Pater’s Renaissance

I used a 1959 Mentor volume of The Renaissance which sold for 50¢. Though the pages are brown and falling out, it sustained yet another reading. As no one else is likely to be using this particular edition I identify quotations here only by the chapter from which they come.


     During Walter Pater’s life, he suffered a degree of notoriety. Though a retiring and scholarly man, he was like Socrates accused of corrupting the youth by providing a justification for hedonism and denying religion. Wrong-headed though they were, his accusers, who included even such subtle thinkers as George Eliot, had reason. What his critics regarded as his baleful influence extends well beyond the author’s life; indeed, it even reached to mid-twentieth century Midwestern suburbs in America and indeed further still, to the very present.
     As a teenage aesthete I was deeply moved by The Renaissance. Probably to some extent under his influence I wrote a college admission essay that said nothing whatever about professional goals, but instead defined my main ambition as to experience as much as possible. The only concession I made to the role of higher education was to declare that by experience I included learning as much as possible and consuming the finest, most beautiful works of art and intelligence. I might have been taking my text directly from Pater’s famous conclusion. For better or worse my values remain unchanged over a half century.
     Immorality was, of course, never Pater’s aim, except for those to whom homoeroticism is a vice. [1] His radical theme was subjectivism. For all his denigration of “abstract theory,” his approach was founded on a thorough philosophic skepticism. Pater has been, I think, insufficiently recognized for the degree to which his ideas anticipate more recent thought in both aesthetic theory and philosophy more generally. Among the many trends for which Pater’s thought opened the way are Rorty’s “ironism,” the reader response theory associated with Stanley Fish, and Derridean Deconstruction.
     The author thought best to omit his “Conclusion” in the second edition for fear it “might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” Pater’s celebrated call “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” has suffered the curse of success and become a cliché, but the “Conclusion” opens with a less-cited line from Herakleitos which Pater translated as “All things give way; nothing remains.” [2] Pater develops then an evocative passage describing the flux of experience, sounding like a Tang Dynasty Buddhist in his wistful insistence on the insubstantiality of what ordinarily passes for reality. He spares neither body nor consciousness, deploying images of whirlpool and flame to demonstrate that physical life is a “perpetual motion” which is “beyond us.” Sense experience is a mere ”swarm of impressions,” “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The human ego is nothing but “an image,” a sort of recollection of memories of past moments. “Our life . . . is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.” Coherence, solidity, knowledge are all illusions.
     For Pater this meant no end of inquiry but rather the most powerful motivation to pursue his researches while privileging sensation. “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.” As “we are all condamnés,” to spend life “in art and song” is the best strategy for “getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time,” while recognizing that “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”
     Pater entertains no illusions and takes refuge in no mythic refuge. [3] His subjectivism as a critic emerges naturally from his skepticism as a philosopher. He quite correctly identifies his position as distinctly modern in his early essay on Coleridge. “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ … To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under certain conditions.” [4] He later restates the theme, again with the emphasis on its modernity, noting that “according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra, after all.“ [5]
     It is curious but true that those who argue for impressionistic art criticism, while inviting the accusation that their judgements must be arbitrary and unfounded, are in fact the only critics who can present solid evidence. After all we know nothing of any topic whatever but the data of our senses imperfectly processed by our brains. Precisely in that interaction of subject and object is the spot where Pater correctly locates the aesthetic experience. In the “Preface” to The Renaissance he correctly locates aesthetic value neither in the author nor in the text, but in the reader’s reaction. “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?”
     While this focus on consumption is a productive approach, Pater does succumb to polemic’s temptation to overshoot the mark. He repeatedly claims that art has no relation whatever to lived experience, insisting, for instance, that “the Venus of Melos” “is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness.” “This ideal art, in the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond its sensible embodiment” [6] Any viewer of a human nude must react in part to a work’s content, in this case to the humanity, the femaleness, and the nudity of the statue. As for symbolism the viewer must realize that the object is in fact a religious cult image, meant for religious services.
     In another passage, Pater maintains that “in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor.” [7] Though stating it, he ignores the critical fact that the “play of sunlight” is, in fact, wholly “accidental,” lacking intention. Thus it cannot be a signifier unless one posits, as Pater would not, some artistic deity presiding over the enormous site-specific installation that is the cosmos. The distinction rests in the fact that every human artifact bears meaning whether consciously designed or not. Every objet d’art poses the question, impossible for natural phenomena, “what does it mean for a person to have made this?”
     Yet many have overestimated the role of truth in art. Art is by no means exhausted by a mimetic ideal. The maker may strive for the greatest verisimilitude, but books remain always black marks on a page and paintings smears of color on a surface, by all means “real” only in a qualified sense, and none “more real” than another. Truth occupies a place similar to realism in art. For some works such considerations are a part of the design, for others they are insignificant, while for yet others deviation and distortion of verisimilitude are intentional and effective. It is elementary that, while art may seek to seem “true” in one sense or another, such an end is merely one among a great many elements that may play a role in a work’s structure.
     Again, Pater has the passionate enthusiasm to go once more a bit too far. Discussing the meaning of false attributions to Giorgione, he comments that “in what is connected with a great name, much that is not real is often very stimulating.” [8] Even errors and misapprehensions are fruitful; indeed, like Freudian slips, they may provide the richest veins of meaning. Having no functional end, art resembles play. [9]
     Pater’s oft-quoted dictum declaring that the arts all aspire to the condition of music [7] does not, of course, suggest that in some way music is a higher or more perfect art than poetry or painting. He means only to clarify his claim that “the sensuous element in art” contains “almost everything in art that is essentially artistic.” Art differs from other human artifacts in that its form, its style, its manner is sufficient for its meaning, or, at any rate, those elements comprise the strictly artistic component of its appeal. A poem may have attractive ideals or a painting may include data of historic or scientific interest, but such considerations have no effect on its artistic worth.
     Pater is one of those like Frazer, Margaret Murray, Joseph Campbell, and others who made dramatic new readings of the materials of history and culture and who are liable to be picked to pieces by specialists far less capable of original thought. Of course, anyone who dares to suggest innovative readings of the past and attempts to synthesize great masses of data will be vulnerable to criticism, all the more as studies advance over the years, yet such work remains more significant, more beautiful, and more readable than any of those who point out their numerous errors. I might add even such names as Freud and Marx. All these are great artists, and from a literary point of view they are all true in the sense that the Iliad and the gospel of St. Matthew and King Lear are true. This would have been Pater’s point of view. In discussing Pico della Mirandola Pater says of Pico’s attempts to reconcile Greek religion and Christianity by imagining wildly fanciful allegorical interpretations “his thoughts, however little their positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of deep and passionate emotion” and this alone justifies them. Surely the very same may be said of Pater’s own deeply significant though highly idiosyncratic judgements.



1. No reader could deny what no one today will condemn, Pater’s homoerotic sensibility. We are inclined to be indulgent if his embattled tastes in life lead him slightly astray in theory. In accordance with his own notions, he approves Winckelmann’s “escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch.” He proceeds In the same essay to venture a side comment, suggesting that homosexuality is associated with “an inborn instinct for beauty and art.” While this is a very dubious notion, it does not entirely lack evidence.

2. Pater’s translation and a lengthy discussion in Plato and Platonism, “Plato and the Doctrine of Motion”: “[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing remains.” Plato, Cratylus 402 A.

3. Even his Marius the Epicurean is led only to the very edge of Christianity ten years after The Renaissance. Chastened by criticism and doubtless frightened by the outré behavior of some of his admirers, Pater hedged his bets, yet he still resisted making his hero a believer.

4. “Coleridge’s Writings,” Westminster Review 1866.

5. “Coleridge” in Appreciations.

6. See the “Essay on Winckelmann.”

7. In “The School of Giorgione.”

8. See “The School of Giorgione.”

9. In the same chapter, Pater links art and play in that neither has a functional end.

Formal Play in a Canso by Cercamon

Though the reader without Old Occitanian may wish to consult a more literal version in connection with this essay, the finest translation is probably Ezra Pound’s which he regarded as the most successful in his “Langue d’Oc” sequence. Typically, Pound makes quite free with his original, not only placing the stanzas in a sequence different from all the manuscripts, but contributing as well a novel spelling of his author’s name, evidently with the aim of pointing toward its etymology. See “Descant on a Theme by Cerclamon” in The Little Review vol. 15, no. 1 (which bears on its cover the slogan “Making no compromise with the Public Taste”).


     Cercamon in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” (“When the sweet breeze sours”) announces his theme unambiguously at the outset as “Amor” (“love”), but what follows is more a formal unfolding of the theme in the manner of a fugue than it is an emotional outpouring. The polarity of the very first line is expressed using terms of weather, animal behavior, and then the persona’s experience in turn. The opposition implied in the rhythmic alternation of the seasons carries affective associations for the sensitive human consciousness which finds springtime delightful in the spring while the fall is unwelcome. From the start the grand, purely abstract music of the cosmos is complicated by the emotion of a human subject for whom the most emphatic form of passion is surely Amor.

     The energy of the emotional struggle for love is the dynamo that sustains the entire poem, but the turnings of amorous fortune are played out against a grand pattern unsusceptible to sentiment. Like most love songs in troubadour times and today in popular culture, this is largely a lack-of-love song, but it oscillates. Every verse contains references to the potential both of suffering and joy that desire entails. There is no progress, no narrative; the poem ends where it began. Cercamon’s focus is the tension itself rather than any fulfilment or other resolution. Rather than satisfy desire or, in the manner of the birds, fall silent, the poet makes a poem of his own frustration, turning pain into the stuff of beauty.

After establishing the polarity with a simple twist of the reverdie introduction that presents the reader with a symbolic paradox. With the coming of autumn, harbinger of the year’s death, though the birds cease their singing, his own song rises in place of theirs, but his is a radically ambivalent melody, one in which the passion of the original is transmuted into a beautiful formal pattern like his rhyme scheme.

     When considered not as sympathetic emotional states but rather as abstract signs, the alternation between the joy of love and the suffering of rejection becomes a dance, beautiful for its own sake. It is peculiarly appropriate to love, in which desire is often intensified and prolonged by denial of satisfaction. Troubadour poetry is capable of considerable coarseness, but in this poem the pressure is raised to such an extent that a single metaphor such as “joja” (“jewel”) becomes highly erotic and the poet thrills to such kinky imagery as to imagine himself “lassat e pres” (“tied up and taken”); he is excited to thinks of himself spending two or three years in her service before receiving any recognition.

     Rhymes always call attention to themselves. Often a poem may be traced through its rhyming words alone. Elaborate rhyme patterns were cultivated in the rhyme rich language of Old Occitan which can rapidly waylay the translator in this age in which poetic sound effects in the far less hospitable American English are rarely the writer's focus. Though Troubadour forms were highly demanding, they were endlessly flexible at the same time. Troubadours prided themselves on their originality and novelty and were able to freely tailor new patterns to suit the material at hand.

     Listeners were capable of perceiving even distant or subtle sound relationships, and, in the absence of the music, in “Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis” the rhymes are the most prominent structuring device. The poem as a whole rhymes ababcd with a double tornada cd cd. The same rhyme sounds are sustained throughout the poem’s fifty-eight lines, a virtually impossible task to duplicate in English in which chiming rhymes would sound childish in any event.

     All the stanzas with the exception of seven end on a note of hope, using words such as “plazer” (“pleasure”), “lezer” (“leisure”), “ver” (“truth”), and even an image of her going to bed (“anar jazer”), thus sustaining the poet’s quest in spite of the lady’s showing no apparent receptiveness to his advances. In the double tornada the signals are balanced, reasserting uncertainty.

     In the opening stanza all the rhyme words have associations of coercion and rejection except two which have to do with singing, a negative use (the birds’ ceasing their song) and a positive one (the poet’s beginning his). Thus the problem of the poem is posed and the solution in art suggested. More subtly, in the eight remaining stanzas, the rhyme words in the quatrains are consonant in nine instances (five good and four bad), contrasting in two, and neutral in six (a neutral word is associated with a good one three times and with a word with bad connotations three times).

     This level of symmetry indicates not planning but a highly sensitive intuition about constructing a poem. The writer applies rhetorical figures like dabs of paint in an abstract composition, seeing to it that looks or sounds right without having to specify a reason. Art excels at expressing the often deeply ambivalent feelings that accumulate around themes such as love. The aim is not to say that love is this or that but most often some form of both and neither. Love may be quite different person to person or day by day.

     The texture of sound patterns with rhyme at the fore constitutes then both a formal pattern with an appeal of its own and a reinforcement of the poem’s self-contradictory investigation of the experience of love. As in tragedy the structural design of the poetry’s melody is a redemption, with its artistic control exerting a power over circumstances over which humankind has no other power. The poet sings his way melodiously through self-declared suffering and thus maintains dignity and pride in spite of helplessness. Desire becomes nearly a force of nature coming and going like the tide or the daylight, but, like Venus, rising and falling with rhythmic regularity.




Appendix: Rhyme Words

The patterns of rhyme words may be traced in this list in which b indicates a negative association, implying constraint or frustration, g means a good one, n is neutral, and s reference to song. Translations of the rhyme words themselves follow.

1-6
bs
ns
b
b

7-12
gg
bg
n
g

13-18
gg
gg
n
g

19-24
nb
ng
n
g

25-30
bb
gn
n
g

31-36
gg
gn
g
b

37-42
bb
bb
g
g

43-48
bb
bn
b
g

49-54
gg
gb
g
g

55-56
b
g

56-57
g
b







1-6
becomes bitter/ language
branch/ sing
taken
power

7-12
won/ acquire
suffering/ desire
thing
have

13-18
rejoice/ dumbfounded
so much/ desire
it [seems]
know

19-24
saw/ darkens
glove/ shines
might have
go to bed

25-30
tremble/ might die
awake/ ask
three
truth

31-36
healed/ figure out
great/ when
mercy
fall down

37-42
maddens/ mocks
mute/ behind
good
pleasure

43-48
die/ killed
command/ semblance
ought, must
to see

49-54
enjoy/ fine, true
make love/ deception
courtly
leisure

55-56
annoys
retain

56-57
court
despairs

Notes on Recent Reading 38 (London, Vonnegut, Cather)

John Barleycorn (London)

London’s account of his lifelong use of alcohol is at the same time a revealing story of the economic conditions of his youth, reminding the reader yet again of how recently a person could work hard in America and yet suffer genuine need. He takes one strenuous and unrewarding job after another, including an illegal entrepreneurial venture as an “oyster pirate” on his own boat at the age of fifteen. His physical powers and discipline are not quite enough to lift him from the slough, but his mind can. He becomes radicalized, and eventually manages to acquire the rudiments of education. After very little time he is selling short stories and lands a book contract. In what seems temporarily almost a fairy tale denouement he acquires not just comfortable but substantial wealth, and establishes his estate in the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma County.

The narrative has in part the outline of a simple success story more inspirational than those of Horatio Alger that were popular in London’s youth and more real since it was not through charity or accident but his own energy and ability that he rose, but the author is pursued by a demon. He is stalked at every turn by John Barleycorn who, as he says, appeared everywhere that “chesty” men gathered, eventually weakening him and doubtless hastening his death. He is so clear-sighted about alcohol’s seductive power that he wishes to be rescued by circumstance. For this reason London enthusiastically supports women’s suffrage, certain that voting women will bring about Prohibition, which would redeem him whether he assented or not.

The book is a candid report of an individual’s addiction, and, as a study of chemical dependence, London’s evasions are as significant as his admissions. He insists countless times that he is not constitutionally or physically an alcoholic but succumbed due to alcohol’s accessibility, particularly on the “adventure-road” of masculine milieux. At the book’s end, he confidently reports his having overcome the temptation to overindulge as well as his tendency to “pessimism,” his term for depression. Essential as it is to a self-help book, London’s biographers would term that a rosy view.


Deadeye Dick (Vonnegut)

In those days when Vonnegut star was rising, I half-way tried to keep up with contemporary fiction, but I tended to prefer Barthelme and Barth and Coover. I was never taken by Vonnegut, though he was popular among the youth of my generation, and I certainly applauded his tendencies to pop culture, left-wing politics, and the counterculture. His vogue, after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, transformed his career, but his work never attracted much of my attention.

Reading Deadeye Dick now, I feel still dull to Vonnegut’s appeal. The book seems like a series of little routines, the more satisfying of which end with a snap something like a damp firecracker. The author’s considerable inventiveness rarely goes beyond what Coleridge might have called fancy. Reflecting this fact, his prose is simple and colloquial, matter-of-fact even while relating dramatic events.

Admittedly, this attitude consistently maintained through an accumulation of sketches amounts in the end to a Weltanschauung, which I would describe as a sort of youthful wonder at all things more or less equally, which, for this reader, eliminates the better part of the wonder. Perhaps I am too much reminded of the late sixties overuse of “wow.” (Its epigone “awesome” is flourishing, I believe, yet today.)



Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Cather)

Willa Cather’s last novel is her only work set in Virginia, the state of her birth. She is said to have based the central incidents of the story on whispered family lore she overheard from her elders. In the epilogue a first person narrator suddenly appears whom one might well take to be the author.

Cather’s descriptive prose is straightforward and quite precise. Descriptions of the changing seasons form a sort of lyric interlude every now and then in an episodic novel. Lit by righteous indignation overt slavery eighty years after abolition, she does deserve credit for making her case nuanced and engaging.

She is not portraying the plantation slavery more common in literature. In the western part of Virginia, in the hills among poor and struggling whites, Sapphira’s inherited slaves brought her not social prestige but her neighbors’ distrust. Her husband himself is opposed to slavery, but does not wish to make problems or diminish his wife’s wealth, so he does nothing. When he does raise the possibility of manumission to a slave who serves as his skilled assistant, the man asks to remain in servitude. Nancy, the slave “girl,” is virtuous but sufficiently boring to be annoying, though the reader can only be pleased that she comes to a good end.

Rather than description or theme, the real triumph of the book is the development of the character of Sapphira, whom one encounters as a snobbish and suspicious woman. Despite her social pretensions and her often small-minded and self-interested actions, the reader comes to appreciate her dignity and strength and to realize that, of course, she, too, has emotional capacity. Her bearing through her crippling dropsy and her approaching death make her in the end a hero, a feat that might have seemed unlikely after the first fifteen or twenty pages of the book.