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History as Palingenesis in Pater and Hegel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

William Shuter
William Shuter*
Affiliation:
Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti
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Abstract

Like Hegel, Pater often uses images of death and rebirth to describe the historical process. This imagery reflects Hegel's principle that later stages of artistic and spiritual development annul earlier phases and yet also conserve them. The series of rebirth images by which Pater describes the process of historical development is the firmest proof that Hegelés thought was a sustained and creative influence on his work. In the strongly Hegelian Winckelmann essay, Pater represents the Renaissance as a cultural affirmation achieved through negation, while others of the Studies in the Renaissance define the idea of cultural rebirth through the images of metempsychosis and the afterlife of the pagan gods. The original version of the Winckelmann essay also mentions Hegel in connection with the myth of Demeter, which, in his essays on Demeter and Persephone, Pater treats as still another image of cultural continuity. The principal source for these studies was Ludwig Preller's Demeter und Persephone. Pater also borrowed Preller's theory of a primitive religion of the earth, connected it with the Christian imagery of death and rebirth, and employed it again in Marius the Epicurean, his most ambitious treatment of the historical dialectic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 3 , May 1971 , pp. 411 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Notes

1 “Walter Pater und Hegel,” Englische Studien, 50 (1916), 300 ff.

2 For the recollections of Capes, Bywater, and Lionel Johnson, see Germain d'Hangest, Walter Pater, l'homme et l'œuvre (Paris: Didier, 1961), i, 54, and Anthony Ward, Walter Pater: The Idea in Nature (London: Margibbon & Kee, 1966), pp. 25–26. For the neo-Hegelians at Oxford, see Ward, pp. 43–55, and for Pater's relation to Jowett, d'Hangest, i, 52–53, 206–07.

3 The Aesthetik in the original version of the Winckelmann essay, Westminster Review, 31 (Jan. 1867), and the Geschichte der Philosophie in Plato and Platonism, pp. 91–92. (Unless otherwise indicated, references to Pater are to the Library Edition, London: Macmillan, 1910.1 have used the following abbreviations: P&P, Plato and Platonism; Ren, The Renaissance; GS, Greek Studies; ME, Marius the Epicurean; MS, Miscellaneous Studies; App, Appreciations.) For Pater's knowledge of the Phénoménologie, see n. 14 below.

4 See Ward, pp. 36, 59–66.

5 Besides Ward's book the most substantial studies of Pater as a thinker are Helen H. Young's The Writings of Walter Pater: A Reflection of British Philosophical Opinion from 1860 to 1890 (Lancaster, Pa.: Lancaster Press, 1933), Ruth Child, The Aesthetic of Walter Pater (New York: Macmillan, 1940), Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater, Die Autonomie des Àsthetischen (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1969), and René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (1750–1950), iv (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 381–99.

6 Ward, p. 177.

7 It is, I think, a failure to make this distinction that leads Wellek to speak of Pater as encouraging a “historical masquerade” (p. 399), and Geoffrey Tillotson to accuse Pater of preferrring his paintings with varnish on them. See Tillotson's “Arnold and Pater,” Criticism and the Nineteenth Century (London: Univ. of London, 1967), pp. 92 ff.

8 “Coleridge's Writings,” Westminster Review, 29 (Jan. 1866), 49. For Goethe's cyclical theory of history, see Fr. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Miinchen & Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1936), and Karl Victor, Goethe the Thinker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950).

9 See Klaus Dockhorn, Die deutsche Historismus in England (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1950), p. 198.

10 Primitive Culture (1871 ; rpt. under the title The Origins of Culture, New York: Harper, 1958), ii, 81 ff.

11 The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1892), p. 131.

12 The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Bailie, 2nd ed. (1931; rpt. New York: Harper, 1967), p. 93.

13 Phenomenology, pp. 807–08.

14 See a letter of Bywater's quoted in W. W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater, the Memoir of an Oxford Scholar (Oxford : Clarendon, 1917), pp. 78–80.

15 D'Hangest, i, 111.

16 The following allusion to Hegel in the original Winckelmann essay has never been reprinted. It deserves quotation because it employs Hegel's formal definition of art as the sensuous representation of the Idea, what Hegel calls the Ideal: “ ‘Ideal’ is one of those terms which through a pretended culture have become tarnished and edgeless. How great, then, is the charm when in Hegel's writings we find it attached to a fresh, clear-cut apprehension! With him the ideal is a Versinnlichen of the idea—the idea turned into an object of the sense. By the idea, stripped of its technical phraseology, he means man's knowledge about himself and his relation to the world, in its most rectified and concentrated form. This, then, is what we have to ask about a work of art—Did it, at the age in which it was produced, express in terms of sense, did it present to the eye or ear, man's knowledge about himself and his relation to the world in its most rectified and concentrated form?” Westminster Review, 31 (1867), 94.

17 See the translation of the Aesthetik by F. P. B. Osmaston under the title The Philosophy of Fine Art (London: G. Bell, 1920), i, 216.

18 Philosophy of Fine Art, iii, 247.

19 Philosophy of Fine Art, ii, 261.

20 D'Hangest, i, 173.

21 Philosophy of Fine Art, ii, 240–41.

22 This summary treatment of Apollo and Dionysus ignores the Apollonian-Dionysian polarity detected in Pater's work by R. T. Lenaghan, “Pattern in Walter Pater's Fiction,” SP, 58 (1961), 69 ff., and by G. C. Monsman, Pater's Portraits (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1967). The whole issue of Pater's conception of Greek myth deserves further investigation in the light of his indebtedness to the mythological scholarship of his time. James Kissane, “Victorian Mythology,” VS, 6 (1962), 5 ff., has opened the question, but I am convinced that he underestimates the extent of Pater's scholarly reading (see n. 27). All I can suggest here is that Pater was less interested in opposing one god against another than he was in those contradictory mythical conceptions of the same god which he discovered in his scholarly sources, e.g., the Delphic and the Hyperborean Apollo; Dionysus, god of the vine, and Dionysus Zagreus. Compare the discussion of Kore-Persephone below and the “two-sided” Artemis of “Hippol-ytus Veiled” (GS, pp. 170–71).

23 “Winckelmann,” Westminster Review, p. 93.

24 Philosophy of Fine Art, ii, 288, 180.

25 Philosophy of Fine Art, ii, 307.

26 Hamburg, 1837. Preller, however, is only one of the scholars to whom Pater is indebted in the Demeter essays. I will examine Pater's scholarly debts more fully in another article.

27 In addition to Preller, Pater cites Karl Otfried Miiller's Die Dorier (P&P, p. 200) and K. F. Hermann's Lehrbuch der gottesdienstlichen Alterthumer der Griechen (“Winckelmann,” Westminster Review, p. 93). For an account of these scholars see Conrad Bursian, Geschichte der Classischen Philologie in Deutschland, in Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland, v, No. 19 (München and Leipzig, 1883).

28 Preller, p. 22; cf. GS, p. 102.

29 Preller, pp. 128–29 (my translation).

30 Preller, pp. 221–22.

31 Preller, p. 12.

32 Preller, p. 197, n.

33 Berlin: Weidmann, 1865.

34 See P&P, pp. 222, 110; MS, p. 210; Ren, p. xiii; ME, i, 21–22.

35 For a thorough examination of the pagan-Christian polarity as it runs through Pater's work, see David DeLaura Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1969).

36 Philosophy of Fine Art, ii, 294.