CRITICISM’ AND APPRECIATIONS

Appreciations is a collection of eleven essays on English literature, two of which date originally from the 1860s, five from the 1870s, and four from the 1880s; they are drawn from a full range of periodicals – the Westminster, the Fortnightly, Macmillan's and Scribner's Magazine – as well as T. H. Ward's anthology of English poetry to which Pater contributed two essays introductory to selections from Coleridge and Rossetti. To compile Appreciations Pater had to dig deeply and widely in the past, as his most recent work was primarily fiction.

The book houses two theoretical essays placed in parallel at its beginning and end. ‘Style’, the opening essay, dates from 1888, and ‘Romanticism’, here renamed ‘Postscript’ to fulfil its function as the conclusion, from 1876. Both essays address the position of Matthew Arnold – ‘Style’ by proposing imaginative prose as ‘the special art of the modern world’, not poetry; and ‘Postscript’ by concentrating on romanticism and not classicism, and by collapsing Arnold's hard and fast distinctions between the two traditions. Moreover, to parallel Arnold's term ‘criticism’, Pater offers ‘appreciations’, a word which values constructive readings which are sympathetic to the text, rather than judgements which arise from external criteria. Another provocative element of Appreciations (and one which shows Pater's resistance to censorious pressure) is its reprinting of the 1868 review of William Morris's poems which Pater had raided in 1873 for the controversial conclusion to Studies. It also appears disguised, generically renamed as ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, and, although one reviewer (William Sharp) described it as new, the Spectator (21 Dec. 1889, 887–8) associated it with degeneracy, ‘rhapsodising’, and ‘affectation’; when the second edition of Appreciations was issued six months later, it had been replaced, still the victim of censorship some fifteen years after Studies. In this connection the provenance of ‘Style’ is of interest, as it too shows Pater's use of the publishing system in producing/writing his work: stemming from an anonymous review of Flaubert's correspondence published in an evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette in August 1888, it emerged as ‘Style’ by December 1888 when the expanded review appeared in the Fortnightly, and finally reappeared in November 1889 as the flagship essay for Appreciations, a book on English literature.