- 1 Coste, RWPE, 124.
- 2 Higgins, ‘Modernist’.
- 3 ‘Dance,’ Transp., ‘Body,’ PN #46.
- 4 Sedgwick, ‘Between men’.
- 5 Pater in the 1990s.
- 6 Mapping.
- 7 Masc.
1Pater first drew my attention because he differed from ‘Ruskin’s moralizing art criticism and Arnold’s absolute poetical types’ in the long debate over didacticism and aestheticism in British critical theory.1 Later I chose to consider Pater’s contemporaries’ response to his public persona and published texts because it seemed so much livelier, more wide-ranging, and, on the whole, more positive than that accorded him from the 1920s until the early 1980s. Pater’s stature, it seemed to me then and now, acts as a kind of lightning rod for larger cultural issues, such as tolerance, literary history, diversity, epistemology, and the struggle for religious affirmation. Without the insights of Lesley Higgins,2 Laurel Brake,3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,4 Billie Andrew Inman,5 Jay Losey,6 Richard Dellamora,7 and many others, it was difficult to understand the near collapse of his reputation and the hostility of such modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Wyndam Lewis.
- 8 Sadock, 1–2.
- 9 Pater in the 1990’s.
- 10 Cruise, PN #47, 8–17.
- 11 Bann, 1.
2The problem was compounded by the unavailability of reliable texts: the Macmillan Library Edition of 1910 was issued in 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, and again in 1923; after that, Boni and Liveright (later the Modern Library) produced cheap editions of Pater’s ‘popular’ works (Ren., Marius, Portraits, and Apprec.) until the 1950s. J. M. Dent seems to have reprinted its own complete edition in 1967 (Sadock 1–2).8 Laurel Brake and Ian Small began Pater in the 1990s by noting that ‘the undisguised distaste for the work of Walter Pater a generation ago—in, for example, René Wellek’s disparaging dismissal in 1965 that ‘today Pater is under a cloud’—now seems very distant.’9 I well remember my distress when my dissertation director insisted that all my citations of Pater must come from the Macmillan Library Edition of 1910, or a reprint thereof. To my horror, my university did not at the time (1972) have a complete 10-volume set. I immediately wrote second-hand and antiquarian book-sellers in Britain and New York to acquire my primary sources. Four months later, Blackwell’s, in Oxford, replied that they had a complete ‘like-new’ set and that I could have it for £14.8s.6d. Two further comments suggest just how far Pater studies have come in the last 35 years. Colin Cruise, in his review of Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, writes, ‘The entire project might be considered a re-evaluation of a writer whose reputation was very dim indeed even as recently as the start of the 1980s and whose works are still not as widely available as one would want them to be. Surprisingly, given the title of the collection, one of the most apparent strands of the essays is Pater’s presence, or absence, in histories and discourses of modernism.’10 Stephen Bann, citing Coste, in his Introduction to The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe, notes, ‘Scarcely had the Second World War come to an end when the reputation of Pater in his own country went into a virtual eclipse, heralding what Coste describes in this volume as his “relative disappearance from the English canon in the third quarter of the twentieth century.”’11
- 12 Kronenberger, Introduction, The Renaissance, x.
3The ‘thaw’ in Pater studies did not take place overnight, but there were signs of reawakening interest in his œuvre and discontent with what Lesley Higgins calls ‘the cult of ugliness’ and the ‘Men of 1914’ as early as 1959, in both England and America. In that year, Mentor Books (a division of the New American Library; and, in England, the New English Library) published The Renaissance with an Introduction by Louis Kronenberger.12 Kronenberger is hard pressed to defend Pater and, although he accuses Pater of [. . .] an exquisiteness that can verge on the too-utterly-utter—,’ he concludes that, ‘The Renaissance must always exert a sway when its own virtues are uppermost [. . .]. Even a modest allotment of art for art’s sake might today have a real value, less for the old reasons than in application to the current reign of art for sociology’s, and psychiatry’s, and anthropology’s, and mere cerebration’s sake.’
- 13 Burdett, Introduction, Marius.
- 14 Moore, qtd. in Marius, in Burdett vii, xii.
- 15 Auto., 373.
4In 1968, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., reissued Marius the Epicurean, first included in Everyman’s Library in 1934, with a new introduction by Osbert Burdett.13 Unlike Kronenberger, Burdett is more interested in Pater the man than in aestheticism or philosophy. He focuses mostly on Pater’s prose, quoting George Moore’s famous remark that Marius is ‘the golden book of English prose’ and that ‘in the pages of Pater, the English language lies in state.’14 He also reminds readers that W. B. Yeats called Marius ‘the only great prose in modern English.’15
- 16 Burdett.
- 17 Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism.
5Burdett peeks, however briefly, beneath ‘the mask which [Pater] wore before the world,’16 thereby anticipating by many years the closer look provided by gay and queer studies, such as Dellamora’s Masculine Desire.17 Considering ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and ‘Apollo in Picardy,’ Burdett observes:
These are interesting not only because they are the most vivid and unforgettable of Pater’s studies, the nearest to exciting narrative of all he wrote, but because they give a glimpse of the forces that lay behind his reserve, and show how the imagination of this austere and restrained man would seek, sometimes, an outlet at the opposite pole from his customary correctitude. His imagination would play with the idea of violence, would rejoice in an outbreak of riot, and, in reaction from his habitual passivity, would linger with an odd delight on bloodshed [. . .]. In the recesses of his nature a fanatic of some kind was lurking, and thus a book like Marius, that may seem to cooler natures to recommend an impossible aloofness from experience, may, in truth, have been the wisdom that was the only solution of a temper really difficult for him so to have tamed.18
- 19 Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans.
- 20 Lawrence Evans, Introduction, Letters of Walter Pater, xxi; Germain d’Hangest, Walter Pater: l’homm (...)
- 21 Lawrence Evans, Introduction, Letters, xxi.
- 22 W. H. Mallock, The New Republic.
- 23 A. C. Benson, Diary.
- 24 Pater 90’s, chapter 2.
- 25 Walter Pater, ‘Poems by William Morris,’ Westminster Review, xxxiv ns, (October 1868), 311-312; Let (...)
6A real milestone in the return of Pater to the canon of English literature, was the publication, in 1970, of Letters of Walter Pater,19 edited by Lawrence Evans. In his admirable Introduction, Evans is among the first to probe the change from ‘the boldly assertive Pater of these early Brasenose years [1864 to 1873] [into] the personality suggested in most of the letters [in which] there lies a period of reflection, reconsideration, of what Germain d’Hangest calls “retour sur soi.”’20 It was not comfortable in Oxford to be known, in Jowett’s phrase, ‘as a demoralizing moralizer.’21 Evans, in more detail than any other author to that date, recounts that Pater was passed over for the Junior Proctorship in 1874 and a few years later was ‘acidulously’ portrayed as Mr Rose in W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic.22 He presented himself as a candidate for the Professorship of Poetry, only to withdraw from the field, in 1876, when bitter opposition developed. Again, in 1885, on Ruskin’s resignation as Slade Professor of Fine Art, Pater allowed his name to be placed in consideration, this time to see the Electors choose Hubert von Herkomer instead. Evans, like others considering the root of ‘the hostility of powerful elements in the University,’ is unaware of the Hardinge affair, of the Diary of A. C. Benson, and of Mallock’s role in apprising Benjamin Jowett of the love letters—signed ‘Yours lovingly’—sent by Pater to Hardinge. The full disclosure of this incident, including the ‘dreadful interview’ between Jowett and Pater, which, in Benson’s words, left Pater ‘old, crushed, despairing,’23 fell to Laurel Brake. In 1980, at the first international conference on Pater, at Brasenose College, Professor Brake, in Billie Andrew Inman’s telling, ‘galvanized her audience by bringing forth the first real evidence pertaining to the, by that time, famous mystery regarding Pater, Jowett, and the Proctorship.’24 Without such knowledge and documentary proof, Evans attributes the opposition of Jowett, representative of the Broad Church faction in the University, to still vivid memories of Pater’s foppish appearance in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and to the unapologetic hedonism of the Conclusion, which first appeared in the October number of the Westminster Review.25
- 26 Introduction, Marius, ed. Harold Bloom.
- 27 Marius, ed. Harold Bloom, ix.
7Of less importance than Evan’s work, but still an indication that Pater studies would soon be resuscitated, is the Introduction written by Harold Bloom for the new Signet Classic edition of 1970. The essay, although idiosyncratic in a characteristic Bloomian way, still has something to tell us. Bloom reminds us that ‘some twenty years before Gautier and Baudelaire created their sensibility out of Delacroix, Poe, and their own complex natures,’26 Arthur Henry Hallam had provided a more direct source of English aestheticism in a review of his friend Alfred Tennyson’s poetry, and that Yeats found his aesthetics in Hallam, before coming under Pater’s influence.27 Hallam contrasted Shelley and Keats as ‘poets of sensation’ with Wordsworth as a ‘poet of reflection.’ In a passage that could well describe Marius’s impassioned passivity and receptivity, Hallam writes:
Susceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature, their fine organs trembled into emotion at colors, and sounds, and movements, unperceived or unregarded by dulled temperaments [. . .]. So vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense.
- 28 Marius, ed. Harold Bloom, x.
8Despite Eliot’s dislike and disparagement of Pater’s work, Bloom asserts that the theme of Eliot’s work is the same as Pater’s : ‘the Copernican revolution in poetry that saw a change in the direction of poetic art form, as Marshall McLuhan phrases it, “the shaping of the poetic object [. . .] to the shaping of psychological effects in the reader.”’28 Bloom is ahead of his time in seeing that ‘Pater is one of the central figures in the continuity between Romanticism and Modernism.’ He sees Pater as ‘more than a link between, say, the sensibility of Keats and that of the late Yeats or late [Wallace] Stevens; he is a kind of hinge upon which turns a single gate, one side of which is Romantic and the other modern poetry.’
- 29 Marius, ed. Harold Bloom, xiii.
9Although Bloom hasn’t much space in this essay, he touches with keen insight on the darker, barely repressed preoccupations of Pater’s mind: ‘[. . .] there is a morbidity in Pater not present in Keats or in Stevens—the spirit of sadomasochism and inversion, the infantile regressiveness of his The Child in the House, and the repressed destructiveness that emerges in some of his Imaginary Portraits. Something of this drifts into Marius the Epicurean through the subtly evaded homosexuality of the love of Marius first for Flavian and then for Cornelius, and in the reveries on human and animal victims of pain and martyrdom.’29 He finds the ‘burden’ of Marius identical to the burden of the modern lyric from Wordsworth to Stevens—’the near solipsism of the isolated sensibility, of the naked aesthetic consciousness deprived of everything save its wavering self and the flickering of an evanescent beauty in the world of natural objects, which is part of the universe of death.’ Here Bloom, like so many before and after him, succumbs to the same florid and deliquescent prose style by which long-time readers of Pater’s texts are seduced.
- 30 PN #45, 37.
- 31 Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Œdipus, 1949 (based on papers delivered in 1910 and 1923).
10The appearance of these inexpensive editions of Pater’s ‘popular’ works, as well as a scholar’s edition of Pater’s correspondence, presupposes a public demand. Indeed, the decade of the 1970s witnessed seismic shifts in Anglo-American culture that would greatly increase the demand for Pater’s works and diversify the nature of his readership. The ‘love that dare not speak its name’ in the late 1890s had, by this time, not only found its voice, but turned vociferous, and, at least in academic circles, insistent. With the ‘arrival of queer theory as a potent scholarly force’ in 1990, the Constitutional ‘right to privacy,’ gradual decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, and a general permissiveness following the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, a new kind of scholarship, at once more honest and more probing arose.30 Walt Whitman’s entire oeuvre was published in America for the first time; E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1960–1971) reappeared after a long absence, and the Wolfenden recommendations were finally accepted. Gay, lesbian, queer, and every other kind of non-mainstream scholar jumped on Pater in what can only be called a feeding frenzy, fueled, no doubt, not only by personal interest but by the need to say something new about a hitherto somewhat neglected or marginalized author in the hope of academic advancement or publication. Nothing like it had occurred since the psychoanalysts had pounced on every ‘disturbed’ artist from Shakespeare to Poe, Melville, James, Lawrence, and many others in the wake of Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Œdipus.31
- 32 B.A. Inman, Pater in the 1990’s, chapter 2.
- 33 John Fielder Mackarness, A Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford, (April 20, 1875) (Oxford (...)
- 34 Mallock, The New Republic.
- 35 Gilbert, W[illiam]S[chwank] and Arthur Seymour Sullivan, The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan(...)
- 36 Brake, PN #46, Spring 2003, 22.
- 37 R. M. Seiler, Walter Pater: A Life Remembered xx.
11What Pater would have thought of this rude ripping off of the mask he had so assiduously cultivated and of the decoding of homoerotic fantasies on which he had expended his genius is hard to say. As we now know, he suffered at least five collisions with Victorian hypocrisy, homophobia, and judgmentalism: the ‘dreadful interview’ with Jowett, which probably ruined his career at the University (1874);32 his condemnation by Bishop John Fielder Mackarness from the pulpit of Christ Church Cathedral and in A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford (1875);33 his vilification at the hands of Mallock in The New Republic (1877);34 his ridicule in the composite character Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Engaged’ (1877) and ‘Patience’ (1881);35 and, as Laurel Brake has shown, his perceived need to alter his persona, both after the Hardinge debacle of 1874 and again after the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act by Parliament in 1885, and the discovery and prosecution of a male brothel in Cleveland Street in London in 1889–1890.36 Any one of these circumstances could have resulted in his dismissal from Brasenose College; the abuse of a minor, if made public, could have led to legal charges, as well as public opprobrium. Academe has struggled against the corruption of youth at least since the time of Socrates (469–399 B.C.), but London has always understood that youth, and anyone else who can be bought or seduced, is fair game. London, in the last quarter of the 19th century was awash in illicit, criminalized activity and catered to every sexual delectation. Oxford, on the other hand, was a microcosm, clergy dominated, and devoted to turning out the elite who governed and administered the British Empire. The redolence of Anglo-Catholicism still hung in the air. It is not, as R. M. Seiler chronicles, without significance that, in 1885, Pater moved to the metropolis with his sisters, taking the house at 12 Earl’s Terrace, Kensington, where they resided until their return to Oxford in the summer of 1893.37 Like Keats, always aware of the nearness of death and the transience of aesthetic rapture, perhaps Pater, now middle-aged, thought to gain a degree of sympathy, or at least anonymity, in cosmopolitan London.
12The openness, greater tolerance, fluidity of gender identity, even pastoral and psychological support for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals that increasingly characterizes our times, especially in academe and the work-place, would certainly, at first, have caused Pater incredulousness. A fairly good barometer of public opinion is cinema and television, media of which Pater had no experience. From the 1960s onward, the U.S., the U.K., and some European countries (e.g. France, Germany, and Italy) produced films sympathetic to homosexual characters in which homoerotic involvement, as well as the damage caused by homophobic disapprobation, were depicted. Apart from films intended for private viewing, pornographic venues, or ‘art’ houses, such films were increasingly shown in mainstream theaters, often to great acclaim. Examples include: ‘Victim’ (1961), ‘The Children’s Hour’ (1937 as an ‘indy’ production, and 1962), ‘Boys in the Band’ (1970), ‘La Cage aux Folles’ (1978), ‘Maurice’ (1987), and, more recently, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (2005).
- 38 Seiler, xv.
- 39 Wright, I, 199.
- 40 Sadock,132–134.
- 41 Edward William Watson, Life of Bishop John Wordsworth (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1915) (...)
13No aspect of contemporary Anglo-American culture would astonish Pater more than its secularization in a post-Christian era. At the time of his election as probationary Classical Fellow of Brasenose, he was the College’s first and only non-clerical faculty member.38 Although Pater was, by 1860, when he burnt the manuscript volume of his poems ‘because of their Christian tone,’ a religious skeptic, if not an apostate, he tried at least three times to obtain a clerical fellowship.39 The Universities Test Act, removing religious tests (the signing of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England) for all university degrees, was not passed by Parliament until 1871. Pater subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles on proceeding M. A. in 1865. The Reverend John Wordsworth (1843–1911), then tutor and chaplain of Brasenose, and (1885) afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, was nominated for the Junior Proctorship after the intervention of Benjamin Jowett. The rebuff was triply bitter to Pater, but it was only the first. Both men belonged to the Old Mortality (a notable literary club for which Pater prepared ‘Diaphaneitè’ in July 1864) and had been ‘fast friends’ since Pater had taken Wordsworth as a private pupil for one term in 1865. The younger don spoke for many of Pater’s colleagues when he allowed his duty as a Christian and academic to dissolve a friendship he no longer considered viable.40 He acted on his belief that Pater was no longer qualified to exercise full academic responsibility in a Christian university. Wordsworth closed his letter by asking Pater to give up his part in the Divinity Examination in Collections, an examination in the Greek text of the New Testament that Oxford retained as a prerequisite to the bachelor’s degree until 1931.41
- 42 Benson, 84-85; Wright, II, 198–204; Sadock, 195.
14Despite his denial of the divinity of Christ, Pater throughout his life recited the Athanasian (or Nicene) Creed at Mass. Benson notes that throughout his residency in Brasenose College he participated in the ‘peculiar little ceremonies’ dating from pre-Reformation times in the College chapel; that he invariably joined the other Fellows in carrying the alms and sacred vessels to the altar and that, ‘though kneeling was painful to him [because of gout], he always remained on his knees, in an attitude of deep reverence, during the whole administration of the Sacrament.’42 Pater was a familiar figure in the chapel, as well as at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Saint Alban’s, Holborn, Saint Austin’s, Walworth, and the Carmelites’ Church in Kensington, all Anglo-Catholic at the time. As a college administrator he strongly advocated mandatory Sunday chapel attendance and deplored the falling-off of ardor when the undergraduates turned from singing the Psalms to singing the Magnificat. As Dean of Brasenose, a minor honorary post without academic distinction, he occupied a dignified, specially canopied stall on the decani side of the altar. Pater never failed to occupy this stall at both morning and evening prayer whenever he was well and in Oxford.
- 43 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872-1900 (London: Faber, 1931); Sadock, 193.
- 44 The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale UP, 1952–62) II, 58.
- 45 Mrs Humphrey Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London: Collins, 1918) 121.
- 46 Rupert Croft-Cooke, Feasting with Panthers: A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers (New (...)
- 47 Rachel Zoll, Record, Thursday, June 22, 2006, A–12.
15Yet this was the same Pater William Rothenstein remembered, and about whom he expressed surprise, who ‘ignored the young precieux’ and filled his rooms with ‘simple good-looking youths of the sporting fraternity.’43 This was also the same Pater whose friendship with Oscar Browning and Simeon Solomon, among others, both overt and well known pederasts, seems to have embarrassed Swinburne.44 Despite his visible piety at Brasenose, he famously shocked the guests at a dinner party given in the Rector’s lodgings at Lincoln College: Pater turned to a lady who had been discussing the varieties of Anglicanism and, in exasperation, insisted ‘that no reasonable person could govern their lives [sic] by the opinions of a man who died eighteen centuries ago.’45 Whether out of a fondness for ornate ritual, elaborate music, and ‘sweet heady incense,’ as Wright imagined, or out of discreet homoerotic interest in the parade of scarlet-cassocked acolytes who served Mass in Anglo-Catholic parishes, as Croft-Cook imagined, Pater’s world was saturated with religion.46 And, while he remained a philosophical and moral relativist throughout his adult life, he seems to have regarded Victorian Christianity, both epistemologically and ethically, as incapable of change. He would, I think, be shocked and, later, perhaps pleased at the ordination of women to the priesthood and at the debate over the consecration of an openly gay man, V. Eugene Robinson (2003), as Bishop of New Hampshire, and the election of the Rt. Rev. Katherine Schori as Presiding Bishop of ECUSA (Episcopal Church of the United States of America), which are currently threatening to tear the worldwide Anglican Communion asunder. While Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaks for the Church of England and most of the provinces, he has no power to compel the exclusion of candidates in any province other than his own because of sexual orientation and lifestyle. His call for a temporary moratorium on gay bishops and on developing official prayers for blessing same-sex couples (based on the Windsor Report) can and probably will be disregarded in many First World countries. The response of the General Convention of ECUSA, which voted ‘to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration’ of candidates for bishop ‘whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church,’ is non-binding. Rachel Zoll, an Associated Press observer at the Convention, wrote that the response is ‘a sign of the deep split over gay clergy—at least one bishop vowed immediately to ignore it.’47 This split, and at least the possibility that some part of the Anglican church intends to fight for full inclusion in the ordained ministry of ‘those who [are] perceived to be inadequate,’ would have validated Pater’s nature and perhaps healed the dualism that caused him to wear a mask.
- 48 Sadock, 127, and note 37, 197.
- 49 PN #37, 8–12.
- 50 David. J. De Laura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Austin and London: U of Texas P, 1969) (...)
16The cause of Pater’s immediate problems was the Anglican establishment at Oxford. In a broader sense he was drawn to and felt sympathy for ‘the catholic church,’ by which he meant the Roman Catholic Church, as he made clear in subsequent editions of The Renaissance, in which he substituted ‘the Roman Church’ for the original phrase.48 If, as his off-the-record jibes against religion suggest, he found Anglicanism oppressive, by how much more did he find Roman Catholicism, during the pontificates of Pius IX (1846–1878) and Leo XIII (1878–1903)? James Eli Adams, in a tough but fair review of Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism, reminds us that Pater’s engagement with Catholicism has been explored by many studies,49 suggesting rightfully that Pater, in common with so many of his contemporaries, free thinker and devout alike, attached ‘momentousness’ to the question of belief; he did not regard religion as another ‘discourse,’ emptied of ‘both metaphysical grounding and doctrinal content and turned into performance, an ‘art’ like any other [. . .].’50 In his Heraclitean belief that ‘all melts under our feet,’ Pater might not be taken entirely by surprise by the deliberately slow, largely imperceptible accommodation accorded the gay agenda during the reigns of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both of whom (in The Theology of the Body and God is Love, first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI) ground their concept of eros more on the ancient Greek philosophers, who embraced gay love, than on the Bible.
- 51 Dale M, Vree, ‘Is the Catholic Church Going the Way of the Episcopal Church?’ The New Republic, Jun (...)
- 52 Vree 4.
- 53 Fr. James, Lucas, The Latin Mass, Spring 2006.
- 54 Fr. Richard John, Neuhaus, First Things First, Feb. 2006, 55–61.
- 55 Richard Dellamora, Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1999) 199, 320.
17In a scorching editorial in The New Oxford Review (2006), Dale M. Vree, a leading Catholic conservative, laments ‘when it comes to homosexuality, there are passages in the Lectionary that are completely omitted [. . .].’51 He cites Genesis 18: 20–32, Genesis 19: 15–29, Jude 7, and Romans 1: 26–27, concluding that ‘the homosexuals and their fellow-travelers are deeply embedded in our Church, apparently able to censor our scriptural verses in the Sunday and Weekly Lectionaries.’ Referring to Benedict’s ‘ambiguous’ document on homosexuals in the seminaries, Vree remarks ‘he flubbed it [. . .]. Nothing will change.’52 Homoerotic desire, concupiscentia oculorum, pederasty, ephebophilia, algolagnia, and many other forms of deviant sexuality have long found a cover in the drama of Calvary, reenacted in the Eucharist, in the same-sex orders and schools, and in the graphic painting and sculpture of the Roman Catholic Church, especially from the late mediaeval period through the 19th century. There is nothing new in any of this. What is new, and what Pater would probably have found radically different from his own times, is that arguably the last absolutist, ‘binary’ institution in Western Civilization is willing to talk about such issues and to revise at least some aspects of its long-standing homophobia. Fr. James Lucas reports that ‘despite pleas from their bishops [. . .] 80 % of priests in an east coast diocese refused to sign a petition that seeks to have the state legislature define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.’53 In a take-off on the old Latin dictum, Roma locuta est, causa finite est, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, regarding the place of homosexuals in the seminaries and priesthood, remarks, ‘Rome has spoken, and the question is anything but settled.’54 Whether this ‘negotiability’ represents progress toward a more inclusive, less phobic, and what Richard Dellamora calls, in regard to sexual identities, ‘a more complex model of shifting possibilities and resistances, and to subject-formulation,’ or to a further slide into decadence remains to be seen.55 Certainly the homophobia, rigid orthodoxy, and hypocrisy of institutional religion damaged Pater, forcing him to mute, encode, and deny his native impulses, except in carefully selected milieux. One recalls Benson’s description of him as ‘old, crushed, despairing’ after his ‘dreadful interview’ with Jowett.
18Coinciding with the sexual revolution there arose, in the hiatus after Modernism (1914–1965), new literary-critical methodologies, objectives, terminology, and research techniques. Coming upon them long after I had finished my doctoral degree (1973), and commenced full-time undergraduate teaching has been like trying to catch a speeding train. Just when I thought I had got Modernism, New Criticism, and Objective Theory under my belt, along came Post-Modernism, Deconstructionism, Structuralism, semiotics, psycho-sexual linguistics, area studies, formalism, historicism, new historicism, and then the computer! Each introduced its own grammatology, often derived from authors (Jacques Derrida, Ernest Cassirer, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, etc.) outside the Anglo-American literary-critical tradition. And each was applied to Pater, an increasingly attractive subject, both because the influence of the Men of 1914 had waned by the last quarter of the 20th century and because the canon of his works is relatively short. The results are a mixed bag: obscurantism for obscurantism’s sake, or novelty for novelty’s sake. While one may agree all or in part with the recovery of Pater accomplished by scholars working in the last 25 years, one may also feel a certain nostalgia for the plain style of the 20s and 30s, especially for that of Eliot, as in ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ (1919) or ‘Tennyson’s In Memoriam’ (1936). A good many writers on Pater today use a prose that is baroque, if not rococo. In addition to new coinages in the style of Carlyle, some of which have not reached the OED, one comes upon periphrasis, paronomasia, and passages so long and convoluted that one must reread them to determine the antecedent of an otherwise ambiguous pronoun.
19An altogether happy event in the ‘rehabilitation’ of Walter Pater was the launching of News of Pater Scholarship by Laurel Brake and Billie Andrew Inman in the fall of 1977, followed at the MLA Convention by the formation of The Pater Society of the U.K. and the U.S.A., later (1998) the International Walter Pater Society. A new title, the Pater Newsletter, appeared on No. 4 and all subsequent numbers. The Pater Newsletter has proved invaluable to anyone interested in the man and his work. The Pater Newsletter has kept me apprised of recent trends in Pater scholarship when the obligations of an academic life and fatherhood made it impossible, particularly before access to the internet, for me to carry on research in any other way. The editors have maintained a very high critical standard indeed, despite the ever-growing volume and range of Pater studies. If one compares an early number, say No. 16, with No. 48, one sees at once not only the difference in format but the difference in size; the earlier number is just over 14 pages in length, whereas the later is 62 pages. The earlier has no Table of Contents and no illustrations, whereas the later has both. The earlier, on the first page, bemoans the letter from the Director of the MLA Convention Program denying ‘“allied organization status” to the Pater Society,’ because ‘the membership base [. . .] is still rather small, its activities limited, and its bylaws appear to be somewhat sketchy,’ whereas the later proudly announces the International Walter Pater Society Conference 2006, this conference at Rutgers. Incidentally, the program for this event covers three days, lists 32 speakers, including some who have revolutionized the study of 19th century fiction and rescued Pater from obscurity.
20These differences are merely cosmetic. Even in the earliest numbers, one can appreciate the scrupulous scholarship, probing research, ‘lean,’ often wry prose, and critical equanimity of Laurel Brake and Billie Andrew Inman. For over a quarter of a century they have honored Pater’s unique genius by providing, in the Pater Newsletter and annual conferences, a forum in which it holds pride of place. No serious scholar engaged in Pater studies today has not benefited from the reviews and on-going studies of this remarkable periodical. The Pater Newsletter’s role in reembedding Pater in literary history is so indispensable that it might itself become the subject of a bibliographical paper.
- 56 Linda Dowling, Introduction, Pater in the 1990s.
- 57 Michael Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (Plymouth: Latimer Trend and Company, 1978).
- 58 Richard Dellamora, Masc.; William F. Shuter, The Outing of Walter Pater. http://sunsite.berkeley.ed (...)
- 59 Levey 171. (Levey reproduces the sketch ‘Pater in London, 1890–1891 by Charles Holmes, an undergrad (...)
- 60 Pater 90’s, chapter II.
21Whither Pater studies in the opening decade of the 21st century? Certainly the project to publish The Complete Works of Walter Pater and a first-rate modern biography must be renewed and brought to fruition. Despite increasing numbers of collected studies and dissertations, no one has yet provided Pater with a life as fine as that provided by Richard Ellmann for Wilde. Other answers are supplied in Linda Dowling’s comprehensive Introduction to the compelling collection Pater in the 1990s. Prof. Dowling properly notes that the ‘aestheticist tradition of formalist or immanent interpretation has [. . .] by no means exhausted itself [. . .] [but] there is a palpable sense [. . .] that the scope and energies of formalist criticism are diminishing, that the outlines of one sort of picture [. . .] have largely been filled in.’56 This is not entirely true: lacunae remain that the New Historicist approach might well fill in. Among these are the penultimate period from 1885 through 1893, during which Pater and his sisters resided at 12 Earl’s Terrace, in London. Michael Levy, in his empathetic, gentle, and rather somber The Case of Walter Pater covers this period, throwing out a sufficient number of suggestive but distanced and incomplete observations to suggest that it should be re-visited.57 Since the outings of Pater in the last 15 years (cf. the work of Dellamora and William F. Shuter),58 it might be possible to reconstruct and document the reasons for the ‘subdued dandyism,’ ‘[. . .] the distinction between Pater’s rather lusterless, untidy appearance at Oxford and the figure in ‘smart top-hat and black jacket, with stiff clipped moustache, neatly rolled umbrella and dog-skin gloves,’ to be seen in London.’59 In light of André Raffalovich’s depiction of Pater as ‘a black and white ingratiatory vampire,’ it might not be vulgar to suggest that Pater, in or approaching what is sometimes called the ‘male climacteric,’ and anticipating diminished libido, might have desired just one last time to act out the behaviors he had been forced to repress in puritan Oxford.60 This would comprise a very different sort of retour sur soi from the one d’Hangest had in mind when he used this phrase in Walter Pater, l’homme et l’œuvre, in 1961.
22Pater did not become a boulevardier in the sense that Wilde did. The mentor and disciple were fundamentally different in formative experience, class, financial circumstances, and temperament. While Wilde’s parents were public, professional members of the Ascendancy in Ireland, Pater was raised in a fatherless household dominated by non-descript women. Wilde took a first in Classical Moderations and Literae Humaniores, then won the Newdigate prize for poetry (1878); Pater graduated B.A. with only a second-class honors in Literae Humaniores, but was awarded the M.A. in 1865. Wilde took Oxford on his terms; Oxford took Pater on its terms, which it enforced for the rest of his professional life after 1874. Pater deferred to university and church authority; Wilde deferred, with tragic results, to nothing but his own genius. While Wilde overestimated and depended upon London’s tolerant wink-and-a-smile, Pater may discreetly have stayed in London for more than the dinner parties, galleries, and theater that seem to have reinvigorated him in the late 1880s.
- 61 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: OUP, 1975) 284.
23Another lacuna that has yet to be filled is Pater’s influence upon the first generation after the Men of the Nineties, those who fought in the Great War, while Pater’s reputation was at its height. Paul Fussell touches on this, describing how ‘an ideal of ‘Greek love’ like that promulgated in Walter Pater’s essay on Winckelmann, stressing the worship of young male beauty without sex’ frequently ‘[. . .] found itself descending to ordinary pederastic sodomy.’61 But more needs to be done to determine Pater’s role before his reputation went into eclipse. Most of those who survived the trauma of the Great War—one thinks immediately of Robert Graves—adopted a vigorous masculinist attitude. Among those who did not survive—one thinks of Brooke and Owen—are those who might have resisted such an attitude and fostered the modernist project along different lines. In his masterful introduction to Lads: Love Poetry in the Trenches, Martin Taylor writes:
- 62 Martin Taylor, Introduction, Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches (London: Duckbacks, 2002) 48.
Among the books [Siegfried] Sassoon took to Egypt in February 1918 was Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Pater, who provided the Decadent handbook with Marius the Epicurean in 1885, had written in Renaissance [. . .] in 1873: ‘While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems, by a lifted horizon, to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.’ In a few succinct words Pater anticipated not only the development in literature from Aestheticism to Decadence, but also the circumstances under which friendships were made in the trenches of the First World War.62
- 63 Rupert Brooke, qtd. in Lads, 50, 52, 53, 16.
24Taylor maintains that the special circumstances of the war, of constant bombardment, and of all-male environments allowed at once ‘a refuge for those “who have known shame”’ (Taylor citing Brooke) and ‘an immediacy that almost amounts to possession’ by an officer corps steeped ‘in late-Romantic obsessions with martyrdom and homosexuality.’ Under this ennobling banner of comradeship, a bond, ‘a greater love’ excluding all civilians and women ‘identified with the civilian ethos,’ came, ‘implicitly or directly, to challenge the primacy of heterosexual love.’ Such a Männerbund leveled class and even national distinctions, fostering intimacy between thoroughly Hellenized officers and rankers desperate for one last ‘exquisite passion’ before the inevitability of death. Wealthy and ‘too scrupulous a man to lie,’ Sassoon, like Pater, ‘[. . .] chose instead to negotiate the issue [of his homosexual identity] by recasting fact as fiction, with a central character based on himself.’63 Like many of the younger generation on whom Pater had a profound influence, he later became a Roman Catholic.
- 64 Browner, Pulsford, and Sears, Literature and the Internet (New York and London: Garland, 2000) 49.
- 65 Wright I, 137; Downes 16; Sadock 222–223. (It is likely that Pater took his terminology of ‘The Cha (...)
25Whither Pater? If it has not already happened, Pater will shortly be launched into cyber-space. Browner, Pulsford, and Sears do not yet list a Pater website. The closest they come is The Victorian Web, a ‘magnificent’ site conceived and managed by George P. Landow, of Brown University. The advantages of such a site are obvious, even intimidating.64 It would make permanent and accessible even the most fragmentary and fragile texts, and include the latest discoveries. Bibliographical research would be facilitated. I well remember fretting over the extensive private collection of Pater’s letters and manuscripts still, in 1972, in the hands of John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, over gaining access to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, where the bulk of his unpublished manuscripts are kept, and over the possibility that some fragment of his early poetry, apart from ‘Saint Elizabeth of Hungary,’ ‘Saint Gertrude,’ and ‘The Chant of the Celestial Sailors,’ might still exist.65 The research possibilities of a Pater website are immeasurable, but there are two down-sides; nothing in cyber-space is formally copyrighted, and there is no guarantee of quality, as much material is not peer-reviewed. It is still a good idea. Both problems could be overcome if an editor with auctorial powers managed the site. It is something for the International Walter Pater Society and Jay Losey to think about.
- 66 Lawrence S. Kubie, M. D., The Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process (1958; New York: The Noon (...)
- 67 Laurel Brake, e-mail message to C. E. Barnes, May 20, 2006.
26Pater’s life and work have never been so thoroughly scrutinized. Biographical, New Historicist, queer studies, and bibliography will continue for the foreseeable future until all the lacunae have been filled in. It is likely that psychoanalytical discourses will permanently become attached to Pater as they have to Poe, Melville, Wilde, T. Mann, and others as readers attempt to illuminate what Lawrence Kubie called ‘the neurotic distortion of the creative process.’66 If it is not already here, the time will come when the most Pater scholars can expect of such revelations from undergraduates, graduate students and junior colleagues is a sustained yawn. Nothing is so soon ‘old,’ in the colloquial sense, as yesteryear’s scandals. While continuing biographical data and newly discovered documents can clear away the mysteries in Pater’s life, they cannot, of themselves, justify continued study of his work, or account for the fact that ‘Pater as a tangential subject has become more prominent.’67 Even a cursory scanning of the internet and the Pater Newsletter reveals that the number of studies of Pater as a primary subject has risen [Appendix A].
- 68 John Addington Symonds, ‘Is Music the Type or Measure of All Art?’ Essays Speculative and Suggestiv (...)
27Since 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. The ekphrastic nature of much of Pater’s writing was undoubtedly inspired by the paintings and images he studied. Virtually all of Pater’s texts appear without illustration. In this regard, Ruskin is more attractive to readers than Pater, because Ruskin was a superb draftsman in his own right; such a work as The Stones of Venice is enlivened by his sketches. In publisher’s language, a ‘lavishly illustrated’ volume presenting Pater’s words with the visual, plastic, and architectural images that inspired them could establish a new and broadened audience for his oeuvre. Greek sculpture, La Giaconda, Botticelli, William Morris, Michelangelo, Tintern Abbey, Giorgione, Rossetti, mediaeval French cathedrals, the Coliseum, portraits historical and imagined, and a plethora of mythological tableaux could be included to demonstrate the dynamic confluences Pater referred to as Ander-streben (that one art form can under certain circumstances transcend the limitations of its medium and ‘pass into the condition of some other art’).68
28In an age when no closet has remained unopened and no methodology spared to discover intellectual formation and meaning, it is to be expected that Pater will assume the stature to which he is entitled. Free of a ‘facile orthodoxy,’ 21st century readers are poised to discover the unique qualities that comprise Pater’s genius.
29Table 1.—An attempt to Objectifiy Walter Pater Research in the Computer Age Using the Search Engine
(*indicates numbers expressed in thousands)
The assumption has been made that the age of personal computers, and their use in research, begins in the 1980’s.
The chart demonstrates an increased interest in Walter Pater in the 80’s and 90’s—and what is immediately apparent is the ‘jump’ in interest in the five-year period of 2000–2005.
(figures accurate as of July 6, 2006)