anyone who likes to read quickly. Pater believed that prose was as difficult an art as
poetry, and he expected his own elaborate sentences to be savored. Like Gustave
Flaubert (1821?1880), the French novelist whom he admired, Pater painstakingly
revised his sentences with special attention to their rhythms, seeking always the right
word, le mot juste, as Flaubert called it. For many years Pater's day would begin with
his making a careful study of a dictionary. What Pater said of Dante is an apt descrip
tion of his own polished style: 'He is one of those artists whose general effect largely
depends on vocabulary, on the minute particles of which his work is wrought, on the
colour and outline of single words and phrases.' An additional characteristic of his
highly wrought style is its relative absence of humor. Pater was valued among his
friends for his flashes of wit and for his lively and irreverent conversation, but in
his writings such traits are suppressed. As Michael Levey observed in The Case of
Walter Pater (1978), 'Even for irony the mood of his writing is almost too intense.' In addition to being a key figure in the transition from mid-Victorianism to the
'decadence' of the 1890s, Pater commands our attention as the writer of exemplary
impressionistic criticism. In each of his essays he seeks to communicate what he
called the 'special unique impression of pleasure' made on him by the works of some
artist or writer. His range of subjects included the dialogues of Plato, the paintings
of Leonardo da Vinci, the plays of Shakespeare, and the writings of the French
Bomantic school of the nineteenth century. Of particular value to students of English
literature are his discriminating studies of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Cole-
ridge, Charles Lamb, and Sir Thomas Browne in his volume of Appreciations (1889)
and his essay on the poetry of William Morris titled 'Aesthetic Poetry' (1868). These
and other essays by Pater were praised by Oscar Wilde in a review in 1890 as 'abso
lutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to whom the present
is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. . . . The
true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad
generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.' The final sentences of his Appreciations volume are a revealing indication of Pater's
critical position. After having attempted to show the differences between the classical
and romantic schools of art, he concludes that most great artists combine the qualities
of both. 'To discriminate schools, of art, of literature,' he writes, 'is, of course, part
of the obvious business of literary criticism: but, in the work of literary production,
it is easy to be overmuch occupied concerning them. For, in truth, the legitimate
contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all
.
STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE / 150 7
successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the
vulgarity which is dead to form.'
From Studies in the History of the Renaissance
Preface
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To 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, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
'To see the object as in itself it really is,'1 has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals?music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life?are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realize such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who
