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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Appreciations, with an Essay on Style," Walter Pater meticulously examines the nuances of aesthetic experience and the practice of writing, placing emphasis on the intrinsic connection between art and life. Written in a lyrical prose reminiscent of the 19th-century aesthetic movement, Pater's work advocates for a profound engagement with art, challenging readers to appreciate beauty in its myriad forms. The collection consists of critical essays on various authors and artists, revealing Pater's belief in the subjective nature of artistic perception and his preference for an organic, impressionistic style that captures the essence of the work rather than its mere content. Walter Pater (1839-1894), a prominent figure in the late Victorian literary scene, was deeply influenced by the ideals of the Aesthetic Movement, particularly the works of John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde. Pater's academic background, particularly in Classical studies, informed his stylistic choices and critical lens, allowing him to analyze the interplay between form and content. His life in Oxford, a hub of intellectual thought, provided fertile ground for his exploration of art and aesthetic theory, further positioning him as a leader in the dialogue on art criticism during his time. For readers seeking a deeper understanding of the relationship between art and personal perception, Pater's "Appreciations" serves as an invaluable resource. It is a must-read for scholars, artists, and enthusiasts alike, inviting them to reflect on their own aesthetic experiences and the transformative power of literature and art. Pater's thoughtful insights encourage readers to engage with the subtleties of creative expression, making this work a timeless contribution to literary criticism. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Appreciations, with an Essay on Style
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume brings together Walter Pater’s mature practice of literary criticism, anchored by a programmatic meditation on prose itself. First published in 1889, it offers a curated sequence of appreciations rather than a comprehensive survey, presenting Pater’s method at full pitch. The collection’s purpose is twofold: to articulate guiding principles of style—precision, economy, and expressive integrity—and to exemplify those principles in readings of writers and works across periods. By assembling portraits of key figures and texts alongside reflections on language, the book becomes both a handbook of critical tact and a demonstration of how criticism may itself rise to the condition of art.
The contents are entirely essays in criticism and aesthetics. They include character-studies of English authors, close readings of dramatic works, reflections on a seventeenth-century master of prose, assessments of Romantic and Victorian temperaments, a consideration of a French novella, and a concluding postscript. The opening essay sets out the discipline of style in non-fiction prose; subsequent pieces apply that discipline to poets, essayists, and dramatists. There are no poems, stories, or letters here; the unity is that of critical prose practiced with literary ambition. Throughout, Pater’s medium is the essay: measured, reflective, and attentive to form, cadence, and the moral poise of expression.
What binds these studies is a consistent ideal of criticism as finely tempered appreciation. Pater prizes exact perception—how a sentence carries thought, how an image fixes mood, how a cadence persuades. He treats style not as ornament but as the precise register of a writer’s mind, the point where intellect and temperament become audible. The essays return to certain questions: how language shapes sensibility, how historical moment and personal vision meet, how beauty and ethical reflection coexist within form. The result is a criticism that is personal without whimsy, historical without pedantry, and stylistically scrupulous—an art of reading that reveals the art of writing.
The range of subjects is deliberately broad. Romantic figures are approached as distinct voices with distinct textures of feeling and thought. A seventeenth-century physician-essayist appears as a master of curious, gravely musical prose. Elizabethan drama is read from within the play of language and situation, while the panorama of a national history in verse is considered through its rhetoric of kingship and state. A Victorian painter-poet is treated as a case of modern sensibility, and a contemporary French narrative serves as a test of psychological nuance and economy. Across these instances, Pater traces continuities and contrasts in English—and European—artistic expression.
Pater’s method favors close attention over system. He approaches each writer as an individuality, asking what is unique in the texture of a page, the cast of an image, the turn of a sentence. Rather than impose doctrine, he lets the style disclose the thought and the thought reveal the style. Historical context matters in his readings, yet it is subordinate to what is immediately there in the writing. The initial essay on prose serves as a touchstone, reminding the reader that criticism earns its authority not by abstraction but by accuracy, tact, and a scruple for the exact value of words.
The continuing value of the collection lies in its union of rigor and delicacy. It teaches a reader how to dwell with a paragraph until its rhythm yields meaning, how to sense the interplay of idea and phrase, how to weigh beauty without sentimentality. These essays model a critical ethos that is patient, discriminating, and humane, making them significant beyond their immediate subjects. They are also admired for their craft: sentences built for clarity and resonance, paragraphs orchestrated for cumulative insight. In an age quick to summary, Pater’s pace—lucid, unhurried, exact—offers a durable counterexample of attentive reading and responsible judgment.
Readers may approach the volume sequentially, letting the opening reflections shape their sense of what follows, or dip among the studies to watch principles in action across different temperaments and forms. Each essay stands complete, yet the sequence creates a dialogue about style, character, and historical feeling that culminates in the final reflection. The postscript gathers the book’s concerns into a quiet emphasis on measure and fidelity in expression. Taken together, these pieces present criticism as a sustained practice: a way of thinking in sentences, of honoring particulars, and of finding, in the best writing, standards for one’s own use of words.
Historical Context
From the waning of Elizabeth I (d. 1603) through the reign of James VI and I (1603–1625), London’s playhouses—the Globe (1599) and Blackfriars (c. 1608)—shaped a civic theatre that frames Pater’s readings of Shakespeare’s Loves Labours Lost, Measure for Measure, and the English kings. The same Stuart milieu nourished Sir Thomas Browne, born in London in 1605, educated at Oxford and Leiden, and long resident in Norwich (from 1637), whose baroque prose bears the stamp of Counter-Reformation Europe and Anglican latinity. The closing of the theatres in 1642, civil war, and the nation’s shift from Renaissance synthesis toward modern skepticism bind Browne’s meditations to Shakespearean moral experiment.
The seventeenth-century traffic between experiment and eloquence—Francis Bacon’s reforming programs, the Royal Society (chartered 1662), coffeehouses, and the periodical press—shaped prose ideals reaching from Browne’s Religio Medici (printed 1642) and Hydriotaphia (1658) to the essayistic refinements admired by Charles Lamb. Addison’s Spectator (1711–1712) and the London press prepared a metropolitan readership that would later receive Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1820–1822) and Coleridge’s Shakespeare lectures (1808–1812). Pater, attentive to cadence and learned allusion, traces this lineage when considering style itself: the inheritance of Latinity, aphorism, and analytic poise informs his judgments on Browne’s cadenced sentences as much as his appraisal of the delicate wit of Shakespearean comedy.
Across the 1790s the French Revolution (1789) and the wars with France (1793–1815) redirected British letters toward nature, conscience, and the visionary. Wordsworth (born 1770 at Cockermouth; at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, 1799–1808) and Coleridge (born 1772 at Ottery St Mary; at Nether Stowey, 1797–1799) issued Lyrical Ballads in Bristol in 1798, with expanded editions in 1800–1802, while Lamb, a London clerk and man of letters, renewed the domestic, reflective essay. Their friendship networks—Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle, the London Magazine, and Lake District circles—formed a common culture of recollection, experiment, and reformist debate that Pater addresses when he weighs imagination, memory, and ethical temper across poetry, criticism, and the theater.
The nineteenth century’s Shakespeare revival frames Pater’s criticism as much as Elizabethan stagecraft. David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee (1769) inaugurated modern bardolatry; Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition, followed by Clark and Wright’s Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–1866), established historicist textual scholarship. Victorian theater, constrained by the Licensing Act of 1737 and the Theatres Act of 1843, favored altered texts—Thomas Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare (1818)—that shaped responses to morally charged plays like Measure for Measure. Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) and Coleridge’s lectures helped recover the tonal range of the old stage, enabling Pater to place Shakespeare’s comedies and histories within a living continuum of performance, editing, and ethical interpretation.
Shakespeare’s English kings are inseparable from Tudor historiography and the making of national myth. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577; 1587) and Edward Hall’s Union (1548) furnished plots and rhetoric for the Henry VI sequence, Richard III, Henry IV, and Henry V (with Agincourt, 1415, emblematic of patriotic memory). That chronicle habit persists in Browne’s antiquarian curiosity and reappears in Romantic historicism—Lamb’s relish for the old drama’s idiom; Coleridge’s interest in character as moral history; Wordsworth’s late conservatism after 1815. Pater reads these interlocked traditions against Victorian nation-building—after the Reform Act of 1832—where literary style helps adjudicate between civic authority, personal conscience, and the pageantries of the past.
Religious conflict and settlement supply the moral vocabulary uniting Browne’s Anglican piety, Shakespeare’s jurisprudential fables, and the Romantics’ self-scrutiny. The Elizabethan Settlement (1559), the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), Laudian ceremonial under Charles I, and the Puritan Commonwealth (1649–1660) conditioned debates on law, conscience, and mercy that Measure for Measure crystallizes. Later, the Evangelical revival and the Oxford Movement—John Keble’s Assize Sermon at St Mary’s, Oxford, 14 July 1833; John Henry Newman’s Tracts for the Times—renewed sacramental and medieval sensibilities that fed Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s symbolism. Pater registers these continuities, balancing doctrinal history with the aesthetics of restraint, penitence, and desire across prose, lyric, and stage.
Mid-century European networks, from the Revue des Deux Mondes (founded Paris, 1829) to London’s periodical culture, underwrote the cosmopolitanism that links Rossetti and Octave Feuillet. Rossetti (1828–1882), co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, translated early Italian poets (1861) and published Poems in 1870 amid controversy over the fleshly school. Feuillet (1821–1890), elected to the Académie française in 1862, wrote La Morte under the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–1870), refining a psychological realism prized in Parisian salons. Pater situates these figures beside Browne’s Urn-Burial and Shakespearean elegy, tracing a Europe-wide commerce of sentiment, medievalism, and style that crosses London, Paris, Florence, and Stratford.
Pater’s own Victorian milieu—educated at Queen’s College, Oxford; Fellow of Brasenose from 1864; publishing The Renaissance (1873) and Appreciations (1889)—mediates his approach to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Browne, Shakespeare, Rossetti, and Feuillet. Debates staged by Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), John Ruskin’s art moralism, and the aesthetic maxim art for art’s sake inform his Essay on Style (first printed in the Fortnightly Review, 1888). Mass literacy after the Education Act of 1870, new university reforms, and international periodicals enlarged his audience. The Postscript gathers this experience, presenting criticism as disciplined impression, historically alert yet personal, across three centuries of English and European letters.
Synopsis (Selection)
WORDSWORTH
Pater presents Wordsworth as a poet of moral earnestness and inward vision who spiritualizes nature and finds the sublime in ordinary life. He notes both the elevating simplicity of this vision and its tendency toward prosaic didacticism.
COLERIDGE*
Pater contrasts Coleridge’s rare, dreamlike poetic masterpieces with his diffuse philosophical writing, portraying a genius of exquisite but fragmentary inspiration. The essay highlights the pull between visionary imagination and personal irresolution.
CHARLES LAMB
Pater depicts Lamb as a humane, whimsical essayist whose love for Elizabethan literature and urban life shapes a delicate, playful, and elegiac prose. He emphasizes Lamb’s blend of humor, pathos, and affectionate nostalgia.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Pater celebrates Browne’s ornate, meditative prose as a baroque instrument for curious, devout reflection on mortality and wonder. Surveying Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus, he shows how style becomes a mode of reverie.
"LOVE'S LABOURS LOST"
Pater reads the play as a youthful exercise in wit and courtly affectation, where Navarre’s vow of study collapses before the Princess of France and her ladies. He treats its airy plotting and inconclusive ending as signs of Shakespeare’s early experimentation.
"MEASURE FOR MEASURE"
Pater interprets the drama as a severe inquiry into justice, mercy, and chastity, centered on Angelo’s hypocrisy and Isabella’s integrity under the Duke’s hidden orchestration. He stresses its austere mood and deliberate moral ambiguity as marks of Shakespeare’s maturity.
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS
Pater surveys the history plays to show how Shakespeare fuses pageant, politics, and character into a national drama from Richard II to Henry V. He focuses on the schooling of Prince Hal and the interplay of historical record with theatrical rhetoric.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Pater portrays Rossetti as a painter-poet whose sensuous medievalism and meticulous form unite color and cadence, especially in The House of Life. He underscores the intensity of Rossetti’s imaginative life and the fusion of visual and verbal art.
FEUILLET'S "LA MORTE"
Pater considers Feuillet’s novella a polished study of posthumous jealousy and conjugal passion, in which a widower confronts the secret inner life of his dead wife. He praises its restrained psychological realism and moral tact.
POSTSCRIPT
In 'Style,' Pater sets out principles of prose that demand exact expression, sincerity, and economy so that style becomes the precise equivalent of thought. He argues for the right word and a disciplined musical cadence over ornament for its own sake.
