding, and enlarging the faculties of sensuous apprehension and as a catalyst in the pursuit of more varied, exquisite, and complex sensations. In the last analysis, Pater was inclined to evaluate and judge life itself as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Pater qualified this position in his later works, however, and since Marius the Epicurean—his one completed novel—was expressly written to revise and reevaluate the conclusion of The Renaissance, it is necessary to acquire some preliminary understanding of Pater’s earlier and less complex point of view.
By way of preparation for Marius the Epicurean, Pater composed a series of stories that foreshadow the mature techniques of his novel. The best of these stories, “The Child in the House,” traces the influence of a child’s environment upon the formation of his sensibility and character. Here, in a statement that may be regarded as a keynote to the author’s subsequent utterances, Pater expresses through the character of Florian Deleal the distinguishing quality that informs not only his own sensibility but also the sensibility of Marius and, indeed, of all hisprotagonists: “For with the desire of physical beauty,” observes Pater of Florian, “mingled itself early the fear of death—the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.”
Before examining the implications of this sentiment in the context of Marius the Epicurean, it is interesting to note that virtually all of Pater’s other works—in both criticism and fiction—are meditations on the propinquity of beauty and death and on the desire that this meditation engenders in Pater to conceive of an absolute that defines itself in and gives broader significance to the sensuous flux of existence. As Pater observes in his study of Plato, “to realize unity in variety, to discover cosmos—an order that shall satisfy one’s reasonable soul—below and within apparent chaos: is from first to last the continuous purpose of what we call philosophy.”
In addition to The Renaissance, then, Pater’s other works include Imaginary Portraits (1887), a collection of stories that prefigure Marius the Epicurean in their emphasis on the aesthetic quality and philosophical repercussions of experience upon a sensitive and circumspect temperament rather than with the dramatization of experience itself; Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (1889), a heterogeneous collection of literary criticisms that apply the principles adduced in The Renaissance to the examination of English and French literary figures; Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (1893), the philosophical and theoretical counterpart to Marius the Epicurean , which examines the respective relations between the temporal and the eternal, the relative and the absolute, the...
(This entire section contains 696 words.)
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ideal and the real in the works of Plato;Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (1895), an examination of the myths of Dionysus and Persephone and their symbolic relation to the spirit of art; and Miscellaneous Studies (1895), a grouping of Pater’s most important writings on figures of literary, religious, and artistic significance. Of special interest in the latter is the short essay “Diaphaneite,” wherein Pater delineates those attributes that go into the making of an ideal and yet realizable humanity. Finally, Essays from the “Guardian” (1896) is a collection of Pater’s reviews on the writers of his day.
Achievements
Walter Pater’s achievement as a novelist and a critic is central to the modern vision of art. Though he was not always edified by the scandalous manner in which his disciples interpreted his message, nor gratified by the distortion of his ideas by an entire generation of aesthetes and decadents, Pater, when he is fully understood, emerges as a figure of incalculable importance in the evolution of twentieth century literature. In the first place, he did away with much of the fustian approach that obscured the appreciation of art in his own day, and he left a critical legacy, which extended into the twentieth century in the works of Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry. Moreover, as Harold Bloom observes of Pater’s most memorable character, “Marius, more than any fictional character of our age, is the representative modern poet as well as the representative man of literary culture who remains the only audience for that poet.”
As a stylist, too, Pater was wonderfully suggestive and original. Adapting the rich and ornate cadences of Ruskin to his more subtle purpose, Pater evolved a style that is the last word in delicacy, refinement, and understated eloquence. His sentences are characterized by elaborate parentheses, delicately wrought rhythms, and mannered circumlocutions—annoying to some readers—and his malleable prose matches with minute accuracy the uncertainties, doubts, and deliberations of a mind in debate with itself, a mind fastidiously alive to the full complexity of human experience and scrupulously intent upon a verbal music that, in its hesitant rhythms, remains faithful to that experience. In this regard, he clearly anticipates Marcel Proust.
It is not, however, on the level of style alone that Pater’s influence has been indelible. Marius the Epicurean, in the role that it assigns to memory, its tone of melancholy retrospect, its analysis of a highly developed sensibility enamored of perfection yet resigned to uncertainty, anticipates, to a remarkable degree, the structural, tonal, and thematic underpinnings of Proust’s novels. When one adds to this Pater’s lasting influence on Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, André Gide, and William Butler Yeats—the last of whom claimed that Marius the Epicurean is “the only great prose in modern English”—one is compelled to admit that Pater was one of the first major sensibilities of the modern age.