18,23 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Famed for his singular prose style as much as for his controversial aestheticist principles, Walter Pater (1839-1894) was one of the great essayists in a century of great essayistic writing. His first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance — one of the most original and influential texts of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement — was described by Arthur Symons as 'the most beautiful book of prose in our literature', and his later work moved Vernon Lee to call him 'the natural exponent of the highest aesthetic doctrine'. Selected Essays is a generous gathering of Pater's essays on literature, art, history, philosophy and mythology — all of them, in the words of Oscar Wilde, 'delicately wrought works of art'. The selection is accompanied by Alex Wong's critical and biographical introduction and rich explanatory notes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
SELECTED ESSAYS
OF WALTER PATER
EDITED BY ALEX WONG
Contents
Acknowledgements
My first thanks are to Michael Schmidt for suggesting this addition to what has hitherto been known as Carcanet’s ‘Fyfield’ series, henceforth re-baptized ‘Carcanet Classics’. My thanks extend, of course, to everyone else at Carcanet, and above all to my editor Luke Allan; also to Andrew Latimer, who helped the book through its last few days of preparation. I am also grateful to Alison Hennegan, for advice and cheering conversation regarding Pater and this selection; to Tess Somervell, for her helpful answers to a number of queries related to the literature of the Romantic period; to Arabella Milbank and James Robinson, for guidance on theological matters; to Alexander Schmidt of the University of Jena, for locating an elusive passage in Schiller; and to Seamus Perry for reinforcement in the search for some still more elusive references concerning Coleridge. Several friends and colleagues at St John’s, Cambridge, kindly helped me with problems in preparing the explanatory notes: especially Stacey McDowell and, for all things Platonic, Malcolm Schofield; also Elena Giusti, Renaud Lejosne and Andrew Chen. Then, in the very final stages of preparing the book, I received help and welcome encouragement from a number of scholars of Pater, especially Lene Østermark-Johansen, Kenneth Daley and Lesley Higgins. Particular thanks are due to Martin Golding of my former college, Peterhouse, for detailed observations and ruminations on a number of puzzles; and most of all, not only for thoughts and ‘second thoughts’ about Paterian matters, but for support of many kinds, to Sarah Green.
None of my academic colleagues, however, has had the opportunity to correct my errors, all of which therefore remain solely my own responsibility. I like to fancy Pater would have understood.
A.W.
Introduction
WALTER PATER (1839–94) was the central figure, ‘virtually the founder’, of the Aesthetic Movement that dominated the artistic culture of Britain in the final third of the nineteenth century.1 He was also one of the most individual stylists of the Victorian age, a model ‘prosaist’ for the aesthetically-minded aspirants of a time that was eager to cultivate prose as a fine art, emphatic in its fineness. Pater’s literary manner, with its urbane and diffident charm characteristically controlled by evident care and effort, and with touches of lyricism rising provocatively out of a background of discursive calm, was the indispensable medium in which he was able to propose and exemplify a subtly worked-out aesthetic sensibility, as well as a critical method. His thinking, virtually impossible to disengage from the special qualities of its expression, was founded upon principles of scepticism and subjectivism, and directed towards a desired state of discriminating attentiveness. Intensity and authenticity of experience, precisely understood by oneself through a continual process of honest self-scrutiny, was the first aim, ‘appreciation’ being the resultant mode in critical work, and ‘sympathy’ the pre-eminent moral virtue. Pater’s philosophy, his approach to the intellectual tasks he selected for himself, and the rarefied idiosyncrasies of the style itself, allured and animated many of his readers while earning the scorn of others.
In the twentieth century Pater was not so much forgotten as resisted, and frequently misrepresented, by most of the authoritative voices of the Anglophone literary world. Even if lately he has been the object of renewed scholarly interest, he is still oddly neglected beyond the academic pale, and it seems his full significance really has been largely forgotten. Nonetheless, that Pater has been ‘a shade or trace in virtually every writer of any significance from Hopkins and Wilde to Ashbery’, is a claim that has seemed reasonable to one recent critic, and it is not such a gross exaggeration that others might not think it possible to defend the notion.2 Between late Romanticism and nascent Modernism the writings of Walter Pater occupy an important place.
PATER’S OEUVRE
Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater’s first book, attracted more attention than its author had probably been expecting, and has remained the most famous of his works. It is a series of independent essays, mostly concerned with individual artists and writers: Botticelli, Leonardo, Joachim Du Bellay, and so on. These are anticipated by a methodological ‘Preface’ concerned with critical theory, and terminate in a ‘Conclusion’ which broadens the critical method into an apparently more general philosophy of life. The whole volume offers a celebration of the sensuous and intellectual achievements of classical humanism, or of what Pater calls the ‘Greek’ or ‘pagan’ spirit, discerned in its various phases as it re-infuses European culture from the end of the ‘Middle Ages’ down to the passionate Hellenism of Winckelmann, lover and historian of ancient art, in the eighteenth century.
The stir caused by the publication of this book seems to have been the great event in a generally quiet life, spent as a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and latterly as a shy but much-courted man of letters resident in London during the University vacations. Pater’s Renaissance, the first and most forthright expression, on a large scale, of his critical and ethical principles, met with a mixed response from its early reviewers: some qualified praise, coming largely from liberal and secularist quarters; some sarcastic disparagement of its intellectual rigour or scholarly plausibility; and a good deal of indignant condemnation on moral and spiritual grounds, for its undisguised religious scepticism and ostensible commendation of a life of sensation and self-involvement. To others, and chiefly to the younger readers about whose moral wellbeing some of the more exasperated critics professed themselves anxious, its extraordinary prose and exhilarating late-Romantic ideals came as a rousing surprise, if not a revelation: a new style in English literature, and an approach to art which, despite the recent activities of a handful of critics, such as the poet Swinburne, had hitherto seemed much more at home on the opposite side of the English Channel. The Renaissance became the essential literary work of the Aesthetic Movement, and remained a canonical title during the so-called ‘Decadence’, distilled from that earlier aestheticism, that flourished in the 1890s. Oscar Wilde, according to the memoirs of W.B. Yeats, called it his ‘golden book’ and declared: ‘I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written’.3
Pater continued to write critical essays for various magazines, but his next book, containing what Yeats thought ‘the only great prose in modern English’, was not published until nearly twelve years later. Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885) is a two-volume novel, set in and around Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Its fictional protagonist, who has been made ‘intentionally not very individual’, as one critic puts it,4 but who patently bears some temperamental resemblance to his creator, is a young man of an aesthetic and contemplative cast of mind, whose mental development—rather than anything one could call a ‘plot’—gives the book what it has of narrative. The chapters represent successively the operation of particular philosophical systems and environmental circumstances upon this delicate temperament, as Marius refines and modifies his ‘epicurean’ scheme of life, and negotiates the influence upon his moral sensibility of the Christian community to whom he finds himself mysteriously drawn. Marius was acknowledged as a major work, and for at least a couple of decades it was as much a point of common reference for aesthetically-minded readers as The Renaissance had been, if not more so.
In the long interval between The Renaissance and Marius, Pater’s fame had grown, but hostile critical notices had not ceased to accumulate. And in 1874 had occurred, it appears, another incident in a life of few dramatic incidents, although one about the precise nature, scale and significance of which we are left in the dark. A talented student at Oxford named William Hardinge, apparently notorious as a flirt and nicknamed ‘the Balliol Bugger’, was temporarily sent down from the University for inappropriate behaviour, and the few letters between his friends which form almost all our extant evidence about the situation imply that Pater had been implicated, and that some flirtation, at the least, is likely.5 There were rumours, in any case, which did not entirely vanish; and also, it may be gathered, some letters which have vanished—though one early source suggests that the threat of their being publicised may have been a considerable burden on Pater for some time.6 Suspicions about the erotic orientation of the always unmarried Oxford don, who in many places throughout his work discusses such topics as romantic friendships between men, or the beauty of the youthful male physique, were thus elided with the notion of the supposed ‘danger’ his sceptical, aestheticist philosophy might pose to the morals of young men. Still it is hardly clear that unease of this nature constituted the sole, or even the primary reason for the disapproval he continued to face from reviewers, churchmen and colleagues. To many or most of these, the other problems with Pater’s outlook—his seeming atheism and hedonism—would have been, and perhaps were, quite enough to damn him on their own.
In Marius the Epicurean, Pater attempted without the loss of integrity to answer some of the misgivings with which The Renaissance had been received. But he was also reformulating his principles and expanding them, as was only natural after more than a decade of pondering, much of which must have been carried on in a defensive mood. The depiction of Marius, safely transposed to Antonine Rome, constitutes a much more detailed account of the ‘epicurean’ elements of Pater’s ethic than had been possible in the brief and more narrowly limited ‘Conclusion’ to his first book, where his moral philosophy had received its clearest expression so far; but it also shows the growth of the protagonist’s mind, movements in his habits of thought, as some of those elements come at length to seem insufficient. Pater’s great novel, in which there are scarcely any external events to speak of, was a due consideration of the moral ramifications which the ‘Conclusion’ had left unexplored.
Pater had been a fellow of Brasenose, Oxford, since 1864. He held his fellowship until his death. But in 1885, the year of Marius, he and his two unmarried sisters, with whom he shared a home, moved to a house in London. There they lived, outside of term-time, until their final return to Oxford in 1893, the year before Pater’s unexpected death. In the London years he continued to write substantial critical essays, but much of his attention was now given to a series of ‘Imaginary Portraits’, in which he combined the forms and conventions of the essay and the short story. Each was an imaginative experiment with temperament and cultural context, which allowed the critic interested by the subtleties and mysteries of subjective experience free rein to deal with characters who, though they had never existed in reality, could be used to work out and symbolically represent the various aspects of Pater’s own thinking, the relationships between his leading ideas. In some, we are made witness to the mental life of a personality born outside of its proper element, or searching for the unattainable, or surprised by unanticipated impulses. In others the spirit of one phase of culture is thrown artificially into the embrace of another, in order to test—again symbolically, or in microcosm—how something like the ‘Renaissance’ might have happened, or been thwarted, under different and less appropriate circumstances. Thus, in two of them, the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, surviving incognito into the Christian age, bring both delight and disorder to Medieval communities.
The first of Pater’s ‘Imaginary Portraits’ had in fact been published as early as 1878. This is one of Pater’s most beloved works, ‘The Child in the House’, the least storylike of them all. It contains some of his subtlest thinking about the psychology of the aesthetic temperament: a Paterian or ‘Pateresque’ temperament, even if in outward fact the portrait is not strictly autobiographical. In other pieces, however, such as the four that were included in the book called Imaginary Portraits, Pater’s third volume, in 1887, certain traits of personality are conspicuously exaggerated: the cold and inhumane idealism, for instance, of ‘Sebastian van Storck’, a Dutch youth of the seventeenth century rather too wholly given to the philosophy of Spinoza. After the 1887 volume a few other pieces of short fiction, not all explicitly identified as ‘Imaginary Portraits’, but in a markedly similar vein, were published in various magazines, and these were collected after Pater’s death.7
The fictional works were central to Pater’s oeuvre, and the truth is that the boundary between his fictional and non-fictional writing is possible to locate only when thinking of the whole of each work, since this or that specific passage in the fiction is very likely to be of indeterminate genre when judged in isolation, and may in fact resemble criticism much more than storytelling; while on the other hand, the creative and speculative nature of Pater’s critical writing might sometimes be thought, with good reason, to approach the condition of fiction. In preparing the present selection, however, with space limited and the disjointing of fictional narratives (such as they are) undesirable, I have chosen to hold to a distinction between ‘essays’ and ‘fiction’ that is starker than it otherwise ought to be. To detach the essayistic passages from Marius, for example, has proven in practice too messy to be worthwhile for the reader or just to the writer. The one exception to my rule is ‘The Child in the House’, the last piece in the anthology, included for reasons that my comments above may begin to explain.
Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889), Pater’s fourth book, is a collection of literary-critical essays. Most of these had been previously published in periodicals over a span of more than two decades, stretching back as far as 1866. The ‘Essay on Style’, which opens the volume, is one of Pater’s most important and revealing statements of his own literary values, with Flaubert as paradigmatic saint and martyr of fine writing. It shows the price Pater set on scrupulousness, sincerity, and ‘impersonality’, these last two qualities offering no contradiction in his usage. Taken as a whole, Appreciations is Pater’s best claim to a distinguished place as a critic of literature specifically. In it can be found not only some of his best prose (though none of the most famous passages), but also much of the writing—parts, for instance, of the essays on ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ and ‘Wordsworth’—that retains the highest likelihood of striking today’s reader as still valid criticism, judged purely as such. The book’s title reminds us that critical appreciation was Pater’s natural mode, and that he knew it: adverse criticism, denigration, denunciation, did not form part of his repertoire as a writer, full though his essays are of gentle qualifications and doubts.
The fifth and final book Pater published before his death is perhaps the most surprising title, at least for those who have inherited the conventional view of him as the decadent dilettante, and it has probably been the most neglected of his major works during the past century. This was his study of Plato and Platonism, which appeared in 1893 and collected in print a series of lectures Pater had given a couple of years earlier to undergraduate audiences at Oxford. In a scrutiny of Plato’s thought he grappled with a central tension in his own: between philosophical idealism, with its eye on the abstract and its heart set on the mysterious absolute, and the aestheticism that in his own work had generally sustained the upper hand—worldly, particularizing, focussed on what lay visibly around one. ‘The book’, as Edward Thomas put it in his strangely ambivalent study of Pater, ‘is in fact a hymn to visible beauty—intellectual beauty often, but always visible’.8 For in Pater’s conception of Platonism, even ideas and moral values can make an aesthetic appeal to the sensitive, and they find material forms, however imperfect, in earthly things and persons.
After his death in 1894 at the early age of fifty-four, Pater’s friends and literary executors issued four further volumes with Macmillan. Greek Studies, a collection of previously published articles on Greek sculpture, myth and religion, came first, appearing in 1895. It includes some of Pater’s most accomplished work. It was followed in the same year by Miscellaneous Studies, which presented a range of essays on art, architecture and literature, together with three more ‘Imaginary Portraits’. Essays from both of these books have been included in the present anthology. A third volume, Essays from the Guardian, appeared in a small edition in 1896, issued by the Chiswick Press (it was added later to Pater’s Collected Works in Macmillan’s ‘Library Edition’). This contained a set of book reviews that Pater had contributed anonymously, between 1886 and 1890, to an Anglican weekly called The Church Guardian. The review-essays give important insights into Pater’s literary and ethical values, and are carefully and beautifully, if perhaps more rapidly, written; but placed beside his more important and highly finished essays they might seem relatively slight or ‘occasional’, and so for want of space, and very reluctantly, I have left them out of this selection.9
The final major addition to Pater’s oeuvre was an unfinished second novel, Gaston de Latour, set in sixteenth-century France.10 The general construction of the book is similar to that of Marius, bringing its protagonist into contact with such figures as the essayist Montaigne, the poet Ronsard, and the esoteric philosopher Giordano Bruno, as well as putting him through the horror of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Gaston too appeared in 1896, with a preface by Pater’s close friend C.L. Shadwell which explained that no more posthumous works were forthcoming. The full set of Pater’s Works, then, in the Macmillan edition, extends to nine titles in ten volumes, Marius filling two. Yet in spite of Shadwell’s decisive statement, several more reviews and other writings did eventually appear, in two American editions whose contents are largely but not entirely shared: an Uncollected Essays (1903), and a volume called Sketches and Reviews (1919). These books are much less common than the Macmillan ones, and their contents—which certainly do not include all of Pater’s previously uncollected journalism—have been generally less well known.
THEORY AND DOUBT
In matters of philosophy and religion, Pater was inclined from his youth to scepticism. Despite the scrupulous conventionality of his personal manners, he seems to have had an ‘antinomian’ streak in his personality not wholly dissimilar from that which he bestows upon the young Marius: ‘A vein of subjective philosophy, with the individual as the standard of all things, there would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men’s valuations.’11
An early and sympathetic critic called Pater a ‘deep though unwilling sceptic’.12 He himself, recognising the sceptical tendency of the ancient philosophies by which he was most exercised, considered such doubt to be a central element just as well of ‘modernity’. Hard to escape, then: at least for all those, like himself, for whom a strong religious faith did not seem to be possible. Modernity, as we see in Pater’s essay on ‘Coleridge’, meant for him the triumph of the spirit of relativity, the rejection of the absolute; and with this modern spirit comes an elevation in the moral and intellectual value of individualism. For if absolute standards have become impossible to take seriously, the individual must then be ‘the standard of all things’, and a mental stress upon the dignity of the individual, each set amid the diversity of so many other individuals, might come to seem an ethical good in itself, as well as making for an interesting field of study for the critical mind excited, as Pater was, by the heterogeneity of human nature. Imbued with this ‘modern’ spirit, and being temperamentally an aesthete and a critic (rather than a philosopher in the mould, say, of Hume), Pater is attracted to what may broadly be called the epicurean mode of thought. But his published work, especially Marius, suggests that he worried about the way in which his qualified espousal of such an ethic might be, and had been, interpreted, and that he felt compelled to emphasise the moral and emotional discipline which in his view inhered in it.
One of the crucial chapters in Marius is headed by the title ‘Second Thoughts’, while in Gaston de Latour there is one entitled ‘Suspended Judgement’. Both phrases recur in Pater’s writings, and they help to define his approach. He is forever reconsidering, making space for reconsideration. And he values those writers and artists who go about things likewise, distrusting the decisiveness of first impressions without dishonouring or forgetting them. Subtlety of understanding is what he looks for, which comes of a reaching past the face of things, past what is superficial: he takes a special pleasure in objects that reward such complexified, meditative thought. Sir Thomas Browne, one of Pater’s favoured authors, speaks of deuteroscopy, the ‘second view’ of things, and this is apparently Pater’s aim. And, since there may always be a third view, or a fourth, one’s final judgement must always be held in suspension.
Pater is a writer from whom it is possible to extract, in fact nearly impossible not to extract, something approaching to a ‘system’ of thought and values, but whose manner of writing nevertheless provides considerable and intentional resistance to the over-systematic interpreter. He carefully avoids the reductiveness inevitably risked by those who commit to stark or schematic expression. For Pater it is important never to reduce the world to stereotypes, since ‘it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike’.13 The aesthetic critic, like the true ‘essayist’—Pater is pre-eminently both—should never substitute preconception, classification, rigid structures of thought, for an attentive experience of the specific object itself. Such a writer will proceed flexibly and responsively, ‘never judging system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars’, as Pater repeats approvingly from Charles Lamb.14 And so to his early biographer, A.C. Benson, we can fairly presume that it did not seem any self-contradiction to say, on one page, that Pater was an author exceptionally ‘preoccupied with a theory’, and then, only a few pages later, that he could ‘hardly be said to have had any philosophical system’.15
A temperamental difference in this regard seems to separate Pater from an older English writer on aesthetics and morality to whom he owed a great deal, John Ruskin (1819–1900). In reading Ruskin one feels the force, and at times the frustration, of a systematizing, if not always systematic, mind; yet one that is so acutely and passionately observant of real particularities that it must struggle continually to adjust the stated principles, to accommodate what has been newly realized, to come to terms with exceptions to the rule. This partly explains why Ruskin’s ‘second thoughts’ sometimes come as moments of intellectual crisis, or at least in troubling conflict with earlier pronouncements. Pater, on the other hand, develops a style which, without eliminating pronouncement altogether, nevertheless attempts to see its matter from various points of view at the same time, or in immediate succession, so that judgements may be effectively kept suspended, or at least confessed to be questionable. We see how we might concur with this or that notion, imagine what it might be like to hold by the given fix on truth. From the middle of the 1870s especially, Pater attempted to incorporate ‘second thoughts’, or the possibility of them, into the very fabric of each essay or argument. Those who condemn Ruskin tend to think him too dogmatic; but Pater’s detractors complain of indecision, lack of commitment, vacillation.
If Pater was ‘preoccupied with a theory’, therefore, it was a theory always undergoing a process of refinement. Or else one might prefer to remove from Benson’s phrase the indefinite article. But the theoretic preoccupations perceptible in all of Pater’s writings did have implications for practice, both in the sphere of critical method and in the larger sphere of morals. These, in fact, are best imagined as concentric spheres, since for Pater the aesthetic and the intellectual were separable only artificially, and in the abstract, from ethics. Ethics, that is, in the broadest sense: the conduct of life, inwardly and outwardly.
To begin with the smaller sphere, the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance offers up the clearest and most succinct iteration of Pater’s critical principles:
“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in æsthetic 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 realise it distinctly.16
It was Matthew Arnold (1822–88) who had defined the critical thought of modern Europe as ‘the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is’. The comment had first been printed in 1861 in Arnold’s study On Translating Homer, and was afterwards made more famous by its repetition at the beginning of his classic meditation on ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’.17 Pater does not dismiss the aim as Arnold sees it. He doubts its practical attainability. ‘Things-in-themselves’ may exist in a noumenal realm, to use the Kantian terminology; but we have access to them only at second hand, being confined to the realm of appearances or ‘phenomena’. Pater, as he will make clear later in the same volume, is far from sure that even our sense of these appearances can be truly shared, still less that they might be or even should be agreed upon. If criticism is what Arnold says it is, then the goal is dauntingly far off: one can only begin by analysing one’s own impressions of things, with scrupulous care, with clarity of articulation, and as far as possible maintain an honesty of both thought and expression. Of any interesting object we must start by asking: ‘How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?’ As Pater reminds us, ‘one must realise such primary data for one’s self, or not at all’.18
The expansion of this mode of thinking beyond the methods of strictly critical enquiry is suggested—or suggestively assayed—in the much-decried and much-celebrated ‘Conclusion’ that lies at the other end of The Renaissance. Modern philosophy, Pater says, puts us in great doubt about our ability ever to know the world outside our own insular subjectivities. We have only ‘impressions’, and lack the wherewithal to test their true relation to external realities. ‘Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.’ Or so we are encouraged to think, at least, by cogent philosophical traditions both ancient and modern. Meanwhile our impressions, which are all we really know (and that only if we really take the trouble to get to know them), are in perpetual flux: ungraspable, unfixable and transient, like the ever-changing physical world by which they are occasioned. ‘A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life’, says Pater. And so by intense, discriminating attentiveness, which needs always to be renewed, we must make the best of what is offered.
Then comes the sentence that has ever afterwards been held up, too frequently in a misleading isolation, as an epitome of Pater’s thought: ‘To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’19
Reviewers, noting the unmistakable religious scepticism beneath these speculations, as well as the larger epistemological doubt, detected in all of this a ‘pagan’ morality. ‘Mr Pater lays himself open’, said one, ‘to the charge of being a heathen, or of trying to become one’.20 They were not unjustified: the whole book, virtually, is a celebration of the revival of antiquity, or, as Pater prefers to say, of the Greek spirit or sensibility. In the essay on ‘Winckelmann’ he explains that ‘Greek sensuousness’ had been in the ancient world, and for some souls in the modern world still might be, ‘shameless and childlike’; for the Greek had been contented with material reality, ‘at unity with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world’. This ‘pagan sentiment’, as Pater apprehends it, survives in the Christian world, the source and explanation of that ‘sadness with which the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from what is here, and now’.21 Yet the modern sensibility, imbued by cultural heredity with both pagan and Christian sentiments, might in fact find itself driven by this sadness, this ‘sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity’, into the world of experience with only the greater urgency—‘gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch’.22
Even in a passage based, as the whole ‘Conclusion’ is, on avowedly hypothetical premises, the writer who would later come to place a high value on ‘reserve’ in literature had gone too far for comfort, been too unguarded, in the positing of moral ‘conclusions’. Of course, Pater’s suggestion that ‘our one chance’ consists in ‘getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time’ was bound to be seen as a call for solipsistic epicureanism, mere pleasure-seeking and self-cultivation, all the worse for its seeming lack of regard for otherworldly benefits.23 To some of his more censorious readers, and those who knew of Pater only by swelling repute, he had become a sort of marauding hedonistic radical, a dandy evangelist among the impressionable youth of Oxford University, who were thought all too ready, in their precarious innocence, to catch this dubious fire. He had the distinction of being denounced by the Bishop of Oxford, and as broad-minded a person as George Eliot called The Renaissance a ‘poisonous’ book. A colleague at Brasenose, John Wordsworth, whom Pater had once briefly taught, wrote to him that although he admired ‘the beauty of style and felicity of thought’, he was ‘grieved’ by the moral conclusions of the book, as he understood them; namely, ‘that no fixed principles either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain, that the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment and that probably or certainly the soul dissolves at death into elements which are destined never to reunite.’ The letter is far from intemperate; it helps us to form a fair idea both of the real disquiet the book must have caused to some of Pater’s friends and students, and also of the distress Pater himself must have felt at the strength of their reactions:—
Could you indeed have known the dangers into which you were likely to lead minds weaker than your own, you would, I believe, have paused. Could you have known the grief your words would be to many of your Oxford contemporaries you might even have found no ignoble pleasure in refraining from uttering them.24
Pater withdrew the ‘Conclusion’ from the second edition of The Renaissance (1877), also rewriting some other sensitive sections. He replaced it, in an altered form, only in the third edition (1888), by which time he had already published a number of other works in which he had clarified his position, and been more explicit about the ethical implications of his aesthetic thought.
STYLE AND THE ESSAY
In the ‘Conclusion’, experience is reduced to a sequence of passing impressions, every moment or incident ‘gone while we try to apprehend it’. The aesthetic writer, therefore, must try first to apprehend, and then to comprehend, the elements of experience through and within the medium of language. The criticism Pater performs is a sensitive literary operation, entirely dependent upon his style. It relies on the ability of his prose to catch up for examination the fleeting subjective response, or to evoke a penetrating imaginative reconstruction, and through these means get closer to the ultimately unknowable thing, or personality—maybe the thoughts or feelings of another, to which we have no certain access; maybe their manifestation through artistic forms. His arguments and his mode of enquiry proceed by delicate expression and re-expression in a recognizably fastidious choice of words, as the essential condition of thought—of Pater’s kind of thought—on any subject. His syntax registers the shifting and self-correcting movements of a doubting but minutely attentive mind in the act of rumination.
Pater was renowned, and by many intensely admired, for his style. It was ‘unlike all other styles’, according to the novelist George Moore (1852–1933), who also calls Pater’s writing ‘the only prose that I never weary of’.25 Among the younger generation, Moore was just one of many strivers after finely crafted English ‘art prose’ who had been inspired by the example of Pater’s Renaissance and Marius. ‘I went about the fields’, he recalls of his first reading of the latter book, ‘saying to myself: the English language is still alive, Pater has raised it from the dead.’26 In the ‘Essay on Style’, Pater commends the painstaking dedication of Flaubert to an unflagging pursuit of the perfect, inevitable word, at all costs; and his own writing seems to have been comparably careful and laborious. Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), another younger friend and follower, remarked: ‘I have known writers of every degree, but never one to whom the act of composition was such a travail and an agony as it was to Pater’.27 If Pater was a prose virtuoso, he was of the kind that does not make brilliance appear effortless.
It is Pater’s meticulousness that warrants his hesitancy in statement and argumentation. ‘Conscientious inconsistency’, to borrow an appealing phrase from Marianne Moore; certainly a conscientious indecision, though in a mind which nevertheless thinks habitually and deeply about what decisiveness in various directions would be like. Such may be the case, or might be supposed: what we are examining is a kind of —, or a sort of —. Is he hedging his bets, a modern critic or scholar might ask, having been taught to distrust or condemn a style full of ostensible evasions—perhaps, so to speak, as it were? ‘In a sense it might even be said’, for example, is a curiously doubtful expression in what has widely been taken as a credo or manifesto, the notorious ‘Conclusion’.28
Yet what to some readers looks like imprecision is, from another point of view, only a way of intimating the desire for yet more precision, or the appeal to a precise sense of something which nevertheless eludes adequate articulation. This is why Pater sometimes sounds as though he were talking to himself, or seems to speak to the reader as if it were taken for granted that one understood what he meant, however insufficient the words. The notion of a shared connoisseurship becomes an implicit standard to be gestured towards. It is a genial manner as well as a critical strategy. Few writers, probably, use the word ‘so’ as often as Pater does, and when he tells us that a thing is so strange, so characteristic, so comely, the bid for precision is referred to our own sense of the matter—even if this is thoroughly conditioned by Pater’s own suggestions. ‘Just’, as an adverb, is another frequent word in his idiolect: just here, or just there; just this thought, just that quality. And the effect is comparable. Other favourites are ‘precisely’, as one expects from an aesthete; ‘really’, an intensifier usually asking us to heighten our sensitivity to some special quality or state; and ‘literally’, which in Pater does not mean what people nowadays require it to mean (‘unfigurative’), but rather conveys a demand that we stop to think about the etymology of a word, or the particular sense in which it is being used. All these words are inviting us to pay more attention. The writing continually reminds its reader how serious it is in the search for accuracy, the mot juste, without obliging itself to summarise or define; having intuited the meaning cumulatively from the complex and often hesitant discussion, we are persuaded to do without the firm formula. Not definition, in a strict or inflexible way, but circumscription is the aim of such prose: getting all the way around something and then gradually moving inward.
Even when writing about Pater, one finds oneself often reproducing the characteristics of his syntax: not only because of the seductiveness of the manner, but because in order to reduce the risk of misrepresenting his ‘many-sided’ thoughts and opinions one needs frequently to refine upon simple statements, usually by the employment of subordinate and parallel clauses that slightly modify the foregoing. Pater’s meandering, self-refining sentences may have been formed in the hope of ‘getting his prose to flow to a murmurous melody’, as George Moore supposes.29 But it has a philosophical function also. It expresses a turn of mind, the ‘Pateresque’ attitude to the business of verbal articulation as the basis of critical thought. ‘He had a parenthetical mind’, another early critic perceptively said; ‘The very Genius of Qualification followed him through all his thinking’.30 And if this is the main charge brought against Pater as a stylist, in particular by those who associate verbal precision above all with economical expression and decisiveness, to admirers it is one of his laudable virtues, producing a different kind of critical scrupulosity. Qualification, after all, does not mean only the weakening of statements by caveats and conditions, but the accounting for and making of qualities, the attempt to put a finger on what things are actually like.
It is worth adding that the idiosyncratic mood or tone of Pater’s writing is in part a result of the tension between a very obvious artifice in the style, and on the other hand a colloquial, almost spontaneous address to the reader. ‘Well!’, he says affably, at the start of many sentences and paragraphs; and he flatters or teases his audience, even when speaking of esoteric matters, with phrases like ‘as you know’, or ‘as you recall’. For all the meditated artistry of his prose, he is still operating within the tradition of the English ‘familiar essay’ as practised by Hazlitt, De Quincey or Lamb. Rhapsodic passages, such as the wonderful and immoderately famous ‘purple panel’ on La Gioconda (the ‘Mona Lisa’) in the essay on ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’, are relatively uncommon and therefore hardly representative.31 Yet even at its purplest, Pater’s prose always balances the deliberate discipline of its calmly evolving, hypotactic periods with the more casual fluency of sophisticated, gently wayward table talk.
Pater’s style, as I have portrayed it, is a formal expression of certain values and principles he appears to have espoused in some form or degree from the beginning of his writing life, though he developed them more and more explicitly after the reaction to The Renaissance. To examine these it is useful to make a leap into the later years of his career.
In the early 1890s, nearly two decades after that first period of notoriety, Pater was writing the series of articles and Oxford lectures that would become his last completed book, Plato and Platonism. He set out to describe the attitude of Socrates and Plato to the pursuit of knowledge. This method of thought he calls the ‘dialectic method’. The dialogues of Plato, in which Socrates conducts his philosophical enquiries through conversation with a range of interlocutors, while himself professing—with some measure of irony—not to know where the conversation will lead, are ‘dialectic’ in the most literal sense. Plato does not write treatises, which show patiently, by gradual argumentation from distinct premises, that a premeditated hypothesis is viable; instead he approaches his problems by taking into account and putting into contest diverse points of view (represented by the characters of the dialogue), and allowing Socrates to discount some of these as he proceeds, by showing their shortcomings. Total consensus is the closest thing, in such a composition, to the indication of the ‘truth’ of an argument. Pater shows that the ‘essayist’, represented primarily by Montaigne, adopts a similar method, proceeding not by dialogue with others, however, but by a continual internal dialogue: the testing and qualifying of one’s own ideas. The aim is a ‘many-sided but hesitant consciousness of the truth’.32 By explicitly connecting this spirit of ‘dialectic’ with the form of the essay, his own chosen medium, Pater has allowed his readers to see clearly that in speaking thus of Plato, or Montaigne, he is at the same time reflecting on his own practice and showing the traditions to which he belongs. The essay, he says—and we should remember that even in fiction he is typically essayistic in style—is ‘that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and issues’.33
Only ‘issues’, we may note. Not quite ‘conclusions’. Indeed, in the course of Pater’s remarks on dialectic, he ends a paragraph (pointedly, it is hard not to feel) by admiring, among the intellectual characteristics of Socrates, his way of ‘always faithfully registering just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never concluding’.34 Is it possible that this was meant as a wry and subtle joke, coming from an author who, though his works must have struck most readers as decidedly inconclusive, had attracted censure and derision particularly, all those years ago, with a ‘Conclusion’? In the meantime the offending chapter had been withdrawn, re-written and replaced, as we have seen, and other works had been largely engaged in a clarification and reformation of its supposed tenets, so that although Pater did not turn his back on the ‘Conclusion’ it is hardly unreasonable to see much of his subsequent work as a sustained attempt to recast, redirect and justify it. He seems to have adopted more consciously, and perhaps more cautiously, the habit or rule of ‘never concluding’, especially in ethical matters. His fictions, the ones that are finished, end ambiguously; his essays show tendencies, preferences, values, but are wary of fixed principles; tensions in his moral thought become increasingly emphatic, and are held in suspension. When he reprinted his essay on ‘Romanticism’ as the final chapter of Appreciations, he called it not a ‘Conclusion’ but only a ‘Postscript’. Valéry’s saying, well known to English readers because quoted by Auden, to the effect that poems ‘are never finished, but only abandoned’, has perhaps some valid application to Pater’s dialectic method, which does not, and should not, tie up all its loose ends in a strict and neat conclusion. To ‘shut up totally’ the question in hand, as the word conclude literally implies, would be alien to its mode of courting wisdom.
This dialectic or essayistic approach is also associated with two other important Paterian values: ‘reserve’ and ‘irony’. Charles Lamb was for Pater an illuminating example of both. ‘Glimpses, suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions’, are what Lamb gives us; ‘profound thoughts of old philosophers, hints of the innermost reason in things, the full knowledge of which is held in reserve’. Such is the stuff, according to Pater, ‘of which genuine essays are made’.35 And yet, as usual under his analysis, this method is also revealed as a personal trait, inviting sympathetic psychological imagination. And the personal element only heightens the effect. Lamb’s habit of ‘reserve’, we are given to understand, may not be unconnected with the ‘genuinely tragic element’ in his private life: misfortunes kept private, but a knowledge of which contributes shades of feeling to the ostensibly ‘slight’ and ‘humorous’ things which are presented on the surface.36 His grief, his anxiety and vulnerability, are among the things thus ‘held in reserve’, and may be taken as partly explanatory of his need to wear literary masks, hiding behind an alter ego, and employing so often ‘that dangerous figure’, as Lamb himself calls it: irony.37
Pater’s own avoidance of dogma, together with his tendency to dwell upon the finer points of aesthetic discrimination and appreciation, may mean that his writing too seems ‘slight’, or even ‘quaint’, to some; and although his humour or irony has not been as fully grasped by modern critics as by early readers, the characteristic of reserve must strike any reader looking in vain for bald expressions of personal opinion, or overt autobiography. As a writer highly conscious of the controversial nature of his thinking, especially after the publication of The Renaissance; as an aesthete and belletrist of wide interests, who had become an Oxford don and was surrounded by scholars of more rigorously ‘academic’ methods and, though not always deeper, more narrowly focussed expertise than his own; as a man whose erotic feelings seem to have been directed primarily, perhaps exclusively, towards young men, in a situation in which many such youths were in his charge, and at a time when homosexual acts were judged immoral by many and ruled illegal; and, after all, merely as a sensitive and bookish individual, Walter Pater may very well have had his own personal or psychological reasons, like Lamb’s, for the cultivation of reserve in utterance.
A.C. Benson records that Pater was known at Brasenose to be a paradoxical conversationalist, ‘apt to talk, gently and persistently, of trivial topics, using his conversation rather as a shield against undue intimacy’.38 Of this ironical reticence Benson gives a convincing explanation, the more convincing (rightly or wrongly) because it sounds so much like the kind of thing Pater himself might have said about one of his subjects:
Probably this habit arose from the fact that he was of a shy and sensitive temperament, and that to give a real and serious opinion was a trial to him. He disliked the possibility of dissent or disapproval, and took refuge in this habit of irony, so as to baffle his hearers and erect a sort of fence between them and his own personality.39
His putative fear of giving ‘a real and serious opinion’ may try the patience of some readers. But it was also a habit, even a merit, assigned by Pater to the venerable Socrates, whose irony may have been useful and ‘welcome’, he says, ‘as affording a means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching’. This in itself might sound like a fault, a failure of intellectual responsibilities, but the next sentence establishes its value: ‘It belonged, in truth, to the tentative character of dialectic’.40 And so the custom of never concluding may have been a bona fide philosophical method, a symptom of personal temperament, and a mere excuse, all at once. We know that Pater read with interest the correspondence of Flaubert with Louise Colet, since he quotes from it extensively in the ‘Essay on Style’. One wonders if he noted down with special pleasure a passage from the letter of 27 September 1846, in which Flaubert confesses, not without irony: ‘I observe much, and never make conclusions: an infallible way of not being mistaken’.
PATER’S DEVELOPING THOUGHT
If Pater’s thinking after 1873 was, as I have said, largely preoccupied with the same questions as had been addressed already in The Renaissance and its ‘Conclusion’, let us consider some of the ways in which he refined his earlier thoughts in returning to them. ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end’, Pater had said in 1873. In an essay on Wordsworth published the following year and later heavily revised for Appreciations (from which I quote this only lightly retouched passage), such thoughts are laid out again, but with a more explicit moral emphasis:
That the end of life is not action but contemplation—being as distinct from doing—a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this principle, in a measure: these, by their very sterility, are a type of beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art, is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified: to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and poetry. Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of impassioned contemplation.41
For Pater, a conception of life which confines its attention to the practical pursuit of material aims and the strategies for their attainment is, if not actually and irredeemably distasteful, at least a view requiring impassioned contemplation as a moral antidote. ‘Against this predominance of machinery in our existence’, he continues, ‘Wordsworth’s poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest.’ Contemplation, then—not, as before, mere ‘experience’, but contemplative experience—is here deemed an ‘end-in-itself’.
Pater’s experiments in fiction gave him the presumably welcome freedom to explore such ethical considerations with even less danger of binding himself to firm statements of principle, and Marius the Epicurean shows its protagonist developing a similar sense of morality as a matter of ‘being as distinct from doing’—even if, as will be seen in a moment, he is also convinced by the force of his own conscience that mere acquiescence in what is morally unsatisfactory in the world is an unacceptable position.
Marius develops his ‘epicurean’ outlook early in life, and the chapters which delineate its contours and development in his mind, recalling, while they explain and justify, the scepticism and aestheticism of the ‘Conclusion’, take pains to show that Marius is no sensualist, and neither immoral nor amoral, but sensitive and humane. Nevertheless there does come a change in his ideas. In the chapter called ‘Second Thoughts’, the essayistic narrator explains the mental evolution of the young protagonist as a natural alteration in the point of view of a person growing older. Epicureanism is ‘ever the characteristic philosophy of youth’—
ardent, but narrow in its survey—sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical. It is one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man’s life there) which it may be said to be the special vocation of the young to express.42
What this presumably communicates to most readers familiar with Pater’s other work is the author’s sense of having outgrown some of his old ideas, his need to place them now in a wider context; yet without repudiating or abandoning them, and with the sincerity of the earlier thinking, both his own and that of Marius, re-affirmed. Or perhaps, if the distinction is truly valid, it may have been the expression of the principles, rather than the principles themselves, that needed reworking. The subjectivism Pater has always insisted upon is now enlisted to defend, so long as they are sincere, and within certain limits, the respectability of ‘partial ideals’—varying between individuals, of course, but also evolving throughout the mental history of the same individual under the unconstant pressure of second thoughts. There is no implication that Marius has been foolish, no suggestion that he ought to have reached his later perspective at an earlier date, and no offensive narratorial knowingness: only the delicate dramatic irony we see here, as the narrator steps back from the free indirect. Marius remains ‘the Epicurean’ by temperament, and by the lasting effect on his psyche of his youthful ideas, but in the rest of the novel he is looking for something more. In contact with Stoicism, idealism of various kinds, a humanistic view of cultural heritage, and finally the spiritual, aesthetic and familial values of Christianity, he gradually achieves an enlargement of his sensibility: a ‘many-sidedness’.
In Marius, then, and also in Gaston de Latour, changes of mind are necessary, natural events in the life of the thinking and feeling individual, but they need not involve a complete rejection of former ideas. Instead they are effects of the mind’s ongoing conversation with itself while accosted by the multiplicity of exterior reality, including the ideas of other people. First thoughts, refined and modified, are incorporated with second thoughts so that the one-sided outlook becomes many-sided; limitations are identified and routes around them are found, but the evolution of sensibility is a cumulative process driven by the dialectic spirit. Paterian subjectivism leads not to mere hedonistic solipsism, the contented imprisonment of each consciousness in its own dense epistemological atmosphere, but rather to a broad intellectual sympathy in which strictly contradictory visions of the world are taken to be simultaneously valid, based on criteria of sincerity, attentiveness, and so on, rather than any criterion of absolute truth. This is a notion that steals upon Marius after a night-time chat with Apuleius, the author of The Golden Ass:
Yes! the reception of theory, of hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a great deal on temperament. They were, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament. […] For himself, it was clear, he must still hold by what his eyes really saw. Only, he had to concede also, that the very boldness of such theory [as thatexpounded by Apuleius] bore witness, at least, to a variety of human disposition and a consequent variety of mental view, which might—who can tell?—be correspondent to, be defined by and define, varieties of facts, of truths, just “behind the veil,” regarding the world all alike had actually before them as their original premiss or starting-point; a world, wider, perhaps, in its possibilities than all possible fancies concerning it.43
Scepticism about the capacity of human minds in concert to ascertain a common truth with regard to any object or question, let alone in the search for a general philosophy, ultimately gives way to an exciting sense of the relativity of truth, enjoyed for its variousness almost as one enjoys variety and diversity in aesthetic matters. And indeed this subjectivism, not despairing but sympathetic and imaginative, does become an aesthetic value for Pater. Truth, as he says in the ‘Essay on Style’, is essential to literary art: ‘there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that’. But truth in this context is a question of ‘the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within’. It consists in the lucid and effective representation of the writer’s special ‘sense of fact’, which will naturally differ from yours or mine. ‘Soul-facts’, rather than ‘facts’ supposedly standing independent of a specific perceiving mind, are Pater’s prime subjects, both in his critical studies and in his explorations of fictional personalities.44 As a writer on art and literature what he wants to articulate is, in a favourite phrase of his, the vraie verité of the artist or the work. Vraie verité, the ‘true truth’, is a phrase which both insists on the truthfulness of the truth discovered, and at the same time gently implies that other ‘truths’—still true, therefore, but less so—might also have been advanced. It makes the truth truer while also subjectivizing it.
In Pater’s late work, especially in Gaston de Latour, the rather bleak sense of mental isolation detectable in the earlier ‘Conclusion’, in which each of us had been ‘a solitary prisoner’ possessed only of our own ‘dream of a world’, changes into a more enlivening and morally constructive sense of the surprisingness and mysteriousness of things and persons outside us. ‘On all sides we are beset by the incalculable.’45 Objects out there in the world are crowding around us, waiting to be understood for what they are, and not simply configured with a ‘stereotyped’ scheme of the world. This even becomes a principle of ethics. According to Pater, a sense of the unpredictable variousness in humanity (‘The diversity, the undulancy, of human nature!’)46 was so profound in Montaigne that even he himself ‘seemed to be ever changing colour sympathetically therewith’.47
A.C. Benson thought that Pater’s whole ethical outlook involved the substitution of ‘sympathy for conscience’, which may not be accurate but is worthwhile food for thought.48 Was Pater reflecting on his own character, for example, when he said of Botticelli that ‘his morality was all sympathy’?49 As for the changing of colour, it may be thought that Pater was a chameleon with a limited palette: ‘narrowness of range’ was one of the traits attributed to him in an admiring article by Havelock Ellis in 1885.50 But, in the end, there are limits to our sympathy, and it makes good sense for critics to confine themselves to subjects they feel especially able to understand or ‘appreciate’. Furthermore it is probably significant that the word Pater usually chooses is ‘sympathy’ (feeling with), and not ‘empathy’ (feeling into). Breadth of sympathy is an important ethical quality or function for Pater, and must involve some empathetic reaching; but in his selection of critical and fictional material, the fellow-feeling is much more a matter of ‘elective affinities’.
On the other hand, Pater’s commitment to sustained inner debate has the effect of pushing his sympathies simultaneously in opposite directions, so that the things which he appears to value are sometimes tensely antithetical to one another, on the surface. The unconventional, ‘antinomian’ side of Pater inspired outrage and suspicion, excitement and intellectual frisson. He can write with enthusiasm about ‘rebellion’, whether in personal feeling or cultural history. He praises the ‘pagan’ view of life with an apparent conviction that some might have thought it prudent to disguise. Even in later works, in which he is supposed by some to have been disablingly over-cautious, ostensibly homoerotic material is presented with notable frankness. Yet he has also what one might call his conventional or conservative side—though relatively apolitical in the practical sense. He can enter at least provisionally into the spirit of Plato’s Republic, repressive to the arts; and his seeming admiration, possibly with a touch of repugnance, for the rigidly anti-individualist culture of classical Sparta, in the essay on ‘Lacedæmon’, may even be somewhat disturbing to modern readers. His early essay ‘Diaphaneité’, which ends with thoughts of ‘the regeneration of the world’, tries to imagine an ideal type of character, from which ‘the pedant, or the conservative’ is sharply distinguished; but then again, so is ‘anything rash and irreverent’.51 In short, we are obliged to take into account many contradictions in Pater’s work, and to join him in negotiating a balance. The dialectic process should therefore be understood as an unending search for the most acceptable combination of, or compromise between, opposing values. Despite his admiration for revolutionary thinkers and questioners, and despite the splash he himself had made in the early years of his fame, he is also attracted to character types, like ‘Emerald Uthwart’ in one of his ‘Imaginary Portraits’, who exemplify an instinct for submissiveness, orderliness, deference to tradition.
… Despite the splash—or because of it? In any case, not even Uthwart can resist the one fatal outbreak of a quite different impulse, the one romantic and heroic eruption from order, ‘an act of thoughtless bravery, almost the sole irregular or undisciplined act of Uthwart’s life’—which results, to his surprise, but also with a sense of inevitability, in a lasting and haunting dishonour: fair or not, depending on one’s point of view.52 There was glamour as well as nobility in the reckless act.
