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.