1 - The Subject of ‘Pater’
Summary
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
‘Poems by William Morris’ (1868), 312; ‘Conclusion’, Studies (1873), 213These words, which Walter Pater wrote at the outset of his career and reprinted in his first book, dogged him until he died; denounced in the pulpits of Oxford, and celebrated and castigated in the magazines of the 1870s, they reappeared in the obituaries of the 1890s. Much of his subsequent writing was an attempt to explain them, both to the censorious and to his admirers. This implant of defensiveness was not confined to Marius the Epicurean, Pater's second book and his only finished novel, which was published twelve years after Studies in 1885. It affected Studies itself: the second edition (1877) excluded the ‘Conclusion’ entirely; the third (1888) amended and restored it with a nervous explanation which linked it to Marius, in which ‘the thoughts suggested by it’ are ‘dealt [with] more fully’ (Ren. (1888), 246). It persisted to affect important late work, theoretical essays such as ‘Style’ and his last collection of lectures on Plato and Platonism. Pater's writing career and his conduct of it might be construed as a trajectory of fight and flight from the cultural and historical ‘moment’ of 1873–4.
In parallel, its influence on his conduct of his life might be read as greater, as Pater purposefully left no diaries, journals, or notebooks, and only the most circumspect, and in the vast majority of cases brief, letters. Those who knew him best declined to write a biography, and the job was left to a trio of strangers who began to publish their versions of his life only a decade after his death.
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- Information
- Walter Pater , pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1994