Introduction
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1A few years ago a scholar had the idea of devoting a series of symposia to studying not authors or literary works, but focusing on specific years. What happened for example in 1842 in the literary, publishing, or philosophical fields? What follows resembles that idea: the essays collected here cast a critical glance on a Victorian writer, Walter Pater, in 2008 and my thanks first go the contributors to this issue of the Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, then to Professor Escuret for having asked me to edit it. Reading the essays has been a rewarding experience as well as evidencing the continuous scholarly interest in Pater.
- 1 ‘Pater’s Academic Reception in France,’ The Critical Reception of Walter Pater, ed. Stephen Bann (L (...)
- 2 Martine Lambert-Charbonnier, Walter Pater et les ‘Portraits imaginaires’. Miroirs de la culture et (...)
2Pater does no longer need recognition in the English-speaking world where scores of essays and books are devoted to his writings. Does he need recognition in the French-speaking world? We have previously underlined the effect of the limited number of available translations which tends to turn him into a novelist or short-story writer.1 However, PhDs, articles and books are being devoted to Pater in France,2 thus signalling his return in the English studies. Like their English-speaking colleagues, French academics have to work with the only complete edition of Pater’s writings dating back to 1931. The so-called Library Edition is not complete and no longer corresponds to contemporary publishing requirements. C. Hill’s edition of The Renaissance cannot be praised enough and should inspire others scholars interested in bringing Pater’s works to the public. Another Pater specialist, G. Monsman, should also be praised for his 1995 edition of the complete text of Gaston de Latour. But other writings by Pater have not benefited from such attention and care and G. Sadock and M. Lambert-Charbonnier rightly plead for a new edition which would strenghten his place in the twenty-first-century English canon.
- 3 Pascal Aquien, Oscar Wilde. Les mots et les songes. Biographie (Paris: Aden, 2006).
3Has everything that current critical discourses allow been published on Pater and do we have to wait for the next generation of critics to uncover another Pater as we uncovered a gay Pater in the 1990s? In this perspective a new biography of Pater would be a welcome addition to the existing ones. Not a biography that would rehash what is well-known from the few letters that have come down to us, but a biography which would draw links between Pater and his times, which would rely on B. Inman’s remarkable studies on Pater’s readings to give a clear picture of the man and his times. Such a work would not be a portrait, a literary genre he masters and which secretly feeds existing biographies, but a work steeped in Victorian culture and in the history of ideas as has been done by P. Aquien for Wilde.3
4However we are of the opinion that there are still essays to be written on Pater as the following essays show, while constituting in their own right ‘bricks’ for our wished-for biography. They are a detailed snapshot of Paterian studies in a precise time, and it is interesting to note that they cover Pater’s diversity of interests. Studies on Pater as a philosopher, a literary critic, a mythographer, have long been missing as have studies on literature, philosophy, Greek art as he understood them and we hope the contributions gathered here may pave the way for further studies in these fields.
5What used to be called the ‘critical fortune’ is the object of G. Sadock’s essay which makes an assessment of the past, present and future fortunes of Pater, useful to all Pater’s scholars. He sets Pater in a modern context and his essay is a welcome reminder of the cultural gap between the Victorian times and ours. G. Sadock justly regrets the lack of an illustrated edition of an author whose writings unceasingly refer to the sensible world and works of art: ‘Since Pater used art as a cypher through which to see human experience and longing, it is lamentable that no synergistic volume of Pater’s words and appropriate images has appeared.’
6In an Internet-dominated world where Google lists a huge number of pages on Pater (342,000 on June, 4th 2008), it is also surprising that Pater’s writings do not benefit from a correct electronic edition. A. Drake’s invaluable website allows scholars to download his main texts (www.ajdrake.com/), but it does not constitute an electronic edition such as some Victorian writers enjoy. As M. Lambert-Charbonnier, who pleads for a ‘Pater Archive’, writes: ‘We can imagine a Pater Archive incorporating a complete electronic edition, including unpublished manuscripts. Such an archive could also offer access to Pater’s own sources whether literary or artistic works, as well as reflect his reception over the last century among critics of various countries, favouring communication between scholars throughout the years and throughout the world.’ It is to be hoped such a project should come to fruition so as to allow the inscription of Pater in the e-literary field for future scholars who will have grown with the Internet.
7It is in this perspective that M. Lambert-Charbonnier has chosen to devote an essay to the links between Pater’s prose and the notion of hypertext defined by George Landow as: ‘a text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality [. . .].’ At first sight nothing could be more different than hypertextuality which puts everything and everyone on the same footing and Pater who imagined a community of ‘scholars’ and who lived in a time of textual closure. Could a writer who consistently refused any illustration benefit from hypertextuality and multimedia which may add a visual dimension to his writings? Hypertextuality may in fact constitute a precious tool for giving one access to bibliographical sources which underline Pater’s immense scholarship.
- 4 Pater, ‘Preface,’ The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. A. Philips (Oxford: OUP, 1988) xx (...)
8However M. Lambert-Charbonnier does not call for a mere parallel between the hypertext and Pater’s writings; she directs our critical attention on the ways both function as a critique of the other, how multiplicity is differently translated in both, as is shown by the multiplicity of sources and their accurateness. ‘Walter Pater raised the issue of scholarship in his own time and his view may help us assess both the dangers and the wonderful possibilities in the use of hypertext in Paterian studies. His notion of a text caught in a network of cultural and artistic references and yet also shaped and framed by a single vision and a unique temperament raises the issue of openness and closure, unity and multiplicity in the new medium.’ Similar as they may appear, Pater’s writings and hypertextuality differ, with the first promoting the textual unity and the second the fragmentation of sources, media, with Pater praising an elitist vision of culture (‘eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture’)4 and the hypertext based on the equal status of files and users. It is in taking these differences into account that one may transform the apparent failings of the hypertext in assets so as to have access to a fuller vision of Paterian textuality.
9The wished-for Pater Archive, which would allow users to visualize the works of art that nourrished his texts, remains to be created. Its necessity also stems from the very Paterian conception of art as the experience of differences—differences between the arts, differences between the sensations each form of art, each moment bring. Pater’s aesthetic difference is the experience of different sensations that each of the arts produces as they are experienced by subjects as he defined them, and he was one of the most talented craftsmen of the exploration of this difference. The notion of Ander-streben which he coined is both the expression and the experience of the aesthetic difference as is shown by M. Poueymirou focusing on ‘The School of Giorgione’, the text where Pater stated his aesthetics the most forcefully. She shows that Pater’s aesthetics demanded an expression of its own, a specific poetics predicated on an impossibility of translating all sensations into words: ‘Keenly aware of the impossibility of translating colour, sound and spatial dimension into words, Pater renegotiated textual boundaries through synaesthetic metaphors. In order to describe aesthetic excellence or the aspiration of one form towards another—music towards the pictorial, architecture towards the poetic, sculpture towards “the equivalent of colour”—he relied on metaphors that conflated sensorial experiences. And thus, Pater’s development of “Anders-streben” was theoretical as well as linguistic [. . .].’ Through Pater’s synaesthetic metaphors, language becomes the means of conveying the experience of difference and the tension towards transgression of this very difference which constantly permeates it. The aesthetic difference appears with the utmost clarity when the difference between the arts and the sensations each of them gives rise to tends to be negated, as is shown by a painting by Giorgione. Transgressing the bi-dimensionality of painting, it exemplifies Pater’s poetics of the Ander-streben. Likewise, Pater’s synaesthetic metaphors rely on and fuse all the arts. It is by experimenting and enduring difference, that the way to its possible subversion is to be discovered. As it fails, subversion reconducts the experience of an irreductible difference. Langage aims at making one aware of this difference, it is a measuring of it: ‘Pulling from various sensorial and perceptual fields, Pater tests and renegotiates textual boundaries. Inter-sensorial metaphor invests in language that crucial ability of consuming a complex range of associations within a single form—a text.’
- 5 Laurel Brake, ‘The Entangling Dance: Pater after Marius, 1885–1891,’ Walter Pater: Transparencies o (...)
10‘The School of Giorgione’ is primarily concerned with Venetian art and may reinforce the vision of Pater as only interested in the Renaissance or Greek art which he was to discuss so eloquently in the early 1880s. This view is misleading as J.-B. Bullen shows by discussing Pater’s assessment of contemporary art. Discussing first Pater’s review of G. Moore’s Modern Painting, he demonstrates the strong and enduring interest of Pater for Aestheticism and his strategies to deal with it, mainly in texts published in the late 1860s and in the early 1890s. Indeed, if Pater appreciated avant-gardist art, he also knew that his position as an educator did not allow him to mention it without some rhetorical and editorial precautions. He would not be the English Baudelaire because he was an ‘Oxford don’. Pater soon became aware that Swinburne and Solomon, the mentors he had chosen, did not constitute a respectable support, and he had to adopt strategies discussed by J.-B. Bullen, such as temporal distanciation, yet without deceiving anyone: in the late 1870’s he was recognized by his friends and foes alike as a major modern art critic. Later Pater experienced the twists and turns of the legislation,5 the prudishness or the increasingly heterocratic mores of his times but he showed he could circumvent them, once again, through his use of language and scholarship.
- 6 Michel Serres, L’Hermaphrodite. Sarrazine sculpteur (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).
11Pater appreciated some philosophers and artists to whom he devoted insightful portraits but he surprisingly neglected Dante, except for the preface he wrote for Shadwell’s translation of The Inferno in 1892. There is no literary portrait of Dante but Pater’s writings contain references to the Italian poet in a time when, as J. Straub reminds us, Dante enjoyed critical favour, although his status and the use one could make of his poetry were diverse. Dante’s writings were seen as moral and aesthetic models as they represented a lost perfection and harmony capable of pricking the nostalgic vein of the Victorians. Pater was drawn to Dante for reasons stated in ‘Diaphaneitè’ which J. Straub discusses carefully. It should not be forgotten that Beatrice is ‘a deliberately chosen model for Pater’s diaphanous type of character’. She is a figure which does away with genders and spatio-temporal divisions. Like the Greek statues, she partakes of a sexlessness which is not predicated on exclusion but on inclusion: ‘“Moral sexlessness” does not primarily relate to a lack of male or female sexual drives, but signifies inclusiveness, i.e. the union of moral characteristics ascribed to the male and the female sex.’ Beatrice is not located within sexual difference but outside of it, partaking, one could say, of the figure of the ‘included-third’ (‘tiers-inclus’) discussed by M. Serres in L’Hermaphrodite.6 She abolishes sexual difference in contrast to Pater’s aesthetic practice which celebrates it.
- 7 Pater, ‘Rossetti,’ Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1910) 206.
- 8 ‘Henceforth, to the end, he will be the analyst, the faithful reporter, in his work, of what he see (...)
12‘diaphaneitè’ as a word is a good example of the diversity of Pater’s readings and of the use he made of his sources. The language of the artistic, literary and philosophical culture from Antiquity to modern times reverberate in his writings, conveying multiple and complex meanings as M. Uemura shows by discussing this strange-sounding and looking word. For an English-speaking reader, somehow mystified by C. L. Shadwell’s bizarre spelling, the term may be stranger than for the French-speaking scholar steeped in the late nineteenth-century writings of both the Symbolists and Decadents and their detractors, both of whom made an extensive use of the word. M. Uemura discusses another source, V. Hugo, who remained one of Pater’s favorite novelists and who wrote about Mademoiselle Baptistine’s ‘diaphanéité’ in Les Misérables. Hugo’s diaphaneity also designates a state beyond sexual difference epitomized by transparency, as it will in Pater’s eponymous talk as transcribed and edited by C. L. Shadwell. Diaphaneity and transparency are the thinly veiled secret of Paterian subjects be they real or imaginary. Rossetti to whom Pater devoted a portrait in 1883 was described as having ‘the gift of transparency,’7 and Raphaël as ‘the analyst, the faithful reporter’ of what he ‘s[aw]’8 including ‘the staff of transparent crystal’ of the Baptist (MS 60). The Preraphaelite poet-painter expressed what he felt, likewise the Renaissance artist painted what he saw, with the emphasis on the subject rather than on scenes and objects, hence the need for a transparent subject, one that lets the impression shine through one’s mind and perceptual apparatus, one that reduces oneself to sensual and intellectual diaphaneity. Transparency also points to sympathy, that is to say the empty locus at the heart of the subject perfectly embodied, as shown by M. Uemura, by Charles Lamb. Such a diaphaneous, transparent place or state of being also allows writers to have ‘a sympathetic perception of the dominant undercurrent of progress in things,’ thus linking the personal and the historical. Transparency reappeared in ‘Winckelmann’ and ‘The Child in the House’ and M. Uemura concludes that C. L. Shadwell was right to put ‘Diaphaneitè’ at the beginning of Miscellaneous Studies as this ‘proto-portrait’ encapsulates Pater’s following texts: ‘this earliest essay by Pater contains the essence of his aesthetic principle, as a miniature, with special reference to transparent character which permeates Pater’s entire work [. . .].’
- 9 Linda Dowling, ‘Ruskin’s Pied Beauty and the Consitution of a “Homosexual Code,”’ The Victorian New (...)
13Any reader of Pater is aware of these reverberations and echoes which give such a forceful unity to his writings. Pater constantly rephrased his meaning and the terms he used as J.-B. Picy shows by analyzing the reorderings of the Paterian prose in Plato and Platonism he translated in French in 1998. Pater appreciated self-reference because it displays a form of stability despite the temporal flux and the retrospective consciousness his writings register. In this perspective, J.-B. Picy discusses anew a term whose meaning has been explored by Pater’s critics,9 poikilia. He shows that Pater’s multi-layered textuality cannot be read by taking into account the mere context but draws on the cultural history of words and self-reappraisals.
14Pater as a mythographer is being discussed by A.-F. Gillard-Estrada. Pater read Müller’s as well as Tylor’s studies, listened to Ruskin’s discussing The Queen of the Air and he can be said to have a fair amount of mythological knowledge according to Victorian standards. However, mythology holds a special place to him: as A.-F. Gillard-Estrada notes, his texts on mythology, ‘Dionysus: A Study’ and ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,’ obey several objectives. They answer Pater’s detractors, reassert The Renaissance’s vision of the cultural continuum between Antiquity and modernity, allow him to review, beyond the fracture represented by the advent of Christianity upon a pagan substratum, M. Arnold’s vision of a happy Greece. They also allow him to offer another conception of sexual identity. To fulfil those aims, Pater proceeded by selecting and rearranging texts on mythology, literary works, paintings, sculptures, dealing with mythological themes valorizing sadness, the Chthonian element, the pagan sentiment which, according to his brilliant demonstration in ‘Winckelmann,’ is the discovery by mankind of its mortality. Pater was no innovator when he saw religion as an ‘anodyne’ to the human cry. He was more heterodox when he turned Demeter and Persephone into an illustration of the ‘worship of sorrow’, thus implying we might say that the Greeks experienced what Heidegger called ‘death-as-death’, therefore turning them into ordinary mortals. This mortal fate allows Greek productions, be they literary or artistic to be somehow similar to the Christian Virgin embodied by Michelangelo’s Pietà. Likewise, Pater underlined the similarities between the fate of Dionysus and the crucified Christ figure. Such a vision was a far cry from Arnold’s ‘neither sick nor sorry’ Greece as it implied that the Greeks knew the meaning of finitude and that they experienced, if not the Christian resurrection, at least the return per se, which is but the enactment of symbolic order. This the reason why Pater’s statufied creatures strive to reappear in the individual or general consciousness and manifest themselves as bodies that contrast the red and the white, the bodily fluids and the marble or the bronze. ‘These corporeal figures exhumed from the earth are for Pater metaphors of the recovery of the spiritual and sensuous conditions of ancient Greece—the images of its cultural legacy to the modern world’: such is the legacy of Greece, as its buried treasures were progressively unearthed at the time Pater wrote his masterly essays celebrating the male body. For the figures which his texts delineate are also gendered figures, with the masculine, torn body, ardently coming back, with the feminine figure who experienced Hades and still bore its pallid colours, holding the grenade, the symbol of generation and disappearance, the symbol of the tension between Eros and Thanatos every woman is the keeper of. Pater’s mythopoetic sexual identities have but a scant resemblance to the dominant Victorian masculinity or to the desexualized Angel in the house. The torn Dionysus like a Saint Sebastian or the tortured Raoul in Gaston, Demeter softening the vampire-like character of the ‘Lady Lisa’ without negating her lethal essence though, partake of a conception of sexual division Pater offers his readers regardless of the time.
- 10 David De Laura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, Pater (Austin: U of Texas (...)
15Pater’s sexual orientation is not the primary object of John Coates’s essay although he devotes a part of it to examine Marius’ deliberate celibacy and continence. More importantly, his essay deals with the dialogic relation Pater had to Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Grammar of Assent through the early chapters of Marius the Epicurean. After D. DeLaura’s seminal discussion of Pater’s relation to Newman,10 J. Coates discusses Pater’s dialogue with Newman in the context of his return towards (?) Christianity in the 1880s. Like Newman, ‘Pater is drawn to the notion of religious belief as an accumulation of probability derived from such a range of variegated experiences, emotion and reflection. For him, this carries more weight then either logical demonstration or sudden conversion and he is attracted to Newman’s sympathetic view of such religious experience.’ However some Newmanian arguments did not convince Pater who was furthermore unable to complete an essay he wanted to devote to ‘The Writings of Cardinal Newman’. The article demonstrates by a close reading of Marius that Pater joins Newman in some aspects of the nature of religious experience while other aspects did not elicit his adhesion. Whereas Newman emphasized the dimension of fear in religious experience, Pater underlined a sense of relief from it. He also replaced Newman’s ‘ultimate realities’ (‘God and [his] own soul’) by the love of others and one’s responsibility towards them. Contrasting both writers’ vision of evil J. Coates underlines the precedence of moral sensitivity before the discovery of evil in Pater. He also underscores that for Pater, good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly are given together, which constitutes another departure from Newman’s trenchant one-sided vision. The question of Pater and religion is still a vexed one but: ‘the early chapters of Marius the Epicurean, describing the young Roman’s seminal religious experiences, illustrate the degree to which, gently but tenaciously, Pater was determined to follow his own intellectual and spiritual course, even where this meant contradicting a revered model.’ A good reader of Newman, Pater remained ‘an alert, discriminating vigilant mind,’ praising sympathy towards the other rather than fear and trembling.
- 11 Baudelaire, ‘Le Voyage,’ Les Fleurs du mal, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Laffont, 1981) 100.
16Finally I have devoted an essay to Pater’s relation to the Decadence both as a temporal concept and a literary movement. I have started by Pater’s vision of temporality which allowed him to equate decadence and renaissance as both strove to elevate time-articulations to the dignity of a cult or to debase it to the trivia of fashion as appeared in The Renaissance and ‘A Prince of Court Painters’. What seems to be at stake in this vision of history is the question of artistic renewal or what Baudelaire called the ‘Nouveau.’11 Pater answered the question through a meditation on poetics which appeared in his writings as a redefinition of euphuism, first in ‘Love’s Labours Lost’ and in some chapters of Marius the Epicurean.
Notes
1 ‘Pater’s Academic Reception in France,’ The Critical Reception of Walter Pater, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Continuum, 2004).
2 Martine Lambert-Charbonnier, Walter Pater et les ‘Portraits imaginaires’. Miroirs de la culture et images de soi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004); Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, ‘“The Greek Paradox” Walter Pater: L’Hellénisme et la Grèce’, Thèse de 3e cycle, Université Paris VII, 2002.
3 Pascal Aquien, Oscar Wilde. Les mots et les songes. Biographie (Paris: Aden, 2006).
4 Pater, ‘Preface,’ The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. A. Philips (Oxford: OUP, 1988) xxxiii.
5 Laurel Brake, ‘The Entangling Dance: Pater after Marius, 1885–1891,’ Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, eds Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, Carolyn Williams (Greensboro: ELT P, 2002) 24-36.
6 Michel Serres, L’Hermaphrodite. Sarrazine sculpteur (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).
7 Pater, ‘Rossetti,’ Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1910) 206.
8 ‘Henceforth, to the end, he will be the analyst, the faithful reporter, in his work, of what he sees. He will realise the function of style as exemplified in the practice of Da Vinci, face to face with the world of nature and man as they are; selecting from, asserting one’s self in a transcript of its veritable data,’ Pater, ‘Raphaël,’ Miscellaneous Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910) 50.
9 Linda Dowling, ‘Ruskin’s Pied Beauty and the Consitution of a “Homosexual Code,”’ The Victorian Newsletter 75 (Spring 1989) 1–8.
10 David De Laura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, Pater (Austin: U of Texas P, 1969).
11 Baudelaire, ‘Le Voyage,’ Les Fleurs du mal, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Laffont, 1981) 100.
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Bénédicte Coste, « Introduction », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 68 Automne | 2008, mis en ligne le 25 septembre 2020, consulté le 12 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/7777 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.7777
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