Pater as polemicist in 'Prosper Merimee'.

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JAN-04

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And still I wonder how much you may be losing, both for yourself and for your writings, by what, in spite of its gaiety and good-nature and genuine sense of the beauty of many things, I must still call a cynical, and therefore exclusive, way of looking at the world.

(Pater to George Moore, 4 March [1888]) (1)

Some readers, at least, will have been struck by a contrast between the account Moore later gave of Pater when quoting this letter and the implications of the letter itself. Moore pictures an abstracted, gentle, and detached eccentric whose politeness was a device to conceal the degree to which, most of the time, he listened only to the music of the prose he was 'composing always'. (2) The letter Moore treasured and several times reprinted paints a different picture. Affable though his manner may be, the energy, force, and direction of Pater's criticism are more striking. The younger writer's 'cynical and therefore exclusive' attitude held dangers both moral and artistic ('for yourself and for your writings'), which Pater is keen to notice.

Recent critics have not generally chosen to emphasize the side of Pater that this note to Moore suggests. Rather than Pater the polemicist, the critic of ideas or attitudes he thought wasteful or destructive, they have preferred to dwell on the (presumed) psychological or sexual needs, guilt, and dilemmas his writing reveals. Naturally, terminologies and formulas have altered over the last thirty years but this line of interpretation has outlived several such changes of fashion. Pater's internal struggles, the problems involved in his intellectual allegiances and emotional inclinations (even such as the fear of blackmail), (3) the tension, suppression, and covert antagonism in his writings have provided most of the field of discussion. Long ago, J. J. Conlon's seminal account of Pater's relationship to French literature saw this as an instance of the strain Pater was under:

Merimee's impersonality puzzled Pater and troubled him: the sophistry about 'personal impersonality' is evidence enough of Pater's concern. Why it should trouble him is another matter [...]. A major part of Pater's difficulty with Merimee is that he sensed in the French writer feelings closely related to his own published reflections on the human condition. (4)

Given the increasing interest in and widespread assumptions about Pater's sexuality, critics are even readier to discuss his work in terms of its strain, stress, and anxiety than Conlon was and have a whole new vocabulary in which to do so. Richard Dellamora, for example, speaks of Pater's 'ambiguous position' at Oxford as the 'member of a male elite' who, at the same time, was the subtle propagandist 'on behalf of a form of desire' which threatened that elite. This ambiguity 'placed him in a highly self-conscious relation, at once complicitous and antagonistic, to literary expression'. (5) Other writers have preferred to endow Pater with a different psychological configuration and set of problems. Instead of Dellamora's propagandist of male-male love, we may choose Jay Fellows's sadomasochist: 'With Pater in general, guilt is usually conditionally Oedipal, to be worked out, if that is the proper phrase, by the penitence of an exotically aesthetic sadomasochism.' (6) Possibly the vaguely necrophiliac Pater of W. F. Shuter may be an inviting alternative ('Whereas the youthful Pater sought to distance the thought of death by heightening the mind's mobility, the older Pater wanders among graves, transcribing epitaphs and consecrating his intelligence to the service of the dead'). (7)

These and other critics wish to tear away the benign or impassive mask which puzzles them as much as it did some of Pater's own contemporaries. Since they wish to pluck out the heart of Pater's mystery, they have to assume that mystery, in the form of concealed troubles, is the determining factor in his work. (8)

There are, of course, problems in these interpretations ('diagnosis' of a long-dead subject and the fluctuating nature of our own psychological terminology, to name the most obvious), but such readings have produced much of interest. Without denying the force and value of these accounts, however, it might be worth proposing another frame of reference in discussing Pater. How useful would it be to explore Pater's art of communication rather than his presumptive inner wounds, psychological strains, or self-exploration? Perhaps the many attempts to decipher Pater's hidden messages have concealed his practical achievement. Whatever else he may have been, above all he was a communicator. His regard for exactness, for the utmost clarity of meaning, is well attested, but Pater's nuanced, highly textured style was concerned with persuasion as well as precision. He wished to win his readers over as well as to define his own meaning. Given this point, an examination of Pater's style in terms of its rhetorical resources and strategies might be more useful than one which viewed it as the product of someone thinking aloud, and trying to articulate or resolve his inner conflicts.

The first product of Pater's late phase (1890-94), 'Prosper Merimee' was presented as a lecture at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, on 17 November 1890 and at the London Institution on 23 November before being printed in The Fortnightly Review in December of the same year. Its multiple presentation within so short a period suggests Pater's keen intention that his voice should be heard. A contemporary account confirms this impression. Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper record Pater's refusal, during the lecture on 23 November, to look at his audience and the 'weight of shyness athwart' his eyes, but add 'what determination--almost brutality there is about the lower part of his face'. (9) It is an interesting suggestion of the way in which Pater resolutely forced himself to communicate, of his earnest desire, despite his awkwardness and reserve, to present his ideas in public.

The opening passage of 'Prosper Merimee' gently questions and undermines intellectual and emotional attitudes which seemed potent and inescapable at one time. By extension, it also interrogates a general human assumption that the latest fashion in thought is final. Pater chooses turns of phrase each of which carries some little implication of distancing or irony. That much that had 'warmed the imagination' of the eighteenth century 'was recently become incredible' (10) for someone born in 1803 hints at the faddish nature of intellectual catchphrases which briefly render a preceding vocabulary 'incredible'. The parallel between Napoleon 'sealing the tomb of the Revolution' and 'Kant's criticism of the mind' is again mildly ironic. Napoleon 'foreclosed' the problems the Revolution had raised. He did not answer them. Perhaps Kant's achievement was of a similar order and the Kantian revolution was as temporary in its effects as the Napoleonic coup d'etat. 'Kant's negations' (p. 12) concerning 'the unseen world', his rejection of metaphysical claims and language, like the Eighteenth Brumaire, were bold and striking gestures rather than final answers. Bathetic juxtapositions ('above all the ecstasy and sorrow of love [...] at least for a pastime' (p. 12)) and careful choice of words ('It was no longer proposed to calculate the remoter issues' instead of 'it was no longer possible') limit and relativize what was offered as a revolution in thought and feeling. Pater's treatment of Senancour's Obermann at this point is striking. Arnold, as Pater's audience probably remembered, had seen Obermann as an important defining text of modern culture and had dwelt on it in both prose and verse. The phrases Pater chooses to characterize Obermann ('the very genius of ennui [...] who has hardly strength enough to die' (p. 11)) suggest affectation, posturing, or neurasthenia rather than new emotional or psychological discoveries.

Pater's style in the opening of 'Prosper Merimee' is strikingly effective as an invitation to intellectual boldness or independence of mind. His techniques of quiet depreciation and relativizing are highly functional. They serve a similar purpose to the somewhat airily dismissive treatment of aesthetic theorizing with which Pater begins The Renaissance or the ironies of 'Coleridge' and of the portraits of 'Sebastian Van Storck' and of 'Duke Carl of Rosenmold'. Apart from its other...

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