Essays from 'The Guardian' E-Book

Walter Pater

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Walter Pater's "Essays from 'The Guardian'" is a compelling collection that showcases his innovative literary style and philosophical musings. Written during the late 19th century, these essays reflect the aestheticism movement, which emphasized beauty as a fundamental component of artistic expression. Pater's prose is characterized by its lyrical quality, intricate structure, and profound exploration of art, culture, and human experience. His critiques delve into various topics, from Renaissance art to contemporary literature, embedding each analysis with an aesthetic insight that resonates with the era's intellectual debates. Walter Pater, a prominent philosopher and critic, greatly influenced the aesthetic movement with his emphasis on individualism and the sensory experience of art. Having studied at Oxford and deeply engaged with other leading thinkers of his time, Pater sought to bridge the gap between philosophy and literature. His rigorous academic background and a profound appreciation for beauty inspired these essays, providing readers with a glimpse into the artistic currents that shaped the Victorian era. "Essays from 'The Guardian'" is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the intersection of art and intellect in the late 19th century. Pater's thoughtful reflections encourage readers to engage deeply with art and literature, making this collection a vital addition to the canon of 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.

Leseprobe

Walter Pater

Essays from 'The Guardian'

Enriched edition. Exploring Beauty and Art in Victorian Literature

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Dylan Bird

Edited and published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4057664593894

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

Essays from 'The Guardian'

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Introduction

Table of Contents

This collection brings together Walter Horatio Pater’s contributions to The Guardian, presenting a compact portrait of his critical mind at work in the periodical press. Rather than a comprehensive body of his writings, it is a focused gathering of nine essays, each originally occasioned by a specific book or topic, now arranged to show their cumulative reach. The purpose is to preserve and reframe Pater’s newspaper criticism for sustained reading, allowing the brief, timely pieces to illuminate one another. Read together, they offer an accessible entry into Pater’s mature manner and a measured counterpoint to his longer studies and fiction.

All the pieces here are essays of literary criticism, written in the form of reviews, appreciations, or reflective notices. Their subjects span poetry, fiction, diaries, and the history of the stage, with examples drawn from both English and French writing. Pater attends to poets of the English canon, living contemporaries, and continental authors, treating each with the same careful attention to style and intellectual temper. The variety of texts under review—verse collections, a novel of ideas, a private journal brought to print, narrative tales, and a historical survey—allows him to test and clarify his critical principles in diverse settings.

Although occasional in origin, the essays cohere through Pater’s distinctive approach. He privileges the felt impression of a work—its tone, cadence, and coloring—while situating it within a lineage of minds and forms. He is attentive to the ethical dimension of style without turning criticism into doctrine, preferring precise description over controversy. A tactful balance between analysis and evocation gives these pages their lasting interest. The prose is deliberate and finely modulated; the judgments are cautious yet definitive. Across subjects, Pater returns to questions of temperament, culture, and the shaping power of art, asking how style refines perception and conduct.

Taken as a whole, the volume maps a late-Victorian critic’s horizon. Pater measures central figures of English poetry alongside contemporaries in the press, and opens the window to French voices seldom discussed in English newspapers of the time. The Guardian’s column space requires economy, yet he produces distilled arguments and memorable characterizations. The collection thus records how a leading aesthetic thinker addressed general readers without relinquishing nuance. It also shows his critical cosmopolitanism: judgments grounded in English letters, sharpened by a sympathetic regard for European counterparts. The result is an instructive record of taste, method, and literary citizenship.

In treating the English tradition, Pater uses concise essays to sketch broad patterns of influence and intention. His piece on English literature in general proposes coordinates for reading the national canon as a living conversation. The study of Browning considers a poet’s dramatic intelligence and the textures of his verse, while the account of Wordsworth reflects on inwardness, nature, and the shaping of language. Across these, Pater avoids narrative summary, preferring to trace the movement of a mind through its chosen forms. He clarifies what distinguishes each writer’s craft and how their work cultivates sensibility in successive generations.

Several essays respond to contemporary publications, balancing immediacy with repose. The notice of Robert Elsmere addresses a novel situated amid discussions of belief, scholarship, and social conscience, attending to its tone rather than rehearsing its plot. The remarks on Mr. Gosse’s poems weigh modern lyric habits—measure, imagery, and decorum—against inherited standards. In approaching a survey of the English stage, Pater treats theatrical history as an index to civic manners and changing tastes, drawing from the record to suggest how audiences educate artists and are educated in turn. These pieces exemplify his capacity to mediate between the moment and tradition.

The essays on French materials reveal Pater as a reader across borders. His consideration of Amiel’s Journal Intime takes the printed diary as a study in self-scrutiny and intellectual conscience. The account of Ferdinand Fabre situates provincial narrative within a precise moral and social landscape, while the note on Augustin Filon’s contes values fineness of outline and the art of brevity. In each case, Pater links personal temperament to literary form, suggesting how national character and individual choice meet on the page. Together, these studies widen the collection’s scope and confirm the quiet authority of his cosmopolitan criticism.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Walter Horatio Pater (1839–1894) wrote amid the late Victorian convergence of expanding print culture, religious unsettlement, and Anglo-French exchange. Educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, and elected a fellow of Brasenose in 1864, he became a central voice of Aestheticism after The Renaissance (1873). His contributions to the London High Church weekly The Guardian, later gathered by Macmillan in 1901 as Essays from ‘The Guardian’, bring together English and Continental subjects—Browning, Wordsworth, Edmund Gosse, Amiel, Ferdinand Fabre, and Augustin Filon—within a shared milieu. The essays crystallize how an Oxford-trained critic, attentive to style and moral nuance, addressed a readership shaped by Anglican culture and modern intellectual debate.

Victorian religious and intellectual controversies form the backdrop to these pieces. After Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Essays and Reviews (1860), and continental biblical criticism (Renan’s Vie de Jésus, 1863), questions of faith and conscience entered the mainstream. Oxford, still shadowed by the earlier Tractarian movement yet increasingly liberal, became a testing ground. The Guardian’s Anglican audience followed these disputes closely, later encountering Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) and the posthumous Journal intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881; English translation 1885). Wordsworth’s meditative “religion of nature” supplied another register for reconciling belief and experience, a counterpoint to positivist and agnostic currents shaping late nineteenth-century criticism.

The collection reflects sustained Anglo-French traffic in ideas. Pater’s own criticism had long absorbed methods associated with Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine, and he remained attentive to French moralists and novelists. Ferdinand Fabre (1827–1898) anatomized provincial Catholic life in Languedoc, while Augustin Filon (1841–1916), displaced by the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, settled in London and interpreted English letters for a French audience. Amiel’s Geneva diary, appearing in French in the 1880s and swiftly translated in Britain, circulated through the same transnational channels. London and Paris—linked by publishers, translators, and exiles—formed a single critical horizon within which Pater judged literary style, belief, and temperament.

These essays also belong to the infrastructural boom of the Victorian press. The Guardian, a London High Church weekly founded in 1846, addressed a national middle-class readership shaped by parish networks, Mudie’s lending library, and W. H. Smith’s railway bookstalls. Reviews could swiftly recalibrate an author’s standing, whether in poetry, the novel, or theatre history. Pater’s shorter notices, later collected by Macmillan in 1901, exemplify how periodicals curated conversation across professional and devotional communities. The same circuitry amplified debates around Browning’s late reputation, Wordsworth’s editorial recovery, and the literary merits of continental writers, forging a critical commons that linked Oxford seminar rooms to circulating libraries and provincial reading societies.

Poetry’s recanonization in the 1880s and 1890s underwrites Pater’s pieces on Browning and Wordsworth. The Browning Society (founded 1881) energized close reading of the dramatic monologue; Browning’s Asolando appeared in 1889, the year of his death in Venice, followed by burial in Poets’ Corner (1890). Wordsworth’s authority, renewed through William Knight’s monumental Poetical Works (1882–1889), furnished Victorians with a language of moral sensibility and natural piety. Pater enters this moment not as a partizan but as a stylist, weighing rhythm, tone, and ethical suggestion. His Anglican readers, negotiating scientific modernity, often sought in these poets a tempered spirituality compatible with modern criticism and civic duty.

The theatre’s changing status forms another thread. Nineteenth-century stage history—codified in John Doran’s Their Majesties’ Servants (1864) and expanded by R. W. Lowe’s new edition (1888)—coincided with the profession’s rehabilitation, symbolized by Henry Irving’s knighthood in 1895 and the prestige of the Lyceum company with Ellen Terry. Yet the Theatres Act of 1843 and Lord Chamberlain’s censorship still shaped repertoire, while antiquarian research lent the stage a national genealogy from Betterton to Kean. Pater’s attention to such histories aligns with his broader interest in performance, decorum, and the interplay of tradition and innovation, themes that also inform his judgments on poetry, prose, and continental narrative art.

Shifts in authorship and criticism inform the essay on Edmund Gosse, a civil servant at the Board of Trade and a prolific mediator of European literature. Gosse’s New Poems (1891) and In Russet and Silver (1894) appeared as London played host to Nordic drama and French influence; J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society (founded 1891) and the advocacy of Ibsen by British critics accelerated cosmopolitan tastes. Figures like Andrew Lang and Arthur Symons shared platforms with Gosse in periodicals that readers of The Guardian might also consult. Pater, writing before the shock of 1895, navigated this climate with measured aestheticism, attentive to form yet wary of mere novelty.

Finally, the essays exemplify Pater’s mature critical ethic—patient discrimination in style, historical tact, and an education of the senses. His “Style” (1888), Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Plato and Platonism (1893) articulate a humanism grounded in Oxford’s classical curriculum after the University reforms of the 1850s. The selections gathered from The Guardian enact that program in miniature: English and French cases tested for coherence of form and life, moral temper and expressive precision. Across debates on faith, national theatre, Romantic legacy, and cosmopolitan modernity, Pater offers not doctrine but cultivated judgment, modeling a late Victorian criticism capable of reconciling tradition with the intensities of contemporary experience.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

I. ENGLISH LITERATURE

A reflective survey-review of English letters that traces key periods and representative writers, stressing the interplay of historical context and style and advocating a finely discriminating, aesthetically grounded criticism.

II. AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"

An appraisal of Amiel’s introspective diary as a modern spiritual confession, charting his oscillations between skepticism and religious longing and valuing its subtle psychological self-scrutiny and cultivated aesthetic sensibility.

III. BROWNING

A compact reassessment of Robert Browning’s achievement, highlighting the dramatic monologue, intellectual and moral energy, and psychological penetration, while acknowledging his difficulty and situating him among the defining voices of Victorian poetry.

IV. "ROBERT ELSMERE"

A review of Mary Ward’s novel about a clergyman’s crisis of faith under historical criticism, noting its earnest debates on belief and social duty within an expansive domestic and intellectual narrative.