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COPYRIGHT 2004 Southern Illinois University
In his late essay "Style" (1888), reprinted a year later in Appreciations, Walter Pater set out to explore the possibilities of prose as the special art of the modern world and to justify his own literary practice. Considering how rarely he theorized about the art of writing, "Style" ought to be important. Oddly, it has disappointed several critics. One notes that, after displaying his hauteur in an "absurd attack on Dryden" (Donoghue 222), Pater launches into a "desultory" discussion that "does not clarify its themes" (224). In addition to the intellectual confusion this writer detects, another commentator blames Pater for timidity. He is "being defensive in this rather convoluted essay," attempting to guard himself against "hovering charges of corrupting aestheticism or amorality" (Ward 73-74).
Critics have sought explanations for the perceived weakness of "Style" in Pater's relationship to his two current literary mentors, Flaubert and Newman. Pater reviewed the first volume of Flaubert's Correspondence for the Pall Mall Gazette (August 25, 1888), and "Style" appeared in the Fortnightly Review (December 1, 1888). A quotation from Flaubert's letter to "Madame X" (Louise Colet) appears towards the end of Pater's essay. It seems reasonable, then, to assume that Pater expanded a review of Flaubert's Correspondence into the essay "Style," "often considered a crystallizing and rationalizing of his theories and habits as a writer" (Monsman 148). Yet, it has been suggested, Pater's grasp of Flaubert was inadequate. He failed to see that, although he and the French writer were both seeking le mot juste, their aims were completely different. Pater wished to objectify an inner vision. Flaubert (it is alleged) "sought a passionless reproduction of facts" (Iser 48).
David de Laura has shown the degree to which Newman's "Literature" influenced Pater's views in "Style" (334). Newman supposedly provided Pater with a warrant for his emphasis on style as an expression of "soul," an inner individual essence of the writer's personality. Newman's influence may be at work, too, in Pater's demand for ascesis, the constant self-denial involved in the writer's craft. Some critics, however, seem as irritated by Pater's putative relationship to Newman as others are by his supposed borrowings from Flaubert. For instance, Denis Donoghue remarks disdainfully of the religious concept of style he thinks Pater assumed from Newman: Pater takes "upon himself the curse of labor and sweat. It is edifying I suppose" (229). Apparently several critics do not feel that connections made between "Style" and the work of Flaubert or Newman serve to explain Pater's essay or to rescue it from charges of incoherency.
There is a neglected aspect of the context of "Style," however, that may clarify Pater's aims. As in other of his writings, a submerged controversial intention is the clue to the development of Pater's argument. Polite and circumspect in his tone, oblique though at times ironic in the manner in which he sapped beliefs he opposed, Pater nevertheless was quietly inexorable. His method of dealing with Arnold's and Renan's idealized versions of Spinoza and of Marcus Aurelius, with the Goncourts' sentimental account of Watteau, or with the "impersonal" art of Prosper Merimee suggests a vigilant awareness of the weak points of attitudes or beliefs he rejected. These and other examples provide evidence that Pater did not ignore material he felt deserved criticism and that he possessed a variety of techniques to make his comments effective.
Given his habitually gentle and guarded approach, we should not be misled by Pater's reference in a footnote in "Style" to George Saintsbury's Specimens of English Prose from Malory to Macaulay. The comment seems to be highly complimentary, though with a hint that Saintsbury's approach is one particular to himself, with which, perhaps, not everyone will agree. Saintsbury, Pater remarks, "has succeeded in tracing, through successive English prose-writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in them, of which this admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover" (Works 5:12). This is not an example of caressing where one means to strike. Rather it is the deliberate removal of any suspicion of personal hostility from what is nonetheless to be a thorough critique. Clearly, Pater disciplined himself to erase any trace of ill-temper or unpleasantness from his speech and writing. As one acquaintance remarked, Pater cultivated "a wise, grave passiveness, a gentle susceptibility, a kind of soft impressionability ... I never remember a single unkind criticism or remark" (Benson 175). An indulgence in the combative manner nineteenth-century reviewers often adopted (under the influence of Macaulay, among others) would have shattered a state of mind needed to cultivate moments of aesthetic delight, like the one Marius experienced in the sunlit garden (Works 3:68-73) or those Pater himself recommended to his readers in the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance. He had "no sort of desire to label with contemptuous names those who must have appeared to him deaf and blind to the subtle and beautiful effects that made the substance of his own life" (Benson 182-83). It is clear, however, that his aversion to direct contradiction or argument did not imply that Pater was willing to surrender his convictions or that he would not seek to defend and propagate them. As his other controversial writings suggest, such a defense would be oblique.
It is easy to see what Pater must have found objectionable in Saintsbury's Specimens of English Prose Style from Malory to Macaulay. The premise of Saintsbury's introduction is that English verse and prose have diverged since the national literature "took a durable form in the sixteenth century." "Whatever may be its merits and defects" English prose style has been "different by the extent of the whole heaven of language from English verse style." Even when undertaken by writers who have included "some of genius," attempts to "make prose like verse" have been "radically mistaken." In fact, prose and verse diverge more markedly in English than they do in other languages. Hugo's and "to a lesser extent" Goethe's prose and verse are "remarkably similar in all but the most arbitrary differences" (xv). By contrast, Shelley's and Coleridge's poetry and prose "are radically different in all points of their style and verbal power" (xvi).
Saintsbury's brief sketch of the development of English prose has the qualities of a good university lecture. It is lucid, energetic, and easy to follow, providing a broad outline of the subject, a map the student can retain. Saintbury's preface offers a plausible sketch of the historical development of English prose and tells a clear story that has explanatory power. Readers need have no doubt what makes good prose and should be well-informed about the processes that brought it to fruition.
This opening essay suggests how Saintsbury succeeded in transforming himself from a journalist "in middle age into the most venerable of professors" and why "for generations of students he was the supreme exponent of Eng. Lit." (Gross 156). His persona is sensible and genial, his range of information wide and well-deployed. A deliberate disavowal of any attempt to "lay down didactically the principles" (Saintsbury xviii) of prose writing provides him with an excellent basis to do exactly that. He is quite open about his credentials. In the ten years since John Morley asked him to undertake the study of modern prose in The Fortnightly Review, he has "reviewed many hundreds of new books, and ... read again, or for the first time, many hundreds of old ones." The public can obviously have confidence in his pronouncements. Since Saintsbury's immense reading of old and new prose has not changed his opinions ("I do not know that the two processes have altered my views much" [xvii]), ordinary readers may feel that their impulses to breezily dismiss experimental or unfamiliar kinds of writing are fully endorsed.
For Saintsbury, the difference between prose and verse determines the quality of prose writing. The experiments of the later nineteenth century blur this fundamental distinction: "In our day prose style has become somewhat disarranged." Those who "have any pretence to style at all," however, understand that the merits of prose stem from a recognition of the utterly separate aims of the prose writer and the poet. Saintsbury concedes that during the ten years he has been studying the subject "considerable attention has undoubtedly been given by English writers to style." In his view, this effort has not led to any "distinct improvement in the quality of the product." The faults he detects in contemporary prose may be summed up under the two...
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