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10.1057/9780230281431 - Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, Edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
Victorian Aesthetic Conditions
10.1057/9780230281431 - Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, Edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
10.1057/9780230281431 - Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, Edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
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Victorian Aesthetic Conditions Edited by
Elicia Clements and
Lesley J. Higgins
10.1057/9780230281431 - Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, Edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
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Pater Across the Arts
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Elicia Clements & Lesley J. Higgins 2010 All chapters © individual contributors, 2010
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–23497–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Victorian aesthetic conditions : Pater across the arts / edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–23497–0 (hardback) 1. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894—Aesthetics. 3. Criticism— Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Clements, Elicia, 1970– II. Higgins, Lesley, 1955– PR5137.V53 2010 824 .8—dc22 2010004780 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
10.1057/9780230281431 - Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, Edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
List of Illustrations
vii
Acknowledgments
viii
Notes on Contributors
ix
List of Abbreviations
xii
Introduction The Aesthetic Life: Thinking Across the Arts and the Senses Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
1
Part I Pater and Contemporary Visualities 1 Art and the Museum Jonah Siegel
13
2 Pater and Contemporary Visual Art J. B. Bullen
33
3 The ‘Necessity’ of Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters Lesley J. Higgins
47
4 Critical Connections and Quotational Strategies: Allegory and Aestheticism in Pater and Simeon Solomon Colin Cruise
68
Part II Pater and the Dynamic Arts 5 Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry Kenneth Daley
85
6 Sculpture, Style and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch Lene Østermark-Johansen 7 The Painting as Physical Object in a Verbal Portrait: Pater’s ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ Norman Kelvin 8 Walter Pater, Film Theorist Carolyn Williams
102
117 135
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Contents
Contents
9 Pater’s Musical Imagination: The Aural Architecture of ‘The School of Giorgione’ and Marius the Epicurean Elicia Clements 10 Haunted Stages: Walter Pater and the ‘Theatrical Mode of Life’ Andrew Eastham
152 167
Part III Pater and the Practice of Writing 11 Literary Communism: Pater and the Politics of Community Matthew Potolsky 12 The Limitations of Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s Individualist Aesthetics Kate Hext
185
205
13 The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction Laurel Brake
220
Bibliography
232
Index
249
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vi
0.1 Edward Burne-Jones, The Golden Stairs (1880). Tate Gallery, London 1.1 Raphael, The School of Athens (1510–11). Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Museums, Vatican City 1.2 Raphael, Disputa (Disputation of the Sacrament, 1509–10). Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Museums, Vatican City 1.3 Raphael, Parnassus (c. 1511). Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Museums, Vatican City 1.4 Apollo Belvedere. Vatican Museums, Vatican City 1.5 Discobolus. British Museum, London (Roger Fenton, 1859) 2.1 Edward Burne-Jones, Day (1870). Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2.2 Alphonse Legros, Le Coup de vent (1875) 3.1 Camille Corot, Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864). Musée de Louvre, Paris 3.2 James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864). Tate Gallery, London 4.1 Simeon Solomon, The Mystery of Faith (1870). National Museums Merseyside (Lady Lever Art Gallery) 4.2 Simeon Solomon, A Prelude by Bach (1868). Private Collection, UK. (Image courtesy of Christie’s Images) 4.3 Simeon Solomon, Sacramentum Amoris (1868). Frederick Hollyer platinotype after Simeon Solomon. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A Images) 5.1 Simeon Solomon, Bacchus (1868). Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 6.1 Auguste Rodin, Masque de l’homme au nez cassé (1882). Musée D’Orsay, Paris 6.2 Andreas Vesalius, De corporis humani fabrica, detail from frontispiece (1543) 6.3 Andreas Vesalius, De corporis humani fabrica, detail from title page (1543) 9.1 Titian (formerly Giorgione), The Concert (c. 1510). Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence
2 14 14 15 21 22 39 43 53 61 71 72
79 96 103 106 107 159
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List of Illustrations
The impetus for this book came from the International Walter Pater Society conference at Rutgers University in July 2006. We are grateful for the lively and productive intellectual exchanges that took place in both the panels and the informal conversations. As always, the generosity and imagination of Paterians was ubiquitous. Financial and institutional support has been provided by York University, Toronto, especially the Faculty of Arts research program. York’s Graduate Programme in English has been particularly generous with the allocation of research assistants, namely Jonathan Vandor, Kristen Ames, and Taryn Ortolan. A very special thank you is owed to the former Director, Ross Arthur, for being unfailingly helpful and accommodating. Amanda Paxton was our exemplary indexer. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Paula Kennedy and her staff at Palgrave Macmillan, UK. They are as professional and encouraging as they are expeditious. We are also grateful to the anonymous reader of the volume whose critical insights and helpful suggestions made an indispensable contribution to the book. Elicia Clements would like to thank Rosalynne, Terry, and Shaleena Clements for their invariable encouragement and support. Lesley Higgins would like to acknowledge, as always, Olga Higgins and Liam Richardson. For permission to reproduce Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs and James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl we wish to thank Tate Images. For permission to include Raphael’s The School of Athens, Disputa, and Parnassus, the Apollo Belvedere, Townley’s Discobolus, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s Souvenir de Mortefontaine, and Titian’s The Concert we would like to thank Art Resource Inc. For permission to reproduce Edward Burne-Jones’s Day we wish to thank Harvard University Art Museums. For permission to reproduce Simeon Solomon’s The Mystery of Faith we would like to thank the National Museums Merseyside (Lady Lever Art Gallery), for Solomon’s A Prelude by Bach, Christie’s Images, and for Solomon’s Sacramentum Amoris, V&A Images. For permission to include Auguste Rodin’s Masque de l’homme au nez cassé we thank the Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux. Lastly, for permission to reproduce details from the frontispiece and title page of Andreas Vesalius, De corporis humani fabrica, we wish to thank Cambridge University Library.
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Acknowledgments
Laurel Brake is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. With Billie Inman she founded the Pater Newsletter in 1977 and co-edited it for 20 years. Her books include two on the Victorian press, Subjugated Knowledges (1994) and Print in Transition (2001), and one on Walter Pater (1994); half of Print in Transition treats Pater’s writing as a case study. ‘Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle’ appeared in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed C. Maxwell and P. Pulham (2006). With Ian Small she co-edited Pater in the 1990s (1990), and with Lesley Higgins and Carolyn Williams, Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (2002). Her Pater entries appeared in Routledge’s Key Writers on Art in 2003 and in the ODNB in 2004. In addition to her Pater work she was the director of ncse, the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2004–08), a free full-text online edition of six nineteenth-century journals (www.ncse.ac.uk) and co-editor with Marysa Demoor of DNCJ, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2009). She is currently writing a biography of Pater. J. B. Bullen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading, UK. He has had a long-standing interest in interdisciplinary studies and his books include The Expressive Eye: Vision and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy (1986), The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (1995), and The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry and Criticism (1998). He has published articles on Coleridge, Ruskin, Dickens, George Eliot, Browning, and Pater; he has edited Roger Fry’s Vision and Design (1981) and Clive Bell’s Art (1987), and has compiled Post-Impressionists in England (1988). In 2003 he published a history of the Byzantine Revival entitled Byzantium Rediscovered, and in 2005, European Crosscurrents: British Criticism and Continental Art, 1810–1910. He has contributed the entry for Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the new ODNB. He is editor of the FOCI series of Reaktion Books, assistant editor of the new Oxford Companion to English Literature, and editor of the series ‘Cultural Interactions’ for Peter Lang. His critical biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti will be published in 2010. Elicia Clements is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at York University, Toronto. She has published on the musical connections between Virginia Woolf and Ethel Smyth, as well as the links between Ludwig van Beethoven’s late compositions and Woolf’s narrative method in The Waves. In a recent article she investigates the performative interchange between the words and the music of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s opera The ix
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Notes on Contributors
x
Notes on Contributors
Colin Cruise is Research Lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published widely on nineteenth-century art and its relationship to literary and religious debates and on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Frederick Rolfe, among others. In 2005 he curated a major touring exhibition of the work of Simeon Solomon, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites. His exhibition surveying Pre-Raphaelite drawing practices, The Poetry of Drawing, opens at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in the Autumn of 2010 before touring in the USA and Australia. Kenneth Daley is the author of The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin (2001), and several essays on Ruskin, Pater, and Keats. Formerly Chair of the Department of English at Ohio University, he currently serves as Chairperson of the English Department at Columbia College Chicago. In 2004, he participated in the NEH summer seminar, ‘Literature and the Visual Arts’, and he has worked as a film archivist for Martin Scorsese. He currently serves as Bibliographer for the Pater Newsletter. Andrew Eastham is an independent writer and teacher who specializes in literature and aesthetics from the Victorian to the contemporary. He is currently completing two monographs: Aestheticism and Theatricality: From Pater to the Fin de Siècle provides a new reading of performance and performativity in aesthetic culture; Aesthetic Afterlives: Literary Modernity and the Concept of Irony examines the legacies of Aestheticism according to anxieties around aesthetic detachment and Romantic irony. He has published articles on Pater and Wilde (in Art and Life in Aestheticism), Henry James (in Symbiosis and The Henry James Review), Samuel Beckett (in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui), and Alan Hollinghurst (in Textual Practice). His most recent piece, ‘The Aesthetic Afterlives of Mr W. P.’ (in Literature/Interpretation/Theory), recounts his personal encounter with Walter Pater in vampire form. Kate Hext recently completed her Ph.D. at Exeter University, UK, where her research concerned Walter Pater, individualism, and nineteenth-century intellectual culture. She is an Associate Lecturer at the University of the West of England. Lesley J. Higgins is Professor of English at York University, Toronto, where she specializes in Victorian and Modern literature, poetry, and feminist studies. Her research also emphasizes the works of Pater and Hopkins. In 2002, she published The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics and co-edited Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. She is the co-general editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (forthcoming; for the next
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Mother of Us All. With the assistance of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant, she has also finished a book-length study on Woolf’s treatment of language, music, and sound in her novels.
Notes on Contributors
xi
Norman Kelvin is Distinguished Professor of English in the City University of New York. He is the author of critical studies of George Meredith and of E. M. Forster, and has edited The Collected Letters of William Morris (1984). He is currently at work on an essay that sees Baudelaire’s ‘modernity’ reappearing, radically transformed, in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. Lene Østermark-Johansen, an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, is the author of Sweetness and Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late Victorian England (1998), and the editor of Nose Book: Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts (2000) and, with John Law, Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (2005). She has published articles on Pater’s Leonardo and Luca della Robbia, on Pater and Heraclitus, and Pater and Euphuism, and is currently working on the subject of Pater and sculpture. Matthew Potolsky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he teaches Victorian and comparative literature and literary theory. He is the author of Mimesis (2006), as well as numerous articles on late nineteenth-century writing. He is also co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999). Jonah Siegel, Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, is the author of Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (2000) and Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art Romance Tradition (2005). He has recently published The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (2007). His current projects include a book tentatively entitled Material Inspirations and a chapter for the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Carolyn Williams teaches in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she is also Director of Writers House. The author of Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (1989), and numerous essays on Pater, she also co-edited Transparencies of Desire: New Essays on Walter Pater (2002) with Laurel Brake and Lesley Higgins. She serves as Book Review Editor of The Pater Newsletter. Her study of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan – Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody – is forthcoming in 2010, and she is now well into a study of Victorian melodrama.
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few years). The first volume in the series, her edition of Hopkins’s Oxford Essays and Notes, was published in 2006.
Works by Walter Pater: Ap GDL GS IP ME MS PP TR
Appreciations: With an Essay on ‘Style’ [1889]. London: Macmillan, 1910 Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance [1896]. London: Macmillan, 1910 Greek Studies [1895]. London: Macmillan, 1910 Imaginary Portraits [1887]. London: Macmillan, 1910 Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, 2 vols [1885]. London: Macmillan, 1910 Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays [1895]. London: Macmillan, 1910 Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures [1893]. London: Macmillan, 1910 The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980
xii
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List of Abbreviations
Introduction Thinking Across the Arts and the Senses Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
When trying to define ‘effective art’ in the 1890s, Walter Pater confidently cited the example of Edward Burne-Jones’s paintings. Few Victorian works of art more vividly capture the paradoxes of their age and medium than Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs (1880) (Figure 0.1). Every would-be category of explication is interrogated or transformed in the painting. Despite the evocation of antiquity, the work resists historical specificity: it could depict ancient Greece, or Rome, or as the reviewer for the London Times suggested, it is ‘hardly classical, or rather is classical of the renaissance, such as is often employed in the school of Mantegna’ (‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, 1880, p. 8A). (The Dantesque title also encourages the kind of medievalizing imaginative leap so familiar in Pre-Raphaelite art.)1 Thematically, a musical performance of some sort is intimated, but the viewer never knows whether or not it is already accomplished or about to take place. A beautiful moment of perpetual undecidability is thus arrested in silence. Simultaneously, the aural liveliness of the women’s conversations can almost be heard. Tensions between movement and stasis are further intensified by the serpentine golden staircase that transects yet unifies the visual field, even as the multiplicity of poses among the 18 female bodies belies the static reality of the canvas. Traditionally, portraiture offers one dominant gaze to which the viewer responds; Burne-Jones’s painting stimulates and disperses our regard by representing many such exchanges. Only one young woman gazes back directly, but subtly so: in the background, at the end (or beginning?) of the procession, she pauses, liminal, on the threshold of entering a new space beyond the scene. Nevertheless, because of the painting’s outsized dimensions (almost 9 feet high), she rests at the spectator’s eye level, in effect engaging the observer covertly. Even a gesture toward another art form confounds expectations. The descending figures have aptly been compared to a sculptural frieze (Hewison et al., 2000, p. 238), but Burne-Jones recasts the typically horizontal architectural element into an elongated vertical column, an aspect accentuated by the painting’s exceptional height. Just as the ‘presence of musical instruments offers, but inevitably withholds, another 1
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The Aesthetic Life
Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
Figure 0.1
Edward Burne-Jones, The Golden Stairs (1880)
aesthetic dimension’ (Hewison et al., 2000, p. 238), the ‘peculiar harmony of colouring’ (‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, 1880, p. 8A) so characteristic of Burne-Jones’s later works mutes the individual vitality of the figures in order to emphasize the work as an aesthetic object. Thus, and on many levels,
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2
3
The Golden Stairs resists narrativization yet at the same time rewrites the relationships among the arts. Burne-Jones took almost a decade to complete The Golden Stairs: although conceived in 1872, execution of the canvas did not begin until 1876, and he was still applying the finishing touches just days before the Grosvenor Gallery opening on 1 May 1880 (Ash, 1993, plate 19).2 Significantly, at virtually the same time, Pater was formulating and refining, in ‘The School of Giorgione’, his understanding of Anders-streben, by which one art strives toward or passes ‘into the condition of some other art’ (TR, p. 105). The essay was most likely the unnamed text omitted in October 1872 from the first version of The Renaissance.3 Initially published in the Fortnightly Review for October 1877, ‘Giorgione’ was subsequently included in the reconstituted Renaissance of 1888. (The production histories of both works speak poignantly to the anxieties that ensue when trying to destabilize conventional modes of thinking and appreciation.) It should come as no surprise, therefore, that when Pater tried to define the ‘peculiar aesthetic achievement, or possibility, of the age’ in ‘The Aesthetic Life’, an unpublished essay begun in the early 1890s, he cited Burne-Jones as one who had produced ‘modern’ art and helped to ensure that ‘the third quarter of the nineteenth century has developed in many phases an art which in spite of its being in some respects a reaction against the age is profoundly characteristic of it (of a soul of reaction in itself)’ (Pater, ?1893, fols 12, 11). Burne-Jones’s painting evokes and Pater’s essay embodies what we would term interartistic discourse. Unlike multidisciplinarity, which simply ‘juxtapose[s] disciplinary perspectives, adding breadth and available knowledge, information, and methods’ (Klein, 2005, p. 55), interartistic discourse – a particular kind of interdisciplinary critique – remaps and reconfigures in the act of crossing and transgressing boundaries. As Julie Thompson Klein explains, interdisciplinarity ‘often embodies . . . a critique of the state of the disciplines being restructured and, either implicitly or explicitly, the prevailing structure[s] of knowledge’ (1996, p. 11). Pater’s engagement across the arts performs such critical manoeuvres ‘so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding’ (TR, p. 108). How the arts provoke and possibly interpenetrate4 one another, how they inspire a new way of thinking across the senses, is his recurring focus. Pater actually begins ‘The School of Giorgione’ by cautioning those who attempt to homogenize the arts: ‘It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting – all the various products of art – as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities . . . [But a] clear apprehension of the opposite principle . . . is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism’ (TR, p. 102). For Pater, the arts should be carefully
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Introduction
Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
distinguished: ‘each art has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the “imaginative reason”’ (TR, p. 109). As he goes on to observe, however, ‘true aesthetic criticism’ takes place when one is working across the arts, acknowledging differences of media and defining their ‘limitations’, but always seeking the possibilities of interconnection. Only in this way can the arts, and aesthetic criticism, achieve ‘a partial alienation from [their] own limitations’ and ‘lend each other new forces’ (TR, p. 105). In the 1880s and 1890s the potential for broader, diachronic (historical) and synchronic (cultural) border crossings is fully realized in Pater’s oeuvre. In the 1888 and 1893 incarnations of The Renaissance, traditional works of artistry (in the visual arts, poetry, and sculpture) are studied in relation to historiography, classical studies, biography, and comparative literature. Pater’s experiments in fiction – both the condensed, deftly drawn ‘imaginative portraits’ and the book-length analyses of individuals sorely tested by material and cultural conditions – further expand his method and his argument by suggesting that the fundamentals of aesthetic criticism can be adapted to a critique of life. Such transversals are an expansion of the praxis first intimated throughout The Renaissance. Read dialogically, the two projects that preoccupied Pater in the early 1890s are especially informative in regard to his broadening of interartistic discourse. Plato and Platonism (1893) turns three decades’ worth of academic lectures into a formal study of pre-Socratic and Platonic philosophy. ‘The Aesthetic Life’,5 revised but unfinished, adumbrates the demands and rewards of self-fashioning, ‘the construction of an “aesthetic” formula of conduct’, within a wholly ‘modern’ physical and social environment (Pater, ?1893, fol. 4). In the centre of Plato and Platonism Pater sets aside the explication of ‘philosophic doctrine’ to investigate – as he does throughout The Renaissance – the relation between the ‘environment’, ‘the conditions common to all the products’ of Plato’s particular age, and ‘what is unique in the individual genius which contrived . . . to have its own masterful way with that environment’ (PP, pp. 124–5). Indeed he insists that, despite Plato’s seeming investment in ‘invisible things’, in the ‘abstract’ and the noumenal, ‘the visible world . . . really existed for him . . . is active still everywhere’ (PP, p. 126). Moreover, this crucial chapter argues ‘that a richly sensuous nature’ is necessarily responsive to both the ‘visible world’ and the ‘audible world also’ (PP, p. 133). In his description of the ‘exquisite monotony of the voice of the great sophist’, for example, Pater employs the analogy of a ‘ringing’ bronze pot to describe the material conditions of communication. The ‘genius’ of Pater’s Plato is that he is unalterably a lover of that which ‘ “really exists”. . . . In that, precisely, lies the secret of the susceptible and diligent eye, the so sensitive ear’ (PP, p. 134).
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4
5
This practice of thinking across the senses leads to the disciplinary insights of the final chapter of Plato and Platonism, ‘Plato’s Aesthetics’, in which the ‘delicacy of eye and ear’ (PP, p. 133) provides the aesthetic counterpoint to Plato’s ethical burden. In a careful refashioning of ‘The School of Giorgione’, Pater deploys musical analogies in expected and unexpected ways. As he has done before, the trope signifies the model by which matter ‘counts equally with’ form (PP, p. 270). This principle is intensely interdisciplinary: it is the measure of ‘all forms of art whatever . . . all those matters over which the Muses . . . preside’ (PP, p. 270). But Pater goes further; the reverberations multiply. His Plato understands how a specific discipline, such as philosophy, ‘is but the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things’ (PP, p. 268). Concomitantly, ‘in education’, the archetypal forum of disciplinary exchange and transformation, ‘all will begin and end in “music,” in the promotion of qualities to which no truer name can be given than symmetry, aesthetic fitness, tone’ (PP, p. 268). Throughout Plato and Platonism, Pater experiments by crossing artistic boundaries; the concluding essay delineates how modes of knowledge emerge ‘sympathetically’, in profound ‘connexion’ (PP, pp. 268, 269).6 To paraphrase his praise for Platonism, ‘You see that the various elements of [Pater’s intellectual project] are interdependent; that they really cohere’ (PP, p. 264). ‘The Aesthetic Life’ begins on a harsh note, with a gambit that is more Jeremiah than Socrates. In an era of acute ‘disillusion’, ‘amid the ruins of so much abstract and artificial theory’ (Pater, ?1893, fol. 3), Pater insists that the orthodoxies of philosophy, religion, and science are neither antidote nor anodyne. But the question remains, will we ‘find in the world now actually around us sufficient congruity, sufficient sustenance or opportunity to make the aesthetic life practicable or worth while’? (?1893, fol. 5). The answer provided is tripartite: once he defines the ‘prosecution of the higher life of mind or spirit’ (?1893, fol. 7), Pater explains its significance, and then offers a method for its achievement. To demonstrate that this work can be done, Pater reaches across to his contemporaries (Whistler, Legros, Burne-Jones, Corot, ‘certain living architects’ and authors) as they realize ‘the aesthetic opportunity of our generation’ (?1893, fol. 7). Such cultural workers teach us how life can ‘become an ordered service to the beauty of the sensible world’ – even when, or perhaps because, that world is variously ‘tame’, ‘drearily mechanical’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘superficially prosaic’, ‘unaesthetic’, or ‘sordid’. Furthermore, this untarnished beauty is inseparable from the ‘actual circumstance of [our] condition’; ‘[c]orresponding to that enlarged appreciation of art’ is an ‘enlarged dramatic appreciation of modes of life with an application to every phase of one’s experience’ (?1893, fols 2, 16). Thus, the ‘energy of ear and eye, of the audible and visible world’ that artists render concrete is identified as that which also informs the everyday ‘life of sensation’ (?1893, fol. 4).
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Introduction
6
Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
And still amid delightful contrasts as a patient connoisseur of fine expression everywhere, he apprehends, he welcomes, again as an added source of interest, remote traits of affinity between medieval art for instance and Japan[,] between early Italian and early Greek[,] discerns the vanished essays of primitive Athenian art through those mid thirteenth-century bronze doors at Pisa and likenesses in Giotto to the Greeks and to William Blake. (?1893, fols 10–11) In the midst of a highly imperialistic historical milieu, one that typically depends upon dominance and acquisition, Pater argues instead for an aesthetic life that constantly aspires to the world’s ‘vast heterogeneous inheritance’ (?1893, fol. 7). Lastly, and however indirectly, Pater instantiates a comparative method – one that we now understand to be a crucial component of critical interartistic practice. The ‘liberal eclecticism’ of his ‘truly catholic sense of the variations of “the beautiful”’ (?1893, fol. 8) is emphatically transhistorical (from the ‘Middle Age to the Classical’) and cross-cultural (‘Japan to Europe’).7 Such a ‘historical sense’ is not only ‘one of the signal intellectual privileges of our age’, Pater asserts, but ‘has co-ordinated the revolutions of taste . . . with the larger cycles of human development’ (?1893, fol. 10). Thus Pater articulates an aesthetic method, and purpose, that is simultaneously self-enriching and productively social, historically nuanced yet relativistically inclined, sensuous, and always attuned to the possibilities of ‘connexion’. The 13 essays in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts vividly demonstrate how Pater imagines and contributes to a burgeoning interartistic discourse. The brilliant range of his ‘eclecticism’ is foregrounded: his works are connected to visual art, tapestry, sculpture, photography, cinema, music, theatre, politics, philosophy, fiction. Pater’s ‘variations of the beautiful’ (?1893, fol. 10), therefore, yield critiques of both artistic materials and modes of knowledge in the late nineteenth century. Not only does each essay contribute to the overarching argument, the book is organized to demonstrate how such a multitude of cross-border excursions reveals fresh understandings of disciplinary relations. In this way, as Pater would have it, the form of the collection articulates its subject matter. To begin, Jonah Siegel provides an extensive critique of nineteenthcentury ‘museum culture’. By comparing how Pater and Ruskin address the politics of art institutions, he shows that ‘the relationship among accessions, aesthetic value, and new knowledge was seldom straightforward or
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To justify the sociocultural import of his argument, Pater embraces difference with a prescient international perspective when discussing the aesthetically disposed individual:
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easy’. (In contrast to Ruskin, Pater welcomes competing cultural discourses, and their artifacts.) Stressing Pater’s responsiveness to setting in the experience of art, Siegel also reconsiders the politics of national cultures within Victorian museumology. Three essays then assess Pater’s keen engagement with contemporary painting. Taking his cue from ‘The Aesthetic Life’, J. B. Bullen reveals both how and why Pater’s writing is particularly crossreferential, although citations of living artists are ‘often covert or veiled’. Pater’s modernist inclinations are investigated by considering the galleries he visited, the network of associations informing his essays, and the personal relationships he pursued. A brief examination of institutionalized forces at work in English and French art circles also informs Lesley Higgins’s essay, which considers the crucial way in which Corot and Whistler feature in Pater’s ‘networks’ of nineteenth-century painters. (Corot’s seemingly unassuming romanticism was as à rebours in its day as Whistler’s sustained battles with middle-class narrative painting and those who championed such work.) Furthermore, she connects the theories of synaesthesia then in circulation with the interart practices that subsequently emerged. Similarly, Colin Cruise demonstrates how productively a Pater/Solomon/Botticelli nexus can be explored. In Paterian fashion, Cruise reveals how Pater was influenced by Solomon’s canvases and how Solomon’s prose poem, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, borrows from Pater’s language and critical methods. Such ‘quotational strategies’ validate the homoerotic at the center of their aesthetic discourse, and demonstrate how subtly contemporary affiliations become culturally encoded. Whereas Part I of the collection explores Pater’s reconceptualization of the historical against the ground of the contemporary, Part II employs Pater’s writings to stage a series of interart explorations. The first essay to bring the dynamic arts into play examines the agency of the static image and the potential of notional ekphrasis. Kenneth Daley considers an art object that does not actually exist – a medieval tapestry – but rather is only imagined by the narrator of ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’. Furthermore, Daley demonstrates how Pater connects us with the fateful ‘weaving and unweaving’ of human and divine destinies. Lene Østermark-Johansen’s inquiry reassesses the complex juncture of Pater, sculpture, and touch. Her essay ranges from Pater’s earliest materialist approach to ancient statuary to the works of Michelangelo and Luca della Robbia. Pater’s insistence on the inseparability of sight and touch leads Østermark-Johansen to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between sculpture and writing. Additionally, she demonstrates how Pater expands the possibilities of the haptic: his sculptural field eventually comprises everything from coins and jewelry to major nineteenth-century museum acquisitions. Norman Kelvin enlarges the purview of portraiture in later nineteenth-century culture by linking visual and verbal modes of rendering to the technological innovation of photography. Comparing the work of Pater and Wilde, Kelvin explains how their notion of the portrait
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Introduction
Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
developed even as they rejected photography as an art because of its status as a ‘mass commodity’. The depth of Pater’s intellectual imagination is demonstrated differently in the next three essays, which shift our critical focus from temporal to spatial concerns, from frozen moments to performativity. Carolyn Williams provocatively explores the possibilities of Pater as film theorist – not to suggest that Pater, avant la lettre, imagined film, but to demonstrate how Pater’s work is ‘saturated with attention to the moving image’ and how this notion contributes to his theory of Anders-streben. Williams surveys cabinet painting, theatrical tableaux, epiphanic moments, and ‘serial discontinuity’ to access Pater’s ‘synthetic’ understanding of painting and music. Pater’s engagement with the audiovisual field, Williams suggests, was yet another way in which he anticipates and instigates a key preoccupation of modernism. Spatializing the sonorous through the innovative concept of ‘aural architecture’, Elicia Clements reconsiders the almost too-familiar injunction that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (TR, p. 106). By reading ‘The School of Giorgione’ in conjunction with Marius the Epicurean, she highlights how Pater’s interartistic discourse leads him to an especially social consideration of subjectivity. Thus, the isolated individual who haunts The Renaissance is reimagined within ‘the music . . . of the assembly’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 127). Andrew Eastham confirms that spatial conditions also inform Pater’s responsiveness to the ‘hybridity’ of theatre. Studying his essays on Shakespearean and Greek drama, Eastham reminds us of Pater’s repeated engagement with the most embodied art. He also discloses how impressionistic criticism often reveals the theatrical elements ‘intrinsic to alternative media’. The mode of inquiry shifts in Part III, from the specific ‘interfusion’ (TR, p. 76) of the arts to broader interdisciplinary possibilities (politics, philosophy, literature). Three diverse essays demonstrate how the ‘complex, many-sided’ (TR, p. xxii) Paterian method of transgression functions when he considers the potential and the limitations of his own verbal medium. The myth of Pater as an apolitical aesthete indelibly circulated by Raymond Williams, Muriel Spark, and others has been partially rewritten in the past two decades by critics such as Linda Dowling, who have explored Pater’s cultural importance as sexual dissident and erotic theorist. Matthew Potolsky contributes an important new chapter to such corrective studies by paying close attention to the ways in which Pater’s discussions of art and artists are linked to then-contemporary political currents. Particularly revealing is the argument concerning Pater’s notion of community, especially literary and aesthetic affiliations. Although social activism (such as his sister Clara practiced) was not Pater’s bailiwick, his texts nonetheless are imbued with an exacting, socially aware political tenor. Pater’s indebtedness to eighteenthcentury Weimar classicism is revisited by Kate Hext to explain how he synthesizes both Schiller’s three-stage model of Bildung in the Aesthetic
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Education of Man and Goethe’s reinterpretation of Schiller. In this way, Pater contemplates an art of life that depends upon aesthetic experience to satisfy the spirit. The collection’s final essay illuminates the intersecting vectors of art, life, critique, and literature. Pater’s comparatively late commitment to the novel, according to Laurel Brake, has theoretical and practical implications. The essay on ‘Style’, for example, should be read in relation to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’. Second, she asserts that the market conditions that had the greatest impact on nineteenth-century fiction – the ‘magazine economy of monthly serialization’ and the censorship to which serial fiction was subjected – were inimical to the art and publication of Pater’s novels. This collection not only responds to current aesthetic and institutional imperatives to think across the arts and disciplines, it demonstrates how effectively Pater deploys such strategies. It also reveals how profoundly he sought to recognize and disseminate the intersensual dimensions of art and life. To follow as Pater embraces and redefines his era’s aesthetic conditions is to enjoy one of ‘those great experiences’ (TR, p. 185) of Victorian letters. But his writings ‘have their fortune in the modern world’ as well (TR, p. 184). As a critic of contemporary life, Pater puts into play the aesthetic insights of such diverse figures as Corot, Ruskin, Baudelaire, Solomon, and Whistler. In his capacious mind both the static and the performative arts resonate, in subjective and social terms. Concerns with politics, education, and the marketplace also redound when he reformulates his writing practices. Applying Pater’s advice regarding Giorgione to his own significance, ‘we must take note of that indirect influence by which [Pater] . . . enlarges his permanent efficacy and really makes himself felt in our culture’ (TR, p. 122).
Notes 1. As Russell Ash documents, ‘Letters to the publication Notes and Queries asking for an explanation of this work evinced contradictory replies, and like several of his paintings, its subject is without specific literary or historical reference (he considered several alternatives including The King’s Wedding and Music on the Stairs), although the title is derived from a passage by Dante’ (Ash, 1993, plate 19). 2. See also Bowness (1984), pp. 235–6. 3. Donald Hill concurs with Lawrence Evans’s conjecture that ‘The School of Giorgione’ was the essay ‘to which no title was given [that] was sent to Macmillan with five others on June 29, 1872. The unnamed essay was printed with the others but then cancelled at Pater’s request late in October, 1872.’ See Hill, ‘Critical and Explanatory Notes’, TR, 1980, p. 384; Evans, 1970, p. 8, n. 2. 4. It is in the ‘Winckelmann’ essay (1867; The Renaissance, 1873, 77, 88, 93) that Pater introduces the phallically encoded significance of a ‘penetrating’ and ‘passionate intellectual life’ (TR, p. 141). Pater’s Winckelmann, for example, praises ‘Greek literature, to which I have devoted myself so far as I could penetrate’; Madame de
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Introduction
Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
Staël observes of Winckelmann that no one else had ‘made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity’ (TR, pp. 146, 152). 5. ‘The Aesthetic Life’ is housed in the Pater manuscript collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University: bMS Eng 1150 (7). Several drafts of the essay exist, in various states of completion. We are quoting from the holograph fair copy, a neat and mostly continuously written document featuring amendments and corrections. Part 1 of the essay, which constitutes roughly three-quarters of the manuscript, is highly polished; Part 2 is very piecemeal, sketchy, with significant empty spaces left for additional ideas and facets of the argument. For the dating of this essay, see Higgins, p. 66, n. 35. 6. Mary Orr (2003) argues that discerning the limits and disclosing the ‘blind spots’ of disciplines is a primary function of thinking across categories of knowledge. 7. Elsewhere in the essay, Pater asserts, ‘The world’s heritage of beauty, the product of artistic labour, has increased of course, with even pace: the eighteenth century added to the seventeenth: the Renaissance, the Middle Age to the Classical: Japan to Europe’ (?1893, fol. 8).
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Part I
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Pater and Contemporary Visualities
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1 Art and the Museum
The nineteenth-century museum (Parnassus or the Disputation of the Sacrament) Between approximately 1509 and 1511, as Michelangelo completed the Sistine ceiling nearby, Raphael set to work on his first major commission in Rome, a set of frescoes for the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican. On one wall of the room he painted the fresco that would become famous as The School of Athens (Figure 1.1); on the facing wall a theological subject that has come to be called the Disputation of the Sacrament (Figure 1.2); and on a third, a vision of poetry, Parnassus (Figure 1.3), presided over by Apollo and the Muses and inhabited by the great poets of antiquity and the modern era. Raphael’s program presents a beautifully realized illustration of the various realms of achievement – divine, intellectual, and creative – given weight not only by the painter’s mastery of technique and originality of conception, but also by the location of his works in the heart of Christendom. Individually, each of the three images is an instance of those pantheons of illustrious men that fascinated the Renaissance. And yet, taken together, the set also proffers a surprisingly complex and unsettled vision of inspiration. Plato famously points up to indicate his emphasis on the ideal; Aristotle points down for the more earthly empirical school of philosophy with which he was associated. Each of the various other thinkers around them stands for a distinct approach to the problems that challenge human reason. More surprising than the arguments of philosophers, however, is the ‘dispute’ that faces them: the Host that forms the center of the painting across from The School of Athens is not presented simply as the culminating earthly manifestation of all the divinity that rises above it (the gospels, Mary and Joseph, Jesus, and ultimately God the father), it is also the center of a transhistorical debate. Indeed, the painter’s art harmonizes any number of disputes on both sides of the room, even as the program as a whole suggests the harmony of classical thought with Christian. The Parnassus links both sides, enacting as it represents the pleasure of harmonization itself. 13
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Jonah Siegel
Figure 1.1
Raphael, The School of Athens (1510–11)
Figure 1.2
Raphael, Disputa (Disputation of the Sacrament, 1509–10)
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Figure 1.3
15
Raphael, Parnassus (c. 1511)
Like all important, but relatively recent innovations, the museum seems to call out for antecedents that will explain its history and demonstrate its actual pedigree. I begin with Raphael’s work at the Vatican because it is through discussion of the decoration of this space that Pater, following Ruskin, addresses the essential qualities of the institution in his first published essay. Broadly speaking we can say that the program of the Stanza is about the sources of inspiration and the relationship of cultural achievement to time, be it atemporality, synchronicity, or the renewal that we call tradition. The frescoes have at their heart the juxtaposition of individuals from widely divergent times and places (Homer with Dante; St Jerome with Savonarola; Plato with Socrates, but also Pythagoras and Zoroaster, and so on). Both themes – inspiration and cultural achievement in time – are at issue in Pater’s writing on the Stanza, but in order to understand what is at stake in his claims, it will be just as well to begin with the precedent that certainly underlies his own account of Raphael’s work: John Ruskin’s troubled reference to the space in Volume 3 of Stones of Venice (1853). The earlier critic had been exercised by a juxtaposition he identifies as being characteristic of modernity. For Ruskin, the problem is the lack of judgment, not to say hierarchy, in the visual paralleling of divine and artistic inspiration, of pagan
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Art and the Museum
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Jonah Siegel
The faculties themselves wasted away in their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter’s field; and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses. (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 11, p. 130) This melancholy evocation of the Disputa and the Parnassus emerges at the culmination of a scathing description of the decline in seriousness of painting indicated by its change in ambition from the representation of religious subjects to the representation of classical ones. Raphael of course does not worship Apollo, but that is precisely Ruskin’s concern; a culture that celebrates idols in which it does not believe participates in the emptying-out of meaning from all representations: ‘[T]his double creed, of Christianity confessed and Paganism beloved, was worse than Paganism itself, inasmuch as it refused effective and practical belief altogether’ (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 11, p. 129).1 Ruskin is describing the beginning of the museum culture he dreads, hence his choice, from the range of pagan figures painted by Raphael, of a representation of Apollo and the Muses: the more skilful the artist, the less his subject was regarded; and the hearts of men hardened as their handling softened, until they reached a point when sacred, profane, or sensual subjects were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display of colour and execution; and gradually the mind of Europe congealed into that state of utter apathy, – inconceivable unless it had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it, – which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass, with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity. (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 11, p. 131) Ruskin moves seamlessly from past tense to present, as in one paragraph he travels from Raphael painting muses at the Vatican to the modern mind at the museum. Pater sees something quite similar to Ruskin at the Vatican, but the fundamentally different understanding of the breaks and continuities in culture that he brings to bear is bound to lead him to entirely different conclusions: In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raphael has commemorated the tradition of the Catholic religion. Against a space of tranquil sky, broken in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great personages of Christian
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and Christian divinity. The rooms speak to Ruskin of a characteristic artistic egotism and the related loss of the ability to ascribe value he associates with the Renaissance broadly:
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history, with the Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco of Raphael in the same apartment presents a very different company, Dante alone appearing in both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology, under a thicket of laurel, sits Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at his feet. On either side are grouped those on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the classical and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia come down, a river making glad this other ‘city of God’. (TR, p. 157) The sensibility behind this bald identification of another city of God is precisely the problem that alarms Ruskin. Nevertheless, it is in this other city and in the tradition for which it stands that Pater locates the continuity of culture that is his theme when he writes on Winckelmann in his very first published essay, challenging the stark divisions separating historical periods that had been so important for cultural analysis earlier in the century: In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raphael commemorates. Winckelmann’s intellectual history authenticates the claims of this tradition in human culture . . . This testimony to the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect, which Winckelmann contributes as a solitary man of genius, is offered also by the general history of the mind. The spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life. The Hellenic element alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this underground life; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and corrected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it. (TR, pp. 157–8) Pater cheerfully cites the juxtaposition that had so offended his predecessor for precisely the reasons Ruskin had dreaded. Placing religions alongside other cultural phenomena – indeed, identifying them as cultural phenomena – is a typical strategy of the later critic; he has no problem understanding the works of art to illustrate two parallel ‘traditions’, the Catholic and the classical. From this point of view, Ruskin’s anxious desire to look at only one wall of the Stanza della Segnatura is a willful denial of a constant tradition, not a turn away from a depraved modernity.2 We may take this instance as typical of a difference between the two critics ultimately traceable to their distinctive responses to a very concrete issue. Pater and Ruskin both are writing about the museum in the midst of the most important period of its development. For both, the institution is at once a symbol and a cause of the modern situation – one in which arguments for cultural continuity as much as for cultural breaks depend on an ever more common possibility of seeing just the kinds of juxtapositions (Madonna and
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Art and the Museum
Jonah Siegel
Aphrodite side by side) that concern Ruskin. Its name notwithstanding, the museum is far from being a classical inheritance. The idea that the gathering together and display of works of art was a social good and necessary for the emergence of further art came to the fore in Europe late in the eighteenth century in response to new concepts of art and art education. It is to the century that followed, however, that we can look for the great period of museum development. The eighteenth century had seen the formation or opening to the public of a handful of influential continental museums, among them the Capitoline in Rome (1734) and the Uffizi in Florence (1769), the Pio-Clementino at the Vatican (1771) and the Louvre in Paris (1793). In England itself, the first national public collection was the British Museum, founded in 1753 when the collection of curiosities and objects of natural history acquired from Sir Hans Sloane’s estate was combined with the Harley collection of manuscripts and the Cottonian library acquired by the nation earlier in the century. The Museum opened to the public in its current location at Montague House, Bloomsbury, in 1759, but its form and content, shaped early on by accidents of acquisition rather than any plan, would be a topic of debate and reform for the century to come, even as individual collections expanded at a rate unforeseeable by its founders and early supporters. The material on display itself presented challenges, at once practical and conceptual. The story of the development of the British Museum’s collections of antiquities, to continue with this central example, is from the outset one of inexorable accumulation leading to competition for resources and viewer attention. The passion for art that emerged with force in late eighteenth-century English intellectual circles, along with the opportunities for acquisition presented by international exploration, conflict, and expansion, resulted in the creation or augmentation of important collections throughout the nineteenth century. But the relationship among accessions, aesthetic value, and new knowledge was seldom straightforward or easy. To cite just one of the quicker instances in which cultural indifference overwhelmed once-admired objects as taste changed and new objects were acquired, we might mention the Townley Marbles. For decades this collection of much-restored, largely Hellenistic, works assembled by the connoisseur Charles Townley had been the principal source of what was understood to be direct knowledge of classical art in England. At the time of their accession in 1805 they formed an important holding at the British Museum, joining the more heterogeneous set of objects of natural history and art assembled by Sloane, as well as such disparate material as the Egyptian collection acquired in 1801, a trophy of Napoleonic struggle. Nevertheless, new forms of discrimination and connoisseurship meant that their fame would soon go into irreversible decline. The Elgin Marbles, purchased with much controversy in 1816, quickly overcame the Townley collection in the estimation of the cultured elite, and eventually in the popular imagination. But
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they themselves were subject to competition from the phenomenal Assyrian finds of Henry Layard and others at mid-century. While the accumulation of objects provokes the desire to organize into hierarchies of meaning and value, those hierarchies are unavoidably subjected to revisions that themselves indicate the difficulty of making sense of so much material. Prized works call out for ideas that might identify the quantity and kind of attention required from the viewer. And so, Ruskin’s anxiety about the effect of museum culture is based on the very conditions that drive the development of his own métier.3 From Neoclassicism to Pre-Raphaelitism and including such foreign developments as the German Nazarenes, as well as characteristic turns in architecture and design, movements in art throughout the period typically shaped themselves as responses to a museal vision of the history of art, whether that vision resulted in the selection of one period (or a fantastic vision of that period) for celebration or emulation, or in the attempt to put the styles of a variety of periods into play. Eclectic amalgamations of historic forms, as much as archaeologically fastidious attempts to revivify one particular era at the expense of others – both extremes testify equally to the centrality of historical precedent for the period. The force of the museum in nineteenthcentury culture was more than metaphorical, however. It is not just the case that more and more of the art of the past was available for evaluation and reuse; the institution in which it was typically presented was itself in the process of consolidation. If the museal nature of the nineteenth century was inescapable to perceptive critics, the emergence of the institution itself was only more self-evident. In 1839, the year of Pater’s birth, the National Gallery in London was only 15 years old; and among its 200 paintings were to be found relatively few of lasting merit.4 It was only the previous year that the Gallery had been moved from what had been the private home in Pall Mall of its principal benefactor, John Julius Angerstein, to premises built by the nation to house the collection and the Royal Academy on Trafalgar Square. By the year of Pater’s death, the Gallery had had two substantial renovations and the Royal Academy had been in its own quarters for more than two decades. That very year, the Tate Gallery of British Art would be commissioned. At Oxford itself, the University Museum (devoted largely to science) was inaugurated in 1860, while the Pitt Rivers (anthropology) opened its doors in 1884. By the early decades of the twentieth century more than 400 museums were in existence in the British Isles, a remarkable change from the less than half a dozen that have been identified at the beginning of the nineteenth century.5 However, new foundations are only a small part of the story in a period that saw constant renovation and rearrangement in response both to new acquisitions and to conceptual developments including the rise of scientific art history, the emergence of anthropology, and new interest in areas ranging from Mexico to Mesopotamia to medieval Britain, and beyond.
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Art and the Museum
Jonah Siegel
To cite an instance that would be quite local for Pater, the Ashmolean, for all that its foundation in the seventeenth century makes it the oldest museum in Britain, saw massive changes in its collections and institutional commitments in the nineteenth century. Few objects on display when Pater arrived at Oxford – a time when the museum still displayed largely curiosities and objects of natural history – would have been on view by the time The Renaissance was first published, which was well after the museum directors had changed the institution’s focus to archaeology. The 1845 Museums Act, which allowed town councils to levy rates to pay for local museums, added to the widespread diffusion of the phenomenon of museums, although the National Gallery and the British Museum would remain the principal models and instances for nineteenthcentury British culture. To these two still-extant institutions, we may add the Great Exhibition itself and especially its many descendants, not only the various international exhibitions that followed and the important 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, but also the Crystal Palace reconstructed at Sydenham in 1854, with its historic courts, casts of artistic masterpieces, and sculptures of prehistoric beasts. Developments such as the acquisition of Assyrian antiquities in the 1840s and 1850s were well covered in the press, in part due to the success of Layard’s memoirs, Nineveh and its Remains (1848) and Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853). The print media also followed closely the various scandals and controversies related to acquisitions and restorations at the National Gallery, and the process of museum reform and renovation that preoccupied a number of Parliamentary commissions and resulted in notable projects, including the construction of the Reading Room at the British Museum and the opening of the South Kensington Museum (1857), the renovations of the frequently derided National Gallery (1860–61, 1872–76), and the removal of the British Museum’s natural history collection from Bloomsbury to South Kensington (1881). Museums were on the mind of nineteenth-century Britain for both conceptual and practical reasons, but the interactions of concepts and practical determinations were bound to be far from simple.
The museum as medium (Apollo or the Discobolus) Keenly interested as he was at all times in the conditions that make perception possible and shape its contingent nature, it was inevitable that Walter Pater should have been particularly responsive to such a crucial setting for the experience of art. And indeed, the critic was keenly aware that a principal shaping force in the period – molding consciousness and the object both – was the museum itself. It is a topic he develops with particular clarity in Greek Studies (1895), a late work whose historical subtlety is not unrelated to its institutional self-consciousness.
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Figure 1.4
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Apollo Belvedere
In order to understand what is at stake in Pater’s long appreciation of the Townley Discobolus (see Figure 1.5) in the British Museum, it will be helpful to cite the influential ekphrastic effusion with which it is clearly in dialogue, Winckelmann’s seminal description of the Apollo Belvedere (Figure 1.4) in his History of Ancient Art (1764). ‘Among all the works of antiquity which have escaped destruction’, Winckelmann famously claims, ‘the statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art’ (1873, vol. 3, p. 212). But only a longer citation will
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Art and the Museum
Jonah Siegel
Figure 1.5
Discobolus. Photo: 1859
demonstrate the ways in which the ideal qualities Winckelmann identifies align the imagined passions of the statue’s creator with those of the sensitive viewer, in that sense recovering in the empyrean an otherwise lost creative context: Let thy spirit penetrate into the kingdom of incorporeal beauties, and strive to become a creator of a heavenly nature, in order that thy mind may be filled with beauties that are elevated above nature; for there is nothing mortal here, nothing which human necessities require. Neither blood-vessels nor sinews heat and stir this body, but a heavenly essence, diffusing itself like a gentle stream, seems to fill the whole contour of the figure . . . The soft hair plays about the divine head as if agitated by a gentle breeze, like the slender waving tendrils of the noble vine; it seems to be anointed with the oil of the gods, and tied by the Graces with pleasing display on the crown of his head. In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner. My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence, like the breasts of those who were filled with the spirit
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Art and the Museum
23
In his important study of Winckelmann, Alex Potts has noted that Pater was ‘an unusually close and careful reader’ of the History of the Art of Antiquity (Potts, 1994, p. 238), a text central to Pater’s essay on the art historian. Little wonder, then, that echoes of Winckelmann’s famous paean to Apollo return when the critic sets himself to describe the beauty of a statue. Still, the similarity serves more than anything to bring out fundamental differences. While the Apollo, in Winckelmann’s telling, is (has to be) the physical embodiment of the ideal, and an unimpeachable masterpiece of original Greek creativity, the Discobolus (Figure 1.5) on which Pater turns his gaze is known to be one of several marble copies of a bronze original:6 The face of the young man, as you see him in the British Museum for instance, with fittingly inexpressive expression, (look into, look at the curves of, the blossom-like cavity of the opened mouth) is beautiful, but not altogether virile. The eyes, the facial lines which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the coming motion of the discus as those of an onlooker might be; but that head does not really belong to the Discobolus. To be assured of this you have but to compare with that version in the British Museum the most authentic of all derivations from the original, preserved till lately at the Palazzo Massimi [sic] in Rome. (GS, pp. 289–90) Whereas the context of the gallery gives Winckelmann the opportunity to believe he is viewing antiquity directly when he looks at its objects purified of all the accidents of history, Pater knows it is modernity that stares back at him at the institution. As Pater accurately notes, the Townley Discobolus has generally been less admired than the one in the Massimo family collection, which he goes so far as to call the original elsewhere in the essay, but which is itself, as he notes here, only ‘the most authentic of all derivations from the original’. Worse, the head of the statue at the British Museum, the feature to which Pater first draws the viewer’s attention, is itself not original, nor has it been correctly oriented on the body by whatever later restorer put it there. Winckelmann’s ideal form, as instantiated in the Apollo, combines divine power and indifference, perfection of execution with a complete invulnerability to the vicissitudes of the world. The image, like the god, is paradoxically incorporeal, rising above nature, beyond what human necessities require. The subtlety of Pater’s vision of the museum, however, is that it leads him neither to imagine an atemporal ideal realm in which the experience of art takes place, nor that the institution vouchsafes him access to the original thing in itself – far from it. While Pater relishes the incongruous atemporality of the experience of art in the museum – the very
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of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and into the Lycæan groves, – places which Apollo honored by his presence. (Winckelmann, 1873, vol. 3, pp. 213–14)
Jonah Siegel
characteristics that can make a Greek athlete equivalent to a British cricketer, or that can make another Greek statue comparable to a Gothic work of art elsewhere in the same essay – the qualities that inspire the general invitation to look together into the flower-like mouth of the young man imply a lost context of a sort which would preoccupy later writers on the institution, one recoverable only by the eyes of the mind, and only with great difficulty. If the museum allows us still in some measure to stand with Pater and gaze at the parted lips of the Discobolus, we cannot ever be in the original context in which the work of art arose. Pater is presciently thoughtful on the effect of the reception of art in the deracinated medium of the museum.7 ‘Look’, is the invitation, ‘look into, look at the curves of, the blossom-like cavity of the opened mouth’ of the young man, ‘as you see him in the British Museum’ (GS, pp. 289–90; my italics). Pater is doing more than indicating where the statue is to be found. He is insisting it be seen where it is, not as though its current situation were immaterial to the experience of the viewer. When he turns to the version of the Discobolus in Rome, his nuanced and insistently material account of the object is very far from the Lycaean groves of Winckelmann’s ideal: Here, the vigorous head also, with the face, smooth enough, but spare, and tightly drawn over muscle and bone, is sympathetic with, yields itself to, the concentration, in the most literal sense, of all beside; – is itself, in very truth, the steady centre of the discus, which begins to spin; as the source of will, the source of the motion with which the discus is already on the wing, – that, and the entire form. The Discobolus of the Massimi Palace presents, moreover, in the hair, for instance, those survivals of primitive manner which would mark legitimately Myron’s actual pre-Pheidiac standpoint; as they are congruous also with a certain archaic, a more than merely athletic, spareness of form generally – delightful touches of unreality in this realist of a great time, and of a sort of conventionalism that has an attraction in itself. (GS, pp. 304–5) The attention Pater brings to bear allows at once a recognition of the actual experience of looking at an object that does not exist in the empyrean, but is embedded in the history of Greek culture (hence the sensitivity to Myron’s place in the development of ancient art) and of something more conceptual. Pater turns to the careful analysis of the sources (themselves, paradoxically material) of the long-lived fantasies of an ideal classical antiquity: What we possess, then, of that highest Greek sculpture is presented to us in a sort of threefold isolation; isolation, first of all, from the concomitant arts – the frieze of the Parthenon without the metal bridles on the horses, for which the holes in the marble remain; isolation, secondly from the
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architectural group of which, with most careful estimate of distance and point of observation, that frieze, for instance, was designed to be a part; isolation, thirdly, from the clear Greek skies, the poetical Greek life, in our modern galleries. And if one here or there, in looking at these things, bethinks himself of the required substitution; if he endeavours mentally to throw them back into that proper atmosphere, through which alone they can exercise over us all the magic by which they have charmed their original spectators, the effort is not always a successful one, within the grey walls of the Louvre or the British Museum. (GS, p. 188) In ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ (1880; GS, pp. 194–262), the experience of modern display is identified as a contributing factor in the understanding of Greek sculpture as fundamentally ideal, which is to say bereft of the accidental, the contingent, even of color itself. The historical inaccuracy of the qualities that Pater associates with Winckelmann’s classicism in The Renaissance are the very topics developed at the opening of the second section of the later essay: Critics of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it as if it had been always work in colourless stone, against an almost colourless background. Its real background, as I have tried to show, was a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a peculiarly animated development of human existence – the energetic movement and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worthily clothed – amid scenery as poetic as Titian’s. (GS, p. 224) While the color of the stone has been stripped away by time, the colorless background is provided by space of the exhibition. This is a criticism that has been leveled at museums with greater insistence in the twentieth century than it ever was in the nineteenth. But Pater’s alert interest in both the experience of actually looking and the deep structures underlying nostalgia makes it impossible for him to stop at this point. For all the losses it entails, the modern museum also opens up the possibility of correcting a weak idealizing historical sensibility and moving beyond the outmoded (but still influential) hierarchies of taste that placed the (pure) merits of line above the (sensual) ones of color. A fiction traceable in no small part to the conceptual force of typical modes of display and reproduction, the chaste classical line of antiquity allowed a distinction between forms such as sculpture and painting that a more accurate understanding of the material past – of the color of antiquity – made moot.8 While the galleries of casts and restored antiquities of the eighteenth century allowed and supported a notably abstracted vision even of sculpture, the museums of fragments that emerged in the nineteenth century opened the possibility of recognizing a
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Art and the Museum
Jonah Siegel
more colorful, nuanced, and accidental past. Still, the process was extremely uneven, in part because preconceptions proved longer lasting than the forms of display that promoted them, but also – as Pater himself suggests in his reference to the gray walls of the museum – because the museum itself will always tend to deracinate and idealize the objects it encloses, even when those objects themselves seem to speak about quite a different world from the one that houses them.
The museum as emblem (‘The Most Religious City in the World’) For Pater, as it was for Ruskin, the museum is a characteristic figure for the modern experience of culture itself, one in no way easy or uncomplicated. ‘To many, certainly’, Pater writes in a biographical sketch, composed in 1886 but first published in Appreciations (1889), the life of the antiquarian Thomas Browne would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one’s own funeral. A museum is seldom a cheerful place – oftenest induces the feeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a somewhat mortified kind. (Ap, p. 134) Pater was bound to be fascinated by the elaborate style of the author of Urn Burial (1658), but he was no less likely to respond to the macabre fascination of a home decorated with ancient funerary urns. ‘Their house at Norwich’, he writes of the family, ‘even then an old one it would seem, must have grown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of antiquities’ (Ap, p. 136). The objects that give the impetus and theme to Browne’s bestknown work belong to a category of antiquity entirely distinct from that to which the Apollo Belvedere or even the Discobolus belong. As receptacles of human remains, the urns are at once more banal and more profound. Moreover, the urns evoke an ancient link between Rome and Britain, the existence of which must trouble that sense of unbridgeable distance that provoked so much productive nostalgia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The vessels and the remains they house are a reminder of a time when Britain was part of the classical world – hence Pater’s description of Browne’s ‘old Roman, or Romanised British Urns’ (Ap, p. 133). The urns make Browne’s home a mausoleum and a museum at once – a conflation of domestic grace and beauty, albeit ‘of a somewhat mortified kind’, that always fascinated the critic, most notably, perhaps, in Marius. In that novel, the sense that the whole world may be a museum is first instantiated in the protagonist’s home, but then made manifest in Rome itself, which is identified by an equivocal title in the chapter that brings Marius to
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Art and the Museum
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He was certainly fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome. That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached its perfection in the things of poetry and art – a perfection which indicated only too surely the eve of a decline. As in some vast intellectual museum all its manifold products were intact and in their places, and with custodians also still extant, duly qualified to appreciate and explain them. And at no period of history had the material Rome itself been better worth seeing – lying there not less consummate than that world of pagan intellect which it represented in every phase of its darkness and light. The various works of many ages fell here harmoniously together, as yet untouched save by time, adding the final grace of a rich softness to its complex expression. (ME, vol. 1, pp. 172–3) Pater’s fantasy is of a perfect museum, which is to say, one in which wealth of display is matched by clarity of explanation and harmony of effect. The museal quality of ancient Rome is the ultimate source of the similarity between antiquity and modernity that Pater emphasizes throughout the novel. Nevertheless, the metaphorical force of the museum in the text is not due simply to the setting of the story in a cosmopolitan past. It is closely linked to the question of religion – hence the superlative title of the chapter. Rome is most religious in the sense that all gods are worshipped within its precincts. This is precisely the kind of polytheism Ruskin feared in relation to art, now transposed firmly back to its natural realm, religion itself. Moreover, Pater’s metaphor gains in complexity because the religious nature of the museum runs two ways, and includes the essentially museal nature of religion, Christianity in particular. Thus, Marius’s engagement with the early Christians he meets in Rome takes place not in a space dramatically different but notably similar to the pagan city. The architecture of Cecilia’s home, to take the central example, is characterized by what Pater describes as ‘a noble taste’, that is at once absolutely modern and typical of the antiquity Marius finds in the city: a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised with effects . . . so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance . . . conceiving the new organism by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements, all
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the capital of the empire for the first time – ‘The Most Religious City in the World’. As the title suggests, Marius is lucky in the era of his arrival – but the explanation of his good fortune fills in some of what Pater means by religion in this instance:
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Jonah Siegel
The novelty of Christianity does not reside in the materials that make it up but in the spirit of arrangement that has harmonized those materials anew much as ‘the works of various ages fell harmoniously together’ in the experience of Rome itself. Cecilia’s house comes to overlap with that other in which the entire novel takes place – ‘the beautiful house of art and thought which was the inheritance of the age’ (ME, vol. 1, p. 121), a location Pater ties directly to the practice of criticism. Like the Christian home, imperial Rome is made perfect by the heterogeneous range of antiquities it integrates. Given the resistance to absolute historical breaks Pater openly declares throughout his work and demonstrates so extravagantly in Marius by means of the continuities he identifies between nineteenth-century Europe and late antiquity, it should come as no surprise that his treatment of the effect of Christianity on art calmly but absolutely revises Ruskin. Architecture in Marius is concrete evidence for Pater’s quiet polemic on the topic of cultural change and continuity. He is fascinated as much by the conversion – not destruction – of pre-existent temples by the early Christians as by the emergence of the liturgy of the Church from a synthesis of the texts of Judaism and the Greek and Latin languages. In this most religious city in the world even that most apparently novel of faiths, Christianity, does not exist outside the museum of culture. Far from it, the exceptionality of the Christians resides in the creativity with which they reinvigorate the material they find around them. The nascent religion leads its members to a cultural practice that is closer to the thought of the contemplative critic, collector, or curator than to the passions of the religious convert: ‘Some transforming spirit was at work to harmonise contrasts, to deepen expression – a spirit which, in its dealing with the elements of ancient life was guided by a wonderful tact of selection, exclusion, juxtaposition, begetting thereby a unique effect of freshness’ (ME, vol. 1, p. 239). The ‘tactful’ work of early Christianity is described in the same terms Pater used of the builders of Cecilia’s home. To work with tact in Marius is to be sensitive in organizing a crowded museum, selecting, excluding, juxtaposing – harmonizing. Pater evidently has more in mind than the history of architecture when he writes of the reuse of the antique. We may remember Ruskin’s desire to separate Apollo and the Muses from the dispute over the Host in the Stanza della Segnatura when Pater suggests in Marius that even Christian Communion is ‘not so much new matter as a new spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many observances not witnessed for the first time today’ (ME, vol. 1, p. 249). The history of the
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of which had in truth already lived and died many times. The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner stones of immemorial building, had put on by such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically very seductive. (ME, vol. 1, pp. 227–8)
Art and the Museum
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I began this essay with the proposal that Pater and Ruskin’s accounts of the work of Raphael in the Stanza are usefully read as a response to a much later phenomenon than his frescoes, that when the critics look at Raphael paintings they recognize an anticipation of what they had come to understand as culture in the museum. When Pater returned to Raphael in a late lecture first delivered to University Extension students at Oxford in 1892 and subsequently published in the Fortnightly Review, he was quite clear on the museo-critical qualities of the painter: ‘The formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius – triumphant power of genius’ (MS, p. 39). Genius transfiguring scholarship or arising from accumulation – Raphael’s triumph is undeniably a beautiful manifestation of the museal, and of a concomitant critical sensibility so characteristic of the modernity Pater sees not as absolutely distinct from antiquity, but as always fated to rediscover itself in its fantasies of the past. The works in the Stanza become pedagogic as they show themselves to be reflections on the transmission of knowledge: But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of those divergent ways, glows his painted philosophy in the Parnassus and the School of Athens, with their numerous accessories. In the execution of those works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood him in good stead; and here, above all, is the pledge of his immense understanding, at work on its own natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, the apprehension, the transmission to others of complex and difficult ideas. (MS, p. 56) Raphael was, of course, a complicated figure for the nineteenth-century culture of art in Britain, serving as he had as a kind of important historical marker or shorthand for a falling away that was never fully instantiated in his work, though dangerously promoted by it. Lecturing in the 1890s, much as when he had written in the 1870s, Pater knew himself to be entering contested territory. His Raphael, like so many of his admired figures, is characterized by the ecumenical ability to take pleasure in a range of traditions typically understood to exist in fundamental contradiction. In the following passage the critic’s point is made in the first sentence by the unelaborated use of commas to set up scandalous equivalences: For note, above all, that with all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge in detail, and with a perfect technique, it is after all the beauty, the
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Host is no less a tale of creativity and inspiration, as Pater understands it, than any other important cultural phenomenon. The insight Ruskin fears is in fact true and precisely the kind likely to be made from within the museum.
Jonah Siegel
grace of poetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious faith that he thus records. Of religious faith also. The Disputa, in which, under the form of a council representative of all ages, he embodies the idea of theology, divinarum rerum notitia, as constantly resident in the Catholic Church, ranks with the ‘Parnassus’ and the ‘School of Athens’, if it does not rather close another of his long lines of intellectual travail – a series of compositions, partly symbolic, partly historical . . . which, painting in the great official chambers of the Vatican, Raphael asserts, interprets the power and charm of the Catholic ideal as realised in history. (MS, pp. 57–8) Ruskin would recognize with distress the tenor of an analysis in which the ‘charm’ of the Church is celebrated, not its truths. The historic sense that allows Raphael to become a thoughtful analyst of the past requires him to keep the diverse range of human achievement in play even as it makes the kind of hierarchies Ruskin celebrates impossible. The great artist will necessarily take on the work of a critic in this context, which is the boon and the challenge of the museum. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Raphael in Pater’s imagination of a successful engagement with museum culture. The fortunate arrival of Marius in Rome is more than matched by Raphael’s manifold good luck in Pater’s 1892 account. Indeed, his explanation of good fortune in the lecture provides a gloss for its presence in the novel; in both instances, it advances a historicist claim about cultural opportunities. The ‘luckiness’, or what Pater also terms ‘the good fortune, of genius’ (MS, p. 38) is the coming together of the receptive individual and the right historical moment. Raphael’s good fortune is to have been born not only in the Renaissance, but in the age that would lead to the Reformation. Pater cites the shared birthday of Luther and Raphael in order to suggest that it is a historical process involving both figures, rather than the actual emergence of Protestant theology he has in mind (GS, p. 39). A kind of Marius redux, Raphael also has a notably celebratory first response to Rome, a metropolis figured as distinctly pagan: ‘Coming to the capital of Christendom, he comes also for the first time under the full influence of the antique world, pagan art, pagan life, and is henceforth an enthusiastic archaeologist’ (MS, p. 54). His encounter with the capital of Christendom makes Raphael a classical archaeologist. One could call this turn the symmetrical opposite to the fate of Marius, if it were not the case that in his novel Pater had made Christianity itself so suitable an area for archaeological researches. While I have noted Pater’s refusal not to see the museum and what the museum has to offer of the broken, the transitional, the imperfect, the critic does not emphasize the shocks of fragmentation in the institution. While he cannot be satisfied by the idealization of Winckelmann, he turns
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away from the related claims of absolute breaks that drive or give shape to Ruskin’s historical anxiety. In Pater’s ideal museum the connections linking the apparently disparate are just what is revealed and made musical. It is in ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864) that the most poignant and surprising celebration of Raphael is to be found. In this essay, which is contemporary with that other evocation of the Stanza in ‘Winckelmann’, Raphael becomes a model for the response to divergent cultural drives. To be confronted by the apparently conflictual juxtaposition of, say, Pagan and Christian, need not result in collapse into either quiescent surrender or hardened refusal. What Pater attempts to imagine is the possibility of entering a state of selfcontained contemplation at once happy and incomprehensible to the world at large: Our collective life, pressing equally on every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, not by suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise among them. In these no single gift, or virtue, or idea, has an unmusical predominance. The world easily confounds these two conditions. It sees in the character before us only indifferentism. Doubtless the chief vein of the life of humanity could hardly pass through it. Not by it could the progress of the world be achieved. It is not in the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world. (MS, pp. 252–3) Underlying this notoriously abstract essay, and giving it substance, we may recognize some very concrete spaces. Indeed, the lecture on Raphael and the essay on Winckelmann license the reader to locate the actual and vivid manifestations of the Reformation and Renaissance in the midst of which the painter finds his equipoise. While Ruskin identified in the calm response to the challenges presented by integrating the classical and the religious a sign of a morbid inability to judge, Pater argues that Raphael’s achievement is a harmony that is itself the very essence of musical. Pater’s is an argument for contemplative pleasure based on the harmonization of the force of excessive and otherwise unintegrated experience (what Pater calls ‘collective life’). The refusal to choose between The School of Athens and The Disputation of the Sacrament is mediated by a third work, one showing the Muses at play, and the calm project of making music. The Stanza stands behind this celebration of Raphael, which is a sympathetic refusal of the values typical of Ruskin at midcentury.9 The painter himself becomes a figure for what it might mean to try to live the fortunate life of the artist-critic-scholar – that is, life in the museum.
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Art and the Museum
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Jonah Siegel
Notes
1. Cf. also ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ (1851): ‘On one wall of that chamber he placed a picture of the World or Kingdom of Theology, presided over by Christ. And on the side wall of that same chamber he placed the World or Kingdom of Poetry, presided over by Apollo. And from that spot, and from that hour, the intellect and the art of Italy date their degradation’ (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 12, p. 148). 2. For the kind of historical sensibility underlying the response to Raphael, see Bullen (1994) and Fraser (1992). See also Law and Østermark-Johansen (2005). On Pater and Ruskin in relation to the painter, see Dellamora (1990), p. 126. For the most thorough conceptual treatment of Pater’s historicism, see Williams (1989). 3. For other instances of Ruskin’s complex relation to museums, see Siegel (2008, pp. 187–99, 278–82, 351–2). 4. When Friedrich Waagen visited in the 1830s, he found some canvases to admire, but he was clear on the weaknesses of the institution: ‘Of the great masters of the Florentine school, a school which above all others carried drawing to perfection, there is, in my opinion, nothing here’ (1838, vol. 1, p. 319). 5. The museum boom of the period comprised more than displays of art, and was wider than England, or even Europe. A small sampling of museums founded in Pater’s lifetime might include: Museum of Economic Geology (London, 1841), Musée de Cluny (Paris, 1844), Museum of Manufactures (London, 1854), National Portrait Gallery (London, 1856), South Kensington Museum (London, 1857; renamed Victoria & Albert, 1899), National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1859), University Museum (Oxford, 1860), Bethnal Green Museum (London, 1872), Natural History Museum (London, 1881), Museum of Science and Art (Dublin, 1890). Foundational work on the emergence of the museum was carried out by Haskell (1976) and Holt (1979). For more recent studies in this quickly burgeoning field, see Whitehead (2005) and Jenkins (1992). 6. Classical sources indicate that Myron’s statue was a bronze. On the Discobolus and its reception, see Haskell and Penny (1981, pp. 199–202). 7. For the most influential accounts of the issue, see Heidegger (1975) and Benjamin (1999). 8. On the discovery of Greek polychromy, see Jenkins (1992). 9. Ruskin himself, as his editors point out, came in later years to a view notably close to Pater’s. In 1876 he observes that ‘Raphael, painting the Parnassus and the Theology on equal walls of the same chamber of the Vatican, so wrote, under the Throne of the Apostolic power, the harmony of angelic teaching from the rocks of Sinai and Delphi.’ ‘Editor’s Preface to the Economist of Xenophon’ (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 31, p. 17). See ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 12, p. 149n.).
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Parts of the argument and instances in this essay are adapted from Siegel (2000 and 2008).
2 Pater and Contemporary Visual Art
It is surprising to find a critic as sensitive to the ideas in Pater’s work as David Carrier telling us that Pater had ‘little interest in or knowledge of contemporary visual art’ and again: ‘Pater isn’t interested in contemporary visual art’ (Carrier, 1995, pp. 112, 113). To many this claim would seem counterintuitive. It is true that Pater never wrote any extensive piece on a contemporary artist, but his writing is punctuated with references, often covert or veiled, to the work of living artists he knew or admired. One document alone is testimony to this abiding passion. His 1893 review of George Moore’s Modern Painting is confident, knowledgeable and authoritative. Throughout the short text he endorses or takes issue with Moore’s views on painters such as Ingres, Degas and Millet. He puts forward his own views of the work of Corot, and congratulates Moore for being in the possession of what he calls the ‘secret’ of Sisley, Puvis de Chavannes and Monet. He praises Moore for recognizing the ‘personal [and] the uncontrollable’ in the work of Whistler and Sargent. And he concludes by saying that Moore’s book would appeal both to ‘those who, being outsiders in the matter of art, are nevertheless sensitive and sincerely receptive towards it’ and equally ‘to those who in this matter really know’, making it clear by further elaboration that he himself was one of those who ‘really know’ (Pater, 1919, pp. 149–50). Pater’s highly developed visual sensibility has never been called into question. Emilia Pattison told the first readers of Studies in the History of the Renaissance that Pater ‘can detect with singular subtlety the shades of tremulous variation which have been embodied in throbbing pulsations of colour’ (Seiler, 1980, p. 72). Furthermore he uses images, often reflected or refracted away from their sources or as reminiscences buried deep in his memory, to provide steppingstones for his mental processes, and sometimes those images were drawn from sources in contemporary art. For example, when reviewing the poems of Edmund Gosse in 1890 he quotes some lines from what he calls one of Gosse’s ‘half-Greek, half-English idylls’ in which, he says, ‘Mr Gosse is at his best.’ The lines, he suggests, remind ‘one of Frederick Walker’s “Ploughman,” [or] Mason’s “Evening Hymn” ’ (Pater, 1910b, p. 117). Clearly, memories of 33
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J. B. Bullen
J. B. Bullen
these two works remained in his mind for many years. He first saw Mason’s painting at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1868 (Levey, 1978, p. 106), described at the time by Swinburne as ‘the finest . . . of his works, admirable beyond all where all are admirable’ (Gosse and Wise, 1926, p. 203). Walker’s The Plough (1870) he must have seen at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1870, where it won for the artist associate membership of the Academy in the following year.1 Pater’s greatest interest in contemporary art seems to fall into two periods. The first occupies the decade between 1867 and 1877, and the second, including the reviews quoted above, coincides with the 1890s. Throughout the earlier period he was intensely cautious about associating himself with modern movements. He believed, with some justification, that such an association would be interpreted by the conservative elements in his university as at best, subversive and at worst, perverse or even immoral. Nicholas Shrimpton has ingeniously demonstrated how Pater’s name was connected with British Aestheticism rather late in its development (Shrimpton, 1995, p. 64).2 John Morely, in his famous review of The History of the Renaissance, described Pater as entering the field as the theorist, or theologian, of Aestheticism, well after the practitioners in the arts, linking his name with ‘the Pre-Raphaelite painters . . . Mr Swinburne, and Mr Morris’ (Seiler, 1980, p. 69). More emphatically, the anonymous critic of the Saturday Review suggested that Pater’s Renaissance heralded a ‘renaissance of the old “Renaissance” in the poetry and pictures of Mr Rossetti, the poetry of Mr Swinburne [and] the painting of Mr Burne Jones [sic]’ (Anon., 1873a, p. 123). Pater’s familiarity and interest in modern, aesthetic art probably first developed around 1867 when he took up a lectureship at Brasenose College and published his essay on Winckelmann, and his credentials as a ‘modernist’ derived substantially from his challenging articles first in the Westminster Review and then the Fortnightly. In 1867 Pater visited the exhibition of the Dudley Gallery from which he bought Simeon Solomon’s (now lost) painting The Chanting of the Gospels; he also had his first sight of Solomon’s controversially homoerotic study entitled Bacchus at the Royal Academy, which was adversely criticized at the time by Sidney Colvin as possessing ‘insufficient manliness’ (Morgan, 1996, p. 74). Even when it appeared in The Century Guild Hobbyhorse some 24 years later, Bacchus was greeted with the epithet ‘lewd’ (Fletcher, 1990, p. 77). Pater, however, praised it at length in his ‘A Study of Dionysius’ in 1876. Pater seems to have met Solomon for the first time in 1868, because in June of that year after lunching in London with Gerard Manley Hopkins, the two went to Solomon’s studio and on to the Royal Academy. Soon after, Solomon gave Pater a version of a drawing entitled The Bride, the Bridegroom and the Friend of the Bridegroom, a work that openly represents the dilemma of the expression of homosexual desire in a heterosexual culture (Cruise, 2005, p. 155). In November of the following year, 1869, Solomon, who had visited
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Pater in Oxford (Levey, 1978, p. 106), wrote to his close friend Swinburne asking him what he thought of ‘Pater’s article’ on Leonardo just published in the Fortnightly (Lang, 1959, vol. 2, p. 49); soon after, in December, Swinburne discussed the same article with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in terms that assumed familiarity on both sides with Pater and with his work (Lang, 1959, vol. 2, p. 58). It must have been at this time that Solomon introduced Swinburne to Pater. A strong bond developed between the men, and through them Pater was linked to a number of avant-garde artists working in London. Solomon and Swinburne were friends or associates of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Frederick Leighton, Whistler, Legros and Bell Scott among others and they must have kept Pater abreast with all the latest developments in the London art scene. In 1869 Pater’s acquaintanceship widened further when he was elected to the New (later Savile) Club at the same time as Sidney Colvin, who was writing extensively on art, and to which Simeon Solomon and the Eton tutor Oscar Browning also belonged (Evans, 1970, p. 5). But if Pater’s principal authorities on modern art were Solomon and Swinburne, they were dangerous companions for someone in his position. Thaïs Morgan points to Swinburne and Solomon’s double programme of ‘aestheticizing the perverse’ between 1862 and 1871 (1996, p. 72), showing parallels between Solomon’s homoerotic art and Swinburne’s writing, from his early review of Baudelaire in 1862, through his publication of Poems and Ballads in 1866, to his review of Solomon’s prose piece A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep in 1871. Given Pater’s close relationship with Solomon he must have known about the artist’s sex tourism to Italy in the company of his lover, Oscar Browning, and that on one occasion in 1870 a dash to the continent was provoked by a homosexual incident in Britain (Morgan, 1996, p. 75). Furthermore, as Linda Dowling has suggested, Oxford in the late 1870s was becoming known for its cultivation of male–male desire and a place where male beauty was in vogue (Dowling, 1994, pp. 67ff.). Solomon wrote whimsically to Browning at this time about the idea of a ‘thermometer for testing love’ that might appropriately be used at Oxford. Such a device, he said, were it to exist, ‘at Oxford I should think . . . would always be 110 in the shade and thousands in the sun’ (Reynolds, 1984, p. 16). Alfred Austin was not the only writer at this time to believe that something ‘nasty’ was coming out of Oxford. In 1872 he linked ‘the disease of the time . . . an emasculated cynicism’ with the university: ‘When the whole community is infected’, he said, lapsing into pathological mode, ‘the whole community is in so bad a way that nothing short of a miracle can restore it to health’ (Austin, 1872, pp. 132–3). Similarly, Robert Browning visiting Solomon’s studio in 1870 adopted the term Colvin had used earlier for Solomon’s work and condemned it as being ‘too affected and effeminate’ (qtd in Morgan, 1996, p. 74). In the same year Rossetti’s Poems invoked the outrage of Robert Buchanan, who included Solomon in his condemnation of the perverse in Victorian culture. His work, said Buchanan, partakes of
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the ‘eccentricities of the Pre-Raphaelites’, which included, ‘false and shallow mysticism’, ‘affectation’ of all kinds and ‘effeminacy’ (Buchanan, 1872, pp. 43, 49, 70). Thaïs Morgan has pieced together the events that led to Solomon’s final downfall, the sight of which must have filled Pater with horror (Morgan, 1996, pp. 80–1). A key moment was Solomon’s publication of his highly Rossettian homoerotic allegory A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep in 1871. At the end of May and the beginning of June of that year Swinburne, who went to visit both Jowett and Pater in Oxford, was engaged in the writing of his review of Solomon’s work for the Oxford magazine Dark Blue. When he arrived, Swinburne first met Hippolyte Taine at Jowett’s. The Frenchman was much puzzled by this figure, ‘très passioné pour la literature française moderne . . . et pour la peinture’. ‘Son style’, he added with disapproval, ‘est d’un visionnaire malade qui, pour système cherche la sensation’ (Gosse, 1917, p. 202). Undoubtedly, Swinburne’s search for ‘la sensation’ received a warmer welcome at Brasenose, where the discussion between Pater and Swinburne must have centred on A Vision of Love and Swinburne’s forthcoming review article, but when it appeared later that year it caused Solomon great disquiet. Though Swinburne had written effusively about Solomon’s painting and writing in terms that Pater was later to develop in the context of his essay on Giorgione, he openly stressed the ‘perverse’, homoerotic element in Solomon’s work, exposing Solomon in the most blatant way. Meanwhile, another exposure brought about further disquiet in the art world. In June 1872 Rossetti collapsed and attempted suicide in the face of accusations of perversity and ‘effeminacy’ from Robert Buchanan. Simultaneously his friendship with Swinburne came to an end. In spite, however, of these stormy events the friendship between Pater and Solomon flourished. The two often met and in 1872 Solomon completed one of the few portraits we have of Pater. But in the following year the blow fell. In February 1873 Solomon was arrested and charged with attempting to commit buggery, for which offence he was later found guilty. Life had caught up with art, and the event sent a tremor through the lives of his friends and acquaintances. Swinburne immediately went to Oxford to consult Pater, whom he assumed would know much more about the incident than he himself (Lafourcade, 1932, p. 250). Burne-Jones was sympathetic (Fitzgerald, 2003, p. 148), but it was Oscar Browning who said of Solomon that his ‘only true friends apart from artists were Pater and myself whom he really loved and we loved him’ (Reynolds, 1984, p. 21). As homophobic panic spread through the community, Solomon was abandoned. In the same month of Solomon’s arrest, Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published, and an early, hostile, review in The Globe linked his name with Solomon’s in terms that were so explicit that they must have heightened Pater’s anxiety. Just as the ‘preface repudiates philosophy’, said the anonymous writer, ‘so . . . the conclusion enunciates a theory
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which destroys morality’. These views, he claimed, will be nothing new to his readers since ‘modern art, in the poems of Swinburne and the pictures of Simeon Solomon, have accustomed us to strange things’. But, he concluded, with the worst cut of all: ‘we do not remember ever to have seen the principles of pure Hedonism more nakedly advocated than they are here’ (Anon., 1873b, p. 8). Although Pater was directly connected with Solomon’s problems, other events conspired to lend aesthetic art the air of sexual subversiveness, irregularity and perversity. In addition to the publication of Rossetti’s poems in 1870, with its dedication to Burne-Jones and references to Whistler, BurneJones himself, with what one reviewer called his ‘abnormal and perverted talent’ (Anon., 1873c, p. 173), was forced in 1870 to remove a painting of a male nude from the walls of the Water-Colour Society (and subsequently retired from exhibiting until 1877). No doubt Pater, himself with a book, as he put it, ‘intended for a comparatively small section of readers’ (Evans, 1970, p. 10), hoped to escape censure. Nevertheless The Renaissance was perceived to be part of a serious challenge to the values of the ‘purists’ led by Ruskin, and abetted by ‘the poetry and pictures of Mr Rossetti, the poetry of Mr Swinburne . . . [and] the paintings of Mr Burne Jones [sic]’ (Anon., 1873a, p. 123). In the 1870s, meddling with modern art, particularly modern British art, was a dangerous activity, especially for figures in establishment positions with pedagogic responsibilities. The William Money Hardinge affair in 1874 intensified Pater’s fears about his university status to the extent that, around 1876, his interests shifted temporarily to safer aesthetic ground: recent French landscape painting. Jean-François Millet and Jean-Baptiste Corot figure in ‘The Myth of Demeter’ (1876) as illustrators of peasant life, and a longer, unfinished piece on Corot, probably composed at the same time, contrasts the broader scope of Turner, ‘a mirror of the whole of nature’ (Pater, ?1876, fol. 2r ), with the limited but intensely focused painting of Corot himself, together with Millet, Théodore Rousseau, Jules Dupré, Charles-François Daubigny and Alphonse Legros. But events conspired to draw Pater back into the controversial field of Aesthetic art. In May 1877, Sir Coutts Lindsay’s Grosvenor Gallery opened. It had been given considerable advance publicity in the press; when the opening arrived, it was rightly hailed as a significant moment in the history of British art. The Grosvenor challenged the Royal Academy by placing aesthetic painting firmly in the public eye and affirming a new kind of art based on formal values and visual pleasure. The link with Pater was at first a general one. The previous year, in 1876, William Mallock’s New Republic had begun to appear in Belgravia, with the Paterian Mr Rose urging domestic decoration in ‘symphonies of subdued colour’ and chambers filled ‘with works of fair form’ (Mallock, 1900, pp. 27–8).3 The decoration and ethos of the Grosvenor Gallery was similarly, self-consciously aesthetic. Described
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Pater and Contemporary Visual Art 37
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by the art critic of Vanity Fair as being louche, effeminate and un-English, it was, he said, ‘a merely artistic lounge for the worshippers of the Fleshly School of Art’ (Anon., 1877, p. 281). Then suggestions of ‘sensuality and self-culture’ were levelled at the work of Burne-Jones and attributed to the influence of Pater. Henry James was not alone in feeling that ‘the reminiscences of Oxford occupy a very large place in Mr Burne-Jones’s painting’ (James, 1956, p. 144). Finally, the link was made explicit by Oscar Wilde. In the July issue of Dublin University Magazine he reviewed the show, opening with the work of Burne-Jones. Jones, he said, was ‘a dreamer in the land of mythology . . . a symbolical painter. He is an imaginative colourist, too, knowing that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a “spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit,” as Mr Pater says’ (Wilde, 1877, p. 118). ‘Mr Pater’ said this, of course, about Botticelli not Burne-Jones, but whether Wilde knew it or not, Pater himself had cautiously made a positive reference to Burne-Jones in his article ‘The Myth of Demeter’ in the previous year. In a discussion of symbolism in art he had referred, without using the artist’s name, to the unity of image and idea in Burne-Jones’s 1870 painting, Day (Figure 2.1).4 Now in 1877, Wilde was linking Burne-Jones with Botticelli using Pater as authority. Furthermore, the strongly neo-Renaissance tenor of much of the work at the Grosvenor Gallery helped to reinforce the connections with Pater’s dicta in The Renaissance, so that within a couple of years Pater was firmly installed as the central critic of the avant-garde by both friends and enemies alike. One of those enemies, the conservative critic Harry Quilter, identified the supposedly corrupt and unhealthy tendencies of the new aesthetic school with ‘Messrs Swinburne, Pater and Burne-Jones, all of them Oxford men’, and with the ‘doctrines of pure sensuousness in art’, which, he claimed, derive specifically ‘from the recesses of Oriel [sic] College’ and Mr Pater (Quilter, 1880, p. 399). We can now see that, whatever his interests may have been, Pater was in no position to write about the work in an exhibition which was so controversial and which pushed so hard against the boundaries of aesthetic and moral orthodoxy. ‘He had learned’, as Billie Inman suggests, ‘through wretched experience not to discuss current aesthetic issues in current terms’ (1990, p. 385), yet the approach that he had previously adopted in The Renaissance was still open to him. His subtler readers (and clearly Wilde was one of them) recognized that in taking a modern, aesthetic stance with regard to historical subjects, and by choosing figures, objects and ideas that were exerting a powerful influence on contemporary art, Pater’s real subject lay in the present, rather than the past. Consequently The Renaissance is punctuated with reminders subtly directing the reader’s attention to its contemporary intertextuality. Elizabeth Prettejohn demonstrates with great perspicacity how Pater’s interests coincided precisely with those of painters associated with Aestheticism. Among others she cites
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Figure 2.1
Edward Burne-Jones, Day (1870)
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J. B. Bullen
Greek sculpture, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, the distinction between medieval and Renaissance, the focus on the secular elements in the culture of the Middle Ages, and in art that ‘refuses subservience to realism or social or political engagement’ (Prettejohn, 1999, p. 38). She uses the idea of a ‘family resemblance’ to point, for example, to the employment of a modernized Tannhäuser myth in Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris, Swinburne’s poem ‘Laus Veneris’ and its re-emergence in Pater’s ‘Aucassin and Nicolette’; the legend, says Pater, represents a ‘revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the time’ (TR, p. 18), where the word ‘time’ signifies simultaneously past and present. In this and other ways, the essays that make up The Renaissance create a relay that shifts persistently between past and present, a relay in which characters, ideas, artworks and literary texts operate within an intertextual matrix that is simultaneously historical and contemporary.5 This was not an unusual procedure in the nineteenth century. Previous writers had explored something similar using different means. Browning’s personae in Men and Women traded on the use of historical masks to articulate modern dilemmas; the medievalism of early Pre-Raphaelite art was frequently a dressing-up of modern anxieties in medieval costume; George Eliot’s Romola (1863) explored problems of British Victorian feminism in an Italian Renaissance setting. Pater’s method was more perplexing because it was offered not as poetry or fiction but as scholarship. In reality, of course, it was not scholarship but pseudo-scholarship; it adopted the guise of history, and as Pater said elsewhere, history is always ‘fine art’ (Ap, p. 10). In this way the historical mode afforded Pater a special kind of licence that allowed him to make a journey through territory that might otherwise have laid him open to calumny. ‘The School of Giorgione’ is especially dense with ahistorical pointers indicative of a subtext connecting it with current issues and ideas. He opens, for example, by challenging the terms of what he calls ‘much popular criticism’ of his day (TR, p. 102); in the body of the essay he applies the principles of aesthetic criticism to ‘the furniture of our houses, and of dress’ (TR, p. 108), and suggests that such a mode of criticism is applicable equally to ‘the products of art, new or old’ (TR, p. 109). He also asserts that the Giorgionesque can be found not only in ‘Venetian work generally’ but ‘in work of our own time’ (TR, p. 117). But which works of ‘our own time’ did Pater have in mind? One approach to this question can be made through the review that Wilde sent to Pater in July 1877, in which he praised Pater, Swinburne and others for fostering ‘that revival of culture and love of beauty’ represented by the Grosvenor Gallery (Wilde, 1877, p. 126). First there are the absentee artists, led by Rossetti and Solomon, both of whom had been associated with Venetian art. Since the eighteenth century, Venetian Renaissance painting had been identified with sensuousness bordering on sensuality, and the idea had received powerful affirmation in Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata of 1860 (Bullen,
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1992, p. 123; Grieve, 1999, pp. 24–5). Colin Cruise perceptively suggests that Solomon’s Bacchus might be interpreted as a homoerotic reworking, some six years later, of Rossetti’s controversial image of Fanny Cornforth, since, as he points out, the pose is similar, its techniques are Venetian and it, too, focuses on a single figure for erotic purposes (Cruise, 1996, p. 209). The first indications that Pater was considering a relay between the Venetian Renaissance and the modern period occur in his 1876 Fortnightly Review essay on Dionysius. In a discussion of the bittersweet duality of Dionysius, god of water and wine, Pater invokes Giorgione as a testimony to the refreshing power of water in the heat. ‘And who that has never felt the heat of a southern country’, he observes, ‘does not know this poetry, the motive of the loveliest of all the works attributed to Giorgione, the Fête Champêtre in the Louvre’ (GS, p. 28). In ‘The School of Giorgione’ Pater connects the Fête Champêtre with Rossetti’s sonnet and the way in which Rossetti’s own painting ‘often comes to mind as one ponders’ the Giorgionesque (TR, p. 114). But in the essay on Dionysius Pater invokes a work by the other absentee from the Grosvenor Gallery show: ‘that strange genius’, as Wilde calls him, ‘who wrote the “Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep” ’. In his discussion of the god of wine Pater recalls the ‘impression of a melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus’ in ‘a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868’.6 Solomon’s Bacchus, Pater insists, represents both the god of sweetness and ‘the god of the bitterness of wine, “of things too sweet” ’ (GS, p. 42). But Solomon’s style, too, had been described as ‘Venetian’. Swinburne in his review of A Vision of Love had said of Solomon: ‘no Venetian ever took truer delight in glorious vestures, in majestic embroideries’ (Gosse and Wise, 1926, vol. 16, p. 450). More important, however, in the context of Pater’s essay, Swinburne had stressed the interpenetration of form and content in Solomon’s work in terms of a musical analogy. This formal relationship had been mooted by Baudelaire on Delacroix and by Wagner in his ‘Lettre sur la musique’ (TR, pp. 388–9), and Swinburne as a passionate admirer of Baudelaire certainly knew this (Maxwell, 2006, pp. 102–5). In his review of Solomon’s Vision of Love he expresses his admiration for artists ‘in whose eyes the boundary lines of several coterminous arts appear less as the line of mere distinction than line of mutual alliance’ (Gosse and Wise, 1926, vol. 16, p. 444), and describes how this ‘mutual alliance’ in Solomon’s work is achieved by its musicality. Music and musical themes figured prominently in the work of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Leighton and others, but as Colin Cruise points out, Solomon had led the way in developing this idea. As early as 1861, notes Cruise, the ‘musician motif’ had been introduced by Solomon and became part of his repertoire for the next decade (Cruise, 2005, p. 88). The very picture that Pater first bought from Solomon, Chanting the Gospels, had a musical subject and it joined others in his oeuvre such as A Young Musician in the Temple (1861) and The Child Jeremiah (1862). But when Swinburne
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J. B. Bullen
wrote about Solomon for Dark Blue he anticipated Pater in stressing music as an analogy for the interpenetration of form and matter: ‘There is an entire class of Mr Solomon’s designs in which the living principle and moving spirit is music made visible’, he observed (Gosse and Wise, 1926, vol. 16, p. 454). Finally, foreshadowing Pater’s account of the work of Giorgione, Swinburne stressed those paintings by Solomon where music was the actual subject: ‘his groups of girls and youths that listen to one singing or reciting seem utterly imbued with the spirit of sound, clothed with music as with a garment’ (Gosse and Wise, 1926, vol. 16, p. 454). Billie Inman feels that the modern painter who most strongly represented for Pater the Giorgionesque notion of art aspiring to the condition of music was neither Rossetti nor Solomon, but Whistler (Inman, 1990, p. 385). Whistler, of course, had been using musical titles, ‘nocturnes’ and ‘symphonies’, since the mid-1860s and Pater certainly approved. In 1878 he wrote to John Miller Gray praising Gray’s review of Whistler’s first one-man show in Pall Mall in 1874. Gray, he said was in ‘possession of many important principles’ connected with Whistler’s work (Evans, 1970, p. 31). Pater also mentioned Whistler favourably in his 1893 review of George Moore’s Modern Painting, in which Whistler, said Moore, had ‘helped to purge art of the vice of subject and the belief that the mission of the artist is to copy nature’ (Moore, 1893, p. 24). But Whistler’s work, which had been so vigorously attacked by Ruskin at the beginning of July 1877, was far too controversial to be mentioned directly by Pater. The evidence suggests, then, that when Pater wrote of how the Giorgionesque might be found not only in ‘Venetian work generally’ but ‘in work of our own time’ he had in mind the painting of the aesthetic artists of the 1870s. This possibility is supported by an unpublished essay entitled ‘The Aesthetic Life’ which Pater composed around 1893. In this, Pater looks back to the beginning of ‘the third quarter of the nineteenth century’, and suggests that at this time a new phase of art had been developed. This phase, he said, was both a ‘reaction against the age’ yet also ‘profoundly characteristic of it’ (Pater, ?1893, fol. 9r ); he names three artists whom he considers the most important in defining this phase. Significantly each of them exhibited prominently at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877: Burne-Jones, Whistler and Alphonse Legros. Though ‘Mr Whistler[,] Mr Legros and Mr Burne-Jones [are] so different in method and in ideal’, Pater argues, all three have contributed to ‘the importance in the aesthetic fortune of our day’ (Pater, ?1893, fol. 10r ). The appearance of Legros’s name may seem strange, but it gives a clue to one of the most interesting deflective strategies that Pater employed in ‘The School of Giorgione’. It is often overlooked that the illustration Pater provided for his famous dictum that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (TR, p. 106) is drawn neither from Venetian work nor from one of the controversial moderns, but from an etching by Alphonse Legros.7 ‘This abstract
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language becomes clear enough’, writes Pater, ‘if we think of actual examples. In an actual landscape we see a long white road, lost suddenly on the hill-verge. That is the matter of one of the etchings of M. Alphonse Legros: only, in this etching, it is informed by an indwelling solemnity of expression, seen upon it of half-seen, within the limits of an exceptional moment’ (TR, p. 106). The work in question is almost certainly Le Coup de vent which was shown at the Salon of 1875 and published in a small print run of 200 copies in the same year (Figure 2.2). As Pater points out, the scene is an unexceptional one where a white track crossing rough country loses itself on the verge of the hill. The interest of the etching lies in the animation of the scene supplied by the stormy light and the gust of wind (which Pater does not mention) driving a shower of rain before it, all caught by the skilfully robust hand of the artist. Legros
Figure 2.2
Alphonse Legros, Le Coup de vent (1875)
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meant more to Pater and his contemporaries than he means to us, but Pater’s choice in giving him this prominent position in the essay is surely quite intentional. Pater had previously expressed an interest in the etching of Legros, and Legros’s ability to transform the commonplace into something almost visionary. In the unpublished essay on Corot, he discusses how ‘the higher school of French landscape has been greatly influenced by the etcher’s art’. Though he writes in notes, the example he gives closely anticipates his more polished remarks in ‘The School of Giorgione’ and the way in which Legros’s ‘homely scenes’ derive a special character ‘drawn from the deep places of the imagination’ (TR, p. 106). ‘In this way’, Pater continues in his essay on Corot, the etcher’s art ‘has been able to seize and express the poetry for instance, the quiet people of which have yielded L[egros] his solemn figures, but which has in it also the elements of his no less solemn landscape, element transformed indeed & strangely combined by the power of the imagina[tion] but transformed also often by slants of sunlight, and moving rain, and made a true land of surprises, for the actual traveller’ (Pater, ?1876, fol. 3r ). Legros was, therefore, much on Pater’s mind. He admired the artist sufficiently to possess two lithographs; he later placed Legros’s achievement alongside that of Whistler and Burne-Jones. But for the cautious Pater, the work of Legros was a safe choice to illustrate one of his most memorable ideas. Unlike Burne-Jones and Whistler, and certainly unlike Rossetti and Solomon, Legros’s name had no scandal attached to it. In 1876 the expatriate Frenchman had been elected to the Chair of Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School, University College, a position that he held until 1892. As Wilde had mentioned in his review of the Grosvenor Gallery (getting the detail wrong), ‘there is a natural curiosity to see the work of a gentleman who holds at Cambridge the same professorship as Mr Ruskin does at Oxford’ (Wilde, 1877, p. 124). In spite of these rather orthodox qualifications, however, Legros’s affiliations brought him closer into the ambiance of the avant-garde than might at first appear. Back in the late 1850s in France, his natural artistic sympathy with Whistler and Henri Fantin-Latour helped to generate the mutually supportive Société des trois. Soon after, in 1859, as undoubtedly Pater knew, a painting by Legros, the Angelus, was written up by Baudelaire in his ‘Salon de 1859’, where he praised Legros’s ability to vivify seemingly trivial or passing moments (Baudelaire, 1868, p. 279). The Angelus was bought by Whistler’s brother-in-law, the etcher Seymour Haden. Things did not go particularly well for Legros in France, however, so in 1863, after he had exhibited in the famous Salon des Refusés alongside Manet and others, Whistler persuaded him to take up permanent residence in London, where he became part of the circle of George Frederic Watts, Edward Poynter, Rossetti, and the group of artists and writers who frequented Cheyne Walk. Legros often exhibited at the Royal Academy, and devotees of aesthetic
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painting such as Alexander Ionides and George Howard bought his work. During the 1868 show (which Pater visited with Hopkins and Solomon), Swinburne publicly praised his work (Gosse and Wise, 1926, vol. 16, p. 208). In 1877 Legros shifted allegiance to the Grosvenor Gallery, where he exhibited nine works, including one that Tom Taylor in The Times called ‘a broadly painted and impressive landscape’ that Legros completed in just ‘two hours’ (Taylor, 1877, p. 10). It is significant that Pater, when he wrote his essay on Giorgione, was careful to choose an artist whose work exemplified an aspiration towards the condition of music through the practice of energetic brio, but who could never be charged with throwing a pot of paint in the face of the public. The fact is, Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold would have equally well illustrated Pater’s point about the interpenetration of form and content; similarly the abstracted symbolism of one of Burne-Jones’s Days of Creation would have served his purpose. But in a mood of profound caution, Pater selected a work by the much less flamboyant Legros, one which did not actually appear in the exhibition. The evidence suggests, then, that Pater had a well-developed interest in contemporary visual art but it was one that he was diffident in expressing. The opening of the Grosvenor Gallery tempted him into the open, but ultimately he used Legros as his stalking horse because the latter’s oeuvre was not steeped in controversy nor would it, by association, bring Pater or his writing into disrepute. English art, observed Pater in a review of Ernest Chesnau’s The English School of Painting (1885), has always had about it ‘a certain temper of revolt’ and has been apt to ‘jar against the English public’ (Pater, 1885, p. 113). This was certainly true of the English art with which Pater grew up. Yet at the same time it was just this kind of art that touched him most closely. He was impressed by its ‘temper of revolt’ because it was so much in keeping with the antinomian position that informs so much of his writing of the period in his life.
Notes 1. Walker’s The Plough is in the Tate Gallery, London. 2. I am especially grateful to Lesley Higgins for allowing me to see her transcripts of Pater’s unpublished essays in the Houghton Library, and to Nicholas Shrimpton for pointing out to me Pater’s review of Ernest Chesnau’s The English School of Painting. 3. Mallock’s New Republic appeared in Belgravia between June and December 1876 and was published in book form in 1877. 4. Now in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard. 5. David Carrier points out that this relay between past and present plays a prominent role in Gaston de Latour. Basing his observation on Patricia Clements’s work (1985), in which she provides evidence of Pater’s pervasive use of Baudelaire in GDL, Carrier points out that the relationship between Gaston and Ronsard is based retrospectively on that between Baudelaire and Constantin Guys, and that, in Pater’s words, Ronsard paradoxically becomes ‘a direct descendent of that idealized Guys’ (Carrier, 1995, p. 112). In an earlier version of this essay Carrier developed
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Pater and Contemporary Visual Art 45
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J. B. Bullen
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the idea in a slightly different way, suggesting that ‘applied to the art of the present, Baudelaire’s theory defends Guys’s modernism. Applied to the poetry of Ronsard or the painting of the school of Giorgione, this theory suggested Pater’s ideal of a self-sufficient decorative painting’ (Carrier, 1994, p. 41). 6. Pater mistook the date here. It should have been 1867. 7. Though see Higgins, p. 66, n. 36.
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3 Lesley J. Higgins
For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage . . . with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. — Walter Pater, The Renaissance As much as the past is a ‘living thing’ for Walter Pater, so too is the present. In ‘Wincklemann’, originally published in 1868, Pater insists that ‘the subtle and penetrative, yet somewhat grotesque art of the modern world’, and the complexity of ‘modern culture’, must be interrogated with a ‘deeper view’ (TR, pp. 178, 181, 180). The five concluding paragraphs of ‘Winckelmann’ struggle, to use Pater’s term for intellectual and aesthetic endeavor, to understand how the ancient world and its ideals can serve ‘the modern world’, nurture its instincts ‘of self-culture’ (TR, pp. 182–3), and help to delineate the contours of a ‘modern’ consciousness. All the while that Pater is studying Hellenic art and Renaissance culture, he is also developing a ‘network’ of associations among nineteenth-century French writers such as Victor Hugo, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Prosper Mérimée, and English writers such as William Wordsworth, John Henry Newman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,1 William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Painters also ‘penetrate the network’, however subtly, and that is the subject of my essay: how the very ‘modern mind’ of Walter Pater experienced and assessed the works of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903).2 The ongoing, intertextual3 presence of both in his writings not only reaffirms Pater’s Bourdieu-like insight that artists ‘breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts’ (TR, p. xxiv), but constitutes one of those definitional pairings which Pater deploys so effectively throughout this canon. References to their names and works (whether identified or not) help Pater to trace the aesthetic significance, ‘the vrai vérité about’ Romanticism, impressionism, and realism – those ‘most 47
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The ‘Necessity’ of Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
liberal and durable impressions which . . . lie beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly ascertained facts about’ them (TR, p. 121). Both painters were considered iconoclasts; both were certainly controversial. Then-contemporary critics were sharply divided as to their merits. Corot’s seemingly ‘unassuming’ Romanticism,4 in an era of Salon-controlled classicism and subject painting, was as à rebours in its day as Whistler’s sustained battles with middle-class narrative painting and those who championed such work. Although very different in their visual rhetoric, Corot and Whistler experimented alike in oils, watercolors, and in etchings. Furthermore, their innovations in ‘style’ and form were sustained by ongoing interventions in debates concerning the relations between art and nature, the need for genre painting, and the degree to which the painter’s subjectivity should be expressed in a work of art. Rather than being affronted by the degree of otherness that defined the men in the eyes of many British reviewers – Corot, a decidedly French individual; Whistler, the American trained in France who lived mostly in London and affected a continental, dandaical persona – Pater again displays a ‘modern’ cultural responsiveness by using those differences to further an ‘art for art’s sake argument . . . for internationalism’.5 Close scrutiny of the artists’ works would have revealed that they too defied easy categorization. The ‘presence’ of both in Pater’s writings further attests to his program of ‘mixed up’6 or highly synthetic cultural critique – the same ‘synoptic intellectual power’ he attributes to Raphael (MS, p. 57). Yet the question emerges: which works by Corot and Whistler did he actually see? The issue of access to their works brings to the fore two particular complexities of the nineteenth-century art world that this essay attempts to address. First, the social relations and institutions (including the academies, press, art literature, independent galleries, and exhibitions) that controlled the social production of art must be considered.7 Second, new modes of disseminating works popularly then emerging – technologies and marketplace methods which Corot and Whistler actively endorsed and encouraged – must be appreciated. The pervasive influence of Baudelaire as a critic who encouraged ‘l’avènement du neuf’ and the challenges of modern art (1955, p. 37) will also be discussed.
Seeing is believing In his essay on ‘Romanticism’, Pater praises Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare because ‘the object of the little treatise is to defend the liberty and independence of choice, and treatment of subject, in art and literature, against those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent’ (1876, p. 65).8 Whistler’s career was certainly the most extreme object lesson in the cost of artistic independence, but all three men were subject to the (sometimes punitive) institutionalized forces at work in English and French art circles.
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Pater’s ability to view the works of Corot and Whistler was circumscribed – and policed – in disparate but telling ways. Certainly, assessing contemporary artists means one’s ‘treatment’ of their works is not overshadowed by decades – or centuries – of established opinions, but the hazards of what can be seen, and when and where, are all the greater. And yet for Pater, because the process of experiencing art by Corot and Whistler was intermittent, incomplete, and sometimes startling, the impressions and insights he accrued might have been all the more memorable.9 His was not the easy task of consulting a sumptuous catalogue raisoné and thus consuming, at his leisure, a painter’s entire oeuvre. Nor, in the 1860s or even the 1890s, could he walk into London’s National Gallery10 or the Louvre in Paris, and expect to find substantial collections of either artist. In the nineteenth century, the only public gallery in London to display a Corot painting – Macbeth (1858–59) – was the new Bethnal Green Museum; Sir Richard Wallace, who owned the canvas, made it available from 1872 to 1875 (the Wallace collection, in Hertford House, London, was not opened to the public until 1900). The first Corot to enter the Louvre, Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864), was installed in 1889.11 Opportunities for a general survey of his career came in May and June 1875, in the major Paris show and sale of works following his death,12 but even then Corot’s splendid accomplishments as a ‘figure’ painter or portraitist were unknown. ‘Of some three hundred or more examples’ of his figure paintings, ‘Corot exhibited only two in his whole career.’13 The first painting by Whistler to enter a public gallery, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1872–73), was purchased by the Corporation of Glasgow in 1891.14 Subsequent to his death in 1904, the largest collections of Whistler’s works were housed in the Freer Gallery, Washington, DC and the Hunterian Gallery, University of Glasgow. During his lifetime, Pater witnessed major changes and challenges to the annual academy-controlled systems of selecting and displaying works of art for public consumption and purchase (the Royal Academy, in London; the Salon, in Paris). As of 1868, for example, honorary foreign Academicians were admitted to the Royal Academy shows; Corot was represented by two landscapes in 1869, Les Nymphes and Figures with Landscape (c. 1860). Exhibition spaces controlled by specialist (or rival) associations multiplied: Whistler, for example, might have joined the Society of Artists, the Free Society of Artists, the Old Water-Colour Society, the New Water-Colour Society (subsequently, the Royal Institute), the Society of British Artists,15 or the New English Art Club. For both men, access to and public perceptions of their works were conditioned by the opening of private galleries and art dealers’ exhibition rooms, including ‘Matthew Morgan’s new gallery [the Berners Street Gallery]’ (Daly, 2005, p. 2),16 the Dudley Gallery, favored by Whistler, ‘which had become associated with the exhibition of new and challenging works’ (Cruise, 2005, p. 107), the Grosvenor Gallery,17 and the Fine Art Society.18 The vogue for international shows and exhibitions,
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
which provided lavish national and imperial cultural displays, brought several works by Corot to London in 1862 and 1871 and provided continental opportunities for Whistler. For French artists, however, the most important venues for their works in England from 1870 onwards were the London exhibitions and sales organized by Paul Durand-Ruel.19 All such public displays, however, were only the silent salvoes in the era’s aesthetic wars; the insistent response of critics in the daily press, periodicals, and specialist journals must also be considered. One should not underestimate the volume of art journalism – neither its vehement tones nor the amount generated on a regular basis in the pages of the Academy, Art Journal, Athenaeum, Blackwood’s, Daily Telegraph, Examiner, Fortnightly Review, Illustrated London News, Macmillan’s Magazine, Nineteenth Century, Portfolio, Spectator, Times, and Vanity Fair. Satirical magazines such as Punch and Fun, and specialized tracts such as Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera or Christian publications, had their say as well – typically, warning would-be gallery-goers to avoid the unacceptably unconventional. Pater summarizes the ‘courage’ required to articulate one’s critical ‘opinions’ in such conditions in the opening paragraphs of ‘Mr George Moore as an Art Critic’: The writer of this clever book deserves to be heard about his opinions on fine art, and especially on the somewhat vexed subject of ‘Modern Painting’. He deserves to be heard, because he has a right to those opinions, having taken more pains than critics of contemporary art sometimes do to know from within what he is writing about; . . . he writes with all the courage of the opinions thus sincerely formed, so as to keep the attention of the reader fixed to the very last page. (1893, p. 3) Pater, I would suggest, is not exaggerating; the autobiographical impetus for the passage seems unmistakable. Some people were writing art criticism for the sake of exercising cultural and social clout – in Pater’s words, upholding ‘exclusive authority’ (1876, p. 69) – as much as they were assessing Corot’s compositional abilities or Whistler’s highly restrictive color palette. Whether encouraged or discouraged to view specific works of art, however, nineteenth-century art consumers and connoisseurs did not have to visit permanent collections or new gallery shows to have visual access. To existing technologies for creating and printing engravings of famous paintings were added, from the 1850s onwards, innovative modes of producing lithographs, mezzotints, and photographs. Not surprisingly, the market for all such items expanded dramatically, often deliberately encouraged by the artists themselves. Corot, for example, allowed Louis François to create a lithograph of Une Matinée (also known as La Danse des nymphes, 1850) even before the painting was finished (Tinterow et al., 1996, p. 231). His willingness to have works copied by studio painters and subsequently offered for rent was controversial, and perhaps encouraged the number of ‘Corot’
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
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forgeries that flooded the market after 1875.20 Richard Lasey’s mezzotint of Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother (1871) was published in July 1879 by Henry Graves and Co., London.
‘What impression then does Corot give’, Pater asks in the mid-1870s; ‘what element has he found out the secret of commanding; of which of these many notes may we regard as a special interpreter?’21 The ‘notes’ to which he refers include a gift for the ‘selection’ of ‘special elements’, the ‘refraction of landscape . . . through the artist’s spirit’, and the ability to represent ‘a special scheme of effects, an impression you have really received but may not be able to recall at will, but which this has the secret of summoning you back’ (?1876, fol. 3r ). Much as he will do for Giorgione in 1877, Pater is trying to define both that which is singular in Corot’s aesthetic practices, and that which is most appropriately identified as the attributes of a ‘school of painters of whom Corot is perhaps the chief’ (?1876, fol. 1r ). Just as importantly, Pater is rehearsing a theory of Romanticism that he will articulate fully in the November 1876 essay for Macmillan’s Magazine.22 In the published article, Romanticism is famously cited for a ‘restless curiosity’ – ‘it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper’ and ‘the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art’ (1876, p. 65). In terms of Corot, Pater praises ‘a balance of curiosity and the design of beauty’ in the ‘artist’s temper’; his works exemplify ‘those curiosities of genius, as we may call them, in which special elements in the mass become intensified into gems’ (?1876, fol. 2r ). Pater’s familiarity with Corot’s oeuvre informs the essay; more than a dozen works are cited, including landscapes featuring the Italian Appenines and Homère et les bergers; paysage (1845). Praise for the ‘little divinities barkcoloured’ that emerge in the ‘grey-green light’, ‘such Dryads as human imag[inatio]n under certain cond[ition]s will always evoke from the trees’ (?1876, fol. 6r ), immediately suggests Une Matinée23 (1850), but could allude as well to Pastorale (1873). In both, figures ‘just slip lissom from the bark brown and silver, and dance with faint, quaint, tiny music, on the grass for a little while – the figures, always felt as potential in such landscapes coming out at last, and most delicately intepreting it’ (?1876, fol. 6r ). The other painting he associates with such ‘veritable personages’ is that of ‘Daphnis and Chloe’; Corot’s toile of that name was first exhibited in the Salon of 1845 and praised by Baudelaire (see below), but its present location is now unknown. Architecture is more prominently represented in Corot’s works of the 1830s and 1840s, the ruins and sites of Italy receiving particular attention. Pater remarks how ‘the sunset, pale with coming rain, throws into relief, the flat lines . . . some simulacrum of a line of terraced It[alia]n palaces’ (?1876, fol. 5v ), which suggests Vue prise des jardins Farnèse (le midi)
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Corot, the ‘special interpreter’
Lesley J. Higgins
(1826) and Le Forum vu des jardins Farnèse (le soir) (1826). Yet even in Souvenir des environs du lac de Nemi (1865), L’Île heureuse (1865–86), or La Route de Sin-le-Noble, près de Douai (1873), one finds what Pater terms the ‘Quite French . . . careless quiet of the houses, wh. seem ∧ with their lichened lites & mossy plaster∧24 as much a part of the dim earth as the green hillocks, among wh. the ∧ little∧ melancholy people, spots of colour a little less bright than the wild flowers . . . sit spinning, or gather soul’ (?1876, fol. 4r ). Pater had developed sufficient depth of knowledge to outline the ‘Phases of [Corot]’s landscape art – first he must have a man – then does without it – drops it – all thro’ his longing for friendship’ (?1876, fol. 8v ). As another fragment states, ‘and, also, how gradually, the ∧ actual∧ human fig[ure]s became less & less necessary, the whole thing as landscape, ∧ became∧ more ∧ completely∧ organic’ (?1876, fol. 8v ). Homère et les bergers; paysage (1845), now cited by critics as the last of ‘Corot’s series of subject pictures on the theme of isolation’ (Tinterow et al., 1996, p. 210), is mentioned by Pater as an ‘old p[ainting]’ in which Corot would ‘gather carefully’ these ‘sympathetic’ landscape ‘notes’ (?1876, fol. 8r ). Canvases such as Une Matinée or Vue du port de La Rochelle (1851) certainly capture scenes of collective joy or industry. The social and the solitary are effectively juxtaposed in Chemin de Sèvres (c. 1858), Environs de Beauvais, du côté de Voisinlieu (c. 1850–55), Une Route aux environs d’Arras (also known as Les Chaumières [The Cottages], c. 1853–58), Un Matin à Ville-d’Avray (1868), and the vernally fresh Premières feuilles près de Mantes (c. 1855), each of which approximates Pater’s observation of a woman with ‘her blue hood at the corner of the street of the little street of the little Fr. town, or [paintings that] seem to catch her in all the incidents of a long day’s journey’ (?1876, fol. 6r ). More haunting, however, are the contemplative figures of the later works presented in tonally subtle and natural isolation: Soliel couchant, site du Tyrol italien (1850); La Solitude; Souvenir de Vigen (Limousin) (1866); Paysage au clair de lune (1874); or the woman gesturing in The Evening Star (1864). Perhaps the most memorable fragment in the manuscript evokes the ‘highly original’ interpretation of nature (Tinterow et al., 1996, p. 226) one finds in the later landscapes, exemplified by Corot’s much-lauded ‘masterpiece’, Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864) (Figure 3.1).25 His trees, Pater observes, have in them ∧ the very spirit of France∧ birch & aspen – poplars, for the most part, with their leaves set each on a long thin stalk, moving therefore in the lightest breath of wind and with a noise of falling water when all else is still in form, and making by this constant motion ∧ making on the eye of ours at a short distance ∧ from them, the effect∧ of a strange, blurred, misty grey wh[ich] C. has exactly caught with exactness . . . . And he presents all this to the eye with such reality that the senses ∧ seem to∧ support each other[.] (?1876, fol. 4r –4v )
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Figure 3.1
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Camille Corot, Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864)
Intimations of Baudelairean synaesthesia are yet another indication that the attention devoted to Corot and the ‘very spirit’ of French painting helped prepare Pater to assess Giorgione’s aesthetic. In the 1890s, such countryside descriptions would be refashioned into the environmental texture of Gaston de Latour’s life.26 Not surprisingly, the essay was planned to pay special attention to the way in which Corot’s ‘greater works’ feature temporally confounding hybrid scenes: how the ‘scenery’ of France, ‘so cool’ and ‘dim’, grounds the visual rebirth of ‘the figures of classical story’ (?1876, fol. 5v ). This ‘Arcadian vision’ (Clarke, 1991, p. 74) or mythologized, ‘historiated landscape’ (Rosenblum and Janson, 1984, p. 177) – best expressed in paintings such as Silène (1838), Diane surprise au bain (1836), Une Matinée, and the Orphée series27 – is the reason why Corot is, for Pater, much more than ‘a landscape painter’: ‘For those aspects wh. filled the Gk. fancy are visible still, and still, as we dream over them, will connect themselves with persons, their char[acteris]tics, their life’s incidents, their actual bodily appearance, the whole bright thing resulting itself in ∧ with∧ fainter colours in our dimmer nor[thern] atmosphere’ (?1876, fol. 6v ). Hence the unexpected aptness of Pater’s reference to Corot in ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, the suggestion that ‘in the homely figure of the roughly clad French peasant woman, who, in one of Corot’s pictures,28 is hasting along under a sad light’ one can espy a ‘wholly
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
humanised’ figure of Demeter, a latter-day mater dolorosa ‘so human in her anguish’ (GS, pp. 150, 149).29 To ‘dream over’ Corot’s works attentively is both aesthetically enriching and epistemologically inspiring. Knowledge of nature and human subjects is filtered – refracted, to use a Paterian term – through the lens of ‘reflection and reminiscence’ (Clarke, 1991, p. 77). This souvenir method was subsequently deployed in ‘The Child in the House’ (1878), ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ (1885), and Marius the Epicurean (1885). One of the few critics to admire Homère et les bergers; paysage when it was first shown at the Salon of 1845 was Charles Baudelaire, a crucial albeit ‘subterranean’ figure in Pater’s responsiveness to Corot and Whistler (Clements, 1985, p. 138). Unlike those who learned to appreciate the ‘later’ Corot, when general approbation was being expressed, Baudelaire recognized from the outset of his annual reviews (1845) that Corot was truly ‘at the head of the modern school of landscape’ (1955, p. 29) – and, as he stated in his review of the Exposition Universelle, 1855, one of the Romantic painters whose works provide ‘an element of the ever-new which eventually elude the rules and analyses’ of the academy, that ‘touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness’ that constitutes its ‘particular quality [of] Beauty’ (1955, p. 195). Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846 report is a particularly crucial intertextual source: not only is Romanticism privileged, and the works of Corot positively juxtaposed with those of Watteau,30 but Baudelaire refines the musical motifs which will also sound in ‘The School of Giorgione’ (and echo in Whistler’s career; see below). Vue prise dans la fôret de Fontainebleau (1846) proves that ‘M. Corot is a harmonist rather than a colorist; and it is their very simplicity of colour, combined with their complete lack of pedantry, that gives such enchantment to his compositions’ (Baudelaire, 1955, p. 114). Pater would also be familiar with Baudelaire’s praise for Corot’s ‘synthesizing and abbreviative’ vision in The Painter of Modern Life (Baudelaire, 1964a, p. 15).31 In the Salon de 1859, however, Baudelaire strikes two chords that become vital in Pater’s aesthetic repertoire: Corot is hailed for privileging ‘form’ and for realizing on canvas a ‘luminous gaze’ (1955, p. 277) that eschews realism and its slavish (one could also say, Ruskinian) devotion to nature. If, Baudelaire insists, ‘an assemblage of trees, mountains, water and houses, such as we call a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so of itself, but through me, through my own grace and favour, through the ideas or the feeling which I attached to it’ (1955, p. 275). Thus does Corot have an indirect bearing on the radical assertion of the critic’s subjectivity in the aesthetic process espoused in the Preface to The Renaissance (‘What is this song or picture . . . to me? What effect does it really produce on me?’ (TR, pp. xix–xx) – written before Pater gathers his own observations on Corot’s paintings. Corot’s death in February 1875 may have been the catalyst for Pater’s essay, but his appreciation of the ‘elusive and evanescent’ paysagiste (1893, p. 3)
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was shaped by extended exposure to the Salon journalism of Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier. A friend of Corot since 1835, Gautier was instrumental to Corot’s positive public reception. For three decades, Gautier consistently praised Corot’s ingenuity and originality, the poetic combination of natural simplicity and ‘antique’ sophistication, the tonal ‘harmonies’ of his canvases and their formal accomplishments (however ‘idyllique’ the subject matter).32 Swinburne introduced Pater to Gautier’s writings; Gautier, Mürger, and Baudelaire constitute the formative trio of French authors whose criticism shapes Pater’s understanding of ‘Romanticism’ (1876, p. 67).
‘Speaking of Whistler’ In the late 1860s and 1870s, one would frequently find paintings by Corot and Whistler in the same Paris or London exhibition. Although Whistler was the more obviously transgressive artist, both were approached guardedly in the British press. Sidney Colvin and J. Comyns Carr were laudatory – but with some reservations.33 Carr, for example, worried about ‘the sacrifice of colour to tone’ that was ‘the recognisable rule of French painters’, for that meant less realism in a work and more artistic self-expression (1879, p. 187). Knowingly or not, many took up Baudelaire’s argument that Corot, and Whistler after him, began as ‘colorists’ and became, more subtly, ‘harmonists’ (1955, p. 30), but most found such emphases disturbing.34 Chauvinism also had its day: Corot’s admirable abilities as a paysagiste were often explained in terms of his indebtedness to Constable or Turner; Whistler’s unsettling originality was explained by lumping him in with ‘the French’. Critics not only noticed how both artists tried to achieve tonal balance but presented works with ‘rapid, abbreviated facture and [the] sense of an acute sensibility to the ephemera of perception’ (Rosenblum and Janson, 1984, p. 363). In the 1890s, Pater links Corot and Whistler in two texts. The first is his published review of Moore’s Modern Painting, which generally praises ‘the modern painting of France, of which we in England still know so little, though a large number of us desire to know more’, and specifically identifies Corot as a ‘master’ (1893, p. 3). The second occasion is the unpublished essay ‘The Aesthetic Life’.35 In the latter, although the essayist regrets tell-tale signs of modernity – ‘the ugliness of London for instance of our English towns for the most part, of their suburbs especially’ (?1893, fols 15r –16r ) – he is more than ready to embrace the ‘heterogeneous inheritance’ and substance of ‘our modern art’: Without pausing to estimate our modern art in detail it is enough to suggest the importance in the aesthetic fortune of our day of three such artists as Mr Whistler, Mr Legros36 and Mr Burne-Jones37 so different
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
in method and in ideal . . . [O]ur century has not so much developed as created one important sense of beauty and of the art which ministers there to modern landscape. Corot with a large company in France and England may assure us that if on the one hand our mechanical modern science has taken from nature something of its thaumaturgic touch on the other hand . . . our intimacy of temper the way the mind has come to live at home with itself has evolved a remarkable sensitivity[.] (?1893, fols 24r –26r ) Whistler’s mind was always ‘at home with itself’, perhaps too much so. Corot, Whistler, and Pater share one other distinctive criterion for the ‘sense of beauty’, and Baudelaire is again the articulate intermediary figure. In the Salon du 1845, Baudelaire takes umbrage with ‘fledgling connoisseurs’ who suggest that Corot’s toiles are come ‘to grief in [their] execution’ – they are apparently ‘unaware that a work of genius (or if you prefer, a work of the soul), in which every element is seen, well observed, well understood and well imagined, will always be very well executed when it is sufficiently so . . . [Also] there is a great difference between a work that is complete and a work that is finished; that in general what is complete is not finished, and that a thing that is highly finished need not be complete at all’ (Baudelaire, 1955, p. 29). Most British critics were not willing to make such fine distinctions. In December 1870, for example, the Times reviewer accused Corot (and indeed any contemporary ‘French landscape painter’) of eschewing the careful ‘elaboration of detail’: ‘In comparison with most of our landscape work his seems almost always, slight, and sometimes unfinished to rudeness’ (‘Exhibition of French Pictures’, 1870, p. 4). Three and a half years later – same newspaper, same complaint: Corot is ‘provokingly and perversely incomplete’ (‘Society of French Artists, Bond Street’, 1874, p. 14). Furthermore, the reviewer not only salutes ‘critics trained in that reverence for completeness and thoroughness of workmanship’, but suggests that such a ‘sense of subordination and reserve’ is wholly British: incompleteness is actually ‘anarchy’, ‘evidence of as wild a spirit of anarchy at work in French painting as in French politics’ (‘Society’, 1874, p. 14). Whistler’s Francophile tendencies were especially apparent in this regard. In 1862, why did the reviewer for the Athenaeum so dislike Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl? Because it is such ‘a striking but incomplete picture . . . Able as this bizarre production shows Mr Whistler to be, we are certain that in a few years he will recognize the reasons for its rejection [by the Academy]. It is one of the most incomplete paintings we have ever met with’ (‘Fine Art Group’, 1862, p. 859). Sixteen years later, Ruskin’s lawyers would repeatedly wield a ‘finishing’ cudgel against Whistler. I will cite an account of the libel trial proceedings published in The Times not only because a certain sympathy toward Whistler is expressed, but because Corot’s name is also mentioned:
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In giving his evidence in the case of ‘Whistler v. Ruskin’, Mr Burne Jones [sic] [a witness for the defendant] informed the jury that the plaintiff’s work presented no more than ‘beginnings of pictures.’ Mr Burne Jones would admit, probably, that a picture is finished when its author has reached in the work that stage of realization which exactly embodies his intentions, together with qualities of execution which cannot receive after-painting without a marring of those technical values which it has been his special aim to secure. The pictures of Corot, for example, are as undefined as those of Whistler. Yet no one supposes that because Holbein and Van Eyck had other views of painting, Corot’s works would have gained by more labour; or ever thought them the ‘beginnings’ of pictures only. (‘Mr Whistler’s Painting’, 1878, p. 6)38 Pater enters this debate about artistic ‘completeness’ in 1871 – not in relation to Corot or Whistler, but Michelangelo (in the same essay, Pater first rehearses his commitment to an aesthetic of ‘strangeness’ [TR, p. 57]). Not surprisingly, Pater embraces indeterminacy, welcomes that which is ‘unwrought’ about Michelangelo’s sculpted forms: [H]e secures that ideality of expression which in Greek sculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and in early Italian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which is surely not always undesigned, and which, as I think, no one regrets, and trusts to the spectator to complete the half-emergent form. And as his persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if to realise the expression by which the old Florentine records describe a sculptor – master of live stone – with him the very rocks seem to have life . . . [On the head of] David there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one touch to maintain its connexion with the place from which it was hewn. (TR, pp. 59–60) Despite Pater’s guardedness – the rhetorical art of litotes is refined to new limits in the phrase ‘which is surely not always undesigned’ – a critically daring preference for ‘incompleteness’ is presented, and the role of the spectator in creating the meaning of the work of art secured. Like Baudelaire before him, Pater suggests that too much ‘finish’ obscures the ‘impalpable soul’ of the work (1893, p. 3). Corot and Whistler could never be faulted in this regard. Specific references to Whistler in the 1890s express an awareness of his artistic and cultural significance that was three decades in the making. This is not simply a matter of stating, very broadly, who didn’t know about Whistler in the London and Parisian art scenes, given the celebrity he courted; the public rows with the academies, other artists, and patrons such as Frederick Leyland; the intense scrutiny his exhibitions received from the
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
press, including the Grosvenor Gallery succès de scandale; the Ruskin trial; and the Ten O’Clock Lecture (both the performances and the subsequent publications). Whistler was not only a self-promoting lightning rod for promoting le neuf, he was another ‘cosmopolitan’ figure with a ‘synoptic’ imagination and critical insight. The ‘condition’ of musical metaphors in his oeuvre is the most important example of this, and also the most densely intertextual. Whether or not Baudelaire knew that Corot ‘frequently employed musical metaphors when speaking of his own art’ (Clarke, 1991, p. 83), he was familiar with paintings such as Le Concert (1844) and the mythic Paysage; soliel couchant (or Le Petit Berger, 1840). As early as the Salon de 1846 review, he depended upon musical terminology to describe the expressive fusion of form and matter in Corot’s works, the surpassing of narrative and common realism to capture a moment of stylized perception shared between the viewer and one or several figures. Baudelaire himself was not pretending to originality with the rhetorical and theoretical gestures – readers would and were supposed to notice the ‘correspondance’ with Théophile Gautier’s art criticism. Furthermore, Baudelaire privileged the idea of harmony to express the way in which the seemingly disparate sensations of modern life – the multiculturalism of Paris in 1846, the extraordinary sights and sounds provided by L’Exhibition Universelle, 1855 – could be synthesized into a new world, ‘tout ce monde d’harmonies nouvelles’ (1964b, p. 117). In Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, ‘which Baudelaire sent to Swinburne in 1863, Baudelaire quoted from his sonnet “Correspondances”, and said it would be surprising “if sound could not suggest colour, or that colours could not give the idea of melody, and that sound and colour were not suitable media for translating ideas” ’ (Spencer, 1999, p. 70). Subsequently, critics from Swinburne to Sidney Colvin utilized such musical figures to define an artist’s ‘fusing, transforming, harmonizing power of mind’ (Colvin, 1877, p. 822). In 1861, Parisian critic Paul Mantz praised Corot’s idealizing vision and ‘l’effet fantasmagorique’ distinguishing his canvases, celebrating the intense ‘harmonie générale’ produced (1861, pp. 428, 431). Two years later, Mantz informed readers of Gazette des Beaux-Arts that a new painter, Whistler, had achieved a ‘symphonie du blanc’ with his The Woman in White. Flattered and inspired, Whistler began to rethink the possibilities of his aesthetic effet and the functionality of titles; by 1867, he had renamed paintings already exhibited, and began the practice of classifying everything according to a new generic sensibility: as symphony, harmony, nocturne, arrangement, or caprice. (Symphony in White, No. 3: Three Girls, 1867, was the first to be exhibited under the new nomenclature.) As Graham Hough observes, ‘Whistler is diverting attention from the subject of his picture, the picture as mimesis, to its existence in itself as a harmoniously constructed object’ (1961, p. 179).39 And yet, with all of these discursive nuances in circulation, it is Pater who finds the most exquisite phrasing and the most discerning aesthetic insight,
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in ‘The School of Giorgione’: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it’ (TR, pp. 105–6). Only ‘a quickened, multiplied consciousness’ (TR, p. 190) could produce such an appreciation of art’s most sensuous, concrete, yet untranslatable gift. One should also realize that Pater is quietly answering Ruskin, again: similar to Corot, Baudelaire, and Whistler, he is insisting that art aspires toward itself, not nature.40 Harmonizing Western and Eastern artistic elements was one of Whistler’s great accomplishments. His commitment to Japonisme was as intense as it was widely broadcast. Unlike Rossetti, Tissot, Monet – or Corot41 – who occasionally used Orientalist details and decorations to expand their visual repertoire (examples of what Edward Said terms the ‘domestication of the exotic’ [1978, p. 60]), Whistler transformed the formal design and arrangements of his compositions, even the poses of his sitters. During the 1860s, his rejection of Western traditions of representationalism necessitated a process of defamiliarization and denaturalization – thus effecting an estrangement that would free him from the bonds of a visually mimetic, narrative, and often moralistic tradition. Immersion in Japonisme made that project possible; it provided a ‘syntax for an otherness, an unfamiliarity, a distance’ (Pollock, 1992, p. 31). Congruently, Pater worked toward an aesthetic of differences, first fully articulated in ‘The School of Giorgione’: In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself. And this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may trace the coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards; from Japanese fan-painting, for instance, where we get, first, only abstract colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the power of flowers; then, sometimes, perfect flower-painting. (TR, p. 104) As is so often the case in Pater’s writings, only sustained close scrutiny of works of art could produce such subtle, knowing, yet seemingly casual observations. In ‘The Aesthetic Life’, Japan’s contribution to the ‘world’s heritage of beauty’ is also mentioned. When Pater wrote to John Miller Gray in 1878 to thank him for sending a copy of ‘Mr Whistler’s Exhibition’ (Courant, 18 July 1874) and other reviews (including, perhaps, of ‘The Child in the House’, August 1878), he kindly remarked, ‘You seem to me to have a real possession of many important principles – in speaking of Whistler’s exhibition, for instance’ (Evans, 1970, p. 31).
10.1057/9780230281431 - Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, Edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
The professional parallels and overlapping crises one can map in the lives of Pater and Whistler are informative. Both should be considered vehement champions of beauty in the later nineteenth century, and both are crucial modernist precursors. Pater first published The Renaissance in 1873; the following year, Whistler organized the first major exhibition of his works. Both forays into the public arena were greeted with divided, sometimes vociferous, critical response. In 1877, Pater published the second edition of his book, but this time without the controversial ‘Conclusion’. Several months later, Whistler’s paintings were featured at the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, which Pater attended. Oscar Wilde, then an Oxford undergraduate and never shy about strategic self-promotion, sent Pater a copy of his Grosvenor review – which cites the Oxford don and devotes four wittily harsh paragraphs to the ‘great Dark Master’, Whistler. The ensuing trial against Ruskin, in November 1878, may have prompted Pater’s sudden decision to cancel the new collection of essays he had so carefully been crafting (the original title, ‘The School of Giorgione’ and other Studies, had been changed to the more provocative ‘Dionysus’ and other Studies).42 In 1884, critic and artist were both busy in London: Pater, making final revisions to Marius the Epicurean; Whistler, the newest member of the Society of British Artists, busy trying to revise its mandate, its exhibition practices, and even its name. In 1885, the month before Pater published Marius (designed to clarify his aesthetic and cultural views in the guise of fiction), Whistler tried his hand at public education by delivering his Ten O’Clock Lecture. Whatever Pater knew of Whistler individually should be traced back to Swinburne. Although the latter’s personal ties with Baudelaire were limited, Swinburne and Whistler were intimate friends from the early 1860s, when Dante Gabriel Rossetti introduced them, until 1888, when Swinburne committed literary ‘fratricide’ by publishing a somewhat negative review of the reissued Ten O’Clock Lecture. In August 1865, Swinburne tried to persuade Ruskin to visit Whistler’s studio and ‘have it out with’ him.43 In the 1860s and 1870s, Swinburne assiduously tried to promote Whistler: his activities included writing a poem, ‘Before the Mirror’, in response to Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (Figure 3.2) (1864, which Whistler subsequently incorporated into the frame of the painting and featured in the catalogue), and concluding Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 with extended praise for works not on display – studies for Whistler’s The Six Projects that, Swinburne declared, demonstrate ‘already promise of a more majestic and excellent beauty of form than his earlier studies’.44 Yet, to borrow Swinburne’s words for Blake, both men were ‘born and baptized into the church of rebels’;45 Pater maintained his professional distance advisedly. Evidence suggests, however, that Pater and Whistler were together on two occasions: the Oxford presentation of the Ten O’Clock Lecture, 1885, and in 1889, at a public dinner.
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Figure 3.2 James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864)
Whistler’s post-trial bankruptcy inspired both his major Venetian etchings project and a desire to find new ways to prove himself in the court of public opinion. As Burns states, the trial’s notoriety ‘marked the galvanizing of Whistler’s protracted and often stormy dialogue with the media that became the basis of his strategy for retaining a privileged place in the limelight of late nineteenth-century publicity’ (1990, p. 30). Brilliantly manipulating
10.1057/9780230281431 - Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, Edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
‘the ever more popular press, Whistler attracted and held the spotlight of celebrity just when celebrity . . . was in the process of becoming a cultural commodity’ (Burns, 1990, p. 30). In that regard, the Ten O’Clock Lecture was a work of genius. No detail was spared in the preparations for 20 February 1885: impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844–1901) was hired to organize the event;46 Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly was rented; invitations and tickets were sent to favored friends and press connections by the third week in January; advertisements were placed in major news venues; the seating plan for invitees was carefully arranged.47 The lecture is a manifesto for Aestheticism and a vindication for Art’s greatest lover. In an extended, wholly sexist personification allegory, Art, the ‘cruel jade’, is chastised for being too free with her favors; critics and self-appointed ‘experts’ are derided for their presumptions (the Ruskinian Preacher is singled out as the ‘gentle priest of the Philistine’); the merely vulgar are chastened (Whistler, 1967, pp. 156, 150). Several paragraphs actually suggest that Whistler may have cribbed from The Renaissance: Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful – as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords . . . Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy of a picture is rare, and not common at all . . . [T]he painter’s poetry is quite lost to [the critic] – the amazing invention that shall have put form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result[.] (1967, pp. 143, 147; my italics) The inflections are Whistler’s own, but the insights are definitely Paterian. If Pater missed the London event, coverage in The Times and other papers was substantial, if somewhat bemused.48 But Whistler then took his Lecture on the road, delivering it in Cambridge on 24 March, at the behest of Sidney Colvin, and in Oxford on 30 April 1885. In retrospect, how could he not deliver his message to Ruskin’s stronghold? Once again D’Oyly Carte was employed to organize the performance (or gauntlet). Both the Oxford Times and the Oxford Chronicle & Berks & Bucks Gazette featured prominently displayed advertisements on 18 and 25 April: MR D’OYLY CARTE | Begs to announce that he has arranged with | MR WHISTLER | To give his | ‘TEN O’CLOCK,’ | As delivered at Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly, | At Eight o’clock. | Tickets – Reserved stalls, 5s; unreserved, 2s 6d; back | of hall, 1s. To be had at Mr Russell’s Music Warehouse, | High Street. | Doors open at 7.30, commence at 8. Carriages at 9.
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(With exquisite irony, both newspapers also featured, either 25 April or 2 May, notices of Ruskin’s [second] retirement as Oxford’s Slade Professor of Fine Art.) Did Pater attend? One can only surmise. Extant letters indicate that he was living at Bradmore Road throughout the late spring, 1885. Subsequent coverage in the local newspapers was mixed: the Oxford Chronicle was respectful, and on the whole positive; the Oxford Times, antagonistic, and quick to point out the lecturer’s flaws. Even in the ‘towery’ city, Whistler could easily polarize an audience. In the spring of 1889, Whistler was elected honorary member of the Bavarian Royal Academy, and awarded both the Cross of St Michael and a first-class medal. To celebrate, friends in London organized a dinner on 1 May (the date was chosen to nettle the British Royal Academy, whose annual exhibition was opening that week; Weintraub, 1988, pp. 359–60; Anderson and Koval, 1994, pp. 305–6). In addition to the members of the organizing committee (among them Albert Moore, Alfred Stevens, and John Singer Sargent), more than ‘sixty chosen guests paid the one guinea charge to render homage’ to Whistler (Anderson and Koval, 1994, p. 306). The dinner was described in the London Sunday Times as ‘the heartfelt tribute of true English artists to a master whose work and worth are justly rated by all whose opinion is authority’ (Swinburne, 1889, p. 6). According to John Conlon, the guests included André Raffalovich, Sidney Colvin, and Walter Pater.
Conclusion ‘Arrested thus’ and interconnected, the figures of Corot, Whistler, and Pater have much to teach us about the complex, competitive, and always contentious art scenes of the later nineteenth century in London and Paris. To multiply the terms of Pater’s conclusion to ‘The School of Giorgione’, ‘we must take note of that indirect influence by which [they], for instance, enlarge[d their] permanent efficacy and really [made themselves] felt’ in their culture and, repeatedly, in our own (TR, p. 122).
Notes 1. Simeon Solomon (1844–1905) was the more significant Pre-Raphaelite painter for Pater. Initially, Rossetti may have seemed too closely tied to Ruskin; when Pater did write about Rossetti, it was a study of his poetry (1883). The timing – a year after Rossetti’s death, when Ruskin, in his ‘second period as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford’, was renouncing ‘his former protégé’ – was propitious for a ‘decisive intervention’ (Dawson, 2003, pp. 113, 121). As Jerome McGann, Alastair Grieve, and Elizabeth Prettejohn have detailed, Rossetti rarely showed his works. Yet in ‘The School of Giorgione’, Pater obliquely links the Fête Champêtre with ‘a delightful sonnet by a poet whose own painted work often comes to mind as one ponders over these precious things’ (TR, p. 114).
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
2. David Carrier has argued that Pater ‘had little interest in or knowledge of contemporary visual art’ (1995, p. 112); along with Prettejohn (see next note) and Bullen (pp. 33–4), I strongly disagree. 3. See Prettejohn’s assessment of the ‘practice of intertextual reference [that] constitutes a defining feature of the Aesthetic work of art’, including Pater’s prose (1999, p. 37). 4. Numerous Salon critics ‘came to recognise that Corot’s individuality set him apart from other landscape artists . . . Corot’s [paintings], seemingly so unassuming at first glance, are wider in range of subject-matter and style, and draw upon a number of different artistic traditions’ (Clarke, 1991, p. 49). 5. I am borrowing Clements’s remarks about Swinburne (1985, p. 26). Pater preferred ‘cosmopolitan’ (see Pater, 1893, p. 3). 6. Harry Quilter praised the ‘manly and powerful’ canvases of Millais and Hunt, but worried that, for ‘Messrs Swinburne, Pater, and Burne-Jones’, the way ‘in which the art, poetry, and criticism of the new school was mixed up was excessively curious’ (1880, p. 398; my italics). 7. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); and Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981). 8. Conlon first noted that the Baudelaire citation is eliminated when this essay becomes the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations; Victor Hugo is named instead (1982, pp. 50 n. 12, 85). 9. For a chronological listing of the works by Whistler and Corot on public display from 1860 to 1894 correlated with Pater’s publications, see Higgins (2007, pp. 36–41). 10. The National Gallery first opened in Trafalgar Square on 9 April 1838; see Taylor (1999). 11. The five Corot paintings in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum were acquired in the twentieth century. As of 1913, all but one of the National Gallery’s eight holdings was part of the Saltings bequest, 1910; the other was acquired in 1907. There are more than 80 Corot paintings in the Louvre, but a large portion of those were acquired in the Étienne Moreau-Nélaton bequest of 1906. National Gallery Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the British and Foreign Pictures with Biographical Notices of the Painters, Indices, etc., 81st edn (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), pp. 166–9. 12. Millet died in January 1875, the month before Corot. Pater mentions both artists in ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, and cites Millet in the second essay on Ferdinand Fabre (1889; Pater, 1910b). Pater’s enthusiasm for the ‘habitual’, Wordsworthian ‘solemnity’ of Millet’s paintings (GS, p. 104) is a rare example of disagreement with Baudelaire, who treats Millet dismissively (see especially Baudelaire, 1962). In England, J. Comyns Carr praised both: see ‘Corot and Millet’, Contemporary Review 26 (26 June 1875): 157–68, and Carr (1879, pp. 192–3). 13. Faison, Jr (1960, p. 8). 14. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother, purchased by the French state in November 1891, was installed in the Musée du Luxembourg. 15. Between 1884 and 1887, Whistler exhibited 50 works (oils, water colors, pastels, and etchings) at the Society’s Suffolk Street gallery. See Koval (1999). 16. When Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862) was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1862, Whistler showed it at Berners Street; in 1863, it was a sensation at Paris’s Salon des Refusés.
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17. For reassessments of the Grosvenor Gallery, see below; and Christopher Newall, The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibitions: Change and Continuity in the Victorian Art World (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, eds, The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Colleen Denney, At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877–1890 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). 18. Founded in 1876, the Fine Art featured national and international watercolors, etchings, and engravings. Whistler’s Venetian etchings were featured in its pioneering 1883 one-man show. 19. ‘The first Impressionist paintings to be seen in London were included in Paul Durand-Ruel’s exhibition of December 1870 . . . a heterogeneous collection of French paintings which ranged from Ingres to Corot, [and] Daubigny’ (Flint, 1984, p. 2). See the account of art ‘exiled from Paris by the war’ in ‘Exhibition of French Pictures’ (1870, p. 4). 20. See Tinterow et al. (1996, pp. 383–96, 416). 21. ‘Corot’, bMS Eng 1150 (25) in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, fol. 3r. The manuscript, in fragments, occupies eight sheets of paper. The opening query, ‘Might come in Fontainbleau? With contrast of Millet’s people’, is one of several indications that Pater was planning a series of lectures, or a volume, on French art. The late William Shuter and Billie Inman suggested that the essay was drafted in 1876 (see The Pater Newsletter, 25 [Fall 1990]); Tucker (1996, pp. 45–7), in 1875. 22. The ‘Wordsworth’ essay (April 1874) was certainly a catalyst; the poet is mentioned in Pater (?1876). 23. Purchased by the government and installed in the Musée du Luxembourg in 1854, it was ‘Corot’s first – and for long his only – painting in a Paris museum’ (Tinterow et al., 1996, p. 232). 24. Carets (∧ ∧ ) indicate Pater’s interlinear additions to the manuscript. 25. ‘ “Always the same thing: a masterpiece. But what do you expect? . . . Corot doesn’t know how to do anything else.” So read one of several cartoons that mocked Corot’s envoi to the 1864 Salon; but [they] were right’; the painting became the Emperor’s ‘most astute purchase’ (Tinterow et al., 1996, p. 301). 26. Clements demonstrates how, in Gaston, the figure of Ronsard is based on Pater’s knowledge of Baudelaire (Clements, 1985, pp. 164–5). As Gaston travels through the ‘Vendomois’ region toward Ronsard’s home, the narrator’s comments on the ‘physiognomy of the scene’ are not only reminiscent of Corot’s paintings (and Pater’s observations), they echo Baudelaire’s words for Corot in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (Baudelaire, 1964a, p. 15; GDL, p. 60). 27. In addition to the major work of that name shown at the 1861 Salon (and criticized for its repetitiveness), Corot executed Orphée salue la lumière (1865); Orphée charmes les humaines (1865–70); three versions of Eurydice blessée (1868–70); and ‘two related clichés-verre’ (Tinterow et al., 1996, pp. 288–91). 28. Samuel Wright suggests that the painting in question could be Sèvres-Brimboron – Vue en regardant Paris (?1858–59), frequently reproduced in prints as La Route de Sèvres (1987, p. 105). 29. Also imported from ‘Corot’ is a link between Shelley’s poetry and art that generates ‘sympathy between the ways and aspects of outward nature and the moods of men’ (GS, p. 96; ?1876, fol. 7r ). 30. In Souvenir de Mortefontaine and other works, Corot ‘reveals . . . the mood of the venerable park, some twenty miles north of Paris, where Watteau himself had painted in the early eighteenth century’ (Rosenblum and Janson, 1984, p. 278). See also Clarke (1991, p. 74).
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Lesley J. Higgins
31. Corot is too contemporary to be cited among ‘The Beacons’ in Les Fleurs du mal (Watteau and Delacroix are listed), but he is named in ‘À M. Eugène Fromentin’ in Les Épaves. 32. Gautier (1996, pp. 23, 25, 31, 44, 53, 63, 69, 71, 72–3, 78, 80, 84). See Girard (1996, pp. 7–22). 33. Carr (1849–1916), whose art criticism was featured in the Pall Mall Gazette and The Globe, also served as the English editor of L’Art. He and Charles Hallé were co-directors of the Grosvenor Gallery with Sir Coutts Lindsay from 1877 to 1886. Colvin (1845–1927), an art critic, academic, and professional, was Cambridge’s Slade Professor of Fine Art, 1876–85; Director of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum 1876–84; and Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 1884–1912. Colvin invited Whistler to deliver the Ten O’Clock Lecture at Cambridge; see below. 34. Aesthetic norms meticulously reinscribe culturally embedded gender distinctions. ‘The association of color with “accident” ’, David Summers explains, ‘and with the superficial and feminine is an important habit of Western thought’ (1989, p. 403). Through ‘figures of femininity, [Renaissance] theorists characterized color as beautiful but dangerous, engaged in a complex and antagonistic relationship with a masculinized disegno’ (Reilly, 1992, p. 87). 35. Pater (?1893). This fair copy of the essay occupies 39 sheets. Inman and Shuter agreed (see above, p. 10, n. 5) that bibliographical and textual evidence argued for a 1893–94 composition date. 36. Both Conlon (1982, p. 94) and Prettejohn suggest that the reference to Alphonse Legros’s etchings in ‘The School of Giorgione’ could also be ‘a coded signal that the theoretical discussion was applicable to Whistler’ (1999, p. 40). Legros (1837– 1911) is another minor but crucial figure in the interconnected cultural scene I am trying to map. As an art student in Paris in the early 1860s, he became close friends with Henri de Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) and Whistler; they styled themselves the Societé des Trois. Baudelaire praised Legros in the essay ‘L’Eau-forte est à la mode’; Legros produced etchings for Baudelaire’s translation of Poe that were never published. Swinburne favorably noticed Legros in Notes on Some Pictures of 1868. Whistler provided Legros’s entrée into London art and social circles in 1861, but by 1867 their friendship had ended. In 1876, Legros was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College London. See Wilcox (2004). Legros exhibited nine works at the Grosvenor Gallery’s inaugural exhibition. See also Bullen’s essay, pp. 33–46. 37. Pater alludes to Burne-Jones, ‘a painter of our own time’, in ‘Demeter and Persephone’. The painting he cites, The Day, was originally created for the same home for which Whistler was fashioning ‘The Peacock Room’ – the Leylands’ house at 49 Prince’s Gate, London. See Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The Burne-Jones painting is identified by Tucker (1996, p. 48 n. 14). 38. The article is signed ‘C’ – perhaps for Sidney Colvin, who cautiously admired The Renaissance. See Pall Mall Gazette (1 March 1873): 11–12; Donald Hill, ‘Critical and Explanatory Notes’, TR, pp. 284–9. 39. As Hough observes, Gautier ‘was in the habit of giving his poems titles derived from the other arts, among them the Symphony en Blanc Majeur’ (1961, p. 179). 40. See Baudelaire’s ‘The Modern Public and Photography’ and ‘The Queen of Faculties’ in Salon de 1859 (1955, pp. 22–9, 232–3; and Whistler’s pithy declaration in
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41.
42. 43.
44.
45. 46. 47. 48.
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the Ten O’Clock Lecture: ‘To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano’ (1967, p. 143). I am distinguishing between Whistler’s thoroughly realized Japonisme of the 1860s and the mere accessorizing in later works such as Milly Finch (c. 1884). Whistler’s paintings should be compared with the cheerfully Eurocentric ethos of Claude Monet’s La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume, 1876) or the Orientalist ‘decorations’ enhancing a nude’s submissiveness in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella (c. 1909). First suggested by Brake (1994, pp. 38–9). See Spencer (1999, especially p. 61). For Whistler’s correspondence, see the Centre for Whistler Studies’ superb hypertext archive: http://www.whistler.arts. gla.ac.uk/. Spencer speculates whether ‘Swinburne may also have brought to Whistler’s attention Walter Pater’s essay on Winckelmann, published at the beginning of 1867’ (1999, p. 71). He does not note, however, their shared interest in Phryne, the ‘celebrated courtesan of the fourth century B.C. [who] is said to have bathed in the sea at a festival of Eleusis and so to have become the model for Apelles’ painting “Aphrodite Anadyomene” ’ (TR, p. 435). In the nineteenth century, the scene was reimagined on canvas by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1861), Gustave Boulanger (1850), G. I. Siemiradsky (1889) – and Whistler, in an uncharacteristic nude, Phryne the Superb!, created for Charles Lang Freer in the 1890s. Qtd in Hyder (1963, p. 3). D’Oyly Carte was also preparing for the première of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (14 March 1885). At my request (May 2006), Patricia de Montfort carefully studied Whistler’s seating plan for the invitees; Pater’s name was not among them. See ‘Mr Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock” ’ (1885a: 7).
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Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters
Critical Connections and Quotational Strategies: Allegory and Aestheticism in Pater and Simeon Solomon Colin Cruise
James Abbott McNeill Whistler did not find in Nature that ‘perfection of harmony’ which he had considered it the purpose of art to reveal. In a provocative essay in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies he announced that the ‘single black figure’ in Harmony in Grey and Gold (1876, Harvard University Art Galleries) interested him only as a black mark in a particular place. ‘I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot’, he wrote. He stressed the non-narratival nature of his paintings in his next remarks: ‘Art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it and that is why I insist on calling my work “arrangements” and “harmonies” ’ (Whistler, 1994, p. 126). Although they do not represent polarized positions in Aestheticist theory, in this matter – the importance of narrative – Pater and Whistler seem opposed.1 Certainly, Pater would have been more concerned about the fate of Whistler’s black figure than its creator and more exercised about its possible meanings. It was precisely the temporal narrative – the past, present and future (that relationship of the viewer and the marks on the surface of the picture) – that produced ‘meaning’ for Pater. Even when he contemplates the formal qualities of a work, Pater finds something more personal, less abstract or formal, the ‘spirit’ that informs an artist’s vision of nature. In a passage in his essay on Botticelli, for example, he starts by considering colour and design and ends by contemplating the wider implications of such formal means: At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the colour is cadaverous, or at 68
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least cold. And yet the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like this peculiar quality of colour; you will find that quaint design of Botticelli’s a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves even of the finest period. (TR, pp. 45–6) The work of which such colouration is a part acquires a personally charged meaning for the viewer at the point of viewing. This process towards meaning is clearly at odds with an art-for-art’s-sake independence that Whistler would want us to find. The passage on the ‘peculiar quality of colour’ is followed by Pater’s interpretation of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus where, in a kind of ekphrasis, Pater confirms his quest for meaning in art and a different aesthetic experience, one based upon the ways in which a personal, meaningful narrative is constructed out of the process of looking at works of art. In the space of a few sentences Pater presents his reader with several different types of critical writing – precise description, poetic reverie, suggestive extrapolation – all of them concerned, to a greater or lesser extent, with narrative: Men go forth to their labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the grey water, moving forward the daintylipped shell on which she sails, the sea ‘showing his teeth’, as it moves, in thin lines of foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli’s flowers always are. (TR, p. 46) Even where there appears to be agreement between the practices of Aesthetic painters and Pater’s practice as a critic and historian, we might see divergence. Whistler – and to some extent his co-worker in Aesthetic painting, Albert Moore – presented white and whiteness as a statement of their abandonment of the narrative-laden traditions of colour which had predominated in Western art since the Renaissance. For Pater, on the other hand, white had distinctly narrative nuances. In his discussion of Botticelli’s The Madonna with the Pomegranate (c. 1482, Florence, Uffizi Gallery), for example, the whiteness of the reflected light awakens entirely personal associations with only the most oblique relation to the iconography of the work. In the midst of his discussion of the various ramifications of the face of the Virgin, her ‘type of beauty’ and the nature of the ‘choice’ which is indicated on her face, Pater interrupts himself to observe: ‘The white light on [her face] is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the
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Allegory and Aestheticism in Pater and Solomon 69
Colin Cruise
ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling’ (TR, p. 44). A whiteness we might associate with virginity is here overlain with a different experience of white, transformative, experiential, yet its introduction undercuts traditions of representation, making the white light about personal experience of vision, at once coolly optical and fiercely personal.2 Pater’s ‘A Fragment on Botticelli’ appeared in the Fortnightly Review in August 1870. It is clear from recent scholarship that this is the first significant critical reassessment of the artist’s work and that it informed Ruskin in his own summary of the artist’s career.3 Pater’s essay neither improves on the chronology of Vasari’s Lives nor advances new facts about the artist; rather, it puts forward a reading of Botticelli which reanimates his art for a modern audience. The debate over the ownership of this revival in Botticellian scholarship – Ruskin vs Pater – has been preoccupied with the authorship of the ‘first’ essay. However, the origins of the new enthusiasm for this ‘secondary painter’, as Pater describes him in the concluding paragraph of his essay, might be found in the earlier reception of Botticelli by PreRaphaelite artists. Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon had expressed interest in Botticelli throughout the 1860s. Before that, the enthusiasm of English collectors, among them Alexander Barker, was a significant indication of a taste for Botticelli’s arcane imagery.4 Solomon’s work paraphrases and quotes from Botticelli as early as 1866.5 Even if he did not owe his interest in Botticelli directly to Pater, the processes by which he introduced Botticellian motifs into his work might have been indebted to Pater’s method of constructing complex critical arguments from diverse sources. The assembling of decontextualized or recontextualized quotations, which will be the focus of much of the rest of this essay, offered Solomon a new way of realizing a painted image. Given the relative current poverty of sources available for illuminating the exact nature, duration and degree of friendship enjoyed between Pater and Solomon, we can only conjecture the means by which they shared enthusiasms. The works of Solomon that I discuss here were produced during the time that Pater began to publish his first essays examining the context for the production of Renaissance art. The compositional processes, as well as the themes uncovered in Pater’s essays, have strong parallels in Solomon’s work. Moreover, when Solomon published A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep in 1871 some of its critical reception already appears to have been influenced by Pater’s language and critical methods, almost as if it were the appropriate language to review an undertaking of this nature. In examining Solomon’s work in the rest of this essay I want to suggest a Paterian process of composition that will illuminate what it meant for an artist to put some of Pater’s critical ideas into practice. Further, I want to suggest that, while we might be led to see Solomon’s work as the product of a ‘picturesque union of contrasts’ – as Pater described both the art of Michelangelo and the ‘attractive’ personality
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of Pico della Mirandola (TR, p. 37) – it is nonetheless quietly disruptive and challenging, both Paterian qualities. Following his earliest paintings on Jewish ritual and biblical stories, Solomon began to exhibit works which had some recognizable Whistlerian harmonic aesthetic while retaining some imagery concerned with religious ritual that seems at odds with it. For example, The Mystery of Faith (1870, Lady Lever Art Gallery), almost entirely painted in white and gold, depicts a priest holding a monstrance into which – or beyond which – he stares fixedly (Figure 4.1). Thus, a ‘harmony’ of the visible beauties of colour is subverted by an arcane narrative about the power of the invisible. The Whistlerian concept of ‘harmony’ is uppermost in some of the reviews of the work, where the handling of the yellow, gold and white is praised.6 It is obvious here, as it is elsewhere in Solomon’s paintings depicting ritual, that a substantial part of their impact is due to the introduction of sexual desire as a part of their aesthetic. While the colour harmonies are evidence of a kind of desire of the
Figure 4.1
Simeon Solomon, The Mystery of Faith (1870)
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Allegory and Aestheticism in Pater and Solomon 71
Colin Cruise
eyes, the physical beauty of the young men depicted serves as an invitation to an alternative desire. Perhaps more radically, both elements sit equally upon the picture plane, defying the viewer either to see them in isolation or to discriminate between them in importance or effectiveness. There is a tension between these two elements for Solomon, as there was for Pater in his critical writing. We might say that an appeal to sexual desire acted as a motivational force in the search for meaning, while the abstract or harmonic qualities lead the viewer away from narrative altogether. Solomon’s A Prelude by Bach (1868, private collection) (Figure 4.2) is a vivid example to introduce at this point. On the one hand it is a ‘harmonic’ work with music as its central theme, on the other a coded narrative about desire. The central figure is a woman seated at a pianoforte, singing; around her are emblematic figures resembling those that flank the figure of Venus in Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1478, Florence, Uffizi Gallery). In that work Venus presides over an entourage of allegorical or mythological figures representing the figure of Spring and the phases of sexual love. A Prelude is, in fact, a Botticellian pastiche in which the original composition of the Primavera is disrupted. For example, Zephyrus is replaced by a young, pensive woman who appears to walk into the picture space to the right and Mercury (or Hermes) is represented by a boy holding a flowering branch to the left. The uxoriousness of Botticelli’s allegory is replaced by a celebration of sexual diversity, notably same-sex love. The two women behind and to the right of
Figure 4.2
Simeon Solomon, A Prelude by Bach (1868)
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the picture are so moved by the music that they embrace. The two framing figures are isolated yet suggest adjuncts to the coupling, both heterosexual and homosexual. The pensive woman seated to the right is a reminiscence of the figure of Sappho from Solomon’s Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864, London, Tate Britain). The man who lies half-asleep on the carpet holds a pose closely modelled on that of Mars, especially about the legs and feet, in Botticelli’s Mars and Venus (c. 1485, London, National Gallery), a picture Solomon would have known from the Barker collection. On the other side of the painting two lovers, seemingly unambiguous in their passion, echo the couple in one of Solomon’s most controversial subversions of conventional marriage, The Bride, the Bridegroom and the Friend of the Bridegroom (1868, Dublin, Hugh Lane Gallery) – that is if we re-engage them with the boy bearing the branch to the left. Pater’s ownership of Solomon’s drawing of this subject reminds us that this image of a male and female couple with a younger man at their side had daring, if still coded indications of bisexuality.7 This painting about music is very different, in other words, to those compositions by Whistler where the musicality of the compositions is expressed as a ‘harmony’, ‘symphony’ or ‘arrangement’. A narrative escapes from a tableau of figures whose faces are utterly blank and whose feelings are nearly undetectable. One aspect of Solomon’s Aestheticism is, as I have suggested above, a strong Paterian methodology. The narrative that ‘escapes’ from A Prelude derives from the borrowing and quoting from sources at first appropriated and then shuffled.8 For Solomon, the borrowing and quoting from and the shuffling of images is highly selective and part of a process in which images are rediscovered, given new importance through reinterpretation, or so dislocated from their original context, function or purpose that a new work is created. The very inaccessibility of Botticelli, the chief model for A Prelude, and the obscurity of the meanings of his work, stimulated both Pater and Solomon into using him as an exemplar; he is both visionary and poetic, a kind of practitioner of abstraction yet conversely an illustrator of Dante. The combination leads Pater to remark of the inventiveness of one illustration that ‘the design is no mere translation of Dante’s words, but a true painter’s vision’ (TR, p. 41). Moreover, the ‘distinct and peculiar’ beauty of his figures allows for degrees of ambiguity of interpretation, intention and emotion. Pater uses a surprisingly urgent language to describe Botticelli’s abandonment of the naturalism of his contemporaries. ‘[The] genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating others, and always combining them anew’ (TR, p. 42). The use of ‘usurps’ is particularly pointed, suggesting a deliberate aesthetic procedure, while the introduction of the term ‘data’ characterizes naturalist practices as somehow only scientific, to be made the vehicle of the
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intellectual, the emotional or the visionary by an exceptional mind. Pater’s use of the journalistic phrase ‘plays fast and loose’ makes this section of the historical reappraisal of a Renaissance painter more like a periodical review of a contemporary artist. Perhaps that is the point. Like Botticelli, Solomon was born into a ‘generation of naturalists’ (TR, p. 41) as Pater describes it, and in A Vision he resembles Dante, if in miniature. Solomon rejected the Pre-Raphaelite naturalism with which he had become identified to achieve a more penetrative art, in particular a transgressive vision of love. We can either detect Pater’s influence at the centre of Solomon’s artistic enterprise or see Solomon’s practice as an artist as offering Pater a modern equivalent to those figures in the early phase of the Italian Renaissance, Pico and Botticelli for instance, that fascinated him. The process of quotation from Botticelli and others helps introduce, if covertly, narrative devices into an aesthetic painting devoted to formal pictorial ends; it opens an imaginative space which displays its origins in art, implying an art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, while offering a narrative, however obscured, that arises from the new context. The most striking example of this process is Solomon’s prose-poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, in which the artist ‘rehangs’ his pictures within a written space composed or assembled from references to the art and literature of the remote past. The various sources and inspirations which form this prose-poem–picture alliance are wide-ranging and their individual discussion is not appropriate here. The books of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, Petrarch, Dante, de Lorris, the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili, Signorelli, Blake, Dürer, Mantegna, Gozzoli and Botticelli have a presence in the work; they illustrate the richness and complexity of his borrowings, quotations and allusions. This list is akin to the ‘ambitious array of every sort of learning, and . . . profusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from the astrologers, the Cabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite’ that Pater identifies in the Song of Divine Love of Pico della Mirandola (TR, pp. 32–3). And, although Solomon was anticipating a method later to be identified in Pater’s own prose style, he might also have been influenced by the practices of Swinburne, whose borrowings from ancient and modern literature formed only a small part of the controversial features of his practice as a poet.9 My purpose here is not simply to identify Solomon’s sources and, thereby, either to reduce or elevate him in relation to them; I want, instead, to suggest that Solomon’s synthesis is a way of creating something new and suggestive. Clotted or saturated with art, his painting and writing become removed from the transcription of nature by quotational devices which locate his concepts in a world of art or aesthetic experience. In the process, an intermingling of ancient Greek, Roman, Hebraic and Christian ideas and a crossover of pictorial and literary modes allow for a sense of the body different from that of the conventions of academic or genre figure painting but central to the emerging discourse of homoeroticism.
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The sites visited by the soul and the traveller and the tableaux presented in Solomon’s A Vision describe several of Solomon’s paintings which either had already been, or were about to be, exhibited. These formed part of two separate, if overlapping, series of paintings Solomon had exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Dudley Gallery throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s. The first consisted of images of religious rituals depicting young men representing different world religions, robed in ritual vestments, in various acts of devotion and with a variety of religious accessories. These included The Mystery of Faith, discussed above, and A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867–68, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1869, and now known as A Greek Acolyte. The second was of images concerning love, usually depicting a winged male figure, as in Love Bound and Wounded (1870, present whereabouts unknown), exhibited at the Royal Academy and Love in Autumn (1866, private collection).10 The reception of A Vision is significant for airing ideas about the role of current art and criticism. I have traced four reviews: the first of which was a short notice by E. M. Lloyd in the Athenaeum in March 1871. Lloyd raised doubts about Solomon’s achievement in literature and expressed disapproval – very early in date and yet very clearly stated – of an art-for-art’s-sake Aestheticism: As a painter, Mr Solomon seems to possess a genuine love of the beautiful. The same appreciation of beauty of form shows itself in his poetical prose; but he should remember that prettiness of expression is no sufficient reason for the existence of a book, even if (and this we doubt) mere beauty of form is a sufficient reason for the existence of a picture. (Lloyd, 1871, p. 368) In May 1871, a review by Sidney Colvin appeared in the Fortnightly Review. Hitherto overlooked by commentators on Solomon, Colvin’s review is an interesting adjunct to his essay in the Portfolio in 1870, which identified Solomon as being in the forefront of contemporary painting. While selective in its praise, Colvin’s review is generally approving, acknowledging a special quality in Solomon’s work which was not located in some formal aesthetic ‘love of the beautiful’, as Lloyd expressed it, but ‘in a colour of style and personality’ (Colvin, 1871, p. 675). This is a carefully worded yet suggestive phrase which adopts Pater’s idiosyncratic critical language advanced in the essay on Botticelli, which had appeared only the year before in the same periodical. (Oddly, it was not the language mimicked by Colvin for his review of Pater’s Renaissance written for the Pall Mall Gazette in March 1873, in which Pater’s prose style is identified as a remarkable element of the book.) In these reviews Solomon is a ‘poetic’ painter much in the manner of Botticelli as described by Pater. Swinburne, however, was much less approving in his review, which appeared in the Dark Blue in July. He was savage
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Colin Cruise
Read by itself as a fragment of spiritual allegory, this written ‘Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep’ seems to want even that much coherence which is requisite to keep symbolic or allegoric art from absolute dissolution and collapse; that unity of outline and connection of purpose, that gradation of correlative parts and significance of corresponsive details, without which the whole aerial and tremulous fabric of symbolism must decompose into mere confusion of formless and fruitless chaos. Even allegory or prophecy must live and work by rule as well as by rapture; transparent it need not be, but it must be translucent. (Swinburne, 1871, p. 568) Swinburne’s confusion in the maze of Solomon’s poetic allegory might be dissipated if there were ‘further reproductions of the designs’, he tells us; designs ‘full of mystical attraction and passion, of bitter sweetness and burning beauty’ (Swinburne, 1871, p. 571).11 Despite Swinburne’s strictures on obscurity – or, perhaps, as a vindication of them – I would argue that Solomon’s language acts as a kind of veil which must be penetrated before the true meaning of his allegory can be grasped. Further, the use of allegory rather than some other form is, I would suggest, indicative of a dialogue between Pater and Solomon as to its role in the production of contemporary art. Indeed, Pater anticipates criticism of these methods at the very start of his essay on Pico della Mirandola. Noting attempts made by Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to ‘reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece’, he continues, It was inevitable that from time to time minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and man’s allegiance was divided. (TR, p. 23) Pater’s own methods of artistic appreciation and interpretation are set against Pico’s in that he sees him and his contemporaries as having no sense of history in the modern sense but an allegorical one instead. The scholars of the period, Pater tells us, ‘had no idea of development, of differences of ages, of the process by which our race has been “educated”. In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they were thus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation’ (TR, p. 26). In attempting to explain the difference of Pico’s methods from those of less distinguished thinkers, Pater alights on the complex allegorical interpretations of Pico and others like him as their most characteristic method. In Pater’s famous term they ‘go below the surface’:
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about his friend’s achievement in the prose-poem, which he contrasted with the success of his paintings:
Allegory and Aestheticism in Pater and Solomon 77
Although Pater seems to be beguiled by the allegorical method because of its strangeness and remoteness – concepts he returns to throughout the essay – there is a sense in which he borrows from it to arrive at his own synthesis for the modern historian. His understanding of Pico grows into his understanding of Botticelli. It is a contributing factor in how he appreciates the work of Solomon, whose agenda as a painter moves away, as I have observed, from the naturalism of his age to an allegorical, erudite and complex iconographic construction. Reviewing A Vision for The Academy, J. A. Symonds implied that a radical agenda was being set out in Solomon’s prose-poem. The ‘Love of Mr Solomon’s Vision is quite distinct and unconventional’, he wrote, before attempting to define this Love by comparing it with what it is not: ‘not classical, not medieval, not Oriental’ (Symonds, 1871, p. 189). Symonds’s insistent gendering of Love throughout his essay is surely deliberate and must have had a coded significance for some of the readers of the review. Most of the individual ‘visions’ revealed to the author by his Soul are of male figures personifying various states of love or attributes of love or correlated states: Eternal Silence, for example, is represented as a male figure who bears in his hand a crystal globe. The female figures are Memory, Pleasure, Passion and Night. But Sleep, Time and Day are male, and Love, in Autumn, in Oblivion, Bound and Wounded, Dead, Sacramental or in Triumph, is consistently male. Solomon’s Love is essentially Eros rather than Aphrodite, Cupid, if a rather big Cupid, rather than Venus. Symonds noted of this Love of Solomon’s: In truth, the originality of any poetical or pictorial Mythus, such as is embodied in this vision and in the series of Mr Solomon’s drawings, consists in its creator having viewed an old problem with new eyes, and communicated to the object some of the qualities of his own soul and of the age in which he lives. This, in our opinion, Mr Solomon has done with eminent and unmistakable distinctness. (Symonds, 1871, p. 189) His adjudication is that Solomon has synthesized several historical and cultural images of love (or Love, for there is a deliberate ambiguity), and that this is the importance of his contribution to the study of love. The modernity which Symonds identifies in A Vision is a product of selection and synthesis. He was surely right to emphasize the classical and medieval sources for
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Plato and Homer must be made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces could never unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one must go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more remote meaning, – that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessus divinus aliquid [Pico], latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure of speech in the books of Moses. (TR, p. 26)
Colin Cruise
A Vision, which act as a kind of compositional aesthetic strategy. Their coexistence is further evidence of a sharing of ideas between Pater and Solomon at this time. In February 1869 the Illustrated London News, reviewing the Dudley Gallery exhibition, censured Solomon’s Sacramentum Amoris, remarking upon the synthetic, constructed quality of the imagery (1868, now lost, shown here in the platinotype by Frederic Hollyer, London, Victoria and Albert Museum) (Figure 4.3). The review noted that the work represents ‘a male figure holding a little winged effigy in a lantern, and relieved against a dark blue background, intended probably for the Athenian Acropolis’: [He] unites, in defiance of Pagan mythology, the attributes of Bacchus, Mercury, and Apollo; the further liberty, somewhat blasphemous as Christians may think, is taken of quoting as a legend for the frame (in Latin) the lines from St John’s Gospel, ‘The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not’. To perverted fancy the figure with all its symbols may, of course, be made to yield almost any meaning, but scarcely a wholesome or profitable one. (Anon., 1869, p. 135) Although this reviewer saw Swinburne as an instigator of what was described as ‘all this gush of love business’ affecting British painters, Solomon’s daring figure of Love resonates with Pater rather more than Swinburne. Pater suggests an entire range of experiences of love from the cruelly outcast to the radiantly transformative while maintaining a homoerotic bias. Thus, ‘all this gush of love business’, while seen as a new and general tendency in British painting, is located more specifically in the linked practices of poetry and painting which were the subject of several of Pater’s essays on the Renaissance. The synthetic quality of Solomon’s painting Sacramentum Amoris is paraphrased towards the end of A Vision, where the figure is described in prose: He moved towards us, gently lifted by the spirit from the ground, neither flying nor running. Ever and again his feet, wherefrom sprang glowing wings, touched the earth and caused it to bring forth flowers; his head was bound with a fillet of violet, and violet blossoms breathed upon by Love; he carried a mystic veil of saffron colour, which depended from his head upon his shoulders even to the ground, and his shining body was half-girt with fawn-skin; in his hand he carried a staff, which was as the rod of the high priest, for as I looked upon its barrenness burst forth in almond bloom; and, as when the prophet put away his shoes from off his feet before the Holy Place, and beheld the bush burning with fire but not consumed, even so I saw upon the staff the dancing tongues of flame cling around the wood, but leave it scatheless. (Solomon, 1871, pp. 30–1)
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Figure 4.3
Frederick Hollyer after Simeon Solomon, Sacramentum Amoris (1868)
Solomon describes the figure of a priest of Love who bears ‘the Very Love within his hands’, an image which unites the two informal series of paintings, those on religious ritual with those on love, but which also offers a synthesis of male and female characteristics in an attempt to construct a
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sexless figure.12 Here the figure combines elements of Bacchus and Mercury with Aaron, the High Priest of the Old Testament. Aaron gives us the symbol of the rod, while a priest of a sacramental ritualized religion, like Catholicism, bears the chalice, and a Jewish bride or groom wears the veil. We are struck also by the fawnskin and the winged ankles, with their different meanings from different cultures. Indeed, the very changes of racial, cultural and gender characteristics clearly act as a paradigm of Solomon’s synthetic technique even if his point is at first obscured and its expression uncomfortably unlovely. When we read A Vision we are involved in an act of deciphering a work in which prose, poetry, painting and drawing are brought together in a particular way and for a particular purpose, even if that purpose is veiled. The ‘vision of love’ may be rooted in high culture but in its ultimate visual form it is unsettling and unconventional. The message is uncompromising although the language is familiar, derived as it is from biblical texts, fragments of poems or stories from ancient Greece.13 The tendency to quotation and allusion, shared by Pater and Solomon, was to construct and assemble images, pictorial and critical, which are essentially quotational. It is a tendency, almost a methodology, that allows both critic and painter to go beyond current practices in art criticism and painting. For Solomon it permitted an avoidance of both academic art teaching and its alternative, the radical intervention of the Pre-Raphaelites of some 20 years before. At times this compositional process runs parallel to Pater’s, at other times echoes it, at yet others prefigures it. Pater describes the power of the allegorical impulse as a critical mode in his essay on Botticelli, in which he demonstrates the ability to interpret works of art in ways that open up personal meanings. Not only does he provide a way of reading A Vision and the painted works that were central to its composition, he would seem to have provided, too, the compositional structure that helped produce Solomon’s works in the 1860s and 1870s, their quotational strategy. But Pater’s depth of interpretation – his own ‘going below the surface’ – depends, perhaps, too much on the breadth of the sources plundered for the process to work successfully for contemporary painting. In Solomon, it helps produce an erudite, even scholarly, painting that tackles serious concerns. How else were uncomfortable truths to be aired in art? How else confronted except in the veiled form of allegory?
Notes 1. For discussions of Pater’s contribution to, and place in, the Aesthetic Movement, see Prettejohn (1999, pp. 36–58) and Shrimpton (1995). While I am suggesting in the opening pages of this essay that an idea of a separation of Aestheticist criticism into Whistlerian and Paterian forms is persistent, it is also clearly artificial. There
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
are clear areas of overlap and indeed Lesley Higgins demonstrates that Whistler ‘cribbed’ from Pater (see above, pp. 58–9). Pater works out this dichotomy throughout the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, particularly in its opening pages, where he brings together the oppositional states of new perception and personal memory: ‘To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or fleeting less, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down’ (TR, p. 188). For a recent discussion of the Pater vs Ruskin dispute on Botticelli, see Paul Tucker ‘ “Reanimate Greek”: Pater and Ruskin on Botticelli’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), pp. 119–32. Barker’s collection, which contained several Botticellis, along with important works by Piero della Francesca and other Italian Renaissance artists, was displayed in his house in Piccadilly. It appears to have been available to artists and, following his death in 1873, was auctioned at Christie’s in June 1874. Solomon’s earliest clear reference to Botticelli can be detected in Love in Autumn (1866). Painted in Florence, this work suggests that Solomon saw and copied from The Birth of Venus, which it paraphrases by reversing the pose of the figure of one of the Zephyrs who blows Venus to the shore. See Cruise (2006, pp. 144–7). The reason for the reversal and the processes by which it was achieved are unclear, although it may have been the result of a simple artist’s exercise in reworking another artist’s picture by using a basic design formulation. Two criticisms will serve to illustrate this point: Guardian (5 April 1871): p. 421: ‘The Mystery of Faith . . . is embodied by Mr Solomon in the person of a young priest who is spiritual rather than strong, & whose face differs little in tone from the pale yellow of the embroidered cope that he wears.’ Art: Pictorial and Industrial 1 (9 March 1871): p. 199: ‘ “The Mystery of Faith” . . . , a dark, southern faced, light-eyed young enthusiast, in pale-yellow figure robe, holding aloft the sacred vessel, by Simeon Solomon, is another work in which colour is harmoniously felt.’ For other critical appraisals see Cruise (2006, pp. 131–2). A Prelude reverts to the earlier placing of the youth in the drawing The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love (1865, London, Victoria and Albert Museum). In the version of this subject owned by Pater, drawn in the same year as A Prelude was painted, the youth, a deacon-like figure, is placed on the right of the composition. In the 1865 version the youth is a naked Amor. In both works the figure of the youth bears a blossoming branch. Pater’s use of quotations, his misquoting and inaccuracy have been the subject of several essays; see, for example: Samuel C. Chew, ‘Pater’s Quotations’, Nation 99 (1914) and H. Law, ‘Pater’s Use of Greek Quotations’, Modern Language Notes 58, no. 8 (1943): 575–85. The reference to ‘shuffling’ in my text is a suggestion derived from William F. Shuter, ‘Pater’s Reshuffled Text’, Nineteenth Century Literature 43, no. 4 (1989): 500–25. C. Y. Lang identifies references to Shakespeare (Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Emily Brontë, Homer, Plato and several books of the Bible, among others, in just one of the poems from Poems and Ballads (1865), ‘The Triumph of Time’. For a further discussion of Swinburne’s quotations and borrowings see David G. Reide, ‘Swinburne and Romantic Authority’, in A Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne, ed. Rikki Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), pp. 22–39.
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10. The two series overlapped in their depiction of an intense, dreamy, mystical or otherworldly atmosphere and both depicted, almost exclusively, male figures. We might perceive links between them. The primacy of religious feeling in the first series of ‘ritual paintings’ is both challenged and supplanted by erotic passions and desires in the second. The reverse effect is also achieved, the Love pictures having a religious, even sacramental, quality, the ritual paintings an erotic charge. 11. The combination of bitterness and sweetness used to describe Solomon’s designs was a feature of Pater’s brief reference to the painter in his essay ‘A Study of Dionysus’, Fortnightly Review (December 1876), reprinted in Greek Studies (1894), where Solomon’s Bacchus is seen as a ‘realisation’ of ‘the god of the bitterness of wine, “of things too sweet”; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup’ (GS, p. 37). 12. For a discussion of the circumstances of the painting of Sacramentum Amoris and a transcription of some of Solomon’s letters to his patron Frederick Leyland discussing the work in progress, see Ferrari (2005). 13. The greatest number of references to the literature of the past, however, and those with both the greatest coherence and the greatest ‘mystical impact’, are from the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible). References to verses from the biblical books of Exodus, Daniel, Isaiah and Jeremiah, as well as to ‘The Song of Solomon’, appear within the work. To these sources, we owe Solomon’s paraphrases of the incidents of the burning bush, the three young men in the burning furnace, the purging of transgressions with burning coal held to the lips, the valley of dry bones, and the frequent, interrelated images of veiling, crowning and of bridal ceremony.
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Part II
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Pater and the Dynamic Arts
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5 Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry
. . . that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves. — Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance My title refers to an art object that does not actually exist, but rather lives only in the text of Pater’s imaginary portrait, ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’. The set of medieval tapestries that the narrator discovers in the French river-town of Auxerre tells the story of Denys, a story in turn that Pater’s narrator represents in his own words. As such, Pater’s portrait belongs to the long tradition of literary texts that represent purely fictional works of visual art, what John Hollander has called ‘notional’ ekphrasis (1995, pp. 7–32). We might say that Pater’s tapestry is radically notional, for he provides little specific description of what the woven images look like, nor of the tapestry’s overall design. Indeed, as we read the story of Denys, the ekphrastic encounter seemingly falls away. Yet, the startling final sentences of the portrait remind us that we have been reading a translation of image into word, an act of intense imaginative energy by which the narrator seemingly transforms the lifeless Denys into a living creature who walks the rainy streets of the late nineteenth century. This framing device, the ekphrastic episode contained within a narrative detailing both an encounter with visual images and the effects of that encounter, is central to the classical tradition of notional ekphrasis, from Aeneas’s reading of the wall murals on the temple of Juno, to Dante’s encounter with the carved figures on the terrace of Pride in the Purgatorio, to Chaucer’s rereading of Aeneas’s tale in The House of Fame, and running throughout the history of Western literature. In dramatizing the act of interpreting visual art, narratively framed ekphrases of notional images highlight the metatextual potential of all ekphrasis. Pater’s portrait follows in this tradition, dramatizing the act of interpreting visual art and translating images into words. There is no extended treatment of figured tapestry in any of Pater’s critical writing, but in the second of the 1880 essays on the beginning of Greek sculpture, Pater singles out the Bayeux Tapestry for the intensity of 85
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Kenneth Daley
Kenneth Daley
its expression. Like the ‘splendidly wrought treasure-chest of cedar-wood’ (GS, p. 225) that Pausanias discovers in the temple of Here, sculpted, perhaps, as early as the seventh century BCE, the Bayeux Tapestry stands as an example of the expressive potential of even very early art: ‘any one who has seen the Bayeux tapestry, for instance, must recognize the pathos and energy of which, when really prompted by genius, even the earliest hand is capable’ (GS, p. 227). Interestingly enough, four months before Pater first published ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ in the Fortnightly Review (October 1886), a fulllength replica of the Bayeux Tapestry was unveiled and placed on display at the Nicholson Institute in Leek, completed in only one year by 35 women from the Leek Embroidery Society. The 230-foot embroidery toured towns and cities across England for close to ten years, drawing thousands of paying viewers, and even traveling to America and Germany. The idea for the replica came from Elizabeth Wardle, a highly skilled needleworker and founder of the Society, who was inspired by hand-colored photographs of the entire tapestry at the South Kensington Museum and a subsequent visit to Bayeux.1 The replica and tour may well have resonated with contemporary readers of Pater’s short story concerning the discovery and reproduction of a medieval tapestry, this one woven in words. The completion of the replica by the women of the Leek Society works to reinforce the culture’s identification of weaving and embroidery, along with other crafts, as essentially female activities, associated with female virtue and domesticity.2 Pater’s narrative, however, exploits the more subversive ends of figured weaving, a means of asserting power and agency of a feminine voice that might otherwise never be heard. As the representation of a silent tapestry telling a tale of suffering and torture, I suggest that the portrait belongs to a particular subgenre of the ekphrastic tradition associated with Ovid, the myth of Philomela, and the ‘voice of the shuttle’. In alluding to and appropriating the subversive rhetoric of this tradition, Pater extends the voice of the visual tale to include the both feminine and homosexual figure of Denys. In his telling of the Denys story, Pater’s narrator makes little effort to describe images that readers can reconstruct or visualize as tapestry. Rather, he performs (and rather extravagantly) what Andrew Laird has termed ‘disobedient ecphrasis’, narrative and description that ‘breaks free from the discipline of the imagined object and offers less opportunity for it to be consistently visualized or translated adequately into an actual work of visual art’ (1993, p. 19). The narrative is wildly disobedient, largely ignoring the ‘ontological distinction’ (Laird, 1993, p. 29) between Denys in a picture and Denys directly described. Even as the narrator first introduces the stained glass and tapestry to his readers, he provides only a modest account of the specific manner in which figures are represented, and conveys very little of the tapestry’s overall design, the relation of part to part, section to section. After seeing the fragment of stained glass, he makes ‘eager inquiry’ about the
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Certainly, those tapestries and the stained glass dealt with the same theme. In both were the same musical instruments – pipes, cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, indeed, included the building of an organ, just such an instrument, only on a larger scale, as was standing in the old priest’s library, though almost soundless now; whereas in certain of the woven pictures the hearers appear as if transported, some of them shouting rapturously to the organ music. A sort of mad vehemence prevails, indeed, throughout the delicate bewilderments of the whole series – giddy dances, wild animals leaping, above all perpetual wreathings of the vine, connecting, like some mazy arabesque, the various presentations of one oft-repeated figure, translated here out of the clear-coloured glass into the sadder, somewhat opaque and earthen hues of the silken threads. The figure was that of the organ-builder himself, a flaxen and flowery creature, sometimes well-nigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes muffled in skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but always with a strong impress of real character and incident from the veritable streets of Auxerre. (IP, pp. 53–4) The story begins and the scenes unfold – the discovery of the green flask, the celebration supper, the canons at play on Easter Day and the first appearance of Denys, and on and on – but no effort is made to indicate in any detail the manner in which these scenes are rendered on the actual tapestry. That they are connected by ‘perpetual wreathings of the vine, . . . like some mazy arabesque’ informs us of the tapestry’s non-linear design, but says nothing of its specific organization, the division perhaps of scenes in upper and lower registers of the tapestry, or perhaps the use of overlapping forms, or the suggestion of deep space. The accumulation of verbal techniques such as flashback and digression, the omniscient representation of thought and motive, the prosopopoeial voicing of speech and sound, all take the reader further and further away from the visual media of the tapestry and glass. Even when the narrator does call attention to the difference between the medium of visual representation and its referent, what James Heffernan calls ‘representational friction’ (1993, p. 19), the effect is to highlight some element of the narrative as opposed to focusing attention on some detail of the visual object. For instance, the noting of the library organ, standing in close proximity to its visual representation, is an assertion of presence, a bolstering of the truth claim the narrator makes for Denys’s story, revealed in both image and the narrator’s own text – ‘What follows’, the narrator asserts in the portrait’s opening paragraph, ‘is a quaint legend . . . as it happened in
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rest, and learns of the set of tapestries ‘designed to portray the whole subject of which the figure in the stained glass was a portion’ (IP, p. 53). The next day, he enters the ‘little Gothic building’, home of the village priest, and is led to the tapestries hanging on the walls of the parlor and staircase:
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an ancient town of medieval France’ (IP, p. 47). The picture of the organ is confirmed by ‘just such an instrument’ as stands in the here and now, as the historical accuracy of the varied images of Denys is supported by the tapestry’s ‘strong impress of real character and incident from the veritable streets of Auxerre’ (veritable from the French, vérité). In addition to lending credibility to the story, the library organ, in its near silence, ‘almost soundless now’, lends strength and sweetness to the heard melodies of the tapestry organ. Pater’s narrator is seemingly not burdened by the uncertainties and questions that characterize the speaker of Keats’s famous ode and his encounter with the silent urn (Pater’s use of the word ‘legend’ also recalls Keats’s poem). He may remind us that he represents a representation – ‘the hearers appear as if transported’ – but the stress falls overwhelmingly on the rapturous shouts of the crowd and the organ music, sounding louder in contrast to the soundless organ in the next room. The narrator makes a few other subtle references to the visual medium of the tapestry. In describing Denys as a ‘flaxen and flowery creature’, for example, he conveys the soft straw-blond color of Denys’s hair, but the word ‘flaxen’ gestures as well to the tapestry thread, medium and referent neatly conflated in a single word. Later in the portrait, he refers again to Denys’s ‘flaxen fairness’ (IP, p. 67). But the unrelenting narrative thrust of the ekphrasis works to subdue the presence of the visual medium. Although the narrator consistently relates sounds of music and speech – vespers are sung; a cacophony of pipe music creates ‘intolerable noise’ (IP, p. 63); the ‘wandering sounds’ (IP, p. 72) of the organ move through the night; Denys himself is heard ‘begging querulously . . . , “Give me wine, meat; dark wine and brown meat!” ’ (IP, p. 64) – he ignores his own interpretive process, the granting of voice inferred from the silent figures’ specific pose or visible expression. In this way, narrative momentum is never stilled, and his own narrative authority never questioned.
I This then is the ekphrastic encounter that Pater builds as the frame for his portrait, and it focuses a number of thematic contradictions, conflicts, and differences, many of which critics have previously recognized: the conflict between Hebraism and Hellenism (the return of a pagan god to a Christian world);3 the distance between archaic art objects and a modern observer;4 the opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollonian;5 the contradiction between ‘unconscious (sentimental-ecstatic)’ and ‘conscious (allegorical-mystical)’ conceptions of myth;6 ‘the polarization between protagonist and society’;7 the ambiguities of interpretive practice itself;8 the ambiguities of Denys himself, figure of summer and winter, force of creation and destruction.9 The presence of these historical, cultural, and social oppositions is consistent with what W. J. T. Mitchell has taught us to expect in
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ekphrastic texts. ‘Ekphrastic poetry’, Mitchell writes, ‘is the genre in which texts encounter their own semiotic “others”, those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, graphic, plastic, or “spatial” arts’ (1994, p. 156). That confrontation, borne of the ‘important differences between visual and verbal media at the level of sign-types’ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 161), becomes the staging ground for a host of ideologically charged oppositions. In Mitchell’s terms, the ‘semiotic structure of the image/text’ is not neutral, but rather is loaded with assumptions about gender, race, and other ‘optical/discursive figures of knowledge and power’ (1994, pp. 181, 162). In Pater’s portrait, then, as in all ekphrastic texts, we can chart what Mitchell describes as ‘the “working through” of ekphrastic ambivalence’ (1994, pp. 163–4), the text’s handling of ‘the problems staged for it by the theoretical and metaphysical assumptions about media, the senses and representation’ (1994, p. 164) that attend the image/text encounter. That ambivalence is expressed with great clarity at the portrait’s close. The story is done, and Denys is dead. Hunted through the streets, he is dismembered, ‘torn at last from limb to limb’ (IP, p. 76). The townsmen peel away his skin, sticking ‘little shreds of his flesh’ in their caps, ‘the women lending their long hairpins for the purpose’ (IP, p. 76). Even his heart, we are told, buried in a dark corner of the Auxerre Cathedral, ‘must long since have mouldered into dust under the stone’ (IP, p. 76). Denys is no more. Yet, the story of Denys survives, woven into the threads of the medieval tapestry, and his image shines through the brilliant fragment of stained glass.10 Translated from the medium of glass and thread, he is resurrected, like the Dionysus Zagreus of Orphic legend, capable of movement and speech. ‘So the figure in the stained glass explained itself’, the narrator insists: ‘To me, Denys seemed to have been a real resident at Auxerre. On days of a certain atmosphere, when the trace of the Middle Age comes out, like old marks in the stones in rainy weather, I seemed actually to have seen the tortured figure there – to have met Denys l’Auxerrois in the streets’ (IP, p. 77). The assertion of renewed presence and speech typifies the ekphrastic genre’s resurrectionist impulse. But typical too is the register of doubt – Denys only seems to be. The ekphrasist yearns to believe in what (he seems ultimately to acknowledge) is only the illusion of presence. Albeit more obliquely, the words ‘trace’ and ‘old marks’ also point to Denys’s figurative form. Pater’s portrait recreates the tension, central to the ekphrastic tradition, ‘between the realist, presencing, logocentric desire and the counter-pressure of absence – between what Murray Krieger calls miracle and mirage . . . that is manifested in the repeated moment of ekphrasis’ (Cunningham, 2007, p. 71).11 In terms of both subject matter (the story of Denys) and kind (a tapestry), I argue that the ‘otherness’ of Pater’s ekphrastic image is associated with the feminine and the homosexual. Contemporary readers typically regard the ekphrastic encounter as being powerfully gendered. While Mitchell argues that gender is ‘only one among many figures of difference that energize
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Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry
Kenneth Daley
the dialectic of the image/text’, he acknowledges ‘female otherness [as] an overdetermined feature in a genre that tends to describe an object of visual pleasure and fascination from a masculine perspective’ (1994, pp. 181, 168). James Heffernan describes the ekphrastic encounter as ‘a duel between male and female gazes, the voice of male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, of male narrative striving to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poised in space’ (1993, p. 1). Accordingly, he traces a genealogy of ‘masculine ekphrasis’, in which ‘the image is largely dominated by the authority of the male word’ (Heffernan, 1993, p. 7). In contrast, Heffernan identifies an ‘alternative genealogy’ that enacts ‘– as far as language can – a revolution of the image against the word’ (1993, p. 90), and seeks to ‘endow a female protagonist with both subjecthood and expressive agency’ (Hedley, 2001, p. 45). That genealogy begins with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, both the series of rapes depicted in Arachne’s tapestry, which detail the perspectives of the god’s victims, and the web woven by Philomela, in which she depicts her own rape and subsequent mutilation. Ekphrastic reimaginings of Ovidian rape extend from Greek novels to Spenser and Shakespeare and into the twentieth century. I am suggesting that, in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, Pater alludes to and appropriates the narrative energy and subversive rhetoric of this tradition, extending the voice of the visual tale to include the figure of Denys, both feminine and homosexual. Like Philomela, Denys’s ‘power to speak in this story is woven into and hence bound up with the power of pictures to speak – to break through the silence in which they, like women [and the homosexual subject], are traditionally bound’ (Heffernan, 1993, p. 49). In piecing together the story woven into the Auxerre tapestry, Pater’s narrator reenacts the mythical plot of Philomela, asserting the power of the loom, the voice of the shuttle, to re-member, to bind together, what the violent mob has torn apart. Despite the metamorphic character of Denys/Dionysus, the portrait paints a sobering picture of suffering and melancholy. Denys is, above all, a ‘tortured’ figure, the epithet the narrator pronounces in both the opening and closing frame. He notes the picture of Apollo and Marsyas painted on the shutters of Denys’s organ-case, identifying Denys with the role of the suffering artist – ‘Apollo with his lyre in his hand, as lord of the strings, seemed to look askance on the music of the reed, in all the jealousy with which he put Marsyas to death so cruelly’ (IP, p. 72). In his 1876 essay, ‘A Study of Dionysus’, Pater suggests that as lover of the pipe and reed, Dionysus is connected with both Marsyas and the goat-god, Pan, but in ‘Denys’ the connection with Marsyas extends to their torturous and horrible deaths (Marsyas is tied to a tree and flayed alive). When Denys is murdered, the crowd is described as ‘transported . . . with a kind of mad rage’, awash in ‘evil passions’ (IP, p. 76). They toss his body ‘hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb’ (IP, p. 76). In his account of the Orphic legend in the Dionysus essay, Pater notes that the Titans ‘miserably slew’ the
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child, ‘hacking his body to pieces, as the wind tears the vine’ (GS, p. 52). In the imaginary portrait, the tearing action of the wind is transferred directly to the crowd, who tear limb from limb. Heffernan points out that the Latin words for ‘tear’ and ‘rape’ come from the same etymological family: ‘rumpere, to rend, break in pieces, or tear asunder’ derives from ‘rapier, to seize or take by force’ (1993, p. 52). I should point out, too, that the Latin raptus derives from the same root. The language that the narrator uses first to describe the tapestry foreshadows the language of Denys’s violent death – a ‘sort of mad vehemence prevails’, and the crowd is ‘transported’ by the organ music, ‘some of them shouting rapturously’ (IP, p. 53). ‘Rapture’ and ‘rape’, then, are extremely close cousins, used synonymously in English through to the mid-seventeenth century. That the rapturous crowd will take Denys by force and tear him into pieces is an act that we can relate to the sexual assault and mutilation of Philomela, especially given that both attacks are subsequently conveyed in the threads of a figured tapestry.
II In creating a narrative within which a fictionalized first-person narrator presents an account of his interpretation and reaction to visual images, Pater provides a second-order, or metatextual, representation of the ekphrastic encounter. In addition to the fictionalized narrator, the portrait’s structure implies as well a fictionalized audience to which the narrator offers his representation. In this sense, Pater’s portrait resembles rhetorical forms of classical ekphrasis, as prescribed in the ancient progymnasmata and exemplified in the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder, in which the ekphrasis is figured as a speech performed in front of a set of listeners. The psychodynamics of the speaker as inflected by the relationship to his audience represents a compelling subject of these classical texts, and, as Ja´s Elsner has detailed, is one of the ways in which ancient rhetorical ekphrasis comments on the process of gazing and speaking that it performs. ‘However much he [the orator] presents himself as in control of his discourse’, Elsner comments, ‘he also is always objectified as the focus of multiple gazes to which his speech responds’ (2004, p. 166). Pater’s second-order representation invites a similar analysis.12 The work is as much a portrait of the narrator as psychological subject and interpretive agent as it is of Denys as pagan god and visual object. The rhetorical performance of Pater’s narrator as he negotiates the ekphrastic encounter results in the oscillation between sympathy and detachment in narrative voice or point of view that critics of the portrait have often observed. Maureen Moran, for instance, argues that the narrator loses the ‘objectivity of historical distance’ and becomes a ‘curious participant in the events of the tale itself’, sacrificing ‘authoritative, clear judgment’ in favor of ‘sympathetic shifts to the focalization of the protagonist’ (1991, p. 186). She regards the collapse of narrative levels as one among
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Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry
Kenneth Daley
many destabilizing elements in Pater’s mythic fictions that seek to dramatize the modern spirit’s ‘fractured consciousness’, and to ‘explode the false myth of interpretation as the recovery of a stable, fixed meaning accepted by consensus’ (Moran, 1991, p. 188). Connor explains the interplay of ‘the detachedly descriptive and the emotionally projective’ as Pater’s attempt to bring together ‘two different outlooks towards the mythical subject’ (1983, p. 39), thereby involving the nineteenth-century reader in the ‘ironic, relativized relationship of the pagan Dionysus with an alien medieval Christian context’ (1983, p. 40). By reading the portrait as notional ekphrasis, however, we more readily identify the narrator as aesthetic critic and spectator, and so recognize the dialectic of identification and detachment that he performs as being symptomatic of ekphrastic ambivalence. Certainly at the portrait’s beginning Pater’s narrator presents himself as very much in control of his discourse. Accomplished and confident, the opening paragraphs add up to a kind of virtuosic verbal display. The sentences are syntactically complex, rich in metaphor and comparison. They convey a genuine familiarity with the French Burgundy towns of Troyes, Sens, Auxerre, and the surrounding landscape, distinguishing their beauty from ancient southern German towns along the Danube and Black Forest, and comparing the Yonne to a ‘child’s fancy of a river’ (IP, p. 50), like those painted in miniature by medieval manuscript illuminators. He writes beautifully, and knowledgably, of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Burgundian architecture and stained glass, and reminds his readers that it was a French architect, William of Sens, who, by rebuilding Canterbury Cathedral after the fire of 1174, introduced the modern Pointed style to England. An admiring reference to Turner demonstrates that his art-historical expertise extends to modern British painting. As Richard Stein has suggested, the ‘manner’ is reminiscent of Ruskin, in the mode of the late study, The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme (1975, p. 269). The narrator’s description of Auxerre as the ‘[p]erfect type of that happy mean between northern earnestness and the luxury of the south’ (IP, p. 451) recalls Ruskin’s earlier, and more famous, description of Venice and its triumphant synthesis of Northern and Southern architecture, ‘the point of pause’ of both ‘the glacier torrent and the lava stream’ (Ruskin, 1903–12, vol. 9, p. 38). As opposed to the ‘warmth’ and ‘summer colouring’ of Troyes, and the ‘cool and composed . . . austerity’ of Sens, Auxerre represents the French Gothic ideal. But in its portrayal of wild social and sexual license, as Stein points out, the portrait’s picture of Denys and the Gothic period is anything but Ruskinian. In his art-historical manner and point of view, Pater’s narrator is decidedly Paterian. The accumulation of historical detail and the convincing style of the opening pages work to establish the narrator’s authority as a worthy guide to French and European art and culture. The narrator’s description of the Cathedral of Saint-Étienne, like Amiens and Vezelay constructed in the
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thirteenth century, is worthy too, of the art historian. He calls special attention to the expressiveness of the cathedral’s ‘final decoration’ (IP, p. 55), confidently identifying the original work that remains, noting that much has disappeared or ‘been transferred elsewhere’. He informs his readers that the sculpted reliefs on the famous western portal are cut from the ‘firm stone of Tonenerre’, and asserts his expertise in judging the work, as an example of ‘early mastery in art’, comparable to the ‘contemporary work of Italy’ (IP, p. 55). As the narrator starts to tell the story of Denys, however, he becomes a far less detached and a more enthusiastic interpreter of events, often presenting ideas and action from the point of view of Denys and other characters. Indeed, he begins to exert an almost divinatory power over the silent medieval tapestry, a power, I will argue, not unlike that of Pater’s Winckelmann and his intuitive, supersensual, grasp of Greek sculpture (Adams, 1995, p. 156; Dowling, 1994, p. 96). Although I agree with Moran that the portrait foregrounds the problem of interpretation, rejecting the critical myth of ‘stable, fixed meaning’, I do not regard the narrator’s sympathetic shift to Denys as a sign of a failed objectivity, nor the erosion of ‘authoritative, clear judgment’. Certainly we cannot regard his reading as being either objective or authoritative. Instead, I suggest we read the narrator’s performance as symptomatic of the ekphrastic encounter, a dramatization of critical absorption and the assertion of achieved communion. In claiming an identity with the visual object of the tapestry, the narrator takes on what Mitchell calls ‘the utopian claims of ekphrastic hope’ (1994, p. 156): ‘the static spatial image of ekphrastic description is temporalized as the principal actor in a narrative’ (1994, p. 167) and the ‘estrangement of the image/text division is overcome’ (1994, p. 154).
III At the portrait’s end, as I have noted, the narrator identifies so strongly with the figure of Denys that he has difficulty distinguishing the boundaries that separate the imaginary world of tapestry and stained glass from the ‘real’ world of nineteenth-century Auxerre. From his initial chance encounter with the ‘large and brilliant fragment of stained glass’, through his ‘repeated examination of the old tapestried designs’, he ascribes increasing agency and animation to the strange, shape-shifting figure of Denys. ‘What is it?’, he asks, gazing at the ‘various presentations of the one oft-repeated figure’ (IP, p. 54). Whatever it is, the woven figures produce in him an intense fascination, an eroticized response to what are quintessentially Paterian images, beautiful male bodies in pain; the narrator is moved to think of Gautier and Heine and the suffering of pagan gods in exile: With all the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a manner of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable. It was as if one of those
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He cannot take his eyes off the tapestry. The expression of wonder and awe at the strange power of the material object turns, over time, and with the aid of historical research and intense imaginative energy, into a hallucinatory fantasia in which the images come alive, and ‘the story shaped itself at last’ (IP, p. 54). The claim that the ‘story’ exerts its own narrative agency is a fantastic one, but at the same time, it works to confer both authenticity and authority to the narrator’s tale. Recipient of what is in effect the authorized version of Denys’s story, the narrator represents himself as an especially gifted intermediary, the exceptional speaking and seeing subject granted the authority to make present again the story that has lain dormant for five centuries, caught in the woven pictures of the web. The narrator asserts privileged access to the graphic tale, gained through his deep, sympathetic identification with the strange, uncanny figure of Denys. It is as if, in telling the events of the story, the narrator looks with rather than at Denys, catching the spirit of the pagan god’s ‘very genius’ and effecting, in his own ‘new, free, generous manner’ (IP, p. 56), an aesthetic transformation, the reweaving of tapestry into text. This process is not unlike the aesthetic transformation that accompanies the development of the Dionysus myth as Pater describes it in ‘A Study of Dionysus’. There, as the myth develops from its ritual to its mythic conception, the aesthetic apprehension of the myth shifts from the visual to the textual. The sensuous images and objects woven by the nympholepti, the female spirits ‘spinning or weaving with airiest fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured threads’ (GS, p. 12), are later transformed and the legend preserved by the ‘urbane young men’ of Athens, whose aesthetic mode is verbal and poetic, creating expressions of ‘colour and imagery’ through ‘loosened utterance and finer speech’ (GS, p. 39). Yopie Prins has persuasively argued that we regard this transfer of Dionysiac worship from ‘enthusiastic women’ to ‘enthusiastic men’ within the context of Pater’s efforts to fashion a new type of male spectator who interpolates same-sex desire and a highly developed sense of aesthetic ‘tact’, or bodily feeling, into interpretive practice. In Prins’s terms, Pater achieves a new masculine critical subjectivity by converting ‘ “feminine” receptivity into a Hellenized manly ideal’ (1999, p. 52). Pater himself, in this reading, takes his place among the ‘urbane young’ Athenian men, converting the work of the weaving and spinning nympholepti into his own ‘finely woven text as [he] – “through the fine-spun speculations of modern ethnologists and grammarians” [GS, p. 33] – weaves together etymologies, mythologies, historical references, and poetic allusions to create a richly symbolic portrait of Dionysus’ (Prins, 1999, p. 53). Similarly, in Pater’s other critical essay on
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fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures of an age later than his own, people of larger spiritual capacity and assuredly of a larger capacity for melancholy. (IP, p. 54)
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the Dionysus legend, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripedes’, a more detailed study of the pagan god’s feminine genius, Pater appropriates the powers of the body and its associated sensations personified in the ‘enthusiastic women’ of the bacchanal. The Thiasus of the bacchanal, Pater tells us, ‘is almost exclusively formed of women – of those who experience most directly the influence of things which touch thought through the senses’ (GS, p. 57). ‘Himself a woman-like god’, he observes of Dionysus, ‘it was on women and feminine souls that his power mainly fell’ (GS, p. 57). As Prins suggests, in the essay’s enthusiastic pitch and ecstatic description of dancing maenads and wild cries of Bacchic women, Pater represents himself as ‘an enthusiastic worshipper of Dionysus’ (1999, p. 52), assimilating as part of his own critical identity the ‘feminine qualities’ of the pagan god and his female followers. ‘After all, a Thiasus “almost exclusively formed of women” might include men, and if the power of Dionysus falls “on women and feminine souls”, perhaps one of those “feminine souls” is his own’ (Prins, 1999, p. 52).13 Before turning back to the portrait, I want briefly to remind us how Pater’s symbolic treatment of Dionysus builds on those elements of the legend that closely associate the pagan god with both gender and sexual transgression: his dual identity as man and woman; his bisexuality; his association with the mask, symbol of the surrender or transformation of identity; his representation as beautiful androgyne, or at least, effeminate youth. As Prins point out, the adjective ‘urbane’ carries ‘the homoerotic associations of the urbanus vir’ (1999, p. 75), and so, Pater writes in ‘A Study of Dionysus’, the pagan god enters the city ‘to become urbane like them [the young Athenian men]’ (GS, p. 39), walking along the marble streets of Athens now in the company of ‘noble youths’ or ‘beautiful slaves’, no longer the country ‘ruddy god of the vineyard’ (GS, p. 40). In Pater’s account of the legend’s historical development, the entering into Athens, the more conscious phase of the myth, heralds the arrival of the sorrowful, winter Dionysus, culminating in the image of The Hunter in the Orphic tale. The move from country to town, and its attendant shift in mores and manners, is ‘from the first tinged with melancholy’ (GS, pp. 39–40). Richard Dellamora and others have pointed to the numerous elements in Pater’s essay that link Dionysus to male–male desire and sexuality, as well as to its repression, or even perhaps, as Dellamora suggests, ‘the self-oppression of men who desire other men’ (1990, p. 177). Pater offers to fellow Dionysiac spirits of the nineteenth century a modern pagan god both homoeroticized and feminized, both suffering and cruel. As a modern visual analogue to his own textual revival, Pater points to ‘a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868’ (GS, p. 42) (Figure 5.1). The provocative allusion to Simeon Solomon’s homoerotic painting emphasizes the ‘sexual context’ (Dellamora, 1990, p. 177) of Pater’s study, as well as the alternative form of masculinity embodied in the figure of
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Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry
Kenneth Daley
Figure 5.1
Simeon Solomon, Bacchus (1868)
Dionysus, in both the legend and its textual/visual Victorian revivals (Cruise, 2005, pp. 206–9). But the allusion emphasizes too the god’s dejection, the burden of his ecstasies and changeful nature, ‘the god of the bitterness of wine’, Pater observes of the image, ‘ “of things too sweet”; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup’ (GS, p. 42; Cruise, 2005, p. 37).14 Pater’s imaginary portrait rehearses yet another revival of the transgressive spirit of Dionysus. In his representation of the Auxerre tapestry, the portrait narrator registers the presence/absence, speech/silence, death/resurrection of an otherness associated with the feminine and the homosexual, and that representation is made available to a modern audience. I am suggesting
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too that we regard the Philomela myth as a visual and mythic analogue to the portrait, highlighting the narrator’s ekphrastic rendering of the Denys legend as an act of resistance against cultural and political authority, as well as a display of feminine receptivity. It is the narrator, of course, who, in reading the tapestry, plays the role of Procne in the Philomela story. In most versions of the myth, including Ovid’s, Procne goes to her sister disguised as a bacchante. The sisters sneak back into the palace during the festival of Dionysus, now both dressed as Bacchic women, a scene that James Frazer, among other classicists, reads as connecting the sisters’ revenge and the murder of Itys with the ritual frenzy of the bacchanals. In his divining of the tapestry story, in his susceptibility to the ‘visible aspects of life’ (IP, p. 62), in his visceral response to the beautiful, eroticized images of Denys and his followers, the narrator, like the Pater of the Dionysus essays, represents himself as an enthusiastic worshipper of the pagan god. The language he uses to describe the wild, nocturnal procession and the frenzies of Denys and his youthful followers is vivid and practically ecstatic: The hot nights were noisy with swarming troops of dishevelled women and youths with red-stained limbs and faces (carrying their lighted torches over the vine-clad hills), or rushing down the streets, to the horror of timid watchers, towards the cool spaces by the river . . . Heads flung back in ecstasy – the morning sleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night was over – dew-drenched garments – the serf lying at his ease at last. (IP, p. 61) That Pater means the passage to echo his description of the Bacchic women’s dance from the essay on the bacchanals is evident in his use of the word ‘swarming’. ‘Such swarming was the essence of that strange dance of the Bacchic women’, Pater writes there, emblematic of the individual woman’s heightened susceptibility to the influence of the pagan spirit when gathered in a crowd, ‘the sympathies of mere numbers’ generating ‘the random catching on fire of one here and another there’ (GS, p. 57). In the portrait, the swarming troop includes both young women and men, extending the spirit of receptivity to male members of the Thiasus, as well as articulating an ethos of male–male desire. Denys is a figure of erotic desire for both the men and women of the town: And from the very first, the women who saw him at his business, or watering his plants in the cool of the evening, idled for him. The men who noticed the crowd of women at his stall, and how even fresh young girls from the country, seeing him for the first time, always loitered there, suspected – who could tell what kind of powers? Hidden under the white veil of that youthful form: and pausing to ponder the matter, found themselves also fallen into the snare. (IP, p. 60)
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Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry
Kenneth Daley
Dellamora has identified a number of more coded signs of male–male desire in the portrait, including Denys’s affiliation with the homosocial communities of Auxerre artisans and monks of Saint-Germain (1990, pp. 180–6), and his building and playing of the ‘organ’ as signifying ‘the free play of fantasy, of masturbation, and of desire between men’ (Dellamora, 1991, p. 140). In the fictional world of the imaginary portrait, Denys/Dionysus rises again from the dark earth, represented by the ‘flask of lively green glass’ unearthed by the medieval masons from the old Greek coffin. The mythical pattern repeats itself; resurrected nature turns dark again; the beautiful, weeping creature suffers and is sacrificed. In his staging of the Orphic story as a graphic tale woven in the seemingly forgotten tapestry – hung inconspicuously in the village priest’s little Gothic house ‘by way of a background for the display of the other curiosities of which he was a collector’ (IP, p. 53) – Pater emphasizes both the delicate, fragile quality of the legend, and its oppositional nature, its periodic rejuvenation an act of resistance against the more dominant culture and authority. In conceiving of the Auxerre tapestry and its nineteenth-century textual transformation as acts of resistance, I suggest that Pater alludes to a long ekphrastic tradition of re-presenting Ovidian tapestries, and to narratives of women weaving tales of resistance. Writing of Ovid’s narratives as they are ‘woven again into the narratives of Dante, or Spenser, or T. S. Eliot’ (2007, p. 63), Cunningham emphasizes the ‘ethical note’ of the ekphrastic voice, the voiceless object granted the act of ek-phrasis, literally speaking out, and continuing to speak out ‘in the reweavings of the tradition, in the many translations, reworkings, revoicings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . . . The pictured voice is indeed inviolable, never to be silenced; it persists’ (2007, p. 65). Pater’s portrait appropriates the rhetorical urgency of that voice and extends it to the feminine and homosexual figure of Denys. Of course, Philomela weaves her own story. The conditions surrounding the production of the Auxerre tapestry are far more obscure. As I have demonstrated, in the portrait the medieval Renaissance is connected with the return of Denys. He inspires a new expressiveness and freedom among the artists of Auxerre, including the artisan monks of Saint-Germain who provide him his final refuge. We can only speculate, but the logic of the portrait suggests that the Saint-Germain monks are most likely responsible for the design and manufacture of the Auxerre tapestry. Recently escaped from an attempt on his life, Denys is ‘gladly’ received into their workshop, ‘though secretly, in fear of his foes’ (IP, p. 70). A ‘busy tribe of variously gifted artists’, the monks are not dissimilar to the group of artisans that surround Denys earlier in the portrait, busily engaged in a wide range of arts and crafts, and working ‘rapidly’ to complete the final decorations of the cathedral of Saint-Étienne. The power of Denys’s influence is so great upon the monks, the narrator tells us, that it is somehow transmitted to all the varied art and
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objects crafted in their workshop, their work transformed into expressions of his peculiar personality and genius: ‘And yet, again by merely visible presence, he made himself felt in all the varied exercise around him of those arts which address themselves first of all to sight. He defined unconsciously a manner, alike of feeling and expression, to those skilful hands at work day by day with the chisel, the pencil, or the needle, in many an enduring form of exquisite fancy’ (IP, p. 70). Denys functions here, of course, as a kind of Gothic muse, wielding beauty in a way that we typically associate with women. In addition to mere presence, Denys’s influence as master artist, as organbuilder, is profound, and we can regard the monks in much the same way that Pater describes the disciples of Leonardo, who ‘acquired his manner so thoroughly, that though the number of Leonardo’s authentic works is very small indeed, there is a multitude of other men’s pictures through which we undoubtedly see him, and come very near to his genius’ (TR, p. 92). The monks of Saint-Germain, along with the group of artisans that are drawn to study with Denys in his ‘deserted’ and ‘haunted’ habitation, constitute what we can refer to as ‘the school of Denys’. As Jonah Siegel has argued, while critics of Pater’s era tended to regard the art-historical concept of the ‘school’ and the problem of de-attribution as challenges to artistic originality, Pater turned these developments into evidence of artistic genius and influence: Pater offers a surprisingly complex response to the challenge of the school, but it is one that salvages the value of the works of followers by making it reside in what they demonstrate about the originary master. The presence of the characteristics of an artist in spite of the absence of any physical work on his part becomes a manifestation of the powers of that artist to make others in his own creative image. (Siegel, 2002, p. 140) The artisans and monks represent, I suggest, just such a group of followers, artists who have thoroughly absorbed the personality, manner, and expression of their originary master, and whose work manifests his individual genius. ‘Here, surrounded in abundance by the pleasant materials of his trade,’ comments the narrator while describing Denys working at home surrounded by the young artists of Auxerre, the vine-dresser, as it were turned pedant and kept school for the various artists, who learned here an art supplementary to their own, – that gay magic, namely, (art or trick,) of his existence, till they found themselves grown into a kind of aristocracy, like veritable gens fleur-de-lises, as they worked together for the decoration of the great church and a hundred other places beside. (IP, pp. 65–6)
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Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry
Kenneth Daley
This aristocratic brotherhood of artists, brought together under the influence of their great teacher, is succeeded by the brotherhood of monks and their ‘workshop’, a word that also reinforces the idea of an artistic school. In the fictional world of the portrait, then, it is not unreasonable to think that the artisan monks of Saint-Germain, following the murder of Denys, design and execute the Auxerre tapestry. As a production of the school of Denys, we can regard the tapestry as illuminating the particular genius and personality of Denys himself. Her tongue gone, Philomela tells her story through images made on the loom and by her hands. Denys’s story too is figured on the loom and by hands made in his own creative image. One of the clues to Pater’s allusion to and appropriation of the Philomela myth is discovered by the narrator, who notices on the tapestry an image of the monks engaged in manuscript illumination. They are working on Ovid, ‘a marvellous Ovid . . . upon the pages of which those old loves and sorrows seemed to come to life again in medieval costume, as Denys, in cowl now and with tonsured head, leaned over the painter, and by a kind of visible sympathy, often unspoken, led his work, rather than by any formal comment’ (IP, p. 71). The visible sympathies of Pater’s imaginary portrait are just as deftly interwoven.
Notes 1. Wardle was closely connected to the Arts and Crafts Movement; her brother-inlaw, George Wardle, managed Morris & Co. at Red Lion Square, and her husband, Thomas Wardle, worked closely with William Morris developing and reviving techniques of vegetable dyeing for the firm’s chintzes, woven cloths, and other textiles. Elizabeth Wardle executed a number of Morris’s own embroidery designs. See Poulson (1996, pp. 52–3). 2. The Leek Society’s refusal to represent the tapestry’s depictions of human genitalia, and even the genitalia of stallions, represents a bourgeois domestication of the tapestry’s expressiveness. See Randolph (2008). 3. See Coates (1995) and Shuter (1997). 4. See Leighton (2002, pp. 20–2). 5. See Lenaghan (1961) and Monsman (1980, pp. 107–17). 6. See Connor (1983). 7. Moran (1991, p. 180). See Dellamora (1990) and Palencik (2006). 8. See Moran (1991). 9. See Stein (1975). 10. The literal weaving of Denys’s flesh onto the clothes of the townspeople – in effect, he is woven into the community itself – functions as a gross parodic counterpoint to Denys’s fair and flaxen reappearance in the Auxerre tapestry. 11. As I have indicated, readers have identified and discussed a range of ambivalences and ambiguities in Pater’s portrait. Steven Connor, for instance, reading the portrait as a reflection of Pater’s treatment of myth, points out that, as opposed to that of Dionysus Zagreus, Denys’s rebirth is far more equivocal. Pater’s story pulls the reader in ‘two opposed directions’, corresponding to the contradictory conceptions of myth that he discovered in the work of the German mythographer,
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Ludwig Preller – the ‘unconscious (“sentimental-ecstatic”)’ outlook and a later ‘conscious (“allegorical-mystical”)’ attitude. ‘As a fantasy’, Connor observes, ‘[the story] seeks to compel belief in the return of a transcendent reality to a mundane world, while as a self-acknowledging fiction it seems sadly to admit that such a return is impossible’ (1983, pp. 37–8). It is no accident that Connor’s terms translate so seamlessly into the discourse of ekphrastic ambivalence, for it is precisely the kind of phenomenological or epistemological opposition – unconscious/conscious, emotional/intellectual – that Mitchell argues we should expect to find embedded in the image/text relation. 12. Michael Davis has recently asserted ‘the similarity between the genres of the imaginary portrait and the [Freudian] case study’ (2007, p. 51). 13. See Eastham, below, pp. 167–81, for a discussion of ‘The Bacchanal of Euripedes’, and of Pater’s Dionysus as a symbol of an extreme uncontainable theatricality. 14. Pater is likely referring to Solomon’s oil painting, although it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867, not 1868. I have chosen to include here a reproduction of Solomon’s watercolor Bacchus, which was exhibited in 1868 at the Dudley Gallery. For one thing, the watercolor is less often reproduced. But the picture is also, I think, closer in spirit to the melancholy Dionysus that Pater is describing. For a discussion of parallels in compositional processes and themes in Pater and Solomon, see Cruise’s essay, pp. 68–82.
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Pater’s Auxerre Tapestry
6 Lene Østermark-Johansen
In the 1880s Walter Pater was given the opportunity of buying one of the ten casts of Auguste Rodin’s bronze bust Masque de l’homme au nez cassé (Figure 6.1), which had been put on the market after its exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1882. Supposedly he turned down the offer with a shudder and a polite ‘I don’t think I could bear to live with it’ (Elton, 1906, vol. 1, pp. 158–9). Rodin’s casts of the man with the broken nose soon found their way into the aesthetic interiors of Frederick Leighton, Robert Browning and the art dealer C. A. Ionides (Lampert, 2006, p. 205). Despite its obvious references to such Paterian fields of interest as ancient and Renaissance sculpture, the fragment and the non finito, Rodin’s piece – at the same time classical and modern – failed to appeal to Pater (Østermark-Johansen, 2000). Rodin’s bust was originally a mask; the back part of the cast had broken off during an accident in Rodin’s studio. This ‘physiognomical landscape of suffering’ (Schmoll, 1983, p. 184), broken at the back and broken at the front, stands in glaring contrast to the Paterian mask itself, recollected in Henry James’s description of him as ‘the mask without the face’ or Arthur Symons’s evocation of Pater’s ‘whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection and out of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask moulded upon the features which it covers’.1 Symons’s description of Pater’s face revolves around Wildean paradoxes of revealing and concealing, suggesting a tension between a hard outer shell and an inner malleability, between cover and truth. Repetition of the highly Paterian word ‘moulded’ points towards an inseparability between mask and face; the mask is the face, and to such a face Rodin’s broken-nosed mask proved a provocation. Pater’s rejection of Rodin’s bust reflects on his sculptural ideals; indeed, realist portraiture and contemporary sculpture are conspicuously absent from his writings. This essay attempts to reassess the complex issue of Pater, sculpture and touch, from his earliest materialist approach to ancient statuary through Winckelmann’s ‘handling’ of Roman marbles in 1867 over the Neoplatonic dream of the new body which evaporates at the end of the 102
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Sculpture, Style and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch
Figure 6.1
Auguste Rodin, Masque de l’homme au nez cassé (1882)
essay on Michelangelo of 1871 and the subtle play of light and shadow of the Quattrocento reliefs in the Luca della Robbia essay of 1872. Within a mere five years Pater would appear to change his attitudes to sculpture radically, from considering it as a tactile, three-dimensional and erotically charged art form to a genre approaching poetry or painting in its denial of materiality and touch. Essays composed in the last half of the 1870s on Greek sculpture, however, return to the links among sculpture, poetry and painting, but if one were tempted to conclude from the essays in The Renaissance that Pater moves away from touch and three-dimensionality, the essays collected posthumously by Charles Shadwell into Greek Studies challenge such
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Sculpture, Style and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch 103
Lene Østermark-Johansen
rash conclusions. Pater’s sculptural field now comprises everything from hand-held intaglios, cameos and coins to such major nineteenth-century museum acquisitions as the Elgin and the Aeginean Marbles, and Homer’s long description of the embossed scenes on the shield of Achilles. Pater’s Homer is a man who – like Winckelmann – approaches the world through touch and sight, yet despite their emphasis on touch, the Greek essays appear to strengthen the links between literature and sculpture, as we shall see. In the essay on ‘Style’ of 1888 Pater subtly fuses the two genres; sculpture is a recurrent metaphor for the act of thinking and writing; touch has been transformed into tact, the ‘right’ touch, and the writer and the sculptor, language and marble merge imperceptibly in Pater’s apotheosis of writing as a fine art. Pater begins his essay on Winckelmann by quoting Hegel’s panegyric on the German art historian: ‘Winckelmann, by contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients, received a sort of inspiration, through which he opened a new sense for the study of art. He 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’ (TR, p. 141). Hegel undoubtedly intended that ‘new organ’ to be the organ of sight, the one sense given unrivalled supremacy in his Aesthetics. In his hierarchy of the senses both touch and taste are vastly inferior to sight: Our problem is restricted to examining whether all these senses – or if not at all, then which of them – are capable by their nature of being organs for the apprehension of works of art. For by the sense of touch the individual subject, as a sensuous individual, is simply related to what is sensuously individual and its weight, hardness, softness, and material resistance. The work of art, however, is not purely sensuous, but the spirit appearing in the sensuous. Neither can a work of art be tasted as such, because taste does not leave its object free and independent but deals with it in a really practical way, dissolves and consumes it . . . Sight, on the other hand, has a purely theoretical relation to objects by means of light, this as it were non-material matter. This for its part lets objects persist freely and independently; it makes them shine and appear but, unlike air and fire, it does not consume them in practice whether unnoticeably or openly. To vision, void of desire, everything is presented which exists materially in space as something outside everything else, but which, because it remains undisturbed in its integrity, is manifest only in its shape and colour. (Hegel, 1975, vol. 2, pp. 621–2) Although Pater invokes Hegel as one of his two main authorities, together with Goethe,2 his essay challenges Hegelian aesthetics. Pater’s Winckelmann handles everything: ‘the words only of Greek poetry’ (TR, p. 146); the antique; ‘he fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands’ (TR, p. 177);
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he is in ‘contact with the pride of the human form’ (TR, p. 152); in ‘contact with Goethe’ (TR, p. 181); ‘in touch’ with antiquity as ‘he feels after the Hellenic world’ (TR, p. 158); in his ‘exercise of sight and touch’ (TR, p. 147). The entire essay is packed with references to the haptic and the tactile. In no other text by Pater, I think, is the tactile sense so strongly evoked, almost in defiance of the Hegelian authority invoked at the very beginning. Winckelmann unites the activities of the scholar, the writer, the critic, the antiquarian and the archaeologist; his exercise of sight and touch provides the unity between the physical and the metaphysical worlds, between the past and the present. Physical touch brings Winckelmann into metaphysical contact with both the spirit of antiquity and with Goethe; the antiquarian’s handling of Greek statues puts him in touch with both his own homoeroticism and that of Greek culture; Winckelmann the archaeologist penetrates the soil and takes possession of the relics of the past embedded under the surface. Thus touch becomes both very concrete, associated with the hand (which since the Renaissance has been the synecdoche for the entire sense of touch), and ubiquitous, everywhere and nowhere, of the here and now and of all times. In the frontispiece portrait to his De corporis humani fabrica of 1543 (Figure 6.2) Andreas Vesalius is depicted in the process of handling the flayed hand of a corpse. The hand has been stripped of its outer layer, of the very skin through which touch is transmitted, and the authoritative, scientific touch of the anatomist is contrasted with the passive, objectified hand he is examining (Harvey, 2003, p. 11). The anatomist’s touch is associated with surface and archaeological depth, with reaching the inner secrets of the body, as also suggested in the title page of Vesalius’s book, in which the anatomist is touching the very centre of life, the female uterus (Figure 6.3). The figurative use of touching, that something touches our heart and our emotions, similarly suggests this journey from the exterior to the interior. Touching implies taking possession of: when touching the female womb in this uterocentric composition, Vesalius indicates his superior status as the owner of the corpse, the master of anatomy, not unlike the way Renaissance explorers were often depicted pointing towards their ‘new found land’ when taking possession of it. Pater compares Winckelmann to Columbus immediately after having asserted that the German antiquarian ‘apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, not through the understanding, but by instinct and touch’ (TR, p. 154). Winckelmann and Columbus share the right touch, the instinct that brings them close to nature and foreign worlds, be it the worlds of the past or those of the present. Pater concludes that ‘that world in which others had moved with so much embarrassment, seems to call out in Winckelmann new senses fitted to deal with it. He is in touch with it; it penetrates him, and becomes part of his temperament. He remodels his writings with constant renewal of insight; he catches the thread of a
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Sculpture, Style and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch 105
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Figure 6.2
Andreas Vesalius, De corporis humani fabrica, detail from frontispiece (1543)
whole sequence of laws in some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair’ (TR, pp. 154–5). Winckelmann’s writings become plastic, the author himself a kind of sculptor, capable of remodelling his texts according to his insights into the significant details of Hellenic sculpture; thus the exercise of sight and touch connect sculpture and writing. Winckelmann’s handling of the Hellenic marbles becomes an imitation of religious touch, stressing the dialectic between materiality and resurrection. For doubting Thomas, belief in the resurrection comes through touch, and Winckelmann’s resurrection of Hellenism – and Hellenism as culture, a way of life, as much as a phase, a certain style – comes about by way of physical touch. Yet it is important to bear in mind that despite Pater’s repeated stress on Winckelmann’s handling
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Figure 6.3
Andreas Vesalius, De corporis humani fabrica, detail from title page (1543)
of the antique, touch is transcendental and connects the realm of the body with that of the spirit. This becomes so much the more obvious in the essay on Michelangelo’s poetry, written four years later. The essay revolves around Michelangelo the poet, rather than the sculptor, both in the concrete sense of the new and ground-breaking edition of Michelangelo’s verses published by Cesare Guasti in 1863, and in the more abstract sense of the poetical and philosophical aspects of Michelangelo’s oeuvre.3 In this context one could hardly expect much discussion of Michelangelo’s hands-on experience as a sculptor; indeed, the entire essay is pervaded by Pater’s interpretation of Michelangelo as the great Neoplatonic artist, suggested by the strong Ficinean undercurrents in his poetry. By comparison with the Winckelmann essay, the antiquarian’s touch has now been replaced with that of the artist, closely
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connected with the divine touch, with the kindling of life. Thus in the description of the Sistine Creation of Man, Adam ‘has hardly strength enough to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the fingertips will suffice’ (TR, p. 59). Touching is no longer associated with handling and fingering, but with the utmost delicacy and frailty, with feather-light faintness, as in Pater’s evocation of the marble statues of the Medici Chapel, which lose all their material heaviness as they soar upwards as emanations of the Neoplatonic body. He begins by questioning the allegorical titles: ‘Night and Day, The Twilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for them’; they are directly related ‘to the mind and spirit of their author’, as they ‘concentrate and express, less by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix and are defined and fade again, whenever the thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions and surroundings of the disembodied spirit’ (TR, pp. 74–5). He concludes by speaking of ‘the new body – a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in the wind’ (TR, p. 76). This passage is one of the most memorable of Pater’s descriptions of sculpture; he brilliantly captures the very special light brought out by the architecture of the chapel, designed by Michelangelo himself, the dichotomy between the gravity of the statues and the airiness of the upper levels of the room, and the tension between the contorted bodies and the expressionless faces. The funerary chapel is thus transformed into a Neoplatonic dream where all the senses, except for the visual sense, have been disempowered and where the spirit gets ready for its flight into higher realms. Pater’s concern with Michelangelo’s Neoplatonism is hardly surprising, given that he was working on this essay alongside his study of Pico della Mirandola in the autumn of 1871, and given that he was deliberately countering the charges of Michelangelo’s excessive ‘fleshiness’ which Ruskin had put forward in his Slade lecture earlier that year (Bullen, 1981, p. 56). Neoplatonism was notoriously anti-tactile in its values. According to Marjorie Boyle, Ficino acknowledged that touch was ‘the universal sense’ in animals and in humans to a superior degree. He denied, however, its extension beyond the body to the intellect . . . As he declared, ‘Nature has placed no sense farther from the intelligence than touch’ and ‘Of all the powers of the soul which are concerned with knowing, the highest are intellect and reason, and the lowest are taste and touch. The last two for the most part lead down to bodily nature, while the first two lead up to divine substance, which is not of the body.’ (Boyle, 1998, pp. 4–5)4
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The links to Hegel are obvious. In Michelangelo’s Creation of Man it is therefore of vital importance that the two famous fingers do not touch, ‘Hands were instruments not of deification but degradation. Hands touching is not a credible image for a Platonist program’ (Boyle, 1998, p. 5). Michelangelo himself, of course, asserted, that ‘one paints with the brain and not with the hands’ (Buonarroti, 1875, p. 489; my trans.). Why did Pater change his approach to touch and to sculpture so significantly from his Winckelmann to his Michelangelo essay? Although conducting a homoerotic discourse in both essays, the homoerotics of touch associated with Winckelmann and Hellenism evaporate in the essay on Michelangelo, in which Pater employs the very word ‘touch’ in an increasingly abstract and figurative sense. Physical touch is either arrested in the process and never brought to completion, as in the Creation scene, or disempowered and denied its physical component as in the passage on the Medici Chapel. The Neoplatonic love expressed in Michelangelo’s sonnets constitutes the homoerotic discourse, and it would appear that Pater changes his own discourse on sculpture, touch and sexuality according to the voice of his subject. The highly sensuous tone of Winckelmann’s writings on sculpture transpires into Pater’s text,5 just as Michelangelo’s language of art and love to some extent becomes Pater’s in the later essay. The brief chapter on Luca della Robbia is the third essay in The Renaissance that deals with sculpture, but it is far more concerned with Michelangelo’s non finito and with Quattrocento relief than with della Robbia’s glazed terracottas. It was composed specifically for inclusion in the book, possibly out of segments from the Winckelmann essay and other fragments relating to Michelangelo;6 this conflation of textual elements may account for it being one of the stylistically weakest and most incoherent essays in the book. Pater was employing his new essay as a framework for discussing aspects of Michelangelo’s sculpture which he had only touched on very briefly in the previous essay, such as his view of the sculptor as a ‘master of live stone’, so obsessed with the quarries at Carrara and so involved in the creative process that he had to leave a piece of unhewn rock on even the most finished of his sculptures such as the David where, on the top of the head, ‘there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one touch to maintain its connexion with the place from which it was hewn’ (TR, p. 60). Michelangelo’s non finito appeals strongly to the tactile sense in its contrast between the rough and the smooth, and Pater was among the first to suggest that the non finito was deliberate rather than accidental.7 He placed the non finito in the context of the Quattrocento relief as the subtle equivalent to colour in sculpture, produced by means of the delicate play of light and shade on a planar surface. As he was moving away from sculpture in the round to the two-anda-half dimensions of the relief, Pater was also approaching art forms which resembled painting by having a background and by suggesting appreciation through a single viewing point.
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Sculpture, Style and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch 109
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Pater’s enthusiasm for relief and the non finito coincides with Rodin’s ‘discovery’ of Michelangelo in 1875 and the vast range of deliberately unfinished sculptures issued from his hand.8 It predates by a couple of years the heated debate about ‘finish’ in painting brought about by the Ruskin– Whistler trial in 1877 (discussed above by Lesley Higgins, pp. 55–63), and the very concept of the non finito in sculpture involves both the visual and the tactile sense. Although stylistically so uneven, the della Robbia essay is crucial for its theoretical concern with the genre of relief as an intermediate genre between sculpture and painting, a genre to which Pater would repeatedly return over the next couple of decades. His fascination with space, materiality, touch and texture merges in the relief, as does his interest in the relationship between background and prominence,9 issues that he would pursue in his writings on both literature and art. Kenneth Daley’s exploration (above, pp. 85–101) of Pater’s concern with weaving and tapestry in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ takes up another aspect of this Paterian concern with texture. Pater was at this time much concerned with creating his first book as an aesthetic object highly appealing to the reader’s tactile sense. His correspondence with Macmillan traces his concern with ‘paper with rough edges’ and his delight in the ribbed paper on which the black letters of his text would stand out in rilievo.10 This aesthetic approach to the book is confirmed in Arthur Symons’s remark that ‘it was from reading Pater’s The Renaissance, in its first edition on ribbed paper (I have the feel of it still in my fingers) that I realized that prose also could be a fine art’.11 Reading The Renaissance involved the exercise of sight and touch, as also advocated in the ‘Conclusion’, which – with its powerful images of hard gem-like flames and all melting under our feet – stimulated the reader’s tactile sense and pretended to have no time for aesthetic theory: ‘With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories of the things we see and touch’ (TR, p. 189). When returning to sculpture in the Greek essays in the late 1870s Pater stressed the links between early Greek sculpture and the Italian Quattrocento. In their purity and freshness the Aeginean Marbles are likened to works by Verrocchio and Mino da Fiesole (GS, p. 267); the metalwork of Achilles’s shield described by Homer resembles that of Leonardo’s shield (GS, p. 197); the story and sculptures of Demeter and Persephone call for references to Botticelli and Leonardo (GS, pp. 117, 147); and the chorus of Euripides’s The Bacchanals suggests the lines, spirit and musicality of della Robbia’s Cantoria (GS, p. 65). Pater indicates that Greek art before Phidias gains its legitimacy through a series of reference points in established Renaissance art, and he now traces much of the sensuousness associated with the Renaissance back to Greek art and literature. As in the essays on Winckelmann and Michelangelo, the lines of sculpture and literature constantly cross or are
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carefully interwoven: the Homeric Hymn of Demeter is read in the light of the monumental statues of Demeter and Persephone, on the one hand, and a careful scrutiny of a Demeter coin, a piece of hand-held relief, on the other. Pater’s definition of sculpture has now widened to encompass everything sculptural, thus implicitly suggesting the pleasure connected with the tactility of the decorative arts as an essential prerequisite to the works of high art which stand out – in rilievo – against the humble background of lamps, intaglios and coins: To have this really Greek sense of Greek sculpture it is necessary to connect it, indeed, with the inner life of the Greek world, its thought and sentiment, on the one hand; but on the other hand also, with those minor works of price, intaglios, coins, vases – that whole system of material refinement and beauty in the outer Greek life, which these minor works represent to us; and with these, as far as possible, we must seek to relieve the air of our galleries and museums of their too intellectual greyness. Greek sculpture could not have been precisely a cold thing; and, whatever a colour-blind school may say, pure thoughts have their coldness, a coldness which has sometimes repelled from Greek sculpture, with its unsuspected fund of passion and energy in material form, those who cared much, and with much insight, for a similar passion and energy in the coloured world of Italian painting. Theoretically, then, we need that world of the minor arts as a complementary background for the higher and more austere Greek sculpture. (GS, p. 191) Although Pater’s own experience of Greek sculpture was exclusively based on his visits to the world of such cold, grey and intellectual museums, he reaches back to one of the pervasive ideas in the Winckelmann essay of Greek art as being full of colour, passion and energy. He is distinctly reacting against the eighteenth-century tendency to interpret Greek sculpture as ‘elements in a sequence of abstract ideas, embodiments, in a sort of petrified language, of pure thoughts, interesting mainly in connexion with the development of Greek intellect’ (GS, p. 189). To stress his point, and to provide a part of the lost context of Greek sculpture which Jonah Siegel discusses in his essay in this volume, Pater significantly alters his view on the materials of sculpture and the relationship between colour and sculpture. In the della Robbia essay he had emphasized Luca as a worker in marble rather than in coloured terracotta and had celebrated both the low relief and Michelangelo’s non finito as the equivalents of colour in sculpture, declaring that, ‘The use of colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects by strictly appropriate means’ (TR, p. 51). By contrast he now speaks of both chryselephantine and metal sculpture and frequently stresses the links between the rich hues of
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Critics of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it as if it had been always work in colourless stone, against an almost colourless background. Its real background, as I have tried to show, was a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a peculiarly animated development of human existence – the energetic movement and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worthily clothed – amid scenery as poetic as Titian’s. If shapes of colourless stone did come into that background, it was as the undraped human form comes into some of Titian’s pictures, only to cool and solemnise its splendour; the work of the Greek sculptor being seldom in quite colourless stone, nor always or chiefly in fastidiously selected marble even, but often in richly toned metal. (GS, p. 224) Pater’s concern with background and prominence, statuary against painted ground, pervades the entire passage as yet another indication of how the whole notion of relief is deeply embedded in his aesthetic perception. His discussion of Homer and Greek sculpture is dense with references to relief; indeed, the essay entitled ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ is as much about Homer as it is about sculpture, and his Homer is a poet who turns his writing into sculpture as he sees and feels his way through the material world: He is as pleased in touching and looking at those objects as his own heroes; their gleaming aspect brightens all he says, and has taken hold, one might think, of his language, his very vocabulary becoming chryselephantine. Homer’s artistic descriptions, though enlarged by fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the extant remains of monuments of the earliest historical age are like lingering relics of that dream in a tamer but real world. (GS, p. 200) Pater ignores any myths of the blind bard in this portrait of a Homer who has as sensuous an approach to the material world as his Winckelmann, and transforms his sensory impressions into white and golden sculpture, but it is striking how he, in the Greek Studies, emphasizes metal sculpture, almost in contrast to the white Roman marble statues on which Winckelmann based his history of art. Thus Myron’s marble Discobolus stands as a lame copy of the splendid Greek bronze original ‘as if a blast of cool wind had congealed the metal’ (GS, p. 287). The passages by Homer that Pater selects for
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Renaissance painting and Greek sculpture. Indeed, the grey, wan colours which were a recurrent feature in his essays on Botticelli and Michelangelo, likened to the Carrara mountains, have now been replaced by references to Titian’s colours – as indeed Pater was turning to Venetian painting in the late 1870s with his essay on Giorgione:
discussion are the two long descriptions of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad and the walls of Alcinous’s house in the Odyssey.12 Both are examples of what James Heffernan calls ‘notional ekphrasis’, descriptions of imaginative works of art (1993, pp. 9–22), and both refer to relief art in either metal or stone. Chryselephantine sculpture consists of carved ivory to which has been added pieces of beaten gold, and the chryselephantine language of Pater’s poet thus matches his subjects, the shield and the wall; it is ornamental and carved at the same time, the product of the sculptural processes of adding and subtracting of material, and it is colour against white, yet not polychrome and excessive in its colouring, but one colour, one material in subtle contrast against another. One of the missing essays in the Greek Studies is the manuscript chapter on the Parthenon to which Shadwell refers in his Preface.13 Throughout his writings Pater returns to the Elgin Marbles, and there is little doubt that in the evolution of Greek sculpture, the Phidian frieze constitutes the absolute peak for Pater. Already in the Winckelmann essay he had selected the Elgin Marbles as the piece of Greek sculpture to be preserved for all posterity, despite the fact that it was a work Winckelmann had never seen, a work whose public life began some 50 years after his death and which, in its fragmentary form, introduced a new sculptural aesthetics which in many ways reacted against that of Winckelmann himself.14 Hence it is, of course, so much the more interesting that it is this piece, rather than the Apollo Belvedere or the Laocöon that Pater singles out: If a single product of Hellenic art were to be saved from the wreck of all beside, one might choose perhaps from the ‘beautiful multitude’ of the Panathenaic frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with their level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service. This colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possibilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest expression of the indifference which lies beyond all that is relative or partial. (TR, p. 174) Purity of form, clarity of outline, control, structure and compression are some of the many virtues Pater finds in the Panathenaic frieze, and the tension in the ‘intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possibilities of a whole world closed within it’ is enormous, almost threatening to burst the slim marble slab of the relief. Pater may have had the frieze in mind when, in 1888, he composed his essay on ‘Style’ and set up his ideal for writing as a similar compression and closeness of style. He compared both the process of reading and writing to that of carving a relief when he spoke of the reader’s ‘aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of style which makes the most of a word, in the exaction
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from every sentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to thought, in the logically filled space connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome’ (AP, p. 17). The passage revolves around the notion of compressed space, on the level of the individual word, within the individual sentence, and on a more abstract level in the transformation from thought to language. The semantic and etymological density of Pater’s ‘frugal closeness of style’ demands from the discerning reader that he activate his own inner sculptor in order to work his way through Pater’s multi-layered ´ words, and the ‘logically filled space’ is filled with the right words (λoγoσ), no more, no less, while resting on a careful balance between mental space and the actual physical space of sentence structure, grammar and complexity of vocabulary. The analogy between language and the marble block is developed in this notion of the confined space within which the artist has to work, and Pater’s ‘precise relief’ refers both to linguistic precision and to its etymological origin in the Latin prae-cidere, to cut short, to abridge, which fits neatly with writing as an essentially sculptural activity. Much of the argument of the essay revolves around the French notion of le mot juste; Pater repeatedly compares writing and sculpting. Language is a finite material: ‘For the material in which he [the writer] works is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor’s marble’ (AP, p. 12), and the art of the writer consists in constructing the right vocabulary, a vocabulary that is bound to be eclectic given the lateness of the day and the heterogeneousness and age of the English language:15 ‘Racy Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in “second intention”. In this late day certainly, no critical process can be conducted reasonably without eclecticism’ (AP, p. 16). Pater couples touch and sight with the simple, the short and the national, but it is one of the few instances in the essay in which the word ‘touch’ occurs. Although Pater is intensely concerned with similarities between writing and sculpture, sculpture has now become such an abstraction, primarily a metaphor for writing, that even a figurative use of ‘touch’ will not do. Therefore he substitutes ‘touch’ with ‘tact’, which is, of course, the right touch, the tactile equivalent to le mot juste, and Pater employs it repeatedly in its figurative sense in the OED: ‘A keen faculty of perception or discrimination likened to the sense of touch’. Thus Pater speaks of how Wordsworth created the language of the next generation ‘with the tact of a scholar’ (AP, p. 15); how – with reference to Schiller – ‘the true artist may best be recognized by his tact of omission’ (AP, p. 18); he refers to the ‘unconscious literary tact’ in religious history (AP, p. 26); and imagines how the mind of his ideal reader will be ‘refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points that the function of style, as tact or taste, intervenes’ (AP, p. 31). Style becomes synonymous with tact or taste; it is intriguing how the basest of the senses in Neoplatonism is now elevated to the very highest praise when employed figuratively.
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Pater’s broad view of sculpture in the Greek essays as anything from oil lamps to monumental statuary is continued in the central sculptural reference in the essay on ‘Style’: ‘For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone’ (AP, pp. 19–20). The entire passage oscillates between extremes: between the anonymous craftsman, the gem-engraver, and the genius of Michelangelo, between the last finish and the first idea, between finish and Michelangelo’s non finito, between the airiness of the last particle of invisible dust and the weight and substance of the roughhewn block of stone. The gem-engraver’s art is that of impressing an image on a solid substance, whereas Michelangelo’s task is that of relieving, of expressing whatever is hidden in the block of marble. The dynamics between ‘impressing’ and ‘expressing’ are fundamental components in Pater’s theory of art, as indeed Symons’s description of the Paterian mask quoted at the beginning would appear to reflect this constant dialectic in him between inner and outer, between revealing and concealing. The plasticity of Pater’s persona and his approach to language and writing as something essentially three-dimensional, or at any rate as something more than two-dimensional, account for the central place of sculpture in his aesthetics. Yet whether he was ever quite willing to circle around a three-dimensional sculpture, thus engaging his own body fully in the appreciation of the sculptural body, is another matter. His fondness of relief, of prominent points, clear contours and outlines seen against a planar background as words could be seen against the page, from a single viewing point, suggests that Pater preferred reading works of art from front to back, from surface into depth, as he would read a text.
Notes 1. Henry James in a letter to Edmund Gosse, 13 December 1894; Symons (1906); both reprinted in Seiler (1987, pp. 201, 124). 2. The strong Hegelian influence on Pater’s early writings has been demonstrated by Inman (1981b, 1990); and Shuter (1997, especially chs 2 and 3). 3. See Østermark-Johansen (1998, pp. 43–6, 98–102, 186–9, 207–15). 4. Boyle refers to a long list of Ficino’s writings in support of this summary: Theologia platonica 10.2 and 14.9; Commentarium in ‘Phaedrum’ 11.8; De vita 1.7. 5. See Potts (1994, pp. 238–53) for a discussion of Pater on Winckelmann. 6. See Buckler (1987, pp. 83–4); Brake (1976); Inman (1990, pp. 315–17). 7. For a fuller discussion of the Luca della Robbia essay, see ØstermarkJohansen (2006). 8. For Michelangelo’s long and complex influence on Rodin, see Fergonzi et al. (1996). 9. See Williams (1989, pp. 143–53) for an interesting discussion of relief in relation to Pater’s ‘aesthetic historicism’.
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See Seiler (1999, pp. 69–72). Symons (1906). Reprinted in Seiler (1987, p. 125). Iliad, bk. 18, ll. 468–608; Odyssey, bk. 7, ll. 37–132. ‘The papers on Greek sculpture are all that remain of a series which, if Mr Pater had lived, would, probably, have grown into a still more important work. Such work would have included one or more essays on Phidias and the Parthenon, of which only a fragment, though an important fragment, can be found amongst his papers’ (Shadwell, 1895, p. iii). The manuscript is among the Walter Pater papers (bMS Eng 1150) in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. It is undated, and amounts to some ten pages together with some 50 of Pater’s characteristic slips with individual sentences or parts of sentences. 14. See Jenkins (1992); St Clair (1998); Gidal (2002). 15. Dowling (1986) is the classic monograph on this issue.
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10. 11. 12. 13.
The Painting as Physical Object in a Verbal Portrait: Pater’s ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ Norman Kelvin
After the mid-nineteenth century a new name frequently displaces an established one and continues to do so until well into the twentieth: the new name is ‘portrait’, and it is used to name texts, usually but not always fictive, that were earlier known as ‘The Life of’, ‘Memoirs of’, or ‘The Adventures of’. (Henry James’s Partial Portraits (1888) is an instance of brief biographies with the new name and G. M. Young’s 1936 Victorian England: Portrait of an Age exemplifies the title in a history.) Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits littéraires and Portraits contemporains, published between 1862 and 1871, are also key documents in this change that began in the mid-nineteenth century. Although they were intended as historical portraits, the freedom with which SainteBeuve expresses his approval and disapproval of the actions he narrates, and the embellishing editorializing he provides, border on the fictive. SainteBeuve was a helping hand in the rise of ‘portrait’ in the titles of works of fiction and poetry, and Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, the first series published in 1887 – and, it might be added, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady of the same year – owe something to Sainte-Beuve (as does James’s collected short sketches, noted above).1 It would be wrong of course to identify Sainte-Beuve’s example as the sole reason for the choice by Pater (and others). But to make my general point, I contrast the use of ‘portrait’ in titles, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, with titles of earlier works. Names that come to mind are Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, his Memoirs of Captain Carleton, and his Memoirs of a Cavalier; Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random; Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond; and Dickens’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, The Adventures of Oliver Twist (first published as Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress, by ‘Boz’), The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, and Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, 117
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in which ‘dealings’, if not synonymous with ‘life’ or ‘adventures’, is closer to them in its implicit sense of narrative progress than it is to ‘portrait’. But to put my fictional portraits in roughly chronological order, James and Pater are followed by Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ (1889) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); by Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); T. S. Eliot’s poem, ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (1917); Literary Portraits (1904) by Charles Whibley, who is unread today but was admired by Eliot, and Political Portraits (1917); and of course Gertrude Stein’s collection of previously published works issued as Portraits and Prayers in 1922. Were there reason to extend the survey beyond the 1920s, we would arrive at Dylan Thomas’s parody of Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940). My sense of the matter, however, is that the use of ‘portrait’ in a title of a work of fiction or poetry diminishes after the 1920s and seems non-existent today. Michael Bartram supplies another possible reason, if indirect, for the emergence of ‘portrait’ in titles. Referring to the mid-nineteenth century, he remarks that the ‘status of portraiture as an art had recently been elevated. Portrait painting had always been an English forte, but authorities had hitherto ranked it below religious and historical painting’ (Bartram, 1985, p. 125). Although I have taken Bartram’s observation out of the context of his main interest, his comment does provide the additional possible reason for the emergence of ‘portrait’ in titles of verbal works. I will conjecture, now, about another contributing reason, more important than Sainte-Beuve’s writing, or Bartram’s observation, for the frequency of ‘portrait’ in titles from the mid-nineteenth until well into the twentieth century. My interest however is fourfold, and conjecturing why ‘portrait’ appears in titles will be followed by other inquiries. In each of the two works I am discussing, ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, there are, in fact, several delineations of the kind I refer to as ‘verbal portraits’; in addition, there is one which is a physical object, a painting. Next I will suggest a basis for comparing and contrasting ‘Prince’ and ‘Mr W. H.’, noting how different the way the painting as physical object relates to the verbal figures within each. Finally, and most important, will be the question of agency. I plan to show that in each work there is a contest for supremacy of agency among the several verbal portraits and the single physical one. ‘Verbal portrait’ is a term of convenience. It is not the name of a genre. There is nothing technical that distinguishes Henry James’s Isabel Archer, in Portrait of a Lady, from Maggie Verver, in The Golden Bowl – no general, novelistic technique that explains why one is called a ‘portrait’ and the other bears as title the name of a symbolic object. Closer to home, the liberties Pater takes in presenting some of the figures in The Renaissance causes the book to share many characteristics with Imaginary Portraits. ‘Verbal portraits’ is shorthand for the verbal constructions – stories – that might have had any
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title but are named ‘portraits’. It is meant to be a focus on the increasing use of the new word in titles of works of fiction, primarily. As to why the new name began to appear so frequently, I have offered one plausible suggestion, mentioned another, and will discuss a third at some length, but the large historical question, exploring all the possible reasons, would be a major study in itself. (A brief aside. I am neglecting any talk about ekphrasis because I view both ‘Prince’ and ‘Mr W. H.’ as multiple verbal portraits set in relation to one physical object. To ponder the idea of ekphrasis in texts as complex as the two in question would take me along paths of inquiry that would lead far away from what interests me.2 ) Why then, beyond Sainte-Beuve’s possible influence and Bartram’s observation, does the use of ‘portrait’ in a title occur frequently during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Wilde’s case, one can argue, the primary reference in both ‘Mr W. H.’ and Dorian Gray is to a physical object; but even with Wilde I would ask, was there a cultural persuasion to create portraits that he shared with other writers, including those who came after him? My answer is that there was such a persuasion: photography, and specifically, its capacity for commodification. Victorian and early modernist culture were saturated with popular photographic portraits, images that were ubiquitous and virtually classless, and that created for themselves an overwhelming presence. The early history of photography is too well known to be repeated here. For my purposes, however, it is useful to stress the introduction of the cartede-visite, so named because the resulting print, 4 by 2½ inches, was about the size of a common visiting card. In 1854 a French photographer, André Disdéri, developed a camera with four lenses to produce, on a single negative and hence a single sheet of paper for prints, eight exposures, which could then be cut up into eight separate portraits. Not only did photographic studios produce cartes-de-visite for people who wanted their pictures taken, but shops were opened that sold carte-de-visite portraits of famous people. As Gus Macdonald summarizes: In London, Mayall and Co. made sets of carte-de-visite portraits of Queen Victoria en famille which sold in the hundreds of thousands at a guinea a dozen. Another firm, Marion and Co., paid £35,000 for the rights to photograph the royal family; within a week of Prince Albert’s sudden death in 1861 they sold 70,000 copies of his portrait. The record sale for one card is thought to be that of Princess Alexandra giving a piggy back to her daughter, taken just after a dangerous attack of rheumatic fever. The combination of public relief on her safe recovery and delight at the informality of the portrait helped sell some 300,000 copies . . . [A]t the height of the boom [in cartes-de-visite] . . . sales grew to an astonishing 300 million cards a year. (1980, p. 53)
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
To accommodate card-photographs of self, relatives, friends, and celebrities, elaborately bound albums were introduced in the 1860s. The family album became a fixture in Victorian homes.3 Yet, what still needs to be theorized is the urge to domesticate the images of one’s favorite public figures, and to confine them all – private and public – within the parameters set by a single album, making family, friends, and public figures almost equal-opportunity candidates for space within the album. (Primarily, however, the album was devoted to the family and its immediate connections.) Interestingly, Maggie Humm tells us that in albums created by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, there are pictures that predate their own lives (2006, p. 8) and that in one album a page includes carte-de-visite portraits of Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Mrs Gaskell (2006, p. 40). It is certain, finally, that family albums were fixtures in Wilde’s childhood home (Holland, 1998, p. 5), and probably in Pater’s, too. Photography, however, played a double role. Writers such as Pater and Wilde, though embedded like everyone else in this phenomenon of popular culture, could neither ignore the ubiquitous presence of classless photographic images nor know its full effect upon them.4 But the consequence, I argue, is that they rejected photography for their literary work,5 recognizing on some level the all-too manifest status of photographs as a mass commodity. There is no need to claim influence on, or awareness, by Pater and Wilde, but rejection of photography by others who created the literary culture of the nineteenth century is widely apparent. Baudelaire, for example, complained: A new industry [has arisen] which contribute[s] not a little to confirm stupidity in [the public’s faith] and to ruin whatever might remain of the divine in the French mind . . . [T]he present day credo of the sophisticated . . . is this: ‘I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature . . . I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature . . . Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art.’ A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself . . . ‘Photography and Art are not the same thing’ . . . I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography . . . have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius . . . [T]his industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy. (qtd in Harrison et al., 1998, pp. 667–8) Ruskin, though his attitude toward photography was ambivalent and changeful throughout his life,6 gives support to my contention both by praising and condemning photography. As for photography as an art, in 1852 he wrote to his father: ‘A fine drawing, made with feeling – is always worth a great many casts or daguerrotypes – . . . a human soul’ (qtd in Birchall, 2003, p. 8). Later, he remarked, ‘A photograph is not a work of art
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though it requires certain delicate manipulations of paper and acid’ (qtd in Harvey, 1984, p. 32). In his lecture ‘The Art of Engraving’ he elaborated this thesis: ‘Photographs have an inimitable mechanical refinement and their legal evidence is of great use if you know how to cross-examine them. They are popularly supposed to be “true”, and at worst, they are so, in the sense in which an echo is true to conversation of which it omits the most important syllables and re-duplicates the rest. But as truth of mere subscription, [photography] has nothing to do with art and will never supersede it’ (qtd in Harvey, 1984, p. 25). A similar view is expressed in Ruskin’s lecture on light, given as part of his inaugural series as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1870: ‘Let me assure you . . . that photographs supersede no single quality nor use of fine art . . . They supersede no good art for the definition of art is “human labour regulated by human design”’ (qtd in Harvey, 1984, p. 31). Moreover, even Ruskin’s reasons for approving photography undermine the status of the photographic portrait; as Harvey suggests, ‘Ruskin’s belief in the value of the photographic architectural record was his only consistent attitude toward photography’ (1984, p. 27). Harvey’s summary statement brings the discussion back to my own main concern: ‘For the rest of his life [after 1870], Ruskin retained this duality of attitude, using photography practically, yet regarding it with a dislike which . . . grew into a bitter reproof for a public who, he was convinced, preferred photographs to art.’ Portrait photography ‘was included in his distaste . . . he regarded photographs of himself invariably as unsuccessful and disappointing’ (Harvey, 1984, p. 32). Stephen Wildman elaborates Ruskin’s attitude toward portrait photography inferentially by quoting from an 1868 letter written to Julia Margaret Cameron, who was of course thoroughly identified with portrait photography: ‘Fifteen years ago I knew everything that the photograph could and could not do; – I have long ceased to take the slightest interest in it, my attention being wholly fixed upon the possibility of wresting luminous decomposition which literally paints with sunlight – no chemist has yet succeeded in doing this’ (2006, p. 9). George Eliot, writing to Mrs Elma Stuart in 1873, refers to a photographic portrait of herself taken in 1865: ‘As to the portrait, I am not one bit like it . . . These portraits seen beforehand are detestable introductions, only less disadvantageous than a description given by an ardent friend to one who is neither a friend nor ardent.’7 Noteworthy, too, is that Lady Eastlake, herself a photographer, in 1857 ‘proclaimed that photography had no claim to be an art form, possessing no evidence of man’s creative genius or his sensitivity to nature’ (Birchall, 2003, p. 16). Perhaps the most immediate and persuasive cultural development that might have turned Pater and Wilde away from photography, for their own artistic purposes, were the facts of Pre-Raphaelitism and the debate that arose. The Pre-Raphaelites, so ardent about painting detail, were accused of basing their work upon photographs. Few thought of praising them for
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
doing so, thus implicitly making the photograph inferior to the painting. Michael Bartram, whose ultimate concern is to establish Pre-Raphaelite photography as an art in and of itself, nevertheless provides information that could be used to argue against this view: ‘Rossetti, at the height of his passion for Jane Morris, turned photographer for a day and posed her in his back garden in Chelsea’, then used the results for pose and details in paintings of her (Bartram, 1985, p. 6). Bartram is saying something similar about Holman Hunt when he comments that although ‘Hunt never took photographs, a friend, living in Jerusalem . . . used to go out to the hinterland with him, and set up his camera alongside the artist’s easel’ (1985, p. 8). As for Ford Madox Brown, he ‘was employed for a time at Lowes Dickinson’s portrait studio “working up photographs”’ (Bartram, 1985, p. 7). Finally, John Everett Millais, ‘from the mid-1850’s onward, relied more and more on photography for landscape backgrounds and portraits’ (Bartram, 1985, p. 7). What one can say about all this, in support of my own thesis, is that Bartram has described photography as a tool, rather than as an artistic undertaking for its own sake. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suggest that there was no Victorian debate over the question, is photography an art? The discussion was carried on in photography periodicals, such as the British Photographic Journal, Photographic Journal, and Photographic News, and in journals of general interest as well.8 In February 1858, for example, the photography critic of the Athenaeum praised rock photographs by John W. Gutch, comparing them with paintings by Ruisdael and Perugino, and concluding that Gutch’s work was far superior to the painters’. Bartram, who cites this judgment, continues: But was it legitimate to compare photographs with the work of Perugino and Ruisdael? There was a heated debate over this. Some – even certain modest photographers – denied that photography could ever be an art. It was predominantly mechanical; the nobility of art depended on culling nature’s best parts. Their opponents argued that painting, drawing, and engraving also involved mechanical skills; that the patience and dexterity needed in these and in photography were equal; above all that the photographer had to exercise as much pictorial taste as choosing the right position for his camera as the painter in making his selections from nature. (1985, p. 53) Although not involved in the dispute over photography’s claims to be an art, Charles Darwin contributed to the cultural mix in which the debate was conducted. In The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (published in 1872 and immediately popular, going through several editions), Darwin, referring to his need for close observation of facial detail in humans, observed, ‘I had hoped to derive much aid from the great masters in painting
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and sculpture . . . but with few exceptions have not profited. The reason no doubt is, that in works of art, beauty is the chief object; and strongly contracted facial motions destroy beauty’ (1965, p. 14). Later, he added, ‘I must have the pleasure of expressing my obligation to Mr Rejlander9 for the trouble he has taken in photographing for me various expressions and gestures’ (Darwin, 1965, p. 23). Other photographers are also thanked. Julia Margaret Cameron unequivocally endorsed the artistic promise of the medium. In a letter to Sir John Herschel in 1864, she explains, ‘My aspirations are to enable photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and the Ideal and sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty’ (qtd in Ford, 2003, p. 83). My interest, however, is in assessing cultural awareness, and the attitudes of institutional practices may be even more to the point. ‘The issue of the artistic status of photography came to a head when the Commissioners for the 1862 International Exhibition placed photography not with painting and engraving but in the scientific section, in close proximity’ to such products of industry as the steam engine and a new design for the mangle (Bartram, 1985, p. 124). Of even greater strength informing public attitudes was the earlier (1856) founding of the National Portrait Gallery. In his Foreword to Camera Portraits: Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery London 1839–1989, John Hayes, the Director of the Gallery, writing in 1989, commented: ‘Twenty-five years ago photographs were still assigned a secondary role in the Gallery’s collecting policy . . . Eminent sitters were asked to sit for the Gallery’s chosen photographer, but this was purely for record purposes. There was no question of . . . photography being considered an art form that would contribute to a deeper understanding of the personalities of the makers of British history’ (Hayes, 1989, p. 7). In 1926, Roger Fry, as a prelude to asserting that Julia Margaret Cameron was an artist of the first rank and that photographic portraits could readily replace painted ones in future acquisitions by the National Gallery, noted that, ‘The position of photography is uncertain and uncomfortable. No one denies its universal services of all kinds, but its status as an independent art has always been disputed’ (Hayes, 1973, p. 23). Official public attitudes were thus mostly negative regarding photography’s artistic claims. Photography, various authorities implied, was useful, but for utilitarian purposes only. A carte-de-visite hardly challenged the assumption. Its function was to preserve the memory of a friend or loved one, or a public figure. It was innocent of aesthetic pretensions. It is interesting how often, unintentionally perhaps, the utilitarian view found expression. Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) contains a vivid example of photography as a tool. When Mrs Lammle wishes to convey to Twemlow the danger Georgiana Podsnap is in, and to do so without being overheard by her husband, she persuades Twemlow to examine with her the Lammles’
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
‘book of portraits’. Meant to be a typical Victorian household fixture, signifying domestic sentiments and memories, it becomes a cover for secrecy and a device to register the total lack of sympathy between husband and wife. Furthermore (and I claim no intended class division, on Dickens’s part, grounded in images), when Eugene Weyburn’s father signifies his acceptance of his son’s marriage to Lizzie Hexam, he does so by ordering that her portrait be painted.10 Thomas Hardy’s novel Desperate Remedies (1871), is, for my subject, an informative cultural index. A detective-mystery novel, its villain, Manston, who is suspected of bigamy but in fact has accidentally killed his first wife, has persuaded a woman who resembles his dead spouse to be a stand-in for her. He manipulates two carte-de-visite portraits to establish the substitute as his actual first wife. Using hot water, he removes a carte-de-visite image of his dead wife from its cardboard backing, does the same with the image of the substitute (which he finds in an album), and pastes the counterfeit wife’s image onto the cardboard from which he has removed his wife’s. I would go dangerously afar from my interests here if I began to explain the plot complications that lead to Manston’s actions, but suffice it to say that Hardy could presumably count on his readers to agree that a carte-de-visite was not an immutable work of art but could be, as it was in the text, a serviceable identity photograph, similar to a police mug-shot (if perverse in Hardy’s use of it). At the same time that fiction writers were exploring photography’s narrative possibilities, the police began using photography to identify criminals. They had started to collect ‘faces’ before 1889, the year in which the first ‘rogues’ gallery’ was established with photographs amassed during previous years (see Wilkes, 1984, p. 35). In Henry James’s short story, ‘The Real Thing’ (1893), an allusion to photography is not wholly utilitarian; nevertheless, for the artist-narrator’s purposes, the allusion is fatally negative. Major and Mrs Monarch are authentically genteel: they have regularly been guests at country houses and, of even more interest, their photographs (cartes-de-visite, presumably) have been sold in shops (James, 1963, p. 48). They have become penniless, however; desperate for some income, they have sought employment as models for an artist who is a successful illustrator and aspiring portrait painter. He hires them, but soon discovers they will not do, are capable of posing as examples of one type only – their own. Trying to draw Mrs Monarch, the narrator says, ‘I began to find her insurmountably stiff . . . my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression . . . She was the real thing but always the same thing’ (James, 1963, p. 56). As useless as Major and Mrs Monarch are, a cockney young woman and an out-of-work Italian street vendor are ‘the real thing’ as models. The artist, with some help from costumes, can move the young woman and man into whatever pose and attitude he wishes, and indeed, he depends on their uncanny knack of becoming whatever he wishes.11
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It was not unknown for a popular person’s portrait to appear not only on a mass-produced carte-de-visite but even as an adornment of other commodities. Such was the case with Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, well known for a time as an American radical and feminist whose image was incorporated into consumer products and also used in ads: ‘One company sold a walking cane with Dickinson’s image carved into the head’, and at ‘least two firms produced small advertising cards featuring Dickinson’s image and a blank space for local companies to insert their own message’ (Gallman, 2006, p. 153). Nor was England to be outdone. After Prince Albert’s death in 1862, ‘Queen Victoria commissioned photograph jewelry’ and among ‘the Queen’s photographic signs of mourning were a ring with the Prince’s photograph, lockets, and bracelets. Photographs also found their way onto cups, funeral urns, fans, and even clothes’ (Novak, 2008, pp. 12–13). These are but examples, but it is no exaggeration to say that (putting aside, for the moment, the American example) Pater and Wilde lived in a society in which the utilitarian uses of photography were strongly asserting themselves in the cultural mix. And relevant, too, is Wilde’s own experience when he began his American tour in 1882. The photographer Napoleon Sarony took at least 27 poses of Wilde for publicity purposes; oddly, the number of each appeared on the print, advertising as it were the commercial intent. Nor could it have helped that several of these poses, converted into lithographs, were incorporated without anyone’s permission into trade cards, so that ‘Oscar became the unwitting endorser of such diverse products as trimmed hats and cigars’ (Holland, 1998, pp. 64, 92). My conclusion from all this: the practical potential and significance of portrait photography were in opposition to the aesthetic theories and practices of Pater and Wilde. Whether they were conscious or not of photography as an opposing force, both reaffirmed a writerly allegiance to traditional portrait paintings, which of course continued to be produced in the nineteenth century, and which, for writers like Pater and Wilde, carried an inevitable class notation, a sign that the painter had been commissioned by a person of means to produce something unique, possessed of an aura. The aesthetic theories of Pater and Wilde required the unqualified privileging of such paintings and the exclusion, for fictive purposes, of the photograph, however manifest and insistent it was in their domestic space and in the broader culture. It was against this multiform background of portraits – those produced by popular and inexpensive photographic means; class-directed street photography; traditional portraits in oils; the emergence of a branch of photographic art that included the making of careful, distinctive portraits, most notably by Julia Margaret Cameron in the 1860s and 1870s (as well, among others, by Lewis Carroll and Oscar Rejlander) – that verbal portraits began to appear; or, more precisely, that writers began using ‘portrait’ in titles that once would have been called ‘biographies’, ‘lives’, ‘histories’, ‘adventures
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
of’, or ‘memoirs of’. It is useful, too, to consider the retrospective view of photography and art in the nineteenth century. Walter Benjamin, although committed to a theory that valued the reproducibility of any work claiming to be art, nevertheless wrote (in 1931) in a manner that obliquely illuminates the position that I see Pater and Wilde assuming: ‘The most recent literature seizes on the striking fact that the flowering of photography . . . occurs in its first decade. That is the decade that preceded its industrialization’ (Benjamin, 1980, p. 200). Photography, Benjamin concludes, ‘greatly extends the sphere of commodity exchange, from mid century onward, by flooding the market with images of figures . . . which had previously been available either not at all or as pictures for individual customers’ (2006, p. 35). Before turning to ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, however, it is appropriate that I not only refer to the cultural background for both but elaborate with further details how Pater and Wilde related to this background. As for calling ‘A Prince’ and ‘Mr W. H.’ ‘verbal portraits’, Pater has invited use of the term by including ‘A Prince’ in his book, Imaginary Portraits, and by the story’s title, which tells us that ‘A Prince’ is an imaginary portrait of Watteau (even if this is a simplification). As for photography, absence of any reference to it in Pater’s work is warrant for arguing that only portrait painting satisfied his need for objects to submit to his aesthetic theory; that is to say, the significance of photography in Pater’s writing is its absence. Of course, ‘A Prince’ is historically bound to concern painted portraits only. But there is no historical reason to have prevented the writer of ‘The Child in the House’ (published in Macmillan’s Magazine, August 1878) from exploring, in another fiction or semi-fiction, photography’s claims to be an art. Wilde is a more complicated – complicated, not complex – figure in my discussion. I have argued that both ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ and The Picture of Dorian Gray add evidence that the word ‘portrait’ begins to appear in titles with frequency after the mid-nineteenth century. Again my major interest, the portrait of Mr W. H. (however fraudulent), is determined by history. But Wilde and photography is truly a broader subject. There is, first, his readiness to be photographed and to have his image widely distributed. Then, a few of his stories exploit photography, though not, I argue, for serious aesthetic purposes. Finally, photography is the subject of three letters to Robert Ross, and I discern a dismissal in them of photography’s claim to be an art. But my argument, with respect to references in both stories and letters, depends more on Wilde’s tone than on his words. A different attitude and intent govern an exchange, in Dorian Gray, between Dorian and Lord Henry’s wife. The scene is their first meeting, while Dorian waits for Lord Henry; she says to the young man, ‘I know you quite well by your photographs. I think my husband has got seventeen of them’ (Wilde, 2003b, p. 45). Lord Henry’s collection is as much indebted to Sarony exposing Wilde in multiple poses for publicity purposes as it is evidence of
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same-sex passion. And there is no effort by Wilde to build a theory on this particular expression of Lord Henry’s fascination with Dorian’s beauty. Lady Henry’s remark is a throw-away line, however much it is a code directed to knowledgeable and appreciative readers of Dorian Gray. In ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1891), the risible Mr Otis, the American minister who has bought Canterville Chase, replaces the Canterville family’s ancestral, painted portraits with photographs of himself. This display of American self-satisfaction and egotism is satirized as well as American commercialism. The photographs were all taken by ‘Saroni’, an explicit twitting of Sarony and his exploitation of Wilde’s image during the American trip (Wilde, 2003a, p. 223). In ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’ (1891), there is at least ambivalence in the meaning of Lady Alroy’s photographic portrait. At the conclusion, the narrator says to Gerald, the friend who had been in love with the woman (now deceased): ‘She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.’ ‘Do you really think so?’ ‘I am sure of it’ I replied. He took out the morocco case . . . and looked at the photograph. ‘I wonder?’ he said at last. (Wilde, 2003a, p. 205) The answer to the question hinges on who is right. But the very least one can say is that the portrait has been carried, in its meaning or lack of meaning, far from the realm of aesthetic discourse. The narrator informs us near the start of the tale that in the photograph ‘the faint smile’ that ‘just played across the lips was far too subtle to be really sweet’ (Wilde, 2003a, p. 201). Whatever is expressed by its not being ‘sweet’, Wilde was unlikely to build an aesthetic theory on the face of a woman, rather than that of a young man. As for Wilde’s letters, not only tone, but circumstances, must be weighed in interpreting references to photography. If Richard Ellmann’s account is accurate,12 when the letters referring to photography were written, Wilde was missing his front teeth (unable to pay for a bridge), was dressed shabbily, and was constantly pained by snubs and avoidances by English people who were once his admirers or even friends. In an undated letter from Rome, Wilde playfully inquired of Ross, ‘By the way, can you photograph cows . . . ? I did one of cows in the Borghese so marvellous that I destroyed it: I was afraid of being called the modern Paul Potter [a seventeenth-century Dutch animal painter of a picture entitled The Young Bull]. Cows are very fond of being photographed, and, unlike architecture, don’t move’ (Holland and Hart-Davis, 2000, p. 1183). In another undated letter to Ross, from Rome, Wilde observed, ‘My photographs are now so good that in my moments of mental depression (alas! not rare) I think that I was intended to be a photographer. But I shake off the mood, and know that I was made for more
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
terrible things of which colour is an element’ (Holland and Hart-Davis, 2000, p. 1187). Then, from Paris, dated possibly at the end of June 1900, Wilde responded to a letter from Ross that had included photographs Ross had taken: ‘Thanks so much for the photographs: you photograph nearly as well as I do. What an art it is! Your only rival in titles is Rossetti’ (Holland and Hart-Davis, 2000, p. 1190). These letters, I argue, show momentary pleasure in photography but the absence of any serious consideration of photography as an art, despite Wilde’s seeming appraisal of it as such in the last letter quoted. The business with cows pretends a fear of being compared with a painter Wilde apparently dislikes. Any notion he was intended to be a photographer is undermined by words that abolish the thought. Praise for Ross’s photographs – though lack of the images prevents any certainty – suggests that Ross had sent him photos of boys or young men. To say Ross’s only rival in titles is Rossetti upends any potential seriousness. Ross is praised for echoing in his titles those of the pictures for which Rossetti was best known – portraits of women. (A sampling of Rossetti’s titles includes Beata Beatrix, Fazio’s Mistress, The Blessed Damozel, and The Girlhood of Mary Virgin). Putting aside Wilde’s mental capacities when the letters to Ross were written, there is no evidence of the seriousness, however paradoxically expressed, that Wilde had once given to art in the Preface to Dorian Gray or in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, or in the four essays published together in 1891 as Intentions (‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’, ‘The Critic as Artist’, and ‘The Truth of Masks’).13 But the last word to be said about Wilde’s letters referring to photography is that they were written long after he was capable of writing a theory of anything. I return now to my main concern – how ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ relate to each other. Although there are no exact parallels, interesting similarities are apparent. ‘A Prince’ can be said to contain four portraits. One is of Marie-Marguerite Pater (a historical person but probably not an ancestor of Walter), her portrait self-created through her diary. Another is of Antoine Watteau as she depicts him in her diary (though Pater does oblige her to incorporate a substantial amount of historical information concerning Watteau in her imaginary portrait of him). A third is of her brother, Jean-Baptiste, also a historical figure but in this case also her subject. There is, finally, the actual painted portrait of Marie-Marguerite (to be seen today in Le Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valencienne), alleged by Walter Pater to have been started by Watteau and then finished by Jean-Baptiste (who began his career as Watteau’s pupil), but in fact was painted by JeanBaptiste alone, from start to finish. ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ also contains three verbal portraits and a physical one. The unnamed narrator and his framing narrative stand in the same space as does Marie-Marguerite and her diary: he tells us much about himself, even as Marie-Marguerite does. Then there are Cyril Graham, who develops the theory that the ‘onlie begetter’ of
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Shakespeare’s sonnets was a boy-actor named Willie Hughes; George Erskine, a friend of both Graham and the narrator, who is at first skeptical about the theory but becomes a believer; and finally, the forged portrait of Willie Hughes, a physical object painted at Cyril Graham’s request by an obscure nineteenth-century artist when, early in the story, Erskine insists that proof beyond Cyril’s reading of the sonnets is needed if one is to believe in the existence of Willie Hughes. Of interest, too, are the texts’ temporal dimensions. Marie-Marguerite’s diary is a series of discrete moments, bound together retrospectively – historically, as Carolyn Williams defines the term in Pater’s canon (1989, pp. 16, 36, and passim). By contrast, ‘Mr W. H.’ is a continuous flow, in which the passage of time seems strangely subordinated to an underlying, ahistorical, theme. Indeed, to himself the narrator is Shakespeare, with an implicit but overwhelming erasure of historical sequence. ‘[I]t seemed to me’, he observes, ‘that I was deciphering the story of a life that had once been mine, unrolling the record of a romance that, without my knowing it, had coloured the very texture of my nature . . . Yes: I had lived it all. I had stood in the round theatre with its open roof and fluttering banners’ (Wilde, 2003c, p. 76). Moreover, ‘in the side-boxes some masked women were sitting. One of them was waiting with hungry eyes and bitten lips for the drawing back of the curtain . . . I saw her olive skin and raven’s wing hair. I knew her. She had marred for a season the great friendship of my life’ (Wilde, 2003c, p. 77). To interpolate a continuation of the fluid erasure of historical time, Cyril is a mask for Willie Hughes,14 who is thus ‘the great friendship of’ the narrator’s ‘life’, as well, it should be added, of Erskine’s. The ahistorical theme, consistent and even-paced, is same-sex passion. Such love, the narrator asserts, is essential to Shakespeare’s art as a dramatist, and the sonnets are no more than a witness and elucidation of this view. But same-sex passion, implicit in the lives of all three of the nineteenth-century figures, exceeds the credentials that rest on a dramatist’s need to love the actor who realizes his play. If the initial testament of love in the nineteenth-century aspect of the story is the uncreative Erskine’s implicit love for Cyril Graham, then the narrator has in fact substituted himself for Erskine and introduced the love-creative realization theme in a manner that actually displaces Erskine altogether. Another way of looking at this is to say that Erskine’s undeveloped character leaves him a cipher in his love for Graham-Hughes and that the narrator, in displacing Erskine, relegates him literally to the sidelines, where unsuspectingly he fills the role of spectator, returning to a more significant one when he wills the portrait of Willie Hughes to the narrator. Finally, the interchangeability and multiplicity of roles recalls nothing so much as Wilde’s assertion of the truth of masks, in the essay by the same name (Wilde, 2004, p. 263), and recalls also the direct implication of the entire essay that the truths of masks are the truth of art. Whatever the inflections in the different appearances of a mask might be, we are encouraged,
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
I believe, to think of a mask, once its existence is established, as having no need to rely on the passage of historical time to maintain that existence. To address now my main interest, the question of agency, I submit that within each of the texts, ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ and ‘Mr W. H.’, one portrait emerges, from shiftings and negotiations, as the strongest; it places its imprint on the others. In ‘A Prince’, the imaginary relationship between Marie-Marguerite and Watteau subdues her historical, physical portrait, even altering, fictively, the agency which creates it. As Lesley Higgins has noted, ‘In chronicling Watteau’s life (and as an astute critic of Watteau’s art work),15 she encounters and writes her own . . . [S]he becomes a creative person’ (1997, p. 55). Higgins adds that Marie-Marguerite ‘never recognizes herself in such a productive role’ (1997, p. 55); my own reading both acknowledges Higgins’s insight and redirects our attention to the further consequences of MarieMarguerite’s creative power. It is through the testimony of her diary that Jean-Baptiste’s historical role as initiator of her painted portrait is subtracted. Finally, as Marie-Marguerite is the real agent for the production of herself, Watteau, and Jean-Baptiste, it is she, as well, who situates the painted, physical portrait as a link among all three. And her censorship in describing Watteau’s fêtes galantes further adds to the strength of agency in the highly detailed self-portrait she creates. In ‘Summer’, ‘the oval frame draws the glance of the viewer into the frame in a vortex, sustaining it on the central nude figure . . . Marie-Marguerite instead discusses the hay on which Ceres is seated, completely failing to mention the figure because it is unutterable’ (Rajan, 1997, pp. 197–8). Supremacy of agency is hers, or her diary’s. Or, as Anne Marie Candido has observed, from a perspective quite different from my own, Marie-Marguerite’s ‘is a highly personal but resolute and unapologetic attempt to impose some kind of intelligent order, some logical sequence and motive, some meaning on the sporadic events, reports, and contacts which pass by her’ (1993, p. 155). And further: ‘Perhaps the real irony . . . is that Marie-Marguerite . . . unintentionally portrays herself as the central and most successful artist of the piece rather than the Prince of Court Painters. Her portrait . . . is at least artistically complete (unlike Watteau’s portrait of her)’ (Candido, 1993, p. 156). In Oscar Wilde’s ‘Mr W. H.’, agency changes as the painted, physical portrait shifts in its relationship to each of the three verbal portraits. The portrait-as-physical-object is a forgery, the painter a nearly offstage nineteenth-century figure; the three verbal portraits are alone in the contest for agency, because the painting itself is out of the running. At first, the narrator of ‘Mr W. H.’ seems clearly dominant. He appropriates Cyril Graham’s reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets, enlarges it, and outlives both Cyril and Erskine. Moreover, the manner in which Wilde kills off Cyril and Erskine borders on the comic. Cyril commits suicide as a sacrifice to the truth of his theory, and thus as a rebuke to Erskine (when he is still skeptical); Erskine, dying of consumption, writes to the narrator that he too will
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commit suicide as a testament to the truth of the theory, thus introducing a kind of decorative deception in a story built on multiple deceptions. (Contrast the weightlessness of these deaths with any death in Pater’s writing, or even with the death of Dorian Gray.) Yet it only seems as if the narrator has emerged as the supreme agent. At the end of ‘Mr W. H.’, he in effect relinquishes his own plausible claim to primacy of agency. He decides that Willie Hughes, the creation of Cyril Graham, is more real than any authenticated historical figure could be. Graham’s reading has, for the narrator, established Willie Hughes as the object of Shakespeare’s love. Same-sex passion defines all three of the nineteenthcentury verbal portraits, as noted. And now, at the end, the narrator decides that Willie Hughes is simply a name, an arbitrary signifier for the reality of Shakespeare’s love for a boy-actor.16 He places the forged portrait (which Erskine, dying, had willed to him) on the wall of his library, and it is indeed the painting-as-physical-object which has the greatest agency in this story, in contrast to Pater’s; it does not matter, it should be repeated, whether there ever was a Willie Hughes. That the portrait is the image of a beautiful young man, of any beautiful young man, confers upon it the greatest agency of all: it has power to give pleasure to the narrator as he contemplates it.17 Wilde’s own words seem to support my reading. In what was no doubt intended a throw-away witticism and embellishment, Wilde adds that the painting of Willie Hughes ‘is admired by all my artistic friends, one of whom has etched it for me’ (Wilde, 2003c, p. 88). It is not difficult to read, in this particular story, ‘artistic friends’ as a nearly open code for ‘gay friends’ and to conjecture that the etching of the image (a single portrait in contrast to Lord Henry’s Sarony-inspired variations on the image of Dorian Gray) means it can now be multiplied for the pleasure of many other sympathetic spectators. It is interesting to note that while Pater deprived Jean-Baptiste’s work of part of its authenticity, Wilde in fact carried the instantiation of Willie Hughes’s portrait one step further. ‘Mr W. H.’ had been published in Blackwood’s Magazine in July 1889, but Wilde planned a second, expanded edition, to be published as a slim volume;18 he commissioned the artist Charles Ricketts to paint Willie Hughes, the portrait to be used as frontispiece. ‘It is not a forgery at all’, Wilde wrote to Ricketts when he received the work. ‘It is a genuine Clouet of the highest artistic value’ (Holland and Hart-Davis, 2000, p. 412). Although the manuscript of an expanded version of ‘Mr W. H.’ and Ricketts’s painting both disappeared during the trials in 1895, the manuscript subsequently surfaced in the United States – and was published in 1921 by Mitchell Kennerley in a limited edition, and in London by Duckworth and Co. later in the year.19 Rickett’s painting has yet to reappear.20 I am not prepared to draw any large conclusions from my comparison, but I suggest that if Pater had imagined a woman in love with a painter – or a
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
sculptor – about whose work he had fewer reservations than he had about Watteau’s, the portrait-as-physical-object would have had greatest agency. To illustrate, one can, without violating any theory of genre, regard the essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in The Renaissance, as an imaginary verbal portrait. If one could then take the license to imagine that Pater had delineated the woman known as La Gioconda as a detailed figure, separate from her portrait, and had then recounted in a diary kept by her the sittings for the portrait, and in the diary invented any relationship she pleased between herself and Leonardo da Vinci, and had Pater retained his famous meditation on La Gioconda, introducing it by whatever means he required in my invented expansion of what he actually wrote, I do not have the slightest doubt that the famous passage as we know it, and thus the historical physical painting, would have triumphed in strength of agency over any verbal self-portrait by the woman, however elaborate in detail it might be. Finally, would that we might see Rickett’s painting of Willie Hughes, and be able to apply to our experience in viewing it Pater’s theory of aesthetic criticism – that ‘the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is’ (TR, p. xix).
Notes 1. Pater’s debt to Sainte-Beuve is mentioned by Gerald Monsman, for one (1967, pp. 36–7), who not only observes that Landor’s Imaginary Conversations was a favorite book of Pater and that ‘we can assume that the word imaginary was borrowed from Landor’, but also believes that the word portrait may have been suggested by Sainte-Beuve’s work (Monsman, 1967, p. 36). 2. For a thoughtful and informative analysis, see Lambert-Charbonnier (2002), as well as Daley’s essay, pp. 85–101. 3. See Macdonald (1980, p. 53). Although my focus is Victorian England, it is worth noting, to emphasize the ubiquity of the family album, that the latter was also a fixture in American households, and contained celebrities’ cartes-de-visite (Macdonald, 1980, p. 53). 4. There was also a direct class influence to be seen on the streets. The ‘working class acquired a breed of photographer, the street-corner operator, who would “take yer ‘ead for six-pence”’ (Heyert, 1979, p. 77). 5. That is, aesthetically serious writing. Wilde occasionally used photography in his short stories for satiric or pseudo-enigmatic purposes. 6. See Birchall (2003). Ruskin’s attitude toward photography was ambiguous; he lavished praise on the use of daguerreotypes for architectural detail, and amassed over time a considerable collection of such images, now in the Ruskin Library at the University of Lancaster. For a full discussion of this subject, see Wildman (2006). For my purposes, it may be significant that Ruskin’s views on portrait photography are not on record, except for an essentially negative response to a photograph portrait of himself. 7. Eliot (1955, vol. 5, p. 437). Qtd also by Novak (2008, p. 1). Although Novak’s interests in nineteenth-century photography are widely different from my own at present, I am glad to acknowledge that the Eliot letter extract,
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12. 13.
14.
15. 16.
17.
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published in his book, called my attention to it. I would have missed it otherwise. All the Year Round and Household Words published articles on photography. They were, in general, satirical, though not exclusively so. See Novak (2008, pp. 28, 40, 42, and 161 n. 70). I have cited Rejlander’s utilitarian photography, but he himself made no distinction between his studies for Darwin and his other photographic ventures; he regarded himself as an artist in photography, and his status as such has been supported by twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians and interpreters of nineteenth-century photography. See Gernsheim and Gernsheim (1969, pp. 246–7) and, for examples of Rejlander’s work, pp. 103–6; see also Novak (2008, pp. 16–22, 92–3). It is faintly relevant that Dickens’s recorded attitude toward photography was also ambiguous, if not in the way Ruskin’s was. In 1856 Dickens expressed his dislike of ‘the multiplication of my countenance in the shop windows’ (The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938, vol. II, p. 819)). Yet he also ‘compared himself . . . to a taker of daguerreotypes, sun-pictures, photographs’ (Collins, 1971, p. 6). I offer ‘The Real Thing’ only as an instance of negative views of photography. I would hesitate to cite the story as evidence that James’s aesthetic theory rejected photography. Preparing the New York edition of his work (1907–09), James had no hesitation in asking Alvin Langford Coburn to provide photographs to be used as frontispieces to each of the volumes. With detailed instructions, James sent Coburn to Paris and Venice, and when the desired scene was in London, often accompanied and directed him. Coburn’s photographs delighted James. See Edel (1972, pp. 334–8). See Ellmann (1988, pp. 530–85 passim). Of interest – but irrelevant to the question, is photography an art? – among the projects in the last years that Wilde talked about but never realized was to be a theory of aesthetics that included a need for pity. For a somewhat fuller description of the never-written theory, see Ellmann (1988, p. 556). ‘Cyril’s forging of the portrait is not really an attempt to provide historical “proof” for his theory. For what he presents to Erskine is essentially a portrait of himself in the role of the boy actor’ (Halpern, 2002, p. 39). She is, concerning his fêtes galantes, apparently disapproving. See for example Marie-Marguerite’s diary entry for 14 February 1712 (IP, pp. 15–17). Although Lawrence Danson, discussing the use of language in ‘Mr W. H.’, finds meaning in this use that goes beyond my own concern, the deferral of meaning that he discerns has room within its scope for my own stress on the arbitrariness of the name Willie Hughes as a signifier. Danson speaks of the ‘story’s structure of self-subverting narratives and its deferral of determinate meaning’ (1996, p. 98). In my view this accurate description embraces a minimizing of individuation among Cyril, Erskine, and even the narrator; it provides, too, I believe, another explanation for the absence of any historical distance, in the story, between Shakespeare’s lifetime and the nineteenth century. Richard Halpern’s view is apposite: ‘In Mr W. H., the formal issues of proof, evidence . . . quickly turn into aesthetic and erotic ones. Nothing exemplifies this more fully than the portrait itself . . . Its primary effect on the beholders is not to satisfy their rational demand for evidence but rather to fascinate and captivate them with its beauty. For the narrator, painting does not prove the theory; rather,
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Verbal Portraits: Pater and Wilde
Norman Kelvin
the very desire to hear the theory in the first place follows from his viewing of the portrait which “had already begun to have a strange fascination for me”’ (2002, p. 37). 18. The publishers of Wilde’s plays, John Lane and Elkin Matthews, announced ‘Mr W. H.’ as being ready for publication in 1893 but abandoned the project (Ackroyd in Wilde, 2003c, p. viii). See also Holland and Hart-Davis (2000), pp. 604–5, 608–9. 19. See Holland and Hart-Davis (2000), p. 606 n. 2. The 1921 text is the one used in the Hesperus edition, 2003 (Ackroyd in Wilde, 2003c, p. viii). 20. Although most references to the painting simply say that it disappeared, Holland and Hart-Davis provide an intriguing detail: at ‘the sale of Wilde’s effects on 24 April 1895 the painting was sold for a guinea’ (2000, p. 412 n. 2).
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8 Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Though we are not accustomed to thinking of Pater as a film theorist – since film was still on the verge of being developed at the time of his death – I would like to venture several respects in which it makes sense to do so. Pater’s work is saturated with attention to the moving image. In this essay, I will link his concern with the art history of the tableau to his concern with the epiphanic moment, whose importance is well known in Pater studies. This link will form a framework within which we can discern new significance in his synthetic conceptions of painting and music. Thus the present essay will also illuminate Pater’s theory of Anders-streben, the ‘striving after otherness’ exhibited by all art forms, the way each art form struggles to surpass its own limitations and thus to merge with other art forms in an interart dynamic that is surely one chief focus of this volume.1 Primarily focused on ‘The School of Giorgione’, this essay is organized as a sequence of five main points, which I will forecast here and then expand at greater length in the five sections to follow. (1) Pater emphatically stresses a moment in Renaissance art history when painting was detached from its former place on the wall. This literal detachment from an architectural or decorative setting indicates a new relation between form and function. The painting is now an aesthetic object, no longer meant for use but for aesthetic contemplation, enjoyment, and companionship. The painting as ‘tableau’, significantly, can be moved from place to place. (2) During the nineteenth century, the term ‘tableau’ was primarily associated with theatrical practice, where it refers to a moment of intense dramatic condensation, pictorially represented on stage in a sudden composition of frozen bodies. Diderot, who theorizes the theatrical tableau in relation to the painting (and to genre painting in particular), analyzes it in ways that are remarkably similar to Pater’s analysis of Giorgione, especially his depictions of ‘animated instants . . . which seem to absorb past and future in an 135
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Carolyn Williams
(3) The essay on Giorgione puts forward Pater’s consummate example of Anders-streben in the assertion that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (TR, p. 106). Ideal painting, however, is firmly related to music in this essay as well. Pater struggles to show that painting, like music, can overcome the distinction between form and content; and he uses the visual image of a ‘space of . . . fallen light’ to represent ideality in painting (TR, p. 104). Thus, the essay is most important for its synthesis of music and painting. (4) Pater’s representation of the epiphanic moment demonstrates his affinity with the pre-cinematic, photographic aesthetics of the still picture and with other visual technologies that led toward film. Musical backgrounds and interludes are important parts of these forms, suggesting that an interart ‘striving after otherness’ operates in the world of popular culture as well. The nineteenth century may be seen as one long process of Anders-streben: an attempt to take the still picture and to make it move. (5) Pater’s work is pivotal in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary history of the epiphanic moment, which stretches from Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, through Ruskin and Pater, to Hardy, Joyce, Woolf, and beyond. In addition to their interruptive and arresting value – to the way they stop time in the present – epiphanic moments may be arranged serially to establish the points of a narrative form. ‘Serial discontinuity’, a term used by Martin Meisel with respect to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, theatre, and the illustrated novel, describes this narrative form. I argue for the connection between serial discontinuity and early film, which operates by moving a sequence of still pictures rapidly in front of a light source to produce the illusion of ‘moving pictures’. I end by suggesting that serial discontinuity is a specifically nineteenth-century narrative form, whose consummation is registered in film. Pater is its master theorist.
Tableaux, or moveable pictures Originally, the word ‘tableau’ referred to painting on a wooden tablet or panel, which could then be detached from the wall and framed. Now ‘the painting’ (no longer simply ‘painting’) becomes an object and can be moved from one place to another. Its status as an object of contemplation, its changeable context (and therefore its relative autonomy), and its detachment from the wall all mark it as ‘aesthetic’. In ‘The School of Giorgione’, Pater focuses on – or, more accurately, he constructs – the art-historical moment when painting is detached from
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intense consciousness of the present’ (TR, p. 118). Genre painting, the melodramatic tableau, and the ephiphanic moment all achieve temporal ‘arrest’ in the midst of ongoing life or action.
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the wall and thus becomes an autonomous art object. First published in the Fortnightly Review in October 1877 and included in the third edition of The Renaissance (1888), this essay has always been best known for its articulation of the theory of Anders-streben, whereby each art form struggles to exceed its own limitations, and for the aesthetic maxim that Pater advances to illustrate the theory: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ Even though he does not use the term, however, we might with good reason say that in this essay he also theorizes the tableau. Separated from their context and framed as works of art (in both conceptual and material terms), tableaux are ‘easily movable pictures’, in Pater’s words (TR, pp. 110–11). The fact that the tableau could now become a piece of portable property might mark a turning point in a materialist history of art, but of course Pater does not take the argument in this direction. He does, however, stress the idea that painting was no longer subordinated to the interior decoration of an architectural edifice like a church or a home. Giorgione ‘detaches [those easily movable pictures] from the wall’ (TR, p. 111). This form of detachment is significant in two different ways, for it frames the object as aesthetic, while assigning it a new function. No longer part of the architecture, the tableau now serves as a companion; its objectivity is posited in direct relation to the beholder’s subjectivity. In contrast to the later Florentines, who overemphasize the ‘stress of thought and sentiment’ – by which he means the content or theme of their paintings – Pater praises ‘those early Venetian painters . . . [who] seem never for a moment . . . to forget that painting must be before all things decorative, a thing for the eye, a space of colour on the wall, only more dexterously blent than the marking of its precious stone or the chance interchange of sun and shade upon it’ (TR, p. 110). We should notice the simultaneous emphasis on something so practical as interior decoration and something so abstract as ‘a space of colour on the wall’. From his focus in the Italian Renaissance, Pater looks back to a past when painting had not yet been separated out as art, and forward to the future of his own time, when he abstracts painting further from its content. Pater then goes on to claim that Giorgione invented genre painting. This strategic conflation of genre painting with the detachment of the painting from the wall cannot be taken as art-historical fact. Nor can we take literally his attribution of both to Giorgione (think of all those ‘moveable’ devotional panels that long predate Giorgione or genre painting). Pater’s claims must be read, instead, as figurative arguments, interesting for their theoretical value and their clarification of his narrative of art history. Giorgione is, Pater observes, the inventor of genre, of those easily moveable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching – little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or
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Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Carolyn Williams
landscape – morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, but refined upon or idealized, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent colour, obediently filling their places, hitherto, in a mere architectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall. He frames them by the hands of some skilful carver, so that people may move them readily and take with them where they go, as one might a poem in manuscript, or a musical instrument, to be used at will, as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one’s cabinet, to enrich the air as with some choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or a lifetime. (TR, pp. 110–11) In this passage, Pater’s emphasis on daily life is doubled: the genre painting depicts daily life and the picture itself, the object, is used in daily life. The scenes depicted appear ‘like glimpses of life from afar’, while the use of the painting is close up, familiar, and intimate, ‘coming like an animated presence, into one’s cabinet’. Furthermore, the glimpse as if ‘from afar’ as well as the ‘fram[ing] . . . by the hands of some skilful carver’ bespeak aesthetic detachment, represented by the artist’s choice of subject, recapitulated in the framing, and finally again in the beholder’s attention. When he separates ‘morsels of . . . life’ from the temporal ongoingness of the ordinary, Pater treats life itself as aesthetic in his characteristic way. As long as an ‘object’ can be isolated, whether that object is a moment, a person, or a thing, it can be seen as aesthetic. This is one sense of the logic of Pater’s connection between genre painting and the detachment of the painting from the wall. Another sense of its logic is conveyed in Pater’s characteristic use of the personal figure. These paintings are made to be companions, not objects of contemplation – not objects at all, in one respect, but interactive subjects, ‘like persons’. Again, Pater is not interested in property relations – the fact that the moveable art object can now be circulated, bought, and sold – as another critic might be, but rather in the obliteration of the conceptual distinction between art and life. In this passage, he approaches his point from both directions, converting life into art by focusing on ‘morsels of actual life’ that have been painted, framed, and detached from the wall, and converting art into life by figuring the paintings as ‘persons, [who might come to] live with us, for a day or a lifetime’. At this point, I might venture my first play on the phrase ‘moving pictures’, to which I will return later in this essay. Never merely adventitious, wordplay on this phrase is a serious part of my argument, for it registers important links in a long history of connections between painting, theatre, literature, and, eventually, cinema. In addition, it links those aesthetic histories within the history of empirical science and philosophy, and within the history of their literary and theatrical offspring: sensibility and sensation. In this particular case, Pater argues, the fact that paintings can now move from place to place allows them to be ‘moving’ in the affective sense, ‘like
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persons, [who might come to] live with us, for a day or a lifetime’. Like his manifesto in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, his argument redefines the aesthetic by mixing up art and life: ‘While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp 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 colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend’ (TR, p. 189).
The theatrical tableau After the last third of the eighteenth century – certainly throughout the nineteenth – the word ‘tableau’ primarily refers to moments of intense dramatic condensation, represented on stage as pictorial compositions. In the moment of tableau, the actors suddenly freeze into stillness and make a picture (‘picture’ is the technical term for a tableau in the playtexts of the English nineteenth century). That sudden shift in registers – from dramatic movement to visual stillness – moves the audience members in turn, calling them to read, to interpret, and also to feel. The picture’s sudden stillness moves them into an affective response: shock and terror, sentiment and tears, or detached contemplation. Thus, though they are absolutely still, theatrical tableaux are ‘moving pictures’ in several senses. They elicit emotion in the audience (we must recover the sensory, bodily sense of ‘emotion’ in order to understand that its expression is a form of motion). They prefigure future movement on stage, for, at least until the last curtain falls, the tableaux contain the potential for further dramatic unfolding. Finally, in a formal sense, the series of tableaux that form the points of a plot trajectory might themselves be taken as a shorthand notation of movement.2 In other words, tableaux and dramatic action are involved together in a dialectic of stillness and motion. Denis Diderot was the first great theorist of the tableau. For our purposes, his work may be taken to mark a moment of historical transition in the use of the term ‘tableau’, since he writes of the tableau with respect both to theatre and to genre painting. In both contexts, he emphasizes dramatic condensation, the way the painter or dramatist frames suggestive moments, detaching them from the stream of dramatic action, which they nevertheless illustrate, so that their interpretive potential can be isolated. ‘There is only one moment for the artist to choose’, writes Diderot, ‘but this moment may carry traces of the moment which preceded it and signs of the one which will follow. Iphigeneia is not yet being sacrificed, but I see the executioner’s assistant approaching with the bowl which is to receive her blood, and this accessory makes me tremble’ (Diderot, 1994, p. 333). Of course, Iphigeneia’s sacrifice is hardly the subject of a genre painting, hardly a ‘morsel of actual life’. But in his Salons, Diderot frequently makes the same point, especially about the genre paintings of Greuze.
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Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Carolyn Williams
Pater makes it, too, praising Giorgione’s genre painting for its ‘dexterous choice of the subject, or phase of [the] subject’ (TR, p. 116). For example, he singles out ‘from the gallery at Dresden, the Knight Embracing a Lady, where the knight’s broken gauntlets seem to mark some well-known pause in a story we would willingly hear the rest of’ (TR, p. 114). Interpreting the ‘well-known pause’, Pater dilates on suspense, narrative interest, and the intimacies of the story. He goes on: The master is pre-eminent for the resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces instantaneous motion . . . The sudden act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression – this he arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is a part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile perhaps – some brief and wholly concrete moment – into which, however, all the interests and effects of a long history have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects . . . from that feverish, tumultuously coloured world of the old citizens of Venice – exquisite pauses in time, in which, arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life. (TR, p. 118) Generalizations like Vasari’s ‘Giorgionesque fire’ (or his own ‘school of Giorgione’, for that matter) enable Pater to evade issues of attribution, to generalize, and to interpret freely. At the ultimate reach of this existential allegory, ‘we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence’. In other words, making these ideal instants stand for ‘actual life’ because they ‘absorb past and future into an intense consciousness of the present’, Pater can imagine, correlatively, that the beholder apprehends life itself. He does not use the word ‘beholder’, however, but the word ‘spectator’, drawing attention to the theatrical nature of the viewing. Like the painterly tableau, the theatrical tableau arrests the passage of time, stills its movement, and concentrates the spectator’s attention in one pictorial composition. Diderot evaluated the success of any tableau according to its power to fixate its spectators. In his theory, the successful tableau must first appeal to, call out to, or attract the spectator’s attention (appeller); then it must arrest the spectator, holding him or her in front of it for a time (arrêter); and finally it should enthrall or entrance the spectator (attacher). As Michael Fried has put it, for Diderot, ‘a painting had to call to someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself, and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move’ (1980, p. 92). Again, we can recognize the dialectical involvement
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of stillness and movement, now taking place within the fixated spectator, who is ‘arrested’ and quite still, but is moved internally by the static tableau. In his Salons, Diderot champions the genre painters – Greuze and Chardin especially – but earlier he had praised the theatrical tableau as well. In his ‘Conversations on The Natural Son’, an essay which comments on his own play (Le Fils naturel, 1757; produced 1771), he explains that ‘an unforeseen incident which takes place in the action and abruptly changes the situation of the characters is a coup de théâtre. An arrangement of these characters on the stage, so natural and so true that, faithfully rendered by a painter, it would please me on a canvas, is a tableau . . . A poet . . . would not be very sensible if he preferred the coup de théâtre to the tableau. One is almost like a children’s game, and the other is a stroke of genius’ (Diderot, 1994, pp. 12, 15). Disparaging sudden twists and revelations in the plot, in favor of composed and meaningful stage pictures, Diderot draws attention to the similarity of his dramaturgy and his views on painting: ‘If a dramatic work were well made and well performed, the stage would offer the spectator as many real tableaux as the action would contain moments suitable for a painting’ (1994, p. 13). His tragédie domestique et bourgeoise focuses on just such moments of dramatic condensation in everyday life. Lessing, who was influenced by Diderot in his dramaturgy as well as in his aesthetic philosophy, theorizes the ‘limits’ of painting and poetry in Laocoön (1766), speculating at length on their differences, what each can do best, what each cannot do. This work had an enormous influence – much greater than Diderot’s – across the English nineteenth century, and it provides Pater with the occasion for ‘The School of Giorgione’.3 Like Pater, many nineteenth-century English writers preferred to go beyond the ‘limits’ set by Lessing. Hopkins, for example, called Lessing’s principles ‘a damned lie’ (qtd in Witemeyer, 1979, p. 1). In Laocoön, however, Lessing also theorizes the ‘pregnant moment’. Like Diderot’s ‘tableau’, the pregnant moment is the moment of perfect dramatic condensation, the moment a painter should choose in order to enfold past and future in one complex pictorial implication. Like Diderot, Lessing argues that the significance of the pregnant moment should be instantly grasped by the beholder. Thus Diderot and Lessing were the founders of a modern dramaturgy that depends on pictorial representation of the moment and sudden spectatorial apprehension in the moment. Toril Moi has argued that Diderot ‘can be considered an unwilling theorist of melodrama’ (2006, p. 116), and the same is true of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, despite his later anti-theatricalism, wrote and produced the first melodrama at the Comédie-Française. His Pygmalion (1762) was in repertory there until the early nineteenth century. As Carrie Preston has shown, Pygmalion is an ‘innovative hybrid’, for the score is divided into three columns, one for the music, one for the declamation, and one for the gestures. The piece is a monodrama as well as a melodrama, in which the
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Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Carolyn Williams
single actor-speaker Pygmalion assumes a series of attitudes while addressing passionate declamations to his statue of Galathée (Preston, 2006; Culler, 1973). For our purposes, the choice of subject matter is itself significant, since the statue’s silence and stillness elicit the sounds of speech and music, as well as the movement of the actor’s body. Already we can see the main elements of melodramatic form: the speaker’s body assumes a series of gestural poses, while music underscores the play of his changing emotions. Music announces the mood of each declamation, and then recedes into the background, or swells into the foreground, as melodramatic music is wont to do (and as we have now come to expect in film). Later melodramas will, of course, feature more than one speaker; the music will express more emotional complexity than one character can elicit; and the attitude, a static moment of composition, will, with more than one body in formation, become the tableau. Thus melodrama displays a ‘pointed’ style that operates on several levels. The music starts and stops, while individual acting bodies engage in sweeping gestures that come to a ‘point’ in an attitude. On a more comprehensive level, the unfolding dramatic action is arrested temporarily in the grand points of the tableaux. The theatrical tableau punctuates, interrupts, and illustrates the unfolding plot through its dramatically condensed, ‘pointed’ moments. In fact, melodrama synthesizes the demands of musical and pictorial form – as Pater’s essay on Giorgione is meant to do. Melodrama is itself a great example of Anders-streben. Like genre painting, melodrama focuses on ordinary people, however typified they might be; like genre painting, the melodramatic tableau moves its audience through the stillness of its dramatic ‘moment’. At this point, we should begin to see the relevance of melodramatic form both to Pater’s idea of genre painting and to the literary history of the epiphanic moment.
Musical backgrounds and intervals Having appreciated the dramatic condensation of ‘instantaneous motion’ (TR, p. 118) as an ideal in painting, and having seen this principle at work in theoretical aesthetics, painting, and theatre, we may now turn to music. ‘The School of Giorgione’ is best known for its argument that music ‘obliterates’ the distinction between matter and form and represents their ‘union or identity’ (TR, pp. 106, 109). Less discussed, however, has been the way Pater makes music important to his concept of genre painting. In order to argue the relevance of paintings by the school of Giorgione to his contention that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’, Pater begins by treating music as content, for, as he points out, the making or hearing of music is often the subject of the paintings. Calling on ‘an ingenious passage of the Republic’, Pater annexes Plato’s authority for the image of ‘people with intent faces, as if listening’ (TR, p. 119). ‘In these, then,
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the favourite incidents of Giorgione’s school, music or the music-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening – listening to music, to the reading of . . . novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies’ (TR, p. 119). In this focus on the depiction of moments of attention, Pater has moved from treating music as content, to treating music as form. It is highly significant that he describes musical form as the fleeting temporality of existence, punctuated by ‘music-like intervals’ of listening that may be represented pictorially. In other words, music makes a good figure both for time’s passage and for its arrest in the significant moment, visually apprehended. Another way Pater understands pictorial form as ‘musical’ is his notion that form in painting is the condensation of a mood. Immediately following the paragraph that announces ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’, he adduces the example of an etching by M. Alphonse Legros (see Figure 2.2). That etching, of ‘a long white road lost suddenly on the hill-verge’ is ‘informed by an indwelling sense of solemnity’ because it is ‘seen . . . within the limits of an exceptional moment, or caught from his own mood perhaps, but which he maintains as the very essence of the thing’ (TR, p. 106). Whether the coherence of the mood comes from the moment represented or from the mood of the artist is not something Pater chooses to decide. He does, however, describe a focused mood in the same terms we have been exploring, those of the ‘exceptional moment’. Pater then makes his description of Giorgione’s genre painting serve as an allegory of historical emergence: ‘On that background of the silence of Venice . . . the world of Italian music was then forming’ (TR, pp. 118–19). Pater concretely imagines the emergence of music out of silence, but in a more general sense he casts the history of music against the background of the history of art. In its own Anders-streben, struggling to be other than itself, Italian music emerges from within Pater’s history of painting. One more conceptual strategy for synthesizing the claims of painting and music, this argument illustrates Pater’s complex imagination of aesthetic history. As I have argued elsewhere, his figures of ‘relief’ use backgrounds and foregrounds to depict the process of historical emergence, while his figures of linear development body forth the shape of historical unfolding. Those time-lines are not continuous, but are imagined as a series of high ‘points’ emerging against a recessive background – the way, for example, classical art ‘rises up’ in the Renaissance and then again in the nineteenth century (Williams, 1989, pp. 153–67). In other words, this is a ‘pointed’ form of representation, with intervals positioned against and isolated from an otherwise unpunctuated background. In ‘The School of Giorgione’, too, he imagines a silent background with concentrated points of ‘music-like intervals’ rising out of and against it. The argument of ‘The School of Giorgione’ becomes more complex with Pater’s effort to bring the image of water into the mix, as a figure both
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Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Carolyn Williams
for time flying and for momentary apprehension, attention, and especially listening. As Pater reminds us, when he quotes from the Cratylus in his epigraph to the Conclusion, ‘Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are moving along and nothing stands still’ (TR, p. 186).4 Somewhere else, Heraclitus also says that we cannot step into the same stream twice. Time rushes on, like water. But ‘from afar’, moving water looks like a still picture. Detached visualization figuratively stills the onrushing movement. We know Pater was interested in this paradox because of his ingenious revision of Wordsworth’s ‘stationary blasts of waterfalls’ from the Simplon Pass episode of The Prelude, where the waterfall – like the ‘woods decaying, never to be decayed’ – stands as an emblem of transcendent permanence (Book VI, ll. 625–6). In the Conclusion, Pater writes of the waterfall that ‘the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest’ (TR, p. 187). For Pater, the waterfall is a perfect image of time’s passing, and its look of seeming stillness is only ‘apparent’, a function of vision and distance. Pater acknowledges the influence of Rossetti’s sonnet, ‘A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione’, and under this influence he veers for a moment from the main line of his argument to entertain, instead, the symbolic value of water. The main line of his argument goes like this: water is like music insofar as they are both good figures for time’s passage. Water is also like music insofar as they both stimulate listening in their audiences, and thus instill the form of attention that promotes consciousness of the present moment. In other words, water calls to mind both the ongoing rush of time and its arrest in an attentive consciousness of the moment. We usually think of Pater as the theorist of seeing, but this essay is interested in synthesizing the claims of seeing and hearing. Like form and content, stillness and movement, Pater asks us to contemplate this third great dialectical relation, and to feel the way the two ‘aspects’ of the dialectic correlate with, complete, and morph into one another. Looking and listening, in other words, are not opposites in Pater, and neither are music and painting, or time and space. This point is especially important because ‘The School of Giorgione’, although most famous for its formulation of the ideality of musical form, offers an analogous abstraction of painting. In an equally poignant and modern formulation, Pater compares the quintessential beauty of painting to ‘a space of colour on the wall’ or ‘a space of fallen light’: ‘In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are in an Eastern carpet’ (TR, pp. 110, 104). Quoting this passage as evidence, Kenneth Clark argues that ‘The School of Giorgione’ was the most original and influential essay in The Renaissance, specifically because Pater draws the connection between this abstract conception of painting as a ‘space of fallen light’ and the idea that ‘All
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art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. With this ‘revolutionary doctrine’, Clark argues, Pater reached ‘beyond even the most adventurous critics of the next generation’. Thus Clark gives Pater credit for both prescience and historical, transitional force (TR, p. 385; Stein, 1975, p. 43). Pater’s essay, in other words, is not only the consummate expression of the nineteenth century’s devotion to the musical metaphor in all its forms (Solie, 2005). It represents a way out of Lessing’s epistemology and aesthetics of ‘limits’ by subsuming both poetry and painting under the higher category of music. Pater criticizes Lessing’s ‘false generalisation of all art into forms of poetry’ (TR, p. 103) and answers it with a grand generalization of his own.
Music and moving pictures We now have a framework within which we can identify new significances in Pater’s synthetic treatment of painting and music. His theoretical boldness in relating music to visual art resonates within the long nineteenth-century attempt to capture the ‘space of fallen light’, to project it, and to make it move. If we think of the painterly tableau as a first phase and the theatrical tableau as a second phase in this history, the magic lantern and the photograph would mark a third phase – all precursors of the cinematic moving picture. Although of course this sequence cannot even claim to be a full sketch, much less a full history, we should nevertheless be able to grasp its figurative value as a conceptual map. When thinking of the painting as ‘a space of fallen light’, Pater is not far from the concept of the photograph.5 Perhaps the history of photography conditioned and made possible his modernist, abstract view of painting. Certainly the tableau stands behind the nineteenth-century development of photography. In Burning with Desire, Geoffrey Batchen helps us conceptualize this relation. He argues that an imaginative desire pre-existed the technological capability to make photographs. Thus the prehistory of photography is the period of ‘burning with desire’ to capture the picture of a moment, by means of light falling on a prepared surface and ‘burning’ the image into that surface (Batchen, 1999). When thinking of sharply focused light burning an image into receptive plate or paper, readers of Pater will recall his exhortation ‘to burn . . . with [a] hard, gem-like flame’ and to ‘be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite’ (TR, p. 188; my italics). But I like Batchen’s analysis not because it reminds me of Pater, but for another simple but powerful reason. In Batchen’s narrative, an imaginative vision of a future aesthetic regime prefigures its actualization, rather than the other way round. Too often these days, historical explanation gives priority to the technology, which is then credited with enabling forms of aesthetic imagination. In other words, Batchen’s is an argument in favor of aesthetic
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Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Carolyn Williams
determination, rather than technological determinism, and I believe that Pater would have found it most congenial. I am arguing that the desire for photography can be recognized in the tableau, and further that the melodramatic tableau prefigures and conditions the development of film. The dialectic of stillness and movement, which we have traced in Pater’s argument, can be observed much more broadly across the aesthetic history of the nineteenth century, as many various attempts were made, first, to stop time in a still picture, and then to get the picture moving. Significantly, Daguerre worked on both photography and the diorama, the latter of which attempts to create movement within one picture and bears a strong resemblance to the use of transparencies and gauze screens in the theatre. Various forms of the panorama also play out the dialectic of still and moving pictures: some move the picture, like a giant scroll, in front of stationary spectators, while others move the spectator past a series of static pictures. These technologies, which were developed before the beginning of the century, continued to develop in the nineteenth-century theatre. The influence of Loutherbourg’s spectacles and his Eidophusikon may be felt in the development of ‘Gothic’ stagecraft, fantasy effects in pantomime and extravaganza, and the spectacular ‘sensation’ scenes in later melodrama. Efforts to intensify and focus the light source and control its projection move through the historical succession of lime, gas, and electricity, both in the theatre and out. And, I hope, the projection of images on transparencies and screens in parlors, exhibition spaces, and theatres would, at this point in my essay, recall the detachment of painting from the wall. In a sort of uncanny return, the pictures now re-merge with the wall. The magic lantern predates photography, but continues to develop until film takes its place. In the famous magic-lantern technique of the ‘dissolving views’, manipulation of glass slides creates the illusion of one image giving way to another gradually enough so that the latter image seems to emerge out of the former. Film inherits this technique in its ‘dissolves’, a piquant form of juxtaposition mobilized in time. Correlatively, the effects of montage – which Eisenstein famously recognized in the work of Dickens – can project simultaneity in time, moving the narrative forward by juxtaposing shots one after the other. Unlike the diorama, which developed ways to represent change within a picture, the magic lantern and its inheritors rely on a sequence of pictures to produce the sense of movement. Cinematic ‘moving pictures’ are the result of such a sequence of still shots, strung together on a strip of film. Add music to underwrite, guide, and elicit the shifting moods, and you have something very much like a movie. In other words, musical backgrounds and intervals were an important part of popular visual entertainments in the nineteenth century. In the theatre of melodrama, for example, thematically coded ‘melos’ set each mood in turn, stopping and starting,
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rising and falling to delimit passages of dramatic action, swelling in the silences between declamations, and receding into the background when speech moves into the foreground (Mayer and Scott, 1983). This musical form supports the rhythmic alternation of dramatic movement and static tableaux as well, sonic crescendo building toward the moment of pictorialization. Intermittently, too, crashing chords make musical ‘points’, and then the background is suddenly punctuated by a fiercer, immediate demand for attention. Often perceived as interludic, or ‘incidental’, theatre music in the nineteenth century is just as often highly organized as a complex sequence of backgrounds and foregrounds, passages and ‘points’ (Pisani, 2004). The use of music in nineteenth-century theatre is a huge topic, but it is no exaggeration to say that it is the background, supporting element in popular visual entertainment of all sorts, from magic-lantern shows, through melodrama, to silent film. Fascination with the technological and aesthetic precursors of film has generated much scholarly attention. The idea of ‘film before film’ reaches back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and forward from there to its nineteenth-century parodic revision, the tale of Gabriel Grub from The Pickwick Papers, which became a favorite subject in nineteenth-century magic-lantern shows. In that story, a misanthropic sexton is captured by goblins, who finally provoke his sympathy by showing him images of human misery on the wall of a cavern. Projecting pictures on a wall or screen need not involve narrative, of course. In this respect, Megan Becker-Leckrone has suggested that light falling through stained glass provides an example of light projection, an example close to Pater’s own sense of painting as a ‘space of fallen light’.6 However, the link between film, melodrama, painting, music, and the history of the epiphanic moment can be identified most clearly when ‘film before film’ is considered in its fully narrative aspect. If one still picture can seem to arrest the ephemeral moment, then a sequence of still pictures can produce the sense of narrative movement in time. From Hogarth to Hollywood flip books, from comic books to animated cartoons – and, of course, from painting to film – a sequence of stills can move the spectator through narrative time; can provoke emotion and thus be moving; and can itself be made to move.
The epiphanic moment and ‘serial discontinuity’ as narrative form In ‘The School of Giorgione’ Pater places the moment – of focus, of vision, of arrest – within a history of art; but the privileged moment has its literary history as well, burning with the desire to be realized as movement. Most readers of Pater will be familiar with this history, which stretches across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Langbaum, 1983; Bidney, 1997). Crucially, it begins with Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, those moments
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Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Carolyn Williams
of ‘renovating virtue, whence . . . our minds/Are nourished and invisibly repaired’ (Book XII, ll. 210–15). In The Prelude, those moments rise in visionary relief against the depressed background of ongoing, ordinary life. In the first chapter of Praeterita, Ruskin recalls the formative moments in childhood when he repeatedly traced the pattern in the carpet as the light fell upon it, practicing the ‘habit of fixed attention’ and ‘close watching’ that would remain his chief resource (1978, pp. 12, 34, 50). Hopkins developed the related concepts of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ in order to emphasize the perfect and immediate grasp of a singular thing by the mind of the beholder. For all these nineteenth-century writers, visual grasp is central to the formation of experience, narrative, and theory. After Pater, many modernist writers work in this tradition. Although T. S. Eliot emphasizes ‘the point of intersection of the timeless/With time’ (‘Dry Salvages’; 1969, pp. 189–90), the apprehension at that ‘point’ is usually precipitated by the phenomenal world – and in particular by the sense of sight. True to the root meaning of ‘epiphany’, Joyce’s Stephen Hero describes ‘a sudden . . . manifestation’, spiritual in nature, ‘the most delicate and evanescent of moments’, when both object and viewing subject come into focus. Woolf’s ‘moments of being’ are those ‘exceptional moments’ in which we glimpse something ‘real’ amidst the drab unreality of ordinary existence. These moments make ‘life stand still here’, as she puts it in To the Lighthouse, where Mrs Ramsay’s ability to stop time is transformed and recreated in Lily Briscoe’s memory and in her abstract painting.7 Pater, however, is the master theorist of the epiphanic moment. The settled commitment to ‘hold by what his eyes really saw’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 90), as he puts it with reference to Marius the Epicurean, expresses his recognition that insight is anchored in sight. That premise is demonstrated in ‘The Will As Vision’, chapter XIX of Marius the Epicurean, where, as in Wordsworth, visual experience provides the background and catalyst of visionary apprehension. In Pater, again as in Wordsworth, those moments are like high ‘points’ that rise out from the background of continuous temporal unfolding. In ‘The School of Giorgione’, as we have seen, he theorizes the beholder’s experience of those moments, their depiction in painting, and the relation of their depiction to musical form. But Pater takes his Wordsworthian heritage and moves it beyond the framework of individual moments of apprehension. He imagines the structure of historical unfolding as homologous to the structure of individual experience, high ‘points’ of apprehension rising against the background of passing time. He is the pre-eminent theorist of the epiphanic moment because he draws the connections between its several kinds: moments of aesthetic creation (like Leonardo’s bien être); moments of aesthetic fixation before a work of art; moments of individual apprehension amid the rush of ordinary life; and the high ‘points’ of an aesthetic history.
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When they are organized in a series – as they are in The Prelude or Marius the Epicurean – epiphanic moments mark the points in a narrative trajectory, whose presumed continuity is relegated to the background. Crucially, this form of narrative is allied to musical form. As Phyllis Weliver has argued, ‘musical form’ is achieved when poetic moments are shaped into a sequence; the particular occasion of her essay, Rossetti’s The House of Life (1881), is germane for Pater admired Rossetti’s ‘structure of verse’. It seems that Rossetti introduced the term ‘sequence’ (rather than ‘series’) to name a group of sonnets in which ‘themes are presented, return and transform’ (Weliver, 2005, p. 196). According to Weliver, Rossetti imagined the sonnet as ‘a moment’s monument’ in order to stress its ability to arrest time’s passage, and to show that the moments could be arrested, preserved, and monumentalized in both spatial and temporal terms, in both the ‘house’ and the sonnet sequence. Blank space between the sonnets teases the reader into the task of projecting an overarching narrative for the sequence. With the establishment of a sequence, the full temporal dimension of the ‘moments’ is activated and mobilized, and a literary analogue of formal musical analysis becomes possible (Weliver, 2005, pp. 194–9). Martin Meisel offers us a useful term – ‘serial discontinuity’ – which can be generalized to describe this ‘pointed’ narrative form, which we have now seen operating in ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Prelude and Marius the Epicurean, in Rossetti’s The House of Life, and in melodramatic and pictorial dramaturgy, the dominant modes of the nineteenth-century theatre. In Realizations, Meisel concentrates on narratives that employ intermittent pictorialization. Narrative continuity is projected between the pictorial ‘points’. For example, a beholder of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress (1734) will understand that each painting represents a turning point in the story, whose detailed continuity has been relegated to the background, to the blank space between the pictures, so to speak, and left for the viewer to imagine. Similarly, the illustrations of a novel crystallize, condense, and interpret crucial moments in the unfolding of the story. So too the series of tableaux in a melodrama – some of which might even be ‘realizations’ of familiar paintings – dramatically mark out or punctuate the plot trajectory, as we have seen. Meisel’s monumental book traces the effects of pictorial narration in painting, theatre, and the illustrated novel, stressing the fact that serial ‘telling pictures’ link these art forms across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, when George Levine writes that ‘all Victorian art aspired to the condition of fiction’, and Meisel shows that pictorialism is fundamental to both narrative and dramatic arts in the nineteenth century, they do not disagree with Pater; but like Pater, they specify the nineteenthcentury relation of other arts within the ‘condition of music’ – that is to say, within their formal relations (Levine, 1968, p. 78). Though they do not focus their attention on the form of ‘serial discontinuity’ as I do, in recent reconsiderations of their pivotal works on melodrama,
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Walter Pater, Film Theorist
Carolyn Williams
both Meisel and Peter Brooks are concerned with the way melodrama implies and leads directly to film (Meisel, 1994; Brooks, 1995). Other works, too, by Vardac (1949) long ago, and by Brewster and Jacobs (1997) most recently, take up this topic. We know that early silent film relies on both the plots and acting style of melodrama. And we know that early silent film was accompanied by almost-continuous live music, another direct inheritance from the melodramatic theatre. Brewster and Jacobs focus on the role of the tableau. But my argument is different. My argument is that the serial tableaux of melodrama are formal prefigurations of the film strip, just as the music of melodrama is the formal prefiguration of the sound track. Thus melodrama – that discontinuous series of genre pictures – is the direct generic precursor of cinema, but in a different way than we usually assume.8 If we understand that melodrama is an audiovisual field in which music subtends the dramatic action and tableaux interrupt and arrest it with their pictorial moments, then we can see that film represents the apotheosis and negation of melodramatic form. The apotheosis because the pictures seem actually to move, film negates the ‘discontinuity’ that is so crucial an element of melodrama’s serial discontinuity. Like a rapidly moving sequence of tableaux, the film strip is moved in front of a light source to project ‘moving pictures’. The ‘persistence of vision’ supposedly elides the blank space between the still shots, providing the illusion of continuous movement.9 But with the development of the technology, and with the advent of continuity editing, the ‘discontinuity’ is obliterated. No longer do we see the blank space between the pictures, or feel the fallow periods between the flashes of insight in the ‘exceptional moments’. It is for this reason that the flicker of silent film is now so historically suggestive, reminding us of the gaps between the still shots. While the ‘gutter’ between the frames of graphic narrative and comics preserves it, later filmmakers have often metacinematically recreated the discontinuity, citing the early history of film with still shots and freeze frames. Cindy Sherman’s ‘film stills’ and Bill Viola’s extreme slow-motion digital art represent two postmodern versions of this dialectic, one concentrating on the discontinuity and the other exaggerating the continuity implied in ‘moving pictures’. Now that we have our digital pause buttons, we can all be in control of the play between still shot and moving picture; at the very least, we should become conscious of the historical wit involved in this novel capacity. In conclusion, and to put it simply: the literary history of the epiphanic moment – including Pater’s pivotal place in that history – is an important form of serial discontinuity. This connection allows us to see new significance in Pater’s ‘music-like intervals’ and ‘space[s] of fallen light’. A complex interaction of music and moving pictures is the dominant Anders-streben in the nineteenth century. Because he is its master theorist, Pater’s work prepares us for film, which reworks this great nineteenth-century Anders-streben for the twentieth and twenty-first.
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1. Pater’s enthusiasm for mixed forms and genres is notable, in contrast to critics who, like Goethe, prefer purity of mode and genre. In this respect, on Goethe, see Hill, notes to TR, p. 388. ‘Striving after otherness’ is Harold Bloom’s translation, in Bloom, ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (1974; reprinted New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 58, n. 3), in which he links Anders-streben to Paterian askesis. 2. In the next section, I will develop this last point further. For more detailed versions of my argument that theatrical tableaux are ‘moving pictures’, see Williams (2004). 3. Pater certainly read Lessing, as ‘The School of Giorgione’ makes clear, though there is no evidence that he read Diderot. See Inman (1981b, 1990). 4. This unidentified translation is quoted in Monsman (1977, p. 4). 5. See Norman Kelvin’s essay in this volume, pp. 117–34. 6. In discussion, 29 July 2006, at the International Walter Pater Society conference, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. 7. In his treatment of ‘Varieties of the Modern Moment’, M. H. Abrams also discusses Marcel Proust, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and, briefly, Symbolism and Imagism (1971, pp. 418–27). I would also mention Thomas Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’ (both title of poem and volume, 1917) (Hardy, 1919). 8. Theorists have been concerned with this relation too. Barthes (1977) triangulates the significance of the tableau among Diderot, Brecht, and Eisenstein, thus implying a certain continuity in the history, though he differentiates carefully between them. Deleuze (1986), on the other hand, emphasizes the discontinuity between an aesthetic of poses, or an abstracted sequence of exceptional moments, which he associates with Bergson on the one hand, and film on the other. For him, the crucial defining feature of cinema has to do with the mechanically paced recording and projection in sequence of any-moment-whatever; each moment has been recorded simply because the moments are captured according to mechanically assigned intervals. 9. I say ‘supposedly’ because this subject is a matter of some debate, though it is surely true that the idea of persistence of vision has been of major importance, even if the exact workings of eye and mind are not precisely described by the phrase. See Gardner, forthcoming.
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Notes
Pater’s Musical Imagination: The Aural Architecture of ‘The School of Giorgione’ and Marius the Epicurean Elicia Clements
Walter Pater’s well-known dictum that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ in ‘The School of Giorgione’ (TR, p. 106) demonstrates an exceptionally aural understanding of the nature of aesthetic appreciation. If, as Douglas Kahn, a theorist of sound in the avant-garde argues, Western society ‘readily and pervasively privileges the eye over the ear’ (1992, p. 4), then Pater’s suggestion that music is the art to which all others aspire is an unexpected assessment of the aesthetic. Moreover, as Kahn states, ‘visually disposed language . . . favors thinking about sound as an object, but sound functions poorly in this regard: it dissipates, modulates, infiltrates other sounds, becomes absorbed and deflected by actual objects, and fills a space surrounding them’ (1992, p. 4). Why then, given that the ‘waves of wandering sound’ (TR, p. 113) have such unwieldy, inconsistent, and malleable qualities, does Pater beckon to the sonorous art as a way to prevent the ‘false generalisation of all art into forms of poetry’ (TR, p. 103)? What is it about music’s aural undecidability that satisfies Pater’s search for aesthetic pleasure rather than thwarts it? To explore some possible replies to such questions, I will focus on the aural dimensions of Pater’s employment of music and sound in two of his texts, one non-fictional and the other fictional (although both genres, as always with Pater, are less fixed than the labels imply): ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877) and Marius the Epicurean (1885).
The question of music’s aspirations Several critics have explored what the sonorous art ‘means’ to Pater, particularly in the Giorgione essay from The Renaissance. Debates tend to focus on establishing Pater’s position on music – not surprisingly given the essay – in terms of form and content. Most recent critics agree that music does not denote pure form for Pater, although traditionally he was often enlisted on the side of the formalists in the context of musical aesthetics (usually somewhat in line with Eduard Hanslick1 ). Patricia Herzog notes this misreading 152
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of Pater’s ‘musical law’ and suggests alternatively that Pater demonstrates the importance of content as well as form in aesthetic experience: ‘the truly artistic – that which for Pater gives art or any other object aesthetic value – concerns not only form but ideal matter, a matter neither reducible to form nor detachable from it but communicable through form, and in music’s exemplary condition, communicable through form alone’ (Herzog, 1996, pp. 130–1). Similarly, stressing the tension between binaries typically associated with music, Brad Bucknell suggests the condition of music is significant to Pater because it ‘both fills us and voids us at the same time’ (2001, p. 49): music ‘figures an ideal even as it dissipates, it sets the stage as the mode of perception and even creation, even while placing an impossible evanescence at the center of this desire, or perception, or creation’ (2001, p. 49). For Bucknell, music is capable of disrupting transcendence because of its link to time: ‘And by offering music as the art towards which all others aspire, Pater undermines the whole issue of transcendent desire, since music, even more than poetry, is associated with time’ (2001, p. 48). For Bucknell, music’s inseparability from temporal exposition binds art to history and the conditions of life. Likewise, Angela Leighton understands time, and its musical manifestation in rhythm, as being integral to Pater’s aesthetics and his prose. ‘Pater’s music’, according to Leighton, ‘is not just a matter of euphony . . . it is also a matter of time, of the rhythms of passage and postponement. Time is therefore not only an aural, but also a historical and physiological property’ (2005, p. 71). She also explores the ramifications of rhythm, ‘The sense of time passing [which] is audible in Pater’s sentences’ (2005, p. 71). Similar to Bucknell, she understands music in terms of time and history, but focuses on the rhythm of Pater’s prose to do so.2 Lastly, coming from another side of the issue, Ewa Borkowska argues that Pater’s concept of music anticipates early twentieth-century composition practices, particularly chromaticism and atonality: ‘In Pater’s aesthetic paradigm, the combinations and concurrences of elements, “renewed from moment to moment”, demonstrate the modulation to another key, that is to a new (a)tonality, no longer restricted as the tonal space but free of the “cohesive force” of diatonism’ (2000, p. 95). Pater’s flux of impressions and disrupted center concerning subjectivity is emulated in the innovations in musical tonality engendered by Arnold Schoenberg and practiced by the Second Viennese School. Pater’s prescience in this regard is again notable and his integration of music as the art form that opens up such possibilities among the arts is quite remarkable. Nevertheless, I would like to shift the focus away from music as movement through time and the form/content divide. Although these interpretations demonstrate the significance of music to Pater’s Aestheticism, they do not encompass all that music offers Pater. Examining the ‘Giorgione’ essay in
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conjunction with Pater’s most representative novel reveals that several other attributes of sonority are prevalent, even integral, to his conceptions of art and life, most fundamentally a spatial understanding of music that foregrounds its performativity. Whether by conscious design or not, these texts demonstrate Pater’s keen sense of aural architecture, a term defined by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter as the properties of a space that can be experienced by listening. In this way, Pater functions as an aural architect when he describes musical experiences. To cite Blesser and Salter, ‘acting as both an artist and a social engineer, [an aural architect] is therefore someone who selects specific aural attributes of a space based on what is desirable in a particular cultural framework’ (2007, p. 5). Obviously, I am not suggesting that Pater physically creates such structures. As with the concept of notional ekphrasis, a tradition of literary texts that imagine works of visual art,3 I am proposing that with his representations of space and sound Pater designs acoustical experiences. These aural blueprints also have a requisite effect on the subjects under discussion in an essay, or on the characters in a novel, for ‘an aural architect can create a space that encourages or discourages social cohesion among its inhabitants. In describing the aural attributes of a space, an aural architect uses a language, sometimes ambiguous, derived from the values, concepts, symbols, and vocabulary of a particular culture’ (Blesser and Salter, 2007, p. 5). Although Pater does not place music above the other arts – despite the implications of his dictum – he does deploy the elements of sound and space to make connections between the subject and the social domain. In turn, at least three attributes of music and sound occur in the essay and the novel: music/sound is capable of maintaining a liminal state;4 the efficacious, participatory, and productive nature of music-making is foregrounded; and music is shown to be particularly imbricated in the tangible world. All three of these aspects speak to a concern with the social sphere, not just the subjective experiences of art and life. In this way music comes to function not solely as an art to which all others should aspire but as a method for practicing aesthetic living.
Anders-streben and aurality Pater begins the essay on the Giorgionesque by noting critics who fail to distinguish between the arts when assessing their beauty – making links among them without marking their differences – fall short of appreciating the ‘sensuous element in art’ (TR, p. 102). Deprecating the absence of the physical realm, Pater interrogates the tendency of critics to neglect the material nature of artistic products and instead to privilege the abstract. As an alternative, the critic must examine the ‘variations of the beautiful’, he contends, for each art has ‘its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable charm’ (TR, pp. 103, 105). The critic’s occupation is to
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‘disengage the virtue’, as he states in the Preface to The Renaissance, of a particular art from natural sights and sounds, not to distill an essential, universal objectivity, but to find a subjective, ‘special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced’ (TR, p. xxi). The uniqueness of each art must be established first, before commonalities are sought. But the connections are indeed sought, because for Pater, only after the differences among the arts have been recognized can the critic observe how one art ‘pass[es] into the condition of some other art’, a circumstance he calls the ‘great Anders-streben of all art’ (TR, p. 106). Translated quite literally as other-striving, all the arts are motivated toward reaching each other ‘not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces’ (TR, p. 105). This formulation is a prescient, interart argument for aesthetic appreciation. Pater is sure to tell us, after all, that Giorgione was also an ‘admirable musician’ (TR, p. 119). Significantly, it is just at this moment in the essay, when he attempts to find an aesthetic common ground, that music – the wholly aural art form – becomes integral to his aesthetic theorizing. Pater alludes to music because it seems capable of sustaining oppositional forces. The aural domain enables the other-striving among the arts with its fluctuation, mutability, and transparency. Thus, it follows for Pater that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (TR, p. 106). In another balancing act between attributes that are typically thought of as oppositional, music encapsulates a special artistic quality because it can combine the ‘mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject’ with its ‘mode of handling’, with its form (TR, p. 106). The liminal space between these two attributes is the objective. Victor Turner, the cultural anthropologist, theorizes what produces the experience of liminality in terms of subjectivity by examining the performance of rituals. He argues that in-between states or a liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (2003, pp. 79–80) The passage of the liminal subject is eventually consummated, however. For Turner, closure is provided by the completion of the journey. In contrast, Pater suspends the spatio-temporal moment to revel in the ambiguity and transformative force of liminality. Music is the medium that helps him to conceive of this interstice in aesthetic terms. Pater’s interpretation of music’s coalesced content and form necessitates distance from representational meaning: ‘For while in all other kinds of art
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it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it’ (TR, p. 106). Understanding – semantic content, something found more readily in poetry or painting according to Pater – makes the distinction between subject and form more palpable, more distinct; it foregrounds the differences. Music, on the other hand, is the facilitator of interconnections among the arts and between form and content because of its distance from propositional meaning, because of its lack of semantic content. Yet, this does not make music – or the other arts – less meaningful to its perceivers. On the contrary, it brings one closer to ‘one’s own impression as it really is’ (TR, p. xix). This other-striving encapsulated by aurality instantiates art in the everyday practices of human beings, precisely because of the ineffable nature of music. Because meaning is less fixed, music enables a variety of interpretations or impressions in ways that words do not. Widening the gap, as music does, between signifier and signified, stresses its liminality. Throughout the examples of clarification Pater provides – all taken from ‘actual’ material conditions (TR, p. 106) – he links each art with the other. The first example is that of landscape painting, which ends with a musical metaphor to bring home the point. Considering the Venetian school, Pater observes: Of its Alpine background they retain certain abstracted elements only, of cool colour and tranquilising line; and they use its actual details, the brown windy turrets, the straw-coloured fields, the forest arabesques, but as the notes of a music which duly accompanies the presence of their men and women, presenting us with the spirit or essence only of a certain sort of landscape – a country of the pure reason or half-imaginative memory. (TR, p. 107) Music saturates this envisioned landscape. In fact, Pater transforms the painting into a soundscape, an acoustic arena – the area ‘where listeners can hear a sonic event . . . because it has sufficient loudness to overcome the background noise’ (Blesser and Salter, 2007, p. 22) – in which cohesion and liminality capture the interstitial aural architecture of painting and music. The ‘other-striving’ enabled by aurality is also enacted in Marius the Epicurean, aptly, at the house of Cecilia in the fourth part of the novel. The character, of course, evokes the patron saint of music and musicians, St Cecilia. Although most critics take it for granted that the name of the character must be at least an invocation of the early Christian saint and what she patronizes, very little has been said about the significance of this connection.5 Why, in this major episode in the text when Marius encounters his fourth religious philosophy, a peaceful and joyful community of early Christians, does Pater invoke the patron saint of music? The episode goes
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further than an invocation as this representation of Cecilia is largely based on the historical personage who is thought to have been martyred during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, sometime between 176 and 180 CE.6 Thus, not only is the patron saint of music alluded to, she is recreated in the text, materialized one could say, so that Marius (and the reader) can witness the aesthetic beginnings of the Christian church, realized as they are in musical ritual (at least in Pater’s construction). Combining the fictional and the factual, Pater utilizes Marius’s experience in the house of Cecilia to demonstrate the importance of community, ritual, and music by depicting the aural architecture of ancient Rome. When Cornelius and Marius first happen upon a doorway in a long, low wall about two miles away from Rome, they become threshold personae, it seems, as they cross the entrance into Cecilia’s courtyard, a moment that the narrator remarks could define ‘the critical turning-point in [Marius’s] days’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 95). The reader is informed that the proprietor of the house inside the wall (completely hidden, as it is, from the road) has noble taste, a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects, both as regards colour and form, so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the ancient world. (ME, vol. 2, p. 95) Cecilia’s special ability to ‘harmonise’ pictorial and architectural attributes is notable; her home reveals the multimedial practice of Anders-streben. The narrator continues to describe the ‘seductive’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 96) aesthetics of the interior landscape: ‘The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically, very seductive’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 96). A similar pattern to the Giorgione essay occurs in this text. The introduction of the early Christian community and its material domestic space is realized in sound: And from the first they could hear singing, the singing of children mainly, it would seem, and of a new kind; so novel indeed in its effect, as to bring suddenly to the recollection of Marius Flavian’s early essays towards a new world of poetic sound. It was the expression not altogether of mirth, yet of some wonderful sort of happiness – the blithe self-expansion of a joyful soul in people upon whom some all-subduing experience had wrought heroically, and who still remembered, on this bland afternoon, the hour of a great deliverance. (ME, vol. 2, p. 96)
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Fittingly, Marius’s (and the reader’s) first experience of Cecilia and her community is aural: sound saturates the scene. Yet, although they are singing, the semantic level of language seems inconsequential. Moreover, the enactment of the ritual enables the community to express ‘some sort of happiness’ literally in harmony or unison – in the musical moment, each member of the community contributes his or her individual voice yet they are still making sound in relation to each other. Thus, Marius steps into, and is enveloped by, the liminal acoustic arena of Cecilia’s house. Interested in the experiential side of this final encounter with religion in the text, Pater employs music to involve Marius in the spatio-aural circumstances of this early Christian community. When Cornelius and Marius come within the ‘precincts of the house’, ‘still in possession of that wonderful singing, although almost in open country, with a great view of the Campagna before them, and the hills beyond’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 104), the narrative describes a distant landscape, this time in crimson splendor. Again, like the description of the Venetian land/soundscape in the essay, an optical reverie is followed by a poignant soundscape, this time an actual hymn sung by the community at Cecilia’s house: At that moment the voice of the singers, a ‘voice of joy and health’, concentrated itself with solemn antistrophic movement into an evening or ‘candle’ hymn. ‘Hail! Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured, Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest: – Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung With undefiled tongue.’ – It was like the evening itself made audible, its hopes and fears, with the stars shining in the midst of it. (ME, vol. 2, p. 104) Pater’s depiction of the aural architecture is striking; it helps him to capture simultaneous movement and stasis – to maintain an epiphanic, suspended moment in motion. The aural domain enables this liminal process, even produces it. Pater manifests the history of early Christian worship by disclosing the acoustic arena of the community. It is the interstitial space enacted by all the arts, and especially music, that remains paramount to the scene in order to create an aesthetic and cultural understanding of Christianity.
Interart efficacy The choice of The Concert as an exemplary painting of the Giorgionesque (see Figure 9.1)7 also enacts Anders-streben: it is a compelling painting about
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Figure 9.1
Titian (formerly Giorgione), The Concert (c. 1510)
musical performers, and Pater’s interpretation of it demonstrates a highly interart reading. In his appreciation of the painting, he strives after the interconnections between visual art and music, ultimately performing, on several levels at once, the aesthetic theory he espouses. Pater acknowledges as much when he reiterates the point of the essay: ‘It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like this is really aspiring; and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subject’ (TR, p. 118). These ‘perfect moments of music’ entail the activities of performing and hearing, stressing the efficacious capacity of the sonorous art. As Richard Schechner has theorized (2003, pp. 112–69), efficacy and entertainment, albeit not merely binary oppositions or a continuum, represent two ends of a performance scale. Ritual, a type of performance, is characterized by Schechner as being imbued with material circumstances and functionality. Theatrical performance, on the other hand, is said to be closer to entertainment or play.8 Music’s distance from propositional content and its imbrication in performative, material experience, I would add, make it particularly efficacious, even though this active quality is precisely what is often overlooked in discussions of it. As the music philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch contends, ‘ “Wanting to say” is often the surest way not to
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convince anyone. Preaching puts us off and discourages our consent: anyone too eager to convince stops being convincing and, perversely, instills contradiction in his audience . . . Music, like the divine nightingales, answers with the deed, by Doing’ (2003, p. 84). The Concert depicts an acoustic arena saturated with imminent efficacy. Each listener is engaged differently with what he hears, but no one’s gaze meets the other’s in the painting, except perhaps the one look directed at the viewer (Figure 9.1).9 If one were to map the directions of each figure’s eyes with vectors, they would cross but never meet in any final consummation, to use Turner’s word, resisting closure in spatio-visual terms. Moreover, The Concert captures a double focus on performance and materiality. Music must be performed to be realized, and subsequently, appreciated. It is this quality in the interior landscape of the painting, as with the description of the Venetian landscape, that captivates Pater’s ‘imaginative reason’. In addition to representing the physical world through the three stages of life (youth, middle-age, and old-age), the painting discloses three musicians – one about to sing, according to Pater, one in the midst of playing, and one who seems to be finished; their participatory functions are described. Pater continues: The outline of the lifted finger, the trace of the plume, the very threads of the fine linen, which fasten themselves on the memory, in the moment before they are lost altogether in that calm unearthly glow, the skill which has caught the waves of wandering sound, and fixed them for ever on the lips and hands – these are indeed the master’s own[.] (TR, p. 113) Both stasis and movement produce liminal tension in Pater’s rendering. But the lifted finger, the plume that looks as though it could so easily be blown by a breeze in the room, the details of the fabric, and somehow, the invisible waves of wandering sound – the physical, although transparent, realization of the music – is being described in this scene of a musical performance. Although the moment is ‘fixed’ because set in the painting, Pater is particularly concerned to describe the reverberation of sound waves in the room. The tension captures what the eye cannot see – the acoustic arena – and strives after the sensory pleasure derived from the sonorous art of music. The same pattern informs Marius the Epicurean. Perhaps this is why the narrator proposes that music (particularly the performance of the song) constitutes the genesis of the Christian Mass in Marius the Epicurean. Rather than focusing on the logos (the word), Pater’s representation of the early Christian church details the architecture of the home, the visual scenery, and the sounds of the voices in the ‘house of song’. In chapter 22 the narrator lays the foundation for the historical beginnings of the church of ‘Minor Peace’. He concludes by characterizing its early development as being in liminal
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Gathering, from a richer and more varied field of sound than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies, some notes of which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after generations of interrupted development, formed into the Gregorian music, she was already, as we have heard the house of song – of a wonderful new music and poesy . . . Singing there had been in abundance from the first; though often it dared only be ‘of the heart’. And burst forth, when it might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical music; the Jewish psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now, gradually, from Greek into Latin – broken Latin, into Italian, as the ritual use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the earlier authorised language of the Church . . . That hymn sung in the early morning, of which Pliny had heard, was kindling into the service of the Mass. (ME, vol. 2, p. 125) Although the act of translating the words of the Mass is discussed, very little of the actual liturgy is included in this historical account. Even though the chapter ends, finally, with a Latin quotation from the Tantum Ergo of the Eucharistic Hymn, it does so without a translation into the English language of the novel. The text does not ‘preach the gospel’ of Christian doctrine; instead, it explores how the community enacts the rituals that produced a particular religion’s ‘good news’. Music and sound are fundamental components of this ceremonial beginning. As Jankélévitch has stated, ‘Music is not calligraphy projected into space, but a lived experience analogous to life’ (2003, p. 93). Its efficacy simultaneously resists the fixity of verbal language, yet enables ritual to be performed. Rather than simply remaining at the level of diegesis, therefore, the historical explication is followed by the enactment of these early aural rituals in chapter 23, ‘Divine Service’. When Marius attends the celebration for the birth of Christ, Pater depicts the performance of a rudimentary Mass: And the proper action of the rite itself, like a half-opened book to be read by the duly initiated mind took up those suggestions, and carried them forward into the present, as having reference to a power still efficacious, still after some mystic sense even now in action among the people there assembled. The entire office, indeed, with its interchange of lessons, hymns, prayer, silence, was itself like a single piece of highly composite dramatic music; a ‘song of degrees’, rising steadily to a climax.
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flux, ‘as being indeed a living creature, taking up, transforming, accommodating still more closely to the human heart what of right belonged to it. In this way an obscure synagogue was expanded into the catholic church’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 125). Subsequently, the narrator suggests that music was part of this process from the beginning, paradoxically keeping its very origins in a state of transition:
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Once again, Pater stresses the efficacy of ritual. The shift away from the eye at this moment, to dramatic music, suggests that the words and their propositional content are less important than the active participation of the congregation. Pater saturates the aural architecture of St Cecilia’s ancient Roman abode with sound to enact ‘weighty . . . symbolic signficance’. The performance of music enables him to do this. Additionally, such active participation is stressed further when the priest and the ‘whole assisting company’ chant the antiphon: ‘Still in a strain of inspired supplication, the antiphonal singing developed from this point into a kind of dialogue between the chief minister and the whole assisting company’ (ME, vol. 2, p. 137). Subsequently, the dialogic nature of music is reiterated after the Communion is taken: The Eucharist of those early days was, even more entirely than at any later or happier time, an act of thanksgiving; and while the remnants of the feast are borne away for the reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the rite reaches its highest point in the singing of a hymn: a hymn like the spontaneous product of two opposed militant companies, contending accordantly together, heightening, accumulating, their witness, provoking one another’s worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry. (ME, vol. 2, p. 140) The description of this early Mass, which comes directly after the historical narrative of its displaced genesis, not only illuminates that music is integral to the ceremony but also characterizes the ritual as music itself, with the climactic moment being the dialogic hymn of ‘sacred rivalry’. In this way, Pater’s enactment of the ceremony suggests what Jankélévitch argues is one of the reasons for composing and performing music in the first place: ‘But first and foremost an artist makes music because he has something to say out loud and because he feels the need to say it, and afterward, what he has written will seem like a new entity, according to his inventiveness, his improvisatory spontaneity’ (2003, p. 84). Pater found this capacity – the need to say something ‘out loud’ (even though this something is still ambiguous) – in music, and this is why it is so integral to the beginnings of the Christian tradition. In the fourth part of the novel, the narrator attempts to reveal the newness of this faith; appositely, its vocalization in song helps to communicate this, particularly the improvisatory spontaneity – one could even say ‘freedom’ – of the early ceremonies.
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Notwithstanding the absence of any central image visible to the eye, the entire ceremonial process, like the place on which it was enacted, was weighty with symbolic significance, seemed to express a single leading motive. (ME, vol. 2, pp. 134–5; my italics)
Aural Architecture in ‘Giorgione’ and Marius 163
Carolyn Williams has shown how important the material domain is to Pater’s conception of aesthetic praxis, how inseparable Pater’s principles of Aestheticism are from his historicism. I would like to make another connection, one that focuses on the sensory domain of sound as a material artifact, and consequently, supports Williams’s supposition that ‘Pater’s aestheticism and his historicism represent homologous and absolutely interdependent procedures in a complex and coherent method’ (1989, p. 4). Both the Preface and the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance begin with a nod to the material world, to the everyday. Resisting the transcendent, the Preface opens with the claim that the student of aesthetics must define beauty, ‘not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it’ (TR, p. xix). Similarly, in the ‘Conclusion’, Pater declaims in the second sentence, ‘Let us begin with that which is without – our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat’ (TR, p. 186). And in ‘The School of Giorgione’, as noted earlier, he also begins with a gambit not to forget the material world when he insists that the differences among the arts must be maintained (TR, p. 102). The preservation of ‘the sensuous material of each art’ is the focus of the passage. The concept of lived experience is important enough to Pater to begin and end The Renaissance. Significantly, the essay that discusses music the most extensively starts with the same caveat. As Rachel Teukolsky (2002) has discussed, the unsettling of the objective, intellectual, and transcendent is a strategy on Pater’s part to argue against then-contemporary Victorian bourgeois critical discourse that valorizes representational art and the privileging of moral didacticism. But Pater’s concern with the physical domain is also antithetical to much of the nineteenth-century discourse on musical aesthetics. Indeed, music was often enlisted to signify the quintessential moment of pure transcendence. As Stephen Benson suggests in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin, music served traditionally ‘as an expression of a commonly held construction, whereby music is somehow extracultural, an escape from the messy contingencies of life in the language world’ (2003, p. 292). Benson argues that Bakhtin – and I would add, Pater before him – reveals that music is ‘always and everywhere grounded in the social’ (2003, p. 295). Pater’s own choice of subject matter, the painting of Giorgione and those who followed him, is also particularly concerned with material conditions. Genre painting, the invention of which Pater attributes to Giorgione, is different from the grand frescoes on the Duomo of Murano. Known as conversation pieces or ‘cabinet pictures’, they are paintings for domestic consumption, meant to be viewed in the home and even portable, as Pater
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Music and the everyday
Elicia Clements
notes. They do not serve the public interests of the State or the Church. As Teukolsky mentions, genre painting moves ‘out of the public world into the private cabinet, the home, the boudoir’. Pater, she continues, ‘imagines that Giorgione’s genre paintings, [are] freed from their institutional moorings’ (2002, p. 155). Thus, these paintings are embedded in the everyday existence of life, a combination of the private sphere and social interaction, capable, like music, of enabling dialogue and difference yet maintaining connections between people as they discuss the paintings in the drawing room. Additionally, the subject matter of the paintings is typically about ‘real life’. To quote Pater, ‘little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape – morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, but refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar’ (TR, p. 111). Pater makes sure to combine both the material and the idealized, never privileging one over the other. The cabinet pictures’ portability (part of their mode of handling) combines with their subject matter ‘as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one’s cabinet, to enrich the air as with some choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or a lifetime’ (TR, p. 111). Not only are these paintings ‘typical of that aspiration of all the arts towards music . . . towards the perfect identification of matter and form’ (TR, p. 111), but they seem almost to come alive in Pater’s recollection of them. They are inseparable from the material conditions of life; they perform the very principles Pater interprets in them. Correspondingly, the sonorous art is the metaphor Pater employs to capture Marius’s final moments at his deathbed, when he comes to a new wisdom (without converting to Christianity) – the moment when Marius realizes that life is not a means to an end, but an end in itself: For still, in a shadowy world, his deeper wisdom had ever been, with a sense of economy, with a jealous estimate of gain and loss, to use life, not as the means to some problematic end, but, as far as might be, from dying hour to dying hour, an end in itself – a kind of music, all-sufficing to the duly trained ear, even as it died out on the air. (ME, vol. 2, p. 219) Skillfully, the musical metaphor forges the link between art and life, the noumenal and the phenomenal, yet stresses their fleeting nature all at once. As in ‘The School of Giorgione’, music’s capacity to be for its own sake is for Pater the highest achievement of the arts, but it is also the highest achievement in everyday life, according to the novel. To experience rather than merely conceptualize might provide the more meaningful life, even at the moment of death. It comes as no surprise that music is the art form Pater employs to express Marius’s final moments. With its disruption of signification, its liminal other-striving, its efficacious nature, and its material imbrication in the tangible world, the making of music might well be an apt
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model for a life lived as an end in itself: life realized as aural architecture provides an alternative, aesthetic model of being. Ultimately, Pater’s aural understanding demonstrates the importance of sound in his work, but also reveals that aurality is a model for his aesthetic (indicating, in turn, another attribute of Pater’s significance to the modernist period that follows him). As he describes Giorgione’s work more generally, ‘In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione’s school [a series of musical and aural scenes of pastoral life he has just documented], music or the musical intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening – listening to music, to the reading of Bandello’s novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies’ (TR, p. 119). We could say, it only makes sense (please do excuse the pun) that he would gravitate toward aurality when formulating his alternative Aestheticism, a theory that crosses artistic borders, investigates the performative, and explores the material circumstances of everyday life, inspired and encapsulated by the condition of music.
Notes 1. Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854) is a seminal text in musical aesthetics, and a major factor in what has been called the ‘War of the Romantics’. Hanslick, on the side of Johannes Brahms and staunchly against Richard Wagner’s ‘new music’, was convinced that the word-painting and motif associations so prevalent in Wagner’s operas was detrimental to music’s ‘true’ function as an ‘absolute’ art, expressive only through its form and nothing else. 2. In an earlier essay (1995), Ellen Keck Stauder also investigates music’s time-bound capacity of rhythm but links it more directly to subjectivity. She is particularly concerned with the debate over the distinction between content and form in Pater’s ‘musical law’. By comparing Pater’s employment of music to Hegel’s she reveals that they share a view of it as ideal, but suggests this is where the similarity ends: ‘Hegel regards the form of music, the notes, as having no content, a problem that poetry, which uses sounds only as signs, avoids. Pater, on the other hand, uses music as a figure that both maps the free inner life and traces its disruption from within, a disruption that saves music, as well as perception and consciousness, from sinking into a solipsism that would invalidate the entire project of the aesthetic critic’ (1995, pp. 2, 3). Although music radicalizes subjectivity in Stauder’s rendering, it does so because of its perpetual movement. 3. See Hollander (1995, pp. 7–32). 4. The other essays in Part II of this volume explore interstitial spaces as well. Carolyn Williams finds such in-between states in music and visual art; Andrew Eastham, in theatrical modes such as masque. Notably, music is involved in both cases. 5. Thomas Wright, in The Life of Walter Pater (1907), notes that Cecilia is the saint and that her house, which was converted into a church after her martyrdom, is one of the showplaces of Rome. Additionally, Samuel Wright lists the saint and the fictitious Roman family name of Cecilia in An Informative Index to the Writings of Walter H. Pater (1987). I have come across two contemporary critics of Pater who also note the saint’s significance, but neither develops this point or relates it extensively to music. See Hughes (1975) and Bump (1982).
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Aural Architecture in ‘Giorgione’ and Marius 165
Elicia Clements
6. Before the mid-nineteenth century, it was generally believed that St Cecilia was martyred some time in the third century. But in 1849, the Christian archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi discovered a fragment of white marble from the grave of Cornelius along the Appian Way. In this vineyard he uncovered the papal crypt, or ‘cemetery of the Popes’, as well as an adjacent tomb, which turned out to be that of St Cecilia. Many of the burial riches were sealed with the tiles bearing the stamps of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, which enabled de Rossi to date the tomb to the time of their reign, 161–80 CE. Rev. J Spencer Northcote, a student of de Rossi, published essays on his mentor’s findings in The Rambler, a Catholic periodical that circulated in England from 1848 to 1862. Northcote was also involved in two other English publications of de Rossi’s discoveries, The Roman Catacombs (1857), which contains information about the papal crypt and Cecilia’s tomb, and Roma sotteranea (1869), based on, but not a translation of, de Rossi’s work of the same name. Gerald Monsman documents that Pater consulted the 1869 text (1977, p. 101) in preparation for writing the novel. Conspicuously, it includes a map of the catacombs specifying exactly where St Cecilia’s tomb is in relation to the rest. The geographical specificity was not lost on Pater, whose detailed rendering in the novel concerning Marius and Cornelius’s approach to the house demonstrates his attention to the spatial design of ancient Rome. Additionally, he would most likely have encountered the new information on his trip to Rome during which he did research for the novel. 7. Ironically, after much debate, The Concert was eventually attributed to Titian rather than Giorgione. 8. Without entering into debates about the implications such terms have for Performance Studies, it is interesting to note the inseparability of these two aspects for Pater. Although I have been stressing the efficacious nature of the musical link, Eastham, in his essay in this volume (pp. 167–81), emphasizes play. Once again, Pater comingles oppositions rather than instantiates them. For a discussion of the terms of the debate and a critique of Schechner’s theory see Stephen J. Bottoms, ‘The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy’, Theatre Topics 13, no. 2 (2003): 173–87. 9. Compare to the orchestration of gazes in Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs; see Introduction to this volume and Figure 0.1.
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10 Andrew Eastham
Pater’s work on theatre and performance has been largely overlooked,1 but as well as writing a series of essays on Shakespearean and Greek drama, his impressionistic criticism frequently unveils the theatrical elements intrinsic to alternative media. In the essay on ‘Charles Lamb’ (1878) he celebrates Lamb’s poetic perception of ‘custom, society, personal intercourse; as if all this . . . were some delicate instrument on which an expert performer is playing’ (Ap, p. 116). Theatrical performance emerges in this essay as an ideal image of civilized life; ‘this lover of stage plays welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play to sweeten the intercourse of actual life’ (Ap, p. 117). In Pater’s work there is a continual crossing between this general vision of theatricality in everyday life, and a more specialized perception of theatre as an autonomous artistic medium, a form which became gradually more relevant to Pater’s aesthetic desires. Theatre might have been said to possess the ideal conditions to satisfy the demands of Paterian Aestheticism. As a medium predicated on transient expression and mobile gesture, it answers the desires of the Conclusion to The Renaissance: the ‘passionate attitude’ that the aesthetic spectator grasps from a ‘dramatic life’ is intensified by the sense of its passing, ‘while all melts under our feet’ (TR, pp. 189, 188, 189). If theatre is a medium defined by evanescence, acting is an art of passing in two senses: while its aesthetic conditions are the transient event, its vehicle is the mimetic gesture; the passing of one body for another, the transitional process of the mask. In Pater’s work the temporal aspect of this passing – transience, ephemerality and moving gesture – frequently comes into conflict with the material conditions of theatre – the body of the individual actor, the conventional gesture, the labour of mimesis and masquerade. The ideal gesture of Paterian Aestheticism is ‘a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream’ (TR, p. 188), but like Mallarmé’s later writings on ballet, Pater’s work seems to call for an ideal, diaphanous performer, who is no longer subject to the aesthetic conditions of the stage. In its focus on transient gesture, Pater’s aesthetic credo is comparable to the more recent doxa of performance art as an ontologically unique 167
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Haunted Stages: Walter Pater and the ‘Theatrical Mode of Life’
Andrew Eastham
mode. For Peggy Phelan, performance ‘becomes itself through disappearance’ (1993, p. 146), and for this reason it ‘cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’.2 In the late twentieth century, this advocacy of performance was frequently associated with a distrust of theatre as a repeatable and conventional event. At the same time, the discourses of twentieth-century visual avant-gardism demonstrated a general embarrassment around theatre, typified by Michael Fried’s dogmatic modernist rejection of ‘theatricality’.3 In this still influential concept of aesthetic autonomy, the hybridity of theatre’s aesthetic conditions is the barrier to the ‘absorption’ and immanence of modernist painting. But against this facile avant-garde orthodoxy one may well look to an alternative vision of theatre in German Idealist Aesthetics, where it was precisely theatre’s capacious and hybrid qualities that made it the ideal artistic medium. For Hegel, theatre was ideal because it effected a synthesis of visual, plastic and literary media, which was elevated by the quality of movement; drama preserved the qualities of sensuous form unique to sculpture but raised or sublated this capacity through the qualities of temporal movement and inwardness that were the provenance of music and poetry.4 Both historically and conceptually Pater’s work stands at the interface between these approaches to performance, and his critical attitudes to theatricality stage a series of conflicts that were central to the culture of Aestheticism. On the one hand he seeks an autonomous medium which would guarantee the most refined sensations, variously identified in Hellenic sculpture, Venetian genre painting, or the abstract concept of music. At the same time his imaginary portraits and life narratives project an aesthetic life which is released from the conditions of the framed object or the repeatable event. This general dialectic of Paterian Aestheticism produces contradictory attitudes towards theatricality, and the purpose of this analysis is to elucidate a progressive striving in Pater’s work to release theatricality from its Victorian aesthetic conditions and provide it with an ideal life. In Pater’s early essay, ‘The Poetry of Michaelangelo’ (1871), the idea of ‘theatricality’ has a significant negative function in a complex system of aesthetic values. Commenting on the failures of Michaelangelo’s followers, he develops a diagnostic critique of the repetitive and conventional work that frequently follows an inimitable master: ‘Theatricality is their chief characteristic; and that is a quality as little attributable to Michaelangelo as to Mino or Luca Signorelli. With him, all is serious, passionate, impulsive’ (TR, pp. 71–2). Although Michaelangelo’s work achieves a union of strength with the Hellenic quality of ‘grave and temperate sweetness’, his followers’ possesses strength without repose. In this prescriptive critique, it is theatricality which compromises the Hellenic values, representing the ossification of expression into convention through repetitive mimicry, a failure which is associated with the ‘grotesque’ mode of medieval culture.5 Pater
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goes on to associate these failings with the more general cultural condition of the medieval world: ‘a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical in its art, theatrical even in its devotion’ (TR, p. 71). This rejection of theatricality works across the registers of diagnostic cultural history and prescriptive aesthetics. In both contexts, theatricality means empty repetition and convention – an art estranged from vital presence and living form. These critical values might be taken as being integral to the system of Hellenist ideals that orientated Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), but by the time of its second edition, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), Pater’s perspective on theatricality had changed in a decisive though complex way. In ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877), his most extended consideration of the relationship between the arts, Pater famously outlines the principle of Anders-streben, the striving of the arts to overcome the limits of their media. Although this ostensibly determines music as the limit of artistic achievement, the first extended example of Anders-streben is the image of a deserted castle which is strangely haunted by theatre. When Pater describes the aspiration of architecture to achieve a poetic effect he invokes the dramatic performer as a ghost who invisibly suggests the passing of time: Architecture . . . often finds a true poetry, as in those strangely twisted staircases of the châteaux of the Loire, as if it were intended that among their odd turnings the actors in a theatrical mode of life might pass each other unseen; there being a poetry also of memory and of the mere effect of time. (TR, p. 105)6 This image of the uncanny return of the actor to an abandoned château suggests the peculiar position of theatre in Pater’s writing: his ghostly actors project the ideal of a ‘theatrical mode of life’ in the absence of an actual stage. At the same time, they inaugurate a poetics of space which may be peculiar to theatre – a medium in which architecture is as likely to be the source of poetry as the text or voice. Pater’s essay is haunted by the possibility of an ideal stage which might tentatively realize the aspirations of an environment to poetry, and in this sense it typifies the ambiguous position of theatricality in his work. In his earlier review of William Morris, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (1868), Pater evokes a world ‘still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or “earthly paradise” ’ (1973, p. 95). Even as they promise a poetic life, Pater’s ghostly actors reiterate this spectral condition, but they also suggest the conflicting theoretical demands Pater places on art. Aspiration to aesthetic autonomy is configured as a moment of spectral becoming; Anders-streben, famously defined as the passing of the arts into the condition of music, is in this case the striving towards ghostly life.7 Ghosts share some of the essential qualities of music; they inhabit space without apparent dimension or limit, while their continual motion is also able to evoke
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Walter Pater and the ‘Theatrical Mode of Life’ 169
Andrew Eastham
a temporal condition.8 At the same time, in their continual haunting, they inhabit a permanent space, determined by the architecture in which they are confined. As in a theatre they are condemned to repeat the same passage nightly. So while art strives towards the state of apparition,9 it is contained within essentially theatrical and architectural conditions. The way that Pater negotiates this performative condition in the Loire châteaux is highly suggestive of the position of theatre in Aestheticism: in this spectral passage Pater negates the conditions of theatre at the same time as he idealizes the ‘theatrical mode of life’. The ‘strangely twisted staircases’ are a spectral place without audience. One of the most paradoxical features of Pater’s text is the peculiar emphasis on the invisibility of the actors: he incites the condition of theatricality only to dissociate the ghostly actors from its primary qualities, the visible presentation of bodies on stage and the presence of the spectator. Despite exemplifying a ‘theatrical mode of life’, the actors ‘pass each other unseen’. The sense of ‘passing’ carries suggestions greater than the strictly spatial sense of transition and movement, implying the activity of feigning, and this register serves to corroborate the paradoxical nature of theatricality in Pater’s haunted passage. The ghosts apparently persist in feigning even when unseen, as if in continuous solitary rehearsal. The passing of the actors begins to suggest a limbo in between the earthly realm of architecture and the spectral realm of poetry; Pater’s theatricality is inaugurated in this haunted space. If the haunted stage of the Loire châteaux is representative of the condition of theatre in Pater’s work, this is a condition that was realized progressively, from his early treatment of ‘theatricality’ as an abstract term to his first work on Shakespeare’s drama, the essay on ‘Measure for Measure’ (1874), through his essays on Greek drama and the spirit of Dionysus in the mid-1870s, up to ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877) and the essays on ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and ‘Charles Lamb’ (1878). It is during this transitional phase in his work that Pater developed the idea of Anders-streben, which is as vitally linked with his mediations on the conditions of theatre as it is with the ideal of music. The exemplary form of the Anders-streben emerges in these essays as theatrical conditions move towards the condition of music. Pater’s 1874 essay on ‘Measure for Measure’ follows, for the most part, a relatively traditional focus on character and morality. With frequent reference to Greek tragedy and to Whetstone’s original source for the narrative, the essay uncovers the ‘old “moralities” ’ (Ap, p. 182) which continually come to the surface in conflicts of character and judgment. Yet at the same time Pater is adamant that ‘this ethical interest’ emerges ‘in accordance with that artistic law which demands the predominance of form everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled’ (Ap, p. 182). This suggests the origins of the theory of Anders-streben, but when Pater refers to Measure for Measure in ‘The School of Giorgione’ the consideration of character has disappeared altogether and been replaced by music: the song of Mariana’s page is taken
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as an exemplary moment, ‘in which the kindling force and poetry of the whole play seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music’ (TR, p. 108). Over three years, Pater has translated ‘Measure for Measure’ across the aesthetic conditions of drama and music. The space of this transition is occupied by the spirit of Dionysus. In between the dramatic and the musical manifestations of ‘Measure for Measure’, Pater also wrote his two associated essays on Dionysus and Euripedes’s The Bacchae. In ‘A Study of Dionysus’, he continues to develop the theory of Anders-streben in terms of ‘a struggle, a Streben, as the Germans say, between the palpable and limited human form, and the floating essence it is to contain’ (GS, p. 34). This struggle is ultimately harmonized in two forms; ‘in the supreme imagination, of Pheidias, in sculpture – of Aeschylus, in the drama’ (GS, p. 35). This suggests a new possibility in Pater’s aesthetic criticism – that drama might assume the privileged position previously assigned to sculpture in the ‘Winckelmann’ essay. This theatrical possibility is both raised and thwarted in the second essay on Dionysus, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripedes’. This is likely to have been written immediately after the first Dionysus essay, though the dating is uncertain. As Samuel Wright observes, it was certainly written before 1 October 1878, since it was one of the essays that Pater would have included in the proposed but ultimately cancelled volume, The School of Giorgione, and Other Studies. That Pater cancelled this volume is a tantalizing mystery, but its virtual existence has a peculiar resonance for the consideration of Paterian theatricality: this would have been a volume suffused with theatre, including his seminal appreciation of the theatricality of Venetian painting, his two most important essays on Shakespeare, his study of Greek drama and his appreciation of Charles Lamb’s theatrical sensibility. The position of ‘The Bacchanals of Euripedes’ in this new wave of Pater’s work is complex, since it might be read either as a stage on the way to ‘The School of Giorgione’, prefiguring some of its central motifs, or as an alternative vision of a theatricality released from the limited conditions of stage optics and mimicry.10 Pater describes Euripedes’s dramatic homage to Dionysus as ‘a sort of masque or morality’ (GS, p. 54), using a metaphor that will become central to his evocation of theatricality in ‘The School of Giorgione’. At this point he attempts to evoke the spirit of drama, soliciting his reader in an act of aesthetic revival where the drama might be revealed in its essential form: ‘Let us listen and watch the strange masks coming and going, for a while’ (GS, p. 59). The subsequent description of Dionysus’s theatrical manifestation is, in the context of Pater’s genius for impressionistic ekphrasis, peculiarly unsatisfying, culminating in a rhetoric of sensuous transcendence which relies on conventional Orientalist motifs; ‘the incense of the East’, ‘the voluptuous abundance of Asia’ (GS, p. 62). But the relative failure of this evocation of Dionysus is perhaps integral to what Pater is attempting. Pater is straining to identify the aesthetic conditions of theatre according
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Walter Pater and the ‘Theatrical Mode of Life’ 171
Andrew Eastham
to a singular spirit, but the spirit of Dionysus is necessarily uncontainable, resistant to representation, a violent form of sublimity. The problem with this sublime aspiration is that the drama becomes the vehicle of a symbolic operation which aims to surpass the conditions of theatre. The fecundity of Dionysus can only be hinted at by Pater’s prose, which strives to evoke a drama, and which itself is striving violently to express the inexpressible essence of a formless deity. In the essay on ‘The Bacchanals’ Pater reveals an aesthetic problem which had been implicit in the theoretical background of his earliest works – specifically in the legacy of Hegel’s Aesthetics, which articulates the problem of the symbol within an aesthetics of sensuous form. In ‘Wincklemann’, his first attempt to articulate a systematic theory of media, Pater had closely reiterated Hegel’s evolutionary theory of art, in which the lowest form was the Oriental or Symbolic mode. In his synopsis of Hegel, Pater invokes the ‘many-headed Gods of the East’ and rejects these symbolic images as ‘overcharged symbols, a means of hinting at an idea which art cannot fitly or completely express, which still remains in the world of shadows’ (TR, p. 164). Hegel diagnosed the symbol as an essentially spectral form, in want of the sensuous life that was restored by the ideal beauty of Hellenic sculpture.11 Pater’s essay on the Bacchantes complicates this theoretical narrative in a peculiar and disturbing way, since while it celebrates the sensuous force of drama, it does so in a way that reinstates the problem of the symbol. Like the ‘Gods of the East’ in Hegel’s system, Dionysus is an uncontainable and immanent force which resists all attempts at identification; the apparent prodigality and multiplicity of Dionysus forces the theatrical event against itself. The attempt to identify the spirit of Dionysus forces Pater into a selfreflexive mediation on the aesthetic conditions of theatre. Whereas in ‘A Study of Dionysus’ the god of sensuous ecstasy had been identified with music, he now reappears as the spirit of theatricality. The bacchanals are ‘a spotted or dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn-skins of its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty, twofold, rapidly doubling genius of the divine, wild creature himself’ (GS, p. 59). But the Dionysian idea of theatre cannot be contained within a representative personality, nor within the bounds of the stage. Dionysus is a contagious principle beyond mimesis: ‘Schwärmerei’ – a swarming which generates rapturous collectivities; ‘the random catching on fire of one here and another there, when people are collected together’, ‘some new and rapturous spirit’ generated in the ‘strange dance of the Bacchic women’ (GS, pp. 56–7, 57). Pater’s evocation of the Bacchic dance suggests another aspect of the aesthetic conditions of theatre; the audience is a site of contagion, and theatre is an event that cannot be contained within the form of the artistic frame.12 In this sense The Bacchae fulfils one of the aspects of theatre that was most compelling to the culture of Aestheticism: the capacity for the theatrical event to break the borders between audience and performer – what Oscar Wilde celebrated as ‘the return of art to
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life’ (1908, p. 243). Yet this festive excess is at the same time a danger; it compromises the autonomy of art as a discrete set of practices within a confined space. It is an essential condition of performance that the border between art and life can be broken at any moment – that the audience might invade the stage or the performer incite the audience to contagious imitative action. But it is equally a condition of theatre as an autonomous art form that the border of the fourth wall is maintained in spite of its fragility. In his evocation of the Bacchic dance, Pater appears to be striving towards an escape from the aesthetic conditions of theatre, as the Streben that he theorizes in ‘A Study of Dionysus’ comes to work against the stage. The dialectic of Aestheticism appears to have broken down at this point, since it is no longer possible to define a relationship between the autonomous artistic form and the aesthetic life in terms of productive sublation. But this presents Pater with a new challenge, and at this point in his career a number of important aesthetic questions remain unanswered. How will Pater synthesize his notion of art’s striving towards otherness with his Hellenist aesthetics of sensuous form? Can he reconcile the more general desire for an unconstrained theatricality with the competing desire for a framed object which transfigures and condenses life’s transient motion? In ‘The School of Giorgione’ Pater moved some way towards achieving these aims. In this work, the theatricality of Titian’s painting becomes the primary focus for a new embrace of a ‘theatrical mode of life’, which is now revealed through a kind of painting that points beyond its own aesthetic conditions. As the image of the Loire châteaux suggests, Pater’s mature concept of Anders-streben allows him to conceive of some extraordinary transitions across the arts. Although it is ostensibly tied to the idea that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (TR, p. 106), the essay is suffused with theatrical life. When Pater evokes music it is always in performance; when he describes the achievement of Venetian painting it is measured by the value of ‘dramatic poetry’ (TR, p. 106). In the third and final section of the essay, Pater stages the competing claims of the different artistic media, promising to illustrate the ‘artistic ideal’ of the Giorgionesque. His most important ideas are deduced from two specific paintings: Titian’s The Concert (c. 1510, Florence, Pitti Palace) (see Figure 9.1), and Fête champêtre (c. 1509, Paris, Musée du Louvre). These works demonstrate the emergence and the flowering of a kind of theatricality in painting that would become a hallmark of Venetian genre work. The Concert is perhaps the most theatrical of all Titian’s paintings, since it represents a suspended moment of musical performance, with a close focus on a primary performer: the monk at the harpsichord, whose passionate attitude of heightened repose seems to strain for release from the conditions of painting. Pater celebrates The Concert as a ‘profoundly significant and animated instant’, a quality which he ascribes to ‘the highest sort of dramatic poetry’ (TR, p. 118). This is clearly a dramatic form which has raised or
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sublated the temporality of the theatre into a condensed moment – a frozen gesture in which the transience of the passionate attitude is redeemed as a ‘wholly concrete moment’. Yet in spite of this atemporal process, Pater maintains the essentially theatrical and transitional quality of the moment by granting ideal qualities to ‘a mere gesture, a look, a smile’ (TR, p. 118). In a subsequent theoretical transition, Pater moves from dramatic poetry to music, translating his focus on gesture between the two media in an ingenious way. In the description of the numerous paintings that Pater believes to be sketches for The Concert, the ‘mere gesture’ of the performing subject is translated into the activity of listening, and the new focus is on those ‘people with intent faces’, waiting on the ‘smallest interval of musical sound’ (TR, p. 119). This leads to another significant theoretical transition, as the moments of listening are described as ‘our moments of play’: those moments in which ‘the happier powers in things without are permitted free passage, and have their way with us’ (TR, p. 120). This first definition of play promotes passive receptivity, but as soon as he has introduced this concept Pater moves to a more active and theatrical conception of play. The way that the theatrical register emerges from within the musical suggests that it is precisely the nature of Giorgionesque play to exist in threshold states – moments of transition between different media and different modes of being. It is in such a typically evocative moment of transition that Pater introduces his ekphrasis of Titian’s Fête champêtre. This is one of the most Giorgionesque of Titian’s paintings, and Pater’s mistaken attribution is understandable: what is important in his evocation is that ‘Giorgionesque’ spirit which resides in the harmonious depiction of individuals in a utopian landscape. The Fête champêtre represents a group of musicians set in a pastoral idyll, with a typically Giorgionesque blue light emerging from the distant hills. Pater stresses the scenic aspect of the work, ‘such as in England we call “park scenery” ’ (TR, p. 120), but the shadowy presentation of the musical group takes the emphasis away from the self-conscious theatricality of the subjects. In comparison with The Concert, there is a far greater suggestion of unconscious absorption,13 in music and with the landscape itself. Yet the distinction between the two paintings is hard to position in Pater’s prose. The name of the Fête champêtre is delayed, so that the free passage between Titian’s paintings mimics the transitional process of the paintings themselves. Pater’s transitional prose passage appears to unveil a stage, as if we are glimpsing a ‘theatrical mode of life’ which is only visible in a certain half light: And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often into the play which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play at real life, like children ‘dressing-up’, disguised in the strange old Italian dresses, particoloured, or fantastic with embroidery and furs, of which,
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As in the image of the haunted actors in the Loire châteaux, this evokes a sense of passing which contains both temporal and mimetic registers, suggesting both the lost time intrinsic to the evocation of performance and the play of disguise. These registers are subsequently condensed into what might be read as the guiding metaphor of ‘The School of Giorgione’: the idea of the masque. This trope locates Pater’s aesthetic within the specific historical moment of Giorgione, since it was in this period that the masque form developed from a relatively simple use of disguise to a complex use of mixed performance media and scenic technology. Yet the idea achieves a far broader significance in Pater’s conceptual scheme: in a sense that will be highly relevant to the development of Aestheticism, the masque appears to offer a way of synthesizing the conflicting demands that Pater places on art. The masque is both hieratic and festive, traditional and transitional. It preserves art’s autonomy while ensuring the return of art to life through a continual process of life achieving form. The reason for the peculiar flexibility and power of the masque as a conceptual image is its ambivalent position in terms of the relationship between the medium of the stage and a general theatricality.14 The masque is an intermediary between social ritual and the autonomous sphere of the stage; although it emerged out of specific social occasions, it had the function of formalizing them in a theatrical presentation culminating in dance. In this sense it was able both to instigate and regulate a permeable border between art and life: it could enact a spontaneous transformation of the everyday into the formal structure of art, as well as providing a fluid transition back to a festive occasion.15 It is distinct from the traditional theatre, which instates clearly demarcated relations between performer and audience, but it is equally distinct from the masked balls and masquerades which proliferated in the eighteenth century, which involved a less clearly structured and more carnivalesque public event.16 The masque existed somewhere in between the masquerade and largely pictorial theatrical forms such as the tableau vivant.17 This figure of aesthetic transitions resonates across Pater’s theatrical essays of the late 1870s; if it is suggested in ‘The Bacchanals of Euripedes’ it is translated and refocused at a distance in ‘The School of Giorgione’. In both essays Pater is negotiating the limits of art within the conditions of theatricality. There is, however, an essential difference between these two modes: while the spirit of Dionysus appears to symbolize theatricality itself, the attempt to embody this spirit transcends or ruptures the stage conditions. This is the mode of aesthetic transcendence as uncontainable sensuous spirit, a Streben without limits. In contrast, the Giorgionesque spirit seeks to contain theatricality within the formality of the masque, resolving character and individuality into an organic image. This has a different kind of negative
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above all the spotless white linen at the wrist and throat, he painted so dexterously. (TR, pp. 119–20)
Andrew Eastham
function, which is equally at odds with the condition of theatre as a medium of expressive and embodied individuals on stage. Although in one sense Pater celebrates Titian’s painting for expressing ‘that feverish, tumultuously coloured world of the old citizens of Venice’ (TR, p. 118), it is clear that the ‘admirable tact’ he ascribes to Venetian painting has a more abstract function, translating the fever of Venetian lives into a ritualized civility. The ‘citizens of Venice’ are, in one sense, divested of their citizenship by the formation of the organic image, because once the aesthetic spectator achieves a requisite distance the individual subjects are resolved into a visual image of an ideal pastoral order:18 ‘Little groups of real men and women amid congruous furniture or landscape – morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, but refined upon or idealized, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar’ (TR, p. 111).19 As described by Pater, this compositional strategy performs a significant shift of perspective from the close view of The Concert towards an idealized distance. The Giorgionesque image resolves that dialectical relationship between figure and ground that Carolyn Williams has identified as being central to Pater’s historical and cultural imagination,20 and this has significant consequences in Pater’s writing on theatre. Although ‘The School of Giorgione’ expresses a new vision of theatricality as a transitional and transformational process, Pater tends to seek a resolution to this process in non-theatrical media which frame or idealize the performance event. This tendency is borne out in his later work on Shakespeare, which increasingly moves towards the translation or sublation of theatricality into the media of painting and music. If Pater’s work of the mid-1870s might be read in terms of dialectical struggle between the Dionysian and the Giorgionesque, it is undoubtedly the Giorgionesque which becomes the dominant principle of his work after 1877 – particularly in the essays on ‘Charles Lamb’ and ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, which form a natural group with ‘The School of Giorgione’. Pater’s essay on ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ was delivered as a lecture to the New Shakespeare Society (13 April 1878), suggesting his increasing desire to be taken seriously as a Shakespeare critic. His choice of play is in many ways perfectly suited to his ideas about the Giorgionesque, since it is set in a park and ends with a masque in which desire is unresolved, suspended in play. Once again, Pater uses an abstract notion of play: his representation of the ‘three youthful knights, gallant, amorous, chivalrous, but also a little affected’ (Ap, p. 170), introduces his assertion that ‘play is often that about which people are most serious’. As in ‘The School of Giorgione’, affectation and performance on the individual level are ultimately transposed into a pictorial conception of form in which the content achieves an ideal musical unity: The unity of the play is not so much the unity of a drama as that of a series of pictorial groups, in which the same figures reappear, in different combinations but on the same background. It is as if Shakespeare had
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The figure of the ancient tapestry has an equivalent function to the image of the ‘eastern carpet’ in ‘The School of Giorgione’, asserting the priority of the ‘essential pictorial qualities’ (TR, p. 104) over the dramatic. This anthropomorphic ascription of voices to the figures in the carpet fulfils the Giorgionesque tendency to reduce the subjectivity of play to strictly formal qualities of the work.21 If Pater’s earlier use of the concept of play suggests the liberal potential of Schiller’s play-drive, the dominant impulse here is the need to synthesize individual movement into organic form. If the Giorgionesque image appears to compromise the freedoms of play, there is a second aspect of Pater’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ which in fact gives priority to a specialized form of aesthetic subjectivity within the drama. Pater’s translation of ‘Measure for Measure’ between 1874 and 1877 had effectively removed the necessity of ‘character’ in drama or dramatic poetry, but the ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ essay suggests a new interest in a peculiar type of aesthetic personality. Just as he recollected Florian Deleal’s childhood interest in certain ‘sacred personalities’ (MS, p. 194) who raise life to a ritualized aesthetic state, Pater looks to Shakespeare for examples of the aesthetic life. He begins by reiterating the Romantic idea of Shakespeare,22 variously theorized by the Schlegels, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Keats, as an impersonal genius: ‘As it happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation’ (Ap, p. 168). This ideal impersonality is then reflected in ‘certain characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture’. Pater singles out Mercutio, from Romeo and Juliet, as an example of this type: ‘versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors’ (Ap, p. 168). It is significant that the ideal Shakespearean personalities are theatrical by nature, and that this theatricality entails a certain negative capability; Mercutio is ideal because he has no definite consistency. In the sense of Pater’s earlier essay on ‘Winckelmann’, Mercutio is effectively ‘characterless’.23 To this degree Pater appears to have redressed the pejorative notion of theatricality in his early Hellenist works according to an ideal of Shakespearean diaphaneitè. Pater can now rescue the aesthetic conditions of acting – a transient and mobile personality – from his earlier critique of theatricality as ossified convention. At the same time, he is clearly attracted to a form of detachment which might be said to escape the conditions of theatre altogether. His ideal character in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ is Biron, who is ‘never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play’ (Ap, p. 169). Biron’s qualities are comparable to the Hellenic type of ‘Diaphaneitè’ and ‘Winckelmann’; he is ‘the expression of a nature truly and inwardly bent upon a form of delicate perfection’ (Ap, p. 166), blending personality and perfection by refining the expressive medium at the expense of ‘character’. In this case a Hellenic
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intended to bind together, by some inventive conceit, the devices of an ancient tapestry, and give voices to its figures. (Ap, pp. 162–3)
Andrew Eastham
personality exists at the heart of the play but is not limited by the form of the scenic event: Biron is a formless substance that will never be subjected to the grotesque constraints of the performative. One of the first tenets of ‘The School of Giorgione’ is that the Andersstreben can be achieved by ‘all things that partake in any degree of artistic qualities’, a category which includes ‘the trivialities of speech, and manner and dress’ (TR, p. 108). In this sense a paradoxically ‘characterless’ theatrical personality like Biron might himself achieve the ‘condition of music’. Just as the Romantics discerned in Shakespeare an ideal condition of freedom, Pater finds in Biron and Mercutio a condition of aesthetic independence. The form this takes is a kind of inverted image of the liberal ideal of Bildung or self-culture, where a character on stage is de-realized, becomes diaphanous. In the process of Anders-streben the individuals on stage achieve the evanescence and invisibility of music. As the focus of this translation, Biron is the image of an aesthetic life, but at the same time he is a curiously ghostly figure, as if to attain any definable characteristics and submit to the law of the performative would betray an essentially diaphanous ideal. Biron is the revenant of Dionysus, his theatrical force abstracted into a musical theme. This tendency to translate theatre towards musical conditions was borne out in the last of Pater’s essays on drama: ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’ (1889). Although ‘The School of Giorgione’ sanctioned the value of ‘dramatic poetry’, Pater’s later essay subsumes the dramatic medium in a Romantic ideal of lyric: A play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were still lying at the root of it, all the various expression of the conflict of character and circumstance falling at last into the compass of a single melody, or musical theme. (Ap, p. 203) The ideal stage of Aestheticism appears now as the sublation of a ‘theatrical mode of life’ into music, but in performing this translation Pater has relinquished the aesthetic conditions that constitute drama’s unique promise of living form. The theatrical life of the Giorgionesque masque has become spectral, withdrawn to the haunted staircases of the Loire châteaux. After ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’ had been published in Scribner’s Magazine, Pater sent a copy to Arthur Symons, asking him to ‘point out any thing that strikes you as behind actual Shaksperian criticism therein’ (Evans, 1970, p. 93). The transitional historical moment of this letter is significant, since Pater is effectively passing his authority to a new kind of aesthetic spectator. As well as being a Pater disciple, Symons would soon be known as the foremost champion of Symbolist theatre in English letters; it is perhaps the haunted stage of Symbolism that most clearly approximated the
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spectral poetry Pater had imagined in ‘The School of Giorgione’. The 1890s would bear out this image in two ways: in the proliferation of a ‘theatrical mode of life’ in Decadent dandyism, and in the ghostly stages of Maeterlinck’s drama.24 It is perhaps Maeterlinck’s work which most closely approximates Pater’s image of haunted actors in the Loire châteaux: in Les Aveugles (1890), where the visionary blind ‘pass each other unseen’ in ancient forests, or in Pélleas et Mélisande (1892), a drama of confined souls striving for escape, which Debussy subsequently translated into the condition of music. If Pater’s writing on drama tends to work against the conditions of the Victorian stage, this was perhaps a necessary condition of its Streben towards fin-de-siècle and modernist theatricality – a stage both haunted and of the future.
Notes 1. One exception: in his study of Appreciations, Albert Farmer suggests that Pater’s choice of subjects in the Shakespeare essays tends to ‘correspond to a characteristic side of his own nature . . . the purely aesthetic side’ (1931, p. 32). 2. Phelan’s suggestion that, in the late twentieth century, ‘the other arts, especially painting and photography, are drawn increasingly toward performance’ (1993, p. 146) is reminiscient of Pater’s Anders-streben. 3. See ‘Art and Objecthood’ (Fried, 1998). Fried’s very performative passion for the dogmatic avant-gardist gesture might be compared to Whistler’s. 4. See, for example, Hegel’s Aesthetics, vol. 2: ‘The art of speech is bound up with sculpture: the actor comes on the stage as a totally solid objective statue. But this statue is vitalised; it assimilates and expresses the subject matter of the poetry; it is associated with every inner movement of passion and at the same time puts it into words and voices it. Consequently this presentation is more animated and spiritually clearer than any statue or picture’ (1975, p. 1186). 5. This critique, implicitly pitched against Ruskin’s celebration of the Gothic, is integral to the prescriptive Hellenist aesthetic mobilized in ‘Winckelmann’. For an extended analysis of Pater’s critique of the grotesque, see Armstrong (1993, pp. 232–51). Pater’s critique of the grotesque was doubly inflected; it was equally pitched against Ruskin’s idea of the Gothic labourer and Victor Hugo’s embrace of Romantic drama as the ‘grotesque’ mode in which beauty was sacrificed in favour of naturalism and expressive energy (see Hugo, 1909–14). 6. Pater’s image of the Loire châteaux may have been inspired by an article by his friend Emilia Pattison (later, Lady Dilke), ‘French Châteaux of the Renaissance (1460–1547)’, The Contemporary Review 30 (September 1877): 579–97. 7. In ‘A Study of Dionysus’, Pater describes ‘a Streben, between the palpable and limited human form, and the floating essence it is to contain’ (GS, p. 28). 8. The haunted château passage brings together a number of the issues discussed in this volume: Carolyn Williams’s theory (pp. 139–42) of the dialectical tension between tableaux and moving form in ‘The School of Giorgione’ is informed by her sense of Pater’s revisionary attitude to Lessing, and Elicia Clements’s reading (pp. 152–65) of the spatio-temporal coordinates of music stresses the performative and ritual event.
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9. For the concept of ‘apparition’ as a composite figure of art’s evanescence and autonomy, see Adorno’s analysis of artistic beauty in Aesthetic Theory (1997; see in particular pp. 80–4). 10. This either/or is ostensibly dependent on the dating of the piece, but it might be more valuable to consider the two works as alternative experiments in the conditions and limits of theatre that Pater could not reconcile. The incorporation of the ‘masque’ motif in ‘The Bacchanals’ could be a strained attempt to establish an affinity between his Dionysus essays and the group that we might regard as ‘Giorgionesque’: ‘The School of Giorgione’, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and ‘Charles Lamb’. If Studies attempts to construct an aesthetic that absorbed the principles of Hellenism and Romanticism, the struggle in Pater’s work of the late 1870s is between the Dionysian and the Giorgionesque. 11. Hegel’s distinction between a spectral ideal of beauty and sensuous Hellenic form is focused in a passage on Schiller’s Das Ideal und Das Leben, which, Hegel suggests, ‘contrasts actuality and its griefs and battles with the “still shadow-land of beauty”. Such a realm of shadows is the Ideal; the spirits appearing in it are dead to immediate existence, cut off from the indigence of natural life, freed from the bonds of dependence on external influences’ (1975, vol. 1, p. 157). The ‘realm of shadows’ may also apply to the vampiric apparition of Mona Lisa in ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ and the ghostly actors of the Loire châteaux. 12. This idea of mimetic contagion would become a key motif in later documents of Aestheticism, notably Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Perhaps the work of his disciple inspired Pater’s later reflections on the mimetic constitution of personality in Plato and Platonism: ‘We imitate not only if we play a part on the stage but when we sit as spectators, while our thoughts follow the acting of one another, when we read Homer and put ourselves, lightly, fluently, into the place of those he describes: we imitate unconsciously the line and colour of the walls around us, the tree by the wayside, the animals we pet or make use of, the very dress we wear’ (PP, p. 248). Pater then develops an idea of mimesis as the unconscious absorption of good values; this works as both a provocative, revisionary reading of Plato’s The Republic, and a defence against Wilde’s decadent mimeticism. 13. The two Titian paintings are illuminated by Michael Fried’s opposition between theatricality and absorption (see Fried, 1980): while The Concert represents a tension between theatricality and the absorption of the central figure of the monk, the Fête champêtre is a triumph of absorption effected through the shift of focus from figure to landscape. 14. For a discussion of the ‘new theatricality’ of the masque introduced by Ben Jonson, see Orgel (1967, p. 117). 15. For David Lindley, ‘the basic symbolic assertion of all court masques derived from the moment of the dissolution of the masque’s fiction into the social reality of the court’ (1984, p. 1). 16. For a treatment of this form in English culture, see Castle (1986). 17. See Williams in this volume (pp. 135–51) for a detailed theoretical reflection on the form of the tableau. 18. This ideological process was intrinsic to the social function of the masque in English culture. See Chibnall, ‘ “To that Secure Fix’d State”: The Function of the Caroline Masque Form’ (in Lindley, 1984, pp. 78–93). 19. Pater’s conception of the organic image draws closely on Baudelaire’s description of Delacroix’s compositional unity in The Salon of 1859: ‘All the figures,
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20. 21.
22.
23.
24.
their relative disposition, the landscape or interior that provides them with horizon or background, their garments – everything in fact, must serve to illuminate the idea which gave them birth, must carry its original warmth, its livery, so to speak’ (Baudelaire, 1965, p. 160). As Higgins argues in this volume (pp. 51–8), Baudelaire’s Salon also informed Pater’s support for painters such as Whistler and Corot. See Williams (1989). For an equivalent theory of play, see Gadamer (1989): ‘The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches presentation (Darstellung) through the players’ (p. 103). Thus, when play achieves artistic structure, ‘it is the game that is played – it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it’ (p. 102). An idea of Shakespeare initially associated with the ideal of Romantic irony – a form of sublime detachment which Friedrich Schlegel had defined as the basis of all free literary production. The Schlegels’ ideas were given different connotations by the various readings of British Romantics: Coleridge stated that ‘Shakespeare’s poetry is characterless’ (1884, p. 80), describing his genius as an impersonal substance; ‘Shakespeare becomes all things, yet forever remaining himself’ (Coleridge, 1983, vol. 2, p. 28). Keats famously stated that men of genius ‘have not any individuality, any determined character’ (1987, p. 36). The ideal of the ‘characterless’ subject is deduced from the Greek statue of the adorante – an adolescent boy who figures an ideal state of freedom before adult identity has been assumed (TR, p. 174). This ‘characterless’ state is pitched against the ‘grotesque’ mode of medieval culture and effectively orientates the prescriptive aesthetic solution to the diagnostic critique I have noted above. See McGuinness (2000) for a convincing argument about Maeterlinck’s fundamental role in the constitution of modern theatre.
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Part III
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Pater and the Practice of Writing
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11 Matthew Potolsky
Nay! our aesthetic doings shall have a purpose beyond any merely momentary satisfaction. — Walter Pater, Gaston de Latour In his densely self-referential 1886 essay on Sir Thomas Browne, Pater narrates a brief anecdote about writing and reception that illuminates a seemingly counterintuitive claim I want to make in this essay: that Pater is a fundamentally political writer. Pater notes throughout his essay that Browne writes with little attention to any broader audience. He speaks as if to no one beyond his immediate circle, and is blissfully ignorant of the effects his words might have in the world. Browne ‘likes talking to himself’ (Ap, p. 124), has ‘no sense of a “public” to deal with, at all – only a full confidence in the “friendly reader” ’ (Ap, p. 127). This apparent detachment does not, however, prevent Browne’s prose from becoming entangled in seventeenth-century politics. As Pater slyly notes, Browne was ‘born in the year of the Gunpowder Plot’, an event that affects his work in unpredictable ways many years later (Ap, p. 130). For although he claims that his life of contemplation is not affected by politics, he was a ‘decided royalist . . . in spite of seeming indifference’, and blames the unauthorized publication of his book Religio Medici on ‘the unscrupulous use of the press for political purposes’ (Ap, p. 135). When a copy of this ‘surreptitious edition’ falls into the hands of the son of a man executed for his participation in the plot, Kenelm Digby, Browne finds himself unwillingly ‘committed to a dispute’ (Ap, p. 136). Forced to acknowledge the public status of his writings, Browne issues a corrected edition of the book, answering Digby’s ‘animadversions’ on his religious doctrines. The debate with Digby concerns theology, but Pater makes it clear in his account that the event is inextricably twined with the fate of the monarchy and the broader political effects of the Reformation. Although Browne is indifferent to politics, the political realm is not indifferent to him. This controversy is a minor incident in Pater’s essay, but the anecdote is telling, both for its obvious resemblance to the unauthorized effects Pater 185
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Literary Communism: Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
feared his own writings, most notably the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, had on certain ‘young men’, and for its suggestive attention to the relationship between writing and politics. For a long line of commentators, from W. B. Yeats to Raymond Williams and beyond, Pater has seemed no less indifferent to politics than Browne. For Yeats, Pater elevates aesthetic pleasure above personal relationships, leaving his followers ‘on a swaying rope in a storm’, effectively helpless when faced with social or political challenges (Yeats, 1999, p. 235). Williams criticizes Pater for radically separating art and the aesthetic from the broader social context that produces it. He seems, Williams asserts in Culture and Society, ‘genuinely unable to distinguish between the condition of a work of art . . . and the condition of any life, which is not made but making, and which can only in phantasy be detached from a continuous process and a whole condition’ (1953, p. 168). For another line of commentators, this refusal of society and politics in favor of a putatively disinterested aesthetic realm allies Pater, much as Browne allied himself, with a reactionary status quo. The most famous statement of this idea is Walter Benjamin’s assertion, in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), that fascism is ‘the consummation of “l’art pour l’art” ’ (1968, p. 242). Benjamin does not point to Pater in particular, but Muriel Spark does in her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). The titular character reads from The Renaissance to her devoted students, and then expresses ‘admiration for Mussolini’s marching troops’ (Spark, 1961, p. 47). Although few current critics accept this genealogical relationship between Aestheticism and fascism, the sense that Paterian receptivity is incompatible with a properly activist politics is difficult to dislodge. Diana Maltz, to take just one recent example, claims that Pater, by contrast with ‘missionary aesthetes’ like John Ruskin and William Morris, ‘emphasized that one could live an aesthetic life apart from social engagement of any kind, let alone social activism’ (2006, pp. 9–10).1 The persistent belief that Pater was indifferent to politics has been challenged in the past two decades by the work of scholars attentive to the sexual politics of Aestheticism. As Richard Dellamora, Linda Dowling, and many others in their wake have demonstrated, Pater is not merely a de facto reactionary, but a sexual dissident and erotic theorist, writing in coded language to an audience aware of his non-normative, and at the time legally proscribed, desires. Given his marginalized status in the Victorian social and sexual worlds, these scholars suggest, Pater is particularly attentive to the cultural power of homophobia and hegemonic masculinity, and sympathetic to its other victims, fashioning an eroticized counter-discourse in his writings to subvert this power. The focus on sexual politics has provided a far more nuanced picture of Pater’s engagement with the legal and political structures of his historical moment. But Pater has a great deal to say as well about the macropolitical entanglements of all cultural production, and about political changes that do not necessarily pertain directly to his late Victorian context.
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I would like in what follows to look closely at a number of references to politics and political events in Pater’s writings. As I shall argue, longstanding assumptions about Pater’s political convictions (or lack thereof) have tended to blind even the most sympathetic readers to the pervasiveness of such references, and to their far-reaching implications for understanding late Victorian writing more generally. Pater was notably reticent – if not altogether silent – about his actual political opinions; I have little interest in trying to reconstruct them in detail. Rather, I want to bring out the important political role that Pater ascribes in his writings to art and aesthetic response. The central figures in Pater’s fiction and criticism are buffeted by wars and religious conflicts, and stand at the crossroads of historical transitions; Pater’s discussions of art and artists are very much alive to their connections with political currents of the age. Read with an eye to their full argumentative significance, these apparently marginal details adumbrate a sophisticated account of the relationship between art and politics; taken together, they add up to a powerful reflection on the nature of community – perhaps the foundational question of any political theory. Seeking to go beyond traditional ‘imagined communities’ defined by nationality, geography, or religious belief, Pater tries to outline the possibility of communal affiliation based on literary and aesthetic judgment. Although such a community of taste might seem to mark a retreat from politics, I will argue that it is in fact fundamentally political, even as it tries to free itself from traditional models of affiliation and overt social activism. Pater’s reflections on art and politics tend to be developed along unfamiliar lines, a fact that has contributed to their general misrecognition by later readers. Art, for Pater, is not an imaginary reflection of actual social conditions (with all the metaphysical weight this opposition entails), but a real and material expression of incipient or utopian political formations. Far from a shadowy reflection of real political forces, or the ornamental expression of a political concept that could be articulated directly, art is political through and through, regardless of whether it makes a partisan claim. Indeed, reception is more important to the political effect of art for Pater than the aims of the artist. Art provides the aesthetic critic with an oblique means of discerning political tendencies that might otherwise go unrecorded. In short, rather than detailing the effects of social and political formations on artistic production, as critics like Williams expect, Pater focuses on how art shapes politics or foreshadows social and historical change. In this regard, as Kit Andrews (2002) has noted, he comes very close in his method to Benjamin, for whom the locus of historical research lies not in seeking to grasp the past ‘as it really was’, but in the historian’s ‘presence of mind’ while engaging the archive. What Benjamin calls the ‘dialectical image’ arises from the act of historical study itself, forming with the historian’s discernment of a relationship between the past and its revolutionary potential for the present: ‘It is not that what is past casts its light on what
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Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, the image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (1999, p. 463). The act of aesthetic criticism, like Benjamin’s dialectical image, occurs at the meeting point of the historical artifact and its contemporary reception. For both figures, the political significance of such artifacts lies as much in the unexpected effects of their reception as in the intentions of the artist or their original audiences.2 Pater attends closely to the political effects of judgments of taste – both his own and those of the historical and fictional figures he discusses. In a suggestive passage from the opening chapter of his unfinished novel about sixteenth-century France, Gaston de Latour (1888), for example, he comments on the ways in which the changing appreciation of material artifacts both shapes and responds to the changing political conditions of the age: Following a long period of quiet progress – the tranquil and tolerant years of the Renaissance – the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by artificial aesthetic culture; it filled with wild passions, wildly dramatic personalities, a scene already attractive by its artistic beauty . . . The old manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer houses under the softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people who now took down the armour hanging high on the wall for decoration among newer things so little warlike. (GDL, p. 8) Pater cannily suggests that art and politics are not distinct fields of activity, but wholly continuous responses to changing historical circumstances. The political culture of the Reformation and the aesthetic culture of the Renaissance embody different modes of relating to the same artifacts from the Middle Ages. The religious wars force a change in perception, restoring to their martial context medieval art and architecture that the Renaissance had come to regard as works of art. The old manors again become defensive structures rather than vacation homes, and the armor that was appreciated for its beauty is now put back into military use. The Reformation also lends the aesthetic a martial function, turning the artistic enthusiasms roused by the Renaissance into a motor of religious and political conflict. The manors, armor, and passions are basically the same; what has changed is their reception and attendant cultural function. Aesthetics and politics, to borrow Pater’s theatrical metaphor, perform upon the same stage. They are different modes of using and perceiving objects – one is no more real or imaginary than the other. The word ‘distraught’ succinctly enacts this point: etymologically and in context it means distracted (from the Latin dis + trahere, to drag away or from); but Pater also wants us to hear the more colloquial sense of
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mad or anguished. The same word means different things for the aesthetic and the political contexts of the novel. Pater’s scholarly aims were less explicitly activist than Benjamin’s, but, as this passage suggests, the analogy between their respective approaches to the politics of the past is illuminating. Very much like Benjamin, who, in the Arcades Project, finds the whole history of nineteenth-century Paris in a largely forgotten bit of commercial architecture, Pater discerns political significance in works that were by no means made with a political aim in mind. As Andrews notes, Pater’s ‘diaphanous’ characters have a privileged relationship to historical transformation, giving them special insight into the ways art prefigures or embodies revolutionary changes (2002, p. 252). As early as his (posthumously published) 1864 paper ‘Diaphaneitè’, Pater would associate expressions of taste with revolutionary social transformations. The diaphanous character he seeks to define in the essay – epitomized by the artistic figures Goethe and Raphael – is a ‘clear crystal nature’, ‘a mind of taste lighted up by some spiritual ray within’ (MS, pp. 253, 250). But this character is also a ‘revolutionist’, ‘discontented with society as it is’, and an implicit affront to other forms of life (MS, pp. 252, 254). ‘A majority of such’, Pater concludes, ‘would be the regeneration of the world’ (MS, p. 254). Elsewhere in his writings, Pater notes the ways in which revolutions in art spark significant changes in social or political formations. The imaginary portrait ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ (1886), for example, traces the emergence of a ‘revolution’ (IP, p. 60) in medieval France, an assertion of ‘a free communistic life’ against the ‘narrow, feudal institutions’ that had previously held sway (IP, p. 55). This revolution is played out in the construction of the cathedral of Saint-Étienne, under the influence of an artisan who seems to be the god Dionysus in disguise. The ‘revolutionary’ Gothic cathedral of Amiens similarly arises from a communal challenge to ‘central authority’ (MS, pp. 109–10). In his 1892 lecture on Raphael, Pater argues that the artist’s Vatican pictures are an artistic mirror image of Luther’s vernacular translation of the Bible, challenging the corruption, elitism, and jealously held interpretive authority of his Vatican patrons. Raphael’s painting of the Transfiguration in the Vatican, depicting the moment Christ first reveals his divinity to his closest disciples, ‘brings the simple, to their great delight, face to face with the Bible as it is, in all its variety of incident, after they had so long had to content themselves with but fragments of it, as presented in the symbolism and in the brief lections of the Liturgy’ (MS, p. 56). These images are not politically motivated, but they give form to political claims that neither the artist nor his patrons could yet recognize. In the imaginary portrait ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ (1885), finally, Pater discerns a foreshadowing of the French Revolution in the paintings of Antoine Watteau. The story’s narrator, the sister of Watteau’s disciple Jean-Baptiste Pater, observes that the master’s works depict the ‘outward manner’ of ‘a new era now dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a novel sort of social freedom,
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Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
in which men’s natural goodness of heart will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars disappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of life’ (IP, p. 33). Writing in 1717, Pater’s narrator uses language later made famous by the Revolution to characterize the potentially utopian sentiments lurking in otherwise apolitical fêtes champêtres. Art enacts the spirit of the Revolution before the storming of the Bastille, and within a work that promotes no overt political position.3 Pater also shows a sophisticated sense of the politically transformative powers of art for the emergence of national consciousness. ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (1886), for example, points to the way art produces, rather than simply reflects, national consciousness. The portrait takes place in seventeenth-century Holland, just after the Eighty Years War, during which the Netherlands gained independence from the rule of Habsburg Spain. In the opening pages of the portrait, Pater details the ways in which ‘the artist tribe’ enabled the formation of a still-incipient Dutch national identity. ‘The artists were, in truth’, he writes, ‘an important body just then, as a natural consequence of the nation’s hard-won prosperity; helping it to a full consciousness of the genial yet delicate homeliness it loved, for which it had fought so bravely, and was ready at any moment to fight anew, against man or the sea’ (IP, p. 84). Pater’s curious syntax suggests that art is at once a product and a producer of the nation. Dutch independence and prosperity allow the flourishing of art as a ‘natural consequence’; but it is art that turns vague emotional bonds (‘the genial yet delicate homeliness it loved’) into a politically consequential self-recognition. Art encourages the transformation of domestic ties into political contracts. Indeed, for Sebastian’s father, a man who models himself on the hero of the Dutch Revolt, William the Silent, and is ‘in contact with great affairs’ (IP, p. 85), becoming an artist ‘was the next best thing to being an influential publicist or statesman’ (IP, p. 87). No less than by warfare or by the elaborate system of dikes that reclaimed its land from the sea, the Netherlands is quite literally formed by art. This political work, though, is not explicitly political at its origins. Rather, by painting portraits and landscapes, the artists give concrete form to the inchoate political forces at play in the era, making visible to the populace its incipient national character: ‘The Dutch had just begun to see what a picture their country was . . . and their painters, the first true masters of landscape for its own sake, were further informing them in the matter’ (IP, p. 87). Art that does not set out to change the world – art for its own sake, as Pater’s diction not so subtly hints – has world historical implications.4 Surprisingly, perhaps, for a writer so often accused of critical solipsism, Pater foregrounds in these examples the relationship between art and the broader community. He describes how communal movements are embodied in art (the cathedrals at Auxerre and Amiens), how art shapes a community’s sense of itself (Dutch nationalism), or how paintings crystallize political discontent in advance of its more explicit articulations (Raphael’s anticipation
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of the Reformation, or Watteau’s of the Revolution). We might add to this list Pater’s discussion of ancient Spartan education in the chapter entitled ‘Lacedaemon’ in Plato and Platonism (1893). In Sparta, the community crafts its young men into artworks. Subjected to a rigorous discipline that renders them ‘very susceptible to the influences of form and colour and sound, to external aesthetic influence’, Spartan youth are fashioned for more than military conquest (PP, pp. 210–11). Giving voice to an imaginary youth asked about the ends to which this training has prepared him, Pater writes in answer: ‘To the end that I myself may be a perfect work of art, issuing thus into the eyes of all Greece’ (PP, p. 232). A number of scholars have pointed to the importance of community in Pater’s writings, and especially to Pater’s fascination with elite communities of intellectuals, artists, and sexual dissidents. Patricia Clements suggests that community is Pater’s ‘central subject’ (1985, p. 83). As Clements and others have shown, Pater uses weighted allusions and carefully chosen artistic examples not only to further his arguments, but also to speak to an audience whom he describes, in his 1888 essay ‘Style’, as the ‘select few’ (Ap, p. 18): those interested in advanced cosmopolitan art and literature, or participants in the Victorian homosexual underground.5 In Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, Linda Dowling describes this kind of community as a subversive variation on the Coleridgean clerisy: ‘There is no “permanent, nationalized, learned order” in Pater, only a learned order that is sequestered, almost fugitive, living in voluntary asceticism at the margins or in the interstices of national life. Recognisable only to each other and virtually unacknowledged by all others, Pater’s clerisy express their influence entirely through literary style’ (1986, p. 140).6 As Dowling’s reference to the ‘national life’ suggests, this community is more than just an in-group of friends, former students, and fellow travelers; rather, it is a model for rethinking politics and sociality more generally.7 Indeed, in each of the cases I have discussed, Pater demonstrates a profound awareness of the ways in which art and aesthetic response are fundamentally political. For Pater, the political implications of art do not lie only in its intended message, but also, and even more, in the interplay of the work with the communities it speaks for, addresses, or even creates. Community, similarly, is produced in and through art and criticism. Crystallizing the community’s sense of itself, artworks join individuals to each other, give expression to communal desires and ideals, and make visible or legible points of connection that would not otherwise be recognized. This function holds whether the community is large and ideologically cohesive, like a nation, or small and dispersed, like the counter-clerisy Dowling describes. With this point in mind, I want to turn to a more extended discussion of Gaston de Latour, a work that explores the relationship between art and community with greater complexity, if also with more uncertainty, than any of Pater’s other works. It is Pater’s most densely political text. The novel
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Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
teems with references to French politics and religious conflicts, and demands a good deal of historical knowledge from its readers. It shares many ideas about community and politics with Pater’s other novel, Marius the Epicurean, but demonstrates even more explicitly the ways in which political events shape the everyday life of the most reflective individuals. Gaston’s three closest companions, for example, are nicknamed ‘The Triumvirate’, after the three Catholic nobles who joined together to drive the Huguenots out of France, and by historical allusion, after the two triumvirates of ancient Rome. His favourite poet, Pierre de Ronsard, is closely associated with political power. Proclaimed the ‘Prince of poets’ (GDL, p. 33), he surrounds himself with emblems of royalty: pictures of the three royal Margarets, a statue of Minerva inscribed with a poem by Charles IX, and ‘souvenirs received from various royal persons, including three kings of France, the fair Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of England’ (GDL, p. 32). Ronsard shows Gaston a portrait of himself dressed ‘in veritable armour’, ready to fight for a literary theory in the ‘battle of the Pleiad’ much as others lined up to fight over religious doctrines (GDL, p. 34). Later in the narrative, Pater parallels Gaston’s marriage to a Huguenot woman, who is killed in the St Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre, to the marriage of the Huguenot Henry of Navarre and the Catholic Margaret of Valois. The very first sentence of the novel brackets the story politically: ‘The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent object which towards the south-west broke the pleasant level of La Beauce’ (GDL, p. 1). The seemingly casual reference to the French Revolution foreshadows the complicated relationship between the local ties manifested in Gaston’s house and the macropolitical forces that shape them. ‘The life of Gaston de Latour’, the narrator observes a few pages later, ‘was almost to coincide with the duration of the Religious Wars’ (GDL, p. 8). The life of Pater’s reflective protagonist is inextricable from the major political current of the age. The novel’s most pressing political concern is the condition of community at a moment of violence and historical transformation. Gaston’s early life is defined by the breakdown of traditional models of affiliation. He is the last of his line, and thus only loosely tied by family to his ancestral home. This house, made by physically connecting two originally separate manors (‘Deux-manoirs’), was a symbolic effort by Gaston’s ancestors to unite two families, so that they might ‘take their fortunes together’ (GDL, p. 2). Leaving this house – where Gaston found ‘little sympathy’ (GDL, p. 12) – also means leaving a crumbling familial model of community. It is not by chance that the one time in the extant narrative Gaston is called back to the house, to tend to his dying grandfather, coincides with the onset of the St Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre. This event, which claims Gaston’s wife, and during which ‘a man’s foes were those of his own household’ (GDL, p. 60), underscores the tenuousness of familial as well as traditional political ties for the foundation of community. Larger political currents were also
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putting traditional ideas about community and political legitimacy under great strain: ‘men’s thoughts were then hard at work all around on the nature and basis of royal and all other authority, on the very basis of society itself’ (GDL, p. 117). The Reformation was making religious affiliation a bloody proposition; the identity of France itself was in doubt, an uncertain royal succession and a deeply divided aristocracy leaving the adolescent Charles IX, guided by his Italian mother, Catherine de Medici, in control of the national destiny. His successor, Henry III, was self-absorbed and unable to control the splintering factions in his kingdom. As Wolfgang Iser puts it, the entire novel ‘depicts an upheaval that does not know where it is heading’ (1987, p. 94). Pater sets up numerous parallels between the ‘decadent’ age of the Valois and the decadent nineteenth century. He hints at such parallels in his 1890 essay on Prosper Merimée, which he wrote while still working on Gaston de Latour. Merimée, for Pater, is the typical figure of post-Revolutionary European culture, becoming the ‘unconscious parent’ for French decadence (MS, p. 31) in response to the fall of Napoleon and the restrictions on thought imposed by Kantian critique. ‘After Kant’s criticism of the mind’, Pater notes, ‘its pretensions to pass beyond the limits of individual experience seemed as dead as those of old French royalty’ (MS, p. 11). Pater devotes a good deal of attention in his essay to Merimée’s own historical novel about the period, 1572: Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1829), which freely compares the decadence of ‘that favourite century of the French Renaissance with our own’ (MS, p. 21). Pater introduces many similar parallels in his own novel, suggesting that the problem of community in Gaston de Latour is a mirror for the problem of community at the fin de siècle. As both Gerald Monsman and Patricia Clements have shown, for example, Ronsard is a stand-in, both here and in The Renaissance, for Charles Baudelaire, a poet of the coterie rather than the ‘vulgar’ multitude, sowing ‘flowers of evil among the rest’ (GDL, p. 36).8 The unpublished chapters of the novel, which focus on the court of Henry and Margaret, are full of references to fin-de-siècle culture. King Henry, in Pater’s treatment of him, resembles the decadent Roman emperor Elagabalus; players at court perform a revised version of Tannhäuser, a paradigmatically decadent tale, with the biblical Eve taking the place of the German knight; and the ‘poison daisy’, Margaret, keeps the mummified head of a dead lover, Jacques La Mole, in her private chamber. In a chapter entitled ‘An Empty House’, which originally had for its epigraph Wilde’s imperative to ‘live up to your blue china’, Gaston visits the home of his friend Jasmin, which, with its collection of beautiful objects, recalls the decadent abodes of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Des Esseintes and Wilde’s Dorian Gray.9 There is clearly an element of critique, even scorn, in such parallels; Pater questions the ability of his contemporaries to maintain clear moral distinctions in a world of glittering surfaces. As he asks at the end of his chapter on Giordano Bruno, whose pantheism epitomizes one version of this problem: ‘And how would Paolo and Francesca have read this lesson? How would
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Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
Henry, and Margaret of the Memoirs, and other susceptible persons then present, read it?’ (GDL, p. 82). The transition from a literary to a political example in this passage suggests, however, that Pater’s reflection on his own age has a more substantial aim than chastizing a few overly enthusiastic disciples. The decay of community that marks Gaston’s experience is a common starting point for decadent texts. Like Gaston, for example, Des Esseintes seeks out new sensations in private because he no longer finds a sense of community at home, with his peers, or in the public sphere; many other isolated decadent figures follow the same path – this is, perhaps, the paradigmatic decadent plot. Perhaps the most suggestive connection between Pater’s novel and other decadent works, however, lies in the way Gaston seeks out new communities. Like Des Esseintes, who reads for ‘intellectual fellowship’ (Huysmans, 1959, p. 181), Gaston looks for sympathy in a series of communities organized by reading and writing.10 In the second chapter, for example, Gaston joins ‘the episcopal household’ (GDL, p. 14), where he serves in the canonical library at the cathedral of Chartres, retrieving ‘dim manuscripts’ for scholarly visitors (GDL, p. 23). His clerical calling thwarted by the Huguenot siege of Chartres in the winter of 1567, Gaston moves to the secular literary circles formed by or imagined in the writings of Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne, and Bruno. Later in the novel, Gaston works as a secretary in the court of Queen Margaret, editing her rapidly expanding Memoirs. As Pater notes, this ‘sovereign beauty of her day’ was also ‘clerkly’: ‘writing, writing constantly with a sort of really classic instinct for the genius of her native tongue’ (GDL, p. 97). Gaston’s relationship to his wife is also textually mediated. ‘Lodged in Abelard’s quarters’, Pater writes, Gaston ‘all but repeats Abelard’s typical experience’, seducing his student by the book, as it were, and being compelled by her family of ‘busy Huguenot printers’ to marry her (GDL, p. 64). In each of these instances, bonds of sympathy are forged by or around books, reading, and writing. Such bonds are not wholly incompatible with older forms of affiliation, as we find with Gaston’s brief marriage to Colombe, but they also point to an effort to redefine community. Turning implicitly from both traditional forms of affiliation, and from modern ideas like the nation, Pater seeks out in Gaston de Latour a historical origin for a community defined by the circulation of texts – as well as warnings about its limitations. Consistent with his understanding of community more generally, Pater explores the ways in which new political formations arise out of the reception of artworks. The most powerful metaphors for community in the novel are suggested by a day on the liturgical calendar. At the beginning of the chapter on Bruno, Pater notes that Gaston’s favorite feast day is Pentecost. Easter, the most joyous day for other Catholics, seems to Gaston the ‘least evocative of proportionate sympathy’: ‘The empty tomb, with the white clothes lying, was still a tomb: there was no human warmth in the “spiritual body”: the white
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with that other festival which celebrates the Descent of the Spirit, ‘the tongues’, the nameless impulses gone all abroad, to soften slowly, to penetrate all things, as with the winning subtlety of nature, or of human genius . . . Into the close world, like a walled garden, about him, influences from remotest time and space found their way, travelling unerringly on their long journeys as if straight to him, with the assurance that things were not wholly left to themselves; yet so unobtrusively that a little later the transforming spiritual agency would be discernible at most in the grateful cry of an innocent child, in some good deed of a bad man, or unlooked-for gentleness of a rough one, in the occasional turning to music of a rude voice. (GDL, p. 69) Whereas Easter focuses obsessively, even ghoulishly, on the presence of the body, and thus thwarts sympathy, Pentecost provides Gaston with a sense of community that, notably, does not demand the immediate presence of others. He imagines himself isolated in Paris, enclosed in a ‘walled garden’, but reflecting upon the feast day gives him a sense of connection with others. The ‘transforming spiritual agency’ celebrated by Pentecost allows him to discern the good in others, and to believe in some force guiding and organizing events. This sympathy extends over ‘remotest time and space’, but nevertheless seems addressed directly to him.11 The New Testament story of Pentecost, narrated in the second chapter of Acts, also describes the creation of a community – a universal Christian fellowship mediated by the figurative ‘voice’ of the Holy Spirit, which speaks to each member of the community in his or her own language. The apostles witness tongues of flame falling from the sky, allegorizing the message of Christian salvation. Gaston’s reflection on Pentecost downplays the Christian meaning of the day, subtly transforming the voice of the Holy Spirit into ‘nameless impulses’ and distant influences, and the tongues of flame into versions of the ‘hard, gem-like flame’ Pater valorizes in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance (TR, p. 189). Where the biblical text describes the formation of a community united by a single message, Pater will imagine an artistic and literary community united by the circulation of texts. Read figuratively, the description of community in Gaston’s reflection on Pentecost anticipates the form of affiliation that Michael Warner has called a ‘public’ (2002). This term names the impression of communal sociability that is projected out of the circulation of texts – the abiding sense that one reads and writes within a predetermined discursive context. Limited neither by geography nor chronology, at once empirical and imaginary, and including individuals not necessarily linked by familial, national, or ethnic ties, Warner’s ‘public’ is produced by the production and reception of writing.
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flowers, after all, were like those of a funeral’ (GDL, p. 69). ‘It was altogether different however’, Pater writes,
Matthew Potolsky
Pater’s notion of a community founded on the shared appreciation of art and literature is strikingly common in the fin de siècle.12 But Pater is significantly more aware than his contemporaries of the potential dangers of such forms of affiliation. The ‘nameless’ circulation of language can bind people into dangerous masses as well as more benevolent communities; Pater refers often in the novel to the effects of rumor and conspiracy, which also bind people together through language. The most significant problem, however, is internal to the community itself. In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy describes what he calls ‘literary communism’, a community, ‘formed by an articulation of “particularities”, and not founded in any autonomous essence that would subsist by itself and that would reabsorb or assume singular beings into itself’ (1991, p. 75). I would suggest that Pater is working toward this idea in Gaston de Latour. The element of particularity for him is reception – the discrete ‘impressions’ that arise from the perception of beauty, and that, as he elaborates in many ways throughout his career, can in the right conditions engender a new kind of community. When, however, the ability to have such impressions becomes a personal distinction rather than an act of judgment, an ‘autonomous essence’ rather than a potentially fleeting impression of pleasure, it loses its character as a form of ‘literary communism’. Judgments of taste describe a quality of the individual, not a quantity of pleasure. This distinction is a persistent concern for Pater. Much the same fire imagery that defines the ideal of a ‘Pentecostal’ community in Gaston de Latour, for example, also describes religious conflict, the greatest threat to community in the novel. The religious wars (fought over the translation of a text) ‘flame up’ throughout the narrative (GDL, p. 7). When Gaston enters the cathedral of Chartres he is disturbed by the way its stained-glass windows transform the ‘placid sunshine’ of the surrounding town into ‘imperious, angry fire’ (GDL, p. 15). And the August heat on the eve of St Bartholomew’s Day is uncharacteristically ‘fiery’ (GDL, p. 65). Literary communities can, Pater reminds his readers, all too easily approximate the communities founded on normative principles and permanent characteristics that so many fin-de-siècle writers wanted to challenge. The imagery of Pentecost circulates throughout the novel much as texts circulate. It offers both a utopian ideal and a problematic temptation; Pater in this way asks his reader to judge each instance, each ‘impression’, individually. Gaston’s meeting with Ronsard in the ‘Modernity’ chapter offers perhaps the most explicit invocation in the novel of Gaston’s Pentecostal ideal. Chief among the poetic ‘stars’ of the Pléiade – a name that evokes both fire in the sky and a group joined by their devotion to poetry – Ronsard is a poet of the coterie rather than the ‘vulgar’ multitude: his writings convey the sense, ‘flattering to one who was in on the secret, that this thing, even in its utmost triumph, could never be really popular’ (GDL, p. 36). Gaston first comes to know Ronsard through his books, in particular a copy of the Odes that he carries with him. Much like the ‘nameless impulses’ Gaston describes, Ronsard’s
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book travels to him across space and time, speaking ‘with the ready intimacy of one’s equal in age’, although it was written many years before (GDL, p. 26). ‘The gifted poet’, Pater writes, ‘seemed to have spoken what was already in Gaston’s mind’ (GDL, p. 29) – much as the Holy Spirit speaks through the disciples – giving ‘the truant and irregular poetry of his own nature . . . an external and authorized mouth-piece’ (GDL, p. 26). Something greater than just a work of poetry, Ronsard’s book conveys ‘a doctrine to propagate, a secret open to everyone who would learn, towards a new management of life’ (GDL, p. 36). It opens up for Gaston an entirely new way of thinking about his relationship to society: He had felt after the thing, and here it was, – the one irresistible poetry there had ever been . . . transforming his own age and the world around him . . . asserting the latent poetic rights of the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent . . . Here was a discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed in turn to one and another, to be propagated for the imaginative regeneration of the world. It was a manner, a habit of thought, which would invade ordinary life, and mould that to its intention. (GDL, pp. 30–1) Gaston sounds less like a reader of poetry than a missionary or a revolutionary – a disciple inspired by the Holy Spirit. With its language of transformation, regeneration, ‘privileged apprehension’, invasion, and ‘poetic rights’, this passage blurs the line between poetic and political innovation.13 For Gaston, in short, Ronsard’s poetry holds out a vision of community at a distance, mediated by books, which offers a compelling alternative to unsatisfactory existing models of affiliation. One finds very similar invocations of such a ‘Pentecostal’ notion of community in the portraits of Montaigne and Bruno. These two figures are joined in Gaston’s mind by their common philosophy of ‘indifference’ – a word Pater uses in a political context in the essay on Browne and elsewhere in his works.14 Here the word describes the relativism that underlies both Montaigne’s skeptical refusal to choose sides, and Bruno’s seemingly opposed pantheistic assertion that God is the universal spirit invested in all particulars. As Kevin Ohi has noted, however, this word is also closely tied for Pater to ideas of tolerance and sympathy. Indifference can describe both a lack of engagement (apathy) and an ‘eroticized communion or merger’ (without difference) (Ohi, 2005, p. 15). Construing this merger somewhat more broadly than Ohi does, indifference in Gaston can be understood as a form of distancing that produces sympathy, or even a practice of disinterest that creates a sense of communion. This is precisely the ideal Gaston describes in his reflection on Pentecost: the ‘nameless impulses’ that ‘penetrate all things’ embody both the distancing and the eroticized merger that the concept of indifference describes.15
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Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
For Montaigne and Bruno, as for Gaston, sympathy and communion are produced in and through language. Living in relative isolation, with his wife and books, for example, Montaigne is nevertheless highly sociable. He ‘was ever on the alert for an interlocutor to take part in the conversation’ (GDL, p. 44). The Essays, which Gaston hears in conversation before they achieve literary form, are in and of themselves a form of community. Each one is akin to ‘a life’, ‘having accumulated in them imperceptibly . . . a thousand repeated modifications, like character in a person’ (GDL, p. 43). Montaigne’s writings, Pater suggests, ‘owed their actual publication at last to none of the usual literary motives – desire for fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell – but to the sociable desire for a still wider range of conversation with others. He wrote for companionship’ (GDL, p. 44). Reading the classics was, for Montaigne, ‘nothing less than personal contact’ (GDL, p. 50). Bruno, too, represents an ideal of sympathy in language. Once a Dominican monk, he is now ‘a citizen of the world’, leaving both the cloister and his native Italy to preach the pantheistic fellowship of all things. Pater’s summary of this doctrine draws upon the same Pentecostal figures – fire and language – that defined Gaston’s encounter with Ronsard. Regarding nature as a book, subject to ‘detailed reading’ (GDL, p. 76), Bruno ‘betrays no original lack of the sensuous or poetic fire’ (GDL, p. 75), ‘[k]indling thought and imagination at once’ with his words (GDL, p. 74). He reserves his most poetic flights for the stars, which, like Ronsard’s Pléiade, produce in him a powerful sense of community. Looking at the sky, he feels an ‘ever-widening kinship and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants’ (GDL, p. 78). Bruno carries this effect over to his pedagogical performance: ‘when Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of the audience’ (GDL, p. 79). His face ‘[l]it up’, and his discourse akin to ‘fiery, volcanic soil’ (GDL, p. 80), he fashions a powerful bond between teacher and student. For every such invocation of the Pentecostal notion of community in the novel, however, Pater also raises questions about the viability of the ideal, and in particular, its tendency to turn in upon itself and lose the openness and unpredictability that defines the communal formations Pater admires. All of Gaston’s early mentors, for example, seek to cloister themselves from the world. Ronsard and Montaigne live in towers; Ronsard and Bruno both evince a ‘remarkable distaste for the vulgar’ (GDL, p. 72; cf. p. 33). Pater also sets up a series of parallels joining these mentors to more problematic figures at the court of the Valois. Montaigne and Queen Margaret, for example, are both associated with Circe.16 The love poet Ronsard is implicitly compared both to his royal patron Charles IX, who once scratched lines of his own poetry into a window at Gaston’s ancestral home during a brief visit (GDL, p. 8), and to Margaret’s former lover Jacques La Mole, as well as Raoule, a young man spectacularly executed for a crime he committed out of
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homoerotic devotion to Jasmin. Pater mockingly returns to the Pentecostal imagery of fire and writing in his discussion of these two men, noting, for example, that upon meeting Margaret, ‘the entire sheaf’ of Jacques La Mole’s ‘gifts and gaieties had kindled into fire’ (GDL, p. 104). Bruno’s pantheistic fascination with stars, finally, is echoed in Pater’s references to the Roman analogue for Henry III, Elagabalus, who took his name from the Syrian sun god, Baal. Gaston attends Bruno’s lecture in Paris on Pentecost, the very day that rumors reporting the death of Charles IX begin to circulate through France, and that Henry became king. Even before Gaston encounters Montaigne or Bruno, Pater hints at the disturbing similarities between cloistered aesthetic and political communities. When Gaston leaves Ronsard, a letter of introduction to Montaigne in his hand, he passes the Huguenot capital of La Rochelle, ‘the “Bastion of the Gospel” of John Calvin’, conceded by the Catholic forces in the religious wars (GDL, p. 42). La Rochelle is manifestly a community formed according to an oppositional doctrine. ‘They were there’, Pater notes, ‘the armed chiefs of Protestantism, dreaming of a “dictator” after the Roman model, who should set up a religious republic’ (GDL, p. 42). Situated in the midst of ‘a wide expanse of marshland, where the wholesome sea turned stagnant’, and populated with citizens who ‘scowled through the heavy air’ (GDL, p. 42), La Rochelle seems a stark contrast to airy and tolerant elevation embodied by Montaigne, the ideal of poetic modernity embodied by Ronsard, or the pantheistic union imagined by Bruno. But Pater slyly asserts their continuity, both by placing this description in his narration of Gaston’s journey from the home of the poet to that of the essayist, and through several fortuitous puns: roche is French for rock, Ronsard’s name Pierre means stone, and the name Montaigne sounds like the word for mountain (montagne). La Rochelle’s location at the border of land and sea, similarly, echoes the associations of Bruno’s name: Giordano derives from the biblical Jordan river, and means ‘down-flowing’, while Bruno means brown, evoking land. The dream of philosophical and literary detachment that these figures embody has something important in common with the Huguenot dreams of a religious ‘dictator’ (from Latin dictare, to assert or speak). Later in the novel, Pater again evokes this danger in a seemingly incidental reference in his account of the St Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre, which he places between Gaston’s stay with Montaigne and his discovery of Bruno in Paris. Pater notes that the Huguenot philosopher La Rochefoucauld was given one of the ‘white badges of Catholicism’ to protect him from the anti-Protestant violence (GDL, p. 65). Much like the pun connecting the moralist’s name to La Rochelle and to Gaston’s three mentors, the white badge – suggesting paper – is a vivid emblem for the ‘literary’ forces than can both form and deform community. Perhaps the clearest allegory in the novel for the challenge posed by a community of letters, however, is Pater’s depiction of Jasmin’s paradigmatically
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Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
decadent collection of books and artworks, which Gaston examines while waiting for his friend to return home. The objects Jasmin has collected all reflect their owner’s impeccable taste, but Gaston fears that they explicitly close off sympathy rather than engendering it. Entering the house, he begins to feel ‘shut off . . . from the crude world outside’, and wonders whether this sense of feeling ‘differenced’ from the rest of the world has benevolent or nefarious aims: Did this novel mode of receiving, of reflecting the visible aspects of life commit one to an intellectual scheme, a theory about it, the remoter practical alliances of which one could not precisely ascertain at present, but would inevitably be led to in due course? Was this odd grace no more than the superficial expression of an intellectual aristocracy ‘differenced’ from the rest of the world by mere fashion or taste, or did it involve other differences from the vulgar, less innocent? (GDL, p. 88) These questions get to the heart of Pater’s fears about community. Jasmin’s collection seems to embody the pervasive fin-de-siècle dream of an intellectual elite, marked off from the masses by its exceptional taste. But the very act of differencing, Pater suggests, can transform such an elite into yet another traditional aristocracy, which makes taste an alibi for political and economic domination. Echoing Marxist theories of alienation, Gaston reflects further that, in this vision of community, the person has been lost in the things: ‘It might perhaps be that, after all, things as distinct from persons, such things as those one had so abundantly around one here, were come to be so much that the human being seemed suppressed and practically nowhere amid the works of his hands, amid the objects he had projected from himself’ (GDL, p. 88). Rather than bringing people together, the expression of taste liquidates community, drowning the individual in a profusion of things. The form of communal organization (taste) comes to stand in for its ideal effect (sympathy). Congealed in things, like prehistoric flies in amber, taste is no more liberatory than traditional forms of affiliation. Indeed, like religious conflict in Gaston’s age, or violent nationalism in Pater’s, taste in Jasmin’s collection is divisive, not unifying. Gaston anticipates this point in his reflection on several objects in the collection that do not fit, notably some ‘nude fragments’ of pagan sculpture. These objects are doubly suggestive. On the one hand, their unashamed freshness refuses to be assimilated to the ‘tricky indoor splendours’ of the current age (GDL, p. 87). But even more, their fragmentary quality figures the way Jasmin’s expressions of taste sever themselves from the larger world, and from any viable notion of community and sympathy. ‘After all’, Gaston thinks, ‘it was not quite true that all really beautiful things went together’ (GDL, p. 87). Because Gaston de Latour was never finished, it is impossible to know how Pater might have resolved the tension between the two versions of
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‘Pentecostal’ community he describes. One might speculate that Pater was unable to finish the novel not, as has been suggested, for personal or aesthetic reasons, but because he could not solve this problem to his satisfaction.17 Pater seems to hold out one instance of sympathy as exemplary, however. When he finally meets Ronsard, Gaston is somewhat surprised to find that the poet, once in the vanguard, has now become old and melancholy, spending his time not on new work, but on ‘amendments, not invariably happy, of his earlier verse’ (GDL, p. 35). As Ronsard is showing him one of his revisions, Gaston catches a glimpse of ‘the first book of the Franciade, in silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king’s hand, but never to be finished’ (GDL, p. 35). The Franciade was Ronsard’s abortive effort, published as a fragment in 1572 – only days after the St Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre – to write a French national epic on the model of Virgil’s Aeneid. The opening verse of the poem is an epic invocation to the muse, connecting the line of Charles IX to that of the Trojan Hector. Crucially, however, it is not the political theme or intention of the poem, but its material presence for a new audience, that creates sympathy between the old poet and his young reader: Gaston, as he turned from a stolen reading of the opening verse, in jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript, let out his soul, perhaps. The poet’s face struck fire too, and seeming to detect on a sudden the legible document of something by no means conventional below the young man’s wellcontrolled manner and expression, he became as if paternally anxious for his intellectual furtherance. (GDL, p. 35) Pater’s description of this bond draws with remarkable brevity on nearly all the figures associated in the novel with Pentecost. Most notable is the ‘fire’ that passes from the ‘feverish’ manuscript to the faces of reader and writer, which strikes ‘fire’ at the recognition of sympathy (Pater’s ‘too’ suggests Gaston’s face is also fiery). Reading Ronsard’s poem, Gaston becomes a ‘legible document’, part of a textual community Ronsard feared was lost with the death of his friend Du Bellay and the waning of the Pléiade. What is most significant about this scene, however, is its depiction of a community formed by chance, out of Gaston’s ‘stolen’ impression of a fragmentary epic. The sense of sympathy between reader and writer – erotically, or at least affectively, charged – arises out of the failure of Ronsard’s political aim. A completed version of this epic would validate a highly traditional form of community; as a ‘jerky, feverish, gouty manuscript’ hidden away in a drawer, it realizes for Gaston the kind of literary community he only imagined prior to meeting the poet. Precisely the fragmentary quality of this poem, its incomplete physical form as well as its unfulfilled desire to invent a glorious lineage for a French nation divided by war and religious conflict, allows for the formation of a new sense of community. Out of the
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Pater and the Politics of Community
Matthew Potolsky
incompletion of the nation – in fact because of it – new political combinations arise. Ronsard’s nationalist epic is most powerful politically when it fails to achieve its stated nationalist aims. This scene is opposed in almost every way to the model of community Gaston reads in Jasmin’s home. Where Jasmin puts his taste deliberately on display, Gaston and Ronsard form a community of taste by chance. And whereas Jasmin’s home seems to shut its occupant off from the world, Gaston’s reading of Ronsard’s fragmentary poem is only the beginning of his secular career. The two visions of community are founded on the reception of artworks, and both respond to the failure of traditional forms of affiliation, but one is open and aleatory, the other closed and exclusionary. Lingering behind his companions after they have left the poet’s home, Gaston reflects on the bond of sympathy he formed with Ronsard, and implicitly upon the community of taste this bond opens up for him. Anticipating a figure Benjamin would also use to describe the relationship between reading and politics, he suggests that the authorship of modern poetry was collective, belonging ‘not so much to a star as to a constellation, like that hazy Pleiad he [Ronsard] had pointed out in the sky, or like the swarm of larks abroad this morning over the corn, led by common instinct, a large element in which was sympathetic trust in the instinct of others’ (GDL, p. 36). Pater associates Gaston’s image with the Hegelian concept of a Zeitgeist, but it also reads as a proleptic gloss on the notion of ‘literary communism’ that Nancy describes. The unity of a constellation is aesthetic, its stars joined only by the perception of a viewer informed by a tradition of interpretation, and not by any substantive relationship among its constituent parts. It is manifestly a product of reception. The communal constellation Pater imagines, moreover, takes the form of an open secret; it is available, as Gaston says, for all who would learn, and not just for a cloistered elite. This openness – or better, indifference – is suggested by the pastoral image of larks flying in unison over the corn, which contrasts sharply with the kind of sequestered life that so many of the figures in the novel seek to lead. Above all, the constellation Gaston imagines is a product of reading. For Pater, we might suggest, the ideal community forms with the opening of a book, and ends when the book is put aside.
Notes 1. The seemingly obvious division between ‘political’ and ‘apolitical’ aesthetes is pervasive in even the best work on Aestheticism. With the notable exception of Dowling’s The Vulgarization of Art (1996), for example, Pater’s eccentric relation to politics has been little affected by efforts in the past decade to situate Aestheticism in the context of liberal political theory. Amanda Anderson (2001), David Wayne Thomas (2004), and Richard Dellamora (2004) all turn to the seemingly more political Wilde when they reach the end of the century. Among the few efforts to define the political implications of Pater’s Aestheticism are Loesberg (1991) and
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7. 8. 9.
10.
11.
12. 13.
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Andrews (2002), who notes suggestive connections between Pater and Benjamin, to which I shall return. For further similarities between the two critics, see Andrews (2002) and Miller (1976). For an account of how knowledge of the past, for Pater, always comes through the critical act, see Williams (1989). One might also contextualize Pater’s relationship to the past in terms of the logic of museum culture that Siegel discusses in his essay in this volume, pp. 13–32. Pater reserves an important role in his writings for the French Revolution, and apparently had plans to write a third novel focusing on its consequences. In a very tentative outline for the novel, which would have been called Thistle, Pater specifically mentions the Revolution (qtd in Higgins, 2002, p. 200). The late imaginary portrait ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (1892), set during the Napoleonic Wars, may have been a fragment of or dry run for the novel. Andrews identifies a similar focus in the essay ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’ (1889), which argues for the centrality of the highly problematic Richard II in Shakespeare’s history of England (2002, p. 259). On the notion that Pater writes to and for select communities, see Clements (1985); Dowling (1986); Prettejohn (1999). See also Cruise’s account of Pater’s relationship with Simeon Solomon in this volume, pp. 68–81. On Pater’s vision of reception as a communal activity, see Teukolsky (2009, pp. 101–48). On the idea of a clerisy, see Knights (1978). For an account of the emerging intellectual ‘aristocracy’ in the later nineteenth century, see Whyte (2005). It is not difficult to read this passage as a description of the gay subculture within which Pater moved, and which Dowling describes in Hellenism (1994). For an account of how writers in the next generation conceived community, see Berman (2001). I would differ with Hext’s claim, in this volume (below, pp. 205ff.), that Pater imagines sociality only as a relationship among friends. See Clements (1985, ch. 2); Monsman, (1967, ch. 5). On Pater’s broader relationship to French literature, see Conlon (1982). The parallels are not only to decadent art. As Jane Spirit has shown, Pater’s discussions of Montaigne and Bruno reflect critically on Victorian treatments of both writers as models for liberal tolerance (1991). The role of reading and writing in Gaston resonates with the many fictional and historical Paterian portraits that begin with the discovery of a book or artifact – a discovery that often leads to a new sense of community and sympathy. Thus Duke Carl imagines the German nation after stumbling upon an old book, and Marius finds a sense of liberation while reading the ‘Golden Book’ of Apuleius with Flavian. In other instances, such as ‘Apollo in Picardy’, it is Pater’s narrator who finds evidence of a forgotten community in a recovered artifact. See also Daley’s account, in this volume (pp. 85–100), of the tapestry that inspires ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’. Early in the novel, Gaston anticipates the link between distant ‘tongues’ and communal sympathy. Left largely to himself at his ancestral home, Gaston awakens to a new quasi-religious sensibility which, Pater writes, had found ‘tongues to speak of a still living humanity – somewhere, somewhere in the world! – waiting for him in the distance, or perchance already on its way’ (GDL, p. 11). This notion of a decadent ‘republic of letters’ is outlined in Potolsky (2007). Indeed, inasmuch as the language of rights is an invention of a later political theory, Pater merges Gaston’s concern with community with his own contemporary concerns – a fact suggested by his allusion, as Clements has noted, to Baudelaire’s
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Pater and the Politics of Community
14.
15.
16. 17.
Matthew Potolsky influential association of the fugitive and transitory with the modern in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1985, p. 89). In The Renaissance, Pater uses the term to define Leonardo’s opportunistic relationship to power: ‘No one had ever carried political indifferentism further; it had always been his philosophy to “fly before the storm”; he is for the Sforzas, or against them, as the tide of their fortunes turns’ (TR, p. 100). The conflicted eroticism of Gaston de Latour is a topic that deserves more attention than I can give it here. Gaston is one of Pater’s few married protagonists, but his wife is killed almost as soon as she is introduced; almost all of Gaston’s other significant bonds are with men. The unpublished chapters contain some of Pater’s most erotically charged descriptions – in particular, the remarkably frank discussion of sexual inversion in the ‘Anteros’ chapter, and the unhidden punning on the relation between sword and sheath (from the Latin vagina) in the account of Queen Margaret. Monsman makes much of this parallel in his discussion of the novel in Art (1980). On towers and isolation in the novel, see also Rajan (1997). For a discussion of the most viable theories, see Monsman’s introduction to his edition of the novel (1995) and Brake’s discussion of the question in her contribution to this volume (pp. 220–31).
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The Limitations of Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s Individualist Aesthetics Kate Hext
It is ‘self-culture’ and not art that lies at the heart of Walter Pater’s aesthetics. This term, which appears in ‘Winckelmann’, consolidates Pater’s efforts to recentre human value from God to secular man, where ‘the proper instinct of self-culture’ is the individual’s endeavour ‘to find [in art] its own strength’ (TR, p. 147). Pater borrows the concept of self-culture or Bildung from Friedrich Schiller, and the way in which he appropriates it reveals the extent to which he is indebted to Romantic aesthetics and the limitations of his quite singular individualism. As far as we know, Pater first read Schiller’s magnum opus, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), in 1865, although it is highly likely that he was already aware of this philosophy through Goethe1 and may have read Schiller’s work in Germany before the composition of ‘Diaphaneitè’ in May 1864. Given Pater’s curiosity regarding pivotal moments in aesthetic history, he would have found Schiller’s ‘moment’ to be particularly significant. Schiller was a central figure in Weimar classicism at the end of the eighteenth century: on the one hand, an idealist who developed the ethical gestures of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and on the other hand, a Romantic who, alongside Goethe, sought to place art at the centre of human experience. Schiller’s influence on Pater is oft-mooted but rarely explored. Billie Inman tentatively suggests that the idea of the diaphanous man as ‘a revolutionary type who, if multiplied, could profoundly affect the body politic [is] reflective of Schiller’ (1981b, p. 75). Intrigued by the possibilities of this influence, in The Sensible Spirit F. C. McGrath identifies an ‘impressively long list’ of issues and viewpoints that Pater shares with and is likely to have borrowed from Schiller (1986, p. 98). The influence of Schilleresque self-culture becomes really valuable, however, when we examine its specific details and begin to recover the organic relation between Schilleresque self-culture and Pater’s elliptical aesthetic philosophy. 205
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Kate Hext
In Schiller, Pater found a kindred spirit. Schiller’s concept of self-culture establishes in lucid detail that which Pater most wanted to believe: that art is a panacea for modernity’s affronts against the spirit and allows the individual to perfect himself. To some extent this instantiates the teleological model that abounds in Hegelian and Victorian thought, asserting that selfhood is brought into being.2 The particular attraction of Schiller’s philosophy is the central role that he affords to personal experience and to art. Self-culture is a process of self-education through art. Reflecting this, Pater’s recurring images of the self-perfecting spirit are defined by his implicit conviction that ‘art is a means to self-education’ (TR, p. 90). Crucially, the concept of selfculture refines the Paterian self of ceaseless flux. It suggests that this may be harnessed into a personal teleology in which the individual ‘achieve[s] this perfect life’, ‘come[s] nearer and nearer to perfection’, ‘[is] on its way to perfection’, when ‘the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point’ (MS, pp. 248–9, 249; Ap, p. 65; MS, p. 248). It is true that sometimes in Pater’s essays Schiller’s ideas are inextricable from those of Hegel, Kant and Fichte (Inman, 1981b, p. 101). Yet in terms of articulating the peculiar role of aesthetic experience and the central importance of the individual, Pater shows a singular debt to Schiller. In Aesthetic Education, this endeavour of self-culture is presented in three stages: the apprehension of art creates feelings of unity or completeness; then these feelings create a sense of freedom and autonomy; and finally, this allows the person to perfect her or himself to an ethical ideal. Schiller’s model is nebulously present in ‘Diaphaneitè’ and The Renaissance, interwoven with fiction, biography and art history to elucidate Pater’s conception of the relationship between art and the individual. Pater neither references Schiller nor abides by his systemic exposition, but then he could trust his contemporary readers to understand his subtle invocations of Aesthetic Education because it was widely known among educated mid-Victorians.3 With this familiarity long passed, I propose to consider Pater’s concept of selfculture alongside Schiller’s philosophy in the three stages that characterize his Aesthetic Education. Pater is the would-be Romantic visionary coming to terms with the confident high ideals of Schiller’s aesthetics in the reduced scope of latter-day Victorian modernity. As he adapts Aesthetic Education to shape his own texts, he reinterprets and interrogates Schiller’s vision, offering far more than ‘an elegant but over-simplified version’ of Schiller’s theory (Wilkinson and Willoughby, 1982, pp. clix–clx) and highlighting the troubled dynamics between the individual, art and society that underpin his aesthetics.
Fragmentation and unity Self-culture begins in the boundless moment of aesthetic contemplation, when that process evokes a sense of unity within one’s self as a panacea
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for the conditions of modernity. Unity is one of Pater’s most consistent concerns, from his early hesitancy to his mature assertion of ‘the unity of the thing with itself’ (Higgins, 1991, p. 83; MS, p. 51). It is apparent in the pantheistic gestures of his essays on ‘Wordsworth’ and ‘Coleridge’ and we see it again as he addresses ‘the problem of unity with ourselves’ in The Renaissance (TR, p. 146). Here, Pater appropriates Schiller’s critique of how modernity undermines the unity of reason and imagination, and the opportunity of restoring this through aesthetic self-culture. Schiller’s aesthetic is set against his belief that the modern individual is fragmented by the experience ‘of living not just as a human being naturally lives, but within one or another specific social role, against a wide background of possibilities, where it is not always clear why that role exists, what its value is, or how to fulfill it well’ (Eldridge, 2003, p. 235). Like Schiller, Pater locates ‘the problem of unity with ourselves’ specifically in ‘the modern world’ (TR, p. 146): for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of the antique life. (TR, p. 146; my italics) In this passage, ‘the conflicting claims’ of modernity victimize the individual, threatening his autonomy as he is pulled this way and that by a world defamiliarized by the science and technologies that were to make human beings lord of all. Pater gestures towards the proliferation of information, the decentring of values and pace that distinguishes modernity from ‘antique life’ and undermines ‘unity with ourselves’. It poses the critical question of how one might regain this state if now, as ever, the intellect really does demand ‘completeness, centrality’ (TR, p. 146). The answer is, as the answer always is for Pater, to be found in art. Schiller argues that the restorative qualities of art are premised on its singular capacity to engage our dual drives of sensation (Stofftrieb) and abstract reason (Formtrieb). In modernity these drives are divided, with its constant stream of phenomena demanding the Stofftrieb while its philosophy wants only its Formtrieb. Yet, as the individual pauses in aesthetic contemplation, sensation and reason are brought into a state of disinterested play in the imagination (Spieltrieb). This sublime middle state is inspired by Kant’s concept of the ‘free play’ of the imagination (1987, 47ff.) but the effect is unique to Schiller: ‘[o]nly the aesthetic mode of perception makes [the individual] a whole, because both of his natures [sense and intellect] must be in harmony if he is going to achieve it’ (Schiller, 1982, 27.10, p. 215). In the finite moment of aesthetic contemplation these drives blend into each other and enhance each other, soaring beyond the demands that bind them in ordinary perception and rising above physical, psychological
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Kate Hext
and circumstantial limitations. We experience ‘the infinite being realised in the finite, hence the possibility of sublimest humanity, is thereby actually proven’ (Schiller, 1982, 25.6, p. 189). In ‘The School of Giorgione’ and ‘Winckelmann’ Pater assumes Schiller’s dichotomy between sense and reason and their resolution in the ‘free play’ of aesthetic experience (TR, pp. 2, 5). For, as he explains, ‘art addresses not pure sense still less the pure intellect, but the imaginative reason’ (TR, p. 83).4 The ‘imaginative reason’ is ‘that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born’ (TR, p. 88): twin-born because it comprises sense and intellect in a holistic apprehension, which is the immediate pleasure of art. Slippage between sense and intellect in the final paragraph of The Renaissance further suggests this ideal: ‘Only be sure it is passion – that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most’ (TR, p. 153). The emotions and sensations evoked in the first sentence are, in the second, reconceived as – not replaced by – ‘wisdom’, infusing a reflective, cognitive dimension into the essence of these qualities. Pater extends the dualism of sense and reason so that it defines not only the aesthetic experience but also the art-object and artistic genius. Thus, artistic genius is defined by ‘imaginative intellect’ (TR, pp. 136, 137), which can unite ‘with absolute justice, the word and the idea: each in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with the other, by that fusion of matter and form’ (Ap, p. 58). This is embodied in ‘the highest poetical expression’ of art (Ap, p. 58). William Wordsworth’s words, for example, ‘are themselves thoughts and feeling; not eloquent, or musical words merely, but that sort of creative language which carries the reality of what it depicts’ (Ap, p. 58). The fusion of sense and intellect is mirrored in the resolution of Wordsworth’s private ‘creative language’ and ‘reality’. It reminds us of J. P. Ward’s argument that Pater is ‘the first to make writing a truly composed artifice rather than directly trusting the language of the heart’ (1991, p. 63) because it suggests that in his ideal the schism between the heart’s truth and its expression would be healed. As his ideal, ‘that sincerity, that perfect fidelity to one’s own inward presentations’ becomes the necessity ‘without which any profound poetry is impossible’ (Ap, p. 51). By insisting that literary art is impossible without this, Pater makes the imagination the centre of unity. Moreover, he is setting up a very personal function for art. He presents art as a panacea to society, consolidating and restoring one’s sense of one’s self in abstract from it. In contrast to Oscar Wilde, who would explore the ‘myriad of lives, myriad sensations’ of the individual, conceived now as ‘a complex multiform creature’ (1999, p. 139) in the knowledge that there is no simple, permanent essence of self, Pater continues to hanker after that unified essence and the means to make one’s self whole. He delves beneath to the more
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fundamental aspects of self, without the Romantic confidence that there would be a fundamental element to be found, but at least with the hope that there might be.
Aesthetic unity with oneself creates a sense of freedom and allows the individual to realize one’s own autonomy. Schiller insists that ‘it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to freedom’ (1982, 2.5, p. 9);5 as Pater’s thoughts unfold they illustrate their debt to this second stage of self-culture. Fundamentally, Schiller presents three kinds of freedom (1982, pp. 311–12) and each is apparent in the aesthetic of Pater’s Renaissance: ‘physical freedom’, which is liberty from restraint; ‘moral freedom’, which is the ability to rise above the ordinary conditions of one’s reality to envisage what ought to be; and the highest form, ‘anthropological freedom’, created when the unity of Stofftrieb and Formtrieb expands to create a feeling of freedom because we are liberated from slavery to one or the other. When Linda Dowling suggests that The Renaissance may claim to be ‘a document of Victorian liberalism’ (1994, p. 78), she indicates the importance of some form of freedom in Pater’s aesthetic. Yet it is not the Victorian social, reason-based form of freedom specified by Mill or Hegel, but the individualistic, imaginative freedoms of Schiller that are sought in Pater’s Renaissance. Schiller argues that the sense of freedom created by art is implicit in the pleasure we take in its contemplation and, although aesthetic experience itself is only ephemeral, ‘[a]rt has for its object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to excite a momentary dream of liberty; its aim is to make us absolutely free’ (2007, p. 141). Therefore, aesthetic freedom is never an end in itself. This is a striking revision of Kant’s conception of freedom. Echoing Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Schiller asserts that art ‘gives rise to freedom’ (1982, 26.1, p. 191). He formulates the significance of this statement through Kant’s early reason-centred philosophy,6 accepting his argument that freedom is the power of the will to act ‘entirely from itself, autonomous of factors external to it’ (Pereboom, 2006, pp. 547–8).7 Schiller’s twist and his major contribution to aesthetic philosophy is that he relocates the capacity for freedom from the faculty of reason to the imagination, implicitly relocating the imagination at the very centre of our being. ‘Physical freedom’, which is simply the freedom to do what one wants, is Schiller’s response to his view that in society, ‘[w]e subject our free judgement to its fantastic customs, our will to its seductions [and] the fetters of the physical tighten ever more alarmingly . . . , and the maxim of passive obedience passes for the supreme wisdom of life’ (1982, 5.5, p. 27). In this first, negative sense, freedom is defiant escapism through art. Schiller’s early critics overemphasized this element of his theory, tending – in arguments that foreshadow criticism of Aestheticism – to suggest that he
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The free autonomous self
Kate Hext
conceives of art purely as escapism, and a destructive form of escapism at that. Pater’s most pervasive image of aesthetic freedom reiterates Schiller’s concept of physical freedom. Such escapism is what Pater suggests when he says that ‘[t]he proper function of fictitious literature [is] in affording us a refuge into a world slightly better’ (Ap, p. 219). The world from which he wishes to take refuge echoes Schiller’s polemic on the fetters of society: ‘[o]ur collective life, pressing equally on every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless uninteresting existence’ (MS, p. 252). It is a striking image. The physical touches that may express love and companionship are corrupted into the oppressive presses of a crowd bearing down on the individual. Baudelaire’s vision of the autonomous flâneur watching all forms of human life is subverted as the crowd engulfs him. The colour that symbolizes Pater’s ideal of fine art in ‘The School of Giorgione’8 is drained, like the creative spirit evaporating. It suggests a certain fragility about the individual, as if he is ever on the brink of his own dissolution, and standing back from the crowd lest it crush him into mediocrity. It is society, not realizing what it does, which breaks a butterfly upon a wheel. ‘The world’, as Pater tells us, ‘has no sense fine enough for those evanescent shades’ of the diaphanous individual (MS, p. 252). The Paterian individual is defined by his ability to soar in beauty regardless. To some extent these dynamics between the individual and society may be thought of in terms of ‘his campaign for the “liberty” of the homoerotic heart and intellect’ (Dowling, 1994, p. 80), in which ‘society’ represents a ‘machinery of power’ that normalizes sexuality through the ‘incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 322). As to whether this amounts to a ‘campaign’ we should be sceptical. Pater’s hesitancy, his increasing inclination to avoid conflict, and his conservatism, suggest that his comments do not really amount to a campaign. His aesthetic moment represents a weak form of freedom, like a daydream that cannot be realized when aesthetic experience has ended. Moreover, the scope of Pater’s interest in the issue of personal freedom ranges far beyond sexual freedom. ‘Art may seem to be our least important part of time,’ he observes, but it is uniquely important because it releases us from ‘the stress of our servile everyday attentiveness’ (TR, p. 96). It is a liberation not only from the sexual censure but also from the banality of the workaday world in which the imagination may be stifled by ‘a stereotyped world’ (TR, p. 152). Pater struggles between Schiller’s forms of freedom, attempting to move beyond physical freedom – that is, beyond the mere sense of being free from oppression – but unsure to what extent this is possible. Schiller’s second form of freedom, which is the freedom of the imagination to see how things ought to be, is exemplified in The Renaissance by the cultural renewal heralded by Venus; a cultural renewal that is premised on the reclamation of autonomy and personal liberty. At the outset, Pater asserts that it is ‘[t]he
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desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life’ in Renaissance sensibility that precipitates ‘the divination of fresh sources thereof – new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art’ (TR, p. 1). Art becomes the site at which one may see into the possible and the means with which to reconceive the order of things. It is a pervasive idea in The Renaissance: Pater describes how art creates ‘a liberty of heart’, in which ‘the happier powers in things without are permitted free passage’ and when experiencing art, ‘[o]n a sudden the imagination feels itself free’ (TR, pp. 2, 96, 118), suggesting the romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo as exemplars of what ‘modern art has to do in the service of culture’, which is ‘to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it that it may satisfy the spirit [with] the sense of freedom’ (TR, p. 148). Schiller’s third form of freedom is anthropological: the power of the will to act ‘entirely from itself ’ and is not, therefore, ‘motivated by factors external to it or implicated in a causal chain’ (Pereboom, 2006, pp. 547–8). The value of art is that it may bring this quality to the ordinary life of the individual: ‘to remove to an objective distance the sensible world; . . . to transform it into the free working of our spirit, and thus acquire a dominion over the material by means of ideas’ (Schiller, 2007, p. 141). Schiller’s identification between freedom and autonomy is crucial. Nikolas Kompridis suggests that Kant and his followers developed an unprecedented conception of freedom, in which freedom is synonymous with autonomy and necessary in order to bring forth ‘a new self-determining beginning’ (2006, p. 35). Freedom and autonomy are absolutely necessary to the teleologies on which the philosophies of Kant, Schiller and later Hegel and Marx are based, because only in these states can we bring the change into being. Like Schiller, Pater conceives freedom as the capacity to initiate ‘a new self-determining beginning’ as an autonomous agent. Art makes the individual ‘actually’ free because it raises her above the conditions of ordinary experience so that she experiences herself as an autonomous being who may transcend the material world: the proper instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that those various forms of genius can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. (TR, p. 147) Self-culture is defined in this passage as the endeavour to ‘see into’ the world and to ‘its own strength’ with self-conscious enthusiasm. It is in wilful opposition to Matthew Arnold’s ‘perfect freedom’, which is the renunciation of one’s self. No: this is the affirmation of self through freedom. The passage shows that insight into the world and enlivened intellect are necessary for
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Kate Hext
the individual to find his own strength and the possessive pronouns suggest that this is an innate power, distinct from the world’s phenomena. The individual is to ‘live upon himself’ outside ‘collective life’. It is his autonomy from ideology and society that makes him insightful and original and this is the strength of the perfected self. In ‘Diaphaneitè’, this kind of anthropological freedom is made prerequisite to the artist. As Pater explains, ‘[i]t is not in the guise of Luther or Spinoza’ – representative of renunciation and intellect, respectively – but ‘rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world’ (MS, pp. 252–3). Raphael’s genius is founded on his ability to remain autonomous while contemplating political and religious currents as they shape the world, transforming them into art. For Pater, artistic expression is proof positive of this autonomy. With this, art is made the salvation of the spirit. Its raison d’être is not understood as a practical function but as the harmonious embodiment of autonomous creation: to have ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ as Kant would say (1987, p. 73). Although Schiller also locates freedom in the imagination, he suggests that it only comes to fruition in the world. In Schiller’s theory, as in the modes of ‘freedom’ proposed by Hegel, or Fichte, or Matthew Arnold, the idea of freedom starts in various ways from the belief that it comes into being and is exercised in a social context. In other words, there is a necessary relation between the individual and the external world of action. As Schiller writes, while freedom begins in the imagination, ‘man is Nought, if we are thinking of any particular result rather than the totality of his powers, and considering the absence in him of any specific determination’ (1982, 21.4, p. 145). Pater cannot envisage how the ‘sense of freedom’ made possible by aesthetic contemplation could be brought into the practical sphere. This phrase locates freedom as a private, imaginative quality; an illusion defined by its unreality. Without Schiller’s metaphysical conceit and without Schiller’s ultimate belief in society, it is difficult for Pater to envisage how the mere sense of freedom can be universalized. And thus one gets to the crux of the matter, and the beginning of Pater’s departure from Schiller.
Morality The Paterian individual is premised on a strong sense of his singularity; a singularity that takes its poignancy from Pater’s own position. He was ever an outsider: part of Oxford but not of Oxford, engaging with the issues of his age but not ever really belonging to his age when in his imagination he traversed centuries. The Paterian individual is an outsider, separate from society, and this is essential to his genius.
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It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the third stage of self-culture marks a schism between Pater and Schiller, as Schillerean aesthetic contemplation opens out to ethical sensibility realized in society. Pater assumes Schiller’s view that unity and freedom create a sense of personal value that is fundamental to ethics. He flounders, however, at Schiller’s turn from the solitude of aesthetic contemplation to society, and thereby leaves himself with the problem of how to ground morality. Schiller bridges the gap between art and morality left by Kant’s Critique of Judgment by confidently making the move from self-realization in aesthetic experience to ethical sensibility. He situates moral sensibility in the imagination, brought into being by the feelings of freedom, unity and autonomy evoked in aesthetic experience and educated by the individual’s contemplation of art. Thus, moral feelings are determined by passionate impulses: ‘Morality . . . consists not in the formal obedience to moral law based on rational assent to principle, but rather in the heartfelt, unpremeditated inclination to do good’ (Schiller, 2006, p. 128). Passionate feelings are autonomous of, and can transgress, law and convention. By placing each individual at the centre of moral judgement, Schiller declares his faith in the individual. In this Pater concurs. He shares Schiller’s view that personal morality emanates from ‘a direct sense of personal worth’ (TR, p. 252) cultivated within one’s self and not determined by any abstract system: The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract morality we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional has no real claim on us. (TR, p. 153) Pater’s words hark back to ancient Greek ethics, which ask, ‘What am I to do if I am to do well?’ and contrasts with modern ethics, which ask, ‘what ought I to do if I am to do right?’ (Tucker, 1991, p. 114). By defining morality within one’s self against ‘some abstract morality’, the individual is empowered. When the individual is made arbiter of the good, this is a conception of the good defined by the individual’s heartfelt inclination towards it. It is with a nebulous assertion that Pater takes up Schiller’s belief that moral sense resides in the imagination. As he puts it, the diaphanous character ‘does not take the eye by breadth of colour; rather it is that fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point’ (TR, p. 248). Once again, light evokes the creative spirit; it does so in this instance to identify the imagination with the moral faculties. Just what is signified by our moral nature and what would it mean to refine this to the burning point is not quite clear. Perhaps Pater is relying on his audience – in this case the Old Mortality Society – to identify the gestures to Schiller in this most Schilleresque of essays. Since ethics are not Pater’s central concern
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Kate Hext
in this text, perhaps the concept needs no further explanation. Even so, the grand sweeping nature of the phrase discloses the indistinctness of his notion of what this would mean in precise terms or how it could possibly be realized in the context of his modernity. Pater defines morality as a compassionate response located in the senses, the heart and the passions, and not in the intellect. The intensity of aesthetic perception and the heightened emotions it excites teach one to notice and respond virtuously in life. He praises Botticelli for his ability to create ‘a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition’. The sympathy is created at least in part by the delicate attention of Pater’s narrative as he describes Botticelli’s Madonnas: ‘they shrink under the pressure of the divine child, and plead unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity’ (TR, p. 39). The beauty and scale of the paintings defamiliarize the subject from the emotion to show it to us as an archetype. Art assumes the role of moral educator in a way that engages the individual to make personal judgements. For this reason the individual is made central, displacing God or any other authority from the role of moralizing: it sets him free. Art evokes an ephemeral experience of intense compassion, which it expands to benefit all society because art ennobles the imagination, allowing us to transcend habitual conditions to recognize that which is morally good. With art, then, ‘in his own hut, he discourses silently with himself and, from the moment he steps out of it, with all the rest of his kind, . . . there will the tender blossom of beauty unfold’ (Schiller, 1982, 26.2, p. 191). So, while self-culture is a private endeavour, a solitary process of self in dialogue with self, mediated through art, the individual is yoked to society and the tender, ethical sensibility cultivated in private is only fully realized in society. The last of Schiller’s letters in the Aesthetic Education asserts that the quickened spirit and sense of freedom evoked in aesthetic experience ‘recalls to us our freedom as moral agents and we return to the everyday world with a disposition ready to face the challenges and a mind emboldened to make certain moral choices’ (Kooy, 2002, p. 40). This integration of art, society and ethics was a significant element in Schiller’s appeal to educated middle-class Victorians, for whom, often, ‘the primary function of art was to socialise individual readers or spectators into the moral values of their culture’ (Guy, 1998, p. 314). This integration of aesthetic experience, society and ethics is foundational to John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Expanded to the grand scale that Schiller imagines, the proliferation of aesthetic education would create the ‘aesthetic State’: a society in which men do good deeds out of a sense of freedom and autonomy (1982, 27.7, pp. 213ff.). The aesthetic State is contrasted with the dynamic State, in which one acts out of oppression, and the ethical State in which one acts out of duty (Schiller, 1982, 24.1, p. 171). Schiller explains that in those circles where conduct is governed by beauty, in the aesthetic State, none may appear to the other except as an object of free play. To bestow freedom by
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means of freedom is the fundamental law of the kingdom (Schiller, 1982, 27.9, p. 215). In the aesthetic State the individual is enabled to act in freedom in accord with the impulses of his heart for the good of society. Of course, these subjective impulses will necessarily cohere with the general good because of their a priori universality. Although Schiller’s ‘aesthetic education’ reaches its zenith when the aesthetic subject returns to society, Pater’s ethics remain wedded to individual experience. He is unable or unwilling to follow Schiller’s confident turn to society. There are two main reasons for this: first, he was intensely aware of the relative nature of moral judgement; second, he did not believe in society. Amidst the debris of philosophical systems and religious faith, with his acute sense of the material world in flux, it is clear to Pater as it never had been to Schiller that moral values are also subject to relativity: ‘Modern thought is distinguished from the ancient by its cultivation of the “relative” spirit in place of the “absolute” ’ (Ap, p. 66). Moral sensibilities are ever shifting through time and ever varying between people, as well he was aware from the changed perception of male–male desire between ancient Greece and the condemnation of his contemporary society. In short, he could not ascribe to Schiller’s universality. He recognizes relativism must be reflected in moral principles: ‘The moral world is ever in contact with the physical, and the relative has invaded moral philosophy from the ground of inductive sciences. There it has started a new analysis of the relations of mind, good and evil, freedom and necessity’ (Ap, p. 67). There is, perhaps, a touch of irony in Pater’s nod towards those who resented the invasion of relativity: moral philosophers such as his contemporary F. H. Bradley, who tried to systematize ethics in apparent defiance of the emergent spirit of relativism. Relativism, which reveals afresh the truth of the human condition, also sets the individual free from ‘facile orthodoxy’ (TR, p. 152), according to Pater, and in the sphere of ethics it grants the individual authority to legislate his own values. It eradicates all moral absolutes and leaves in their place morality defined as an inexhaustible empirical investigation. This is indicative of the spirit of relativism that would reach its apotheosis a short time later in the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche.9 With the distinction between good and evil in question, one is left to wonder whether Pater’s teleological language is but the relic of a learnt language of ethics or whether Pater aspires still to this apparently impossible ideal.10 Or is he, like Nietzsche, gesturing beyond good and evil to some other form of perfection? Pater also finds society a difficult concept because of the emergent evolutionary view that society has ‘spontaneously evolved’ and its values are irredeemably relative (Spencer, 1998, p. 85); he is suspicious about the integral relationship between the individual and society on which the visions of Plato, Hobbes and Hegel are founded. Pater says precious little about society: pre-empting the modernist interiority that he was to influence,
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Kate Hext
he turns from it. Society, he suggests, ‘reduces us to an almost colourless existence’ (MS, p. 252). In the world of Pater’s writings at least, society’s substantive value is to create a standard of mediocrity against which the creative individual may be judged. Thus, he atrophies the social vision of Schiller’s theory in ‘Diaphaneitè’. Written right at the beginning of his career, it is the justification for his disregard of society thereafter. Pater appropriates Schiller’s concepts of the dynamic State, ethical State and aesthetic State into the three types of individual in ‘Diaphaneitè’, where they become ‘doctrinaires’, ‘the saint, the artist, even the speculative thinker’ and the diaphanous man (MS, p. 248). The significance of this is the way that Pater atrophies the broad social significance of Schiller’s vision into a vision limited to just one: the solitary self. In ‘Diaphaneitè’ the individual and society become dichotomies. The diaphanous is first defined by the way that he ‘crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s life’ (MS, p. 248). This singularity is confirmed as Pater evokes the threat of ‘collective life’, discussed above, and he stresses that the diaphanous type, the self-cultured individual, could never be expanded to society: ‘Society could not be conformed to their image’ (TR, p. 158). The exceptional nature of the diaphanous type means that the principle of self-culture cannot be expanded to all. In a world that is irredeemably banal, the self-cultured individual becomes defined by exceptionality. ‘A high culture is a pyramid,’ as Nietzsche writes, ‘it can stand only on a broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity (1982, p. 646). Later, in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, Wilde re-established an unproblematic relationship between the individual and society, ‘propos[ing] a welfare and industrial State as precondition of a “New Individualism” characterized not by machinery or wealth but by Christlike inwardness’ (Gagnier, 2000, p. 325). And so, as though Pater is himself that ‘solitary prisoner [in his] own dream of a world’ (TR, p. 151), his Schilleresque gestures towards humanity at large are undermined by his inability to envisage how self-culture could expand beyond the individual. Arthur Symons conjectures that ‘[Pater] was quite content that his mind should keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of the world; it was that prisoner’s dream of the world that it was his whole business as a writer to remember to perpetuate’ (2003, p. 98). I beg to quibble on a point. If Pater ultimately seems like that ‘solitary prisoner’ he is not ‘content’ with this. The inclusive pronouns of Pater’s essays consciously and consistently reach out to people, just as Pater himself reached out to his students as a kindly friend and teacher. It is the move from ethical feelings founded on personal friendships to an abstract conception of ethics in society that Pater finds difficult. His gesture towards this broader vision of self-culture at the end of ‘Diaphaneitè’ is indicative: ‘A majority of [diaphanous people] would be the regeneration of the world’ (MS, p. 254). This hyperbolic flourish does not make up in gusto what it lacks as a tenable
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idea. Its irreverent idealism belies ambivalence about society, which remains a blank somewhere in between the particularity of the individual and the ideal of the whole world. That blank is the space in which the individual is reduced to ‘a dull, colourless existence’, which he cares not to discuss. Pater cannot envisage the social regeneration implicit in his theory. Like the end of The Renaissance, ‘Diaphaneitè’ burns itself out with this voracious flame, leaving such dull practicalities unresolved. Pater’s desire to prioritize the individual allows space for the social deviance and relativity. However, it effectively means that Pater also writes against the tenor of social responsibility. His dichotomy between the individual and society not only places a gulf between himself and Schiller, it puts a gulf between himself and his eminent contemporaries and with the earlier thinkers he elsewhere identifies with. He cannot, for example, take up Hobbes’s conception of civil society or Hegel’s Sittlichkeit. Such concepts ring hollow to Pater. When he does take up Plato’s Republic at the end of his career, in Plato and Platonism, it is aestheticized, with its scope diminished. He risks the solipsistic, unchecked supremacy of the individual against whom there is no authority. Such a vision is ultimately unrealizable, but he knows that. It is a pipe dream of individualism that could never be realized; a Romantic individualism, curiously out of time, in an age that had long since given up such notions for a model of individualism founded on economics. For these reasons, ‘Pater’s task to complete the “aesthetic education of man” that Schiller had begun’ (Dowling, 1986, p. 86),11 is doomed to fail. But maybe this was not his task in the first place. It is difficult to imagine Pater wanting to complete anything, least of all a grand and extensive philosophical system. Incompleteness – exquisite incompleteness – is part of his philosophy. By editing Schiller’s metaphysics out of his ‘aesthetic education’, Pater presents a form of self-culture that is always and forever incomplete. Without it he finds it hard to muster the moral authority to legislate for humanity. At times one may even wonder whether he believed in a unique aesthetic capacity: perhaps he just preferred to turn from society’s web of necessities, believing that art may educate hearts and imaginations but it cannot alter the world without. But this is not really so. Pater is a neoRomantic attempting to reconcile Schiller’s vision and his own experience of modernity, highly aware that, ‘Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture sometimes exercise their subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them’ (Ap, p. 65). As Pater begins his essay on ‘Coleridge’ with this statement he is intimating his own intellectual tendencies as much as those of Coleridge. The intellectual and spiritual culture embodied by Schiller offers him a philosophy in which art is at the centre. Holding fast to its ideals of freedom, unity and heartfelt morality, Pater explores how far these are tenable in his world as he heralds the rebirth of culture in The Renaissance.
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Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s Aesthetics 217
218
Kate Hext
1. The great friendship of Schiller and Goethe gave rise to an almost daily, essayistic correspondence between 1794 and 1805, in which they worked out their aesthetics. Because of this they were often mentioned in the same breath by writers including Thomas Carlyle and Oscar Browning. Pater was reading Goethe’s poetry, his play Faust and most significantly his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit in 1860 (Inman, 1981b, pp. 11, 63, 9). 2. This, of course, contrasts to the Socratic call to ‘know thyself’, which presupposes selfhood as an a priori entity, and recalls Friedrich Nietzsche’s later command, ‘become yourself’ (1982, p. 657). 3. Schiller came to prominence in England during this period through his friend and correspondent Goethe; Goethe’s popularity enjoyed a revival following Carlyle’s exhortation to ‘close thy Byron and open thy Goethe’ in Sartor Resartus. The profiles of each were heightened by Carlyle’s ‘Life of Schiller’ (1825) and George Henry Lewes’s Life of Goethe. This information, together with Pater’s studies in Heidelberg Library and the British Museum (although there are no records of what he read), prompts me to question Inman’s argument that ‘the ideas in “Diaphaneitè” parallel to Schiller’s could not have been derived from Schiller’ (1981b, p. 101) because he borrowed none of Schiller’s work in Oxford. 4. The ‘imaginative reason’ is a phrase coined by Matthew Arnold in ‘Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment’ (1925, p. 161); superficially it makes a similar claim that sense and intellect are fused in aesthetic experience. 5. Like Kant, Schiller assumes synonymy between art and beauty. When he refers to beauty, however, he is invariably speaking of art and not natural beauty. 6. The Immanuel Kant who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 is a very different philosopher from the one who wrote the Critique of Judgment in 1790. The latter work illustrates his reconsideration of the significance and centrality of aesthetic experience. Its gestures towards ethics suggest an implicit revision of the extremely rationalistic conceptions proposed in the Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. 7. Kant’s transcendental freedom is distinct from that of Schiller’s by the fact that it proceeds from the faculty of the reason, whereas Schiller’s proceeds from the imagination. Pater of course follows the latter, true to his belief that reason is subject to the imagination where it plays with the senses. 8. ‘Those spaces of more cunningly blent colour’ (TR, p. 90). 9. Of course, Pater was rather more reserved than Nietzsche; no doubt the lengths to which Nietzsche takes his often very Pateresque ideas would have shocked Pater beyond measure. The comparison between them has been made several times; Patrick Bridgwater touches on some of the issues involved in Nietzsche in Anglosaxony (1972). One can read Nietzsche’s comments on ethics in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. 10. Even as he expresses this teleology, Pater criticizes teleological conceptions of humankind (Ap, pp. 60–1). In matters of ethics he argues that teleologies neglect ‘the intangible perfection of those whose ideal is rather in being than in doing’ (Ap, p. 61). To some extent this may be addressed through his conception of time, which attempts to reconcile synchronic with diachronic in the ‘consummate moments’ of aesthetic contemplation (TR, p. 88). 11. Dowling’s presentation of Schiller’s significance may be questioned more broadly. The idea that Schiller’s philosophy survived ‘only [as] a ghostly idealized
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Notes
Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s Aesthetics 219
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vestige . . . to puzzle readers’ (Dowling, 1996, p. 87) does a great disservice to him. His aesthetic philosophy exerted great influence on Coleridge and Schelling in the late eighteenth century, Nietzsche, Carlyle and Pater in the nineteenth century, and Walter Benjamin in the twentieth. In the twenty-first century, Germany has celebrated Schiller Year (2005) and academics such as George Steiner continue to engage with his aesthetic, declaring ‘Say it Loud – It’s Schiller and it’s Proud’ (2005).
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13 Laurel Brake
Walter Pater’s second book was a novel. Issued first in 1885, Marius the Epicurean was his only experiment in this genre to be completed and published in his lifetime. Three years later, chapters of Gaston de Latour, his second novel, appeared serially in five parts as magazine instalments. Conceived of as a sequel to Marius, they seemed a canny bid by Pater and his publisher to reinforce his reputation as a novelist and to augment that of the critic. Gaston was a historical novel, similar in kind to Marius, and the linking of the two projects as parts of a series suggests a commercial eye, with the setting of the second in sixteenth-century France replacing that of the first in Antonine Rome. It is a strategy that twenty-first-century publishers and authors still deploy. During Pater’s lifetime, the commercial success of Marius, which went into a second edition within weeks in 1885, and the truncated publication of Gaston in 1888, are the sum of his public association with the novel form as a practitioner. But Pater’s persistence in novel writing also suggests that he took a writerly pleasure in the freedoms of fiction, and in the possibilities of the novel as a form. In so doing, Pater was participating in an interrogation of the novel that might be said, literarily, to characterize the 1880s. The hypothesis of Pater’s pleasure prompts one of the research questions of this essay: what are the advantages of fiction for Pater, and specifically those of the novel? Pater’s interest in novel writing as a practice in the 1880s was accompanied, if not fuelled, by a wide-ranging critical debate on ‘The Art of Fiction’ (Spilka, 1973). Pamphlets and lectures on this topic, as well as a significant incidence of criticism and reviews in the press, filled the decade. Pieces by William Dean Howells and Robert L. Stevenson appeared in 1882, and by Margaret Oliphant, Walter Besant, Andrew Lang, R. H. Hutton and Henry James between April and the winter of 1884 – while Pater was writing Marius. James’s intervention in the September number of Longman’s Magazine, entitled ‘The Art of Fiction’, echoed Besant’s April lecture and May pamphlet 220
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of the same title. Issues in the debate of the ‘art’ of fiction included the legitimacy of romance, the virtues of realism, and the dignity and art of the novel. Moreover, George Moore’s pamphlet, ‘Literature at Nurse’, appearing in 1885, urgently reminded readers of the patent censorship of the English novel by publishers, circulating libraries and distributors, and both of these notions aired in the mid-1880s were revived in 1890–91 in symposia in the New Review.
Pater and the serial publication of Gaston de Latour If anything, Pater’s success in placing his second novel within the magazine economy of monthly serialization in Macmillan’s Magazine, which he had not managed with the first, locked him further into the publication patterns of other British novelists of his day. Materially as well as perhaps conceptually Gaston de Latour was aimed at serial production and consumption at regular intervals over an extensive period, that preceded and ‘trailed’ volume publication; potentially, it involved triple exposure – in monthly parts, expensive two- or three-volume publication and cheap single volume. That it was published in the house magazine of Pater’s publisher meant that this instance of a book-trade economy was optimally in his publisher’s interest as well as his own. Certainly the cessation of the novel after five instalments had appeared, the last in October 1888, involved some commercially based embarrassment and disappointment between author and publisher. This is discernible in the record of Pater’s publications: nothing further appears in Macmillan’s Magazine for ten months until ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ in August 1889, by which time mutual relations between publisher and author are revived, if they had faltered, through their mutual agreement in the early summer to continue with the publication of Pater’s work, and to issue Pater’s new book that appeared five months later as Appreciations.1 It is, however, arguable that the publication of ‘Style’ in December 1888, in the Fortnightly Review, a journal to which Pater had not contributed for eight years, is a casualty of this embarrassment. Between 1885 and 1888, Pater’s periodical publications had not only been preponderantly in Macmillan’s, they were also frequent – seven pieces in four years. If they were all short fiction, it could be argued that ‘Style’, with its origins in Pater’s review of Flaubert’s correspondence, not only was closely related to the ‘art of fiction’ debates, but that it was a contribution to them. After the truncation of the serial publication of Gaston, it is also notable that, while Pater retained Macmillan as his publisher for the remainder of his life, involving six new volumes between 1889 and 1894, he published only once again in Macmillan’s Magazine, in 1892.2 Pater’s late commitment to the novel, when he was over 40, and his trouble with sustaining it in Macmillan’s, are open to a number of interpretations, including authorial ambivalence towards the genre; a temperamental
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The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction
Laurel Brake
mismatch between his elaborated, exacting process of composition and the importance of narrative length as a defining constituent of the form; or a disjunction between Pater’s subjects and styles and periodical publication. The relatively low status of the novel in Britain in the nineteenth century – the persistence of its pejorative association with popular, and often female readers and writers, as well as censorship of the market, are factors I have in mind here. Whichever of these possibilities one elects to privilege, one might interpret Pater’s abandonment of serial publication as authorial ambivalence towards this demanding project, or as a shrewd estimate of the limitations of what the higher journalism might allow. At what point in the serialization of Gaston did Pater realize that he would not supply the next part, or alternatively a suitable part for the November issue? As the October instalment of Gaston appeared with no assurance at its conclusion that it was ‘To be continued’, the publisher knew by the deadline for the October issue, say mid-September, that the novel was ending abruptly in a truncated form. If it was simply a matter of not keeping up with the pace of monthly instalments, why was Pater undertaking reviews in June and August 1888, during the run of the novel in Macmillan’s, when he knew that he would be strapped to monthly deadlines from June onwards? From the publication record it seems likely that, once the September deadline for the October issue of Macmillan’s Magazine passed, Pater turned to the composition (or perhaps the finessing) of ‘Style’, which derived from his August review of Flaubert, and that he submitted the finished piece to the Fortnightly, eight to ten weeks afterwards at the latest, in time for it to appear in the December number. Indeed, it is possible that he was working on ‘Style’ from September onwards. In his introduction to ‘The Revised Text’ edition of Gaston de Latour, Gerald Monsman gathers contemporary interpretations of the truncated publication of Gaston, quoting an Athenaeum reviewer on the one hand that Pater ‘deliberately abandoned’ it out of dissatisfaction in 1888, and on the other Arthur Symons’s report that in 1889 Pater thought he needed two or three years to complete it (Monsman, 1995, p. xviii). Monsman himself avers, on the basis of Pater’s library borrowings, that in late spring of 1893 Pater was still trying to finish it. So, what might we conclude about Pater’s experience of the novel form, and his problems with Gaston particularly? First, that Pater and/or his editor/publisher were ‘dissatisfied’/troubled by Gaston, perhaps by the nature of the content as much as by the writing and the form. While we have the Athenaeum reviewer’s version of the author’s position, the publisher’s view is nowhere directly expressed. Nevertheless, in George Worth’s study of the firm and its house journal, he gives numerous instances of Alexander Macmillan’s active intervention with authors in the 1860s, requesting that they adjust their manuscripts in accordance with his view that ‘every thing we put into our Magazine should be manly and elevating’ (qtd in Worth, 2003, p. 28). Within a year of Gaston’s truncation in
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Macmillan’s (1888), its editor Mowbray Morris turned down Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles on the basis of its possession of ‘rather too much succulence’ (qtd in Worth, 2003, p. 159). Worth also notes that, soon afterwards, in a riposte to the symposium in the New Review on ‘The Candour of Fiction’, Morris makes his moral scruples as editor, and those of Macmillan’s Magazine, clear (Worth, 2003, pp. 160–1). In this respect, the editor is in harmony with the firm’s orientation. Against these criteria, critical assessment of instalment five and chapter 6 of Gaston may have resulted in agreement between Pater and Macmillan that the chapters did not pass muster in this respect. The last instalment, ‘Suspended Judgment’, contains references to a romantic friendship between Montaigne and Étienne (Pater, 1995, pp. 50–1), and oblique defence of the ‘culture of the body’, ‘physical sensation’, the ‘licence’ of Montaigne’s writings and his ‘free and roving’ soul (Pater, 1995, pp. 57–8). It seems significant to me that Pater never published the next, sixth chapter, ‘Shadow of Events’, in his lifetime, although he did manage to place chapter 7, ‘The Lower Pantheism’, in the press as a historical article on Giordano Bruno. I am suggesting that Pater came to believe that chapter 6 was unpublishable in the press of the day, partly because of the discussions he had had with his editor and publisher. The ‘Shadow of Events’ parades moral uncertainties with an insouciance and profligacy that seem calculated to alarm any reader requiring ‘elevating’ fiction. Marriage is treated dismissively by the hero (not the villain), and the blood of the massacre is tantalizingly yoked with ‘vagrant love’ and religious passion in a nexus that, even at the time, seems associated with decadence. That Pater seems to be among the authors Mowbray Morris admired (Worth, 2003, p. 163) supports my hypothesis that the withdrawal of Gaston from Macmillan’s in September may have been the result of negotiation between author and editor/publisher, with all in agreement that continuation of Pater’s novel could not be fitted to the magazine’s requirements. There is some evidence that this was not entirely unexpected by either author or publisher. If we look back to the publication by Macmillan of Marius the Epicurean, Pater’s first novel, we note that Pater did not submit it for serialization in the house magazine until a very late stage in its composition, and that as ‘its unfitness for publication having sometimes occurred to [him]’, he was not surprised at its rejection.3 It is disorienting then to see, in the Table of Contents of the June 1885 number of Macmillan’s, an item entitled ‘Marius the Epicurean’, at a point when instalments of the novel might have been appearing, had it been serialized. The piece, however, is Mary Arnold Ward’s review of Marius, a robust critique of the novel, in the house magazine of its publisher. Although Ward had been a long-standing friend of Pater and his sisters, her review of his work is highly critical, and entirely on religious and ethical grounds. Moreover, her views would have been well known to the editor, as by this time she was an experienced, seasoned and trusted contributor to Macmillan’s, having published 16 pieces,
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The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction
Laurel Brake
regularly, since February 1883. In addition, she was a Macmillan author herself, the firm having published her first novel seven months previously. Her review of Marius reads, inescapably, like an explanation of why Marius was not serialized in Macmillan’s. After such a flurry of work for Macmillan’s and such a flagship piece, it is surprising to find that Ward’s review of Marius is the penultimate piece she wrote for the Magazine. Yet in addition to the position of the review with respect to Ward’s relationship to her publisher, it bears on the dialogue between Pater and Ward. I have argued elsewhere that the simultaneous writing and publication of Pater’s, Ward’s and Vernon Lee’s first novels may be usefully interpreted as incidents among a circle of friends (Brake, 2006), but it now appears from Ward’s review that Marius is also relevant to the germination of her second novel, Robert Elsmere (1888). According to her sister Julia, Ward had been contemplating its plot since November 1884, but by May 1885 ‘[n]ot a line of the new story is written yet’ (qtd in Sutherland, 1990, p. 109). Sutherland’s view is that Ward only began writing in November 1885 (1990, p. 110). Thus while Ward had already given serious thought to her tale of disintegrating faith as she wrote the review, her analysis of Marius appears to be part of the process out of which her novel came, and Marius a text with which it was in dialogue. A runaway success, Robert Elsmere first appeared in late 1888, at the same time that Gaston was juddering to a halt in Macmillan’s. And, just as Gaston may be read as a riposte to critics of Marius of Mary Ward’s persuasion, so Robert Elsmere continued this debate. Although readers of the posthumous edition of Gaston knew, from C. L. Shadwell’s 1896 introduction, that it was part of a full-length novel, I suspect that this was not obvious to readers of the five instalments in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1888. This is because in that period it was commonplace for fiction in Macmillan’s to be short, spreading over four or five months, rather than long, appearing over 12 months.4 In this respect, the length of Gaston might appear normal in the economy of Macmillan’s, rather than anomalous; in context it looked like a novella, comparable to Henry James’s concurrent serialization of ‘The Reverberator’.5 By contrast, Shadwell makes the status of Gaston very clear in the 1896 volume, both in the subtitle of the work – An Unfinished Romance – and in his Preface, in which he notes both its parallel relationship with the genre of Marius, and its focus on ‘the spiritual development of a refined and cultivated mind, capable of keen enjoyment in the pleasures of the senses and of the intellect, but destined to find its complete satisfaction in that which transcends both’ (Shadwell, 1896, p. vi). For all of these reasons then – the uncertainty of Macmillan’s commitment to serialization of Pater’s work as indicated in the Ward review and their refusal to publish Marius in magazine parts; the normality of the short serial in Macmillan’s Magazine; and the author and publisher’s nervousness about the match between Pater’s material and the house magazine’s
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ethos and readership – I suggest that Pater and Macmillan came to an agreement about the withdrawal of Gaston: the decision was neither a dismissal by the publisher/editor nor a unilateral decision by the author. Examination of the authorial dimension might be pursued further, however, with profit. A second possibility is that not long after serial publication began, Pater found that he would not be able to keep up the pace of monthly publication, but that he did retain interest in the novel project for at least five years after its publication was abandoned in October 1888. Even if we go with this hypothesis, I suspect further factors, beside the difficulty of composition itself, may have contributed to this disruption of publisher’s and author’s plans. In particular, I suggest the lure for Pater of the short, discrete periodical piece: the article as a genre, and as a medium of topical, timely intervention and visibility in the world of letters. This factor could even have contributed to Pater’s equanimity after the truncation of Gaston in the conditions of the first hypothesis. It is important to remember the virtual absence of Pater from contemporary letters between 1880 and 1885 that the task of completing Marius (in conjunction with his employment) had exacted from him. To reinforce this point, we should consider the lure of the Fortnightly. In the autumn of 1888, and overlapping with the appearance of Gaston, the Fortnightly, newly under the editorship of Frank Harris, had published Swinburne, J. A. Symonds and Henry James in the October number and William Morris in November, followed by ‘Style’ in December, and Wilde, Symonds and Gosse in January 1889. ‘Style’ alone ensured that Pater was in the frame with these other significant contemporaries. As a result of the isolation of writing his novel, Pater the critic was in danger of being crowded out and even obliterated for some considerable time by the long-term commitment of the demanding narrative genre.
Pater and the art of fiction Pater’s involvement with fiction in the form of the short story both precedes Marius and outlives Gaston. From the publishing record, it seems that in December, fresh from the discontinuation of Gaston’s serialization in Macmillan’s, Pater was working on a short story, what we now know as ‘Hippolytus Veiled’. He described the latter to Symons as ‘a new [imaginary] portrait’ for a projected second series of Imaginary Portraits that had initially appeared in 1887 (qtd in Wright, 1987, p. 37). He was also thinking about prose narrative more generally in this period, as he published the review of Flaubert’s correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette on 25 August 1888, and between August and November reworked that review into ‘Style’, which appeared in December 1888. ‘Style’, it could be argued, grew out of Pater’s practice of fiction writing of both types in the 1880s. Concerning ‘the advantage of fiction’, it is tempting to conflate the short stories and novels under the one heading of fiction, but there is a meaningful
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The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction
Laurel Brake
and helpful distinction between them with respect to Pater. While acknowledging links and overlaps between Pater’s novels and short stories, and across his prose generally, there are specific advantages of the novel form of fiction for Pater. That chapter 7 of Gaston, written for the novel, was published initially as a history-related article in a monthly magazine as ‘Giordano Bruno’, and only posthumously in Gaston as ‘The Lower Pantheism’, calls attention, as does ‘Style’ with its invocation of ‘prose’, to the common features of Pater’s prose, and his view that all of his published work is part of the larger category of prose, which he touts in ‘Style’ as the literary mode of the modern world. Yet one of the more important advantages of fiction over other forms of prose for Pater does involve distinctions among different types of fiction. Its main advantage for Pater in my view is seen in the novel, and involves differences between the short story and the novel. The latter offers a far greater narrative sweep and scope for complexity, both in content and in form, than the short story in its main manifestation in Pater’s work, the imaginary portrait. This genre Pater claimed as his own in a volume bearing that title published between the two novels. If the imaginary portrait in its short-story forms – which Pater explicitly developed from 1878 through 1893 – reinforces both Pater’s flight from history and gravitation towards fiction and the imagination, and his persistence with fiction or ‘the imaginative sense of fact’ that Marius the Epicurean signals, it is in the larger dimensions of the novel that the most important differences between Pater’s criticism and fiction may be seen. In the short stories, overlaps and continuities between his fiction and many of his articles, critical and historical, are plainly detectable. Most of the articles in The Renaissance editions, for example, combine fictive/‘imaginary’ and realistic/historical ‘portrait’ elements, cheek by jowl, as well as a strong narrative line, all of which are akin to an ‘imaginary portrait’ short story such as ‘Sebastian von Storck’. Practically, the canvases of the magazine short story and article are similar: the common length of the imaginary portraits and the ‘history’ articles means that these works involve familiar narrative timing for Pater, rather like a university teacher becomes accustomed to 60-minute teaching units, and psychoanalysts to 50-minute sessions. There is an intriguing point about length and Pater’s only completed novel. According to Pater’s correspondence with Macmillan’s, it was late in 1884 that Pater finally learned that Marius was not to be serialized in monthly parts in Macmillan’s Magazine, presumably after the novel had been pondered, written and revised. The chapters of Marius, like those of Gaston, all have titles, like articles, as though they were to be serialized, but ultimately Marius was to be read in volume form only, as a whole, initially in early 1885, and was delivered complete to the publisher. By contrast, Gaston had been accepted for Macmillan’s Magazine, by a different editor than
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the one who had rejected Marius; it was developed to be read in monthly magazines, like his articles and short stories. Gaston is not unique among Pater’s monthly publications to be part of a series of successive pieces belonging finally to the same volume (cf. the Imaginary Portrait stories, and the Plato and Platonism articles), but it does involve the exposure of the monthly part of a longer work to readers’ detailed scrutiny and commentary as the work appears. It is interesting to consider whether this factor contributed to Pater’s and his publisher’s withdrawal of faith in his second novel and loss of nerve – its greater exposure, as it appeared over five months, signed, to the readership of Macmillan’s Magazine, opening up the possibility of adverse reviews in the course of publication and before the volume appeared. In the event, published in volume-format only, Marius offered Pater an expansive form in which his particular type of Epicureanism could be presented in nuanced and sustained historical and imaginative contexts. Within its considerable length and density could be accommodated an eclectic combination of philosophy and autobiography, and he could include but bury his taste for macabre and violent incidents such as the ‘bath of blood’ in chapter 16, or his risky reference to ‘arrest’, which for mid-1880s male readers might bring the dangers of apprehension of homosexual men by the police to mind, and for Pater constitute a reference to Simeon Solomon’s experience. In Marius he could indeed marry his bread-and-butter profession of classics don with his pleasure in writing, and yoke his prose invisibly to classical texts through translation and indirect quotation in a free-wheeling tissue that short fiction or articles did not facilitate. In that sense, his novel could accommodate and address both university-educated male readers and those unfamiliar with Greek and Latin. Moreover, the scope of the novel also gave Pater the opportunity for writing a Bildungsroman about the formation of male youth, Pater’s primary fictional subject it might be averred, over time and in complex episodes, while the classical setting of Marius in particular naturalized and legitimized a nostalgic, retro focus largely on culture from a male perspective, and one in which male youth and male friendship were valorized. This specific historical setting deployed the ambiguity of classics itself in the nineteenth century, and Pater exploits that to its limits. Thus the relations between Marius and Flavian, and then Cornelius, are imagined without embarrassment or apology, and the ending, which avoids both marriage and conversion, is resonant and Jamesian in a manner established by a novel such as The Portrait of a Lady, which had appeared a mere five years earlier. Where the essay collections have a ‘Conclusion’ or a ‘Postscript’, like the ‘endings’ of novels or stories, purportedly gathering together themes and arguments, these endings are both formally problematic. The composition of the two miscellaneous essay volumes, Studies (the first edition of The Renaissance) and Appreciations, was notably piecemeal, consisting as it did of a laborious process of constructing allegedly coherent collections from
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The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction
Laurel Brake
separate articles written over time, reordering and truncating for the purposes of the volume-length collections. Pater’s solution to the Conclusion problem in Studies immediately posed its own problems. One advantage of fiction for Pater, it could be argued, is that the composition of a finished novel involves technical, formal challenges of narrative skills and imagination, which are more complex, satisfying and literary than the cutting and pasting that go into cementing the two essay volumes into shape. The ending of a fictional narrative is also both determined by and determining of what preceded it. Formally, the ending of a novel promises to be both more coherent and more nuanced than the Conclusion to Studies, with its separate provenance from an essay to hand that was excluded from the volume, a conclusion that was first added and then removed. In a repetitive act for his second collection of articles (1889), Pater not only raids the same Morris essay of 1868, from which he drew the Conclusion in 1873, for partial inclusion in Appreciations, but he also deploys ‘Romanticism’ as its ‘Postscript’, an essay initially published 13 years earlier. The novel form goes some way to solving Pater’s problems with endings; the challenges it presents about composition are more complex and engaging than the article or short-story journalism unit, even if that unit necessarily figures in much nineteenth-century fiction (chapters and short-story lengths are closely related to it). What else does the capaciousness of the novel offer beside greater formal complexity and scope, which feed and derive from Pater’s proven interest in form and style? Perhaps, foremost, it permits him to refine and hone his arguments about Epicureanism, hedonism and aesthetic pleasure, which provoked adverse commentary in 1873 – or, to put it more positively, to develop his arguments for the male, homosocial aesthetic life safely and fully. He had found an adequate and satisfactory platform in Marius. Novel writing in the 1880s also afforded Pater two other advantages. Although Pater tended not to review British fiction, except that written by friends, he was demonstrably interested in fiction. He wrote a number of reviews of French texts and from his writings and letters we can infer that he was clearly an interested reader of English, French and German novels. I want to suggest that Pater’s own fiction allows him to explore and communicate his taste, his preferences and the traditions of fiction with which he wishes to be associated – or not, Goethe’s Elective Affinities being an example of the former, and George Eliot’s Romola perhaps of the latter. I will only limn this argument of ‘grandfathers’ on this occasion, because Franco Marucci’s important discussion of this topic as reported in the Pater Newsletter (Bizzotto, 2005) invites a paper in its own right. Henry James’s concluding remarks on art and morality in his intervention in ‘The Art of Fiction’ debates are particularly apposite to Pater’s problem in Marius and Gaston, even though, appearing in September 1885, they may only have retrospective bearing on Marius. First is James’s point about the
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In the English novel (by which I mean the American as well), more than in any other, there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. There is the great difference, in short, between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in print. The essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field. (James, 1884, p. 519) The last paragraph of James’s defence of the English novel brings Pater’s ‘Style’ to mind forcibly: ‘the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the producer. In proportion as that mind is rich and noble will the novel, the picture, the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and truth’, and he is eloquent and insistent on its freedom: ‘the magnificence of the form . . . which offers to sight so few restrictions and such innumerable opportunities’ (James, 1884, p. 520). Debate on the novel form continued throughout the decade. James’s piece was reprinted in 1888 in Partial Portraits. The Fortnightly Review had a spate of material in 1888–89: William Watson’s ‘The Fall of Fiction’ in September 1888, and Edward Dowden’s ‘Hopes and Fears for Literature’ in February 1889, alongside ‘The Trade of Author’. These were followed by symposia in the New Review in the early 1890s – ‘The Candour of Fiction’ and ‘The Science of Literature’ – so one can argue that both ‘Style’ and Pater’s practice as a novelist are informed by this debate, in which they may also be viewed as interventions. As for the James piece, it is indicative of how closely James’s position concurs with aspects of Pater’s at this moment in the history of fiction, when novelists and critics alike were attempting to wrest acknowledgement of the novel as a legitimate type of literature, long after the de facto battle among readers and in the marketplace had been won. So, to summarize: the advantage of fiction for Pater that I have limned includes a move to a popular and ‘modern’ genre, and to greater sales and readership which has the potential of higher remuneration. It has the simplicity of a single arrangement with a publisher for a series of parts rather than submission of individual pieces, each of which must be submitted and accepted. It represents a release for Pater from the exclusive demands of the discourse of history to those of fiction and the imagination. It offers narrative and formal opportunities for the writer of larger scope, and the potential to match the formal complexity with that of content. Pater’s novels functioned as his position papers on fiction, in relation to both the current debates on the art of fiction as well as to his antecedents and the tradition of novel discourse. For Pater, fiction provides privacy and a rationale for the
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problem of English fiction and its suitability for the young. Although English fiction has a ‘diffidence’, James observes, it does not lack moral seriousness:
Laurel Brake
charge of autobiographical writing as well as readings. In particular, fiction, and particularly the extensive, complex novel, offers freedom and scope to the homosexual male-speaking subject. One consequence of the incompatibility between Pater’s only two novels and Macmillan’s Magazine is positive – a distinction between these narratives that remain free of the pressures of periodical publication6 and those that are thus constrained.7 The elaborate syntax of sentences, the pace of the narrative, the length of paragraphs, the prominence of ideas, the dearth of action, the preponderance of ekphrasis and the ubiquity of quotation (direct and indirect) all flourish in a filtered textual environment: voluntary, discerning readers who purchased or borrowed the volumes, opting for ‘Walter Pater’ rather than the miscellany of Macmillan’s Magazine, out of familiarity with his work or reputation. At the same time, the history of the composition and publication of Gaston de Latour shows the gap between the advantage of the novel for Pater’s artistic and intellectual purposes and the nature of the middle-class public sphere as constructed in Macmillan’s Magazine. In 1890 Oscar Wilde managed to publish his aesthetic novel in Lippincott’s, an American periodical, albeit in a short form. In 1885 and 1888, Pater did not.
Notes 1. Pater and Macmillan had agreed by 20 June (Evans, 1970, p. 97) to publish Appreciations, which appeared in November 1889. 2. This lone remaining article in Macmillan’s Magazine in January 1892 was a chapter from the Pater volume published by the firm a year later in February 1893, Plato and Platonism. Mindful perhaps of the boasted propriety and respectability of Macmillan’s and its warning against ‘abuse’ (quoted by George J. Worth in the subtitle of his 2003 book as its quintessence, ‘No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed’), it is notable that Pater placed the other two chapters of Plato and Platonism in a more intellectual and expensive magazine venue, a review (the Contemporary Review), in December 1891 and May 1892. 3. Pater worked on the novel for five years, from 1880. Having submitted the first two chapters 9 June 1884 in his proposal for serial publication, Pater received a negative verdict from the editor of Macmillan’s by 9 September. He promptly used the notification to offer Alexander Macmillan publication of Marius in volume form. The novel appeared in May 1885, although Pater had wanted it to be published ‘early in the year’ (Evans, 1970, p. 55). 4. The five parts of Gaston de Latour appeared in volume 58 of Macmillan’s Magazine. In volumes 57–8, Henry James’s ‘The Reverberator’ appeared in six parts, three in volume 57 and three in volume 58. Bret Harte’s Cressy began in volume 58, with three parts, running simultaneously with Gaston for two months, and was completed in volume 59 in two parts. Between May 1887 and November 1888, shorter fiction is preponderant in Macmillan’s. Before that period, 12 instalments of Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders had appeared, and after it 12 parts of Marooned by W. Clark Russell, beginning the month after Gaston stopped in volume 59, and carrying on in volume 60.
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5. ‘The Reverberator’ appeared in six instalments in Macmillan’s Magazine between February and July 1888. However, two years previous to the appearance of Gaston in Macmillan’s, a brief announcement about Pater’s plan for ‘a new romance of the past’ set ‘in the sixteenth century and in France’ appeared in the Athenaeum on 10 April 1886 (Wright, 1987, p. 105). 6. Such narratives are rare in Pater’s published work. 7. Bourdieu notes that in journalism the ‘conditions of diffusion’ are antipathetic to ‘conditions of production’ which include the privilege of autonomy (2005, p. 45).
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The Art of the Novel: Pater and Fiction
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Index
Abrams, M. H., 151 n. 7 Academy, 50, 77 Adorno, Theodor, 180 n. 9 Aeginean Marbles, 104, 110 aesthetic art, see Aestheticism aesthetic criticism, 4, 28, 40, 187–8 ‘aesthetic historicism’, 115 n. 9, 163 Aestheticism, 34, 37, 38, 42, 62, 68, 69, 73, 75, 80 n. 1, 165, 167–8, 180 n. 12, 209–10 and fascism, 186 and politics, 202 n. 1 and theatre, 170, 172–3, 175, 178 see also decadence aesthetics, 25 and the aesthetic personality, 177–8, 181 n. 23 appreciation of, 208 and freedom, 206, 209–12 and gender, 66 n. 34 and morality, 212–17 and music, 152 and politics, 187–202 and self-culture, 206–17 agency, 130–2 allegory, 76–80 All the Year Round, 133 n. 8 Anders-streben, 3, 8, 136, 137, 142, 143, 150, 151 n. 1, 154–6, 157, 158–9, 179 n. 2 and character, 178 and melodrama, 135, 146–50 and music, 42–3, 45, 59, 136, 137, 142–5, 152, 155, 178 and painting, 136, 137, 142–5, 173–4 and theatre, 169–71, 173, 175, 178 see also interartistic discourse Andrews, Kit, 187, 189 Aphrodite, 18, 77 Apollo, 13, 16, 28, 90 Apollo Belvedere, 21, 21–3, 113 Arachne, 90 Aristotle, 13
Arnold, Matthew, 211 Culture and Anarchy, 214 ‘Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment’, 218 n. 4 art, aspiring towards itself, 59, 66 n. 40 dissemination of, 48, 50 and form, 54, 68, 135, 149–50, 151 n. 1 fusion of form and content in, 5, 41–2, 45, 58–9, 136, 142–5, 152–3, 155–6, 165 n. 2, 170–1, 208 and incompleteness, 56–7, 102, 109, 110, 111, 115, 201 journalism and critics, 50, 55, 75, 122 (see also names of individual critics and publications) and politics, 187 and self-fashioning, 206–17 social production of, 48 unity in, 176–7 see also Aestheticism; Anders-streben; film; Greek art; interartistic discourse; music; painting; photography; sculpture; theatre; names of individual artists and movements art criticism, 4, 28, 40 art journalism and critics, 50, 55, 75, 122 (see also names of individual critics and publications) and chauvinism, 55, 56 and narrative, 68–9, 73 and subjectivity, 54, 69, 94, 132, 137, 154–5 see also aesthetic criticism art for art’s sake, 48, 69, 74, 75 Art Journal, 50 Arts and Crafts Movement, 100 n. 1 Ash, Russell, 9 n. 1 Ashmolean Museum, 20, 64 n. 11 askêsis, 151 n. 1 Athenaeum, 50, 56, 75, 122, 222, 231 n. 5
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‘aural architecture’, 154, 156, 157–8, 165 Austin, Alfred, 35 Bacchantes, 95, 97 Bacchus (Solomon), 34, 41, 96, 101 n. 14 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 163 Barker, Alexander, 70, 81 n. 4 Barthes, Roland, 151 n. 8 Bartram, Michael, 118, 122 Batchen, Geoffrey, 145–6 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 45 n. 5, 47, 48, 54, 55, 59, 60, 64 n. 8, 65 n. 26, 66 n. 36, 193 and Corot, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 66 n. 31 and Delacroix, 180 n. 19 the flâneur, 210 and Millet, 64 n. 12 and photography, 120 and Swinburne, 35, 41 Works by: ‘L’eau-forte est à la mode’, 66 n. 36; [review of] Exposition Universelle, 1855, 54; The Painter of Modern Life, 54, 203–4 n. 13; Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, 58; Le Salon de 1846, 54, 56, 58, 66 n. 40, 180 n. 19; ‘Salon de 1859’, 44 Bayeux Tapestry, 85–6 Becker-Leckrone, Megan, 147 Belgravia, 37, 45 n. 3 Bell Scott, William, 35 Benjamin, Walter, 126, 186, 187–8, 189 Benson, Stephen, 163 Berners Street Gallery, 49 Besant, Walter, The Art of Fiction, 220 Bethnal Green Museum, 49 Bible, 74, 81 n. 9, 82 n. 13, 189 Bildung, see ‘self-culture’ Blackwood’s, 50, 131 Blake, William, 6 Blesser, Barry, 154 Borkowska, Eva, 153 Botticelli, Sandro, 7, 38, 40, 68–74, 77, 81 n. 5, 110, 214 nineteenth-century reception of, 70, 81 n. 3 Works by: The Birth of Venus, 69, 81 n. 5; Madonna with the Pomegranate, 69; Mars and Venus, 73; Primavera, 72
Bourdieu, Pierre, 47, 64 n. 7, 231 n. 7 Boyle, Marjorie, 108 Bradley, F. H., 215 Brake, Laurel, 9, 204 n. 17, 220–31 Brasenose College, 34, 35 British Museum, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 218 n. 3 British Photographic Journal, 122 Brontë, Emily, 81 n. 9 Brown, Ford Madox, 122 Browne, Thomas, 26 Urn Burial, 26 Browning, Oscar, 35, 36 Browning, Robert, 35, 102 Men and Women, 40 Bruno, Giordano, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 203 n. 9 Buchanan, Robert, 35–6 Bucknell, Brad, 153 Bullen, J. B., 7, 33–46 Burne-Jones, Edward, 3, 5, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 55, 57, 66 n. 37, 70 Day, 38, 39, 66 n. 37 Days of Creation, 45 The Golden Stairs, 1–3, 2, 166 n. 9 Laus Veneris, 40 Burns, Sarah, 61 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 121, 123, 125 Canterbury Cathedral, 92 Carlyle, Thomas, 218 n. 3 ‘Life of Schiller’, 218 n. 3 Sartor Resartus, 218 n. 3 Carr, J. Comyns, 55, 64 n. 12, 66 n. 33 Carrier, David, 33, 45 n. 5, 64 n. 2 Carte, Richard D’Oyly, 62, 67 n. 46 Cathedral of Saint-Étienne, 92–3, 98 Cecilia, St, 156–7, 165 n. 5, 166 n. 6 The Century Guild Hobbyhorse, 34 Chesnau, Ernest, The English School of Painting, 45, 45 n. 2 Christianity, 27–9, 30, 156–7, 158, 160–2 and classicism, 13, 16, 17, 31, 76, 78, 88, 92 feast of Pentecost, 194–5, 196–8, 201 and paganism, 15–16, 17, 27, 30, 31, 88, 92 Protestant Reformation, 30, 31, 185, 188 cinema, see film Clark, Kenneth, 144–5
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class, 125, 132 n. 4 classicism, 6, 18, 24, 25, 27, and Christianity, 13, 16, 17, 31, 76, 78, 88, 92 in painting, 16, 48, 53 see also Greece, ancient; Greek art; paganism; Rome, ancient Clements, Elicia, 1–10, 152–66, 179 n. 8 Clements, Patricia, 45 n. 5, 64 n. 5, 191, 193 Columbus, Christopher, 105 Colvin, Sidney, 34, 35, 55, 62, 63, 66 n. 33, 66 n. 38, 75 The Concert (Titian), 158–60, 159, 166 n. 7 and n. 9, 173–4, 176, 180 n. 13 Conlon, John, 63, 66 n. 36 Connor, Steven, 92, 100–1 n. 11 Constable, John, 55 Contemporary Review, 179 n. 6, 230 n. 2 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 5, 7, 33, 37, 44, 47–63, 64 n. 4, n. 9, n. 11, and n. 12, 65 n. 19, n. 21, n. 23, n. 25, n. 26, n. 27, and n. 30, 66 n. 31 and Baudelaire, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 66 n. 31 and classicism, 53 and display of works, 49 and incompleteness, 56 and innovation, 48 and landscape painting, 52–3 Works by: Chemin de Sèvres, 52; Le Concert, 58; Daphnis and Chloe, 51; Diane surprise au bain, 53; Environs de Beauvais, du côté de Voisinlieu, 52; The Evening Star, 52; Figures with Landscape, 49; Le Forum vu des jardins Farnèse (le soir), 52; Homère et les bergers; paysage, 51, 54; L’Île heureuse, 52; Macbeth, 49; Un Matin à Ville-d’Avray, 52; Une Matinée (or La Danse des nymphes) 50, 51, 52, 53, 65 n. 23; Les Nymphes, 49; Orphée series, 53, 65 n. 27; Pastorale, 51; Paysage au clair de lune, 52; Paysage; soleil couchant (or Le Petit Berger), 58; Premières feuilles près de Mantes, 52; Une Route aux environs d’Arras (or Les Chaumières), 52; La Route de Sin-le-Noble, près de Douai, 52; Silène, 53; Soliel couchant, site du Tyrol
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italien, 52; La Solitude; Souvenir de Vigen (Limousin), 52; Souvenir de Mortefontaine, 49, 52, 53, 65 n. 25, 65 n. 30; Souvenir des environs du lac de Nemi, 52; Vue de port de La Rochelle, 52; Vue prise dans la forêt de Fontainebleau, 54; Vue prise des jardins Farnèse (le midi), 51 De corporis humani fabrica (Vesalius), detail from frontispiece, 105, 106 detail from title page, 105, 107 Le Coup de vent (Legros), 43 criticism see art criticism Cruise, Colin, 7, 41, 68–82, 203 n. 5 Crystal Palace, 20 Cunningham, Valentine, 98 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 146 Daily Telegraph, 50 Daley, Kenneth, 7, 85–101, 110, 203 n. 10 dandyism, 179 Dark Blue, 36, 42, 75 Darwin, Charles, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 122–3 and photography, 122–3, 133 n. 9 Daubigny, Charles-François, 37 da Vinci, Leonardo, 40, 99, 110, 132 La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), 132 Davis, Michael, 101 n. 12 Day (Burne-Jones), 38, 39, 66 n. 37 decadence, 179, 180 n. 12, 193–4, 223 Degas, Edgar, 33 Delacroix, Eugène, 41, 180 n. 19 Deleuze, Gilles, 151 n. 8 della Robbia, Luca, 7 Cantoria, 110 Demeter, 53–4, 110, 111 see also Pater, Walter: ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ de Rossi, Giovanni Battista, 166 n. 6 desire, 97–8 in Solomon’s art, 71–2, 82 n. 10 see also homoeroticism de Staël, Anne Louise Germaine, 9–10 n. 4 Dickens, Charles, 133 n. 10 Our Mutual Friend, 123–4 The Pickwick Papers, 147 Dickinson, Anna Elizabeth, 125
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Index
Diderot, Denis, 135, 139-41, 151 n. 3 ‘Conversations on The Natural Son’, 141 Salons, 139, 141 Dionysus, 41, 89, 90, 94–6, 97, 100–1 n. 11, 101 n. 14 as symbol of theatre, 101 n. 13, 171–2, 175, 178 see also Pater, Walter: ‘A Study of Dionysus’ Discobolus (Myron), 22, 23, 24, 32 n. 7, 112 Disdéri, André, 119 Disputa (Disputation of the Sacrament) (Raphael), 13, 14, 16, 30, 31 Dowling, Linda, 8, 35, 186, 191, 202 n. 1, 209, 218 n. 11 drama, see theatre Dublin University Magazine, 38 Dudley Gallery, 34, 49, 75, 78, 101 n. 14 Dupré, Jules, 37 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 50, 65 n. 19 Eastham, Andrew, 8, 165 n. 4, 166 n. 6, 167–81 Eastlake, Elizabeth, 121 ekphrasis, 7, 21, 69, 85–100, 100–1 n. 11, 119, 132 n. 2, 171, 174 see also ‘notional’ ekphrasis ekphrastic poetry, 89 Elgin Marbles, 18, 104, 113 Eliot, George, 121 Romola, 40, 228 Eliot, T. S., 148 Ellmann, Richard, 127 Elsner, Ja´s, 91 epiphanic moment, 135–6, 142, 147–50, 151 n. 7, 158 Euripedes, The Bacchae (also The Bacchanals), 110, 172 see also Pater, Walter: ‘The Bacchanals of Euripedes’ Examiner, 50 Exposition Universelle, 1855, 54 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 44, 66 n. 36 Farmer, Albert, 179 n. 1
femininity, 96, 97, 98 and artistic reception, 94 and colour, 66 n. 34 and Dionysian myth, 95 and ekphrasis, 90 and embroidery, 86 see also gender; masculinity Ficino, Marsilio, 108, 115 n. 4 film, 135–6, 145–7, 150, 151 n. 8 Fine Art Society, 49, 65 n. 18 Flaubert, Gustave, 47 form, 165 n. 1 in art, 54, 68, 135, 149–50, 151 n. 1 fused with content in art, 5, 41–2, 45, 58–9, 136, 142–5, 152–3, 155–6, 165 n. 2, 170–1, 208 Fortnightly Review, 29, 34, 35, 41, 50, 70, 75, 82 n. 11, 86, 137, 221, 222, 225, 229 François, Louis, 50 Frazer, James, 97 Freer Gallery, Washington, DC, 49 Free Society of Artists, 49 French Revolution, 189, 192, 203 n. 3 Fried, Michael, 140, 168, 179 n. 3, 180 n. 13 Fry, Roger, 123 Fun, 50 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 181 n. 21 Gautier, Théophile, 47, 55, 58, 66 n. 39, 93 gender, and aesthetics, 66 n. 34 and artistic receptivity, 94 and artistic representation, 77, 79–80 and ekphrasis, 89–90 see also femininity; masculinity genius (artistic), 208 German Idealism, 168 see also Hegel; Kant Giorgione [Giorgio da Castelfranco], 41, 53, 137, 140 Fête Champêtre, 41, 63 n.1 Giotto [Giotto di Bondone], 6 The Globe, 36, 66 n. 33 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 104, 105, 151 n. 1, 205, 211, 218 n. 1, n. 3 Elective Affinities, 228
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Faust, 218 n. 1 Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, 218 n. 1 The Golden Stairs (Burne-Jones), 1–3, 2, 166 n. 9 Gosse, Edmund, 33, 115 n. 1 Gray, John Miller, 42, 59 Great Exhibition, 20 Greece, ancient, 76, 80 ethics of, 213 see also Greek art Greek art, 110 polychromy, 25, 32 n. 9 sculpture, 21–6, 103, 105, 106, 110, 111–13, 172 Grieve, Alistair, 63 n. 1 Grosvenor Gallery, 3, 37–8, 40, 42, 45, 49, 58, 59, 65 n. 17, 66 n. 33, n. 36, 102 Guasti, Cesare, 107 Gutch, John W., 122 Haden, Seymour, 44 Hallé, Charles, 66 n. 33 Hanslick, Eduard, 152 On the Musically Beautiful, 165 n. 1 Hardinge, William Money, 37 Hardy, Thomas, 136 Desperate Remedies, 124 Harvey, Michael, 121 Hayes, John, 123 Heffernan, James, 87, 90, 91, 113 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 104, 109, 115 n. 2, 165 n. 2, 168, 180 n. 11, 211 Aesthetics, 104, 172, 179 n. 4 Heine, Heinrich, 93 Hellenism, 106, 168–9, 177–8, 180 n. 10, n. 11 Heraclitus, 144 Herzog, Patricia, 152 Hext, Kate, 8, 203 n. 7, 205–19 Higgins, Lesley, 1–10, 10 n. 5, 45 n. 2 and 7, 47–67, 80–1 n. 1, 110, 130, 180–1 n. 19 Hill, Donald, 9 n. 3 historical continuity, 17, 26, 28, 110 in The Renaissance, 38–40, 42 Hogarth, William, The Rake’s Progress, 149 Hollander, John, 85 Homer, 74, 77, 81 n. 9, 104, 110, 112–13
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homoeroticism, 7, 34, 41, 72–3, 78, 94–6, 105, 109, 126–7, 129, 131, 210 in Oxford, 35–6 see also homophobia; homosexuality homophobia, 35–7, 186, 227 homosexuality, 86, 89–90, 94, 95–6, 98, 230 and gay subculture, 203 n. 6 and sexual dissidence, 186 see also homoeroticism; homophobia; homosociality homosociality, 98 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 34, 45, 141, 148 Hough, Graham, 58 Household Words, 133 n. 8 Howard, George, 45 Hugo, Victor, 47, 64 n. 8, 179 n. 5, 211 Humm, Maggie, 120 Hunt, William Holman, 122 Hunterian Gallery, University of Glasgow, 49 Illustrated London News, 50, 78 ‘imaginary portraits’, as genre, 4, 226 imagination, 207–8, 209, 210–11, 212, 213–14, 218 n. 7 and moral sense, 213 Impressionism, 47, 65 n. 19 incompleteness, 217 in art, 56–7, 102, 109, 110, 111, 115, 201 influence, 99–100 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 33 Inman, Billie Andrew, 38, 42, 205, 218 n. 3 interartistic discourse, 3, 6, 8, 41, 152, 156, 159, 164 between sculpture and writing, 114 and ekphrastic poetry, 89 and theatre, 168 see also Anders-streben International Exhibition of 1862, 123 internationalism, 48 intertextuality, 64 n. 3, 74, 80, 81 n. 9, 82 n. 13 Ionides, Constantine Alexander, 45, 102 Iser, Wolfgang, 193 James, Henry, 102, 118 on art, 38 and photography, 133 n. 11
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James, Henry – continued Works by: ‘The Art of Fiction’, 9, 220, 228–9; Partial Portraits, 117, 229; The Portrait of a Lady, 117, 227; ‘The Real Thing’, 124, 133 n. 11 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 159–60, 161 Japonisme, 59, 67 n. 41 journalism, 231 n. 7 and art criticism, 50, 55, 75, 122 see also names of individual periodicals Jowett, Benjamin, 36 Joyce, James, 136, 148 Kahn, Douglas, 152 Kant, Immanuel, 209, 211, 212, 218 n. 5, n. 7 Critique of Judgment, 205, 209, 213, 218 n. 6 Critique of Pure Reason, 218 n. 6 Keats, John, 88 Kelvin, Norman, 7–8, 117–34 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella, 67 n. 41 Klein, Julie Thompson, 3 Kompridis, Nikolas, 211 Laird, Andrew, 86 Landor, Walter Savage, Imaginary Conversations, 132 n. 1 Lang, Cecil Y., 81 n. 9 Laocoön, 113 L’Art, 66 n. 33 Lasey, Richard, 51 Layard, Sir Austen Henry, 20 Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, 20 Nineveh and its Remains, 20 Leek Embroidery Society, 86, 100 n. 2 Legros, Alphonse, 5, 35, 37, 42–5, 55, 66 n. 36, 143 Angelus, 44 Le Coup de vent, 43 Leighton, Angela, 153 Leighton, Frederick, 35, 102 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 141, 145, 151 n. 3 Laocoön, 141 Levine, George, 149 Lewes, George Henry, Life of Goethe, 218 n. 3
Leyland, Frederick, 57, 82 n. 12 liberalism, 209 Lindley, David, 180 n. 15 Lindsay, Sir Coutts, 66 n. 33 see also Grosvenor Gallery Lippincott’s, 230 Lloyd, E. M., 75 Longman’s Magazine, 220 Louvre, 49, 64 n. 11
Macdonald, Gus, 119 Macmillan, Alexander, 222, 223, 230 n. 3 Macmillan Publishers, 221, 223, 224–5, 230 n. 1 Macmillan’s Magazine, 50, 51, 126, 221, 222–7, 230, 230 n. 2, n. 3, n. 4, 231 n. 5 Madonna, as art icon, 16, 17, 214 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 181 n. 24 Les Aveugles, 179 Pélleas et Mélisande, 179 Mallock, William, New Republic, 37, 45 n. 3 Maltz, Diana, 186 Mantz, Paul, 58 Marsyas, 90 Marucci, Franco, 228 Marx, Karl, 211 masculinity, 95–6, 186 and aesthetics, 66 n. 34 and artistic reception, 94 and ekphrasis, 90 see also femininity; gender Mason, George, 33 Evening Hymn, 33 Masque de l’homme au nez cassé (Rodin), 102, 103 Mater dolorosa, 54 McGann, Jerome, 63 n. 1 McGrath, F. C., 205 medieval culture, 168, 169, 181 n. 23, 189 medievalism, 6 and Pre-Raphaelite art, 40 Meisel, Martin, 136, 149, 150 Mérimée, Prosper, 47 1572: Chronique du règne de Charles IX, 193
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Michelangelo [di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni], 7, 13, 40, 57, 107–10, 111, 112, 115, 115 n. 8 Creation of Man, 108, 109 Dawn, 108 Day, 108 Night, 108 Twilight, 108 Millais, Sir John Everett, 70, 122 Millet, Jean-François, 33, 37, 64 n. 12 mimesis, 58, 180 n. 12 Mino da Fiesole, 110 Mitchell, W. J. T., 88–9, 93, 100–1 n. 11 modernism, 8, 148, 151 n. 7, 165, 168, 179 modernity, 15, 17, 23, 27, 29, 55, 77, 206, 207, 217 Moi, Toril, 141 Monet, Claude, 33 La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume), 67 n. 41 Monsman, Gerald, 132, 166 n. 6, 193, 204 n. 16 and n. 17, 222 Montaigne, Michel de, 194, 197, 198, 199, 203 n. 9 Moore, Albert, 63, 69 Moore, George, 33 ‘Literature at Nurse’, 221 Modern Painting, 33 Moran, Maureen, 91, 93 Morely, John, 34 Morgan, Thaïs, 35, 36 Morris, Mowbray, 223 Morris, William, 34, 47, 100 n. 1, 169, 186 Mürger, Henri, 55 museums, 7, 13–32, 203 n. 2 history of, 18–19, 32 n. 6 and organization of knowledge, 18–20 see also names of individual museums Museums Act (1845), 20 music, 31, 142–7, 148, 149–50, 152–65, 165 n. 1, n. 2 aesthetics of, 152 as artistic subject matter, 41, 72, 87, 142–3, 159 as condition to which art aspires, 42–3, 45, 59, 136, 137, 142–5, 152, 155, 178 as fusion of artistic disciplines (see also interartistic discourse), 41
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as fusion of form and matter, 42, 45, 58, 152–4 and melodrama, 142 and painting, 135, 136, 142–5, 156, 158–60, 164, 174 Myron [of Eleutherae], 24 Discobolus, 22, 23, 24, 32 n. 7, 112 The Mystery of Faith (Solomon), 71, 75, 81 n. 6 mythology, see paganism; and names of individual mythological figures Nancy, Jean-Luc, 196, 202 National Gallery, London, 19, 20, 49, 64 n. 10, 64 n. 11, 123 National Portrait Gallery, London, 123 naturalism, 73, 74, 77 Neoplatonism, 108, 114 New English Art Club, 49 New Review, 221, 223 New Water-Colour Society (later, The Royal Institute), 49 Newman, John Henry, 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 215, 216, 218 n. 2 Beyond Good and Evil, 218 n. 9 The Genealogy of Morals, 218 n. 9 Nineteenth Century, 50 non finito, see incompleteness in art Northcote, Revd J. Spencer, 166 n. 6 Notes and Queries, 9 n. 1 ‘notional’ ekphrasis, 85, 92, 113, 154 novel, as genre, 220–2, 225–30 Victorian cultural connotations, 222 Victorian publication practices, 221 Ohi, Kevin, 197 Old Water-Colour Society, 49 Orr, Mary, 10 n. 6 Østermark-Johansen, Lene, 7, 102–16 Ovid, 86, 90, 97, 98, 100 Metamorphoses, 90, 98 Oxford, 19, 38, 60, 62, 212 culture of male-male desire, 35–6 Oxford Chronicle & Berks & Bucks Gazette, 62, 63 Oxford Times, 62, 63
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paganism, 93 and Christianity, 15–16, 17, 27, 30, 31, 88, 92 see also names of individual deities painting, 7–8, 16, 25, 33–46, 48, 103, 110, 112, 135–49, 190 academy-controlled systems of display, 49 and Anders-streben, 136, 137, 142–5, 173–4 British painting, 78, 92 colour in, 54, 55, 59, 62, 66 n. 34, 69 French landscape painting, 37, 42 French painting, 53, 55, 56 genre painting, 48, 135, 137–8, 139–40, 142, 143, 163–4, 168, 173 and music, 135, 136, 142–5, 156, 158–60, 164, 174 portrait painting, 118, 125, 126 societies and associations, 49 and tableaux, 135–42 and theatre, 171, 173–4, 176, 179 n. 2 Venetian style, 40–1, 42, 112, 137, 156, 168, 171, 176 Victorian reproductions of, 50–1 see also art; and names of individual artists, associations, galleries, movements, and works Pall Mall Gazette, 66 n. 33, 75, 225 Parnassus (Raphael), 13, 15, 16, 29, 30 pastiche, 72, 73, 74 Pater, Clara Ann, 8 Pater, Walter, and Aestheticism, 34, 38, 80 n. 1, 153, 163, 165, 167 and Baudelaire, 47, 54–5, 56, 57, 65 n. 26 and Burne-Jones, 38, 44, 66 n. 37 conservatism of, 210 and contemporary visual art, 33–45 and Corot, 33, 44, 47–63, 64 n. 9 and n. 12, 65 n. 21 and Dudley Gallery, 34 and the epiphanic moment, 135, 136, 148, 150 and Gautier, 55 and gay subculture, 203 n. 6 and Grosvenor Gallery, 60 and homoeroticism, 78 and homophobia in Victorian culture, 35–6
and Hopkins, 34, 45 lectureship at Brasenose College, 34 and Legros, 42–5, 143 and Macmillan’s Magazine, 221–5, 226–7, 230 and modernism, 7, 8, 165 and novel-writing, 4, 220–30 as outsider, 212 in Oxford, 35–6, 212 and politics, 185–202 and Pre-Raphaelitism, 34 and Rossetti, 34, 41, 63 n. 1, 144, 149 and Royal Academy, 34 and Ruskin, 15, 16–18, 26, 27–9, 30–1, 59, 70, 81 n. 3, 186 and self-fashioning, 4, 205–17 and sexual freedom, 210 and social engagement, 8, 185–202 and Solomon, 7, 34–5, 36–7, 41, 45, 63 n. 1, 70–80, 95, 227 and Swinburne, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 55, 60, 64 n. 6, 78 and Whistler, 5, 7, 9, 35, 42, 44, 45, 47–63, 64 n. 9, 66 n. 36 and n. 37, 67 n. 44 and n. 47 and Wilde, 38, 40, 120, 121, 125–32, 180 n. 12, 208, 230 Works by: ‘The Aesthetic Life’, 3, 4, 5, 10 n. 5, 10 n. 7, 42, 55, 59, 66 n. 35; ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, 169; Appreciations, 26, 64 n. 8, 179 n. 1, 221, 227–8, 230 n. 1; ‘Aucassin and Nicolette’, 40; ‘The Bacchanals of Euripedes’, 95, 171–2, 175, 180 n. 10; ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, 112; ‘Charles Lamb’, 167, 176; ‘The Child in the House’, 54, 126; ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, 60, 81 n. 2, 110, 139, 144, 163, 167, 186, 195, 228; ‘Corot’, 65 n. 21 and n. 29; ‘Deny L‘Auxerrois’, 7, 85–100, 110, 189; ‘Diaphanietè’, 31, 189, 206, 212, 216–17; ‘Emerald Uthwart’, 203 n. 3; [Review of] The English School of Painting, 45; ‘A Fragment on Botticelli’, 70; Gaston de Latour, 45 n. 5, 53, 65 n. 26, 188, 191–202, 203 n. 10, n. 11, and n.13, 204 n. 15, 220,
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Pater, Walter – continued 221–3, 224–7, 228, 230, 230 n. 4, 231 n. 5; Greek Studies, 20, 23–5, 30, 103, 112, 113; ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, 221, 225; Imaginary Portraits, 117, 118, 126, 226; ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, 35, 132; ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, 176; ‘Luca della Robbia’, 103, 109, 111, 115 n. 7; Marius the Epicurean, 8, 26–8, 30, 54, 59, 148, 149, 152, 156–8, 160–2, 164–5, 166 n. 6, 220, 223–4, 225–7, 228, 230 n. 3; ‘Measure for Measure’, 170–1; Miscellaneous Studies, 29, 30, 31; [Review of] Modern Painting, 33, 42, 55; ‘Mr George Moore as an Art Critic’, 50; ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, 37, 53, 64 n. 12, 66 n. 37; ‘Pico della Mirandola’, 76, 108; Plato and Platonism, 4, 180 n. 12, 191, 217, 230 n. 2; ‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’, 103, 107, 109, 110, 168; Preface to The Renaissance, 54, 155, 163; ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, 54, 118, 126, 128–32, 133 n. 15, 189–90; ‘Prosper Mérimée’, 193; The Renaissance, 3, 4, 20, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 47, 54, 62, 66 n. 38, 75, 78, 81 n. 2, 103, 110, 118, 169, 206, 207, 209, 211, 226, 227–8; ‘Romanticism’, 48, 55, 228; ‘Sandro Botticelli’, 68, 75, 111; ‘The School of Giorgione’, 3, 5, 8, 9 n. 3, 36, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 54, 59, 63 n. 1, 66 n. 36, 111, 135–9, 140, 141, 142–5, 147, 148, 149, 151 n. 3, 152–6, 158–60, 163–5, 169–71, 173–6, 177, 178, 179, 208; The School of Giorgione, and Other Studies, 171; ‘Sebastian van Storck’, 190; ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’, 178, 203 n. 4; ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, 185; Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 33, 36, 169, 227–8 (see also Pater, Walter: The Renaissance); ‘A Study of Dionysus’, 34, 41, 82 n. 11, 90, 94, 95, 171, 172, 173, 179 n. 7; ‘Style’, 9, 104, 113–14, 115, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229; ‘Winckelmann’, 9 n. 4, 17, 23, 31, 34, 47, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 113, 171, 179 n. 5, 208
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Pattison, Emilia (later, Lady Dilke), 33, 179 n. 6 performance arts, see film; theatre Performance Studies, 159, 166 n. 8, 168, 179 n. 2 Persephone, 110, 111 see also Pater, Walter: ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ Phelan, Peggy, 168, 179 n. 2 Philomela, 86, 90, 91, 97, 98, 100 Philostratus the Elder, 91 Photographic Journal, 122 Photographic News, 122 photography, 7–8, 119–28, 132 n. 5, 133 n. 8, n. 9, n. 10, n. 11, n. 13, and n. 14, 136, 145 Phryne, 67 n. 44 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 74, 76, 77 Song of Divine Love, 74 Plato, 4, 13, 81 n. 9, 142, 147 Republic, 217 see also Pater, Walter: Plato and Platonism play, 159, 166 n. 8, 174–5, 176–7, 181 n. 21 ‘free play’, 207–8, 214 poetry, 208 see also names of individual poets Portfolio, 50, 75 portraiture, ‘imaginary’, see ‘imaginary portraits’ Potolsky, Matthew, 8, 185–204 Potts, Alex, 23 Poynter, Edward, 44 A Prelude by Bach (Solomon), 72, 72–3, 81 n. 7 Pre-Raphaelites, 80 and Botticelli, 70 see also Pre-Raphaelitism; and names of individual artists Pre-Raphaelitism, 34, 36, 40, 74 and photography, 121 Preston, Carrie, 141 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 38–40, 63 n. 1, 64 n. 3, 66 n. 36 Prins, Yopie, 94 Procne, 97 Punch, 50 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 33 Quilter, Harry, 38, 64 n. 6
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Raffalovich, André, 63 The Rambler, 166 n. 6 Raphael [Raffaello Sanzio], 13, 16, 29, 30, 31, 48, 189, 212 Disputa (Disputation of the Sacrament), 13, 14, 16, 30, 31 frescoes in Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, 13–17, 28, 29–30, 32 n. 2 Parnassus, 13, 15, 16, 29, 30 The School of Athens, 13, 14, 29, 30, 31 realism, 47, 54, 55, 58, 66 n. 40, 102 Reformation, Protestant, 30, 31, 185, 188 relativism, 215 Renaissance, 13, 16, 30, 31, 40–1, 74, 98, 105, 110, 135, 137, 143, 188 Ricketts, Charles, 131, 132 Rodin, Auguste, 110, 115 n. 8 Masque de l’homme au nez cassé, 102, 103 Romanticism, 47, 48, 51, 54, 180 n. 22, 205 Rome, ancient, 26–8, 157, 165 n. 5, 166 n. 6 Ronsard, Pierre de, 193, 194, 196–7, 199 Franciade, 201 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 59, 60, 63 n. 1, 70, 128, 149 and photography, 122 Works by: Bocca Baciata, 40–1; The House of Life, 149; Poems, 35; ‘A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione’, 144 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 141 Pygmalion, 141–2 Rousseau, Théodore, 37 Royal Academy, 19, 34, 37, 41, 44, 49, 64 n. 16, 75, 95, 101 n. 14 Royal Institute (formerly The New Water-Colour Society), 49 Ruskin, John, 37, 62, 63 n. 1, 70, 81 n. 3, 136, 186 and the gothic, 179 n. 5 and museum culture, 6–7, 15–19, 26, 27, 28–9, 30, 31 and Neoplatonism, 108 and photography, 120–1, 132 n. 6 and realism, 54, 59 Whistler controversy, 42, 57, 60, 110 Works by: ‘The Art of Engraving’, 121; ‘Editor’s Preface to the Economist of Xenophon’, 32 n. 10; The Flamboyant
Architecture of the Valley of the Somme, 92; Fors Clavigera, 50; Praeterita, 148; ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, 32 n. 2; Stones of Venice, 15–16, 214 Sacramentum Amoris (Solomon), 78, 79, 82 n. 12 Said, Edward, 59 Saint-Beuve, Charles-Augustine, 47, 117, 132 n. 1 Portraits contemporains, 117 Portraits littéraires, 117 Salon, Paris, 49, 54, 64 n. 16 same-sex desire, see homoeroticism; homosexuality Sargent, John Singer, 33, 63 Sarony, Napoleon, 125, 126, 127 Saturday Review, 34 Savile Club (formerly The New Club), 35 Schechner, Richard, 159 Schiller, Friedrich, 8–9, 114, 218 n. 1, n. 3, n. 5, n. 7, and n. 11 and ‘self-culture’, 205–17 Works by: Aesthetic Education of Man, 8–9, 205, 206, 214; Das Ideal und Das Leben, 180 n. 11 Schlegel, Friedrich, 181 n. 22 Schoenberg, Arnold, 153 The School of Athens (Raphael), 13, 14, 29, 30, 31 Scribner’s Magazine, 178 sculpture, 7, 57, 102–15, 168, 171, 179 n. 4 classical, 21–6, 103, 105, 106, 111–12, 172 relief, 110, 111, 112–14 and writing, 103, 106, 112–15 ‘self-culture’, 178, 205–17 selfhood, 206 see also ‘self-culture’; subjectivity Shadwell, Charles, 103, 113 Shakespeare, William, 177, 181 n. 22 Measure for Measure, 170 Romeo and Juliet, 177 Sherman, Cindy, 150 Shrimpton, Nicholas, 34, 45 n. 2 Siegel, Jonah, 6–7, 13–32, 99, 111, 203 n. 2 Sisley, Alfred, 33 Slater, Linda-Ruth, 154 Society of Artists, 49 Society of British Artists, 49, 59
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Solomon, Simeon, 7, 34–7, 40–2, 44, 45, 63 n. 1, 70–80, 82 n. 13, 203 n. 5, 227 and Aestheticism, 73 and allegory, 76–80 and Botticelli, 70–3, 81 n. 5 and desire, 71–2, 82 n. 10 and homoeroticism, 72–3, 74, 78, 95 narrative in work of, 73, 74 Works by: Bacchus, 34, 41, 96, 101 n. 14; The Bride, the Bridegroom and the Friend of the Bridegroom, 34, 73, 81 n. 7; The Chanting of the Gospels, 34, 41; The Child Jeremiah, 41; A Greek Acolyte (formerly known as A Saint of the Eastern Church), 75; Love Bound and Wounded, 75; Love in Autumn, 75, 81 n. 5; The Mystery of Faith, 71, 75, 81 n. 6; A Prelude by Bach, 72, 72–3, 81 n. 7; Sacramentum Amoris, 78, 79, 82 n. 12; Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, 73; A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, 7, 35, 36, 41, 70, 74–5, 77, 78, 80; A Young Musician in the Temple, 41 South Kensington Museum (later, Victoria & Albert), 20, 86 Souvenir de Mortefontaine (Corot), 49, 52, 53, 65 n. 25, n. 30 Spark, Muriel, 8 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 186 Spectator, 50 Stauder, Ellen Keck, 165 n. 2 Stein, Richard, 92 Stendhal, Racine and Shakspeare, 48 Stevens, Alfred, 63 subjectivity, 8, 48, 153, 155, 165 n. 2 and the aesthetic personality, 177–8 in art criticism, 54, 69, 94, 132, 137, 154–5 see also ‘self-culture’; selfhood Summers, David, 66 n. 34 Sunday Times, 63 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 45, 47, 55, 58, 66 n. 36, 67 n. 44, 74, 78 and Baudelaire, 35, 41 and Whistler, 60 Works by: ‘Before the Mirror’, 60; ‘Laus Veneris’, 40; Notes on the Royal
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Academy Exhibition, 1868, 60; Notes on Some Pictures of 1868, 66 n. 36; Poems and Ballads, 35, 81 n. 9; [review of] A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, 35, 36, 41–2, 75–6 Symbolism, 178 Symonds, J. A., 77 Symons, Arthur, 102, 110, 115, 178, 216, 222 Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (Whistler), 60, 61 tableau, 135–42, 145–6, 147, 149, 150, 151 n. 2 and n. 8 Taine, Hippolyte, 36 Tannhäuser myth, 40 tapestry, 85–100, 110 taste, see aesthetics Tate Gallery of British Art, 19 Taylor, Tom, 45, 56 Teukolsky, Rachel, 163, 164 theatre, 135–6, 138–9, 140, 141–2, 145, 146–7, 149–50, 151 n. 2, 159, 167–79, 180 n. 10, n. 12, and n. 14 and aestheticism, 170, 172–3, 175, 178 and Anders-streben, 169–71, 173, 175, 178 and Dionysus, 101 n. 13, 171–2, 175, 178 masque, 175, 180 n. 10, n. 14, n. 15, and n. 18 The Times, 45, 50, 56, 62 Titian [Tiziano Vecellio], The Concert, 158–60, 159, 166 n. 7 and n. 9, 173–4, 176, 180 n. 13 Fête champêtre, 173, 174–5, 180 n. 13 Townley Marbles, 18 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 37, 55, 92 Turner, Victor, 155 unity, 180 n. 19, 202, 206–9, 213 in art, 176–7 Vanity Fair, 38, 50 Venus, 72, 77, 81 n. 5, 210 ‘verbal portraits’, 118, 119, 125–32 Verrocchio, Andrea del, 110
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Index
Vesalius, Andreas, frontispiece of De corporis humani fabrica, 105, 106 title page of De corporis humani fabrica, 105, 107 Viola, Bill, 150 A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (Solomon), 7 visual art, see film; painting; sculpture Waagen, Friedrich, 32 n. 5 Wagner, Richard, 165 n. 1 ‘Lettre sur la musique’, 41 Walker, Frederick, 33 The Plough, 34, 45 n. 1 Wallace Collection, 49 Wallace, Richard, 49 Ward, J. P., 208 Ward, Mary Arnold, 223–4 Robert Elsmere, 224 Wardle, Elizabeth, 86, 100 n. 1 Warner, Michael, 195 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 54, 126, 128, 132, 189 Watts, George Frederic, 44 Weliver, Phyllis, 149 Westminster Review, 34 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 5, 7, 33, 35, 37, 42, 44, 47–63, 64 n. 9 and n. 15, 65 n. 18, 66 n. 36, n. 37, and n. 40, 67 n. 41, n. 43, n. 44, and n. 47 and Aestheticism, 62, 68, 80 n. 1 Eastern and Western elements in the work of, 59 ‘harmony’ in art, 58, 62, 71, 73 incompleteness in the work of, 56 innovation in the work of, 48 Ruskin controversy, 57, 61, 110 Ten O’Clock Lecture, 58, 59, 62, 66 n. 33, 66–7 n. 40 Works by: Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist’s Mother, 51, 64 n. 14; Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 49;
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 68; Harmony in Grey and Gold, 68; Milly Finch, 67 n. 41; Nocturne in Black and Gold, 45; Phryne the Superb!, 67 n. 44; The Six Projects, 60; Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 56, 64 n. 16; Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, 60, 61; Symphony in White, No. 3: Three Girls, 58; The Woman in White, 58 Wilde, Oscar, 38, 40, 120, 121, 125, 126–32, 133 n. 13, 172–3, 180 n. 12, 208, 230 ‘The Canterville Ghost’, 127 ‘Decay of Lying’, 180 n. 12 [review of] Grosvenor Gallery opening, 38, 44, 60 Intentions, 128 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 118, 119, 126–7, 128, 180 n. 12 ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, 118, 119, 126, 128–32, 133 n. 14, n. 16, and n. 17, 134 n. 18, 180 n. 12 ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, 128, 216 ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’, 127 Wildman, Steven, 121 William of Sens, 92 Williams, Carolyn, 8, 129, 135–51, 163, 165 n. 4, 176, 179 n. 8, 180 n. 17 Williams, Raymond, 8, 186 Winckelmann, Johann, History of Ancient Art, 21, 22–3, 24, 30 Woolf, Virginia, 148 To the Lighthouse, 148 Wordsworth, William, 47, 114, 136, 147–8, 208 The Prelude, 144, 148, 149 Worth, George, 222 Wright, Samuel, 165 n. 5 Wright, Thomas, The Life of Walter Pater, 165 n. 5 Yeats, W. B., 186 Young, George Malcolm, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 117
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